Sony and Microsoft Team Up
While the buzz around Google’s Stadia was ramping up in May, there was something going on behind the scenes with Microsoft and Sony in regards to their gaming divisions. The partnership, which started forming on May 13, is a collaboration for developing cloud solutions in the future. Although Sony has its own streaming service and has had the service for years, most of its revenue is still through console game sales. A statement from Microsoft reads,
“The two companies will explore joint development of future cloud solutions in Microsoft Azure to support their respective game and content-streaming services.”
Speculation for the underlying software includes the ability for developers to make titles for both streaming services. At present, neither company has a dedicated streaming service, having instead hardware that is placed into data centers. This gives them the ability to offer both game libraries from their cloud streaming service. Developers, due to this, don’t need to do any work for games they develop to run off a server.
There is also a rumor the Nintendo and Microsoft are talking about a collaboration as well for making cross-play gaming a reality.
Meanwhile, EA has 1,000 employees on Project Atlas, which is their version of a cloud game streaming platform, and Nvidia has its platform own called GForce.
X-Com Successor Phoenix Point Delayed AGAIN
It was supposed to debut last year but was postponed until September 2019, and now it’s looking like the crowd-funded game, which is surrounded by controversy, will be postponed until December -with no locked-in debut date. The studio released this statement:
“We know this is not our first delay, and we are very sorry to the fans we know are highly anticipating getting their hands on Phoenix Point. No one is more disappointed than we are, but we collectively agree that we would rather miss a launch date than ship something that does not meet our standards. We want the Phoenix Point you play to be one of your favorite games of all time, and that means we need a bit more time.”
Phoenix Point was crowdfunded to the tune of $765 thousand dollars with the devs promising to release the game on Steam and GOG. The game is headed for Xbox One and PC, with the PC version being exclusive to the Epic Games Store. It is the Epic Store release that left fans angry and feeling betrayed.
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