News Mash-Up - Week # 29

• • In an hour-long video presentation, EA hosted its EA Play 2021 showcase. Seven games were highlighted. New games include Grid Legends from newly acquired Codemasters, a gothic inspired action-adventure game called Lost in Random and Battlefield 2042 which featured a new game mode called Battlefield Portal which allows players to host their own sandbox battlefield maps. A Dead Space remastered was also announced, expected in 2022 or 2023.

  • Konami has decided to make its annual football game, eFootball, formally known as PES, into a free-to-play game. Expected to launch this Autumn, the game will be download only and available on the current and last PlayStation and Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch, PC and mobile. It will support cross-play across all platforms. A “Match Pass system” will be made available, from which in-game currency can be earned as well as top ups from microtransactions. Konami insists the game will be fair and balanced.

  • Ubisoft fiscal Q1 2021 was released. Revenue declined year-on-year by -14% to €353 million. Interestingly the €353 million revenue is only €10 million less than in fiscal Q1 2019 (the pandemic “bump” from last year has corrected itself, this could be a trend). From October, Ubisoft will close servers for its 2020 mobile game Tom Clancy's Elite Squad, citing lack of interest. Guillemot, Ubisoft CEO, said the publisher is putting 80% of its future content investments into premium content titles, with the remaining 20% focuses on expanding its free-to-play slate.

  • Some EVGA Nvidia 3090 RTX cards have been permanently damaged, or even destroyed, by numerous games which ran the cards at 100% capacity resulting with heat scarring. Light of the issue came into focus when Amazon’s new game New Worlds entered into open beta last week resulting in some EVGA 3090 RTX card gamers getting damaged. EVGA has promised to replace the damaged cards.

  • Tencent is set to buy the British game-for-hire developer, Sumo Group, for $1.3 billion. Tencent already owns a sizable minority of 9% in the company. Sumo Group recently made Sackboy: A Big Adventure for Sony and Crackdown 3 for Microsoft.

  • PS5 owners have been given 6 months free access to Disney+. Sony has entered into a deal with Disney rewarding its users with access to the subscription provided the offer is redeemed by the 22nd June 2022. Apple One subscribers are exempt from the offer.

  • Netflix is working on an upcoming animated project on the game Player Unknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG).

  • Netflix has fleshed out more details regarding its plans to include gaming as part of its subscription service. It is currently focusing on mobile games based on its original content IP and looking for cross-overs between games and TV.

  • Polygon has launched a new company called Polygon Studios and is investing $100 million in plug-and-play software development kits (SDKs) for developers such as Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Atari and others, enabling them to integrate blockchain attributes into non-blockchain games, especially for free-to-play games. To do this, Polygon will focus helping developers fuse existing Web 2.0 games with Web 3.0 decentralized blockchain technology.

Week commencing Monday 26 July 2021