"Mythology, by its nature, is told and retold": Hades 2 dev on changi…

A week after new Xbox chief Asha Sharma said Game Pass had become "too expensive," Microsoft has announced a pretty significant cut in the price: An Xbox Wire post says Game Pass Ultimate has dropped from $29.99 per month to $22.99, while PC Game Pass is going from $16.49 to $13.99. Naturally, as the lawyers like to say, "prices may vary by region."

The cuts don't take the cost of Game Pass back to where it was prior to the massive price hike in October 2025, when Game Pass Ultimate was available for $19.99 and PC Game Pass was $11.99. Still, it's movement in the right direction, and a $3 price hike on Ultimate is a lot easier to swallow than a 50% hike.

The reduction in Game Pass pricing does not come without a cost, however. Beginning with the next release in the series, Call of Duty games will not come to Game Pass at launch: Instead, they'll be added to both the Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass "during the following holiday season (about a year later)," Microsoft said. The change will not impact CoD games that are already on Game Pass, however.

That's a big change that may blunt the impact of the Game Pass price reductions, but it's possible Microsoft has decided that the economics work out better this way regardless. Microsoft reportedly lost an estimated $300 million in sales of Black Ops 6 because the game was available on Game Pass at launch, while a staggering 82% of the game's full-price sales in October 2025 were on PlayStation 5, where Game Pass isn't available. You have to sell an awful lot of Game Pass subscriptions to generate that kind of cash, and this step back from Game Pass uber alles could indicate that Microsoft is finally starting to accept (or at least acknowledge) the possibility that the service has plateaued.

"Our players cover a wide breadth of geographies, preferences, and tastes, so while there isn’t a single model that’s best for everyone, this change responds to a lot of feedback we’ve gotten so far," Microsoft said of the price and game cuts. "We’ll continue to listen and learn."

The Game Pass price-and-games cuts are also seemingly part of the ongoing disavowal of former Xbox president Sarah Bond, who resigned in February when Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer retired. Sharma promised to"recommit to our core Xbox fans and players" when she took the reins in February, leading us to wonder about the future of the "everything is an Xbox" strategy formed under Bond's guidance. A month later, we found out: It's gone.

A huge moment of hype in Silent Hill f's pre-release was when it was announced that none other than ryukishi07 would be writing the script. A marriage made in heaven, and it turns out that the famous horror novelist wasted absolutely no time getting to work with the latest Silent Hill game.

"He is a super fast writer, and he's a very detailed kind of guy, too," director Al Yang told PCG's senior editor Wes Fenlon at GDC. "The final version of the script only went through like three, three and a half full revisions. About 60% of the script stayed the same, but that 60% was kind of the core themes and kind of the key beats. Those never changed."

The main beats in question are your regular Silent Hill motifs such as the atmosphere and troubled protagonist, but one area left blank was the location. "A lot of locations weren't set in the original script," Yang explains. "So for instance, with the school, that's something we brought up. We had a section of the game where Hinako is talking to Sho and Rinko, they're together, and they reminisce about school days. It would make sense, because they're classmates, to have this set in [the school]."

Silent Hill f developer NeoBards already had something of a template for a school set in a Silent Hill world: Midwich Elementary School is an important location in the OG Silent Hill game, and was also featured briefly in Silent Hill 3. But schools set in the Mid-Atlantic/ Northeastern US aren't exactly the same as Japanese schools.

"Japanese schools have a very particular layout, or windows and hallways are supposed to be a specific way," Yang says. "And we actually flipped it around by accident and Konami came back: 'Okay. Japanese schools do not have this layout, this is something that we need to change'. Lots of checks on all sides, and again, like I said, it's a collaborative effort."

Another check that came during the early stages of development was actually on ryukishi07's writing. After solidifying all the basics came the process of writing out actual scenes, a task which was made tricky because of the disparity between what can be described on paper and what the devs could actually show in the finished product.

"So a lot of the cut scenes, for instance, we talked about like budget wise, this is really cool, what you're writing here, but these are just words," Yang says. "If we actually show this, it's gonna take three months to build. But we understand the intent. So we're like, okay, how can we do that in the confines of our space? That's budgeting and working backwards."

The end product had some truly spectacular scenes such as the Ebisugaoka in Silence ending boss fight which sees Hinako taking on both the Tsukumogami and the Kyubi on a visually stunning astral plane. This in itself was impressive enough, so I can't imagine how wild some of the scenes which had to be restricted due to budget and time constraints were.