Daily Briefing: Tuesday 22nd February

Bethesda Are Sunsetting Their PC Launcher - Moving To Steam!

In a surprise move, Bethesda have announced they’re winding down their own launcher and moving their library to Steam - including transferring licenses for existing Bethesda.net customers. Starting in early April, players will be able to migrate games and Wallet to their Steam account. Bethesda.net accounts will still be required for some games, and the account will remain intact, but game access will be through Steam.

• This is an interesting move - the reason they moved to their own launcher was to get around the Steam cut from all their game sales and microtransactions... so what’s changed? Was it proving too expensive and time-consuming to develop? Hard to know, but as a sub-unit of Xbox, having their content walled off as Bethesda-only didn’t make much sense. Perhaps it’s part of a move to ensure all Xbox games are always on the same platforms.

Square Enix: Guardians of the Galaxy “undershot expectations”, but is recovering.

In Square Enix’s Q1-Q3 report, they railed on Guardians of the Galaxy’s initial performance, however, pushes they made to improve sales via marketing has resulted in sales growth and they plan to continue doing so. Strong reviews and word of mouth of the game’s actual quality seems to be spreading, and after Avengers, I think another Square Enix Marvel game is a hard sell. Glad to see it’s working. In other news, they have multiple new HD Games titles due to launch in the coming month before April, their smartphone/browser games have been underperforming and their MMO segment is doing very well.

• Square Enix seem to have a lot of projects loosely confirmed by the Geforce leak that we haven’t seen yet - like the FFT remaster hinted at by the recent sale of brand new FFT character figures on the store. They might be gearing up to drop a ton of remasters and remakes throughout this year before FF16 is ready to launch.

Paradox Interactive “Finding The Way Back” After 2021 Results

Paradox Interactive’s end of year report revealed revenues are down 19%, and in an industry full of growth opportunity, that signals they got something wrong. “Too few content releases, too low quality on some of our releases and several discontinued projects...” CEO Fredrik Wester explained they’re going to shift back to a focus on their “core business” model: “We have placed a special emphasis on increasing our content velocity and the quality of all content we release.”

• He also noted they’re going to ensure decisions are made closer to the games and their communities to identify problems earlier, and that they’re going to change how they work with external development - less money and a dedicated oversight team. I think this will all be great news to Paradox fans!

Atlus Stick To Global Release Promise

Back in 2021, SEGA said that they’re focusing on “simultaneous worldwide release on multiple platforms” for titles, and that they would look into the subsidiary Atlus (SMT, Persona, Catherine) doing the same. Atlus have been notorious for bringing games to the West much later, but with Shin Megami Tensei V and the newly announced Soul Hackers 2 releasing at the same time, it looks like the future for SMT and Persona fans is bright - and a lot closer than usual.

• Japanese games are seeing such a massive wave of Western success it’s heartening to see a high cadence of quality, if niche, games being prioritised for the audience and releasing to success.