Gaming Lemonade

FEB 10

Hi friends. Hey you know what, I hope you’re doing good, but if you’re not I promise that you do have somebody in your life that can help you talk through it. I just got a lil emotional, don't know what's going on lol.

We have people from Twitter, McLaren and Apple reading the newsletter. Not sure if you guys are new here, but if you are, welcome fam, I consume all of your products. Well, not McLaren, I don’t have that type of cash.

Anyways, lot’s of gaming updates this week.

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Made by Franco

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🆕 Updates From the Corner

Publishers, game studios, investors, and all sorts of characters from the industry looking to create the next big thing, become hopeful and dreamy around this time of the year.

After they analyze everything that went left or right during a year’s performance, then comes a new January where teams asume what's THE move for this year. They play the waiting game for others to announce shit first so they can later improve their proposal. That process usually takes a month and February is filled with rumors and updates.

So, let’s see what we have:

Apex Legends: Defiance
These guys announced a bunch of new things, including a new game mode, and people are really happy about it. It’s their 3rd birthday and honestly, I feel that this title had a difficult beginning because of all the other battle royal games trying to make it. Persistence and innovation kept them up in the charts.

Rockstar Games finally talks
The last GTA proper release that we saw was back in 2013 for PS3 and Xbox 360. After years of memes yet still a successful game to this day, Rockstar Games said that a new GTA will be released on March 15, 2022. Holy shit, hallelujah.

Warcraft represents more than you think
Blizzard announced that they are working on a Warcraft mobile game. Now it starts to make more sense why esports teams and startups were making moves around Warcraft. Cheeky cheeky good sers.

Stadia.
Word on the web says that Stadia is moving away from gaming. Google Stadia had a rough life, even though cloud gaming was a great approach. All memes aside, my guess of what really happened here was that the dev team behind Stadia did their job by having 100+ games ready to go. The marketing and strategy team got lost; and the people at the top putting the money, not recognized by their patience, killed the project. Just to put it in a nice way, and not to say that suits literally took a nasty and impatient shit on Stadia’s developers.

Love Story: Microsoft and Sony
We talked about their approach in last week’s edition.

The Red Hub
Nintendo just doing Nintendo things. Their strategy is interesting, they focus more on reviving dead games than launching new ones. I mean, they do both, but they saw how people reacted to games getting electroshocked on social media. They are increasing their game's lifespan, so, why not do it again and again? The first Nintendo Direct from 2022 went live yesterday, here’s everything about it.

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💣 New Games & Trailers
GHOSTWIRE: TOKYO — Gameplay Details
SIFU — Spotlight
DEMON SLAYER — Nintendo Switch Teaser

🎞️ Gaming x Film Hub
Just your weekly dose of Arcane’s incredible art. Still the best animation series I ever watched. If somebody from Riot could give me a hint on how long I need to wait for Season 2, my health will be grateful to you.

📖 Read of the Week
Biggest Video Games Releasing in February, by Nandal Patil.

📈 Stats of the Week: Twitch’s Latest Figures

Average daily visitors: 31M
Average viewership at any given time: 2.5M
Unique creators streaming each month: 8M
Minutes watch in 2021: 1.3 Trillion

Here’s the tweet where I found this data. What really surprised me was the 8M unique creators. That’s a huge amount of people for the % of the ones who can actually make a living with it. I think people know that already, but YouTube had the same situation and we still have kids trying to be YouTubers even though the odds are minimal.

The difference is that I think people will still stream in the future, but as a hobby and without worrying about making it a career. YouTubers can’t do that, it does not have the characteristics of a hobby.

🏆 Esports Highlights

All CDL franchise teams and owners.
Everything about IEM Katowice.
Everything about the 100K OpTic Texas Tournament.

📽️ Video of the Week
Ready Up - A CS:GO Documentary, by BLAST.

💎 Crypto Bowl
Look, I don’t know about you but I still have traditional bones in my body. I love a good Super Bowl game filled with commercials that make me go through emotions. This year, I feel like we’ll have the equivalent of the dot-com ‘2000s Super Bowl commercials, but crypto.

Every crypto brand will be there. Since gaming startups and esports teams are directly related to some of these brands now, I wonder 1) Was being in a Super Bowl commercial part of the pitch before acquiring teams’ name rights? and 2) Is crypto gaming going to be even mentioned, or they need to establish crypto in general first and then approach gaming next year? After writing this, I realized that you probably don’t a single fuck about the Super Bowl lmao, it was just on my mind.

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