The Verge - Entertainments |
- Big video game companies just can’t stop buying studios
- Bloodborne is finally on PC (in the form of a neat PS1 demake)
- Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, will ‘initially’ remain free for everyone to play
- Disenchantment’s first season 4 trailer is dark and full of hellish terrors
| Big video game companies just can’t stop buying studios Posted: 31 Jan 2022 03:07 PM PST  Sony just announced its intent to acquire Destiny maker Bungie for $3.6 billion, capping what's been an absolutely massive month for gaming acquisitions. Take-Two kicked things off with its deal to buy Zynga for $12.7 billion, which at the time may have counted as the biggest deal in the video game industry, but Microsoft significantly one-upped that just a week later with its $68.7 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard. The total value of all three acquisitions, assuming they all go through, is a staggering $85 billion. With Bungie, Sony will house the talent behind the hugely popular Destiny 2, and it seems likely the company will use Bungie's expertise to help create similarly expansive and long-running live service titles. Sony is renowned for its expensive single-player games like God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, but it doesn't have its own take on Fortnite or Destiny that's updated regularly over the course of many years to keep players coming back. While PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said in an interview with Gamesindustry.biz that the Bungie deal wasn't a response to the big acquisitions already announced in 2022, it's hard to look at Sony's recent purchases as anything but an attempt to keep up with a tidal wave of consolidation in the industry. Just in 2021, Sony acquired PC port developer Nixxes Software, Returnal developer Housemarque, The Playroom maker Firesprite Studios, PlayStation remake / remaster experts Bluepoint Games, and God of War support studio Valkyrie Entertainment. Microsoft has also been on a buying spree, acquiring ZeniMax Media / Bethesda Softworks in 2021, Psychonauts 2 developer Double Fine Productions in 2019, and announcing a five-studio addition to its roster in 2018. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention Microsoft's very successful purchase of Minecraft maker Mojang in 2014. It's not just Sony and Microsoft that have opened their wallets. Facebook parent company Meta has shelled out for a whole bunch of VR studios to give its Quest headsets an edge (though Meta's VR division is reportedly coming under some scrutiny from the government, including for its purchase of the maker of VR fitness app Supernatural). EA has spent billions to acquire Codemasters, Glu Mobile, and Playdemic. And Chinese giant Tencent is behind a lot more of the industry than you might realize: it's the developer of the mobile hits Call of Duty: Mobile, Honor of Kings, and Pokémon Unite, owns League of Legends maker Riot Games, has a 40 percent stake in Fortnite creator Epic Games, and bought Clash of Clans studio Supercell from SoftBank in 2016, just to name a few things. The wave of acquisitions, especially the deals for Activision Blizzard and Bungie, also make previously unfathomable ideas that much more possible. Could Sony buy Square Enix to make Final Fantasy a PlayStation-exclusive series? What if Microsoft bought Ubisoft to make Assassin's Creed yet another draw for Xbox Game Pass? Would Nintendo buy Sega Sammy to make Sonic a first-party franchise? If you had asked me in December, I would have laughed at all of those ideas, but now, I don't think I'd bat an eye. Sony is also signaling that there could be more acquisitions to come. "We should absolutely expect more," Ryan told Gamesindustry.biz. "We are by no means done. With PlayStation, we have a long way to go." Sony's deal for Bungie isn't complete yet, but another major studio acquisition seems inevitable at this point — even free word games aren't safe. |
| Bloodborne is finally on PC (in the form of a neat PS1 demake) Posted: 31 Jan 2022 01:57 PM PST  Bloodborne is finally on PC — in a manner of speaking. Fans of 2015's FromSoftware roguelike have been fervently wishing for a PC port. At long last, their prayers have been answered on the gnarled finger of a monkey's paw with a PSX "demake" available now for free.
Developer Lilith Walther has been working on the demake for 13 months and has drummed up considerable interest from fans of PS1-era games and Bloodborne enthusiasts alike. The game already has its own Twitch category with (as of right now) over 25,000 people tuned in to see the technical feat of de-yassifiying one of the best games of the PS4 era. It's unclear just how much of the original Bloodborne Walther has included, but it seems like only Yharnam, the game's first zone, has been faithfully de-created. Though this demake doesn't encompass the entire game, players can still get a well-rounded Bloodborne experience. You can fight both the Cleric Beast and Father Gascoigne — arguably one of the hardest bosses in the entire game — while also encountering one of the notoriously difficult Hunter NPC fights. Bloodborne PSX is a lovely rendition of its source material. The opening cutscene lines up perfectly with its PS4 predecessor, and a lot of little details have been faithfully transported. As I was playing, it was a delight to feel my Bloodborne muscle memory kicking in, remembering exactly where enemies should be and being rewarded by ganking them before they could gank me. But the game isn't just Bloodborne with a retro-looking coat of graphical paint. Walther also took steps to capture what playing Bloodborne would have felt like were it released in 1997 instead of 2015. The game has controller support, but only the D-pad moves your character despite the analog sticks working in the menu. And there are settings you can enable that will intentionally slow down the game's framerate during intense moments like boss fights and increase "loading times" in order to recreate the painfully slow chug-a-lug of the PSX. There's even the old school "bwaam whaam" of the Sony Computer Entertainment start-up screen and a graphics setting that makes the game look like it's being played on an old CRT TV. In an interview with Kotaku, Walther said she was inspired by other fan-made demakes like the NES version of Breath of the Wild and that, to her, Bloodborne was made a couple of console generations too late. "I always thought of the Soulsborne games as retro in their feel," Walther told Kotaku. "And I mean that as a form of the highest praise." |
| Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, will ‘initially’ remain free for everyone to play Posted: 31 Jan 2022 01:47 PM PST  The smash online word game Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, which will integrate the daily word puzzle into The New York Times Games suite of word games, creator Josh Wardle announced today. Wordle will "initially remain free to new and existing players" once it moves over to the Times' site, and Wardle says that he's working with The New York Times to preserve players' existing wins and streak data once the game heads to its new home. That said, The New York Times' announcement leaves plenty of room for the company to decide to put Wordle behind its paywall in the future.
In his announcement of the sale — for a price that The New York Times' announcement reports is "an undisclosed price in the low seven figures" — Wardle explains that running the hugely popular game has "been a little overwhelming," especially considering that he's the only person who actually handles running the entire game. "We could not be more thrilled to become the new home and proud stewards of this magical game, and are honored to help bring Josh Wardle's cherished creation to more solvers in the months ahead," said Jonathan Knight, general manager for The New York Times Games, in the Times' announcement of the acquisition. When it moves over to The New York Times, Wordle will join a lineup of other popular daily puzzles, including The New York Times Crossword, the Mini crossword, Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed, Tiles, and Vertex. As an earlier New York Times profile details, Wordle was originally created by Wardle as a gift for his partner, Palak Shah, after the two of them got hooked on word games (like the Times' Spelling Bee and crosswords) during the pandemic. It was publicly released in late 2020, but has since exploded in popularity, thanks in part to the viral, emoji-based messages that allow players to share how they did on the daily puzzle without spoiling it for others. While Wardle kept Wordle as an intentionally free, web-based experience, the app was quickly copied by multiple clones that sought to capitalize on the game's popularity with knockoff iPhone apps. Apple quickly banned those apps from the App Store following reports that put a spotlight on the clones, although Wordle's skyrocketing success has also helped lift up older, unrelated word games (like the similarly named Wordle!), too. |
| Disenchantment’s first season 4 trailer is dark and full of hellish terrors Posted: 31 Jan 2022 01:24 PM PST  By the end of Disenchantment's third season, Bean, Elfo, and Luci were all down for the count and left in places that made it seem like they might have been ready to call it quits on their journeys through Dreamland. The gang's all back in the first trailer for Disenchantment's fourth "part" (read: season), though, and while things have certainly gotten bad, the story's not over yet. Disenchantment's third season closed out on Bean (Abbi Jacobson), Luci (Eric André), and Elfo (Nat Faxon) being split up as the kingdom was coming under siege by ogres, and Bean's mother Dagmar (Sharon Horgan) reappeared to spirit her daughter away to the underworld. Though Bean struggled with becoming Dreamland's newly crowned queen when last we saw her, Disenchantment's season 4 trailer emphasizes how her trip to hell leaves her that much more committed to becoming a better leader and more accomplished magic user. Slight as the new trailer is on concrete plot details, it more than makes it seem like Disenchantment's going to lean even more heavily into the serious tone it began to take in season 3, and its protagonists were all pushed to grow up in different ways. Pivoting into self-seriousness can be a risky move for animated comedies built on poking fun at other series like it who've pulled similar stunts, but Disenchantment might be able to pull it off — especially if the show comes out swinging with some excellent, ambitious jokes to match. Disenchantment's fourth chapter hits Netflix on February 9. |
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