Every month, Xbox brings new titles to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service.
Normally, these come in two waves and now, the company has revealed what’s hitting Game Pass in the second half of August, with notable titles like Immortals Fenyx Rising and Midnight Fight Express included in the batch.
See below for the full list of new titles coming to Xbox Game Pass in the second half of August:
Coffee Talk (Cloud, Console, and PC) – Available today
Midnight Fight Express (Cloud, Console, and PC) – August 23rd
Exapunks (PC) – August 25th
Opus: Echo of Starsong – Full Bloom Edition (Console and PC) – August 25th
Commandos 3 – HD Remaster (Cloud, Console, and PC) – August 30th
Immortality (Cloud, PC, Xbox Series X|S) – August 30th
Immortals Fenyx Rising (Cloud, Console, and PC) – August 30th
Tinykin (Console and PC) – August 30th
Meanwhile, the following 16 games have received Xbox Touch Controls on mobile:
Chorus
Coffee Talk
Dragon Age 2
Dragon Age Origins
Floppy Knights
Matchpoint
MLB The Show 22
My Friend Peppa Pig
Paw Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls
Skate
Star Wars: Squadrons
Super Mega Baseball 3
TMNT Shredder’s Revenge
Turbo Golf Racing
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion
Here are the titles leaving Game Pass on August 31st:
Elite Dangerous (Cloud and Console)
Hades (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Myst (Cloud, Console, and PC)
NBA 2K22 (Cloud and Console)
Signs of the Sojourner (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Spiritfarer (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Twelve Minutes (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Two Point Hospital (Cloud, Console, and PC)
What Remains of Edith Finch (Cloud, Console, and PC)
World War Z (Cloud, Console, and PC)
As always, Game Pass subscribers can take advantage of an exclusive 20 percent discount to purchase any game in the catalogue and keep playing even after it leaves Game Pass.
Just when I started to regret upgrading my Switch Online subscription to the ‘Expansion Pack’ tier, one of my favourite Nintendo 64 (N64) games makes its way to the service.
Wave Race 64, one of the first titles released for the N64, is a pretty straightforward racing title, only instead of cars and asphalt tracks, it features jet skis and tropical locales (and several dolphins). The game will make its way to Switch Online’s Expansion Pack tier on August 19th and follows last month’s Pokémon Puzzle League.
In a sense, Wave Race 64 was almost like a tech demo for the N64 when it was first released in 1996, showing off the console’s impressive water and physics tech. Though the game is simplistic by modern standards, it’s still remarkable a title this good-looking was one of the first games to release on Nintendo’s 64-bit system back in the mid-90s.
It’s worth noting that unlike its Wii and Wii U virtual console re-release, this version of Wave Race 64 still features the original’s Kawasaki jet ski branding. The game features four modes: ‘Championship Mode,’ ‘Time Trails,’ ‘Student Mode’ and a two-player versus option.
Nintendo’s ‘Expansion Pack’ online tier costs $63.99 for a 12-month individual membership (one account) or $99.99 for a 12-month Family Membership (up to eight accounts).
Disney has announced a brand-new “Disney and Marvel Games Showcase,” which will be held on Friday, September 9th as part of its D23 Expo.
Kicking off at 1pm PT/4pm ET, the event will feature reveals from Disney & Pixar Games, Marvel Games, Lucasfilm Games, and 20th Century Games. Kinda Funny’s Blessing Adeoye, Jr. will host.
In terms of what to expect, Disney says there will be “all-new announcements” on top of new reveals from titles like the Canadian-made Animal Crossing-esque sim, Disney Dreamlight Valley,Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and a “sneak peek at the upcoming Marvel ensemble” from Skydance New Media. It’s worth noting that Amy Hennig, the creator of PlayStation’s beloved Uncharted series, is overseeing the Skydance Marvel games.
The announcement trailer also teases Ubisoft’s recently delayed Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora game, and if the publisher is already part of the event, it could reveal more details about its mysterious open-world Star Wars game. Xbox’s Machine Games (Wolfenstein) is also working on an Indiana Jones game, of which we also haven’t seen anything. It remains to be seen whether either Lucasfilm title will make an appearance.
It could also go either way when it comes to Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Marvel’s Wolverine and Kingdom Hearts 4. The former two games are from PlayStation’s Insomniac, so it’s possible they may appear at a separate PS5 showcase down the line. And given that Kingdom Hearts is developed by Square Enix, KH4 may be saved for a standalone event from the Japanese publisher. There’s also the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake, although it was recently reported to be on hold, so it’s unlikely we’ll see that soon.
Those interested in tuning into the Disney & Marvel Games Showcase can do so via:
D23 is set to run from September 9th to 11th in Anaheim, California and feature a slew of Disney-related programming, including more announcements from Marvel Studios about its film and Disney+ series slate.
Microsoft has confirmed that its last-gen Xbox One console sold less than half of what Sony’s rival PS4 did.
The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant noted the sales data in a broader filing to Brazil’s national competition regulator about its pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
“Sony has surpassed Microsoft in terms of console sales and installed base, having sold more than twice as many Xbox in the last generation,” Microsoft wrote in the documents, as translated from Portuguese by Game Luster.
This is particularly notable because Microsoft stopped sharing Xbox One sales data in 2016. Therefore, while it’s been clear that the PS4 had been performing better than the Xbox One, analysts have only had to estimate a more precise margin.
For context, the PS4 topped 117 million units sold as of March 2022, which would work out to Xbox One sales of fewer than 58.5 million. This is in line with Ampere Analysis’ report that the Xbox One reached 51 million units sold as of Q2 2020.
That said, Microsoft still doesn’t reveal Xbox hardware sales data, even in this new console generation. However, Ampere Analysis reported earlier this year that “Sony ended 2021 with PS5 cumulative sell-through reaching 17 million units, around 1.6 times the performance of Xbox Series sales,” suggesting that Xbox is closing the gap. In Microsoft’s most recent quarterly earnings call, company CEO Satya Nadella also claimed that Xbox has “been the market leader in North America for three quarters in a row among [current-gen] consoles.”
It should be noted, though, that Microsoft and Sony’s hardware strategies are somewhat different, as there are two different current-gen Xbox consoles, the Xbox Series X and Series S. The former is a beefier, 4K-capable model, while the latter is a lower-cost, smaller hardware upgrade over the Xbox One. Naturally, the Series S’ price point of $379 positions it as an affordable entry point into the current generation, especially when the Xbox Series X and standard PS5 cost $599 and $629, respectively.
Of course, it’s still early in the consoles’ lifecycles, as both families of devices launched in late 2020. There’s also a global semiconductor shortage that has constrained the supply of all of the consoles, an issue that the PS4 and Xbox One generation didn’t have to deal with. Therefore, it remains to be seen how this generation will play out in the years to come, especially as Microsoft further dives into a more platform-agnostic approach which includes Xbox consoles, PC and streaming.
Microsoft’s long-awaited admission of the Xbox One’s sales comes as the company is working to get its Activision Blizzard buyout deal approved in Brazil and other markets. As part of that process, the company is arguing with Sony over various aspects of the gaming industry, particularly whether Microsoft owning Activision’sCall of Duty series would be anti-competitive and unfair to PlayStation.
Nintendo says it isn’t planning to raise the price of its Switch system “at this point” in time.
Speaking to Nikkei Asia, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said that despite “rising production and shipping costs,” the cost of the Switch will remain the same for now.
“We’re not considering [a price increase] at this point, for two reasons,” Furukawa said. “In order to offer unique entertainment to a wide range of customers, we want to avoid pricing people out. Our competition is the variety of entertainment in the world, and we always think about pricing in terms of the value of the fun we offer.”
According to Furukawa, “keeping prices down isn’t giving us any trouble with procuring parts,” so instead, “the problem is that demand exceeds supply.” He was specifically referring to the widespread semiconductor shortages that are affecting many businesses, including video games, smartphones and automotive. This is one of the factors Nintendo cited in its most recent earnings release, in which it confirmed that Switch sales dropped 23 percent between April and June 2022.
“Nintendo will continue to sell three [Switch] models: the standard model; the Switch Lite with reduced price, size and features; and the OLED model,” said Furukawa. “We’ll work out the best strategy as we go along. We’re doing our best to procure high-quality products at an appropriate price with an eye toward the next few years.”
Through this agreement, Square Enix would give up iconic properties like Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and Thief, and focus more on its Japanese portfolio. In a recent GamesIndustry.biz interview, Eidos Montreal founder Stephane D’Astous mentioned that none of this was a shock to him, given that, based on his experiences, Square Enix had been mismanaging its Western studios for years. There’s since been a lot of talk about what will happen with the publisher, especially as more and more companies look to be acquired.
But if you ask me, the biggest casualty of Square Enix’s Western business isn’t Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, or any of the other IPs it’s confirmed to be forking over to Embracer. No, that would be Sleeping Dogs, the 2012 open-world action-adventure game from Vancouver’s United Front Games.
Amid all of this Square Enix news and Sleeping Dogs‘ 10th anniversary on August 14th, I’ve found myself reflecting on the game. Sure, it might have been one of many Western titles that Square Enix considered a commercial disappointment due to, by its own admission, “exceedingly high” expectations. But it was a real gem, and it’s a damn shame that we never got a proper sequel and, worse still, that United Front sadly ended up shuttering a few years later. Because after replaying Sleeping Dogs over the past week or so, I’ve come to appreciate it even more than I did the first time around. In several ways, it holds up remarkably well, even among the litany of other open-world games since. Simply put, it deserved better, and here’s why.
A standout story
Like a lot of games, Sleeping Dogs is heavily inspired by Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, particularly with its open-world crime-centric premise. In fact, it even started out as an entry in Activision’s GTA-esque True Crime series before moving over to Square Enix. But a big part of what distinguishes Sleeping Dogs, even 10 years later, is how it approaches that sandbox framework. While many GTA-likes — including, even, Rockstar’s own Red Dead series — are all about straight-up criminals, Sleeping Dogs follows an undercover cop named Wei Shen as he infiltrates the Triad in contemporary Hong Kong. Structurally, the game is divided between missions for both the police and Triad, with Wei finding himself torn between the opposing worlds.
While we’ve seen similar stories in Hong Kong films like Infernal Affairs, from which United Front openly drew inspiration, it still feels novel in the gaming space, especially in the open-world genre. The core conflict of Wei struggling to balance conflicting loyalties — and, through that, discover his own identity — is genuinely fascinating. All told, Wei proves to be a compelling morally grey character — not an outright criminal like most Rockstar protagonists, but also not exactly the hero we see in many other games.
Making things further distinct is the voice cast, which is both predominantly Asian and absolutely stacked. We’re talking the likes of The Good Doctor‘s Will Yun Lee (Wei), Michael Clayton‘s Tom Wilkinson (Superintendent Thomas Pendrew), The Farewell‘s Tzi Ma (gang leader Henry “Big Smile” Lee), Kill Bill‘s Lucy Liu (singer Vivienne Lu) and, even, La La Land‘s Emma Stone as Wei’s girlfriend Amanda. Admittedly, some are underused (like Amanda, who feels like a glorified cameo after appearing only in two brief missions), but overall, the performances are solid and the characters quite likable and interesting, especially throughout all of the story’s entertaining twists and turns. (Special shoutout to Wei’s childhood friend Jackie, voiced by Vancouver’s Edison Chen, who’s such a lovable bro.)
Kicking ass and taking names
It would have been enough to just use the cop/Triad story to fuel the narrative, but United Front also cleverly weaves that setup into Sleeping Dogs‘ core gameplay systems. As mentioned, Wei takes on missions for both factions, and each is given its own RPG-lite progression path and rewards. For example, Triad XP is awarded for carrying out more violent actions, while you net Police XP for minimizing property damage and completing cop side missions. With these points, you can unlock Triad skills (focused around hand-to-hand combat) and Police skills (emphasizing navigation), respectively, while a third, morally neutral combo-centric skill tree is tied to a sidequest involving Wei’s martial arts school. This all creates an intriguing tug-of-war dynamic to progression that might encourage you to play a little bit differently, be that mid-mission or even to take on some of the police-related side activities. It’s also just a neat spin on the traditional sort of morality system we’ve seen in games, where your character’s alignment is represented with “good and bad” bars.
Of course, those even somewhat familiar with Sleeping Dogs know that it also stands out from the pack through its focus on melee combat. In fact, you go several hours before even getting to fire a gun, a stark contrast to many other games which begin with an explosive firefight. It’s a welcome level of restraint from United Front, and it makes the later gun-focused setpieces and Max Payne-style bullet time feel just a bit more special and earned. Leading up to that, though, you’ll be doing a lot of punching and kicking.
Remember the Batman: Arkham games? Sleeping Dogs draws heavily from those, especially through its single-tap timed counter system. And hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! But Wei can also perform deadly environmental takedowns, which predate a similar mechanic in 2015’s Batman: Arkham Knight and are, of course, more brutal than The Dark Knight’s non-lethal methods. Grappling a guy and then shoving him headfirst into a meat grinder or aquarium, then picking up the knife or giant fish that fell out of that mess to attack his buddies never gets old. In other instances, you’ll be thrown into chase sequences — either you pursuing a suspect or, in some cases, the cops coming after you — which further diversify the moment-to-moment gameplay.
Credit must also be given to United Front for its recreation of Hong Kong. With Rockstar games, imitators like Mafia and Saints Row or even superhero adventures like Marvel’s Spider-Manall being set in various parts of America (or, in the case of Arkham, the fictional American city of Gotham), Sleeping Dogs‘ Asian setting feels even more exceptional. It’s a richly crafted, dense and geographically diverse locale whose high-rise skyscrapers nicely contrast with smaller suburbs and packed market districts. The activities you can take on within the city are also enjoyable, particularly karaoke; hearing badass Wei sing “I Ran (So Far Away)” by A Flock of Seagulls has fondly stuck with me over the past decade. You’ll also find quirky civilian sidequests also reward you with Face (affecting your ability to purchase rarer items, get discounts and more), and they’re just silly fun in their own right, like crashing a woman’s car in the water to help her claim its insurance.
A great foundation
Of course, Sleeping Dogs is not a perfect game. The aforementioned skill tree system is painfully basic and linear, so there’s no way to branch out and fine-tune Wei’s progression. The melee combat, while certainly engaging on the whole, is rather simple and lacks the fluidity of something like Arkham. That’s to say nothing of the sometimes tedious nature of navigating the open-world, as the game bafflingly lacks a fast travel system, and the only solution is to chase down a cab and pay it to instantly bring you to a destination. The marker-filled map also certainly feels somewhat dated in a post-Breath of the Wildand –Elden Ring world.
But these issues just make it all the more disappointing that we’ve never gotten any sort of proper sequel to Sleeping Dogs. United Front laid such a strong groundwork with many good ideas that it’s easy to see how a follow-up could have meaningfully built on it, Uncharted 2- or Assassin’s Creed 2-style. What’s even more saddening is that United Front was, in fact, in early production in 2013 on a since-scrapped sequel. In a November 2016 Vice feature, we learned that Sleeping Dogs 2 would have centred around Wei and a “conflicted, corrupt partner” named Henry Fang as they tackled China’s Pearl River Megacity. Players would have had the ability to arrest any NPC and follow a branching storyline that offers different sides to missions depending on whether you used Wei or Henry. United Front also proposed a “cloud-based” system that would let players use a mobile device to further influence what would happen in-game, such as by summoning a police helicopter. Players would also be able to affect other people’s games by collectively working together to tackle crime, which sounds not similar in spirit the brilliant community-focused asynchronous multiplayer elements of 2019’s Death Stranding.
Everything that could have been improved from the original game, coupled with United Front’s early ideas for new features and mechanics? There’s just so much potential, and it’s heartbreaking that it hasn’t ever been realized. And considering how much technology has developed, it’s easy to imagine how these concepts could, in theory, be better realized today, two console generations later. Instead, all we’ve gotten since besides a remaster is a weird MMO spin-off called Triad Warswhich was cancelled in 2015 in the beta stages after United Front correctly realized that it wasn’t what players wanted out of a Sleeping Dogs successor.
Further complicating matters: we don’t even officially know who owns Sleeping Dogs right now. When the Embracer news came out, Square Enix was asked if Sleeping Dogs was one of the unnamed IPs that it was selling, but no answer was apparently given. Regardless, it would be wonderful if some studio could take on Sleeping Dogs — if not one affiliated with Square Enix or Embracer, then even an external team for a spiritual successor. Considering GTA has such a massive gap in between releases, the market seems all the more prime to welcome a new Sleeping Dogs.
Replaying Sleeping Dogs and it is AWESOME. Someone should make that movie…
Because man, what United Front created in 2012 was pretty special. There’s a reason you see so many people on Twitter share positive anecdotes about discovering or replaying Sleeping Dogs. There’s a reason people quickly wondered what the Embracer deal meant for the game. And there’s a reason why major stars like Donnie Yen and Canada’s own Simu Liu have expressed interest in adapting it into a movie, suggesting a potentially larger audience for the property.
Who knows what, if anything, lies in store for Wei Shen and Sleeping Dogs, but one thing’s for sure — it would be a true crime not to revisit them.
Sleeping Dogs: DefinitiveEdition, a remastered version of the original 2012 game with all post-release downloadable content, is currently available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and Mac.
Microsoft has accused Sony of paying for “blocking rights” to keep games off services like its own Xbox Game Pass.
The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant made the claims in documents filed with Brazil’s national competition regulator as part of a review of its pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
“Microsoft’s ability to continue expanding Game Pass has been hampered by Sony’s desire to inhibit such growth,” Microsoft claimed in an August 9th filing to the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), as translated from Portuguese. “Sony pays for ‘blocking rights’ to prevent developers from adding content to Game Pass and other competing subscription services.
Sony is arguing that Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard would be anti-competitive, specifically arguing that it could pull Call of Duty players — a large and lucrative audience — from PlayStation to Xbox. In particular, Sony says Microsoft would do this by making Call of Duty available on its popular Xbox Game Pass service. In response, Microsoft has brought up the purported Sony “blocking rights” while also reiterating plans to continue to release Call of Duty on PlayStation should the acquisition be approved.
It should be noted, though, that specifics regarding Sony’s alleged “blocking rights” deals were not provided, so it’s unclear whether they’re supposedly short-term (i.e. one year) or more long-lasting. We do know, however, that exclusivity deals for games have grown increasingly complicated amid the advent of streaming services. For example, during the major Epic Games v. Apple trial over the past two years, it was revealed that Microsoft was looking into lowering its PC games revenue split in exchange for securing streaming rights.
In any case, this is just another variation on the time-old business strategy of exclusivity, which PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo all take part in. To that point, VentureBeat‘s Jeff Grubb, a credible industry insider, responded to this “blocking rights” news by stating that “this is what exclusivity is” when it comes to games.
“Companies almost never pay to make a game truly exclusive, they instead pay to keep a game off of one console,” he said. “Or Epic pays to keep a game off of Steam, but you can get it everywhere else.”
This is what exclusivity is. Companies almost never pay to make a game truly exclusive, they instead pay to keep a game off of one console. Or Epic pays to keep a game off of Steam, but you can get it everywhere else. https://t.co/hm4v9NIZtF
Responding to a tweet from The Verge‘s Tom Warren that this “doesn’t feel like the ‘traditional’ concept of exclusivity,” Grubb added that “none of this is the traditional idea of ‘exclusivity.’” Instead, he says, “companies [are] just trading specific favors for cash in an attempt to position themselves as best as possible.”
Looking at what game companies have been doing in recent years, it’s easy to see what Grubb means. By and large, the platform holders have been paying to have titles debut first on their platforms before they can eventually release elsewhere. With Xbox, this has been the case with games like Cuphead, 12 Minutes, Below, Nobody Saves the World! and The Medium, which all came to PlayStation and/or Nintendo consoles at later dates. Similar situations have happened with PlayStation with the likes of Persona 5, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Death Stranding, Nier Automata and Bugsnax.
Otherwise, “traditional” exclusives — games that permanently remain on a single console or family of consoles — tend to come from studios that these publishers own, like God of War (PlayStation’s Sony Santa Monica), Halo Infinite (Xbox’s 343 Industries) or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD). There are also special instances in which an once-multiplatform series becomes exclusive because a publisher stepped in to foot the bill, like Nintendo helping to fund Bayonetta 2 and 3 and Marvel’s Ultimate Alliance 3, which were then only released on Nintendo platforms.
In another timeline, we may have been playing a Breaking Bad video game inspired by Rockstar’s popular Grand Theft Auto series.
That’s according to Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, who brought up former ideas for a game adaptation of his hit AMC/Sony Pictures Television series on the latest episode of the Inside the Gilliverse podcast.
“I’m not much of a video game player but how can you not know Grand Theft Auto?” Gilligan said. “I remember saying to the two gentlemen who said yes originally to Breaking Bad, I said ‘who owns Grand Theft Auto, can’t you have like a module, can there be like a Breaking Bad [adaptation]?’
He noted that he and the Breaking Bad creative team actually spent “a lot of energy and talent into writing three or four stories” for potential games.
“There were a lot of people hours poured into that,” Gilligan said. “Making a video game is damn hard. It takes years and millions of dollars, especially when you’re trying to break new ground with VR. It never came to fruition though, which is a shame.”
Given that Sony is heavily invested in the gaming space through its PlayStation division, it’s perhaps surprising that it didn’t do more with Breaking Bad in this market. Incidentally, the last Grand Theft Auto game, Grand Theft Auto V, launched in September 2013, two weeks before Breaking Bad ended, so there’s definitely been a lot of time since to make a similar game set in the “Gilliverse.”
That said, Gilligan noted that he and the Breaking Bad creative team didn’t want to release a game just to cash in on the series’ success. “You gotta make it great. Execution is everything,” he said, citing the infamous Atari E.T. game as an example of a poor adaptation.
“We just don’t have enough bandwidth usually to make it work,” Gilligan said. “I wouldn’t hold your breath on a video game.”
Instead of a video game, Gilligan has spent the years following Breaking Bad on the critically-acclaimed Better Call Saul prequel, which is itself coming to a close with an August 15th finale, and the El Camino sequel film on Netflix. That said, Gilligan says he’s planning to move on from the Breaking Bad universe after Better Call Saul, so even if Sony made a game based on that, it’s likely that the creator won’t be involved.
See below for the full list of games that are coming to PS Plus Extra and Premium on August 16th:
Bugsnax
Dead by Daylight
Everspace
Metro Exodus
Monopoly Madness
Monopoly Plus
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands
Trials of Mana
UNO
Yakuza 0
Yakuza Kiwami
Yakuza Kiwami 2
It’s important to note that these games are only offered through PS Plus to those subscribed to the service’s higher Extra and Premium tiers, which start at $17.99 CAD/month and $21.99/month, respectively. If you’re a PS Plus Essential member, click here to find this month’s free games.
Additionally, check out what came to PS Plus Extra and Premium last month here.
The message behind this purchase was quite clear: more PlayStation games are coming to PC. Fast forward one year and Nixxes is about to release Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, the enhanced version of 2018’s beloved PS4 game, Marvel’s Spider-Man, on PC for the first time. Assisting with the port? Burbank, California-based Insomniac Games, the original developer of the Marvel’s Spider-Man series.
Together, the studios have brought several features to Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on PC, including ray-tracing, Nvidia DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), Nvidia DLAA (Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing), a multitude of display ratios, mouse and keyboard support and the option to use PS5’s DualSense controller for adaptive triggers and haptic feedback.
To learn more about Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, MobileSyrup sat down with Jurjen Katsman, Nixxes founder and senior director of development, and Mike Fitzgerald, Insomniac core technology director. Together, the pair offered insight into the two PlayStation studios’ close partnership, the technical work that went into getting Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered up and running on PC, swinging around New York City on the Steam Deck and more.
MobileSyrup: Jurjen, Nixxes has a long history of PC game development, but you’ve also worked on several PlayStation games. Your first project, even, was a Dreamcast port of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, which is a classic PlayStation game, so it’s almost a full circle moment to be part of PlayStation Studios. What’s it been like for Nixxes to make that transition and be welcomed into the PlayStation family over the past year?
Jurjen Katsman, Nixxes founder and senior director of development.
Jurjen Katsman: That’s certainly been really exciting. It’s interesting how you sort of took it all the way back to Soul Reaver — I hadn’t made that link yet. But yeah, [we] certainly worked on that originally as we were putting out on PlayStation back then. And then, in general, we’ve just had a connection with PlayStation for many, many games. We’ve done a lot of ps3 titles. In the past, we’ve got a bunch of PS5, then some other PS5 games, even, in addition to all those PC work. And we knew various people before who worked at PlayStation studios, especially some local ones. So in many ways, it was a sort of break away from the previous home, but certainly also felt like coming home to a new home — a great home. That was a really nice move. So we really excited about it.
One thing I actually was doing a little while before, as we were wrapping some of the projects, I had some discussions with the team about, ‘hey, whatever projects would you guys be excited to work on in the future?’ And it could be a dozen publishers. And it was interesting how many Sony projects came up in the people’s wish list. It wasn’t even a realistic list. Everybody’s going crazy, and it was interesting sometime after that to start working on some of those, including Spider-Man. So that was it was good news for the team. And everybody was really, really excited to join PlayStation Studios, and especially the partnership with Insomniac has been a really, really big part of that.
Q: What’s the collaboration between Insomniac and Nixxes been like, especially considering one team is in the U.S. and the other in the Netherlands?
Mike Fitzgerald: It’s been a great collaboration from my point of view. We’ve tried to get a lot of our tech folks chiming
Mike Fitzgerald, Insomniac’s core technology director.
in and getting Nixxes up and running on our tools and our engine and understanding all the bits and bobs and how it fits together and where the opportunities were to do a bit more on PC. But they’ve also just taken it and run with it and really done a great job bringing it to the PC. So it’s been nice to be involved and have the team understand what Nixxes is doing and why it’s important, but also not have it be a big devotion of our time and we can keep focusing on the other projects that we have in development.
Katsman: To anchor on that, I think it’s really interesting how much, in one way, the teams are really quite independent and working on their own different things, but even though that is true, how much they interact and just chat and talk to each other about technology about things that are going on in the game or going on with the engine. So I think that’s actually been really exciting for me to see and the team is incredibly excited about that.
Fitzgerald: [to Katsman] You mentioned other people’s wishlists of PlayStation games, and I think if we [Insomniac] had a little wishlist of studios to work with to bring our games to PC, Nixxes is at the top of that. So things lined up really, really nicely for us to do this together.
Q: Mike, as someone who originally created Marvel’sSpider-Man and then brought it to PS5, what’s the process been like to bring your work to PC? And for Jurjen, what’s it like from more of an outsider’s perspective to come on board as a fan of Insomniac and Marvel’sSpider-Man and help port the game?
Fitzgerald: For me, I think as someone who makes games — really, at the end of the day, what you want is for people to play it, and have a lot of fun playing it. And so just thinking about [how] we can get our game that has, very thankfully, already seen many, many millions of players in front of many, many more millions of players, hopefully, via the PC is just as exciting. That’s what it is for me.
Katsman: And I think for [Nixxes], it’s really exciting to do, because they’ve played this game, they’ve loved this game, and then being able to go in there, as engineers, to understand that engine, see the clever things they were doing there, maybe, in some cases, even like, ‘oh, that’s how I would have done it, great!’ And that’s the sort of thing that our team really gets to do quite a lot and really enjoys doing — diving into different engines, working with different companies, and just adding another one to that list that they really enjoyed working on.
Q: A lot of people underestimate how difficult game development can be, and for a port, in particular, some people might assume it’s sort of an easy ‘copy-and-paste’ job, which obviously isn’t true. With that in mind, can you give some insight into the behind-the-scenes work that goes into bringing a game, especially one as big as Marvel’s Spider-Man, from PS4/PS5 to PC?
Katsman: I think the first one that comes to mind, sort of thinking through the ‘cut-and-paste’ idea — the Insomniac [proprietary] engine has a history on PC, though it’s been quite a few years ago since they shipped on PC. For example, it has the DX11 Renderer; on the DX11, we can’t do any ray tracing. So we did have to fully rebuild the renderer for DX12. And that’s not just a cut and paste; there’s a lot of real work to do to make sure that aligns well and runs efficiently. So people put in an awful lot of work into that. And then the challenge there that is new to PC is the variation of hardware and features, even, that people are looking for. That just adds a whole other level of complexity. It’s actually quite common for a lot of studios to have a version of their game just as they made it on consoles, but that is not a shippable PC product — it needs a lot of customizations capability, and potentially other features to really turn it into a shippable PC game. We spent quite a while still adding [all of this], even though the original game was already there and already really great.
Fitzgerald: I think supporting a vast array of hardware is something that certainly has taken a lot of work and attention and something that Insomniac isn’t familiar with these days. It’s a luxury on our part to have one console, one configuration of hardware, that it runs on. So that’s been a new one, but for us, this has been an opportunity to learn from a studio like Nixxes that’s done this work and has so much experience there and hoping it rubs off on us.
Q: What were the challenges in adapting the game to PC, be it from translating the experience from controller to mouse and keyboard, variety of hardware (including different screen types and supported resolutions), etc.?
Katsman: The challenge is that all of those you mentioned and quite a few more all have some challenges associated with them, which compounds the challenges. And certainly, as we get closer towards [release], I always start feeling like, ‘oh my god, did we add one too many of those?’ To focus and close all of those things down. For example, you were talking about different screen types. [In Spider-Man], there’s the open-world gameplay, so you have a wide aspect ratio. But it’s a very cinematic game, right? So there are lots of cinematics and scripted things playing out, and then suddenly, if you expand the view on the screen, then that doesn’t always work nicely. The strangest things can happen. So the team has put a lot of work into it, going through all those cinematics and making sure it all looks great on a 4:3 screen, a 21:9 screen, a 16:9 screen, 48:9… The craziest things we try out because we feel gamers will try it out, and we owe them the best experience in all those combinations.
And the same applies for mouse and keyboard. Yes, we’re talking about how DualSense works — it’s great that DualSense works on PC, I love DualSense — but also, mouse and keyboard are what’s unique about PC. How you can quickly use the mouse to swing and look around the world, I think that’s really powerful. And having controls that definitely work for that was a long road with many user tests where we have large groups of players play the game — see how they will configure them, how will they remap things differently, do they want features in our game that will allow them to do things in a different way.
And so intuitively, slowly and slowly, we get to a state that we feel, ‘Yes, this will be great for everybody. And everybody will be able to get set it up just the way they like it and enjoy playing it.’ And then all those categories of things you mentioned have that route to go through, which actually, in some ways, you do on console, but there’s just a far, far larger amount of unique little aspects that play into PC.
Fitzgerald: I’ll add that mouse and keyboard support isn’t just, ‘can you make the mouse and keyboard work?’ But one thing Nixxes noted is that some of our UI-based minigames in the game, like the DNA sequencer and things, they worked with mouse and keyboard, but they didn’t feel natural that you couldn’t drag and drop a thing from one side to the other. Of course, we didn’t even do that with the controller at all — it was ‘choose this thing, then choose that thing.’ And so they spent the time to put in support for some of that type of stuff into the different [minigames] around the UI and things like that.”
Q: The core appeal of Spider-Man is just going through the city with those great Marvel’s Spider-Man swinging mechanics. When you were first playing it on PC and swinging through the city, what were some of the things that caught your eye — that were a step up from the PlayStation versions?
Fitzgerald: I think sometimes [developers] look at games differently than players do. [laughs] Like, for me, I know exactly the level of quality we had in the window reflections on the PS5, and so even the most minor little detail improvement in them is exciting for me. I guess I’ll mention the very high ray tracing settings that Nixxes was able to put in that adds more objects to scenes in the windows and things to eat up people’s GPU power a little bit more. And the ultra-widescreen is probably the other one. I have not personally had the benefit of sitting in front of a triple monitor setup yet, but I’m very excited to do that and see how that feels.
Katsman: Just last night, I was going through the latest build on my system, spending an hour just sort of swinging through the city and hanging on windows. I couldn’t really call out what was the one [standout] thing but I think overall, it just felt really satisfying — just swinging from one side of the city, crossing the park, hanging on another window, looking all the way back across the park, seeing every little thing in there, the detail of some of the buildings as they sort of panned across to the side. And then I was playing with some options, turning off some things that really allowed me to see that we have so many more exciting things that you can enable on the PC that looks so much better. And yeah, I was pretty happy with what I was seeing.
Fitzgerald: And the configurability of the PC means players might also decide, ‘I want to see the different experience, I want to get swinging through the cities, I want to run it at 100 frames per second’ or something like that, and so maybe for some other players, that’s the most salient difference.
Q: Growing up, pretty much all of the portable Spider-Man games were pared down from the console/PC versions, so you couldn’t really swing around the same fully-realized city. But now, we have the Steam Deck, and Marvel’s Spider-Man is Steam Deck Verified, so you can take the full, unaltered experience on the go. What’s it like to have the game, which was originally intended for a TV or, now, a PC monitor, on a small handheld screen?
Katsman: The first time it was kind of exciting because we hadn’t necessarily proven that yet. Before we got Verified, it was quite a while before we fired it up [on Steam Deck] and it actually worked reasonably well. But there was still quite a lot of tuning we had to put in to making it run better on that. But I think it is kind of special in that way, right, how that scales? In some ways, it’s just a small PC, but it also gives you this very different way of controlling it, with the inputs straight in your hand, how you can use trackpads and things like that.
It’s really kind of neat. And [while] weren’t allowed to take it on the train, you can just take the train and play with it there. It’s really cool that PC allows that, and to me, that is the excitement of PC. New devices will come out and the existing games will look better on that and be able to be played in a whole different way. And that’s what you get when you buy a PC — something that will last for a really long time and will play on all these different devices.
Fitzgerald: It’s a different feeling for sure. I think it does come back to just finding more people who get to play this game for the first time that didn’t play it before. And if those people are Steam Deck players, then we want to just embrace that hardware and make the game show it off well and use all the features of it in different ways. And I think we got there. Nixxes did a great job optimizing for it because that was a unique challenge.
Q: We touched on a bit, but do you each have a particular feature or enhancement in Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on PC?
Fitzgerald: It’s the ultra-wide screen for me. I just like seeing it at that ratio.
Katsman: For me, I think it is all the detail in the reflections. That really stands out, to me, as a giant difference. I really can’t get enough of looking out over New York with all that enabled.
Q: It’s been almost four years since Marvel’s Spider-Man was first released, and then Miles Moralescame two years later and we have Spider-Man 2 set for next year. For you, Mike, what does it mean to have seen so much love for this series, and then now to extend that to a larger audience with PC?
Fitzgerald: Really, it’s just something to be grateful for — to get an opportunity to work with a character like that, have Marvel be such a good partner with it and give us the freedom to do some creative things and make the character feel like ours. And it’s amazing how it’s resonated with people and it seems like that excitement hasn’t died down, even as we have this game coming to PC and Spider-Man 2 coming later. [I’m] really just thankful for it and excited about it every day.
This interview has been edited for language and clarity.
Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered launches on PC (Steam and Epic Game Store) on August 12th. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales will debut on PC sometime later this year.
