News Mash-Up - Week # 4

• • New games projects were announced. Blizzard Entertainment has announced it is working on a new survival game. EA’s Respawn studio announced it is making three new Star Wars games. Crytek has officially announced Crysis 4. When released, it will be over a decade since the last Crysis game.

  • According to an article in Bloomberg, it looks like the next three games in the Call of Duty franchise will be coming to the PlayStation platforms. Phil Spencer, President of Xbox, made the following statement in his blog, "had good calls this week with leaders at Sony. I confirmed our intent to honour all existing agreements upon acquisition of Activision Blizzard and our desire to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation."

  • Epic has released a summary report on its Game Store for 2021. Highlights include:

    • 194 million accounts, 5x increase compared to the number of accounts in 2020.

    • Daily active users at 31 million accounts. This is less than half Steam numbers.

    • 917 titles on the store, double that to last year, but far lower than Steam’s estimated 48,000+ games.

    • About $840 million was spent through the store in 2021, +20% from 2020. Third-party games represented 36% of all sales with more than $300 million in player spending, +12% increase from 2020.

    • 89 free games worth $2,120 were offered and over 765 million free games were claimed by players.

  • Ubisoft’s battle royale free-to-play game Hyper Scape will permanently shut its servers from the 28th April. The game launched in August 2020 but failed to find an audience. Hyper Scape made the news when Ubisoft resorted to gifting gamers with $10 vouchers to get players interested in the game.

  • The Savvy Gaming Group (owned by the Saudis) purchased Esports event organizer ESL Gaming and tournament platform FACEIT for $1.5 billion.

  • Microsoft has changed the Terms and Conditions for Xbox Live and GamePass. The changes include clearer subscription details, refunds with pro-rata compensation, warnings of any price increases and contact to lapsed memberships. The rollout of these new Terms and Conditions will be done globally.

  • The new handheld from Valve, the Steam Deck, will start worldwide shipment to consumers from the 28th February.

  • Employees of Raven Software new trade union “Game Workers Alliance” seeks recognition with the US National Labor Relations Board after Activision Blizzard, who owns Raven Software, refused to recognize it.

  • After more than 50 years, SEGA will pull out of the Japanese arcade business.
    

     

Week commencing Monday 31 Jan. 2022