News Mash-Up - Week # 45

Top News Items

• • According to tracked GSD, Call of Duty: Vanguard week 1 sales are -36% lower compared to last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. As a percentage of total units sold, network sales for Call of Duty: Vanguard week 1 came to 64%. This was 4 percentage points lower than the 68% that network sales accounted for in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. It is most likely the rising popularity of the free-to-play game Warzone has cannibalized sales from Call of Duty Vanguard.

  • It has been a bad week for Rockstar if one was to go by the Metacritic score for Grand Theft Auto: The Definitive Edition. At the time of writing, game so far has a Metacritic of 64 (out of 100) with a User Score of 0.6 (out of ten). Poor conversion, cartoon art style, bad modelling, the removal of many iconic songs and broken gameplay mechanics are the reasons for the low reviews.

  • Playground Studios who made Forza Horizon 5 for Microsoft were delighted to announce the game released to the best launch numbers in the franchise history. 4.5 million registered accounts played the game on launch. The game came with the GamePass package.

  • Konami Digital Entertainment division (namely video games) quarter revenue reached $428 million, an increase of +7% vs Q2’20. Konami stated that its newly launched eFootball PES 2021, which is a free to play game supported with microtransactions, attained 450 million downloads globally.

  • Roblox has seen its Q3’21 calendar revenue double vs Q3’20. Revenue surpassed the ½ billion mark to reach $509 million, but the company is still making a loss. Net income was negative $74 million, almost double the loss it made last year with negative $49 million, so although the company is making more money, it is also spending more as well. The losses come from the fact the company must pay for developer fees and supporting the platform.

  • Tencent’s international revenue increased +20% vs last year to $1.7 billion. Total revenue (including China) reached $22.2 billion, an increase of +13%. Its operating profit reached $8.2 billion, an increase of +21%. Tencent’s international revenue accounts for 8% of its total revenue, a one percentage point increase on Q3’20. Tencent attributes the international revenue success to Valorant and Clash of Clans.

  • Sony has launched PlayStation Direct in Europe. An online store that will sell hardware, accessories, and games directly from Sony. A playbook that Microsoft has been doing for some time.

  • Steam put out an announcement that it will delay the release of its new portable gaming machine, the Steam Deck, to February 2022. It planned to release the machine in December but blamed the worldwide supply constraints for the delay.

  • YouTube has removed the Dislike count which is open to public viewing. People can still vote dislike, but the number of dislikes can only be seen by the content provider only.
    

  • Unity has acquired Weta Digital, the Special Effects house co-founded by Peter Jackson, for $1.6 billion. Unity is famed for not only being a games engine but it is also used by film content makers for visual special effects.
    

  
  
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Week commencing Monday 15 Nov. 2021