For some people, January 18th is a Tuesday, but for us in the gaming world, it’s another massive announcement out of left field. News broke on this day that Microsoft, fresh off of their recent Bethesda acquisition, is now set to acquire Activision Blizzard for a staggering $68.7 billion dollars! This is pending final approval from regulatory bodies, but if this goes through, it will make Microsoft the third largest gaming company in terms of revenue, beaten only by Sony and Tencent. Of course, you’re probably wondering why this matters to a PlayStation gaming site. For starters, a lot of games you may play on PlayStation could be going exclusive to Xbox now, not to mention the ongoing harassment investigations and toxic culture at Activision Blizzard. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s dive in. Microsoft Acquires Activision Blizzard: Could Call of Duty Become an Xbox Exclusive? Getting past the huge amount of money changing hands here, what does this mean for Activision Blizzard’s catalogue? We’re talking about Call of Duty, Overwatch, Diablo, and yes, Candy Crush. This is one of the biggest companies in gaming that’s merging with Microsoft, so does that mean some of your favorite titles are going to go exclusive to Xbox? Right now the best answer is “maybe.” We had a similar line of questioning when Microsoft acquired Bethesda. As it turned out, Starfield is going to be exclusive to Xbox. This may not be a blanket policy for Bethesda titles, but the other options aren’t much better for PS5 gamers. Future Bethesda studio titles could be timed exclusives that come to PS5 a year after Xbox, or they could have exclusive content, which brings us back to Call of Duty. Call of Duty games have often had PlayStation exclusive content or modes in the multiplayer. Obviously, if this deal goes off without a hitch, that’s no longer going to be the case. What could happen is that Xbox enjoys that type of content and COD remains a multiplatform title. My gut says this is how it will be, only because of things like Warzone being multiplatform and Call of Duty being such a decidedly multiplatform title. Of course, $70 billion is a lot of money, so maybe Sony needs to bring back something like Resistance or Killzone to fill the gap if COD goes Xbox exclusive. Without more detail, we can only speculate here, but it’s safe to assume that at least a few big franchises won’t be on PlayStation going forward. Addressing the Kotick in the Room Now, something that cannot be left off the table is the ongoing accusations of harassment and toxic culture at Activision Blizzard. The entire scope of this ongoing investigation is worthy of its own entire article and discussion, but you can get caught up on everything with this piece from PC Gamer. In addition to the horrible stories coming out of Activision Blizzard since last year, it’s curious that just one week prior to this … Read More
Dead Space Remake, online gaming outage and more in this weeks drop!
Welcome back to another gaming new update here at PS5 Gamers. The Non-E3 EA event has passed us by and it was a decent showing. We got a little extra news on some of the upcoming titles we were expecting. PSN, Xbox Live and Steam went down yesterday for a short stint and more! Let’s get to it! We got confirmation that Dead Space is getting a remake from the ground up and it is exclusive to current Gen consoles. I know some folks feel like the PS4 and Xbox One X/S are still current, but alas, they are last Gen consoles now. Sorry. The good news for current gen console owners is a Dead Space Remake. Personally, I cannot wait! During the show at EA Play, it was also announced that Battlefield 2024 is getting a sandbox mode called Battlefield Portal. Players will be able to custom build their own Battlefield experience. Moreover, players can upload their creations for others to try out. It seems like something we could have had in past titles, but now works for me. Lots more seems to be coming to Battlefield 2024, so I for one am pretty excited to see how the actual hands-on game turns out. Did you run into some issues getting online yesterday? Well, you weren’t alone. For whatever reason, the internet was causing problems for PlayStation, Xbox and Stream gamers alike! At no fault to any of the companies that own the services listed above, the net wasn’t having it. It wasn’t down long and by the time most people heard about the outage, it was already cleared up, but I had to laugh when I started seeing comments on social media about how which service is better because the other was down… well, let’s just say a fool will make a fool of themselves even when there is ample opportunity to avoid it. Good job to those that handled the trolling with a little wit and some kindness sprinkled on top. Shout out to the soccer fans reading up on this article. Konami has rebranded Pro Evolution Soccer to eFootball and it is fully free to play. eFootball is scheduled to release sometime this fall and will drop on last Gen, current Gen and PC, but not Nintendo. Nintendo is in a market of its own and I don’t think the company cares either. That being said, eFootball is a cross platform title, so you won’t be restricted to the console family you typically play on. You won’t need a subscription service to play online either. Call of Duty Black Ops and Warzone got mid season updates the other day. Weapon balances, bug fixes, all kinds of good stuff, but Warzone did get a little something extra. A new game mode called Payload, which if I’m being honest here, doesn’t really fit into the CoD franchise in my opinion. For starters, a lot of people don’t seem to understand how the … Read More