As most weekends go regarding news, this was a pretty uneventful weekend.
As a heads up, I am planning on changing the times that I publish my articles. For the past week, I have been publishing articles somewhere from 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM EST the following day. Going forward, I will publish articles at the end of the day at 5:00 PM, so expect May 20th’s article hit your inbox later today!
Ghost of Tsushima Beats out God of War on PC
Ghost of Tsushima is Sony’s biggest single player launch on PC. While Tsushima is a fantastic game coming in with a critic score of 83 and a user score of 91, this PC release could not have come at a better time.
Feudal Japan is having a complete resurgence in the mainstream at the moment. You have Shōgun, one of the biggest TV shows of the year having wrapped up last month. Last year’s Blue Eye Samurai landed with overwhelming critical and mainstream success. Sekiro and Total War: Three Kingdoms have shown that this time period is an underserved one and I hope the success of the game on Steam encourages more developers to take a dive into feudal Japan or the Three Kingdoms era.
And on top of all of this, Assassin’s Creed Shadows had it’s reveal trailer this week?
Genshin Competitor Releases Launch Trailer
Wuthering Waves, the up-and-coming free-to-play open-world gacha game just released its launch trailer. The game comes out this Wednesday and if you’ve enjoyed Genshin Impact, it’s definitely worth taking a look at. The game is available on iOS, Android, and PC through the Epic Games Store.
PS5 Significantly Outsells Xbox Series X
Did the PlayStation go on a tear last quarter or is the Xbox failing to keep up? All signs are pointing to Xbox just not having enough momentum this late in the cycle.
My takeaway:
Microsoft is moving away from consoles as their main driver of growth to Game Pass. They don’t care where you’re playing their games, they just want you playing them. If you’re playing them on Windows? That’s great. iOS or Android? Fine by them. Xbox? Sure, why not. I have no source but I’m sure they would love to have Game Pass available on Switch and PS5, but I highly doubt Nintendo or Sony would allow that, at least in the near future.
Microsoft acquired a gargantuan amount of studios over the last several years and there hasn’t been a significant increase in released cadence on the platform. Over the past decade, Microsoft has amassed over 30 different studios. They are now one of the biggest game publishers in terms of studios held at the moment.
There was undeniably a content gap at the beginning of both the PS5’s and Xbox’s lives. With over 30 studios, I figured with the Game Pass model we would start getting a release from Microsoft about once every two to three months. A release doesn’t have to be a massive AAA success and could be a smaller yet high quality title like Pentiment or Hi-Fi Rush. Interestingly enough, this may not be their strategy considering they just closed Tango Gameworks, the creator or Hi-Fi Rush.
Regardless, their last big release was Starfield which released in September of 2023. Their next big game is Senua's Saga: Hellblade II which releases tomorrow. That’s a gap of six months. Because they have so many studios that haven’t released anything over the last four years, I have a feeling we’re going to have a constant stream of games from the sea of Microsoft’s studios sometime over the next two years and once that stream starts, I don’t think it will stop. Then again, I thought we would already be knee deep in that stream of already, so I could be wrong!
Couple that with the fact that consoles are more expensive than ever and Microsoft has day-and-date releases with PC, many people are opting to have a powerful PC and a PS5.