In The News
Slingshot Esports is no more, and The Daily Walkthrough will sorely miss the investigative journalism Slingshot produced. CEO Joe Ragazzo published a piece yesterday announcing “Slingshot will cease operations effective tomorrow, Oct. 31, 2017.” Here’s a snippet of the rest of the piece: “For the past eight months or so we have been trying to raise funds and simply did not raise enough to continue Slingshot in the way we wanted. We had offers…”
Multiple reporters at the site spoke out. Jarek “DeKay” Lewis posted a video titled “Slingshot Esports and My Future in CS:GO.”
Emily Rand tweeted her thanks to the site, saying, “Thank you to @SlingshotEsport for all of the work that they did, and picking up my stuff for a bit. ^ ^;”
Andrew Kim tweeted his praise, “I learned what work ethic really meant with Slingshot.”
Freelancer Sam W. Delorme also weighed in on the situation with an op-ed for Medium titled “Slingshot and the Burden on the Consumer.”
Unsurprisingly, Super Mario Odyssey is stomping all over sales. Engadget’s Rachel England reports that “sales of Super Mario Odyssey have exceeded two million units in just three days. In other words, since it hit the shelves, the game has sold at a rate of 463 copies a minute (or eight per second).” Odyssey surpassed Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as Nintendo Switch’s biggest release.
Here are some summaries of all the PlayStation Paris Games Week goings-on: The Verge, Kotaku and Polygon.
Sassy. Xbox’s Mike Ybarra wasn’t having it when someone told him to “stay on message” about console over PC. “You realize we create both gaming platforms right? Windows and Xbox. I don’t care where people play. Play and have fun,” he replied to a tweet saying, “What are doing? Do you think your Xbot followers want to hear you mention Windows 10? Stay on message with the console around the corner.”
Sony’s revenue is going onward and upward thanks to “the Game and Network Services division,” GamesIndustry.biz’s James Batchelor reports. “Sales were reported as ¥443.2bn ($3.92bn), more than double the ¥319.9bn ($2.82bn) achieved in Q2 FY2016. Operating income also saw a decent year-on-year rise of 35.8%, up from ¥19bn ($168m) to ¥54.8bn ($484.7m).”
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus was censored for its German release, Comicbook.com’s Tanner Dedmon writes. “One of the most notable changes that you’ll see in the German version of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is that the Swastikas are nowhere to be found” and Hitler received an updated look.
Pause button. Eve: Valkyrie is being put “‘on the shelf’” according to CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, Polygon’s Charlie Hall reports. “Some 100 employees and multiple studios will be affected. Pétursson went on the say that CCP would step out of the VR market entirely for the next two or three years.”