The main thing for the weekend (April 22-23)

Microsoft denied the rumor that Hi-Fi RUSH did not meet the company’s expectations, the quest director of Cyberpunk 2077 said that it was becoming too difficult to make AAA games, the circulation of NieR: Automata exceeded 7.5 million copies, – we tell you what happened in the gaming industry this weekend.

The other day, an insider Jeff Grubb (Jeff Grubb) said that the Hi-Fi RUSH rhythm shooter did not earn the money that Microsoft expected. Shortly after, Aaron Greenberg, the head of marketing at Xbox, issued a rebuttal. He did not disclose the sales of the game, but said that it became a hit on all key indicators.

The quest director of Cyberpunk 2077 Pavel Sasko participated in a round table organized by the PC Gamer portal. During the conversation, he noted that AAA games are getting bigger and it is more and more difficult to work on them: “I think we’re running into a fucking wall and we’re going to crash into it very soon.” As an example, Sasko told how CD PROJEKT‘s approach to game development has changed. While working on The Witcher 3, developers could afford to resort to a variety of tricks: for example, to save on animation by hiding a person behind the bar and not drawing his legs, and to add a darkening of the screen when switching between scenes and at this time to change the weather and arrange objects. In Cyberpunk 2077, released five years later, such techniques had to be abandoned, partly due to the fact that the game had a first—person view.

The Burning Shores add-on for Horizon Forbidden West has undergone a review-bombing on Metacritic. By Sunday evening, gamers had left over a thousand reviews for the supplement, rating it 3.3 points out of 10. At the same time, the critics’ score was 82 points out of 100. The main reason for discontent was the possibility of the main character to have a romantic relationship with a girl. Also, users of the site complained about the boring plot and bland characters.

▪️NieR: Automata has sold over 7.5 million copies. It took her a little more than six years to do this: the global release of the game on PC and PlayStation took place in March 2017 (later NieR: Automata also reached Xbox and Nintendo Switch).