New Game + March 4-10
Stock Bites
Nothing major happened in the world of gaming stocks this week. Most stock including major ones like TTWO, ATVI and NTDOY stayed pretty consistent throughout the week with minor fluctuations. Gamestop stock continues its downward slide after the acquisition talk was shelved. GME fell about 10 percent this week. The company announced it planned to buyback about 300 million in shares, which is not typically a bad thing but there was some other xbox related news that might have not helped the stock as well. In brighter stock information Ubisoft (UBI.PA) shares rose about 8 percent this week to just under 70 per share. It is slowly working its way back to its high of 104. They have a very strong stable of games that are mostly all firing on all cylinders at the moment. They are expected to announce strong earnings at the end of march report. The other brighstide is that they have finally been able to get all of their shares from Vivendi, who attempted to take a controlling stake in the company. Ubisoft founder made a plea to investors to help keep this from happening two years ago and with some help from multiple large investors including Tencent. They were able to fend off the takeover and in the process of working with Tencent now have access to a massive Chinese market.
Reviews
Devil May Cry was the lone major release of last week and most of the critics agreed that the series is back in fine form after its long absence of over six years. The impressive bit of information that many people might not realize about the game is that it uses the Resident Evil Engine or RE Engine. This is a modern engine that was first used on the return to form for the series in Resident Evil 7. Its great to see the many ways that Capcom is utilizing the engine and its assets. It has been praised for its return to its roots by focusing on combos, massive bosses, battles, metal and style.
News
Things we mostly quiet in terms of news for the week. However, the one story that really caught my attention was the announcement of the disc less xbox one. It was leaked a while back that Microsoft had two consoles in development. It was assumed that both of these console would both be part of the next generation for Microsoft. The rumour stated that they had two consoles in development, one was a strong, tech heavy console similar to what we know of consoles today and the other one was an all digital system that didn’t have optical drive or cartridge slot. The interesting part about this story is that the all digitial version will be part of this generation and will be releasing worldwide in early 2019. There are a few major takeaways from this story, the first being why now ? I think Xbox has something great going with gamepass and releasing an all digital version if priced right will get a lot of people in the door. Its assumed that the price of this console will be sub 200 dollars and hopefully it will be as low at $149. There is a reason that most companies are trying to go to the subscription model or at least have one in their portfolio and that is because they are very profitable and it capitalizes on peoples laziness to cancel. It would be a great idea to get people in the eco system cheap now so that when the next console launches they are potential buyers of the next platform. The second reason for doing this I think is that Microsoft has already lost this generation and the time for experimenting is right now before the generation reset. If this all digital Xbox sells great then they will have unsureness about pushing that direction harder next time around. On the other hand if this is met with pushback and doesnt sell well or things go wrong then there is always time to adjust and alter course for the next Xbox. The one benefit to being in 2nd place is that making the wrong decision doesnt cost you, instead it allows you to learn faster.
This also isn’t just big news for Microsoft but big news for the industry in general. The other big first that Xbox started was with Gamepass, which basically became the first iteration of the Netflix for games. Playstation had something similar but it had too many limits and didn’t feature much in the way of hot titles that justified its expense. Gamepass features a constant assortment of the latest, greatest and even some same day releases of the biggest Xbox exclusives including Forza, State of Decay, and Sea of Thieves to name a few.
It will be interesting to look back on the launch of the all digital Xbox in the future to see where it all began. It won’t be adopted by all as a lot of the world still lacks high speed internet to be able to constantly download these large titles. This will be the first time that a major console maker releases a major console without a media drive.