DF Direct Weekly returns once again – perhaps inevitably given its name – and the major topic for discussion this weekly is equally inevitable: the news that Halo and Destiny creator Bungie is the latest target in the ongoing studio acquisition war, becoming a member of the illustrious collection of PlayStation Studios. However, seemingly, this is not an exclusivity play: indeed, Destiny 2 and future Bungie titles will remain as multi-format as they are today, which raises the question: what’s in it for Sony?
The GamesIndustry.biz interview with Jim Ryan paints a picture of a company looking to acquire the personnel and the skills to compete in the lucrative games-as-a-service arena, while a snapshot of 860,000 Destiny 2 active users during the course of one day in a relatively quiet period, meaning that while the game doesn’t dominate discourse, it’s clearly got a large, committed audience: good business for Sony then, and one where you probably wouldn’t want to lose the 32 percent gaming on an Xbox console. With the news that Sony apparently has a further 10 live service titles coming in a four year period (!), having that kind of expertise on-hand also adds to the value. But with that said, a $3.6b purchase in a world where Microsoft snaffled Zenimax/Bethesda for $7.5b is eye-opening to say the least.
Other discussion points this week? We’ve been a touch disappointed by Microsoft first-party support for cutting-edge technologies including ray tracing and DLSS, but the welcome news that Asobo is adding DLSS to Flight Simulator can only be a good thing – the question is to what further extent it will highlight the CPU bottleneck inherent in the game. We also spend some time discussing Nintendo Switch’s meteoric success. Similar to the Wii, the Mario makers have struck gold with a formula that breaks out into the mainstream in a different way to the Sony/Microsoft offerings.
00:00:00 Introductions00:00:33 Sony buys Bungie00:15:22 DLSS coming to Flight Simulator00:19:56 Switch is the fastest-selling console of all-time00:27:25 Bloodborne “PSX Demake” releases00:31:50 Team 17 pledges support for NFT, cancels support for NFT 24 hours later00:40:51 DF Content Discussion: Dying Light 200:50:26 DF Supporter Q1: Do you believe that games on the next generations of consoles from Sony and Microsoft will rely mostly on ray tracing for rendering graphics?00:52:56 DF Supporter Q2: Do you think the Steam Deck would be capable of becoming a portable 60fps PS3 thanks to the emulator RCPS3?00:55:55 DF Supporter Q3: How does id Tech 7 avoid the shader compilation stutter issues we see in Unreal Engine games?00:58:36 DF Supporter Q4: Does DLSS work with dynamic resolution scaling?01:02:05 DF Supporter Q5: When do developers get an idea of what hardware will be in next-gen consoles?01:07:58 DF Supporter Q6: Local hardware combined with cloud based hardware = super hardware?
And as for the ongoing drama surrounding NFTs… well, the bottom line is that it even if there were some kind of positive approach to this technology, the mere association of a product with NFTs is essentially a kiss of death to the core gamer. That said, I am curious as to whether this violently negative reaction is an example of twitter dot com in action, and how the concept may be received in the broader space (my guess: bafflement and a more general lack of interest).