Our Industry News   (10/06/24 - 16/06/24)

• Xbox Games Showcase 2024│Best in class

Just under a two-hour presentation that included a deep(ish) dive with Call Of Duty Black Ops 6 Direct, Microsoft was the clear winner of the summer presentations for 2024.

Here is the Eurogamer summary:

- The official Xbox channel on YouTube received 3.8 million views (at the time of writing) with 129,000 upvotes and 9,000 downvotes making for an upvote ratio of 14:1.

- 29 games were showcased in the main show, followed by a dedicated show for Call of Duty Black Ops 6.

- There were only a handful of indie / AA games; the remainder were all AAA.

• Ubisoft Forward 2024

- In a 90-minute video, Ubisoft showcased 17 games, of which 14 are older games that have already been released. On the official Ubisoft channel, the video received 568,000 views at the time of writing with 17,000 upvotes and 10,000 downvotes making for an upvote ratio of under 2:1.

- Among the 14 games already released, the showcase featured DLC packages for 5 games.

- Apart from The Prince of Persia Sands of Time remake, which is scheduled for a 2026 release, all other games have been released or will be released in 2024. The teaser trailer for the Prince of Persia Sands of Time Remake was pointless as it told us nothing. The showcase was really done to focus on two games: Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

• Steam sued. Yet another lawsuit in the games business. Valve is being sued for £656 million by a UK digital rights campaigner, who claims the company is rigging the PC games market and deliberately "shutting out" competition and suppressing price competition through Steam due to its monopoly position. The claim is that Valve "imposes" price parity clauses on publishers and developers, preventing them from selling titles at cheaper prices on rival platforms.
  
  
  
• Last week we reported GameStop raised nearly $1 billion with a sale of shares following a rally in its share price thanks to the short squeeze investor, Keith Gill. Well, they did it again, this time raising an additional $2 billion. GameStop is being rewarded for failure.

      Week commencing Monday 10 June 2024