It's time to report on what happened through the gaming industry within the past 3 months of this year. There's going to be coverage of various topics, including hardware based, long as they're related to video games and gaming in general. I will bring up old news but with recent updated info around them.
Q1 of 2022 was a pretty big year because: Acquisitions happened, a crazy number of games have been coming around, some unfortunate setbacks like certain talent in the industry passing away, and there is a lot more to cover, but we'll be looking at important aspects, mostly positive ones.
Axie Infinity Hack, And NFTs Dying Out
Yeah, so this happened. Axie Infinity Ronin bridge hack has resulted in multiple players losing over $600M. The validator nodes got exposed, and so hackers got accessed to keys for access towards the playerbase's account details and token holdings. The tokens got stolen, before Sky Mavis announced to the public of what happened.
To add insult to the injury, they were trying to short out both Ronin and AXS right around the time the news broke out to plummet the market value. The vulnerabilities were from Sky Mavis's side, and they have since then apologized for the lack of better security.
Afterwards, they managed to raised around $150M to reimburse back the players for the tokens they've lost.
Meanwhile, NFTs are kind of dying, Metaverse has been losing steam for a while and that is mostly good news now. Sadly, this won't mean they'll give up trying, including Ubisoft with their Quartz program. But the traction has died down and because of that, my feed is less filled with NFT nonsense, hurry for me.
Sony Finally Answered Microsoft's Game Pass Service
Sony's answer to Microsoft is introducing their new PS Plus tiers. For allowing access to both multiple games and Sony introducing full backwards compatibility towards games from their very first generation of consoles.
It was pretty disappointing as they won't have first party games added on launch, and have been vague about the selection of these games. Not to mention, something seemingly feeling odd about the pricing too. I did an article here earlier, you can give it a read about it.
Since then, no new updates and response to feedbacks regarding it. Nothing to say that Sony is making changes for the better.
GPUs Are Becoming Affordable
Times have graced us with something amazing. The prices of GPUs are finally coming down. Well, not entirely back to MSRP or even close to that, the price seem to be coming back to Q1 2021 right before the surge. If all goes well, all the GPUs will become rightfully affordable.
A number of reasons could be causing this, the mining scene dying out and that miners/scalpers see less reason to use/sell them at a higher price, but it also could be that manufacturers are ramping up production. With Intel's new Arc on the way, things might get interesting in the catalog for this year.
Been A Good Year For Gaming
There's been an interesting number of games that have come out, and I don't usually say that out lightly. This year, no games studios are putting out the stops as the hits keep coming. I had the pleasure of playing games like Sifu, Elden Ring, Total War: Warhammer III, Stranger of Paradise, Shadow Warrior 3, Ghostwire Tokyo, and so on.
If that isn't enough, there have been announcements of new games, including remakes and remasters. Remasters like Chrono Cross, remakes like Prince of Persia 2D and Max Payne with Remedy involved. A new Kingdom Hearts game got announced, the title 4 is already here.
As if that isn't newsworthy enough, the new Sonic The Hedgehog 2 movie just beat Morbius in the box office. The film just came out over a week ago and is going really strong. This on top of the news that Ghost of Tsushima movie is also coming out, with an industry veteran named Takashi Doscher.
Halo: Infinite Is Getting Fixed
I have torn this game apart for the past few months, that's because 343 had been testing my patience with their content update. They have announced that in May, season 2 will drop, but not with everything we were initially expecting.
For some reason, the management of 343 were messing things up and because of that, most of the staff had to fix the damages and make quality of changes to the game. We won't get any content now, but they are making a lot of big changes currently. The list is pretty big.
If the desync issues get fixed, and the game becomes much easily playable with the return of Jeff Steitzer for the multiplayer announcer voice, I won't lie, I will head back into the game and be fully onboard one more time.
Steam Deck Sales Doing Well
A handheld device that would catapult Linux gaming into the complete mainstream, the Steam Deck came out with fewer units available to purchase than all the Switch ever has. But demand has been pretty high and people around have been scalping since then. This indicates that the Steam Deck is a pretty well received system and has potential for taking over the market in the near future.
Steam Deck is costly, but it bears much higher end hardware compared to the Switch. The low price unit is tagged at $400. This begs the question, whether the Nintendo hybrid should have a Pro version or Nintendo should release a next generation system. Least they could do is already reduce the price, but this could probably be in effect if the Steam Deck sales start to make a bigger presence on the market share. Soon enough, it might.
Death Of An Indie Developer
We lost someone talented last month on the 28th. The creator of Coffee Talk, Mohammad Fahmi. It was confirmed by his sister on Twitter that Fahmi passed away, though reasons why have been unknown to this point. Fahmi was praised by a lot of people as an up and comer talent from Indonesia that made a large presence of the indie gaming scene there.
Losing talent like this really sucks, and it's not rare to see someone who've worked in the industry departing this world. Like, numerous people died last year, including Gordon Hall of Rockstar Lead and just recently the original Fallout writer, Scott Benny.
These remind me and us of how turbulent these times are and that we should appreciate things more. Find ways to cherish games they make in their awake. It has been a really difficult year from a mental standpoint, and
So this year has a lot to process with, major economical challenges and with everything around us becoming entirely different on a social scale, we can at least relish the fact that video games are more in abundance this year than they were last year, and there's plenty more that are going to come out.
I hope you guys are hanging in there, stay safe, cool minded, and keep endearing the hard times, I will sure try my best. Keep it real.