Microsoft has created a game preservation team, Apple has allowed retro game emulators in the App Store, sales of Call of Duty: Vanguard may have exceeded 30 million copies - we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.
Call of Duty: Vanguard
- Microsoft has a special team dedicated to saving old games. This was announced by the president of Xbox, Sarah Bond, in a letter to employees of the corporation. According to Bond, such an initiative is important both for Xbox and for the gaming industry as a whole. "We build on our rich history of backward compatibility and strive to provide an amazing library of Xbox games to future generations of gamers," Bond wrote.
- Vice President Kareem Choudhry has left Microsoft's gaming division. It is unknown why he decided to leave the corporation and what he is going to do now. Chaudhry has worked at Microsoft for over 26 years. He was responsible for some of the most advanced Xbox projects: under his leadership, tools for backward compatibility of consoles and the Xbox Cloud Gaming cloud service were developed. For the past two years, he has been in charge of the Xbox Emerging Technologies division dealing with artificial intelligence.
- In February, Microsoft announced that it would release four games on competitors' consoles: Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves and Grounded. As The Verge's sources found out, the corporation is not yet sure about the need for further releases. According to their information, everything will show the release of Sea of Thieves on PlayStation 5. The release of this game will be a "key test" of whether other Microsoft titles will be able to appear on PlayStation 5 or Nintendo Switch. Recall that Sea of Thieves is due to be released on PlayStation 5 on April 30th.
- Call of Duty: Vanguard did not meet Activision's expectations, but it seems to have sold tens of millions of copies anyway. The shooter's sales could exceed 30 million copies. This number was indicated on his LinkedIn account by Brian Hong, a specialist who helped with the strategy for social networks Call of Duty: Vanguard.
- Apple has updated the rules of the App Store and allowed the publication of retro game emulators. There were no restrictions. The corporation stressed that games for emulators must comply with the law. In other words, emulators with pirated games are still prohibited in the App Store.
- IGN has published a lot of material on the toxic environment in Deck Nine Games, a studio that is currently working on a new part of Life is Strange. Her staff reported to IGN about crunches, low salaries, mass layoffs, discrimination, harassment cases and attempts by some developers to add Nazi references to the new game. ING's interlocutors also talked about the pressure from Square Enix. According to them, the company actively intervened in the development of Life Is Strange: True Colors and opposed the studio's desire to make the project "gay". In addition, Square Enix set extremely tight deadlines. Separately, IGN's interlocutors added that the development of their new game did not go very smoothly at the initial stage, but now everything is fine.