For whom the siren tolls
According to many sources including IGN, the Game Rating and Administration Committee of Korea handed down a rating this week to a previously unannounced Silent Hill game. Titled Silent Hill: The Short Message, little is known about the project. Not platform nor story, but anticipation runs high. The Publisher UNIANA also published Konami’s recent free-to-play Soccer game eFootball 2023. Silent Hill originally debuted for PlayStation back in 1999 and it’s been about 10 years since the last full game. 8 years since the infamous P.T. playable teaser. More news as it develops.

Freebie Jeebies
PlayStation Blog gets the ball rolling with its PS Plus Essential lineup for October 2022. This Halloween season players can expect Injustice 2, Superhot and HotWheels Unleashed. All playable from Oct 04 and available until Oct 31. The Extra and Premium tiers will be announced later in the month. As for September’s titles, fans have until Monday October 03 to add Need for Speed Heat, Toem and Granblue Fantasy: Versus to their library.

On the Xbox side of things, XBox Wire kicks off October with Games with Gold titles Bomber Crew Deluxe Edition and Windbound. Windbound will be available Oct 01-Oct 31 while Bomber Crew will be available Oct 16-Nov 15 inclusive. The same perks apply to Ultimate members.

The stream scene
Gamesindustry.biz reports that Netflix is opening up its 4th internal gaming studio but first from the ground up; located in Helsinki Finland with Marko Lastikka as studio director. Netflix VP of game studios Amir Rahimi said “This is another step in our vision to build a world-class games studio that will bring a variety of delightful and deeply engaging original games — with no ads and no in-app purchases — to our hundreds of millions of members around the world.” To quote Brendan Sinclair, “It was a year ago this week that Netflix announced the acquisition of its first internal studio, Night School Studio. It followed that up in March with the acquisitions of Boss Fight Entertainment and another Helsinki-based outfit, Next Games.”

Save who you can save
HBO released its first full length teaser trailer for The Last of Us TV series this week, to positive results. The trending video with over 6 million views features glimpses of new characters such as Riley and Marlene as well as returning protagonists Joel and Ellie. Slated for a 2023 release, you can check it out here.

Digital TKO
The much-maligned Google cloud gaming service Stadia has announced that it will be shutting down come 2023. More specifically, Stadia will remain live for players until January 18th, 2023. According to theverge, refunds for Stadia hardware “purchased through the Google Store as well as all the games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store” will be completed in mid-January. Speaking in a Blog post, Stadia vice president and GM Phil Harrison said “…while Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.” As for the future, Harrison remains optimistic for the tech saying “The underlying technology platform that powers Stadia has been proven at scale and transcends gaming. We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts — as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed. We remain deeply committed to gaming, and we will continue to invest in new tools, technologies and platforms that power the success of developers, industry partners, cloud customers and creators.” A FAQ is available and should answer further questions for those affected by this.