Daily Briefing: Thursday 13th January

PlatinumGames’ president and CEO has stepped down

Kenichi Sato took up the position back in April 2016, but revealed in a new statement posted on PlatinumGames’ official website that  he left the role last month. Atsushi Inaba, who was previously the vice president and head producer of development at the studio, has stepped into Sato’s vacant role. Inaba was previously the CEO and producer at Clover Studios, so he certainly has experienced in the realms of upper leadership.

• As for why Sato stepped down, his statement goes into a little more detail. He says that when he took the position of president in April 2016, Platinum focused on the game development business “with the desire to bring smiles to people around the world.” Platinum launched expansion efforts to aid this goal, and now the company want to accelerate their efforts in creating new games. Sato says that “the best way to do this is to hand over the presidency to Inaba, who has been the studio head of PlatinumGames for many years and has demonstrated his skills in the creative side of games.”

Hey, Twisted Metal is back

That’s according to a new report from VGC which, following on from an earlier report of theirs discussing how Destruction All Stars developer Lucid had ceased working on a Twisted Metal reboot, state that Sony’s newly-acquired Firesprite studio has taken over the project. It’s an interesting change for the studio who, before being acquired by Sony, were hiring for a multiplayer shooter and a “dark, narrative project.”

• It’s fairly unclear why Sony would decide to shift development responsibilities, though it is worth noting that Firesprite and Lucid are like a 15 minute drive from one another. It looks some Lucid staff are making the jump across to Firesprite. Matt Southern appears to be one such staffer on the move, having left his role as game director at Lucid to assume the same role at Firesprite. Odd times.

PUBG’s shift to F2P looks to be going down well

The game, which is confusingly now formally titled PUBG: Battlegrounds even though the BG in PUBG already stands for Battlegrounds, transitioned to a F2P model earlier this week and has since managed to almost double its concurrent player count on Steam. PUBG’s 24-hour peak is just over 667K, while there are around 357K people playing at time of writing. There’s still a good ways to go before PUBG troubles its all-time peak of 3.2m concurrent players from back in January 2018, but the boost is still very welcome for a game that has seen its overall player count decline steadily over the past few years.

• There has generally been a bit more traffic through PUBG’s Steam page since the F2P shift, and not all of it is positive. In one day, the game amassed more than three times more negative reviews than it did the entirety of last month. The majority of these reviews are complaining about hackers and/or demanding refunds now that the game is F2P. This new era of PUBG does have a few bonuses for players who had already bought the game. They’re automatically upgraded to Battlegrounds Plus, which includes access to the game’s Ranked mode (which is now a one time purchase under the new model) alongside a few other XP boost and cosmetic rewards.