Hello everyone. Welcome to another issue of Emmen Weekly, our new twist on gaming news. 

We’ve got a pretty decent grab bag of news and updates from the games industry this time. From unexpected game announcements to unexpected game cancellations, it is safe to say that last week was another eventful week.

So let’s begin our look back by starting… a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

Three New Star Wars Games Announced

EA announced three more Star Wars games last week.

According to the company, all three of these games will be overseen by Respawn Entertainment, best known for Titanfall and Apex Legends.

The first of these three games has been confirmed to be a sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. This sequel will once again be directed by Stig Asmussen, who also directed God of War 3 back in the day.

The other two games currently have no official titles but we do know some details about them.

The first of these is apparently going to be a first person shooter. This game will reportedly be led by Peter Hirschmann, who is known for many things including the co-creation of the Medal of Honor series.

The other one will reportedly be a strategy game and will be developed by recently-formed studio, Bit Reactor. 

Bit Reactor is composed of many veteran developers from Firaxis Games, best known for their XCOM series. So this team is clearly no stranger to strategy games.

Star Wars has an incredibly rich universe that can be explored in many ways through many types of video games. It is quite nice to see this creative potential being realized.

Here’s hoping the games live up to the hype.

Ubisoft Executive Says Users “Don’t Get It” in NFT Interview

It’s a commonly held opinion that executives in the games industry are very out of touch with games, gaming, and gamers. It’s hard to argue against that point of view when news like this comes up.

In an interview with the Australian website Finder, a high ranking executive from Ubisoft had a lot to say about NFTs and gamers.

After admitting that when first launched, Ubisoft Digits (an NFT) and the Quartz platform didn’t go well, the executive went on to low-key blame the gaming press for the negative reception. 

Then he said that gamers “don’t get it for now” and lamented that when they hear NFTs, they think that it’s a planet destroying tool for speculation… which, I mean, yeah.

Predictably, the executive said that Ubisoft intends to continue on with NFTs. 

A key point to focus on is that Ubisoft is really into the idea of “players reselling items they don’t need”. Doing this would result in Ubisoft getting a cut, which means that it would want us to sell and resell as much as possible.

While we’re on this topic, let me link you to Emmen Gaming’s breakdown on gaming’s love affair with NFTs.

Ubisoft to Shut Down Hyper Scape

In other Ubisoft news, here’s a quick one: They are shutting down their battle royale game, Hyper Scape.

In a statement released on their website, Ubisoft said that the game would go down on 28 April 2022. 

It thanked the fans of the game and said it would be taking key points learned from this game into future projects.

The game was not well received and holds a 68 critic score and a 4.0 user score on Metacritic.

At the point of release, there was speculation that this game was Ubisoft’s attempt at entering the battle royale market to take on Fortnite and it’s contemporaries.

However, it seems that Ubisoft’s attempt has been deemed a failure. 

So long, Hyper Scape. We hardly knew ye.

PS5 Users Get Useful Update

Let’s move on from Ubisoft and talk about something simple and nice for a change. If you are one of the lucky few who managed to own a PS5, this news is for you.

A very useful feature is being introduced to users with the newest Playstation update that is currently being rolled out. 

The feature allows you to upload images and clips taken from games onto your phone through the Playstation mobile app.

While this might seem like nothing special to an outsider, do note that it used to be a much bigger hassle to get this content out of your Playstation. Some “effective” strategies include posting it on social media and manually saving which is a huge annoyance to say the least.

Users have also been getting access to an auto-upload feature. Image uploads will reportedly be on the app for about 14 days  before being deleted. Video uploads, unfortunately, will be limited to 3 minute clips if it’s an auto-upload, which makes sense from a data storage perspective.

So if you are a PS5 user, be on the lookout for this feature. 

Finally, you can access your game screenshots and clips without jumping through so many hoops. 

Nintendo Switch Outsells PS1 Worldwide

The current sales of the Nintendo Switch has overtaken the lifetime sales of the PS1.

The PS1 is one of the best selling video game consoles of all time, placing 4th on this list by Guiness Book of World Records. Its lifetime sales cap out at 102.5 million units.

As of last week, the Nintendo Switch, the Switch Lite, and the Switch OLED together have sold an estimated 102.81 million units. This makes the console the fifth best-selling video game console of all time. 

The Switch’s next target on this list is the PS4, which has an estimated 116.58 million consoles sold at this point.

This is a great achievement for Nintendo’s weird little hybrid console. 

In the days of super realistic 4K graphics that let you see the nose hairs of Nathan Drake or whatever, it’s nice to see this little guy chugging along, spreading joy and quietly breaking records.

Good for you, Nintendo Switch! You deserve it.

Activision Opposes Employees Attempt to Unionize

Here’s a story about Activision using its power to step on their own people. 

The company has chosen not to recognize the attempts of the QA testers of Raven Software to form a union. 

In a clear attempt to delay or bypass the issue, Activision said that it would not recognize a union from the QA testers until all 300+ staff of Raven Software vote on the issue.

If you were wondering what all this means, let me break it down.

Remember Call of Duty: Warzone? Activision’s massively popular battle royale shooter that earns them $5.2 million PER DAY?

Raven’s QA testers reportedly worked very hard on the game to get it to the level of acclaim and renown it now holds. 

And their reward for all that hard work? Activision fired several of them.

This caused some Raven employees to walk out in protest and snowballed into the campaign by the QA testers to unionize.

With this latest update, it appears as though Activision is attempting to avoid directly addressing the concerns raised by making it seem like all of Raven Software need to weigh in on it.

You can add union busting to the list of wrongdoings by Activision and/or Blizzard,

right next to firing hardworking staff after record profits and widespread sexual misconduct.

This is what Microsoft paid almost 70 billion dollars for.