An analyst has stated that the main competitor to GTA VI will be GTA V, animal rights activists have urged Nintendo to remove the nose ring from the Cow in Mario Kart World, and the creators of Sword of the Sea have admitted that their collaboration with Sony saved their studio. Here are the main events in the gaming industry from the past weekend.
- The greatest competition for GTA VI will not come from another new blockbuster, but from GTA V, according to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella. In an interview with the GamesIndustry portal, he stated that the 12-year-old GTA V continues to regularly rank in the monthly top 20 best-selling games in the US, and it will be difficult for Rockstar Games to convince gamers to switch from it to the next installment in the series. Piscatella believes that now is generally not the best time to create new games. Development has become more expensive, and a few online hits like Fortnite and Minecraft have dominated the top of the market, making it very challenging to compete with them under current conditions.
- The animal rights organization PETA has called on Nintendo to change the design of the Cow, one of the characters in the racing game Mario Kart World. Activists want developers to remove the large metal ring from her nose. They pointed out that in reality, such rings are used in the meat and dairy industries to control animals and cause them discomfort. According to PETA, featuring such elements in Mario Kart World serves as an unpleasant reminder of cow exploitation and hinders players from fully enjoying the races. Nintendo has not commented on PETA's call.
- Matt Nava, co-founder of Giant Squid, the studio behind the atmospheric adventure Sword of the Sea, participated in the Friends Per Second podcast. During the conversation, he shared that his team would have struggled to survive the gaming industry crisis without Sony's support. According to Nava, Giant Squid benefited from joining the PlayStation Indies program. "We’re okay now. Of course, it wasn't easy, and there were moments when we wondered: 'Will we make it?' But we had truly fantastic partners in PlayStation Indies who believed in [Sword of the Sea] from the very beginning. And when tough times came, they stepped in and basically saved us," Nava said.
- The developers from Relic Entertainment announced that the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War remaster sold 150,000 copies in less than 24 hours after its release. Currently, the game has "mostly positive" reviews on Steam — with 76% of 3,600 comments praising it. The peak concurrent players of the Steam version of the remaster over the weekend reached 18,262.