Daily Briefing: Thursday 3rd March (Patreon)

PlatinumGames’ Babylon’s Fall Has Released To Crickets

Square Enix’s next attempt at a live service following the disastrous Marvel’s Avengers has released today.... to zero fanfare. Impressions across players of the demo are profoundly negative: “EXACTLY What I Feared”, “Depressingly Bad”, “It WASN’T Very Good...”. and more. At time of writing, despite being available on PS5, it has only 2 critic reviews, one unscored and the other rating it 5 out of 10. Over on Steam, it has an overall positive rating but with very, very few reviews - the game apparently has satisfying combat once it opens up after 20 or so hours, but it’s also a full $60 game with a cash shop - seriously, Square Enix?

• It’s hard to know what went wrong with the game, but between PlatinumGames and Square Enix, something clearly went extremely wrong. A full-priced game full of microtransactions, with well-designed combat but essentially nothing else of value... They’ve effectively made almost every mistake EA and BioWare did with Anthem.

Resident Evil Next-Gen Upgrades Coming, And For Free!

Capcom have announced that RE2, 3 and 7 are coming to next-gen consoles with visual enhancements later this year, with free digital upgrades available for all existing owners. That’s how to do it.

• We assume these will also come with other, miscellaneous upgrades and substantially improved performance. One thing to note with Capcom is that a substantial amount of their financial success in these games comes from long-form back-catalogue sales, so providing support like this to what now seem like old games is a great way to get a second wave of sales. Good on them.

CD Projekt Group Suspend Physical Sales & GOG Service In Russia And Belarus

Continuing the trend of entertainment and media sanctions, CD Projekt Group have begun to pull all sales from the region. On the issue, they say “we do believe that commercial entities, when united, have the power to inspire global change”. They also said the know this isn’t an individual issue, "but with this action we wish to further galvanize the global community to speak about what is going on in the heart of Europe.” On their investor site, they shared an estimate that Russia and Belarus sales and revenue was 5.4% and 3.7% in the last 12 months - so this is a fairly noticeable sacrifice financially.

• Being Polish, which borders Ukraine and has a modern history with the Soviet Union, CD Projekt Group leaders and staff members will be a lot more sensitive to European geopolitics than most other games publishers. We’ll have to see if other large publishers will join the array of smaller organisations pulling sales and products.