Daily Briefing: Wednesday, 20th January

Sony Santa Monica 'Confirm' A New Game

The studio is hiring an art director for an unannounced title - rumored to be Cory Barlog's sci-fi game. It may be a revival of Internal-7, an old sci-fi project that Santa Monica cancelled after encountering issues with the PS4's capabilities. This new generation would be a good excuse to bring it back.

• Given God of War is due 2021, this would line up for pre-production and early stages of development being finished in time for the God of War team to hop over. Sony's first-party will be an absolute onslaught at this rate. 2021 seems so stacked they could push games to 2022 without leaving a gap - and this proves they're planning for 2023 and beyond, as well. Especially with their new San Diego team apparently working on an Uncharted follow-up.

Materia Collective are 17 Months Late On Game Soundtrack Royalties

Artists who worked on Celeste's B-Sides remixes, among others, are accusing the group of withholding outstanding royalty payments for up to 17 months. They've since apologized and outlined a plan to make payments and improve internal processes, citing rapid growth and 2020's challenges as reasons.

• It seems they were unprepared to navigate the complexities of game and music royalty payments. This is a grave error, but hopefully they can right their wrongs quickly. Nurturing quality game music artists will be a massive benefit to games in the years to come - it's already bearing fruit, as evidenced by the quality of Celeste's B-Sides in the first place.

GAME UK Fighting Off Scalpers

After VGC reported that scalpers secured over 2,000 new PS5 orders this week in the UK, they received a statement from GAME. They say that they have 'strong measures in place' to ensure their one per customer limit is enforced. Automatic checks run after orders have been confirmed but before payment is taken, so those scalpers might be counting their chickens before they hatch.

• A simple check on orders to ensure that multiple orders aren't going to the same address or the same postcode would do most of the work, here, provided there's manual verification.  We shouldn't be having simple bots successfully ordering thousands of PS5s, simple as. Hopefully GAME aren't just offering platitudes here.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Beta Version Found

Nintendo history preservation group Forest of Illusion were looking through a development cart for F-Zero X and discovered it also contained about half of an early Ocarina of Time ROM, intended for demoing at Spaceworld 1997. Fans have been tearing the ROM apart to see what it contained, and have found many unused assets, including rewritten story sections and ambitious but unused items.

• While not relevant to us today, fun bits of gaming history being discovered are just that - fun. For fans of a game or series, it can be fascinating to see what could have been. It's also fun to see what ideas weren't used at the time, but were kept for the next game or scrapped entirely.