Dailt Briefing: Tuesday 4th May

Sony reportedly charge publishers for cross-play

The Epic v. Apple trial is now underway and one of the first interesting pieces to come out of it is that Sony sometimes require "additional revenue" from publishers to enable crossplay. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said Epic had to give in to these fees in order to enable cross-play for Fortnite.

• Sweeney also confirmed that Sony are the only platform-holder that asks for fees in exchange for cross-play. Sony's historic reluctance to enable cross-play for big multiplayer titles suddenly makes a lot more sense - they only relented to cross-play pressures back in September 2018.

97 games can now use Xbox Series X FPS Boost feature

The functionality increases the framerate of some Xbox One games to either 60fps or 120fps depending on the title. Around 70 new titles were added to the library earlier this week and 12 were added last week as part of Microsoft's scheme to both support and enhance backward compatibility on Xbox Series X|S.

• Xbox's Major Nelson also highlighted on Twitter that a decent chunk of these games are available for "free" as part of either Xbox Game Pass or EA Play (which is included in the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription). Games that support the feature include Alien: Isolation, Assassin's Creed: The Ezio Collection, and Fallout 4. Just make sure you actually have the feature turned on to get the benefit because it isn't always on by default for some reason.

Nintendo are thinking about non-Mario animated content

A Super Mario movie is currently in the works with Illumination and is set to release next year, but Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa says the company are considering additional animated projects based on other IP, but on the provision that they can find partners who "deeply understand" the source material.

• Nintendo have any number of IPs that could lend themselves perfectly to an animated project, though Furukawa seems a bit reluctant to commit too many resources too quickly - stating that Shigeru Miyamoto is "very, very hands-on" with the Mario movie. Nintendo also allegedly canceled plans for a Legend of Zelda animated series and a Star Fox claymation project after Netflix leaked details to the press, so any new partnerships could take a while to work out.

Sony invest in Discord just weeks after Microsoft acquisition deal collapse

Sony have taken a minority ownership stake in Discord in advance of the communication service being integrated into the PlayStation Network early next year. The announcement comes during Discord's latest round of capital raising and just a few weeks after a reported sale to Microsoft fell through.

• Sony haven't gone into the specifics of how the deal will work just yet, but CEO Jim Ryan say that the overall goal of the partnership is to "bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile" from next year. It'll be interesting to see what form this integration takes.