Daily Briefing: Thursday 6th January

Konami announce NFT push

It seems that Ubisoft and Square Enix’s previous (highly confusing and ill-advised) pivots into NFT trading has started a big of domino effect of stupid decisions. This week, the ever money-hungry Konami announced that they will also be launching an NFT scheme as a way to “celebrate” the 35th Anniversary of the Castlevania franchise, though it’s unclear how they envision flushing an historic series’ image down the toilet to be a worthy birthday present for Dracula and the Belmonts. Haven’t they all suffered enough?

• Anyway, how will this latest futuristic nightmare work? Konami confirmed earlier this week that they will be auctioning off a “Konami Memorial NFT collection” featuring 14 unique pieces of artwork from the Castlevania series. The collection will be put up for worldwide auction from January 12th. This is a little different from other gaming-related NFT schemes as it appears to be a restricted collection rather than an ongoing series of sales like what Ubisoft are doing. However, Konami have also confirmed that this is just the “first” project that they’re considering in this area. They will “continue to explore new developments” alongside player feedback.

Days Gone director is still mad at Sony

He may have left Bend Studio back in 2020, but former Days Gone director Jeff Ross still appears to have an axe to grind with Sony. Come to think of it, he was with Bend Studio for some two decades so he probably has a couple of axes. This time, Ross has accused Sony of making Bend feel like Days Gone was “a big disappointment” despite the fact that it sold around 10 million copies.

• Ross’s comments come following word this week that Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima, a fellow PlayStation platform exclusive, has now sold 8 million copies. This is obviously a huge achievement but Ross still feels (probably )justifiably nettled that Ghost of Tsushima has been widely praised inside and outside Sony while Days Gone has always been made to feel inferior despite evidently selling more copies. Ross said on Twitter “at the time I left Sony, Days Gone had been out for a year and a half (and a month), and sold over 8 million copies. It’s since gone on to sell more, and then a million+ on Steam. Local studio management always made us feel like it was a big disappointment.”

The Last of Us Remake could release on PS5 before the end of the year

A lot of PlayStation news today for whatever reason. Maybe they’re jealous of Microsoft suddenly being best friends with Ubisoft, although hopefully Ubisoft make better friends than they do business and management decisions. Anyway, according to industry insider type Tom Henderson, a PlayStation 5 remake of the original Last of Us title is almost finished and could release in the latter half of this year.

• Henderson wrote on Twitter that he had “heard from multiple people now” that the game is on the way. His claims were later corroborated by gaming media outlet VGC, who are generally pretty on the ball with this sort of thing. It’ll be interesting to see whether the game does make an appearance before the end of the year. Bloomberg reported that it was in the works last April but nothing has ever been formally announced, even with series creator Naughty Dog seemingly leading development after wrapping up the sequel in June 2020. Naughty Dog co-president Neil Druckmann said at CES 2022 this week that he was “dying to share” information on the “multiple projects” currently under way at the studio. Share away, Neil.