Less than a week after Ubisoft promised that a new Ghost Recon game is coming but probably not anytime soon, the company says it will mark the series' 25^th anniversary in August with some proper news on what's coming next.

"It’s been a while Ghosts!" the announcement excitedly states. "We know some of you saw some updates, we’ll have more to say on the 6th of August when we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Ghost Recon. Intel coming soon."

My initial impression was that this is basically a scaled-down version of last week's big Bethesda blowout: A blast of the hype machine intended, at least in part, to help you forget about all the bad stuff going on, specifically the sweeping layoffs at Xbox that are putting thousands of people out of work.

Obviously an update on the Ghost Recon franchise, whose most recent game is now seven years old and was decidedly not great (although it has gotten better in the years since), doesn't have the hype heft of Fallout 5. But Ubisoft's condition is dire, and sometimes the best gun is the one you can reach.

My second and more lasting impression, however, is one of annoyance, and I'll tell you why. After a few seconds of pondering this Ghost Recon update, I thought to myself, perhaps there will also be news on Splinter Cell! After all, Tom Clancy is Tom Clancy, right? Hard men doing unpleasant things for freedom and stuff. The Ghosts, the Rainbows, the Echelons—it's all Clancyverse underneath, right? And if anyone in that gang is overdue for some attention, it's Team Splinter Cell.

Ah, but they are not all the same, at least not in the way that matters at the moment. I popped around to the Splinter Cell X account and found a Ubisoft 40^th anniversary retweet from earlier in July, a half-dozen 2025 posts (mostly about the Splinter Cell animated series on Netflix), one retweet from 2023, and a relative flurry activity from 2022. I thought for a second that would correspond to the announcement of the Splinter Cell remake, but no: That was actually announced in 2021, believe it or not. (Hint: Believe it.)

The 2022 activity marked the 20^th anniversary of the first Splinter Cell game; it was also the year that remake director David Grivel left Ubisoft for "a new adventure." He's had enough time since then to work on Battlefield 6, then return to Ubisoft and resume directorship on the Splinter Cell remake.

In that same stretch we've also seen Netflix make its Splinter Cell cartoon without Michael Ironside, the Splinter Cell movie starring Tom Hardy get cancelled, and Ubisoft making everyone mad by posting the wrong picture of Sam Fisher, which I genuinely think was intentional because at this point it's clear that Ubisoft just gets off on screwing with us.

Of course, this isn't a problem unique to Splinter Cell. Consider the Sands of Time remake, which was cancelled after six years of futility, or Skull and Bones, which came out six years late, or Beyond Good and Evil 2, which will soon celebrate 20 years of non-existence. Timeliness just isn't Ubisoft's strong suit, which is how we got here—"here" being the recent announcement of a "quieter year" in Ubisoft releases before things start happening in 2027-28—in the first place.

One possible spot of good news, relatively anyway: The 25^th anniversary of the first Splinter Cell game lands on November 18, 2027, about a year and a half from now. Maybe Ubisoft just really digs big anniversaries and has decided that at this point it might as well hold out for a good one before it drops any more Splinter Cell news. So there's something to look forward to. In the meantime, we'll let you know what's cooking in the world of Ghost Recon when it happens.

Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek hears you crying about PlayStation's decision to end physical game discs in 2028, and he's shoving your own fist in your mouth to make you stop. You caused your own suffering, he wants players to know.

"You, the consumer, have made a choice, and your choice is for digital," Faliszek says plainly in a new YouTube video on the subject. "I keep seeing this, like, 'Oh, they should do memory cards. They should do…' Right now, today – the games we are talking about are available at retail today. The used games are available at retail today, and you aren't going into retail and buying them."

Unfortunately for the thousands of commenters spamming Sony's last trailer for Marvel's Wolverine with emoji pitchfork and torches, he's right. Circana industry analyst Mat Piscatella just revealed only seven PlayStation games managed to crack 100,000 physical sales in the US this year.

Even worse, "Anybody who's reporting software sales right now, and they're doing digital and retail, they're all under reporting," Faliszek says, "because they're not reporting Steam. Let's not even get into mobile. And what was Game Pass? Game Pass was digital only. You as the consumer have forced the large corporations hand, and you've told them 'Stop with retail.'"

Once you, apparently, regretted your decision to invest almost entirely in digital, you didn't start buying Crimson Desert discs while you could, nor did you abstain from making digital purchases altogether. Now it's too late, says Faliszek.

"You should have started protesting Game Pass, and stop buying Xbox games, and stop buying digital," says the frustrated writer. "But you didn't, because it's easier."

The Steam Machine isn't doing exclusives because Valve thinks "restricting where people can play" doesn't work.