Cowabunga 🤙

Good Morning. Don't listen to the critics.

Unless you want to win Game of the Year. Then what the critics say is pretty important. Check out our deep dive below on Metacritic scores of this year’s biggest titles as we try and predict 2023’s GOTY.

— Jason Liu, Derek Neville

HEADLINES

YouTube joins native gaming party. YouTube confirmed that they’re currently testing a new product called “Playables” for select users. The new feature is located on the home feed in both desktop and mobile.

Mortal Kombat 1 roster leaked. The roster as well as some commentary on gameplay for Mortal Kombat 1 has been leaked by a Redditor. We’re not quite sure how the user managed to get their hands on an early copy for their Switch.

Diablo IV to get annual content overhauls. Similar to the Bungie’s Destiny 2 treatment, Diablo IV will also be getting large, paid DLCs on an annual basis. If history serves as any indication of what’s to come, these expansion packs will feature new playable characters.

HUD

• 🚫 Nintendo confirmed that Tears of the Kingdom will not be receiving any DLC, and they will be moving on to a brand new game in the Zelda franchise after the massive success of ToTK and 2017’s Breath of the Wild

• 🍕 The recently released hit animated film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem will now be getting a video game spin-off from Outright Games, set to release in 2024.

• 👷‍♂️ In a recent BBC interview, Starfield boss Todd Howard said the exclusivity with Xbox made Starfield a better product because the team could focus more.

MAJOR W

• 🎮 Starting next month developers for games on Steam will be able to mark whether or not their game is DualShock 4 and DualSense compatible, and those games will noted in the store and library.

• 💰 Sea of Stars sold over 250,00 copies in its first week, hitting Sabotage Studio’s one-year sales projections with just a little bit of time to spare.

DEEP DIVE

Predicting the 2023 GOTY

Can we predict the Game Of The Year using real data?

With our understanding of how the GOTY is determined, we decided to dig into Metacritic data to see if there's enough to see a clear winner from 2023's cohort so far.

What we found:

• 🥊 It'll come down to a head-to-head between Nintendo’s Tears of the Kingdom and Larian Studios Baldur’s Gate 3.

• 👩‍🚀 Bethesda’s Starfield and Square Enix’s FFXVI are both quite polarizing.

• 😍 Big year for indie games - critics love MINTROCKET’s Dave the Diver and Sabotage Studio’s Sea of Stars.

Check out the analysis and see who we ended up backing in the full article…

THIS DAY IN GAMING HISTORY

Sony and Insomniac Games released Marvel’s Spider-Man exclusively on the PlayStation 4 this day 5 years ago. The game was critically acclaimed and received multiple Game of the Year nominations. Following the 2020 spin-off Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, we are only a month out from the release of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which has received enough pre-release hype for at least one game to have its release date pushed back to avoid competing.

CAREER CORNER

• Principal Software Engineer, Blockchain Gaming — Zynga (Various locations)

• Senior Producer — Timbre Games (Vancouver)

• Senior Combat Designer — HoYoverse (Montreal)

HIVE MIND

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