Daily Briefing: Friday 14th January

Final Fantasy XIV will go back on sale at the end of the month

In the very definition of suffering from success, Final Fantasy XIV was removed from sale in mod-December 2021 in the midst of server issues brought on by the launch of its phenomenally popular Endwalker expansion. In a blog post published on the game’s official website at the time, director and producer Naoki Yoshida announced that digital and physical sales of the games were to be suspended as the team fought to handle the traffic. The team also froze new free trial registrations as well as new advertisements for the game, so as to not further disappoint players.

• Now, it looks like all these strategies have paid off, as the game will return to sale on January 25th. In a new blog post, Yoshida confirmed that Square Enix will be opening a new data centre for the Oceania and, with five separate game worlds, “there should be more than enough room for everyone in Oceania to transfer over.” Square Enix will also be expanding the game’s Japanese data centres to allow for 50K more players, while North American and European data centres will be expanded in phases across 2022 and 2023 due to component shortages. Things are looking fairly solid now, though Yoshida does warn that “in the event servers continue to experience extreme levels of congestion, we may consider suspending digital sales again.”

Steam Deck on track for February release

It feels like we haven’t heard a whole lot about the Steam Deck lately, which is a little odd seeing as it’s a first-party piece of Valve hardware that will enable users to access their PC games library on the go. It feels like it should be a hot piece of kit, but it’s possible that the lack of buzz is due to the usual suite of pandemic supply issues and a subsequent general “yeah, we’ll believe it when we see it” attitude toward the release. Valve seem to still be pretty optimistic, though, writing in a new update, “global pandemic, supply issues, and shipping issues notwithstanding, it looks like we’ll be able to start getting these out the door by the end of February.”

• Anyone who successfully managed to preorder one of Valve’s wee machines can head over to Steam Deck section of Steam to get a rough estimate on when their reservation will become available. It’ll certainly be interesting to see the general gaming public get their hands on the Steam Deck, especially seeing as it’s been delayed a few times. The “powerful all-in-one portable PC” was originally supposed to launch back in December but was pushed by material shortages. It seems like there will still be a bit of work to be done on the Steam Deck even after release as Valve implements the sorts of visibility and compatibility changes that will make the hardware a winner. Watch this space.

Sony are removing PlayStation Now cards from retailers

That’s according to a new report from GamesBeat, which claims that an internal message sent to staff at UK retailer GAME requires that all PlayStation Now cards be removed from sale by end of day on Wednesday, 19th January. There are also similar claims that retailers across the United States and Canada have been removing these products from sale over the past few weeks. The official reason for this removal, given to GamesBeat by a PlayStation representative, is that "globally, we are moving from PlayStation Now gift cards to focus on our current cash denomination PlayStation gift cards, which can be redeemed for PlayStation Now.”

• But there’s a large amount of suspicion around this rationale thanks to a recent report from Bloomberg which claimed that PlayStation will soon be overhauling the PlayStation Plus subscription service as a means of competing with Xbox Game Pass. The new iteration of the service, which is apparently expected to launch sometime in the spring, will reportedly include new membership tiers integrating PlayStation Now streaming alongside a new retro catalogue. Indeed, there’s been a story doing the rounds online that PlayStation system architect Mark Cerny has “cracked” full backwards compatibility on PS5 for the first three generations of PlayStation consoles. Definitely one to keep an eye on, this.