Daily Briefing, Tuesday 5th January 2021

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of the Bellular Daily Briefing - industry news right at your fingertips

Epic Games to convert shopping mall into new global HQ

The $95m deal was first reported by the Triangle Business Journal and will give Epic the enormous 980K square foot Cary Towne Center in North Carolina - around two miles from Epic's current Cary HQ.

• Epic hope to have converted the mall space into their new global HQ by 2024 and, thanks to the terms of the deal, construction can begin immediately. Epic had previously intended to expand their existing Cary HQ with a new 500K facility that would have held 2K employees - but those plans are off in favour of fancier ones.

Sony just discontinued a lot of PS4 models in Japan

Following quite a few rumours to the effect, Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan have confirmed that only the standard Jet Black 500GB PS4 Slim will continue to be produced in the country - everything else (including the PS4 Pro) will disappear once existing stock is sold.

• There's no word yet on whether these models, particularly the premium PS4 Pro, will be discontinued in the West. Demand for the PS5 has been unprecedented and Sony have always been clear on their intention to transition players to Ps5 - so we'll have to see.

Nintendo acquire Next Level Games

The Vancouver-based studio were most recently responsible for Luigi's Mansion 3 and the deal is expected to close at the start of March, though details and sums are still undisclosed.

• Next Level Games were founded in 2002 and have worked with Nintendo for 15 years on games like Mario Strikers Charged, Metroid Prime: Federation Force, and Luigi's Mansion 2 and 3. They've worked exclusively with Nintendo for almost the last decade - so this acquisition is Nintendo making the relationship official.

Hitman 3 will optimise the first two games, reduce install size

Speaking on ResetEra following Hitman 3's snazzy New Year's Eve trailer, an IO Interactive dev stated that the team will be retroactively applying some technical improvements to the first two games.

• All three titles have had their file structures optimised, meaning that the entire trilogy will now clock in at a tidy 100GB. Despite this optimisation, the first two games have actually received some visual upgrades, like nicer reflections. Hitman 3 releases January 20th.

That's it for today - catch us back here tomorrow for another dose of daily news!