The last episode was all about Xbox and their recent acquisitions, as well as Xbox game development as a whole. I was intended for the next episode to be about analyzing Sony through the same lens, but I’ve had too strong of an itch to talk about actual games. But I promise to return to the Sony portfolio topic before too long. Though, it looks like some new developments are on the way – as rumors of more acquisitions and announcements are swirling. I’m keeping an eye on that space. In the meantime….

RPGs are everywhere these days. Or are they? For quite some time now, many games have adopted a lot of mechanics that come from role-playing games like item crafting, gathering resources, branching decision trees, weapon progression, the list goes on. But the inclusion of these features has absolutely exploded over the last 15 years or so without an accompanying growth of games being called RPGs. Why are so many non-RPGs borrowing these elements? At what point does having these elements transform them into legitimate RPGs?

Back again to dissect all of this with me is my old friend Byron Guina.

It’s kind of a wild time to be looking at the games industry. Like everything else, it’s dealing with the issues resulting from the global, and ever-present pandemic. Shifting timelines for game releases, unpredictable availability of hardware during generational launches, it’s already been a lot. And then a few days ago, the news exploded: Microsoft announced it is purchasing Activision-Blizzard – the makers and publishers of huge IPs like Warcraft, Overwatch, and a little thing called Call of Duty. What does this $70 billion deal mean for Microsoft? What about dominant competitors Sony? And then this bombshell is followed by a twist: a few days later, Sony itself announced it is purchasing Bungie – the creators of Halo and Destiny – in another multi-billion-dollar deal.

To help me address this onslaught of developments is my old friend Byron Guina. But there’s a lot for us to unpack, so here we focus on Xbox and we’ll be following up with the PlayStation side of things shortly.