Weekly News Digest - 31st January 2025
Phil Spencer confirms Xbox will support Switch 2 – Video Games Chronicle
Microsoft’s Head of Gaming says new console will benefit from Xbox ports and also reveals that in an email exchange with Furukawa-san, the CEO of Nintendo, “I gave him a big congrats and said my old eyes appreciate the larger screen”.
Why games magazines are a vital source of cultural history – The Guardian
Keith Stuart uses the Video Game History Foundation’s announcement of a digital archive of out-of-print magazines to read online as a jumping-off point to look at what revered eighties and nineties magazines such as Crash, Edge and GamesMaster tell us about the history and culture of games.
The developer will donate 3% of profits from Monument Valley 3 (which highlights the impacts floods can have on a civilisation over the next three years directly to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ Disaster Response Emergency Fund. Players will also be able to learn more about the IFRC's efforts in-game.
Sony Interactive Entertainment is moving from the co-CEO system, with Hideaki Nishino taking sole charge from April first and Hermen Hulst stepping, er, sideways(?), to become CEO of the Studio Business Group, reporting directly to Nishino.
In other news...
Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, the US president's friend, the father of eleven children, and the head of six businesses - has risen to the top of the video game charts as one of the top players of Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2… Then officially confessed he cheated to get there!
SPOTLIGHT by Will Guyatt- Tech Journalist and Broadcaster
Is Nvidia’s pain help or hindrance to the games industry?
It’s been a crazy week for NVIDIA - the company was getting ready to launch its RTX50 series graphics cards, but unwittingly found itself at the centre of an unprecedented slump in value for tech companies, making history as the largest single decline in market value in one day - as almost $600bn was wiped off its stock price.
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The realisation that our Artificial Intelligence future doesn’t need Ferrari power and can operate happily on a lawnmower shook market expectations and established wisdom to its core, but what could this mean for the games industry?
Will the world change now there’s an open source alternative to the more costly, resource hungry AI favoured by Western tech giants?
Today, Chinese games developers seem ahead of the curve in using generative AI to build their titles. It’s being used to fill in some of the resource hungry elements in creating animation or visuals, while other companies are using AI to refine their development processes - looking at coding, game design and resource planning.
Passionate debate rages over whether AI is good or bad in any sector, and gaming is no different. AI could be used to make human developers more efficient, or could ultimately be used to replace them all together.
Let’s say we live in a decent world where human developers are favoured to algorithms - a decision that will ultimately be decided by gamers themselves, it could be possible to see game development becoming faster and cheaper with AI support. If a publisher was able to release more titles per year, perhaps that would counter the all-or-nothing, feast-or-famine scenario that it would appear most Western publishers are experiencing.
Ever the optimist, I still think low-cost AI could transform the industry forever, in a positive way.
Will Guyatt is a Tech Journalist and Broadcaster for LBC and BBC Radio 2. He is former Head of Comms for Instagram, IGN and Future Publishing.