Daily Briefing: Thursday 14th April

Bloomberg Reports A DFEH Lawyer Resigns Over Activision Case Interference

According to Bloomberg, the assistant chief counsel of the DFEH has resigned in protest, claiming that the chief counsel and DFEH boss was ‘abruptly fired’, which itself is linked to the California Governor’s Office allegedly interfering with the Activision Blizzard lawsuit - aggressively asking for information and DFEH plans and litigation strategies ahead of time once the DFEH were winning in court, at times mimicking the interest of Activision’s counsel.

• Basically, it’s being alleged that the Governor has Activision-Blizzard’s back, and is trying to stop the DFEH suit from making possibly landmark improvements to worker’s rights and setting major precedent over worker mistreatment in California.

Witcher 3’s Next-Gen Version ‘Delayed Until Further Notice’

CD Projekt Red have announced that Saber Interactive will no longer be working on the next-gen installment of The Witcher 3, and they will in fact be finishing it themselves in-house. They’re evaulating the scope of the project and will update players asoon as possible. While no official reason has been given, it’s being alleged that Saber Interactive’s Russia-based studio is tasked with the project, and that’s why - CDPR have pulled sales from Russia and condemned the attack on Ukraine, so pulling dev work from the country is a logical next step.

• It’s a shame that this means a delay for players, and that Russian developers could end up out of work, but this is the unfortunate circumstance that geopolitics and war can leave us in.

Creator of OddWorld Claims That PS Plus Was ‘Devastating’ For Soulstorm

Lorne Lanning said that a deal with Sony was signed based on the expectation that 50k-100k downloads would occur during the free month, but that over 4 million downloads happened - and he believes that utterly devastated potential sales and profits. He also said that taking the PS Plus deal felt necessity in order to actually complete the project.

• Perhaps the takeaway here is that, when signing deals like this, the norm should be that both sides consider potential outcomes like these. There’s also no guarantee any of those four million downloads would have actually been sales, but it’s only fair to assume at least some of those downloads imply buyer interest. For consumers, this is a slight look into a possible bad future - one where platform holders succeed and consumers get games at a deep discount, but developers end up being priced out of the market.

Playstation Acquisition Rumour Time! This Time, Kojima Productions

The Playstation Studios website banner has recently been updated to include Sam Bridges from Death Stranding, much in the same way Demon’s Souls and Returnal images were added prior to the announcements of Bluepoint and Housemarque - although it’s possible this is just adding further representation for Guerrila, since they provided a lot of development for Death Stranding. In addition, it’s been reported by Jeff Grubb that plans from last year for Kojima and Xbox to work on a game are still on as of a couple of weeks ago - which makes an acquisition less likely on paper, but there’s always the possibility a reverse Bethesda happens, where the company is contractually obliged to release a game exclusive to a competitor’s platform, like with Ghostwire Tokyo and Deathloop.

• The rumour mill has been exhausting the past few months, but at the same time, Kojima and Sony have a very long and prosperous history together, and are even working together on the MGS movie. All of these MGS and Kojima rumours are bound to manifest SOMETHING big, right...?