PlayStation
- Gwent: The Witcher Card Game public beta is out now on PS4
- It has been confirmed Tom Holland will play a young Nathan Drake in Sony’s upcoming movie based on the Uncharted series. After development hell, the cinematic adaptation will now take place when Nate first meets Victor “Sully” Sullivan, an inspiration taken from a sequence in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception.
- Active users on Sony’s PlayStation Network have surpassed 70M with 26.4M being paid PlayStation Plus subscribers.
Nintendo
- Internal slides from what appears to be an Ubisoft presentation leaked on the internet showing details and art for the long rumored Mario/Rabbids RPG crossover. Check out the images at the bottom in our media section.
- Arms will be supported with free DLC like new characters, arms, and arenas similar to the original Splatoon on Wii U
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has been approved for sale in China, joining New Super Mario Bros which was approved a few months back. Both games will be playable on NVIDIA Shield as part of a content sharing agreement between both companies. It’s an interesting potential route into the Chinese market for Nintendo, and a chance to partner with NVIDIA to get key (albeit old) releases onto hardware. In other major territories Nintendo tightly controls content to promote and support its own hardware, of course, so these potential releases through Shield would be specific to the challenging market in China where game console makers are largely don’t exist.
- This week 8Bitdo released firmware update 4.0 which enables support for Nintendo Switch. All we need now is Virtual Console and Switch may be my favorite retro console yet.
- According to reports, it appears Niantic is now hiding rare Pokémon from cheaters in Pokemon GO.
- Nintendo’s share value has been moving in a generally positive direction since the Switch launched in early March, and has continued to rise significantly since mid-April in the build-up and then reception to the company’s annual financial results. Nintendo’s shares are the highest they’ve been in five years and even surpassed the peak of last year when the company’s stock soared amidst Pokémon GO’s viral success.
- Level 5 CEO said the company is developing games for Switch. Tristan and I can only hope it’s the sequel to Fantasy Life, a game we both adore on 3DS.
- If you’re the owner of a newer Samsung TV that’s giving you issues when your Switch is in sleep mode, you’ll be happy to hear Samsung is working on a firmware update for your TV to resolve the issue. Expect it in the summer.
Xbox
- The Xbox team announced that Xbox Game Pass will be launching broadly June 1 with exclusive Early Access for Xbox Live Gold members starting Wednesday May 24. In case you’re not familiar, Xbox Game Pass is a new digital subscription service that gives gamers unlimited access to over 100 Xbox One and Backward Compatible Xbox 360 games for $9.99 a month. Xbox Game Pass joins other programs unique to the Xbox platform, including Xbox One Backward Compatibility and Xbox Play Anywhere.
- Microsoft is rebranding it’s recently acquired Beam service into Mixer as well as launching new features such as co-streaming, a beta for the Mixer Create mobile streaming app, a new moderated channel of content on Mixer called ‘Channel One’, and a new Mixer page on the Xbox One dashboard.
- 4K HDR content is making it’s way to the TV & Movies Store on Xbox One, starting with The LEGO Batman Movie.
Industry News
- Resident Evil is getting a six movie reboot according to confirmation by the studio’s head Martin Moszkowicz.
- EA isn’t happy with how Mass Effect Andromeda turned out. So much so that the company turned Bioware Montreal into a support studio and moved a bunch of it’s developers to EA Motive while a handful stay on to further support Andromeda with patches.
- Red Dead Redemption has been pushed back to Spring 2018 which should surprise pretty much no one. Rockstar titles are held to high standards and are a big deal when they’re released, so it makes sense the company would want to get everything right, especially with a new entry into a beloved series like Red Dead.
- Speaking of Rockstar and their beloved IP, Grand Theft Auto V has sold a staggering 80M copies physically and digitally across all platforms spanning PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
- Following the horrible Manchester attack this past week, gruesome psycho-thriller Get Even has been pushed back a month to June 23 out of respect for the victims and their families. A representative for Bandi Namco had the following to say:
“Given recent events and out of respect we have decided to postpone the commercial release of Get Even to June 23rd,” a company representative said in a statement. “We would like to express our deepest condolences to everyone concerned.”
- Minecraft will be getting an Adventure Time pack across all versions of the game some time in the future.
- Dragon’s Dogma Dark Arise, the expanded version of Dragon’s Dogma, is getting new ports to PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
- Harvest Moon is heading to Switch and PC for the first time ever. We expect we’ll hear more news and details at E3.
- After working full time for four years, Wynncraft has released for Minecraft. It’s a full and proper MMO, and has everything from quests to leveling to guilds to bosses, and takes place on an enormous map that’s around 4000 x 5500 blocks in size.
- Netflix released the first trailer for it’s upcoming animated series based on Castlevania due out July 7.
- Sega’s PC port of Bayonetta has cleared 170K copies on Steam since it’s April 11 release. That’s good news for Sega fans as the company is planning to release more IP on PC like the Vanquish coming later this month.
Media
