Author Archives: 1080Partners

Gamestop to close more stores

Video game retailer GameStop hasn’t been doing too well in recent years, and the hits don’t stop coming. GameStop held its second quarter earnings call today, announcing that it would be closing down between 180-200 “underperforming” stores this year. This announcement follows a couple massive rounds of layoffs, including one that affected a large portion of the editorial staff at Game Informer.

GameStop currently operates more than 5700 stores worldwide, and earnings call indicated that a majority of them were profitable. The total number of “opportunistic” closures based on performance alone amounts to fewer than 5% of GameStop’s brick and mortar locations. Gamesindustry.biz reports that this is the beginning of on ongoing effort that will result in a “much larger tranche” of additional locations closing down over the next two years.

While that is an impressive statistic, we have a clear opportunity to improve our overall profitability by de-densifying our chain. That work is well underway. We are on track to close between 180 and 200 underperforming stores globally by the end of this fiscal year. And while these closures were more opportunistic, we are applying a more definitive, analytic approach, including profit levels and sales transferability, that we expect will yield a much larger tranche of closures over the coming 12 to 24 months.”

These drastic moves are in an effort to revitalize the retailer with a complete revamp of the GameStop identity as more and more business is pushed to digital storefronts and fast physical shipping from online retailers like Amazon. GameStop also has to compete with other brick-and-mortar stores like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy carrying video games. GameStop also noted that the end of the current console generation is partially to blame for the losses that it’s been experiencing, as well as console manufacturers confirming the upcoming launches earlier than they have in the past.

For Q2, GameStop posted a net loss of $415 million and an adjusted net loss of $32 million. While individual store locations may be profitable, that isn’t translating to a wider profit for the company. In after-hours trading today, GameStop shares were below $5 each, a massive drop of nearly 15%, despite previous investment from The Big Short guy.

[Source: Gamesindustry.biz]

Overcooked 2 arrives on August 7th!

Overcooked 2, the sequel to the fun, frantic cooperative multiplayer cooking game, is coming later this year. The follow-up to the original Overcooked, which was first released in 2016 and came to Nintendo Switch last year, will include a major new feature: online multiplayer.

Rebellion is always looking forward

Rebellion is a company full of unique characters that has spent the last 25 years pushing technological boundaries. Jason Kingsley, CEO and creative director of Rebellion says that the company was born out of freelance game work that he and his brother Chris, a co-founder and the company’s CTO, were doing alongside their PhDs.

“We were doing more and more computer game stuff,” says Jason Kingsley. “But we also ended up doing quite a lot of management, because nobody else in the team was doing it. So we ended up managing projects, and trying to coordinate things a little bit, as well as our freelance tasks and we weren’t getting paid for it. “

So the brothers decided to found Rebellion together and go into business for themselves.

“We’ve always wanted to make games that we want to play. One of the problems we’ve always had at Rebellion is that we’re always too ambitious in how we create our environments,” Kingsley says with a smile that indicates he’s not too upset.

Take Sniper Elite, an FPS game about taking out soldiers of the Third Reich at long range, perhaps Rebellion’s best-known franchise in recent years.

“A sniping game means you need to be able to zoom into the distance,” Kingsley continues. “For a lot of people that don’t have sniping in their games, they don’t have to worry about distance and the number of polygons.

“We often feel that we’ve made a rod for our own backs with some of our creative decisions, but our technical team is so good that they can make the best of it and make it really work. And that’s why our games are successful, and why, I think, games like the Sniper Elite series are right up there with the best games in the world from the very expensive and very well funded big studios.”

Kingsley says that the firm is “absolutely” drawn to technical and gameplay challenges that they can try to conquer. It’s something shared by the entire company.

Everything Rebellion creates is built on its own technology, so the studio uses its own engine, and tries to avoid middleware where possible so that everything is tooled towards the game it’s been created for.

“If there’s something we need it to do, we can make the engine do that,” says Kingsley. “We don’t have to worry that ‘Oh, the engine can’t do that so we have to compromise our creative visions’.”

This focus on bettering themselves led to the art team pulling out and reworking the rendering system between Sniper Elite 3 and its sequel, the well-received Sniper Elite 4 but it also means that, of all the projects Payton is most excited about at Rebellion, he’s hoping he’ll get another chance to go back to World War II, as he’s got unfinished business with the Nazi-killing sniper Karl Fairburne.

“I would love to make another Sniper Elite game,” he enthuses. “I think it’s an artistic thing, when you’ve been making something for a while, I think the last third of it, you’re already thinking: ‘Shit, if I do this again, I’d be doing that or I’d be doing this.”

Making games for themselves

Jason Kingsley suggests that the reason Rebellion throws itself so entirely into every technological challenge is that, fundamentally, they’re making games for themselves:

“We’ve always wanted to make computer games that we want to play. That’s the truth of it. We don’t do much in the way of analytics or analysis of what’s the next big thing in computer games, because we just like making the games we like to play.”

Rebellion’s stability, Kingsley opines, is down to its portfolio approach to games so that there’s a mix of projects of different sizes landing at different times with manageable budgets. There’s plenty of room for experiments, but the team doesn’t gamble everything on
a single game.

The company has experimented with VR with Battlezone – “a huge financial success for Rebellion,” Kingsley says, adding that Rebellion is “going to stay in VR.” The studio is also experimenting with remasters of earlier games, with a recent Rogue Trooper release doing good numbers for the company, although Kingsley says the team isn’t keen to just continue retreading old ground when there are new games to release.

New games in this case takes the form of Strange Brigade, a four player co-op shooter that channels something distinctly British in its story of four pulp-era adventures battling mythological creatures for ancient relics and profit. If it works out, it’ll be another successful IP for Rebellion. If not, the studio has several more ideas for what might come next.

Kingsley describes the portfolio approach as a desire to avoid gambling everything on one project. But, as it turns the page on its second quarter-century, the company feels like a sure bet.

Read more at mcvuk.com

All games will be digital in 2027: Take-Two

Don’t expect NBA 2K38 to come on a disc. Speaking at the Credit Suisse 21st Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference today, Take-Two Interactive president Karl Slatoff said he ultimately sees the mix of physical/digital sales tipping entirely to one side.

“I think over the long-term, it will be 100% [digital],” Slatoff said. “I just can’t predict whether that’s five years, 10 years, or 20 years. It’s probably less than 20 and maybe more than five, but I think it ultimately gets there. That’s the zeitgeist. Things are moving in that direction.

“Why I think it’s a little quicker than people imagined is honestly, Sony and Microsoft have done a really nice job with their services. You’ve got more people on Xbox Live, more people on PSN, and it helps. The friction is going away at a quicker rate because these platforms have been really well developed, and the consumers love it.”

Even if the brick and mortar retailers of the world won’t be playing a large role in Take-Two’s future, Slatoff acknowledged the company still relies heavily on them in the present.

“The truth is physical retail is still the majority of our business, and very important partners of ours,” he said. “And we want to do everything we can to support that environment. And we do. They’re very strong marketing and distribution partners for us. But again, it’s out of our control. Whether we want it or not, it looks like it’s going to happen eventually.”

The shift to digital has also enabled publishers to pursue business models including loot box-driven microtransactions. But as EA recently discovered with Star Wars Battlefront II, players aren’t always enthusiastic about how they’re incorporated. Slatoff acknowledged recent consumer uproar over the practice, but suggested their objections were not with microtransactions themselves, but the game around them.

“The whole gambling regulator thing, we don’t view that sort of thing as gambling. Our view of it is the same as the ESA statement for the most part,” Slatoff said. “That’s going to play its course, but in terms of the consumer and the noise you hear in the market right now, it’s all about content. It’s about overdelivering on content and making sure you’re focused on engagement. That has been our strategy and where we’re focused, and as long as you keep your eye on that ball, you’re going to be OK. The consumer’s going to be really happy with what they get.”

He added, “You can’t force the consumer to do anything. You try to do your best to create the best experience you possibly can to drive engagement. And driving engagement creates value in entertainment. That’s just how it’s always been and always will be.”

Via gamesindustry.biz

Armored Ogres invade in new Extinction trailer

Gamers moving fast towards digital games

The move from physical to digital is happening faster than most analysts had predicted. A report from Games Industry shows that in some instances, triple-A console titles are seeing as much as 45 per cent of their sales being claimed by digital.

Indeed, Activision just yesterday revealed that digital sales of Destiny 2 on consoles accounted for over 50 per cent of its total, setting a new record for the company.

EA CFO Blake Jorgensen also this week told investors that the company was “very pleased and a bit surprised” at the strength of digital downloads for both this year’s FIFA and Madden, adding that “it’s great to see the movement towards digital”.

Digital is appealing to publishers – not only is a digital unit cheaper to produce than a physical one, but it cannot be traded in to potentially claim an otherwise new sale further down the line, for which the publisher would receive no money.

Games Industry adds that while a number of big 2017 releases (such as FIFA 18, Forza Motorsport 2, Assassin’s Creed Origins and, indeed, Destiny 2) have reported annual unit sales drops in the physical-only UK charts, once the missing digital sales are factored in, many of these titles are actually up compared to their predecessors.

Sources tell the site that retail’s insistence on selling games at or close to RRP is a crucial factor in the rapid change.

With digital games now typically costing around the same as their boxed counterparts, consumers are starting to value the convenience they offer, even at the cost of lost trade-in potential.

Via MCVUk.com

Path for Fire new goodies for Holidays

ArenaNet is prepping some nifty goodies for the holidays, all themed around the Guild Wars 2 expansion, Path of Fire.

You’ll be able to get hold of a Quaggan mug (currently available for preorder), a Choya plushie (currently available for preorder), the Path of Fire soundtrack in both digital and vinyl editions and other items to be announced soon.

You can check out some of the items…that Choya plushie though ^^ … by visiting the Guild Wars 2 shop site.

Via mmorpg.com

Giant Ogres invade in new Extinction trailer

Let your Road Rage out this fall!