Football's gaming ties, Epic's social push, Zelda's mobile connection and lessons from Sucker Punch | Week in Views
The games industry moves quickly and while stories may come and go there are some that we just can't let go of…
So, to give those particularly thorny topics a further going over we've created a weekly digest where the members of the PocketGamer.biz team share their thoughts and go that little bit deeper on some of the more interesting things that have happened in mobile gaming in the past week.
Craig Chapple
Andrew Stalbow-led investor group completes Bath City FC acquisition
An investor group led by Seriously co-founder Andrew Stalbow has completed the acquisition of English football club Bath City FC. The group has raised approximately £6 million in a seed round to invest into the club.
On the football side of things, it’s a remarkable investment in a non-league football club. Given Stalbow’s ties to the entertainment world, I wonder if a documentary will end up in the offing to trade the club’s journey, somewhat similar to that of Wrexham, bought by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
On the gaming side, there’s a long history of the industry partnering with English football.
Games commerce company Xsolla signed a gaming and shirt sponsorship deal with League One football club Stevenage FC a couple of years ago. We went to a game and interviewed the company’s chief marketing and growth officer about the surprise partnership.
Stevenage club director Stuart Dinsey is also the executive chairman at UK publisher Curve Games, which has published games including Human: Fall Flat and For The King II.
Elsewhere, EA is a shirt sponsor for referees in the English Football League until the end of the 2028/2029 season. The developer famously also develops the EA Sports FC series, too, of course.
Meanwhile Sports Interactive develops the Football Manager series, which has long also been used by clubs to support their scouting initiatives. The company has also had sponsorship deals and partnerships with various clubs, including Brighton, Watford, Leyton Orient and many others. Longtime Sports Interactive studio director, Miles Jacobson, is himself a Watford supporter.
In a different kind of partnership, Man City and Norway striker Erling Haaland joined Supercell’s Clash of Clans to play the Barbarian King for a seasonal in-game event.
Rovio has previously had a multi-year sponsorship deal with Everton to promote Angry Birds. And to tie things back to Andrew Stalbow, back in 2019, Seriously signed a sleeve sponsorship deal with Norwich City to promote Best Fiends.
It’s a fascinating intersection of industries, whether used as a marketing tool, a passion project or other motives.
Paige Cook
Epic Games launches Epic Parties to give players a cross-ecosystem voice chat
Epic has launched Epic Parties, which brings voice chat across Fortnite, the Epic Games Store and its mobile apps.
This makes a lot of sense for Epic, if anything, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. Party chat systems have become such a standard part of gaming that it's actually strange to think back to a time when major platforms didn’t have it.
I remember having what was then Xbox Live many moons ago, before party chat was even a thing. It had its pros, I made a bunch of friends but it also had its negatives because you couldn’t privately talk to a select group or easily avoid not-so-pleasant voice chat situations.
Of course, PlayStation and Xbox have long had their own party systems, and then Discord plugs the gap for many gamers, particularly PC players. Epic introducing its own version feels like a natural step and I wonder how many people will use it over something like Discord.
Overall, I think this is a broader move to expand its ecosystem, they want you to use the Epic Games Store to play their games and talk with friends without going elsewhere. It may be a simple feature, but it's become a core part of the gaming experience and I'm sure we will see them add more social or personalisation features in the future.
Aaron Astle
Legend of Zelda Direct reveals movie title and Ocarina of Time mobile support
It’s been a busy news week for me as a Nintendo fan. First there was a Fire Emblem Heroes presentation on Monday, which revealed the inclusion of four Fortune’s Weave characters before the Switch 2 exclusive launches - including challenge maps, a new difficulty mode and a story event to help familiarise mobile players with the key cast members.
Roll on Tuesday, and we got The Legend of Zelda Direct, which revealed plenty of news on the Ocarina of Time remake, including mobile compatibility. I was particularly stunned by the stylish look of the environments in the upcoming release, and think it's finally time for me to enter the Switch 2 generation with that special edition console.
As well as new dialogue, voiced cutscenes and a jump button, Nintendo also revealed a surprising amount of mobile content. The Ocarina of Time theme music was shadow-dropped on Nintendo Music, and Zelda Notes within the Nintendo Switch App was shown to have connectivity with Ocarina of Time.
You can have automatic screenshots of your gameplay show up on your phone, as well as stats like enemies slain and time spent in each area. There are also quizzes with more than 2,000 enemies and rewards for finding a location in-game that’s shown on your mobile device. It’s a strange but interesting time we’re living in.
Then came Wednesday with a Nintendo Direct. Metroid Ravenous looks intriguing as a clear follow-up to Metroid Dread’s story, and Monster Hunter Wilds finally got a Switch 2 trailer and release date. With all this in one week, I can’t really ask for more.
Mariam Ahmad
It’s not often that you get to sit down with the people behind your favourite game, so when I had the chance to interview Chris Zimmerman, co-founder and studio head emeritus at Sucker Punch when I hosted the Big Indie Pitch at SLICE in Seattle last week, I was excited to say the least!
Together, we went through Sucker Punch’s journey, which started in 1997 with six people from Microsoft who did not have a publisher, an engine or even a game. It's now a 160-person PlayStation Studios team behind Ghost of Tsushima, inFAMOUS and Ghost of Yōtei, so, naturally, I asked whether anyone could still pull that off today. He expressed his doubt - not because making games got harder, but because it got easier for everyone at once.
Initially, when they picked the N64, they were choosing to be one of about 50 games instead of one of 500. Today that number is closer to 500,000. Chris mentioned that the struggle now is not just producing a good game but making sure that game catches people’s attention.
We also get into how the studio hunts for the one thing that will make their game stand out - Tsushima's combat took 10 months of prototyping before the parry finally clicked and some of what players now consider core to that game didn't turn up until year five. He's candid about the cost of being big, too: five million units or it isn't worth making, which can rule out sharper, smaller games the team might have preferred.
And then there's the book he can't bring himself to write, the arrogance involved in starting any creative project at all and the lessons studios can take away from his journey in gaming.
He finished by telling me to turn off my recorder so he could get into the things he can't say on the record. You'll have to settle for everything that came before!
Companies
