And it gets worse for the company over the course of the year before the bombshell report by the Wall St Journal that sees Activision Blizzard chairman and CEO Bobby Kotick pointed at for allegations against him as well as Activision. A story that continues to roll on and one that, despite numerous calls for his resignation, has not forced Kotick from the company as of this episode going out.

The second half of the year was also jampacked with numerous showcases, including big ones from Sony and Nintendo as well as The Game Awards and massive releases including Deathloop, The Artful Escape, Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite and a lot more.

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There is way too much to go over in text form what has happened, but to name a few: Ubisoft and Star Wars, Bethesda and Indiana Jones, Bethesda and Microsoft, closures of Japan Studio and Google Stadia’s first-party unit, the return of Nintendo Direct and releases of the likes of Hitman 3, Returnal, Resident Evil Village, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and more.

Oh, and the return of E3. And that is just between the period between January and June. And before everything hits the fan the following month.

The first of a two-part feature-length Press Play goes over the year, the biggest news stories and biggest releases of the year within the first half of 2021.

Part two will feature July through to December, including the Activision Blizzard stuff that has happened over the majority of the second half of the year as well as in August and September, release silly season and more.

That will go live publicly tomorrow at the same time as this is now, 5pm GMT, but you can listen to part two right now if you become a $2 podcast early access tier to our Patreon here.

Links: Play Diaries|Twitter|Facebook|Patreon

But outside of games like Animal Crossing or other bigger games within the area, a subspace of smaller games in the wholesome space from independent developers was mainly overlooked. That was until a Twitter account started profiling these titles and grew a following off the back of it to the point where it now hosts online showcases showing them off, including its yearly annual Direct presentations during E3.

"I think that's like so one of the best things about the online showcases is that sort of accessibility," said Wholesome Games co-founder James Tillman on the advantages of hosting an online showcase like its headline Wholesome Direct event.

"It costs a fortune to come from Ireland or anywhere else to the US and there are passport issues and all these other things for showcasing in-person. Online, it's a way more level playing field - like there are language gaps sometimes, there's definitely time zones that are a problem. But it's something we really try to be mindful of."

Adds Ben Wassler of Ooblets developer Glumberland, itself a key game within the scene, on how Wholesome Games has helped shine a spotlight on these games: “That group of folks has been super supportive and kind to us and they work really hard to uplift game developers and support the community.

“We've been participating in their events and stuff since the beginning, but the key pillars of the movement are the individuals on their team”

In a special 90 minute long episode of Press Play, developers of wholesome games as well as key figures within Wholesome Games the community including co-founders Matthew Taylor, James Tillman and Wholesome Direct host Jenny Windom talk to Play Diaries on delving into the area, its growth, what comes next and a movement that could arguably become a full-blown genre in its own right, if not already.

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It’s a love letter to the platforming genre. It’s a love letter of self-expression through the art of gameplay. And more than anything else, Demon Turf is a love letter of telling slapstick humour while telling a serious story of its main character finding confidence in herself to become ruler of the demon kingdom (even when she is still a smartmouth even then).

"For example, the first boss [in Demon Turf] is this very big pig demon. And she literally refers to him within five seconds as bacon boy," says Demon Turf game lead Fabian Rastorfer. "She has that crazy approach to all of this, but it's just so endearing somehow and I think a lot of people have really clicked with her.

"But there's also a bigger reason for it because it's part of that narrative drive of friendship because at her core, she actually somewhat lacks confidence. She makes up for it with her bratishness, but she's actually lacking confidence and really is in search of recognition. When she says she's going to do something and nobody believes her, that really gets at her core."

Ahead of its release next week, Rastorfer talks of its aims and goals for Demon Turf and how players will hopefully walk away with a better understanding of the genre.

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Both games are from different teams: Loddlenaut comes from a team led in the States, while Venice 2089 is from a team set in Italy (shocker).

And both Loddlenaut and Venice 2089 have different play styles.

But what unites both games together is their message of global warming and climate change and how those play a factor in them.

Here, Safe Place Studios' Giacomo Checchin and Matteo Brentegani as well as Moon Lagoon's Ricardo Escobar talk of both games and what they want their games to be in their messaging on those and more.

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Even with its chill nature, Glass Bottom Games’ Megan Fox is ready for Skatebird’s absurdity to release onto the world and what players do with it as they roll it out. Now that it is out, how does it fit into the skating renaissance in games, find itself revisiting the skating boom of the early 2000s and more as well as what comes beyond Skatebird?

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But art director and lead writer Weichen Lin wants Behind the Frame to be more than its Ghibli-inspired looks. It wants to provide something cozy, something challenging and something that is endearing to the player.

Ahead of its release today as of this episode going out, this is how Behind the Frame intends to show it’s a lot more than what it appears to be on the surface.

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At BioWare Edmonton, Fernando Melo was coming off the back of working on Mass Effect: Andromeda and hopping on to the next Dragon Age game currently being made. But as production wore on, he started questioning whether another four or five-year cycle was worth it anymore.

“When we got to EA’s greenlight towards the end of pre-production [of the next Dragon Age], things are looking pretty good. That went through, that wasn’t a problem or anything,” says Melo.

“But it’s when it really kind of hit me if I was prepared to sign on for another four or five-year dev cycle. And I realised that my heart just wasn’t quite into that as much as I think it needs to be to take on something like that.”

He decided to up sticks in 2019 to break out from the AAA mould, start a new studio and pour his – and other people’s – experiences from the AAA scene into Game Director Story.

Here, Melo talks of the pressures of the AAA scene, how he’s putting those into Game Director Story and how he hopes players will come away from Game Director Story with a better understanding of what game development is actually like.

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“A lot of their tactics to try to save the arcade just don’t fully help, honestly,” says Ryan Woodward. “I think that was something that we kind of wanted to be like, ‘Hey, sometimes, things are a little bit bigger than just you, you know’. But I think it’s really more about the friends you made along the way or something like that.”

Adds Shandiin Woodward: “I hope people are able to see the characters and find characters that they resonate with. We tried to really make a very colourful, diverse cast. People with different family structures, characters with disabilities, characters with different personalities and dynamics. And I hope people find someone that they can relate to or latch on to.”

Several years after development began, next week, Button City will release into the world. Here, the Woodwards go into detail about how it was shaped, its themes of friendship, the slice of life influences and more and how the power of friendship shines through the game.

[NOTE: This is a change in a previously-advertised episode on Skatebird. That will, however, arrive next month just before the game launches]

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But Tunic director Andrew Shouldice wants you to come away with the thought that it’s more than merely just its Zelda inspiration.

“Occasionally, you’ll see someone say like, ‘Oh, I sat down to play this cute game and I was pleasantly surprised that it was not what I was expecting,” says Shouldice. “‘It is challenging, it is mysterious, it is not putting all its cards on the table at once’. And that’s great. That’s what we want.

“Occasionally, people will see it and be like, ‘Oh, I thought that this would be a game that I could sit my four-year-old in front of and just have them have no problem with it’ and they might be a little bit disappointed about that.

“I wonder if people will see it and think, you know, ‘breezy Zelda clone’. And what I hope is that they are able to experience it on its own merits and be excited to explore a challenging, mysterious world full of secrets around every corner.”

Ahead of its impending launch soon…ish – a release timeline isn’t forthcoming when we talk – Shouldice talks in part of how Tunic intends to charm the world through adventure, mystery and more.

By the time this goes out, PlayStation 5 will launch in two waves, starting tomorrow in North America, Japan and other countries (in fact, it's already rolling out in Australia and New Zealand) - but not the EU and UK. That’ll come next Thursday. With those two launch waves and the global launch of Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X yesterday as this goes out, it marks the end of another transition between the now outgoing-gen and the just starting next-gen.

By right of being the more successful first-party from what we’ll now refer to here as the last-generation, Sony should be going into this incoming generation with PlayStation 5 the market leader. But despite that, it also faces a more game (no pun intended) Microsoft this time round with Xbox Series S/X who’ve not put a foot wrong in the build-up to this generation unlike last time with Xbox One or even Sony’s past mistakes with PlayStation 3. And even this time round, Sony has slipped up in one or two big ways.

With PlayStation 5 24 hours from release at this point, the second of two episodes of Press Play this week takes a look at how we got to this point in time as we head towards tomorrow's first launch wave and then the second wave next Thursday.

But in the first of two episodes of Press Play coming this week – and after fixing some massive technical hurdles – we go over how Microsoft went from the failed unveil and release of Xbox One to build itself back up with Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S under Phil Spencer’s leadership as well as the introduction of Xbox Game Pass and bolstering its first-party through acquisitions.

And that little matter of buying Bethesda for $7.5 billion roughly two months out from the launch of both Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

As of a few weeks ago, it's seven years since Grand Theft Auto 5 launched to massive anticipation and excitement on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. But even with the last-last generation version's launch and how successful that was with an $800 million launch in its first 48 hours and $1 billion in its first 72 hours, the fact it has still been able to be successful, although unsurprising, is still insane. An insane achievement, but insane all the same.

So, the question is... how?

The latest episode of Press Play delves into the success of the franchise from Grand Theft Auto 3 onwards to now with Grand Theft Auto 5 as well as GTA Online, how it will continue onto the next-generation consoles next year and how Rockstar will carry that momentum into the inevitable Grand Theft Auto 6.

All of this is discussed with Ampere Analysis' Piers Harding-Rolls, DFC Intelligence's David Cole and GameDaily.biz editor-in-chief Sam Desatoff.

And there are a lot of queer-identifying people in the LGBTQIA community within the games industry. Representation with games, both the actual games and the people who make them, is finally starting to catch up, albeit slowly. But just in the past month alone, let alone this hellscape of a year, representation has picked up in a massive way through one of the biggest AAA releases of this year, The Last of Us: Part 2.

In October of last year, I hosted a panel about being queer in the games industry at EGX (remember when physical shows were a thing?) featuring five fellow folks in the UK games industry among various disciplines from development to comms to streaming and social media to talk of being queer and their experiences.

Them being Izzy Jagan (Junior Global PR Manager for Life is Strange, Square Enix), Hannah Flynn (Director of Communications, Failbetter Games), Charleyy Hodson (Head of Social Media, Xbox UK and Ireland and one of the on-air personalities for Xbox On),  Els White (Game Director, Spider Lilly Games) and Ed Fear (Game Director, Mediatonic).

In this episode, we discuss first coming across queer content in games (spoiler: The Sims is a popular answer), how far queer representation has come along in games, what work remains in bringing representation forward, how they can be achieved and more as we do an hour-long panel that is hopefully enlightening, entertaining and fun.

I’m on my way from my home in Derry, Northern Ireland – literally four days after launching Play Diaries – for a three hour trip across the border to the Republic of Ireland. Depending which way you’re going from in Derry, if you head east, you can be heading across into the border into Bridgend in Co Donegal within 15-to-20 minutes or Lifford – also in Donegal – in 45 minutes if you head south via the town of Strabane in Co Tyrone.

However, for this adventure, we’re having to go through Belfast to Dundalk for Run for the Border, a meet up between the Irish game development communities in both countries.

The event takes place in the shadow of Brexit two weeks after, but unbeknownst to what would happen months down the road with the worldwide Covid-19 outbreak. But before all of that, the event sees a jovial and friendly crowd as it hears from a pack of speakers on their respective works: how to make and publish your own boardgame, the experiences from funding some of Northern Ireland’s games scene, making 3D art on a budget and how the idea for Northern Ireland’s biggest games production ever came to be respectively.

Not to mention, chatting and nattering over a few drinks and a few slices of pizza. All that good craic.

“The mentality behind it was that we all became aware that the Northern Irish and the Republic of Ireland rarely get together on the island,” says Run for the Border lynchpin and Italic Pig boss Kevin Beimers. “We might go to San Francisco and bump into a few familiar faces at GDC, might do the same thing at gamescom, but in terms of the North going down to State of Play or the South coming up to the Belfast Media Festival, there’s not a lot of transfer there.

“It’s almost like it’s just a little bit too far away to spend a day on it, you save your money for another bigger event. So we thought if we could get the two teams together, we’re so close, it’s a two hour drive the there might be partnerships, there might be ways that different funds could be used against each other.”

Adds Vicky Potts, co-founder of Belfast-based Murder at Malone Manor developer Whitepot Studios: “The general vibe for Run for the Border, like it’s really got that kind of friendly, you know, everyone’s really excited to see each other type thing. When you arrive, you get these unrelated sort of trading cards almost. So it’ll be like different names for different games or TV shows and you have to sort of swap with other people to try and collect all of the same set.

“It’s got that sort of feel when you’re starting a new year at school or whatever, and you’re trying to find someone to trade Pokemon cards within the playground. Yeah, it’s good. It’s fun, friendly.”

In a special feature-length episode of Press Play, we delve into Run for the Border, how Northern Ireland’s biggest games production ever in Paleo Pines came into existence but almost didn’t (as already written about here, though this episode has more details and background than what’s in the piece), how Brexit will affect the scene and how both the North and South can collaborate together among several subject matters.

He had an itch to make his own game, known as Eastshade, an adventure game where you explore the island of Eastshade as an artist. But he had given himself a two-year deadline to make the game and if it still wasn’t out by then, he’d go back to a job.

“It’s funny when two years came around. I was like it wasn’t even a consideration,” said Weinbaum. “Really stop. It was like, ‘I’m just gonna spend every penny I have to finish this game. It was a no brainer. It wasn’t even a difficult decision.”

This is the story of how it came to be, making comfortable and wholesome games and what it has planned next (spoilers: not Eastshade 2).

Cris Tales, announced last summer at E3, is a homage to some of the most famous JRPGs of all time. You play as Crisbell, a heroine who’s had recently awakened time powers and must save the world with her fellow companions Cristopher and, wait for it, Matias the frog. Seriously. But the big twist isn’t within the game, but outside it. Cris Tales is not your usual JRPG. This is not being made in Japan, but rather in South America. Specifically, Colombia. It’s an odd mix when you think about it, but it’s definitely different and unique.

Executive producer Derek Neal describes how those games help bring together a fusing of Columbian and Japanese cultures.

“You know, my favorite games from history are things like Final Fantasy 4 and 6, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, these kind of SNES classics from my childhood. Again, I basically had played all of the same games and had a very strong passion for them. And they really wanted one of the things that we both sort of feel is that modern RPGs have strayed very far from those roots. Like there’s been lots of interesting evolutions and changes to the genre over time.

"But we were nostalgic just for the experience that we had back when we were kids working on those games. And so, [studio head of developer Dreams Unincorporated] Carlos [Rocha Silva] really wanted to bring that to people, the RPG fans of today and kind of create something that was, you know, a more direct evolution of those formative experiences from our childhoods.”

“I remember coming over to Mira very carefully, a little nervous, saying, ‘should we maybe write a thesis together?’ because we were interested in the same things, we both really loved narrative in games,” says Tankred.

Adds Dorthe: “I wasn’t so sure at the start. None of us had written anything with anyone else before. Very lone wolf people in that regard, so we were just like, ‘okay, we should just try this’ and then we just had the same vision from the start which was really cool that we came up with the idea of the game we just released.”

In the mid 2010s, two women met at uni and worked on a joint thesis on how to make a game featuring narrative that allowed for two players to share within the same narrative without being online across two devices. What it turned into was Tick Tock: A Tale for Two, a game designed around two players that could be played on two devices and inspired by escape rooms as well as the fairytale stories of Hans Christian Anderson.

This is the story of how Other Tales Interactive found its footing with Tick Tock and how it was learning to make a game as it went on.