Hello! Happy not-E3 week to those who celebrate. Hit Points is in a rather festive mood at the moment, having recently celebrated its... hang on. Its fifth birthday? I’ve been doing this nonsense for five years? Are we sure? Good heavens.

To mark this happy occasion, for a short time you can get 55% off a year’s subscription. (New or returning subs only.) That’s by far the biggest discount in Hit Points history. One half of a whole decade! Shit the bed. Let’s celebrate by diving into the good, the bad, and the Asha Sharma Motivational Memos of not-E3 2026.

A hastily rewritten Microsoft bit

Sigh. I’ve been chipping away at today’s edition all week. In the first few drafts I actually wrote some nice stuff about Asha Sharma, her Xbox rescue mission, and what was comfortably Microsoft's best showcase of the not-E3 era. I was almost optimistic for Xbox's future.

I wrote about how, if I squinted a bit, it was like watching an E3 presser from the 360 era. Enormous lads with thick necks, impossible shoulders, and voices so gravelly you could almost smell the cigars. Blood, gore and body parts spattering the camera lens, and spanning to the far horizon. A charmingly earnest dev-diary scene about how a chainsaw ought to sound. This was not just about Gears Of War: E-Day, though as this year’s big firstparty game it naturally led the charge. This vintage Xbox scent was everywhere, from the gibs of a Doom: The Dark Ages expansion to the Halo remake’s HDR gleam, from the burly steampunk of Clockwork Revolution to the undead grime of State Of Decay 3.

Sure, there was the other stuff, your Flight Sims and Spyros and whatnot. The sheer size of the studio operation mandates it, at least for now. But this is, and if we’re honest has always been, Xbox’s core business, its stock in trade: big, silly, violent and mostly American games for big, silly, violent and mostly American boys, that you have to buy their console to play. I'm not saying that Xbox is now the console of MAGA — though since one of Sharma’s first moves after taking the chair was palling around on socials with alt-right shitheels who’ve spent the week complaining about, and I wish I was making this up, the Halo remake’s “bisexual lighting”; I am increasingly worried that when Sharma talks about doing right by the fans, she means catering to the whims of like seven awful guys on not-Twitter — Im not not saying it is now the console of MAGA. Either way it all felt like the beginning of Xbox’s second bro era, and as rescue strategies went, while it certainly wasn’t to my taste, I figured it had some merit. After the last however-many miserable years, it felt if nothing else like a start.

More than anything it seemed like Sharma had a plan. A lot of the moves she made in her first 100 days at the helm — slashing the price of Game Pass and hoiking COD off the service to compensate; cancelling development of Copilot on console; talking about “returning to the spirit that the team was founded on” — suggested firstly that she had her head screwed on right, that she understood that Xbox has always been at its best when it has been the least aligned with Microsoft’s wider business objectives. The skunkworks rebel spirit that birthed the first Xbox, and the slightly Poochie-esque dudebro posturing of J Allard and co in the 360 era, yielded far greater dividends than the disastrous ‘one box to rule them all’ ethos of Xbox One, or the doomed SaaSiness of the Game-Pass-uber-alles era. The showcase, with all its blood and swollen shoulders, seemed to reinforce this theory.

More importantly, it suggested Sharma was being given some rope; that the higher-ups at Microsoft understood there was no way of fixing Xbox while still demanding it return a 30% profit margin, and were giving her some breathing room; a window of reduced oversight, and less accountability. Get the ship back on course and we’ll be back in a couple of years, that sort of thing. How else was I to interpret her being allowed to cancel Copilot, of all things, at a time when Microsoft seems intent on stuffing it into every crevice of its business?

All that is certainly some stuff I thought, and wrote, and have just hastily rewritten into the past tense. Almost all of it, I now realise, is bollocks.

I woke up this morning to Bloomberg reporting that the Xbox division is bracing itself for another mass layoff, due soon after the end of Microsoft’s financial year on June 30. Sharma and her overpromoted lapdog Matt Booty wrote another one of their special memos — which was promptly leaked and, soon thereafter, published on Xbox Wire — in which they completely killed any lingering buzz their subordinates might have felt from not-E3 by laying out just how fucked everything is, and warning that they will have to fuck things even harder before they can get better. I advise you not to read it unless you have an enormous tolerance for anger, have access to a soundproof room, or live near a scrapyard whose owner will let you smash some stuff up with a sledgehammer. There’s a paragraph bemoaning the AI-driven surge in component prices that makes no mention of the enormous role Microsoft itself has played in that surge. Without the proper preparations, it will make your head explode.

That this should arrive so soon after the not-E3 festivities — so soon after Microsoft apparently flew a load of fans and influencers to LA, showering them with freebies, pretending they were so fucking back — reveals that Sharma is, despite her varied CV, Microsoft to the core. If there’s one thing we can take away from the last decade of Xbox it’s that these clowns can’t take one step forward without immediately taking two steps back, and at they end of the second step they fall flat on their arses, shit themselves, and ruin the lives of like two thousand people. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Xbox will die and deserve it.

Well that was frustrating. Let’s try and have some fun in the rest of today’s edition, eh?

Geoff Keighley’s middle

Don’t worry, I’m not bodyshaming; glass houses, and all that. I’m not even having a go at his outfit this year, which I can assure you is quite the test of willpower. As is often the case when Keighley takes the stage, this is a question of curation, and of pacing.

For about 20 minutes there, this was shaping up to be the best Summer Game Fest yet, at least in terms of the games shown off. (In purely technical terms it was a contender for the worst ever, the YouTube chat feed a stream of complaints about the frequent drops of audio sync.) As Hit Points has observed ever since Keighley sauntered onto his summertime Los Angeles stage — bloodstained knife held awkwardly behind his back — after E3 kicked the bucket during Covid, our latter-day Videogame Santa is always at his weakest at this time of year. With the major platform holders and rival stage producers all jostling for position, Keighley often has to feed on scraps, rather than have the feast to himself as he does at The Game Awards and, to a lesser extent, Gamescom.

But as he reeled off his opening handful of announcements, it briefly looked like everything had changed. This was quite the opening salvo: the long-rumoured Resident Evil: Code Veronica remake, Alien Isolation 2, and a Cuphead sequel and spin-off before, sweet lord in heaven, an actual Fumito Ueda game that appears to be running at (slightly) more than 12fps. Was this to be the year Summer Game Fest finally turned the corner?

Not quite. While Keighley and team did their best to sprinkle some more stardust as the show progressed, it was not enough to hide the rather stark drop-off, as exciting new announcements gave way to the usual parade of what we will politely call ‘commercial obligations’. When the obligatory trailer for Fortnite’s new season pops up, you know you can walk off to the bathroom or fridge, and probably both, safe in the knowledge you’ll be missing nothing but paid-for trailers for live-service updates, f2p gacha nonsense and janky Soulslike wannabes. Sure, there was some good stuff towards the end, there always is. But by the time it finally arrives you’ve been so worn down by all the guff in the middle that the hype no longer hits quite so hard.

This is just the way of things with Keighley, and always will be. Unlike the platform holders, he is not trying to sell you a console or a new game with this stuff; he is selling you, the watching punter, to game companies. He has a business to run, staff to pay, and a sprawling walk-in closet to fill with even more crimes against style. (Dammit. I was doing so well.) But unless he finds a better way to structure this stuff he’s going to find himself losing viewers, or at least finding less of them tuning in live. When everyone’s just watching the first 20 minutes, then scrubbing straight through to the end, he’ll find those mid-show slot fees harder and harder to justify.

Sony’s biggest mistake

It’s not the live-service push, the Bungie acquisition, or even thinking that Jim Ryan ever had the air of an entertainment CEO, rather than an overpromoted regional manager of Carphone Warehouse. It’s closing Japan Studio, and if that makes you raise an eyebrow, go watch the State Of Play again through this prism. I guarantee you will change your mind.

Sony has thinned its studio operation in such a way that pretty much all it has left, now its live-service strategy is in tatters, is a bunch of teams who need like five years and, if you’re lucky, a couple hundred million dollars to make a game. And, crucially, all the things they eventually produce will, to all intents and be purposes, be the same game: a slow-burning cinematic singleplayer thing with a bit of sneaky-sneaky to mix up the action, some kind of companion to pull you up ledges, kick down ladders and help you solve puzzles, and an Uncharted-aping setpiece or God Of War-ish boss battle every couple of hours to raise the pulse. Like Ubisoft in the PS4 era, Sony these days works to a template. And like Ubisoft in the PS5 era, that template appears to be all it really has left.

Two such games formed the bookends to last week’s State Of Play; such games will likely form the bookends to every State Of Play for the next decade. And as I observed last week, while there was plenty in between Wolverine and Laufey to get excited about, vanishingly little of it had anything to do with Sony. How this show could have done with, I dunno, a Gravity Rush, or LocoRoco. A Puppeteer or Tokyo Jungle. Hell, I’d even have taken a Knack, at a push, though I wouldn't have been that happy about it. Just something to add a little shape and texture to Sony's firstparty output; some form of signal that it is interested in funding more than 20m-selling blockbusters and live-service moonshots. Alas there was nothing like it, and we can expect this sorry trend to continue.

Look, I'm not a prude but this is really probably too much blood

I’m not just talking about Gears Of War. This applies as readily to Keighley’s thing, to the second tier of showcases like Future Games etc, and particularly to Sony, which opened this year’s PlayStation broadcast with so much claret I felt like I was at a 1970s dinner party.

When the game industry isn’t beaming like 800 games into our eyeballs in the space of four days, when it isn’t laying people off and closing studios, when it isn’t apologising for a game delay / a botched launch / its senior management being a bunch of diddlers, it worries about its future. It points fretfully to TikTok and Roblox, to Snapchat and Fortnite, to a new breed of gamers who aren’t really gamers and expect everything to be on their phone and free, and it asks: where are we going to find the next generation of customers? How do we get these kids to put our consoles on their Christmas lists, and spend their pocket money on our games?

Have you tried making a game where someone’s head doesn’t get chopped, blown, ripped or chomped off? A game that kids can actually ask their Nan for? A game that doesn’t require a meticulously researched chainsaw noise? Just a thought, like, don’t mind me.

Is Nintendo okay?

I should probably have made it clear earlier in today’s edition that this was a good not-E3. Every show I’ve watched contained a good half-dozen things that caught my eye, and in pure ‘yes I will play that’ terms, Tuesday’s Nintendo Direct was probably the best of the lot. It might not have felt like that in the moment, admittedly, when the Ocarina Of Time remake was unveiled instead of the 3D Mario for which I have grown so desperate. Nine years, it’s been, and this is unacceptable. There should be laws forbidding it. But still: good games. And at a commendable cadence, too. Sony pushes itself to the limit and gets maybe three games out a year; Nintendo puts its name to something just about every month. That’s pretty good going.

But I dunno, man. Something just feels off to me. Nintendo might be publishing a lot of games, but most of them are farmed out in one way or another (this week it emerged the imminent Star Fox 64 remake has been made by US developer Velan Studios). Its internal teams — the people who, over the last however-many generations, have made the actual games you bought Nintendo’s consoles for — have been worryingly quiet. Remakes and reheats are everywhere, the nostalgia-baiting excessive even by Nintendo’s usual standards, which is saying an awful lot. Were it announced in a vacuum I would probably be very excited about an Ocarina remake, but it wasn’t. Instead I thought: yeesh. Another one?

Which brings me back to Mario, and the pain I feel in his absence. In the nine years since Odyssey Nintendo has made two movies about him, and designed theme parks in his image. It has spun up a merch business that leverages his iconic fizzog to the max, and remade or re-released just about every single 3D game he has ever starred in. In the run-up to the second movie, Nintendo tarted up the Galaxy games; now, in the run-up to the Zelda movie, it’s remaking Ocarina.

Whither the new stuff? What’s going on? Is this another round of growing pains as teams adapt to making 4K assets? Are they struggling for direction as the old guard start to retire? Or has Nintendo just become so cynical that it sees no need to hurry the new stuff, because it knows its ardent fans will slurp up whatever reheated old toss they serve up? I do not know, but I know I want answers. In the meantime I suppose I’ll have to start another run through Odyssey. Knowing my luck they’ll announce a remake the moment I roll the credits.

That will do! In case the buttons sprinkled throughout this edition haven’t drilled it sufficiently into your skulls: 55% off a year’s subscription. What a deal. Paid subs, I’ll be back in your inboxes tomorrow. To the rest of you: see you soon!