Daily Briefing: Thursday 8th April

Kojima Apparently Working With Xbox For Next Game

According to VentureBeat's Jeff Grubb, Kojima Productions are in talks with Xbox to publish the next Kojima title, something Phil Spencer actually hinted at via a Homo Ludens statue on his shelf during a Microsoft event. No further details are known, although Jeff says this is part of Xbox making big moves into the Japanese market.

• Jeff, by now, is the boy who cried wolf in games journalism - he makes so many predictions that some of them end up right. However, this specific bit of news makes a fair degree of sense. Sony are focusing efforts on Naughty Dog, Insomniac and their Western teams, so Xbox could slip in and nab an exclusive from Kojima with ease. Kojima's next game on Game Pass? Guaranteed sub boost.

Death Stranding Pulled In $27M On PC

505 Games' parent company, Digital Bros, revealed in their financial report that Death Stranding earned them a tidy $27m in revenue from July 2020 to December 2020. For the 'second wave' of a highly anticipated timed console exclusive, that's a huge amount of money.

• 505 will be happy with their pickup, as it performed notably better than both Control and Ghostrunner. All in all, it's clear that PC as a primary or secondary platform for console releases will be a big focus going forward. Finally.

Atari  Establish A Gaming Division, Aim for Console & PC

Their recent projects have been hotels, cryptocurrency and a retro console, but now they have a clear focus. Splitting into separate Blockchain and Gaming Divisions, Atari's Gaming side will continue work on the Atari VCS console and mobile games, but another goal is "revitalizing classic Atari intellectual property for the modern era". That apparently means old Atari IP on console& PC today.

• Atari have been jumping from failure to failure for years, but taking a step back into gaming with old IP might grant them some real success at last, instead of this modern hustle the tiny company has gotten caught up in.

Call of Duty 2021 Rumours Aren't Good

According to a notable CoD figure Tom Henderson, Call of Duty's 2021 release, supposedly named Vanguard, "is a fucking disaster." According to a Call of Duty content creator, "Sledgehammer will put the nail in the coffin." Sentiment amongst some of the CoD community online is turning extremely negative against each of the main development teams behind Call of Duty. As to whether these issues will reach the wider community and have any impact on Activision-Blizzard's absolute blockbuster series, we'll have to wait and see.

• Call of Duty is 'too big to fail'. If development teams begin to make serious mistakes in developing their game, it likely won't be represented in any financial data until it's too late and the damage has been done. Call of Duty is a cultural giant, and it could take more than one or two bad games to impact those yearly sales. Besides, Call of Duty is continuing to see record engagement as a franchise, so perhaps the average CoD player does not share the opinion of this section of the online community.