Daily Briefing: Friday 21st January

Firaxis veterans form new indie studio

Well here’s a surprise, a group of AAA game development veterans breaking off to form their own indie studio with a focus on innovation, creative thinking, and employee care that doesn’t have anything to do with Activision Blizzard. Veterans of XCOM and Civilisation developer Firaxis games recently announced the formation of Bit Reactor, a new studio with the goal of creating turn-based tactics games with “high-end production values.” Their end goal is to win Game of the Year.

• There’s an impressive amount of talent over at Bit Reactor, which should make for some interesting creative thinking now that they’re free from the usual AAA trappings that we’ve discussed so often on the channel. The studio was co-founded by Greg Foertsch, who previously spend nearly 22 years with Firaxis. 14 of those years were spent as the studio’s senior art director with experience and credits across games like Alpha Centauri, Civilisation, SimGolf, and the first two XCOM Games. He’s joined at Bit Reactor by “lead developers and creatives” from the XCOM series and the studio are hard at work on their first game.

70% of gamedevs have no interest in NFTs

That’s according to a new survey released as part of the Game Developers Conference’s annual State of the Game Industry report, which asked over 2,700 game developers about their work. One of the questions was “what is your studio’s interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?” 70% of correspondents replied that they were “not interested,” while 21% were “somewhat interested.” 7% of respondents said they were “very interested,” while just 1% admitted that they were already actively developing them as part of their work.

• Similar results can be see in a follow-up question exploring whether game studios are interested in using cryptocurrency as a payment method. Those results read: 72% not interested, 21% somewhat interested, 6% very interested and 1% already working on it. GDC offered a little supplementary writeup on NFTs and cryptocurrency, onlining that “a few developers called it the future of gaming.” However, the writeup went on to state that a vast majority of respondents spoke out against both practices – noting their potential for scams, overall monetization concerns, and the environmental impact.”

Nintendo may have improved the Switch’s N64 emulation

The Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack released back in October and caused no small amount of outrage among fans frustrated at what was judged to be shoddy emulation and missing features like button-mapping. At launch, some games experienced delay in in-game audio while others had some serious graphical issues. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - popularly considered to be one of the best games ever made and surely a major draw for the Expansion Pack as a whole - suffered from just about everything.

• Well, Nintendo’s latest update to Switch Online could signal that the company are steadily (and sneakily) rolling out a few improvements to the much-criticised N64 emulation. Some of the more notorious glitches appear to have been fixed as part of the update that introduced Banjo & Kazooie, particular some of Ocarina of Time’s worst graphical hiccups. According to information gathered by dataminers, Nintendo haven’t actually altered any of the ROMs themselves, which would suggest that any improvements have been made directly to the Switch’s emulation software. This follows on from Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser’s confirmation that the company were taking the criticism “very seriously.”