News Mash-Up - Week # 1

Top News Items

• • Ubisoft have announced that its subscription service, Ubisoft+, will join GamePass sometime in 2022. The inclusion of Ubisoft+ follows the addition of EA Play subscription service to GamePass and all of Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda’s games in 2021. As part of the announcement that Ubisoft+ will be coming to GamePass, its new co-op PvE shooter Rainbow Six Extraction, expected on 20th January, will be on GamePass from day 1.

  • NFT news: Konami will mark 35 years of Castlevania with a NFT auction. Samsung has announced its slate of new Neo QLED TVs for 2022 with a new feature called “Gaming Hub” which will enable streaming gameplay of services Stadia, GeForce Now and Utomik (with a compatible controller). In addition, TV owners will be able to purchase, display and "trade" NFTs directly from their devices. GameStop has created a new division in the company to seek partnerships with video game creators and publishers to sell and market NFTs.

  • In an interview with SEGA’s CEO Haruki Satomi, the company has expressed an interest in NFTs on the provision “if it is perceived as simple money-making, I would like to make a decision not to proceed."

  • The ESA have confirmed that E3 2022 will not be a physical show. This will be the third year running the E3 show will be a digital event. The pandemic is the reason for the continued cancellation.

  • Jim Ryan, PlayStation’s CEO, unveiled the PlayStation VR2 at the technology expo CES. The PSVR2 headset will have a 4K OLED display that will deliver a resolution of 2000 x 2400 per eye, a 110-degree field of view and frame rates of between 90Hz and 120Hz. The headset will have integrated cameras, doing away with the need for an external camera, it will connect to the PS5 with one USB cable and will come with new PSVR2 Sense controllers. No release date or price was announced.

  • At CES, Nvidia announced its new flagship GPU, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. No benchmark details were revealed but the card will include 24GB of GDDR6X memory operating at 21Gbps.

  • For a moment this month, Apple became the first company in the world to have a market capital higher than $3 trillion. The company passed the first trillion mark just in 2018. Two-thirds of the App Store revenue comes from games. Microsoft is close on Apple’s heels with a market capital valued at $2.5 trillion.

New games

Week commencing Monday 10 Jan. 2022