Weekly Retro: 1/28 – 2/1

PlayStation

• In February, Sony will be expanding cloud storage from 10GB to 100GB for PS Plus members. This doesn’t beat Microsoft’s unlimited free tier, but it’s better than what players have been paying for up to this point.

• PlayStation’s February PS Plus games have been announced

  • For Honor
  • Hitman: The Complete First Season
  • Divekick, PS3 (Cross-Buy with PS Vita)
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, PS3
  • Gunhouse, PS Vita (Cross-Buy with PS4)
  • Rogue Aces, PS Vita (Cross-Buy with PS4)
• Spider-Man is getting two new suits, both inspired by Peter Parker’s appearances in issues of Fantastic Four. The Bombastic Bag-Man suit, in which Peter Parker wears a paper bag over his head and an old-school Fantastic Four uniform over the rest of his body, and the Future Foundation suit, a reference to the rebranded FF of which Spider-Man was a member, are available for Marvel’s Spider-Man as part of a free update which is available now.

Nintendo

• THQ Nordic is bringing Darksiders Warmastered Edition to Switch. A trailer for the game exists on the company’s media server, confirming the news.

• Uniqlo and Nintendo have teamed up again to offer a range of graphic tees for both children and adults based on the company’s Mario and Splatoon properties.

• According to Japanese publication Nikkei, a smaller version of the Switch is in the works and may release as early as this year. They also claim that Nintendo is readying some sort of new service for this year aimed at game enthusiasts, however, further details were not provided.

• Nintendo revealed their latest sales numbers from their 2019 fiscal report

  Switch

  Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 15.02 million
  Super Mario Odyssey – 13.76 million
  Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 12.08 million
  Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 11.68 million
  Pokemon: Let’s Go, Pikachu / Eevee – 10.00 million
  Splatoon 2 – 8.27 million
  Super Mario Party – 5.30 million
  1-2 Switch – 2.86 million
  Mario Tennis Aces – 2.53 million
  Kirby Star Allies – 2.42 million
  Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze – 2.08 million
  Octopath Traveler – 1.08 million (not counting Japan)
  Nintendo Labo: Variety Kit – 1.06 million
  Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker – 1.05 million

  3DS

  Mario Kart 7 – 18.11 million
  Pokemon X/Y – 16.37 million
  Pokemon Sun/Moon – 16.14 million
  Pokemon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire – 14.17 million
  New Super Mario Bros. 2 – 13.08 million
  Super Mario 3D Land – 12.41 million
  Animal Crossing: New Leaf – 12.10 million
  Super Smash Bros. for 3DS – 9.45 million
  Pokemon Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon – 8.28 million
  Tomodachi Life – 6.40 million

• Nintendo has had a store here in New York for a long time now. According to Yelp, I’m a regular (and that definitely means Tris is too). While this is a great thing we take advantage of a lot, it kind of sucks that no one else gets to enjoy what the Nintendo NYC Store offers outside of New York. Tris and I long suspected the company was going to expand their retail presence when they changed the store name from “The Nintendo Store” to “Nintendo NYC” and now we have confirmation. Announced during the company’s financial results briefing, Nintendo said they’ll be opening a store in Tokyo in Shibuya at Parco building.

• Nintendo also announced they partnered with Japanese company Line to create a new Dr. Mario game for iOS and Android called Dr. Mario World. It’ll be out worldwide in early summer 2019.

Xbox

• Xbox’s Games with Gold titles have been revealed:

  • Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Xbox One) — Feb. 1-28
  • Super Bomberman R (Xbox One) — Feb. 16 to March 15
  • Assassin’s Creed Rogue (Xbox 360) — Feb. 1-15
  • Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (Xbox) — Feb. 16-28
• The Xbox team is getting a new addition by adding on ex-Nintendo employee Damon Baker. After leaving Nintendo in late-December, Baker was best known for his work as the company’s head of partner management, working with the Japanese developer/publisher, he saw a long career at the company spanning twelve years. Now, Baker has announced that he is moving over to Microsoft as their new Head of Portfolio for Xbox.

• Here are some fun facts regarding Microsoft’s Xbox One Backwards compatibility service:

  • The current number of games that are now backwards compatible sits at 538 titles. The Xbox 360 has had over 2,000 games released for the platform as of January 2018 which means that roughly 25% of the entire Xbox 360 library is now playable on Xbox One.
    • Of these 538 backwards compatible titles, over half of them are Xbox Live Arcade games which ends up being 37% of the entire XBLA library.
    • Currently, only 33 Original Xbox games are backwards compatible, which is only a sliver of the entire library, adding up to only 3% of the whole 1,047 games that make up Original Xbox library.
    • The following franchises are fully playable on Xbox One
      Assassins Creed
      Banjo
      Battlestations
      Bioshock
      Call of Duty (excluding Call of Duty Classic and OG Xbox games)
      Crysis
      Dead Space
      Dragon Age
      Fable
      Gears of War
      Halo
      Just Cause
      Left 4 Dead
      Portal
      Mass Effect
      Perfect Dark
      Saints Row
      Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
      Star Wars Battlefront
      The Darkness

Industry News

• Unity acquires Vivox, which powers voice chat in Fortnite and League of Legends. Unity plans to use its cross-platform support expertise to make it easier for developers on platforms traditionally underserved by voice chat tools, like mobile, to take advantage of the deeper communication that’s made possible by Vivox.

• Fortnite has been updated to support Apple MFi-certified controllers for iPhone and iPad.

• Capcom said they have shipped 3M copies of Resident Evil 2 within it’s first few days on sale. The original Resident Evil 2 sold just shy of 5M copies total, so it looks like the remake is well on it’s way to surpass the original.

• Twitch said it will stop promoting big streamer’s events on other steamer’s feeds. This has been decided on following blowback from Ninja’s New Years Eve event being promoted as well as Pro Bowl event with Pokemane.

• When Gamedev.world was announced on Jan. 24, many saw it as a shot across the bow of the annual Game Developers Conference, also known as GDC. But its organizers have bigger ambitions than simply providing free programming to go up against an increasingly exclusive event held each year in San Francisco. Organizers tell Polygon that they hope to bridge the gap between the thousands of isolated development teams around the world by destroying the final wall that separates them — the barrier of language itself.

  Gamedev.world will be streamed as a live event and an archived conference. It will feature talks from game developers around the world translated live into eight languages — eight of the most commonly spoken languages in the world. So anyone who has an internet connection anywhere can see and learn and, through the online community chatting, find kindred spirits in their own language.

• Deep Silver made headlines this week after it announced that Metro Exodus will be the latest high-profile game to be releasing exclusively on Epic Games’ storefront. In addition to leaving Steam, Exodus will not be available via the Humble store, sticking solely to Epic’s platform. The move will be a timed exclusivity deal for one full year, and it will return to other storefronts on February 14, 2020. Players who had previously pre-ordered the game through Steam or Humble will still be able to download it through Valve’s client and play the game on February 15, 2019. Deluxe Edition pre-orders will also be granted DLC through Steam. This change is limited to new customers only.

• Apple is said to be planning to launch a subscription service for games according to a report from Cheddar which cites five anonymous sources that suggest Apple is talking to game developers to be part of a new subscription service. It would be structured similar to Netflix, users would pay a set fee for unlimited access to a selection of titles. Further details like pricing or availability were not stated.

• Epic Games has kept paid blind loot boxes out of Fortnite’s signature battle royale mode, and now it’s clearing them out of the cooperative Save the World mode, too as of the 7.30 update. Players can now see what’s on offer so they won’t spend real money on a set they don’t want. Now they can simply wait until the following day to see what’s refreshed.