Sony is the Bad Guy of 2026, but it’s Going to Win Anyway

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In Polygon’s fall preview this week, we’ve been rooting around for stories to sharpen your appetite for the season ahead, from talking to Zach Cregger about his Resident Evil movie to talking to talking to the makers of Ace Combat 8 about the art of video game clouds. And hey, did you remember that Gears of War: E-Day is a thing? For some reason, I keep forgetting.

Nintendo was in the mood to look to the future, too.

Nintendo dominated headlines this week with an unprecedented Direct double feature, led by its remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The game’s look was deeply divisive and the pre-order launch of the Zelda-themed Switch 2 special edition was bungled, but it’s the only 2026 release outside of GTA 6 to muster a real sense of event. It’s a huge deal.

Then Nintendo doubled down with an exhaustingly comprehensive (or just exhausting) showcase that was somehow both boring and impressive; the Switch 2 is looking to crush all impediments to its success through sheer weight of numbers. It’s probably going to work.

It’s a busy fall, then, but is it an exciting one? Evidently, but it’s kind of lopsided. You can’t get more buzzy than GTA and Ocarina, but everything else seems to be falling flat. I’ve already forgotten that there’s a new Gears of War coming out since I wrote about forgetting about it two paragraphs ago. A string of anticipated games like The Blood of Dawnwalker are being met with a collective shrug. And then there’s Marvel’s Wolverine.

Sony must be unaccustomed to its big first-party exclusives meeting the kind of resistance that Wolverine has. First, fans mocked it; this week it was critics’ turn. Wolverine is not a bad game, per se, but its one-note approach to the cinematic action blockbuster playbook seems to have exposed that framework’s flaws. For the first time in a long time, people aren’t picking up what Sony’s putting down.

It’s a tough break for a platform holder that has already cast itself as the villain of 2026 (an impressive feat, considering its rival Xbox enacted mass layoffs and spun out five studios). Fans refuse to let the company move on from its decision to end physical game production, and ignoring them isn’t working. Everything Sony does is now seen through this lens — including the other big PlayStation story this week, in which Sony dropped a prestige exclusive straight into Xbox’s lap.

In the current climate, so hostile to Sony, there’s no way this wasn’t going to be portrayed as PlayStation handing its rival an easy win. In reality, there’s a good chance that what Sony has actually handed Xbox is a costly, risky vanity project of exactly the sort that both companies are trying to stop making. But Hideo Kojima supports physical media, so there can be no doubt about who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy in this mess, and many surmised that this issue was at the root of the breakup. It almost certainly wasn’t; it was Sony that pulled the plug, well before the discs thing kicked off. But never mind, that’s the narrative now, and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma gets to look good by association, even if there’s no way she can put a disc drive in the next Xbox.

So Sony is the big loser of this brief and frantic fall… except it absolutely isn’t. PS5 has sold so much better than Xbox Series X that it’s the lead platform for GTA 6 by default, even disregarding Sony’s marketing partnership with Rockstar. GTA 6 will sell a ton of PS5s, and will sell a ton on PS5s, where Sony takes a 30% cut of every transaction on the PlayStation Store. This game is going to be a gargantuan, perhaps unprecedented windfall for the platform holder. In this context, there’s only so much Sony can get wrong. This fall, the bad guy’s going to win.

Plus this:

Simone de Rochefort, Matt Patches, and I run down a GOTY season that is very simple, but at the same time rather complicated

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