Plus POKÉMON SCARLET & VIOLET sell 10 million copies and Tesla allegedly approached game developers offering ‘exposure’
NEWS THIS WEEK
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SIFTER is produced by Kyle Pauletto, Fiona Bartholomaeus, Daniel Ang & Adam Christou. Mitch Loh is Senior Producer and Gianni Di Giovanni is our Executive Producer. Thanks to Omny Studio for their support of SIFTER.
FIONA: Hi I’m Fiona Bartholomaeus
DANIEL: and I’m Daniel Ang
FIONA: Welcome to Walkthrough, SIFTER’s weekly recap on the biggest news in video games.
DANIEL: This week Pokemon sells a lot despite a buggy launch, some of the biggest indie developers are offered just “exposure” for putting their games on Tesla, and the game taking off on TikTok.
Here is the news for Sunday 27th of November, Let’s Go
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DANIEL: Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have officially become one of the fastest selling titles for Nintendo ever, despite a number of glaring technical bugs.
Nintendo announced that in the first three days of sale ten million copies had been purchased with about 40% of that number in Japan alone.
There would have been a lot of presales for sure, so it’ll be interesting to see how these sales go now that the widely publicized bugs are all over the internet.
To put it in perspective, Sony’s God of War Ragnarok which launched the same week also had a record breaking launch for PlayStation 5 but selling only 5.1 million copies in comparison so it’s fair to say Pokemon is still huge.
FIONA: I preordered it and got right on the day it came out which i imagined heaps of people did, it’s amazing though that it’s got more sales than GOd of War, a game that is in the running for game of the year at the game awards.
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FIONA: Sticking with Nintendo, Nintendo Switch Sports will give you the chance to show off your long drive and precision putts with golf arriving this week in the casual sports game.
It’ll include 21 holes from the Wii Sports series, casual competition mode and online survival mode, both of which can have up to eight players.
It’ll be a free download, available on November 29.
DANIEL: Amazing, I love that they are adding new ways for my family and friends to beat me in this game.
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DANIEL: The Activision Blizzard acquisition continues with another interesting tidbit from UK’s Competition and Market Authority…Microsoft continues to roll out funny justifications for making some of their games exclusive and others cross-platform.
Microsoft offered a pretty arbitrary categorizing process for their games claiming that the next Elder Scrolls is a ‘mid-sized release’, so it won’t harm Sony being exclusive because it doesn't have the mass appeal of a Call of Duty, or Minecraft
Elder Scrolls Skyrim sold around 30 million copies since its 2011 launch, but that’s up against 425 million lifetime sales of CoD or 238 million sales of Minecraft, so I guess it does seem pretty tiny despite being one of the biggest games ever.
Reporting in Reuters this week said that the US Federal Trade Commission was expected to try to block the purchase, arguing it put too much market power in the hands of one company.
FIONA: It’s strange that they think Elder Scrolls doesn’t have a mass appeal because I have seen so many people playing it for years. If anything, making it cross platform would give them more players and money.
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FIONA: People love making games and a new trend has popped up like a cat with a fistful of coins on TikTok.
It’s a roleplaying game of sorts where ‘players’ collect dab-loons from videos shared across the service, keeping track of their loot in a notes app or spreadsheet, when certain prompts appear.
You can gain coins, have them stolen, buy insurance or items such as daggers, potions and jets.
It's a fun, goofy experience for the participants, but seeing a roleplaying game being developed in real time through memes by thousands of people on an app designed for creating and sharing short videos, is pretty amazing.
It’s likely Tiktok culture will move on in a couple of weeks, but i’m sure someone will try commericalise this free grassroots game and it’ll be fully dead.
DANIEL: As much as I avoid Tiktok I actually don’t mind this, and it seems like a pretty fun idea but I have so many questions - do people pay Dabloon taxes?
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DANIEL: It's still a bit weird that you can use your car to play video games but it turns out that one of the bigger manufacturers was just offering “exposure” for indies to port their games over.
Sam Barlow who worked on Her Story said on Twitter that Tesla had approached him to include the game but allegedly they weren’t willing to offer anything to license it and that instead, it’d be good exposure.
Melbourne-based House House got a similar offer for Untitled Goose Game, with Cabel Sasser from publisher Panic confirming on Twitter.
Pay developers for their work…come on.
As an artist I've got some pretty mixed feelings about this.
Speaking of cars, Sony is working with Honda for their electric vehicle and Izumi Kawanishi said it’s possible a PlayStation 5 could be built in.
FIONA: I’ve seen people hooking up their Wii’s and other consoles to cars and it blows my mind. But developers work incredibly hard on their games and just offering ‘exposure’ is really not enough. They’re big car companies so I’m sure they can afford to pay them.
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DANIEL: That’s it for news, here are the games releasing this week.
DANIEL: World of Warcraft Dragonflight, the ninth expansion to the long running MMO arrives this week. You can be a dragon, you can ride a dragon, you can make friends with a dragon, I bet you can kill dragons. But can you kiss a dragon? Find out on the 28th of November on PC and Mac.
FIONA: Warhammer 40,000 (forty thousand) Darktide the 4 player ‘Left 4 Dead-like' comes to the grim future on the 30th of November. It’s a class based co-op survival game and will be out on PC.
DANIEL: The hotly anticipated The Callisto Protocol is out on the 2nd December. Directed by Glen Schofield who was the executive producer on Dead Space, The Callisto Protocol is a spiritual successor to that really popular horror survival series. Grab it on PC, PlayStation and Xbox this Friday.
FIONA: After nearly eight months of delays, Marvel’s Midnight Suns the tactical RPG developed by Fur-axis games, makers of Civilization and X:COM arrives this week. If you love a bit of tactical strategy and the Marvel universe, this one looks to be a definite winner. It’s out on PC, Playstation 5, and Xbox Series S and X on the 2nd.
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FIONA: This has been Walkthrough by Sifter, my name is Fiona Bartholomaeus
DANIEL: And my name is Daniel Ang
FIONA: We know you love listening to SIFTER so if you’d like to support our work, we’ve got a Ko-Fi where you can contribute whatever our work is worth to you. Even a small amount makes a big difference to us. Head to sifter.com.au/support where even a couple of dollars helps us keep making our shows
DANIEL: SIFTER is produced by Kyle Pauletto, Fiona Bartholomaeus, Daniel Ang, Daniel Hyndes & Adam Christou. Mitch Loh is our Senior Producer and Gianni Di Giovanni is our Executive Producer.
FIONA: Thanks to Brian Fairbanks from Salty Dog Sounds for composing the Walkthrough theme tune.
Thanks to both Audio Technica Australia and Omny Studio for their support of SIFTER’s three podcasts.
DANIEL: Thanks again for listening, we’ll be back with more news next Sunday.
