TGO Daily | April 20, 2021 | PlayStation U-Turn
TGO Daily | April 20, 2021
In The News
PlayStation U-Turns
PlayStation has backtracked on their plans to discontinue support for the PS3 and PS Vita digital stores. This plan was initially reported by Bloomberg last month, with an official announcement soon following. The community backlash was significant enough that they decided not to follow through — except for the PSP, that’s still being shut down.
Here’s what CEO Jim Ryan said:
When we initially came to the decision to end purchasing support for PS3 and PS Vita, it was born out of a number of factors, including commerce support challenges for older devices and the ability for us to focus more of our resources on newer devices where a majority of our gamers are playing on. We see now that many of you are incredibly passionate about being able to continue purchasing classic games on PS3 and PS Vita for the foreseeable future, so I’m glad we were able to find a solution to continue operations.
I’m glad that we can keep this piece of our history alive for gamers to enjoy, while we continue to create cutting-edge new game worlds for PS4, PS5, and the next generation of VR.
This is a good move by them. It’s not often you see companies like PlayStation do reversals of this nature, and it’ll make a small but passionate community happy.
Earthblade Announced
Extremely OK Games (Celeste, Towerfall) have announced their newest project called Earthblade. There isn’t many details about it yet, but they’ve given what they call a “Vibe Reveal,” which shows some art, the logo, and a song from the game.
On their plans for marketing:
We've debated back and forth how to talk about this game during development. While making Celeste, we basically tweeted out whatever interesting-looking thing we were working on day-to-day, when we were in the mood for sharing. But an air of mystery lends itself particularly well to this project, so we've opted to save it all up for a big reveal that will hopefully blow your socks off.
The game is still early in development, but this was their most successful prototype as they tried to figure out the next game they were making. I know that the studio has a passionate community, and by their blog post, it’s pretty clear they want to do this next game right. No release year has been set.
Xbox Cloud Gaming
Some Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members are going to be invited to a beta test this week for cloud streaming games to PC and and Apple devices. Up to this point, Xbox game streaming has only been available for Android devices. For the people invited, they will be able to play games directly through a web browser.
We knew this was coming, but this shows how quickly it may be available to people. Xbox will undoubtedly be the biggest player in the game streaming scene when it fully releases — the value of the Game Pass is just too good to pass on. If Google Stadia had any chance of surviving, they had to innovate before Microsoft rolled up on PC and iOS. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out in a few months.
Free Games
If you’re on PlayStation, make sure you pick up Horizon Zero Dawn, which is being given away for free on the platform starting today. It’ll be free-to-keep for the next month, and is highly regarded as one of the best PlayStation exclusives to be released. It will include the paid expansion as well. While you’re at it, grab the other games they are giving away with it, including Subnautica, The Witness, Abzu, and Enter the Gungeon.
If you’re on PC, then go to the Epic Games Store and grab the full Deponia series, Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, and The First Tree. Then make sure you log in for the week after, when you can grab Alien Isolation and Hand of Fate 2.
More From TGO
ADRIAN’S GRAD PARTY!
Hey! As I mentioned yesterday, I’m done school now! And I want to celebrate with all of you :) Here’s a neat little graphic:
We’re going to be doing a lot of fun stuff in the TGO Discord server. There will be a live mailbag, which is a segment we usually do on the weekends for the audio version of this newsletter. I’ll also be doing some one-on-ones with my family and friends (as part of the celebration), we’ll do some gaming (possibly Jackbox, possibly a solo stream on Twitch), and if there’s time I’ll throw in a live Q&A in there!
If you want to come hang out, please fill out this form. You can answer the mailbag prompt in there in advance. Otherwise, you can also just drop-in when the time comes!
Hope to see you there :)
Say Hello!
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