Hottest news: Gamescom 2024, New Steam record breaker and 580 million Gifts from Epic Games!

Gamescom Opening Night Live 2024

- Some games looked promising, such as Dune Awakening, Little Nightmares 3, and Reanimal. We received teaser trailers for Borderlands 4 and Mafia 4, both expected in 2025.

- There was only one VR game, exclusive to the Meta Quest 3: Batman: Arkham Shadow.

- One very interesting development was the promotion of a Prime TV show called Secret Level, expected to be released in December. It is an anthology series similar to the existing Netflix programme Love, Death & Robots, and utilises CGI assets from game studios to tell short stories. This is an intriguing concept for a video game showcase, aimed at promoting TV shows based on video game properties.

Black Myth: Wukong is a Steam and sales darling.

Game Science’s new title, Black Myth: Wukong, has become a record-breaker on Steam. With over 2.13 million concurrent players, it is now the second most-played game of all time on Steam, following PUBG, narrowly beating Palworld (2.10 million) and boasting the highest concurrent player base for any single-player game. According to data from Simon Carless of Gamediscover, 88% of the player base is Chinese. However, the game is not without controversy. There is no physical release for consoles; it is purely digital and has not yet received an Xbox release. It has also garnered mixed reviews from streamers and gaming media alike. Nevertheless, these factors have not impeded its massive sales. The game’s official X account stated that it has sold in excess of 10 million units within its first three days on the market, combining both Steam and PS5 sales.

Epic Games

It was announced that since its inception in 2018, the Epic Games Store has given away 580 million units of “free” games through its weekly giveaways, a cost that must have exceeded $100 million for the company (we know it spent $11 million in the first nine months of the initiative). Between 2018 and 2021, Epic paid over $300 million to secure exclusives. Exclusivity on the Epic Games Store now also applies to titles that Epic is funding through the publishing division it established in 2020. The first game published by Epic to release was Remedy’s Alan Wake 2, which has yet to turn a profit. Recently, Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox, stated that Borderlands 4 will not follow the Epic Store exclusive deal made for Borderlands 3, given the substantial size of Steam’s user base. Pitchford described the Borderlands 3 exclusive deal as “misplaced”. After a four-year battle to bring Fortnite back to Android and iOS, the game is now available on those platforms within the EU.

As anticipated, the new PS5/PC full-priced hero shooter GaaS title Concord is dead on arrival. Although we do not have PS5 player base figures, on Steam the highest concurrent player count has only reached 697 since its release. The pressing question now is not whether Concord will result in financial losses for Sony, but rather how long the company will continue to support the game. This contrasts sharply with Sony’s previous full-priced GaaS title, Helldivers II.

      Weeks commencing Monday 12 August 2024