Great games coming out is a good thing for the industry - Phil Spencer

Hey there.

We start the week with new and long-waited Radeon graphic cards, Xbox games on GeForce NOW and a lot of downloads for Pokemon Sleep.

Big up to Evil Geniuses, Valorant new world champions. And let’s hear the audio fatalities from MK1.

Let’s play.

Welcome to The Power-Up #4

Round-up of the day

🖥️ AMD will release its highly anticipated Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT graphics cards, targeting 1440p performance, on September 6. Retail prices will be $449 for the RX 7700 XT and $499 for the RX 7800 XT.

🕹️ You can enjoy 19 Xbox Game Pass titles confirmed to be available on GeForce NOW, but you'll require subscriptions to both services. It's like a power couple, but for gamers.

😱 BioWare layoffs cause Dragon Age Dreadwolf and Mass Effect delays. Layoffs began at the studio in June, with another round hitting developers last week. A number of important roles were eliminated and long-term employees were let go.

💃 Baldur's Gate 3 used motion capture from 248 actors to give life to the game’s companions and all NPCs.

👋 After 16 years, Rockstar Games’ vice president of writing, Mike Unsworth, leaves the studio.

Biz Reel

At the Multiverse Summit, held during Gamescom, Saga has introduced new Web3 technologies, poised to reshape the gaming industry and the multiverse.

Talking about web3: NFL launches NFL Rivals, a web3 mobile game. Mythical Games, the developer, says the blockchain elements will not be pushed to players, because the game is “gamers first”.

Krafton has acquired the rights to the mobile version of Ironmace's Dark and Darke. Ironmace still has an ongoing legal dispute with publisher Nexon. 

Sleep has never been this entertaining. Launched on July 17, Pokémon Sleep has reached 10 million downloads worldwide.

VC gaming investment is still not at high levels in Q2 of 2023, Pitchbook reports. Even though the total value of deals grew by 12% from Q1, the total number of closed deals dropped 29% to 110.

Even in this context, Scriptic raised $6.2 million in a second seed round of investment. Scriptic is a British developer of “phone-first interactive stories which are “efficient to produce, easily scalable, and highly accessible to consumers”.

Game Central

Evil Geniuses clinched the world championship title at the Valorant Champions tournament, triumphing over Paper Rex with a 3-1 victory in the grand finale.

This year, NBA 2K24 player builds will be different on the PS5. Game will launch on September 8.

Xbox will launch (at least) four first-party games every year. It was an aspiration, now it’s a plan, Phil Spencer told IGN in an interview.

Last week I was really curious what the audio descriptions of the MK1 fatalities would sound like. Well, they sound awesome!

Some of the games launching this week:

• August 28 - Goodbye Volcano High (PS4/5, PC), Sea of Stars (PC, PS4/5, Xbox X/S/One, Switch)

• August 30 - Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle (PS4/5, Xbox X/S/One, PC)

• August 31 - Trine 5: A Clockwork Conspiracy (PC, PS4/5, Xbox X/S/One, Switch), War Hospital (PS5, Xbox X/S, PC)

That’s it for today. Stay powered-up until next time.

Bobby & Andrei