Daily Briefing: Thursday 3rd February

Skate 4 is reportedly “launching soon”

That’s straight from the mouth of EA CEO Andrew Wilson who, speaking  earlier this week in EA’s most recent earnings call, let slip a few key details. When discussing User-Generated Content, Wilson outlines that it’s been at the very centre of modes like Ultimate Team (Madden, FIFA, etc.) and that it will also be at the centre of Skate 4, which is “launching soon.” Well, it turns out that the new Skate game is actually just called Skate rather than being a numbered sequel, but hey that’s franchise reboots for you.

• Wilson’s suggestion that this new Skate will be launching soon is curious, because we haven’t heard a whole lot about it since it was announced way back at E3 2020. We haven’t seen gameplay or anything since the game was revealed via a brief (but incredibly excited) video presentation from a couple of the game’s developers. The news that the game will support user-generated content isn’t actually anything new, EA confirmed as much a month after it was revealed. Still, the last new thing we learned about the game was last August when EA confirmed it would be coming to PC in a franchise first so it’s nice to hear something.

Nintendo aren’t fans of the acquisition race

We may in the grips of gaming acquisition and industry consolidation arms race - a race that’s currently being led by Microsoft and Sony and their apparently bottomless wallets - but Nintendo aren’t about to jump in anytime soon. Speaking in their latest investor Q&A, president Shuntaro Furukawa stated that the company would rather prioritise organic growth by investing in development studios that they already own. The reason, according to Shuntaro, is the need to retain the “Nintendo DNA” of these studios.

• Nintendo are obviously no stranger to working with external studios (last year’s excellent Metroid Dread was developed by Spanish studio Mercury Steam and that went very well), they’re also dedicated to investing in themselves. Last year, they announced that almost $870m would be used to support their internal studios, and that they would only consider making additional, external studio acquisitions if the studio in question could provide some sort of technological expertise that Nintendo didn’t want to create themselves. Oh, and Nintendo haven’t figured out how to do anything fun with NFTs just yet, so that’s one bullet dodged for now.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League may have been delayed into next year

That’s according to a new report from Bloomberg which, quoting the usual sources familiar with the matter, claims that Rocksteady’s upcoming superhero ‘em up has been pushed to 2023. While no concrete reason is given for this particular delay, Bloomberg claim blame “the pandemic and other development charges.” Warner Media have several big name projects in different stages of development, and all have been struggling with pandemic challenges in one way or another. The game was supposed to release sometime this year.

• Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is being developed by Rocksteady Studios, and the last time we heard from them in 2015 when they released Arkham Knight. Suicide Squad isn’t strictly a sequel, as amazing as that would have been, but it is set in the same canon as Rocksteady’s Arkham franchise. This delay is actually a pretty big one, we’re only in the first week of February after all, and Rocksteady actually showed off some pretty solid gameplay footage a few months ago. At any rate, no Suicide Squad this year.