Industry articles
🎮 It’s been a busy month for Sony, who revealed both the PlayStation 5 Pro and a selection of retro grey consoles and accessories for PlayStation’s 30th anniversary. But there’s little to celebrate - the Pro will cost £700, and if you want to play physical games then all consoles in both lineups require a clip-on disc drive that must be registered online. The expense and restrictions killed my interest, and raise questions over the future of console gaming.
Concord's failure should be a wake-up call for the video game industry
What a week it’s been in the video game industry! We’ve witnessed one of the most remarkable failures ever, as Concord - the Firewalk Studios-developed live service game into which Sony had invested so much in the hope it would be the next big thing - was shut down after...
Stellar Blade is a challenging and stylistic gaming nostalgia trip
The Stellar Blade demo is here! There are many adjectives that could be applied to Level Up’s much-discussed PlayStation 5 exclusive - beautiful, unique, gruesome, and challenging, to name a few - but for me, more than anything else, the upcoming action-adventure title is a nostalgia trip to previous eras...
Why is everything a live service?
I caught a streamer I follow playing Marauders recently and the game looks fantastic. For those who don’t know, it’s a sci-fi FPS that has players jumping between ships as space pirates in search of loot. Visually, it struck me as an interesting fusion of No Man’s Sky, Wolfenstein, and...
GTA VI leak: Beyond the videos
We saw one of the biggest leaks in video game history last Sunday as a hacker uploaded a huge number of videos and images from Rockstar’s upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI to the internet, and it’s safe to say online discussion around this unexpected sneak peek has been a complete...
GTA VI: First details leave plenty of room for scepticism
It was last week, nearly nine whole years after the release of Grand Theft Auto V, that an article by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier finally provided some concrete information on its sequel - at least if you believe his ex-Rockstar sources. The piece focused mainly on how progressive Rockstar is apparently...
Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, and the future of gaming
This isn’t a blog about the business of video games, but there was one piece of industry news this week that was such a shock that I had to cover it - Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. A long time coming Really, this story started a lot earlier...
