daily

2026-07-12
1

RISCBoy is an open-source portable games console, designed from scratch

Hacker News · original → · 8/10 · Retro gaming: open-source handheld console design
RISCBoy is an open-source portable games console, designed from scratch. This includes: - A RISC-V compatible CPU - A raster graphics pipeline and display controller - Other chip infrastructure:…

RISCBoy is an open-source portable games console, designed from scratch. This includes: - A RISC-V compatible CPU - A raster graphics pipeline and display controller - Other chip infrastructure: busfabric, memory controllers, UART, GPIO etc. - A PCB layout in KiCad It is a Gameboy Advance from a parallel universe where RISC-V existed in 2001. A love letter to the handheld consoles from my childhood, and a 3AM drunk text to the technology that powered them. The design is written in synthesisable Verilog 2005, and is intended to fit onto an iCE40-HX8k FPGA. This is a LUT4-based FPGA with 7680 logic elements, so fitting a 32 bit games console requires a crowbar and some vaseline, or perhaps just careful design. The HX8k was once the largest FPGA targeted by the open-source Icestorm FPGA toolchain, but that toolchain has since moved on to greater things. More detailed information can be found in the documentation. The processor supports the RV32IMC instruction set, and passes the RISC-V compliance suite for these instructions, as well as the riscv-formal verification suite, and some of my own formal property checks for instruction frontend consistency and basic bus compliance. It also supports M-mode CSRs, exceptions, and a simple compliant extension for vectored external interrupts. This repository uses submodules for HDL as well as tests git clone --recursive https://github.com/Wren6991/RISCBoy.git riscboy Alternatively git clone https://github.com/Wren6991/RISCBoy.git riscboy cd riscboy git submodule update --init --recursive Note a recursive submodule update is required to run the processor's standalone tests. This is not necessary for building RISCBoy gateware. The RV32IMC toolchain is required for compilation of software-based tests. Follow the instructions on the RISC-V GNU Toolchain GitHub, except for the configure line: # Prerequisites for Ubuntu 20.04 sudo apt install -y autoconf automake autotools-dev curl python3 libmpc-dev libmpfr-dev libgmp-dev gawk build-essential bison flex texinfo gperf libtool patchutils bc zlib1g-dev libexpat-dev cd /tmp git clone --recursive https://github.com/riscv/riscv-gnu-toolchain cd riscv-gnu-toolchain # The ./configure arguments are the most important difference ./configure --prefix=/opt/riscv --with-arch=rv32imc --with-abi=ilp32 --with-multilib-generator="rv32i-ilp32--;rv32ic-ilp32--;rv32im-ilp32--;rv32imc-ilp32--" sudo mkdir /opt/riscv sudo chown $(whoami) /opt/riscv make -j $(nproc) On smaller FPGAs, like the iCE40 UP5k, RISCBoy may be configured to use a smaller RV32I variant of the processor, rather than the higher-performance RV32IMC version. The compiler will support any of the ISA variants available on RISCBoy, but we must also instruct the toolchain build scripts to produce standard libraries for these variants, via the --with-multilib arguments. Running a RV32I executable linked against an RV32IMC standard library on an RV32I-only processor will ruin your day! The simulation flow is driven by Xilinx ISIM 14.x; makefiles are found in the scripts/ folder. This has only been tested with the Linux version of ISIM. You will also need to checkout the RISC-V compliance suite in order to run these tests (note the -- test is required to stop git from looking in the KiCad directories and complaining about the library structure there). $ git submodule update --init --recursive Once this is ready, you should be able to run the following: . sourceme cd test ./runtests which will run all of the HDL-level tests. Software tests will require the RV32IC toolchain. You may need to adjust some of the paths in sourceme if ISIM is installed in a non-default location. To graphically debug a test, run its makefile directly: cd system make TEST=helloworld gui The image shows the Rev A PCB. It is compatible with iTead's 4-layer 5x5 cm prototyping service, which currently costs $65 for 10 boards. The schematic can be viewed here (pdf) Rev B will look quite different; I am waiting for the gateware and bootloader to mature before proceeding. My current dev hardware looks a lot like my Snowflake FPGA board. FPGA synthesis for iCE40 uses an open-source toolchain. If you would like to build this project using the existing makefiles, you will first need to build the toolchain I used: - Yosys for synthesis - nextpnr for place and route - Project Icestorm for bitstream generation Note that I have only built these on Linux. I've heard it is possible to build these on Windows, but haven't tried it. However, they can be built on a Raspberry Pi, which is neat. Once the toolchain is in place, run . sourceme cd synth make -f HX8k-EVN.mk bit to generate an FPGA image suitable for Lattice HX8k evaluation board. There is also highly experimental support (i.e. not my main dev platform) for ECP5, with board files for the Lattice LEF5UM5G-85F-EVN evaluation board: make -f ECP5-EVN.mk BUILD=full bit This build replaces the external, 512 kiB, 16 bit wide SRAM of RISCBoy development hardware with an internal, 256 kiB, 32 bit wide synchronous memory, which Trellis builds out of ECP5 sysmem blocks. board : KiCad files for main RISCBoy PCB and other small boards used during developmentdoc : LaTeX source and diagrams for documentation, and the most recently built PDFhdl : The Verilog source for RISCBoy gateware.busfabric : AHB-lite crossbar and APB peripheral fabricgraphics : Source for the pixel processing unithazard5 : Source for the RISC-V processor. This is completely self-contained.mem : Memory controllers, and inference/injection wrappers and models for the memories themselvesperis : Small peripherals such as UART, SPI, PWMriscboy_core : Structural module to instantiate and connect the components that comprise RISCBoyriscboy_fpga : Top-level wrappers for a few different FPGAs and boards: connect up IOs, provide clock and reset reference : a few PDFs for standards used in RISCBoy, e.g. the RISC-V instruction setscripts : Junk that I can't put anywhere elsesoftware : Loose collection of C files that are used for system-level tests. Not really a useful software tree yet.synth : Working directory for running whole-system synthesis. Top-level makefiles, pin constraint files.test : Regression tests. Some are Verilog testbenches, others are software testcases that run on simulations of the processor or the full system.

2

Mesh LLM: distributed AI computing on iroh

Hacker News · original → · 7/10 · AI: distributed LLM computing and infrastructure
Mesh LLM: distributed AI computing on iroh by Rae McKelveyWhen people picture running a large language model, they picture a data center. Racks of GPUs that belong to someone else, a metered API,…

Mesh LLM: distributed AI computing on iroh by Rae McKelveyWhen people picture running a large language model, they picture a data center. Racks of GPUs that belong to someone else, a metered API, and a bill that grows every month you succeed. You send your prompts off to a black box and hope the price, the model, and the privacy policy all stay the way they were when you signed up. For a lot of teams that is a bad trade. You give up control over when models change, where your data goes, and what hardware runs your workloads. And as usage grows, so does the bill, with no lever to pull except "pay more." Mesh LLM is a different shape. It pools the GPUs and memory you already have, across as many machines as you want to add, and exposes the whole thing as one OpenAI-compatible API. Start one node. Add more later. Let the mesh decide whether a model runs on the box in front of you, routes to a peer, or splits across several machines. The problem: AI is expensive, and it is somebody else's The popular models are monoliths. Most people reach them through a UI or an API key and pay a large provider to run everything. That is convenient, and it is also a surrender. You do not control when the model gets updated, what memory it runs in, or what hardware sits underneath. Plenty of businesses and services that depend on these models want the opposite: more control, more pluggability, lower cost. They have GPUs sitting in offices, in closets, under desks. What they are missing is a way to make those machines act like one. Mesh LLM: run the models yourself The pitch is simple. Run bigger models without buying bigger GPUs. Share compute privately with your team, or publicly with the world, to power agents and chat. Point any OpenAI client at http://localhost:9337/v1 and stop caring where the work actually happens. Under the hood, Mesh LLM distributes model compute across a mesh of iroh endpoints. A request can be served three ways: - Run it locally, on this machine's GPU. - Route it to a peer that already has the model loaded. - Split a model too big for any single box across several machines, as a pipeline. How it works The architecture is pluggable. Plugins declare what they provide in a manifest, the runtime starts them, routes calls, and exposes their capabilities over MCP, HTTP, inference, and mesh events. The catalog ships with 40+ models, from half-a-billion-parameter models that fit on a laptop to 235B mixture-of-experts giants. For the giants, Mesh LLM has a split mode (internally, "Skippy"). A model gets partitioned by layer ranges into stages: layers 0 to 15 on one node, 16 to 31 on the next, and so on down the pipeline. Activations flow from one stage to the next, so several modest machines can run a model none of them could hold alone. The OpenAI client never sees any of this. It still just talks to localhost. How it uses iroh Every node, whether it serves models or only sends requests, boots an iroh endpoint. That endpoint is the node's identity, a public key, and its only network surface. There is no central server. iroh handles the hole-punching, NAT traversal, and relay fallback needed to open a direct, authenticated QUIC connection between any two nodes, wherever they sit. To keep that working across the open internet, Mesh LLM runs two iroh relays in different regions, so nodes that cannot reach each other directly always have a fallback path nearby. The whole protocol rides on QUIC's ALPN negotiation. There are three: | ALPN | What it carries | |---|---| | mesh-llm/1 | Main mesh: gossip, routing, HTTP tunnels, plugin channels | | mesh-llm-control/1 | Owner control plane (config sync, ownership attestation) | | skippy-stage/2 | Latency-sensitive activation transport for split models | Inside the main mesh-llm/1 connection, everything is a bidirectional QUIC stream tagged with a single leading byte that says what kind of stream it is. One connection carries gossip, inference, route queries, and peer-lifecycle events, all demuxed by that first byte: | Byte | Stream type | Description | |---|---|---| | 0x01 | GOSSIP | peer announcements (models, GPU, RTT, capabilities) | | 0x04 | TUNNEL_HTTP | inference requests proxied to a peer | | 0x05 | ROUTE_REQUEST | "which models do you host?" | | 0x06 | PEER_DOWN | dead-peer notification | | 0x07 | PEER_LEAVING | graceful shutdown | | 0x08 | PLUGIN_CHANNEL | plugin RPC | | 0x0e | DIRECT_PATH_REQUEST | share direct addresses for NAT traversal | The neat part is what this buys you. iroh gives authenticated, NAT-traversing QUIC between any two machines, addressed by public key. So "route to a peer" and "stream activations to the next pipeline stage" become the same primitive as "talk to localhost," just with a different endpoint ID. The networking stops being something you have to think about. iroh provides the secure transport. Mesh LLM builds its own gossip layer on top, so it controls exactly who gets admitted to the mesh, which versions are compatible, and which peers to trust. Getting started Users can install the lightweight software (about 18 MB) and either join the public mesh or configure private deployments. The system presents itself as localhost:9337/v1 to any standard OpenAI client. A mobile app is coming, built on iroh's Swift SDK. The plan is to speak ACP, the emerging agent standard, so other clients can join the mesh too. The throughline is the same one that motivated the whole project: more peer to peer, fewer closed servers, and no lock-in. To get started, take a look at our docs, dive directly into the code, or chat with us in our discord channel.

3

Why Write Code in 2026

Hacker News · original → · 7/10 · AI: software engineering role evolution with agents
It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately. We set up the…

It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately. We set up the infrastructure that makes agents successful. We act proactively through prompts (skills, AGENTS.md, knowledge bases etc). We protect software reactively through automated evaluation (tests, linting, type systems, evals, other AI, etc). It all keeps the agent on track. Even a stupid model, with fresh context, can work within these constraints and produce a good-enough change. It starts to seem ridiculous to even look at the code. And definitely laughable to ever want to write code. I disagree. It’s still useful to write code. Even with Fable-like intelligence humans get value from writing code. Not because agents are worse at coding that humans. But to think directly in the execution environment, not proxied through English. It’s about attention and understanding. To keep my attention, I must go beyond ‘read code’ like a passive observer of agents from afar. To really connect with the architecture of the system, it helps to truly experience the code. I don’t want your flat 2D system of diffs and patches. From time-to-time, I need the full, 4DX virtual reality experience with pain sensors attached to my nethers to experience what’s happening. And no, it’s not because this “code isn’t pretty”, it’s about experiencing fragility. If it’s hard for me to build on top of this code without something breaking, it’ll harder for an agent to make sense of it. If I can clean it up, then document a consistent principle about the architecture, without half-a-dozen exceptions the software factory works better. If I can debug, find where the testing strategy is weak, and find a fix I can squash an entirely new class of bugs. Yeah, you can do that without writing code. I’m not going to lecture you, call you slop-kitty, and say the only way to really experience software is by a magnetized needle and a steady hand. I, too, am infected with AI Psychosis. The vast majority of my code is AI generated. Nevertheless, I find writing code to be a useful tool. I encourage others to do it. I struggle to pay attention when I’m just a reverse centaur. When I read and approve code, I observe I don’t have the same sense of ownership. Slop flies under the radar. It’s harder to micro-adjust. And in the long run slop hurts agents too. The fragility accumulates precisely because we’re not paying attention to the details. On the other hand, when the human does some work, spikes an approach, and then the agent stamps out the patterns I participate and own the result. Writing code helps me think. English is an under-specified language. It’s not a precise way to express computation. For truly algorithmic work, I want to sketch and think in executable steps. I want a calibrated degree of precision. Sometimes a low-level language with a huge design space. Sometimes a high-level language with a more limited computation environment. Instead, we’re switching to this wrong-headed mindset that coding agents are like compilers. That mindset gives us permission to ship terribly written code. Agents aren’t compilers - they’re more like freshly onboarded interns. They read partial possibly slopified code, take an imprecise description of the change, and must generate a change. Humans can’t surrender their thinking and taste to armies of interns. And being hands-on, rather than consumers, helps. For example, have you ever seen an agent follow the boy scout rule? Where they leave code better than they found it? And would you WANT them to try to do this? Agents bias to making the current change as safely as possible. I had a situation in a previous codebase where one morning, pre-caffeinated, my meat brain mentioned using browser local storage. So some random state was managed in local storage. Everything else through a backend database. When I looked at the code, the amount of wrapping and indirection to preserve this idiotic human mistake probably tripled the LoC. Agents can amplify our one-off bad decisions by being so conservative. Going through and joyfully deleting code and exploring helped me arrive at a better architecture than just trying to proxy this through English. My thinking, my authorship, my ability to guide the factor was massively amplified by caring about the code. If we’re building a software factory, details matter. The details that establish architectural patterns. Down to algorithms and performance. Agents push us to evaluate, measure, and guard. They’ve made it cool to add CI into side projects early, not as an afterthought. That’s massive improvement to the state of software. But any assembly line has its weak spots. Occasionally at the car factory, we need to take apart the assembly line. Or dig into the details of internal combustion engines to make a 10% improvement. Or spend an entire day observing brake pad testing to figure out why some issue in the field isn’t detected early. We need to do that not while keeping the entire picture of the factory in our heads. We connect the minute details to the big picture. Drawing arbitrary boundaries about what you can touch in software gets in the way of that endeavor.

4

A rare win for digital ownership: Chinese courts rule game accounts can be inherited

r/gaming · original → · 7/10 · Gaming: digital ownership precedent in China
Chinese courts allow heirs to inherit accounts of deceased gamers — multiple cases spanning years establish precedent for digital ownership of games, in-game items, and microtransactions Your kids…

Chinese courts allow heirs to inherit accounts of deceased gamers — multiple cases spanning years establish precedent for digital ownership of games, in-game items, and microtransactions Your kids can inherit your digital game library if you're in China. While most of the Western world has been grappling with publishers and big tech companies about digital ownership, a Redditor who claims to be married to a Chinese lawyer and certified Chinese-English translator said that multiple Chinese families have successfully sued “for the right to inherit their deceased relatives’ game accounts.” u/Slawrfp shared summaries of three rulings favoring a gamer’s estate with regards to digital ownership on a subreddit. These cases go beyond game ownership, too, as they also tackled digital assets, in-game purchases, Bitcoin, and even social media accounts. “Chinese courts view game accounts and microtransaction purchases as something of monetary value, and therefore gamers have rights related to those assets,” u/Slawrfp wrote. “Chinese courts reject the idea that standard non-transferability clauses can stop you from inheriting or bequeathing a game or even individual microtransactions (of the same nature as CS:GO knives or skins in other games) and have made this ruling in multiple cases.” u/Slawrfp cited several cases — the first one is called “the Golden Blade case," which arose out of a dispute between two parties in 2009. The issue started when the wife (Li Lan) of a deceased gamer (Lu) wanted to sell the “Golden Blade” he acquired in the game Zhengtu, a now-defunct MMORPG. However, Lu required the cooperation of his “in-game wife,” Yang Yuan, to get the item, and therefore argued that she should get ownership. In the end, the court ruled that since Lu put in the effort, paid for internet access, loaded up with in-game credits, and that buyers were willing to acquire the item for around RMB 50,000 (around $7,350 at the current exchange rate), then it had the attributes of property and could be inherited by his legal wife. Aside from that, DeHeng Law Offices [machine translated] said that the “in-game marriage” between Lu and Yang had no legal bearing, so Li Lan stands as the inheritor of Lu’s properties. But because Yang spent a similar effort in helping Lu to acquire the artifact, its ownership belongs to both, so both Li Lan and Yang Yuan are entitled to 50% each of the asset’s price. Another case in 2024 tackled a deceased user’s Bitcoin holdings, a gaming account worth nearly $30,000 (RMB 200,000), and a social media account. According to Chinese lawyer Wang Lianghua on the Chinese social media platform Toutiao [machine translated], the inheritor’s lawyer argued that virtual property has attributes of legal property because it could be traded, has value, and could even generate profits, which meets the “scarcity, disposal, and value” definitions of property. On the other hand, the platforms holding these digital assets argued that ownership belongs to them based on the agreements that the user accepted when signing up for the account. The court judged that virtual assets, including Bitcoin, game equipment, social media commercial rights, and domain names, among others, are included in the deceased’s estate and are inheritable, and that operation of social media accounts can also be passed on to the heirs. However, private content, such as chat records and other “purely personal interests,” cannot be passed on and are instead archived by their respective platforms. Lastly, the “inheritance prohibition” included in most license agreements is invalid as they violate statutory rights — platforms are required to assist with inheritance requests and could ask for supporting documentation as well as charge reasonable costs. Aside from these cases, there was another one where a mother lost her son and asked a gaming platform to give her access to his accounts. The court ruled similarly as the previous case, saying that the gamer’s accounts, character data, virtual items, and other assets are virtual property, and thus, inheritable. The company was then obligated to cooperate with the mother and transfer all inheritable rights to her. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. These court cases offer a stark contrast in most of the rest of the world, where publishers could cut you off from your media library the moment their licensing contracts expire. The Steam subscriber agreement also prohibits the transfer of a Steam account — and with U.S. courts counting games as digital licenses, then Valve cannot be compelled to pass them on to the user’s heirs. Digital rights are a hot topic among gamers and consumers, especially as many big tech companies transition from selling physical copies of games to going all digital, and preservationists fight to keep game archives alive. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics. - chaos215bar2 Meanwhile in the US, you lose your digital assets whenever the company you bought them from very well feels like it.Reply In fact, you even lose access to digital hardware, as we've seen multiple companies alter terms and issue firmware updates that will effectively brick your bought-and-paid-for hardware until you pay up for a subscription. - voyteck I can imagine headlines like this:Reply "Teen killed his own father for a digital account in a popular game" - TerryLaze Reply He had the Sword of A Thousand Truths, I had to do it!voyteck said:I can imagine headlines like this: "Teen killed his own father for a digital account in a popular game" https://i.imgur.com/ifQZsAw.jpeg - PEnns "...and to my favorite, Son Number One, I leave...."Reply Followed by gnashing of teeth, loud gasps and colorful lawyers offering to dispute the will.....😂😉😠 - John Kiser Reply I assume you are talking about movies from SturdioCanal removed from Sony's Playstation store... this is sadly a case of things working as intended. Sony stopped selling video content in the Playstation store 5 years ago.chaos215bar2 said:Meanwhile in the US, you lose your digital assets whenever the company you bought them from very well feels like it. In fact, you even lose access to digital hardware, as we've seen multiple companies alter terms and issue firmware updates that will effectively brick your bought-and-paid-for hardware until you pay up for a subscription. This was a case of rights contracts not being removed and because Sony doesn't actually own StudioCanal they had to remove it and since digital now requires DRM they will atop working once the drm licenses expire for those movies. Sony is basically in a rock and a hard place situation here. Either they literally throw money dowm the drain to keep the licenses for movies they no longer sell for 5 years now. StudioCanal could have simply changed their terms to allow downloads for people that already bought the movies, but they didnt so there wssnt really any choice other than throw money down the drain to save face - snlacks Reply or executives who sold something they didn't own or have the right to sell in the first place could be imprisoned for fraud.John Kiser said:I assume you are talking about movies from SturdioCanal removed from Sony's Playstation store... this is sadly a case of things working as intended. Sony stopped selling video content in the Playstation store 5 years ago. This was a case of rights contracts not being removed and because Sony doesn't actually own StudioCanal they had to remove it and since digital now requires DRM they will atop working once the drm licenses expire for those movies. Sony is basically in a rock and a hard place situation here. Either they literally throw money dowm the drain to keep the licenses for movies they no longer sell for 5 years now. StudioCanal could have simply changed their terms to allow downloads for people that already bought the movies, but they didnt so there wssnt really any choice other than throw money down the drain to save face - DarkXork ReplyJohn Kiser said:I assume you are talking about movies from SturdioCanal removed from Sony's Playstation store... this is sadly a case of things working as intended. Sony stopped selling video content in the Playstation store 5 years ago. This was a case of rights contracts not being removed and because Sony doesn't actually own StudioCanal they had to remove it and since digital now requires DRM they will atop working once the drm licenses expire for those movies. Sony is basically in a rock and a hard place situation here. Either they literally throw money dowm the drain to keep the licenses for movies they no longer sell for 5 years now. StudioCanal could have simply changed their terms to allow downloads for people that already bought the movies, but they didnt so there wssnt really any choice other than throw money down the drain to save face That wasn't what happened. It's understandable when a digital storefront stops selling items after their license to sell them expires but that shouldn't give them the right to go into someone's library and delete the content they paid money for. That is what Sony/PlayStation did. They didn't just stop selling those films, they completely deleted them from people who had already bought them. Anywhere else that would be considered theft. - erq Valve will not allow you to pass on your games after you die. People with thousands of dollars worth of Steam games don't actually own themReply

5

EU Says It's Powerless to Stop PlayStation From Killing Discs: 'Companies Are Free to Offer Games and Services in the Manner They See Fit'

r/gaming · original → · 7/10 · Gaming/EU: PlayStation disc discontinuation policy
As gamers sign online petitions and swarm upon each and every PlayStation social media post, the EU has said it’s powerless to actually stop Sony — and indeed any company — from killing discs.…

As gamers sign online petitions and swarm upon each and every PlayStation social media post, the EU has said it’s powerless to actually stop Sony — and indeed any company — from killing discs. Sony's controversial decision to stop releasing games on physical discs has sparked a backlash from gamers upset at the move to an all-digital future for all new PS5 games launched from January 2028 onwards — something that's almost certain to also continue on PS6. A high-profile petition calling on Sony to reconsider its decision is inching towards 300,000 signatures, and in the past few days, PS5 users have taken to social media to share screenshots of cancelled PS Plus subscriptions. Some had hoped that the EU, which has a record of strict consumer protection, might aid the cause, but Ireland’s EU Commissioner has said Sony cannot be stopped from doing away with physical discs. As reported by the Irish Mirror, European Commissioner for consumer protection, Michael McGrath, said the EU is unable to step in. "It does come down to commercial and contractual freedoms, and companies are free to offer games and services in the manner that they see fit, provided that consumer rights are fully protected in line with national and EU law,” he said. "At this time, we did have to consider a European citizens initiative on this question of whether games should continue to be available after a new edition of the game has been brought forward." Part of the backlash around Sony’s decision to kill discs has to do with ownership and preservation. Last month, the Stop Killing Games campaign suffered a setback when the European Commission said it was unable to propose a legal obligation to keep video games playable after they stop being provided commercially due to existing intellectual property rights. Under EU copyright law, the Commission said, rights holders enjoy exclusive rights over their creations. The Commission pointed to existing EU consumer law, which forces video game publishers and developers to inform consumers about the duration and the conditions for terminating the contract before the consumers sign up for the video game. The Commission did, however, say it would talk with the games industry and consumer representatives to draw up an industry code of conduct on managing video games' "end of life." With the EU out of the picture, will the online backlash be enough to force Sony into a U-turn? Not a chance, analysts have told IGN. Dr. Serkan Toto, CEO of Japanese game industry consultancy firm Kantan Games, suggested that even if half a million people cancelled their PlayStation Plus subscription in protest, it would be just a drop in the ocean for Sony — which is not going to change its mind. "I sympathize with physical media fans, but Sony will not reverse this decision," Toto told IGN. "They of course knew what the online reaction would look like, and they now wait for this storm to pass. "Sony has over 120 million active PlayStation users," he continued. "Around 50 million people subscribe to PlayStation Plus. As a thought experiment, let's say 500,000 cancel in protest, that would be just 1% of that business gone — of course not enough to Sony to start rethinking. Digital is just too lucrative." For Sony, going all-digital for new game releases will earn it more money from every sale at a time when console sales are expected to plummet due to their rising cost. For a first-party PlayStation game such as The Last of Us, Sony will only keep around 65% of the money from a physical copy, with around 30% going to the retailer and roughly another 5% on manufacturing costs. Meanwhile, for a physical copy of a third-party game such as the Activision-published Call of Duty, Sony will get a licensing fee, likely around 15%. For downloads, however, the margins are much higher. For a first-party game sold via Sony's own PlayStation Store, the company obviously keeps 100% of the revenue. For third-party games such as Call of Duty, meanwhile, Sony keeps a 30% cut (so, roughly $21 for a $70 game). Overnight, Santa Monica Studio confirmed that God of War Laufey will "be available on disc," suggesting its launch will arrive in 2027. Insomniac has also confirmed Marvel’s Wolverine will be released on-disc. Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Items scoring 7/10 or above from 11 sources, scored by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 on relevance to my interests. At most 3 per source.

Scoring categories & sources
  1. Local Wexford or South East Ireland news
  2. Irish or EU-wide affairs affecting citizens broadly: elections, new laws or policy being debated, cost of living, education — especially impacts on mid-life adults or teenagers. Never courts/crime stories.
  3. Irish news on a topic relevant to my interests
  4. Work and tech topics: networking, AI, Kubernetes, platforms, SaaS
  5. AI news including critical or anti-AI perspectives
  6. Gaming: PC gaming, indie gaming, retro gaming
  7. General interests: gardening, woodwork, cycling, fitness, travel
  8. Comics

Sources: Breaking News Ireland, Wexford Local, Hacker News, r/gaming, r/pcgaming, r/antiAI, r/indiegaming, Lenny's Newsletter, One Useful Thing, Newcomer, Simon Willison