Daily Briefing: Monday 17th January

Halo Infinite’s shop is getting a few price changes

Developers 343 Industries made the announcement over the weekend that they will be changing the price of several items in the Halo Infinite in-game shop following feedback from the playerbase. In a series of tweets, 343 Industries’ design head Jerry Hook said that the team have “been monitoring the discussions on the shop, bundles, and pricing closely since launch. He went on to say that Halo Infinite’s shop will vary from week to week (starting this week) and will focus on “reducing pricing across the board, providing stronger value in our bundles, starting to put individual items outside of bundles, and more.”

• That final point is actually a pretty important one for the Halo Infinite community. The confirmation that individual items will be available for sale outside of bundles will do a lot to address some lingering player complaints. Bundles have been a hot topic in the realms of Halo Infinite’s monetisation strategy as they have so often been the only way to unlock certain items, as well as not offering amazing value overall. Both these issues should be addressed soon, with Jerry Hook confirming that the team “will be  trying new things throughout the rest of the season so that we can continue to learn and improve for the future.”

PlayStation devs reportedly hassled Sony to bring games to PC

That’s according to God of War director Cory Barlog who, speaking in a new interview with GameInformer released alongside the game’s PC port. Barlog was asked how much insight God of War’s creative team had into Sony’s eventual decision to bring the game to the PC platform, and Barlog replied “I think it was the collective of studios all over saying this is a really good idea. We should be looking into this.” The way Barlog tells it, PlayStation’s first party developers essentially overloaded Sony’s suggestion box with requests for PC releases, and eventually they got their way.

• Barlog told GameInformer “eventually, I think it reached that tipping point. When we had sent so many suggestion box suggestions that they were like, ‘I’m tired of hearing all this. Fine, we’ll do this.’” It’s really for the best that Sony cocked an ear and actually listened to their developers, as the idea of double-dipping major PlayStation platform exclusives has become a fairly significant part of Sony’s strategy as of late. It doesn’t look Sony are currently envisioning a future where they release major titles simultaneously on PC and PlayStation, but maybe even that could be changed with a few more strategic emails.

PS3 games have started appearing on PS5

New reports began emerging over the weekend of certain select PlayStation 3 games popping up to buy on the PS5 Store. Usually, selecting a PS3 game listing through the PS5 Store would redirect to the game’s PlayStation Now page but, at least currently, certain games are showing an actual price. Dead Or Alive 5, for instance, is apparently selling for £7.99 in the UK. Bejeweled and Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones also carry a price at the moment.

• At time of writing, users haven’t actually been able to purchase any of these games, so it remains to be seen whether all this is just one big listing error. It would have to be a pretty sizeable one as, interestingly, Dead Or Alive 5 isn’t on PlayStation Now in Europe. All of this comes following the discovery of a patent filed by PS5 system architect Mark Cerny, which lead many observers to believe that Sony have finally “cracked” backwards compatibility for older PlayStation console generations. Watch this space.