Daily Briefing: Tuesday 8th March

A Japanese Publisher-Focused State Of Play Tomorrow!

Sony have announced a State of Play, lasting about 20 minutes, will be on Wednesday, March 9th, at 2pm PT/5pm ET/10pm GMT. It’ll focus on “highlighting great games” from Playstation’s partner Japanese publishers, but will feature some updates from “other developers located around the world”.

• Bandai Namco, Square Enix & Capcom are the most likely to drop major updates, especially with Square Enix’s leaks from Geforce NOW - they had an extremely aggressive Q2/Q3 lined up. With Forspoken’s delay from May to October, Square Enix might want to bolster its Q2 with other projects. They’ll also do a major pre-launch push for Strangers of Paradise.

Warcraft’s New Expansion & Mobile Game Announcement Set For April & May

On the heels of 9.2’s release, Blizzard have started something new: announcing a timeline for reveals. Hearthstone is up first on March 15th, then World of Warcraft’s next expansion will be revealed on April 19th, and sometime in May, one of the long-rumoured Warcraft mobile projects will appear.

• Will it be Diablo Immortal-style mobile installment of a full gameplay fantasy, will it be a battle pet collection game, or will be something completely out there? Given the time its been in incubation, here’s hoping their announcement actually excites people instead of repeating that disastrous Blizzcon.

itch.io’s Bundle For Ukraine: Over 500 Games, 300 TTRPGs And More For $10

Indie developers and their friends have come together to create a bundle to incentivise donations to two charities: International Medical Corps, which provides medical assistance in Ukraine, and Voice of Children, a Ukrainian charity in support of children dealing with war trauma and PTSD. It contains 991 items in total, but some standouts are: Celeste, Kingdom Two Crowns, Baba Is You, Sundered, SkateBIRD, CrossCode, ZeroRanger and a lot more.

• How do you even start to play 572 games? One at a time, I suppose. The civilian-support nature of the charities chosen feels well-considered for a helpful cause, and that’s a lot of quality game for not a lot of money. All DRM-free, too, as is standard with itch.io.