PS PLUS + GAMES GOLD

As we have entered the start of the month both of the major console players have announced their free offerings for PS Plus and Games with Gold. On the PlayStation, the new games for the service included the original Overcooked and What Remains of Edith Finch. As a huge fan of the indie Overcooked, I strongly recommend people pick up this game and hopefully it funnels more people to the sequel. This game is at its best when played with friends on the couch ruining relationships and friendships. The bright side is that if your friendship or relationship is strong enough to survive playing Overcooked together everything else should be a breeze. The offerings for the Xbox include the Marooners and The Golf Club 2019. In my opinion this is a bit of a downer month for both services that I don’t think will drive new customers to the service. My assumption is that similar to last year the companies are saving bigger games that will cost the company more until June when E3 is taking place. Last June Sony had Xcom 2 and Trials Fusion as their PS Plus games and on top of that Black Ops 3 was free for a period during E3 to help generate buzz for the next instalment in the franchise. As Modern Warfare was free for PS PLUS this past March, its a strong possibility that we might get an additional COD for PS PLUS in June that might be related to the fall instalment. Possibly Infinity Wards last COD which was Infinite Warfare, which was a critical hit but was considered down in terms of sales year on year.

On a similar note it is also interesting that we didn’t receive any new NES titles from Nintendo as we normally do at the start of each month. Could this be an indication that they are putting all of their resources into bringing SNES games to the Switch in time for E3. We don’t have long to find out but it does seem coincidental.

MK11

Still enjoying the game so far and still playing the story, currently about 75% done and I have recently attempted to dive into the crypt. The crypt is a decent mode to take a break from the fighting, but its mostly busy work and it really emphasizes the micro transactions and just how much you need to acquire to get everything as the chests cost some form of currency. In regards to that, NetherRealm also released a patch earlier in the week changing the reward system and also gifting people with multiple currencies. All of these microtransactions are a black mark on an another successful game launch from NetherRealm. Then there was also the variety article featuring the poor working environment at NetherRealm. Including overworking permanent and contracted employees, harsh management and sexist behaviour towards the few women who work at the studio. This includes very sexist nicknames as well as not getting much of a voice towards new input into the project. It is quite unfortunate as it seems like you hear about this from a new studio every week including Epic regarding Fortnite that just came to light a few weeks back. Its unfortunate but hopefully it sounds like the industry is getting better. I sadly don’t think that’s its just the gaming industry as with my work in other industries, I have also encountered similar behaviours including crunch during busy seasons on the year. The more people talk about the situations and shed light on it then hopefully the better working environments will become. Depending on how bad allegations can sound, it often affects my enjoyment of the game or can also be a reason not to purchase, but also sometimes people could just have a vendetta so its important to take all of this information with a grain of salt and do your research properly.

Borderlands 3

Speaking of a company that is no stranger to controversy, this week gearbox unveils Borderlands 3 gameplay. I am not the only person who was underwhelmed with the reveal of Borderlands 3 at Pax East. Whether it was the way in which it was revealed after magic tricks, board games and buffering trailers or if it was just a teaser trailer with little to no gameplay. One smart move the team at Borderlands 3 is to do a gameplay reveal only a few short weeks after. This works because if some people did leave that event with a sour taste or less impressed vibe from the pax event don’t have long to dwell on it. It is also a works as a great way for Gearbox to control the message and have all the attention be on Borderlands 3 rather than share it with any other possible announcements from PAX. At the start of the reveal on twitch there were over 250K people watching the Borderlands 3 channel so its clear that there is still a lot of hype for the game. The reveal started out by bringing the whole Borderlands 3 team on stage which I thought was a nice move in an era of faceless companies. After a quick round of applause for the team the presentation learned from the last time and quickly got into gameplay. What it seems like is a lot of little changes on the whole. Whether or not this all adds up to a meaningful enough change is yet to be known. Graphics look a little better, which is hard to make them look a lot better considering its cell shaded but the game is now running on unreal engine. There is now some fast travel options, loot drops at whatever level you are playing at even if a friend is playing with you at a much different level they will get loot based on their level. The campaign if you mainline it should take around 30 hours, but if you go for full completion you are looking at closer to 120 hours according to the dev team. One dark spot on the whole reveal process was how Randy Pitchford said there would be no micro transactions yet as it turns out they are in the game according to an article from Game Informer. It turns out there will be no pay to win type micro transactions but there will be plenty of cosmetics to purchase. We are still too far off from the game to know just how bad they are or if they aren’t bad at all, but in todays gaming culture its never a good idea to say something and not be completely transparent about it.

Apex Legends

There has certainly been a lot of talk lately about Apex Legends being dead but the game is still doing quite well in its own right. It wasn’t the Fortnite killer that a lot of financial analysts were banking on but the minute you say free to play that’s all they can think of. When Fortnite took over PUBG as top streamed game and things like most concurrent players on steam a lot of people also said that PUBG was dead. However, PUBG is still doing great but its just not the king of streaming anymore. In fact at the end of 2018 PUBG announced that it had crossed 200 million downloads across all platforms including PS4, XBOX, PC and Mobile. As a quick sidenote about why people are always comparing Apex to Fortnite is due to Epics ability to constantly put out patches and new content. Well last week there was some information that came to light last week in an article on Polygon that talked about just how overworked they are and how toxic the environment is. Many people in the article reported working 70 hour weeks and some up to 100 hour weeks. I bring this article to light because last week Apex Legends Executive Producer, Drew McCoy made a blog post on the EA site talking about the current state of the game and the future for the next season. He mentioned a few problems the could address including “missteps with our updates, not giving players enough visibility into future content and not properly setting expectations”. This game has done well beyond their wildest expectations and they are trying to do their best. Most likely the road map was already in place well before launch but learning what people want and when they want it might have forced their hand on season 1 as people started compiling about the lack of battle pass. Im sure Respawn would have liked to tweak things and change some of the skins and rewards but it needed to go out, for the fans and for the shareholders. Drew went on to say that they are aware of such critical issues as slow servers, audio issues, cheaters and hit registration issues. “Over the next few weeks we’ll talk more about the work thats being done in these areas and provide updates” Respawn is aware of how much the community wants better rewards but did go on to say that the “studio culture and the health of the team is very important”. We will hear plenty about season 2 at EA play in June and they stated “for season 2 you can expect a battle pass with more meaningful content, the introduction of a new legend, a new weapon and you didn’t expect kings canyon to stay the same forever”. These are all exciting changes for the next season of Apex Legends and its also good to hear that they are not forcing people to work overtime and crunch. This is just their word and the word of employees could be the complete opposite but I don’t think you would poke the bear if you had poor working conditions. It’s important to note that almost no online multiplayer game or almost any game released nowadays get its right straight off the bat. I am still having a blast playing Apex but the rewards for season 1 are far from great but at the end of the day Apex Legends is a very fun game at its core and it can hopefully only get better from here.

ATVI Earnings Report

Activision Blizzard had their Q1 earnings call this week and although they beat their expectations they set out in February, the stock still took a slight dip after by about 5%. In the long run I still believe this stock has plenty of value to offer. The dip in the stock was related to the continued lack of large blockbusters from Activision or Blizzard.

Analysts are pretty mixed on the earnings report, however as a core gamer I see a lot of key areas of strength for the company. The people that are playing Acitivision, Blizzard and King games are all very invested as daily time spent per user increased year on year. This is a good metric to for sales of micro transactions, DLC, and expansions.

It wouldn’t be an Activision earnings call without talk of Call of Duty. The first is that time spent per user in Black Ops 4 is up double digits vs WW2. This year we are also getting a new Call of Duty which is to be expected, however this year there will be the return of the campaign, which should help sales and this is rumored to the return to their flagship series, Modern Warfare. Call of Duty Mobile will also be launching this year which has good potential based on the success of some of the other major franchises who have made the expansion to mobile as well including Fortnite and PUBG. This expansion of the series should also go very smooth based on the experience the company picked up during the acquisition of King. Finally, seeing the success of the Overwatch league, the company is expanding into a Call of Duty league. So far there have been 5 teams that have secured rights, which cost $25 million per team, including Atlanta, Dallas, New York, Paris and Toronto. With gaming and Esports growing it will be interesting to see how this league succeeds considering that Call of Duty is has been the best selling game for 9 of the last 10 years according to Activision.

In regards to the success of the OWL, it continues to see growth according to Activision as Viewership hours for the second season are up over 30% compared the first season.

For Blizzard, things seem like calm before the storm as they will not be releasing a major title until next year however they have a large array of strong franchises already existing, not considering the fact that almost every time they launch a new IP it succeeds. There is a strong potential for many of their already existing franchises to be ported to the Nintendo Switch, which technically would not be a new AAA entry. Diablo immortal, the mobile game, was reported to be due in 2019 but the statement of no major titles puts this one at 50/50. The remaster of Warcraft 3 is also supposed to be due out in 2019. While it seems like nothing major is due out from Blizzard in 2019, there is still big potential for all of these games to be massive hits as has become the standard for Blizzard games.

Epic Buys Psyonix (makers of Rocket League)

In actual gaming business Epic has purchased the studio behind the infamous Rocket League, Psyonix. The studios have been working closely for a lot longer than you would think with Epic contracting Psyonix for work on such games as Unreal Tournament, Gears of War and Mass Effect 3. According to Epic CEO, Tim Sweeney “Psyonix has always been a part of the family, and we are happy to make it official” The deal shouldn’t become official until late May or June until it goes through all the regulatory processes. This seems like a good thing for Psyonix who will be able to leverage a lot of expertise Epic has running games as a service and a lot of lessons they have learned launching the ultra successful. Instead it has caused Rocket League to be review bombed as most people have a severe dislike for Epic, their ties to Tencent and the possibility that everything is being monitored.