Daily Briefing: Tuesday 31st August

Starfield Is STILL Not Coming To Playstation

At a Bethesda Gamescom stream, Pete Hines said “It’s not a ‘sorry, you’re never going to get to play anything by Bethesda again’ [situation]”. “Certainly, there are going to be things that you’re not going to be able to play on PlayStation.”

On Starfield specifically, he said “it was announced as a thing that’s an Xbox exclusive” and “I don’t know if I would go so far as to say you’re done ever playing stuff on PlayStation. But again, I don’t know the answer to that right now.”.

Many people took this as an admission that the possibility still existed for Starfield on the Sony platform, but this was quashed very quickly. Xbox's Aaron Greenberg was quick to tweet - it's launching exclusively on Xbox and PC, day one on Game Pass, and none of that will change. People even questioned if that wording means it's a timed exclusive, and Greenberg had to deny that too.

• It shows how important Starfield is to the overall gaming market that this obviously set-in-stone decision is still being questioned at every step by fans, seemingly full of hope and desperation. Once Starfield is out and Elder Scrolls 6 is on the horizon, Xbox's Bethesda purchase will pay off in droves for them.

Game Boy Advance Getting Its First Commercial Release In 13 Years

Indie developer Richard Nicol is releasing his game, Goodboy Galaxy, on Switch and Steam, as you'd expect... but he's also releasing it on GBA. On Kickstarter now with a demo, the ode to classic platformers is asking for £18,000 on Kickstarter and is offering digital GBA roms, Switch/Steam keys and a boxed GBA cart, complete with manual and a set of stickers.

• This isn't particularly striking news, but it's cute! It's great to see indies doing crazy things like releasing GBA games - as another example, Micro Mages was released for the NES in 2019.

Dead Space live stream today!

At 6pm BST (10am PT, 1pm ET, etc), Motive will be showing off a 'very early look' at the development of Dead Space. VentureBeat has said that Dead Space is targeted for fall of 2022, which calls into question just how early development is - assuming they started it shortly after Star Wars Squadron's release, that implies the game will be done in just under 2 years of development.

• That sounds remarkably ambitious to me, especially if content and features is added to the tight scope of the original.

More Evidence Against WATA's Fraudulent Collectible-Selling

Seth Abramson, games professor and journalist, posted a lengthy article on Substack detailing his findings into potentially illicit activities by the antique game grading firm WATA, specifically one of its members, Mark Haspel. It's against WATA policy for members to sell WATA-graded games, but this member has been selling some extremely-well graded Atari games for substantial amounts of money. As Seth himself puts it: "What is certainly clear, for now, is that a WATA executive is running a lucrative side business selling games his company graded, contrary to the very policy WATA announced to the media as the basis for it being a legitimate grading concern."

• Basically, it seems at least one person has been getting rich on the side by exploiting this market's growth and his place in the middle of it all. According to one source, Haspel was found at a gaming convention stockpiling NES games from vendors - looks like intent, to me, but we'll have to wait to see what legal weight it bears. If you're a retro game collector, keep yourself informed!