Gamer Oktoberfest
E94: October marks the release of many great new games.
Good morning gamers! The video game industry is starting to pick up steam and October is a great month for game releases. Last week brought a lot of new details for some of this month's headliners so here’s what we learned, and everything you can look forward to.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II launches on October 28th for every console and platform. According to Activision, the MWII beta was the biggest Call of Duty beta of all time. It had the most hours played, the most amount of players and the most matches played.
Gotham Knights launches on October 21st for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC. We already knew that the game features the biggest version of Gotham City ever developed, but WB Games recently revealed that players will need to play through the storyline 4 times, once with each character, in order to see everything the game has to offer.
Overwatch 2 is finally releasing on October 4th as a free-to-play title on all Xbox and PlayStation consoles, PC and the Nintendo Switch. Three new heroes will be introduced during the first season, all of which are unlocked via battle pass progression. Additionally, it will now take new players 100 games to unlock all of the original Overwatch characters, a system which Blizzard implemented to prevent overwhelming new players, and to help eliminate smurfing.
Other major game releases include,
PGA Tour 2K23 [OCT 11]
Dragon Ball: The Breakers [OCT 14]
A Plague Tale: Requiem [OCT 18]
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope [OCT 20]
New Takes from the Borderlands [OCT 21]
Scorn [OCT 21]
Victoria 3 [OCT 25]
Resident Evil RE: Verse [OCT 28]
Bayonetta 3 [OCT 28]
Google Stadia
Google announced that they will be shutting down their Stadia streaming service as of January 18th, 2023. Phil Harrison, the Vice President and General Manager for Google Stadia said “it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected”. Google Stadia originally launched in November 2019 but had to compete against Cloud gaming services from Sony, Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft.
Refunds will be given to Google Stadia players for hardware purchases made through the Google Store. Refunds will also be offered for all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store, which are expected to be completed by mid-January 2023.
According to Stephen Totilo, the announcement from Google came as a surprise to the developers working on different Stadia projects. Google reportedly paid studios to bring their games exclusively to Stadia and these studios heavily rely on Stadia store content purchases as a form of revenue. The studios are concerned because as of January 2023, players will no longer be able to play Stadia exclusive games and they’re urgently attempting to publish their games on other platforms.
Esports Corner
The 2021/2022 Valorant Champions Tour has come to a close and it was Valorant’s most-viewed esports event ever peaking at 1.5 million concurrent viewers and averaging 520,000 viewers throughout the event. To help quench our thirst, Riot announced the VALORANT OFF//SEASON, a new circuit of officially sanctioned events that will take place between October 2022 and January 2023. These events will happen across all Valorant regions, will feature unique event formats and will focus on aspiring players, newly formed professional teams and content creators.
FIFA 23 has been out for less than a week and EA wasted no time releasing their esports roadmap. The enhanced and reimagined program kicks off with the inaugural EA Sports Cup, a 2v2 circuit with representation from some of the worlds biggest esports organizations and football clubs. Traditional 1v1 events will take place throughout the year with a huge variety of tournaments including the ePremier League, Virtual Bundesliga, eLaLiga Santander, eMLS, eSeria A TIM and the eChampions League, amongst others. The top 64 players throughout the season will compete at the FGS Playoffs, and then the top 24 players at the FGS Playoffs will qualify for the FIFAe World Cup 2023.
Gaming Roundup
Apex Legends data miner KralRindo has found that nine original Titanfall 2 maps were added to the Apex Legends files.
Jetpack Interactive, the studio behind the God of War PC port, is hiring for a AAA live service game based on a “flagship” PlayStation IP.
Skull and Bones, the Pirate open-world action-adventure game from Ubisoft has been delayed to March 9th, 2023. It’s been in development since 2013.
Wild Hearts, a AAA fantasy combat monster hunting-style game by Omega Force is releasing on February 17th, 2023. It is branded as an EA Original.
Dead Space the remake is set to be released on January 27th, 2023. The official Xbox Store page for the game has gone live.
Far Cry 6’s “Game of the year” expansion/upgrade has been found in the Xbox database by data miner Aggiornamenti Lumia.
Disney wants to release two Star Wars games per fiscal year. Lucasfilm Games plans to release one AAA game and one smaller game per year.
Netflix has announced the creation of an internal video game studio in Helsinki, Finland with Marko Lastikka as the studio director.
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