Daily Briefing: Tuesday 24th August

Why Are Retro Games So Expensive? Fraud, Apparently!

Youtuber Karl Jobst released a 52-minute long video breaking down his investigation into retro game valuation. Wata Games grades, or assigns quality levels, to retro videogame copies and then Heritage Auctions sells graded retro games. Before Wata, the highest price paid for a game was $30k. The first auction for a Wata game sold for $100k to the Heritage Auctions' co-founder and involved parties. They then used this in a press release to suggest games are getting more valuable... and now a copy of Super Mario Bros has sold for $2m. The gist of it is that Karl Jobst is accusing Heritage Auctions and Wata Games of manipulating the market in a way that can only be described as 'fraud' and skimming off the top. Heritage deny any wrongdoing in a statement given to VGC.

• This is an insane story, one we're going to cover on the channel quite soon. Fraud and manipulation would certainly explain the retro market growing in size by about 6,000% within a year or two.

EA Open Up Accessibility Patents

In a seemingly altruistic move, EA have announced a patent pledge, allowing other game developers to use some of their accessibility patents without risk of legal action or fines. The included patents are the 'contextually aware communications systems' i.e. Apex's ping system, two patents on colorblind image processing, automatic contrast detection and rendering, as well as audio generation based on potential user hearing issues.

• They also said they "may add additional patents" later. Interestingly, if someone files a lawsuit against EA for infringing patents, they'll be excepted from the pledge. So if you need to use ONE of these patents, EA can use any of yours in return. Smart, good for most devs, and real sneaky on EA's part to include that.

Activision 'Hide' Logo In Vanguard Game Client

Activision were under some scrutiny for not putting their logo in the Call of Duty: Vanguard announcement trailer, responding by saying it was a "creative decision". It goes beyond their trailer, with players finding that the logo does not appear in the alpha client either.

• This is clearly Activision divorcing their own brand from the Call of Duty one, and setting Call of Duty up as its own brand and platform. A 'creative decision' that also hides the name that was embroiled a lawsuit, involving substantial allegations of sexual harassment. Sneaky.

Elden Ring Might Appear At Gamescom - Nominated For Awards

As always, a games show brings Elden Ring rumours. The Gamescom 2021 Awards opened public voting, revealing which games were nominated (by a jury). Elden Ring has been nominated for 5 categories (Best Xbox, Playstation, PC, Role Playing and Action Adventure Game - yes, all of them!). Nominated games must submit ten minutes of footage, that features core gameplay mechanics and in-game sound.

• Awesome! I hope there's a lot of detail released this Gamescom, since this will be the last major event (except The Game Awards, and maybe Tokyo Game Show) before it is released.

Gamescom Xbox Stream

The Xbox stream for Gamescom has come and gone, with no substantial new information about first-party exclusives added. Tomorrow at Geoff's Opening Night Live, then? What they did talk about was Game Pass Ultimate Cloud Gaming come to the Xbox consoles, a new Forza Horizon 5 controller, Dying Light 2 and a ton of interesting games - many of which will be on Game Pass on day one. Including a long list of Humble Bundle games!

• First party is not their strength yet, which can cause some optics problems at events like this, but they showed off a wide variety of games all available on Xbox for just the price of Game Pass. The event's pacing was a little slow, but the content was generally great.