Business

These stories are in no particular order. The first story is that EA paid ninja and other streamers over 1 million to stream Apex Legends. No one from Team Ninja or EA has commented on the credible rumours. With such a small release window without the typical press cycle, EA had to make smarter decisions with the marketing budget. Trade show setups including swag and travel accommodations, creating media and using the typical channels of internet advertising, print and video would be the typical area that budget would be spent. Since the game dropped stealth there was no need for the traditional marketing which paved the way for more progressive thinking. Pay the biggest streamers in the world to play your game. Most streamers from day 1 are still playing this game on the regular which is a added side effect of the decision which has clearly paid off as the game has been downloaded over 50 million times already.

Stock Bites

TTWO - Rumors once again began circulating of a takeover bid of Take Two. Late last year there were rumblings of a similar scenario but nothing came of it. The current story going around is that it would be a joint deal with CBS and Viacom although Sony has also been mentioned in some articles. The Sony mention I think holds less credibility as they already have a lot of in house first party studios all doing different things and the cost to acquire TTWO wouldn’t make sense in this case. Currently the stock is trading in the mid 90’s and the valuation would potentially go upwards of 130 if a takeover did happen. The stock at the start of the week was around high 80’s and jumped to the high 90’s when the story leaked. The side effect of this was that a lot of other video game stocks also took a small jump last week as excitement for the video game stocks came to life again.

Assasins Freed

Former Executive producer of the Assasins Creed series, Jade Raymond, announced this week that she would be taking a job at Google as VP. She didn’t state exactly VP of what but it would be safe to say that Google is trying to beef up their gaming division. The addition of Jade Raymond gives Google even more industry veterans including former head of Xbox Phil Harrison. It is becoming more apparent that Google is making a hard push into the world of video games but we are unsure in what capacity. The good news is that we won’t have to wait long to find out as GDC is next week and the story is that Google will be announcing some gaming related news. Jade last position in the industry was working at Motive Studios under EA. The last project that we knew about was an unidentified Star Wars game in collaboration with Visceral Studios. Visceral Studios was closed down and not much has been known about the direction of the game since. The last time google tested the gaming waters was with streaming Assassins Creed Odyssey via web based browser. This meant you didn’t need a beefy rig to be able to play the game in all its high fidelity glory, instead all you needed was a high speed internet connection. Many people that signed up for the private beta were all delighted and amazed with the results with many people trying to test the limits by using very limited and outdated computers.

Borderlands Reveal ?

Gearbox has finally teased an announcement of Borderlands 3. Gearbox released an image showing a roadsigns that showed the date March 28 and Boston. The image was very much in the art style of previous borderlands games. The date and location of this image would lead many to believe that the game will be revealed at PAX east on March 28. It will be interesting to see what their vision for this game is. Back in 2012 when the second Borderlands came and even somewhat with the pre sequel in 2014 there still wasn’t anything that was doing what it was doing. Mixing the best of loot games with shooters. The world is a different place with games as a service what they are today. The world in 2014 was just starting to get a taste of this with games like Destiny in 2014. Nowadys the biggest corporations are making loot shooters including EA’s Anthem, Ubisoft’s the Division and Bungie with Destiny. The big question is after all these years how will it stack up ? Will it be online based like the rest of the loot shooters I just mentioned or will it just be co-op. Will it introduce innovative features or will it just be a next gen version of a game that used to be loved by many.

Firestorm

The battlefield battle Royale mode Firestorm was finally announced this week via a CG trailer. This part was a bit of a let down as it didn’t really show off any gameplay, but the trailer shows a lot of what EA and Battlefield are known for. If you want to see what our thoughts are for what we would’ve done with the Battlefield BR click here. There were a couple of highlights to take away from the announcement. The first was that it will in fact be free to Battlefield V owners and the game will actually be released very shortly on March 25. One of the only pieces of information that we got was that it would be able to play in either squads or solos and that it would still be launching with 64 player battles. It is still unknown if that is the final number or just the target for release.

Left 4 Dead 3

Not actually L4D3 but the next spiritual successor titled Back 4 Blood. As the title indicates this will once again be a 4 player game. This comes from the team at Turtle Rock who announced they are working on a new co-op shooter. They are known for the Left 4 Dead series, however the last game this team made was Evolve the 4v1 shooter. I thought the game was pretty great with its inventive classes and abilities but unfortunately it didn’t gain a large enough community. It might have been the lack of depth or that it was too soon for multiplayer only game on console. It eventually went free to play as a last ditch effort to gain momentum but it didn’t work. They haven’t announced a date yet but did indicate that it would be released on PC, Xbox and PS4. Based off that information and the idea that the next generation of consoles are due within the next 12-24 months max the game will be released somewhat sooner than later which means it has been in development for some time now.

Undivided

Finally, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 was released this week, at all different times depending on what version you ordered. The game has been receiving positive reception from fans and critics alike. You can check out some of our beta concerns but so far most of the main issues we had with the beta have been ironed out. Usually during large releases of massive online games the opening weekend is typically riddled with problems whether that be server issue, balance issues or bugs but things to be going smooth so far for the team at Ubisoft. Keep an eye posted to our review section as we will be reviewing the game in progress.