Gaming - Page 361

Sony needs to ensure there is proper synergy between its live games and big premium AAA singleplayer games in order to maximize reach, engagement, and potential sales.

We've outlined a few things that Sony should be doing regarding its live games, including dropping the PS Plus requirement for any first-party free-to-play games, and now it's time to quickly discuss synergy between online and singleplayer games.

Ideally, Sony should establish direct links between its first-party AAA games and its live games. This is especially true for games that are set in the same franchise, and it can be done in a number of ways. We've already seen Sony's early start into live games with built-in monetized multiplayer modes like The Last of Us' Factions mode, Uncharted 4's multiplayer, and non-monetized live content like Ghost of Tsushima Legends.

Sony is significantly ramping up production of its PlayStation VR 2 headset and plans to make 2 million units by March 2023, sources have told Bloomberg's Takashi Mochizuki.

Sony is planning a VR blitz to accompany its new record-breaking PlayStation 5 shipments. The company will produce 2 million PlayStation VR 2 headsets throughout Fiscal Year 2022 as part of a new hardware fusillade meant to meet exceptionally high market demand.

Sony will also ship 18 million PS5's during the year, the single largest console shipment in PlayStation history. By March 2023, Sony expects to have over 37 million PlayStation 5 consoles shipped worldwide.

Fandom, a network of websites known for walkthroughs and content, has bought out some of the biggest gaming sites on the internet.

Today Fandom announced that it has purchased a ring of leading gaming and entertainment websites including Gamespot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, Metacritic and others. Workers' jobs are apparently being preserved and no one is expected to be fired during the transition period.

"The news is out. We learned about this last week. The amazing thing is everyone got to keep their jobs, titles, and salaries, which never happens with these acquisitions. While it's kind of scary to be bought out, at least our new parent company understands what it is we do," Gamespot video producer Tom Caswell said on Twitter.

Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan reportedly met with European regulators in Brussels to discuss the ramifications of Microsoft's mega-billion merger with Activision-Blizzard.

Sony's Jim Ryan is believed to have met directly with European Commission regulators that are currently overseeing the approval of gaming's biggest merger. Ryan has publicly voiced his opposition to Microsoft buying Activision-Blizzard for $68.7 billion, with Call of Duty's exclusivity at heart of Ryan's arguments.

Ryan has publicly confirmed that Microsoft had plans to remove Call of Duty from PlayStation 3 years after Activision's current contracts had ended. This has likely been noticed and recorded by regulators as a key point to consider; the UK's Commission for Markets Authority (CMA) had also stated concerns about exclusivity.

Sony reportedly has plans to release a remastered version of Horizon Zero Dawn, which is already one of the best-looking games on PlayStation 4.

In an effort to capture resales and engage a next-gen audience, Sony has been releasing remakes and remasters to help fill the gaps in between its PS5 first-party lineup. The PS5's release saw the remake of Demons' Souls (which isn't a first-party game but published by SIE) alongside remasters of the best-selling Marvel's Spider-Man. The most recent high-profile remake was The Last of Us, which was significantly overhauled with impressive visuals, effects, and in-game adjustments to gameplay.

Now reports indicate that Horizon Zero Dawn is the next best-seller to get the remaster treatment. Sources have told MP1st and Video Game Chronicle that Guerrilla Games plans to refresh Horizon Zero Dawn to take advantage of the PlayStation 5's power.

Guerrilla Games is reportedly working on a new online Horizon game that will release on PlayStation 5 and PC, sources have told MP1st.

Horizon Zero Dawn was originally supposed to feature some form of online co-op play, but the feature was scrapped due to time and technical constraints. Despite early reports, the feature didn't show up in Horizon Forbidden West either. Now it looks like Horizon's online multiplayer will be a standalone live service game.

Sources have told MP1st that the Horizon franchise will get a new online multiplayer game that bridges both PS5 and PC. The game is expected to have some sort of co-op or PVP action (naturally, given it's a MP game). This news fits right in line with Sony's new multi-platform business model that targets big games across mobiles, PlayStation 5, and PC.

Google may have a compelling argument against Microsoft's proposed buyout of Activision-Blizzard.

Right now worldwide regulators are sifting through data and conducting interviews with the biggest players in the $198 billion video games market. The goal is to determine whether or not Microsoft merging with Activision-Blizzard would harm competition. After the merger, Microsoft would be the second biggest video games company on the planet and own multiple billion-dollar franchises like Call of Duty, a $30 billion franchise that dominates PC and consoles, and Candy Crush, a top-earning mobile app with over $11 billion revenues since 2015.

The case involves an alphabet soup of worldwide regulators including the FTC in the US, CMA in the UK, and the European Commission in EU all trying to determine whether or not the deal is fair to competitors and consumers. Everyone is involved in this merger scrutiny, including competitors like Sony, Epic Games, and even Google--the latter of which may have an interesting argument against the deal.

Tencent reportedly plans to buy more majority stakes in video games companies to continue earnings growth and counteract falling share prices.

Sources tell Reuters that Tencent will aggressive buy up more majority stakes in overseas games companies. The Chinese gaming giant, who earned $33 billion in 2021 and more than Xbox and Nintendo combined, wants to spark growth in gaming as domestic games revenues stagnate due to strict regulations. Tencent's solution is to buy more stake in overseas countries with the hopes of riding consistent revenues.

Reuters reports that Tencent is targeting companies in Europe. This is on the heels of Tencent acquiring nearly 50% of controlling stake in Guillemot Bros. Limited, a company run by the founders of Ubisoft. The Guillemot brothers sold stake in their company in order to fend off a hostile takeover from Tencent. As part of the deal, Tencent's stake in Ubisoft can rise as high as 9.9%, but can't exceed this threshold for 8 years.

Microsoft has filed a formal merger proposal in Europe concerning its desired buyout of Activision-Blizzard's shares.

Regulators around the globe are currently scrutinizing Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. The deal is valued at $68.7 billion and is the largest in gaming history by a long shot; it's over 5 times more valuable than Take-Two's recent acquisition of Zynga for $12.7 billion.

Microsoft corporate executives are confident the deal with will go through despite Sony's direct and public opposition. The billion-dollar tech firm has filed its merger proposal with worldwide markets including the United States and now Europe. Microsoft's merger proposal has been officially filed in the European Commission's competition database and has been assigned a provisional deadline of November 8, 2022.

Google has made all of its Stadia videos private, and the official Stadia YouTube channel is now a ghost town.

Google plans to shut down Stadia, its fledgling game streaming service, in January 2023. The service had largely missed its market and failed to gain traction, losing Google untold millions in the process. Now history repeats itself as Google shuts down the service as it has many other products before.

What's most interesting about Stadia is that Google has effectively scrubbed all traces of the service from its official YouTube account. All videos uploaded by the Stadia YouTube account have been made private and the following message pops up: "This channel doesn't have any content."

Google cancelled a Death Stranding sequel that could've helped Stadia take off.

Years ago when Google established Stadia Games and Entertainment, Google had opened collaborations with famed Metal Gear Solid developer Hideo Kojima. Rumors had circulated that Kojima would make an episodic horror game for Stadia (which may have evolved into his latest game, Overdose) but the reality was the auteur was laying out concepts for a new Death Stranding game for Google's ill-fated streaming service.

Sources have told 9 to 5 Google that Hideo Kojima's new game would have been a successor to the popular cinematic Death Stranding game released in 2019 on PS4. The project was to be singleplayer-only, however, which is something that Google disagreed with. Stadia's third-party dealmakers cancelled the collaboration in the middle of 2020 after Kojima Productions had delivered game assets.

Google Stadia actually mattered a lot and helped define a new inflection point for the games industry.

Stadia didn't even last 3 years on the market. It was a risky bet, but major inflection points for the industry usually are. Some inflection points like the evolution from SD to HD graphics is an obvious benefit (even if it did add tons of work for developers), but the radical transition from singleplayer to multiplayer gaming wasn't ever guaranteed to work (Xbox LIVE was messy in its early days). Neither was the industry-changing paradigm shift from buying games outright to leasing them with subscriptions like Xbox Game Pass.

With cloud game streaming that actually worked, Stadia helped one of these major inflection points mature. Streaming wasn't new--OnLive did it in the 2010s, then Sony pioneered it with PS Now, followed by NVIDIA streaming PC-level performance with GeForce Now in 2015--but Stadia used the same servers that power the entire internet to beam games directly to consumers browsers, laptops, phones, desktops, and even Chromecast dongles. The service also introduced major innovations like save state sharing and merging YouTube streaming with gameplay.

To a Florida native like myself, there are few things scarier than hurricanes (that's saying a lot because with gators, the Everglades, and the eponymous Florida Man, the Sunshine State is legitimately terrifying).

The storms bring untold destruction including floods from ocean and river water that annihilate whole cities, high-speed winds that effortlessly tear roofs off, and torrential rains that only raise the flood levels. The devastation in Fort Myers recently brought on by Hurricane Ian's relentless category 4-force winds are a key example of what these storms can do, and it brought to mind an interesting concept that Rockstar Games could use for GTA 6.

What if the next Grand Theft Auto game had real-time storms in key segments of the game? What if players had to navigate part of the storyline through a category 4 or even cat 5 hurricane that wreaks total havoc on Vice City? That kind of chaos would make an epic set piece that would rival blockbuster movies.

Google's own teams were kept in the dark about Stadia's closure before the announcement was made, and partnered developers found out with the rest of the internet.

Yesterday Google announced its failed game streaming service Stadia would be shut down in January 2023. Google promised to refund all game and hardware purchases, and the store was abruptly pulled offline. No one can purchase games on Stadia, which is pretty bad news for developers like Milestone, who had released Hot Wheels Unleashed on the platform earlier that day.

It turns out that Stadia's closure was a surprise to everyone. Game developers weren't told ahead of time, a few of which had planned to release games on the platform. Even Google's own engineers weren't told before the announcement.

After multiple delays and five years of development, Scorn is finally releasing this October...and now the launch date has been moved up so that Scorn will release sooner.

Scorn's release date has been moved up and the bizarre first-person shooter will now release on October 14, 2022 on Xbox Series X/S, PC via Steam, the Epic Games Store, Gog, and the Windows Store, and also a day one release on Game Pass.

It's been a long five years for developer Ebb Software, who has established deals with Kowloon Nights and Kepler Interactive to help slowly evolve their ultra-weird vision from an interactive Giger painting into a game that's playable from start to finish.

NetEase continues scoring top talent to fill out its international game studios.

Watch Dogs creator Jonathan Morin has joined NetEase Games Montreal, the studio today announced. Morin not only established the concepts behind the Watch Dogs franchise but also served as creative director on both Watch Dogs and Watch Dogs 2 at Ubisoft. Now Morin is serving as a creative director to help form new IPs for NetEase's growing content label.

NetEase's Montreal division is focused on research and development, and published of Naraka Bladepoint's during its global worldwide launch (Naraka remains one of NetEase's most important games).

The developers that helped with God of War's successful PC port are making a new PlayStation live game.

Jetpack Interactive, who spent 2 years working on God of War's highly-optimized PC version, are developing a new live game for Sony. The Vancouver-based studio has been entrusted with a "prized IP" and is currently hiring a number of vital positions like network engineers and system designers for the project.

"We are hiring programmers to join our small & nimble team at JETPACK. We're excited to embark on a new live services title with Sony - and we're ready to launch," the studio wrote on LinkedIn.

The new Skyrim Anniversary Edition is the Nintendo Switch's first $69.99 mainline base game, and the RPG is currently more expensive on the eShop than any other digital storefront on the market.

Today marks the seventh time Bethesda has released Skyrim. The new Skyrim Anniversary Edition is now up on the Nintendo Switch with an eye-opening price tag. For some reason, the game is listed as $70 on the Switch eShop, which cements it as the first base Switch game priced at PS5 and Xbox Series X/S prices. Every other eshop game with a $69.99 price tag includes bonus DLC or an expansion pass.

This price tag means Skyrim Anniversary Edition is currently more expensive on the eShop than any other digital storefront on the market by a significant margin. The game is $20 more on the eShop than other store; it's currently $49.99 on Steam, the PlayStation Store, the Xbox store, the Humble Store, and is even discounted to $24.99 on GOG.com without any DRM.

Sony has kicked off controversy by using its new PlayStation Rewards loyalty program to prioritize access to its PlayStation support help section.

Sony's new PlayStation Stars loyalty program has a lot of perks. The idea is simple: Play games, earn points, and trade them in for free games, PSN cash, or little digital collectibles. PS Stars also has a ranking system. The more games you buy, trophies you unlock, and challenges you complete, the higher you rank up. There's four ranks and the highest tier has the best rewards.

This rewards program has one hidden perk: priority on PlayStation Support. In Japan, users with higher PS Stars ranks will be able to skip the general line and have more direct access to PS support (spotted by Automaton). Earlier this year, Sony made it even harder to contact PlayStation Support by stopping all Twitter responses and direct message responses on the Ask PlayStation Twitter account.

It'll be a while longer before gamers can set sail in Ubisoft's new pirate simulator.

Ubisoft has announced Skull and Bones has been delayed to March 9, 2023, right before the company's fiscal year ends (although the game's release won't make much of an impact on FY23 revenues, it will however help buffer the Q1 period of the following year...assuming the game does well).

As IGN notes, this is the fifth time Skull and Bones has been delayed. The game has been in development for some 10 years after being announced in 2013, and has been rebooted multiple times. Skull and Bones had originally started off as an Assassin's Creed expansion, and then morphed into an MMO at one point. The pirate sim's current iteration puts emphasis on online multiplayer, ship decoration and naval combat (which should offer monetization potential), as well as crafting and gathering and exploration of the High Seas.