PlayStation
- Sony are officially pulling the plug on DriveClub with their announcement that servers will be shut down March 31 2020. If that wasn’t bad enough, the title will be delisted August 31, 2019 from the PlayStation Store—including DriveClub Bikes and DriveClub VR. Offline game modes will continue to function.
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Here in the states, digital game purchases have a lot of annoying ‘gotchas’ attached to them—especially if you preorder. In a step in the right direction, Sony has made some changes this week I’ve outlined below:
- refunds can be issued for any game within 14 days of purchases as long as the game hasn’t been downloaded
- to go along with this, pre-orders can now be cancelled as long as the game hasn’t started downloading
- PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now subscriptions can now be cancelled 14 days in as well, although your refund will be adjusted for the two weeks of use
It’s clearly not perfect. The biggest issue is that refunds go back to your PlayStation Wallet and not to the original purchase method. The other glaring issue is that you can’t try a game out for say, two hours, before deciding it’s too broken/poor quality to keep playing.
- April’s 2019 PlayStation Plus updates have been revealed:
- The Surge
- Conan Exiles
Nintendo
- In a surprise announcement coming out of nowhere, Nintendo announced VR support for Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild via the upcoming Labo VR kit. The VR kit itself launches April 12 while the free updates to Odyssey and Breath of the Wild will launch April 25. In Mario Odyssey, players will hav ethe opprotunity to play small minigames while Breath of the Wild will let players enjoy the entire game (minus cutscenes) in VR via a third person camera perspective. This actually happens to be one of my favorite simple VR perspectives as it adds a whole new level of immersion.
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Sega announced this week that Mario & Sonic At The Tokyo 2020 Olympics will be released on the Switch in summer 2019 and in arcades in winter 2019.
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Nintendo’s Switch Online app has been updated with new titles:
- Punch-Out!
- Star Soldier
- Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels
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Best Buy has since hidden these games in its internal system, but earlier this past week it showed Metroid Prime Trilogy, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Persona 5 for Switch.
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Analytics firm Sensor Tower is back at it again with more Pokémon GO data. Since last July, the title has earned almost $80M per month since then, or roughly $2.3M per day. This equates to a pretty impressive year-over-year increase of 40%.
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PDP announced a new Switch controller with integrated chat support. Dubbed the Faceoff Deluxe+ Audio Wired Controller, the gamepad features a 3.5mm jack, audio controls, interchangeable faceplates, and two programmable buttons. Pre-orders start in May, but no price or release date have been confirmed.
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Niantic and The Pokémon Company have big plans for Pokémon Go Fest this year, with the 2019 event being spread across three events: one in Chicago, the event’s home for the past two years; one in Dortmund, Germany; and one in an unannounced city in Asia.
Industry News
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Shirley Curry, an 82-year-old grandmother and YouTuber known for her Skyrim videos, will make an appearance in The Elder Scrolls VI Bethesda revealed at PAX East during the Elder Scrolls 25th Anniversary Panel.
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Last September, Sega decided to delay the release of the Mega Drive Mini / Genesis Mini after the response to the announcement here in the west was bigger than it expected. The company cited how it also wanted to achieve a level of quality fans would expect and brought in proven Japanese software developers to help out. This week, Sega revealed the system will launch worldwide on September 19th for roughly $70 for the system and one controller or about $90 if you want two controllers. The system will include a total of 40 titles.
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n the past week, Artifact’s peak concurrent player count hasn’t even reached 500 mere months after its November 28 launch. Now the Valve-developed card game is floundering and the Artifact team has decided it’s time to reshuffle the deck, so to speak, and try to save the title from being a complete failure.
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Valve has also started to give us an idea of what its VR headset is going to look like. All we know at present is it’s called Valve Index and it appears like it will be a high-end headset meant to compete with other Steam VR options like the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift.
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After a leak earlier this week, Gearbox confirmed Borderlands 3 will release on all available platforms September 13, 2019.
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In a move that isn’t perhaps terribly surprising, Ubisoft has halted production of toys for Starlink: Battle for Atlas. While the game itself is pretty solid, having to assemble and swap out parts on a base your joy-cons attach to looks cumbersome beyond belief. That and who really wants more toys laying around?
