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Daily Briefing: Monday 9th August
🕑 Added 2021-08-09 14:01:05 +0000 UTCGoogle reportedly considered buying Epic Games during the Fortnite drama
It's easy to forget with how much press the other side of the lawsuit has gotten but, when Epic Games filed their infamous lawsuit against Apple for the "monopolistic" App Store, they also fired a similar suit against Google. Well, newly unsealed court filings have revealed that Google actually considered buying "some or all" of Epic Games during the clash - presumably to shut them up.
- These documents call Epic's initial attempt to sidestep the 30% revenue cut taken by the Google Play Store as a "contagion" threatening Google. It also calls sideloading an "awful experience", which is what Epic asked customers to do with Fortnite. Commenting on the documents on Twitter, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney revealed that Google's considerations were "unbeknownst" to Epic at the time - meaning the company are essentially finding out about all this at the same time we are.
Take-Two Interactive have three remasters in the pipeline
The Grand Theft Auto parent held an investor meeting last week which included three unannounced "new iterations of previously released titles." The mysterious titles are listed alongside the upcoming PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions of Grand Theft Auto V, Kerbal Space Program, and the standalone edition of Grand Theft Auto Online.
- It isn't really a huge surprise that Take-Two have a few remasters in the works given the extent of their legacy portfolio, but the interesting thing will be how they approach these projects. Discussing the company's intentions to continue releasing remasters back in March, CEO Strauss Zelnick outlined that they can't deliver a "great experience" by "just doing a simple port." It'll be interesting to see what these unannounced projects end up being, though Take-Two thinking that all those different versions of GTA V aren't ports is just adorable.
A copy of Super Mario Bros. is the new most expensive game
Another month, another record-breaking game sale as a pristine, unopened copy of 1985's Super Mario Bros. just sold for $2m. The bafflingly priced piece of gaming history was purchased by an anonymous buyer via collectables site Rally - and marks only the most recent time the record for most expensive game has been shattered.
- Just last month an immaculate copy of Super Mario 64 sold at auction for $1.56m, breaking the previous record of $870K set by a sealed, early production copy of the NES The Legend of Zelda sold only two days prior. The amount of money being spent on these kinds of items has really ballooned over the past year - back in November the record holder was a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 that sold for a comparatively modest $156K.
Steam Deck won't get a performance boost while docked
In a recent interview Greg Coomer, one of the designers of Valve's fancy new handheld, revealed that the Steam Deck will perform in exactly the same way whether it's in handheld or docked mode. Coomer told PC Gamer that the design felt it was "actually better, all things considered, to not modify based on docked status or mobile status." This means that, unlike with the Nintendo Switch, players won't experience a dip in quality or performance when playing on the go.
- That being said, the Nintendo Switch getting a performance boost while in docked mode provides a genuine incentive to use the dock. The Steam Deck outputting the same performance either way is good news for predominantly portable players, but Kotaku point out that this equal performance could see the Steam Deck struggle to play some games on big monitors - as the device will have to output in higher quality without an additional power from the dock.
