PlayStation’s big tariff refund
PLUS: The case of the missing GTA VI previews
Sony estimates it will have received ¥80 billion ($508 million) in tariff refunds from the United States government, in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in February that the global levies imposed by the Trump administration were illegal.
“Most” of that refund will be recouped by Sony’s gaming division, company chief financial officer Lin Tao said last week during a Q&A with press and investors.
The 2025 tariffs contributed to Sony’s decision to raise prices on hardware and accessories. It has increased the cost of the base PS5 that cost $500 in early 2025 to $550 in August 2025 and up again to $650 in April 2026.
Sony executives said last week that about 70% of the tariff refund (that’d be $356 million or so) was collected in the April-June quarter and that “most” went to the games division.
The refund has been a boon for the bean-counters at the Tokyo-headquartered giant. It’s cited as one of the key factors that compelled Sony to increase its operating income forecast for the current year by 10%. (Other factors cited were foreign exchange rates and “improvements in costs.”)
The refunds, while directly paid by the U.S. government, originally were paid by consumers in the U.S. who bought tariff-hiked goods from Sony and other companies.
Some of those consumers have sued Sony and other corporations, saying the refunds should be passed on to them.
In April, gamers filed a class action claim against Nintendo, accusing the company of illegally enriching itself, should it keep its refunds for the illegal tariffs rather than pass them on to consumers. Last month, Nintendo replied in court, saying it had no legal obligation to distribute the refunds to its customers: “Those who bought Nintendo’s products received exactly what they bargained and paid for: a console, game and/or accessory at a price to which both parties agreed.”
Multiple similar class action claims brought by PlayStation gamers against Sony were recently consolidated into one case. Sony is slated to respond to the combined lawsuit later this month.
More Sony notes:
A mystery: Sony said that its revised forecast for operating income this year would have been even higher, if not for “adjustments to [the] FY26 first-party title roadmap.” That suggests the cancellation or delay of game(s)/expansion(s) out of the 12-month period ending March 2027. Sony’s slate for the current fiscal year includes two very big first-party games: September’s Marvel super-hero adventure Wolverine from Insomniac as well as God of War: Laufey, which recently was announced for February 2027. [see slide 9]
Discs! Sony CFO Lin Tao was asked a few questions about the thinking behind the company’s July announcement to stop producing discs for new games in 2028. In remarks in Japanese tat were translated live into English by a Sony interpreter, Tao said the company had “put in a lot of thought” into the change, cited “digitization of content overall” as a major reason for the shift and acknowledged the “strong views” expressed by fans in response. “Games are loved by many people,” she said. “It’s a form of entertainment that’s loved by people, and it’s connected to people’s fond memories, in many cases. And so we understand those emotions.” Later, she said, “the players have attachments, and we have to think about how to respond to [their] feedback.”
Item 2: Where are the GTA preVIews?
Take Two Interactive will report its quarterly earnings on Friday (and hold an uncharacteristically early 8am ET morning call with investors). That’s as good a reason as any to spin up the speculation about the whereabouts of a third Grand Theft Auto VI trailer.
But, one might also wonder: Where are the previews for what could be the biggest video game of the decade?
As of now, there have been no previews, just two trailers from Rockstar Games and a stack of promotional screenshots and blurbs. No sign of gameplay. No details about how GTA VI is or isn’t similar to its predecessors
That’s unusual, even for Rockstar, a studio whose games generally sell themselves.
The new Grand Theft Auto is slated to come out on November 19, with pre-orders having been available since late June.
Some dates to consider, re: prior Rockstar games:
Grand Theft Auto V
May 2, 2013: First hands-off GTA V previews
September 3, 2013: First hands-on GTA V previews
September 17, 2013: GTA V released
Red Dead Redemption 2
May 3, 2018: First hands-off Red Dead Redemption 2 previews
September 20, 2018: First hand-on RDR2 previews
October 26, 2018: RDR 2 released
GTA VI
No previews yet
November 19, 2026: GTA VI planned for release
If pre-order dates are anything to go by, the initial GTA V previews preceded the availability of pre-orders for that game by a few weeks; the first previews for RDR 2 happened about a month before pre-orders began for that game. GTA VI has been available to pre-order for just over a month.
In other words, GTA VI’s previews are not following the same pattern as Rockstar’s prior big releases. They’re late.
Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has said that Rockstar would start marketing GTA VI this “summer.”
Item 3: In brief…
🇸🇦 Electronic Arts has officially gone private, as of today, having cleared regulatory hurdles and closed the deal.
The maker of Madden, Battlefield, the Sims and SSX is now owned by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, with much smaller stakes held by investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. The latter is run by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of U.S. president Donald Trump.
⚽️ Developers from Refactor Games, the studio behind the recently released Netflix-exclusive sports game FIFA World Cup, are out of work, saying publisher Delphi Interactive “pulled” funding for the team, Game Developer reports.
Three weeks ago, Game File covered a panel in New York City, during which Delphi leaders and investors hailed the success of the game. At the event, Delphi CEO Casper Daugaard told Game File that Delphi had partially handled the development of the FIFA game alongside Refactor. He floated that the game would be updated and improved into next summer’s women’s World Cup, and possibly be ported to non-Netflix platforms.
Delphi declined to comment on the Refactor cuts nor on whether it impacted any plans for the game. Netflix also declined to comment. A rep for Refactor couldn’t be reached by press time.
🎮 Xbox revenue declined by $1.7 billion in the 12 months ending June 2026 (Microsoft’s FY26), compared to that stretch a year ago, the company reported last week.
Microsoft blamed the drop on a 5% decline in review from game content and services and a 29% slide in hardware revenue, due to selling fewer consoles.
Alongside the financial update, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma posted the following on social media: “In FY26, over 200 million new players came to XBOX and our games, but our business did not grow with our audience. We need to close that gap by investing in what players value. That will take time, but we expect to return to growth by the end of FY27.”
Sharma said last month that Microsoft’s Xbox gaming group would cut 3,200 jobs, divest of multiple studios and reduce spending on outside vendors throughout the FY27 stretch.
🚫 Double Fine, one of the studios Microsoft sold back to its management, announced last week that it was laying off 23 workers.
“Only the survival of our studio would ever make us consider such a painful action,” studio head Tim Schafer said.
🚫 Tencent has laid off 80 workers associated with The Last Sentinel, a would-be GTA competitor in development at Lightspeed LA, as the project has run aground, Bloomberg reports.
Tencent maintains the game is still in development, but, Bloomberg notes: “Last Sentinel was in the works for six years, delayed several times and had a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars…” and yet still failed to impress Tencent brass.
📱 Palworld, which has been one of the most-played games on Steam since its recent upgrade to a full 1.0 release, is getting a massively multiplayer online mobile spin-off by Free Fire development powerhouse Garena later this year, per a press release.
👀 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s record-setting Metacritic average of 99 should probably be a slightly more common 98 for the 1998 Nintendo 64 classic. That’s according to an investigation by video channel Did You Know Gaming and explained in print by Kotaku.
DYKG says the revised results, which incorporate a broader aggregation of reviews and some more accurately calculated scores, produce an all-time four-way tie between Ocarina, fighting game SoulCalbur, Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV.
With all of Sony’s success, the decision to cut physical media feels more and more like a greedy move to get even more profits.