Daily Briefing: Friday 2nd April

PlatinumGames' April Fool's joke shooter is real and it releases this year

Arcade shooter Sol Cresta was announced last year as the fourth and seemingly final announcement of the studio's Platinum Four website and, while many people thought it was nothing more than an April Fool's joke, it is a very real game set to release on Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Steam later this year.

• It turns out that Sol Cresta, on top of being the third in a series of games that stretches all the way back to 1980, will also be the first title in PlatinumGames' new Neo-Classic Arcade series. Platinum have advised fans to "stay tuned" for more games in this series, and here's hoping they're as refreshingly weird as Sol Cresta.

Call of Duty Warzone update caused Virgin Media's "biggest ever download day"

Call of Duty Warzone's chunky update earlier this week rang in at 52GB on PlayStation consoles, 58GB on Xbox consoles, and 52GB on PC and unsurprisingly drove an enormous amount of internet traffic. Virgin Media confirmed the update drove a record-breaking day of downloads here in the UK, something that's become increasingly common in recent months.

• Virgin Media's previous busiest download day was February 25th when Warzone launched its second season and, before that, the launch of the Xbox Series X|S and another suite of Call of Duty updates drove record traffic in November 2020. Activision say that this most recent round of updates should have decreased Warzone's overall file size.

E3 2021 has backtracked on locking some content behind a paywall

Earlier this month multiple sources reported that E3 organisers the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) had initially pitched plans to charge a fee for some of the 2021 show's content - such as on-demand game demos or an odd access-all-areas content packing. Apparently, this premium package could have cost as much as $35.

• Well, it now seems that the ESA have realised how terrible an idea that was, and have confirmed that "there will be no elements of E3 2021 that will be behind a paid-for pass or paywall." It's honestly for the best because the ESA have been struggling to make E3 relevant in recent years and, with a digital show scheduled for this year, a paywall was certainly not the way the go.

Another Sony Studio Japan alum has set up their own indie studio

Sony shuttering their historic Japan Studio this week and sent a lot of veteran developers out into the world to do their own thing. One such developer was Masami Yamamoto, who served as an executive producer and external production director at Japan Studio. He just announced his new indie studio - EPIGRAsm.

• Yamamoto served as executive producer for games like Tokyo Jungle and Rain, and as external production manager for Soul Sacrifice, Bloodborne, Freedom Wars, and a whole host more. It'll be interesting to learn a) what his new studio will be working on and b) how exactly its name is pronounced.