The Front Row

There’s a lot we can take from the physical versus digital debate. It doesn’t always come down to who is using what anymore. We can see that Xbox is entirely digital, and they’re supporting that ecosystem with the right kind of balance. Then you look at Nintendo, and you see what they’re doing—they’re doing right by their audience. It’s up to Sony now to do right by theirs.

And there’s been a lot going on since I’ve been away—to the point where Sony is now offering some of the best things in gaming to its fans on a plate. I said before that they would need to do more to convince some of their fanbase. Let’s face it: they have the games to compete with anyone, they have the content, they have the backlog. They simply haven’t used it. It was always in their armoury, locked away until the day they actually messed things up quite badly publicly—and only then could they unleash the firepower. That’s what we’re seeing now.

Xbox has returned to growth. That’s great for the gaming industry, but it isn’t going to go unnoticed how much momentum Xbox has right now. Sony certainly had to do something to convince the vast majority of their fanbase to upgrade to a PS6, and the launch titles are going to factor into a lot of that.

When we look at how the gaming industry is right now, the hardware pricing is ridiculous—which makes me think many will stick with what they have. There isn’t going to be the same level of uptake as in previous generations, not at the prices these consoles are going to be at. Yes, there will be multiple hardware bundles with differential pricing, but when I look at these consoles and they say they’re offering this, that, and the other—I’ve heard it all before, and I know for a fact that after the last few generations a lot of people will be feeling the same way. So essentially, software is going to be key, and that’s where exclusives factor in again. That’s why Xbox has gone back to it, and that’s why Nintendo never left.

The gaming industry needs growth across the board, and you do that by doing right on the balance sheet—but also by what’s actually favourable to the audience, where most of your money is coming from. If you don’t give people a product they’re excited about, or content they actually want as an exclusive, well, you might as well go home. Your platforms aren’t going anywhere, but many of your fans are.

I think reading the room is the right thing for Sony to do—but so is bringing back some of the games that have been absent for years. When you talk about how to make games faster, you have to look at what Capcom is doing there. I think there is purpose in what AI can do when it’s utilised in the right way—improving the productivity and profitability of a business. You’re still going to need people; it’s about getting that balance right. We cannot just kill the creative prowess of the whole industry. When things are going stale, some of these companies have to look within and figure out how to make it right for their audience. I feel we will get there in time, and we’re certainly on a trajectory where creativity is needed en masse for the gaming industry to flourish again at the rates it wants.

PlayStation being back in the picture is important for the whole industry—competition brings the best out of everyone. When people say “pick a lane” to Xbox, as Shawn Layden proclaimed, it’s really about what level of risk-taking in creativity is still there, delivering to fans across the board and aligning your brand with something they can actually get behind. We need to see the gaming industry back at its very best, in terms of both back catalogue and new things. That’s the only way you sell the next generation to people who might not even be that sold on it right now.

Most discovery platforms broadcast at you. Algorithms push, playlists decide, you scroll and hope. Encore Call flips it: the room runs the show.

However you choose to participate, the room hears you:

🎤 Shout in the pit. Our community is where the loudest fans catch drops first. Hype, early reactions, chatter about the tracks that just landed. And those shouts matter — pit momentum visibly pushes releases toward the front row of the wall.

🗳️ Vote on your favorites. Every release is up for an encore call. Anonymous, no account needed. Earn enough love and a track earns its Crowd Favorite badge. Get rejected, and it retreats to the back of the wall.

Your favorites elevate themselves. Not because an editor picked them, not because someone paid for placement — because the room called for the encore.

And the wall itself is built different:

✅ Official artist and label channels only — every tile comes straight from the source ✅ Confirmed new singles and EPs from the last 14 days — no livestreams, no shorts, no filler ✅ Lyric videos? Only when you want them — they stay off your wall unless you flip them on ✅ Album rollouts grouped into one tile, so campaigns read like campaigns ✅ Vote-decay: your call is loudest exactly when music is newest, fading over 24 hours — new drops get judged by fresh ears ✅ No trackers. No ads. No autoplay ambushes. Works offline as an app.

No editorial picks. No pay-to-play. No velvet rope. We just listen to the room.

Artists with official channels: the stage door’s open — submit yours from the site footer. The crowd decides who earns their encore.

Check in. Catch up. Get on with your day.

encorecall.com 🎤

Writing sits at the very core of my creative work — but I’m equally passionate about building platforms that serve fans, especially fans of the things I write about. This is where those two intentions meet.

ScreenTime Plus — Feature Set

🎬 Fresh-first ranking. Recency weighs alongside momentum. A 36-hour freshness half-life means today’s drop competes fairly against last week’s — not just the loudest channel.

🏗️ Tiered wall layout. Hero tiles span two columns and two rows; major tiles span two columns. Priority content gets the big-screen treatment without crowding out discovery.

📂 Six purpose-built categories. Movies & TV, Horror, Games, Anime, Streaming, Cable TV. Dynamic tabs that rearrange based on what’s actually showing.

👁️ Seen-it tracking. Mark trailers as watched; filter to your personal watchlist. Everything lives in localStorage on your device — nothing sent to any database.

🎟️ Release date countdown chips. “Out in 3 days,” “Released last Friday” — stamped directly on every tile. The wall remembers why you clicked.

🌍 Region-aware pruning. Heavy pruning at build time plus in-flight failure detection. Geo-locked videos that slip through are caught silently and removed. Honest about what “works everywhere” actually costs.

⚡ Installs like an app, loads like a brochure. Progressive Web App with offline support. Millisecond load times. Because you’re here for the trailers, not the page.

🔎 Search and sort modes. Three sorts: Heating Up, Most Viewed, Newest First. Instant search across titles. Seen-filter toggle for personal curation.

🔗 Share without widgets. Native Web Share API with clipboard fallback. No third-party tracking pixels, no social button baggage.

🧩 Snapshot architecture with live fallback. Expensive builds run out-of-band via cron; the request path serves CPU-only snapshots with graceful degradation. No 500s, no blank walls.

ScreenTime Plus V1 is out now.

Thank you for your support.

— Craig.

In my opinion, when you look at what Xbox has done with cloud streaming and how they’ve restricted it, there is a distinct possibility this could happen if Microsoft wanted it to. Look at the disc-to-digital programme and see how popular that is. From that perspective, Game Pass isn’t really moving the needle in terms of subscribers — and on reflection, Microsoft already has a genuinely popular replacement in the chamber. That gives Xbox all the ammunition it needs to remove day-one Game Pass games.

It wouldn’t be a popular decision, but at a corporate level — and given the way Xbox is going about making exclusives again — there isn’t anything really stopping it from happening as Microsoft looks to put the Xbox brand on healthier financial footing.

Now, playing devil’s advocate: if the plan is to revert course, it runs directly contrary to the investment Xbox is making in Game Pass by bringing more titles to the service. If Xbox were looking for a get-out clause on day-one games with Game Pass Ultimate, they’ve certainly got one now that there’s a more popular initiative loaded and ready to take its place. Popular being subjective, of course — I want Game Pass Ultimate to stay exactly as it is.

I do, however, understand why Microsoft might make that call, however we end up perceiving it if any of these rumours prove true. It’s a decision that would undo all the work of making that kind of service a reality — especially when they have the means to fund it, and are focused on value propositions heading into the next generation.

When I was predicting the industry, I stated that content would be incredibly important moving forward. If you look at the back catalogue that PlayStation has, it’s immense. The question is: with them now moving away from ambitious projects on the scale of the PS4 era, do they have room in their budgets to take the kind of risks on franchises that could keep those who enjoy PlayStation games on the platform?

Recently, Sony has been taking much longer to complete their games. PlayStation fans, after all, are still waiting for that Naughty Dog game. It’s been in development for so long now, but it’s likely it will be released sometime next year. However, in terms of PlayStation Studios projects, they have been few and far between.

Yes, PlayStation are fully capable of gluing their fans to their screens with their exclusives. The question remains: how committed are Sony to doing it when they’re already dropping big-profile PS6 games like Kojima’s Physint that are now being invested in over at Xbox? That’s simply something Sony wouldn’t have allowed to happen back in the previous generation. We can talk about monetising PlayStation fans with Plus subscriptions. At the same time, though, and going into a PS6 generation that could effectively be completely digital, are 30-plus-year fans willing to stay on course with the platform if its direction isn’t clear?

In the past, we talked about how Sony’s games are increasingly becoming more expensive to make. The likes of Shawn Layden have even come out and said something has to give. So is this entire new direction of reining in on the most important franchises something that makes sense to them?

I mean, we have no idea what form Killzone could take under this new Sony. It doesn’t inspire a level of confidence, but at the same time, I do understand why they’re making some of the moves they are. Because as financially viable as Sony are, games are only getting more expensive as time goes on.

Saying that, though, to be the best place to play, you really need to have the content there that fans are invested in. This live-service nonsense direction isn’t going to cut it going into the next generation. And if fans start to see them lapse on PlayStation Studios titles and they start getting fatigue from the constant sequels, it could land Sony in an awkward place moving forward if they do not do right by their IP — something that the previous leadership of PlayStation never missed and were dependable on.

When you look at what Sony is doing, they’re very much getting into the action in that area now. They’ve basically made a massive U-turn on their commitments to fans of the PS4 era. I think anybody who signs Kojima does so with the intent to meet his lofty ambitions and maximise his creative talent to its fullest potential. Otherwise, you simply do not make that move.

So is it the right fit? Yes, it is. Kojima retains his independent voice and is not forced into an exclusivity arrangement that he would have likely gotten at Sony.

I mean, in terms of conceptual worlds, Kojima is a genius. Regardless of what you think of this move as a gaming fan—in terms of what it could offer in the realms of entertainment and Kojima’s own ambition to show up more in this very area—it’s a partnership that very much aligns everything together. We could see great things from all the connected worlds he’s recently been developing since leaving Konami.

Having Kojima be able to express himself in this way. Well, I think about what happened after Konami. The man has earned it.

I think this represents a good value proposition. And let’s face it—Xbox has the pockets to deliver on anything Kojima wants to add to his worlds.

Can we just reiterate how much this squad simply doesn’t work as a team? It hasn’t been fixed, and the ownership has brought in someone who very much loves this club but wasn’t backed at all in the right way.

Now, some could say: is this a situation where they’re not confident in his ability to take them to the next level and buy those sorts of players outright? Personally, I feel that’s just an excuse for an ownership that has had many chances to get this right. If anything, the Glazers passing over to Ratcliffe has only allowed them to get away with so much more in the way of this. It becomes like a reset, but effectively you’re still stuck on autopilot — and I think we’re seeing that happen around Manchester United. Because what is happening at that football club is just unrecognizable.

Forget about the result. Forget about the bad performance, or if it was offside or not. Let’s recognise the real issues here, because this has been a revolving door in terms of managers. If we do not start to understand the core issues here — why Manchester United isn’t working — we haven’t evolved since Fergie left. I haven’t seen us actually have a style of play that represents the honour of wearing our club crest.

Effectively, who is allowed to keep choosing the cheap option? And can we just recognise that this isn’t actually going to win us any trophies? Yes, last season’s third was fantastic for club revenue, but what about the ambitions of the fans? We keep pumping money into this club and we’re seeing no return.

The reality is this way of carrying on isn’t sustainable for this football club, and we need to find a way to bring a fresh perspective in from the bottom up. Until we get that, it doesn’t matter if the results are great one week and then we’re back to where we were the following. We’re not going anywhere, and we’re certainly not competing at the level we aspire to.

When the squad on a matchday isn’t being utilised in the right way, and when the same mistakes keep being made throughout, there has to be an answer to why this is allowed to continue. Of course, we have to give chances, but how many chances can we continue to give when the result is effectively the same? Where is the accountability the protests are actually there for?