PlayStation
- Pour one out for the Vita! Sony said they’re ending production of physical game cards on March 31 and now it appears they are ceasing manufacturing of the Vita console itself. When it came out it was a neat little device that suffered the same fate as most of Sony’s older hardware offerings: proprietary memory cards along with proprietary charging bricks. The device fell from grace and lost nearly all AAA support after getting a few great offerings like Uncharted Golden Abyss, Killzone Mercenaries, and Assassin’s Creed Liberation. The fledgling handheld was kept afloat thanks to the vast indie scene on the device, but now that audience has since moved on to the much more lucrative, and much more capable, Switch.
- Media Molecule announced its long-awaited PS4 exclusive create-’em-up Dreams will be going into Early Access. The game’s Early Access will be a limited release, with no firm date provided, but we have a cost $29.9 and a limit to the following countries: UK, USA, Australia, Austria, Benelux, New Zealand, France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Spain.
Nintendo
- With a heavy heart I’m writing this news update: Nintendo announced that Reggie Fils-Aime, the president of Nintendo of America, will be retiring, with his last day taking place on April 15. (Trying) to replace him will be Doug Bowser who is currently the senior VP of sales and marketing. We’ll miss you Reggie and we wish you the best.
- According to Nintendo World Report, “Nintendo could make its first VR-related announcement as early as this year”. Emily Rogers, who wrote the piece, cites having heard about this from “multiple sources.” Rogers adds that “a small, select number of traditional first-party software titles may receive VR support in the not-so-distant future.” Nintendo has commented on the possibility of virtual reality in the past, but has never made a clear indication that such a feature is planned for Switch.
- Rumors have been swirling this week that Nintendo was going to revive a game that was thought to be dead. The rumor mill started after Game Informer’s senior editor Imran Khan hinted at this to be the case on Kinda Funny Games last week. After specualting what it could be, an article from Nintendo Insider surfaced claiming to “know people familiar to the situation” (as always) and dropped the bombshell that the game Nintendo is supposedly reviving is none other than Scalebound. If you remember, that was a title by Platinum Games that was orginally an Xbox exclusive before the company canned development on it in 2017.
Xbox
- According to reports, Crackdown 3 beat out Far Cry New Dawn and Metroid Exodus to be the most-played title at launch.
- Microsoft may have release some great titles on Games Pass last week like the newest entry for Lara Croft, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but that hasn’t stopped the company from dropping even more titles into the subscription service.
- Alien Isolation
- Headlander
- The Walking Dead: Season 2
- After years of languishing in development hell, Steven Spielberg’s live-action Halo TV series is finally taking shape — and with a commander at the helm. On Thursday, Showtime announced that Otto Bathurst (Black Mirror, Robin Hood) will direct the pilot and multiple episodes of the nine-episode series.
Industry News
- BioWare has prepped a massive day one patch for Anthem which includes a slew of bug fixes and optimizations for performance as well as loading times. It’s no securet during both betas that loading times were certainly less than ideal, so here’s to hoping the game is faster.
- Shaun Lord of Exciting Events decided to hold a Fortnite Festival to drum up excitement for his family-owned business. He had hopes of holding two other events, but after Epic’s lawyers caught wind of the first event not living up to fans’ expectations, they decided to shut it—and all future events—down for good.
- According to an invitation sent by Google, the company looks set to reveal details about its unannounced gaming project at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next month. The company will hold a keynote presentation on March 19, at 10 a.m. PT, where its expected to reveal details about a new endeavor focused on video games, Project Titan.
- Scratch the 9th of April release date from your calendars, as Yacht Club Games has revealed the next major update for Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove – comprised of Shovel Knight: King of Cards and Shovel Knight Showdown – has been delayed. According to a post on the game’s official website, Yacht Club Games said it estimated the delay would be several months, at most.
- After only 10 months of operation, The Razer Game Store is closing permanently at 4AM EST on February 28 2019. According to a post on The Razer Game Store site, the closing is part of a company wide realignment plan. The Razer Game Store was a digital storefront that provided Steam and Uplay keys to players. The store also provided discounts and rewards to users. Razer Game Store users are warned to retrieve any unused keys from the store before the shutdown occurs on February 28. Razer will also fulfill any pre-orders players currently have on upcoming games.
- Wargroove is less than a month old, but developer Chucklefish is already hard at work on quality-of-life improvements for the title. Here are a few of the big ones:
- a checkpoint system
- the inclusion of more difficulty modes: Story, Easy, Medium, Hard, and custom hard
- the ability to add CPU opponents to online matches in multiplayer
- ability to set movement speed to make animations faster
- Activision and Treyarch began a season’s worth of new content for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. The event, Operation Grand Heist, will drip-feed various bits and pieces into Black Ops 4’s various modes over the coming weeks, but also sees the stealth return of everyone’s favorite feature: loot boxes. Having gone through a name change—what were once “Supply Drops” are now “Reserve Crates”—the boxes can be earned by in-game grinding and include a single mystery item. However, players can purchase special Reserve Crates that feature three items for 200 Itchy & Scratchy money, or roughly $2. It’s worth noting that the patch notes for Operation Grand Heist made zero mention of the return of paid microtransactions, only noting that the Black Market was being “newly-revamped”. This has lead to speculation from the community that the publisher was fully aware of the surrounding negativity that would accompany the loot box return, and chose not to mention it.
- Contrary to what the publisher is saying, Sony has sent out communication via email to gamers stating that Overkill’s The Walking Dead has been cancelled. The message reads below as:
The publisher has notified us that the game is canceled, As a result, we have withdrawn the current pre-order from the PlayStation Store and will cancel all pre-orders. You will receive a refund to your original payment source within 5-7 business days.
- Valve is paring down its video offerings on Steam, and will now limit the service to movies that are directly related to video gaming or are adjunctive to ones sold on Steam. The company said:
In reviewing what Steam users actually watch, it became clear we should focus our effort on offering content that is either directly related to gaming or, is accessory content for games or software sold on Steam.
