Alex Birlo on June 27, 2020
Microsoft announced that they will be closing their streaming platform “Mixer” on July 22-nd and partnering with Facebook Gaming to move their viewers and users to that platform.
It is obvious that Microsoft had big plans for Mixer, wanting to integrate it into their Xbox “infrastructure” and compete with the other big players in the streaming area.
As many others have pointed out by now, the pandemic that caused everyone to stay home, play games, and watch streams online, is the prime time for streaming platforms to increase in popularity and gain more viewership.
But based on the statistics, Mixer had a miserable increase in viewers thus it was only a matter of time for Microsoft, as a business, to cut this plan loose and close down shop.
Speaking to The Verge, Microsoft’s head of gaming Phil Spencer said that “We started pretty far behind, in terms of where Mixer’s monthly active viewers were compared to some of the big players out there.”
He continued to say “I think the Mixer community is really going to benefit from the broad audience that Facebook has through their properties, and the abilities to reach gamers in a very seamless way through the social platform Facebook has.”
Microsoft also apparently will be working with Facebook on integrating their xCloud technology into Facebook gaming so that people could click and immediately play the game that is being streamed right now.
Also, due to the nature of the contractual agreement with Microsoft, the big contracted streamers such as Ninja and Shroud now might not be obligated to stream exclusively on the Facebook platform. Which gives them the freedom to return to Twitch or maybe even move to YouTube Gaming.
Off the back of the successful remakes of the older 3 games from the Crash Bandicoot series, now we see a full-fledged continuation to the franchise in the form of a fourth game called “Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time”.
The new game will also have new tricks that change up the game. From the gameplay that was released we can see that there will be wall-running, rail-grinding, Crash will have new power-ups that allow him to manipulate time or change gravity. And also we can expect multiple playable characters such as Cortex and Coco.
The developer that is working on this new game is Toys For Bob, they are the ones that made the greatly successful “Spyro Reignited Trilogy”.
The game releases this year on October 2-nd
In the gameplay, we saw one of the missions later on in the game, where the avengers are attempting to prevent the Chimera Helicarrier from falling down on the city.
The gameplay demonstrated some great action from the perspective of Thor and many of his abilities, giving us a taste of the character’s play style.
The game releases on September 4-th this year.
CD Project Red hosted the first episode of their new series called “Night City Wire” which they will be continuing throughout the weeks coming up to the release of Cyberpunk 2077. In those, they will be showing gameplay, trailers, and sharing news.
In this episode, they started with a trailer that showcased segments of the prologue. In that prologue, the player reaches Night City and instantly gets into trouble by picking up a job that is more than they can handle.
Then they moved on to showcase a section of the game where the player uses a feature called “Brain Dance”.
In the world of Cyberpunk “Brain Dance” is a technology that allows a person to relieve someone else’s memories down to all the sensations and emotions.
The player will apparently use this as a very feature-heavy variant of a Detective Mode from other games. You will be able to pause and rewind the memory, scan objects, heat signatures, profiles etc.
It also allows you to get really creative with how you approach the environment and the clues to figure out things that were outside the person’s field of view for example.
Amongst all that, they also made several announcements.
CD Project Red announced that the idea that you can buy the game on current-gen consoles and then freely upgrade to the next-gen version when you get the console is now confirmed not only for the Xbox but also for the PlayStation 4 to 5 transition.
And last but not least, they announced that CD is working with studio Trigger and Netflix to launch an Anime series based in the universe of Cyberpunk 2077!
Sources:
Microsoft shutting down Mixer: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/21299032/microsoft-mixer-closing-facebook-gaming-partnership-xcloud-features
Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time – Gameplay Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vuulZaWFvU&t=5s
Marvel’s Avengers – Once An Avenger Gameplay Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGxuafH6E0U&t=1s
