Daily Briefing: Thursday 2nd September

Sony Announce The Playstation Showcase: "A Sneak Peek At The Future Of PS5"

On Thursday September 9ths, at 1PM PDT/9PM BST, Playstation will show off 40 minutes of updates from Playstation Studios and 'some of the industry's most imaginative developers', for games releasing this holiday and beyond.

• It seems like they are trying to continue to push against the narrative that they are blockbuster-focused - we have no idea what they have in store, but it's certainly exciting!

CDPR Has 25% Of Its Dev Staff Working On CP2077 Expansion

In an earnings call, CD Projekt said they have around a quarter of their developers on an expansion for Cyberpunk, which is 160 people, and around a third working on supporting the game and bringing it to next-gen consoles. 70 are working on unannounced projects. They say "In accordance with our promise to gamers, we intend to keep improving Cyberpunk for as long as it takes. Meanwhile, we do not lose sight of the bigger picture: we want to develop other products based on our franchises and to keep growing our core business."

• Given the size and complexity of the project and the fixes required, it will cost a lot of time and money to win back players - but props to them, they're giving it a solid try so far. If No Man's Sky continues to be the benchmark, they have a LONG way to go.

No Man's Sky Frontiers - Settlements & Management!

The 17th major update to No Man's Sky, Frontiers adds planetary settlements on all populated planets. Players can become Overseer to manage these, defend and grow them, deal with citizens and more - basically, find an alien village and manage it into a bustling town. Base building has also been expanded with settlement parts and the UI has been overhauled.

• They just keep doing it. They just keep improving the game, both by overhauling existing systems for the better and adding entirely new things. Their production pipeline must be optimised to an insane degree, because this is putting almost every other developer on the planet to shame.

Cookie Clicker Is Now On Steam

Over 8 years since it played a major role in starting the idle game genre, Cookie Clicker finally makes its way to a gaming platform - Steam. Available for $4.99, a slice (or crumb?) of gaming history is now ready to take the top spot on your games played by time list.

• Idle/incremental games get a bad rap for being simple, but there are tons that have interesting design mechanics and tons of creative detail in presentation and writing - like Cookie Clicker's themes of cosmic horror and the effects of uncontrolled capitalism, games like Candy Box, Clicker Heroes and Forager all offer that great videogame feel of NUMBERS GO UP but each in a uniquely interesting. If you haven't experienced them before, it's worth a try!