Daily Briefing: Wednesday 23rd March

PlayStation Network Facing Issues After Software Update: Subscription Changes Inbound?

After today’s firmware updates for the PS4 and PS5, social media was flooded by users presenting issues with verifying their PS+ status and being unable to play their online games. There’s been no official communication on the issue, but around 6 hours later, they seem to have been largely resolved.

• Other users have reported their PS+ and PS Now subscriptions have recently been merged, and this outage was a PS+ issue... so all fingers are pointing towards back-end changes preparing the release of their revamped subscription codenamed Spartacus. At a GDC Fireside Chat aired today, Sarah Bond, head of Xbox Creator Experience spoke to Phil Spencer and said “Sony’s announced theirs” when discussing subscriptions. Any day now, then!

Suicide Squad Delayed Until 2023

Rocksteady’s game, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, has been officially delayed until Spring 2023, following earlier reporting from Bloomberg. Another example of a game clearly being impacted by development issues during the pandemic. Considering Gotham Knights is still planned for October 2022 this year, it may just be Warner Bros deciding it makes more sense to stagger their releases.

• Delays, delays, delays! This will mean Rocksteady will go well over 7 years without releasing a game, with Arkham Knight from 2015 being their last.

Ocarina of Time PC Port Now Available

The Ocarina of Time decompilation project that was recently complete has evolved, and now a full recreation of the game on PC is available to download. As always, the actual game needs rebuilt by the user to include game assets, which should be taken from a ROM the user has dumped themselves. This PC port supports custom resolutions, ultrawide aspect ratios, hi-res textures, mod support and more. 60fps, hi-res, ray-traced, improved controls Ocarina of Time!

• This is game preservation at its finest: communities making sure games can be played at their absolute best. As long as a ROM, this codebase and a PC exists, the genuine classic and outright formative Ocarina of Time will be available to play.

Microsoft Now A Victim Of Hacking, Joining Nvidia & Samsung

Lapsus$, a hacker group, have now added Microsoft to their list of compromised targets. A “single account” has been compromised by the group according to MS, although only some source code for Bing and Cortana was accessed - no customer data was available to them. Microsoft know how it happened, have countermeasures planned, and have assessed the motive of the group: “a cybercrimina actor motivated by theft and destruction.”. Microsoft have also provided recommendations to other companies, and have shared info showing who Lapsus$ are targeting, which includes “large gaming corporations”, and how they execute their attacks - social engineering & stolen credentials.

• With Samsung having a ton of data stolen, and Nvidia driver source code being leaked, this kind of cybercrime is becoming very dangerous to big companies. A game having substantial information or code leaked would be a massive hit to companies who pump millions into tech R&D.