We're barely one month into 2022, and the gaming industry's shake-ups have been severe. Microsoft and Sony are snapping up studios left and right. And only a scant few weeks after Microsoft announced its acquisition of Activision Blizzard--creator of one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world, Call of Duty--Sony announced that it's bringing Bungie into the fold.

It's hard to keep track of the numerous acquisitions and announcements from Sony in the past year, so we've put together a comprehensive picture of what Sony's business looks like at this moment.

Rapid studio acquisitions in 2021

Prior to 2020, Sony picked up studios at a slower pace than Microsoft. But in late 2020, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan dropped hints that Sony would be looking to acquire more studios--a tease the company has made good on. Housemarque (Returnal), Bluepoint Games (Demon's Souls remake), Firesprite (The Playroom), Nixxies, and co-development studio Valkyrie all joined Sony in 2021.

It's quite the variety of studios, and not all are household names. Nixxies specializes in PC ports, Valkyrie has co-developed quite a few games across different platforms, and Bluepoint Games specializes in remasters (although it will initially develop an original game).

Now with Bungie, Sony has made its first acquisition of 2022. It's not looking like it'll be the last one, either. According to Gamesindustry.biz's Christopher Dring, Sony is looking to buy more studios following Bungie.

Sony's First-Party Studios

• Bend Studio (Days Gone)
• Bungie (Destiny 2)
• Bluepoint Games (Demon's Souls Remake)
• Firesprite (The Playroom)
• Guerrilla Games (Horizon Zero Dawn, Horizon Forbidden West)
• Housemarque (Returnal)
• Insomniac Games (Ratchet & Clank series, Marvel's Spider-Man, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales)
• Media Molecule (LittleBigPlanet)
• Naughty Dog (Uncharted, The Last of Us , The Last of Us Part II)
• Nixxies Software (known for PC ports)
• Pixelopus (Concrete Genie)
• Polyphony Digital (Gran Turismo)
• Sucker Punch Productions (Ghost of Tsushima)
• Team Asobi (Astro's Playroom)
• Valkyrie Entertainment (God of War's co-dev; known for co-developing games)
• xDev (Sackboy: A Big Adventure's co-dev; known for co-developing games)
• San Diego Studio (MLB The Show)
• Santa Monica Studio (God of War)

First-Party Titles And Future Releases

Sony's first-party titles also received much acclaim and praise in the last couple years. That's been the company's long-term strategy--developing critical darlings and releasing them at a slower pace--so far, in contrast to Microsoft's approach of acquiring more titles in order to beef up Xbox Game Pass.

That's the key--so far. With the number of acquisitions made in 2021 and Bungie coming under Sony's banner, it's likely Sony is changing track to proactive procurement of studios--which means we can expect more first-party titles.

The Last of Us Part II (2020), Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020), Ghost of Tsushima (2020), and Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) can be counted among Sony's recent first-party hits. Upcoming releases include Horizon Forbidden West and Gran Turismo 7. See below for a list of future titles.

PlayStation's Future First-Party Releases (Confirmed Dates)

• Horizon Forbidden West--February 18, 2022
• Destiny 2: The Witch Queen--February 22, 2022
• Gran Turismo 7--March 4, 2022
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2--2023
• MLB The Show 22--April 5, 2022

PlayStation's Future First-Party Releases (In-progress/Release Date TBA)

• Bend Studio's (Days Gone Dev) unnamed new IP
• Bungie's non-Destiny unnamed new IP
• Insomniac Games' Marvel's Wolverine
• Media Molecule's Tren
• Naughty Dog's unnamed standalone multiplayer

Subscription Wars

Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft's subscription service, poses a form of competition to Sony that PS Now and PS Plus don't address. For $10 a month (at the lowest tier) and offering many popular first-day releases (third-party games like Back 4 Blood and Rainbow Six Extraction, and all first-party games like Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5), Game Pass is undoubtedly the best gaming subscription service on the market right now.

Sony plans to compete with Game Pass by revamping PS Now and Plus into a combined subscription service codenamed Spartacus, according to a Bloomberg report. The subscription service's target launch date is Spring 2022, but very little is known about it currently.

Regarding first-party releases, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan said in a 2020 GamesIndustry.biz interview, "We are not going to go down the road of putting new release titles into a subscription model. These games cost many millions of dollars, well over $100 million, to develop. We just don't see that as sustainable."

Whether this plan will change in the future for Spartacus remains to be seen, but continued acquisitions could be a path to bolstering its hypothetical library and expanding its live-service footprint and transmedia efforts.

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The best couch co-op or online co-op on PlayStation 5.

What are the best PS5 co-op games? Which PS5 games should you play for some co-op action with your buddies? While singleplayer experiences can be great, sometimes you can't beat a bit of co-op with friends. Whether you're looking for local co-op or online co-op games, there are a good amount of cooperative titles on PS5. In this list, we've gathered together what we think are the best co-op games on PS5. If you're looking for more competitive experiences, check out our guides to the Best PS5 Local Multiplayer Games and Best PS5 Online Multiplayer Games through the links. Read up on the Best PS5 Games overall, while you're at it.

Read the full article on pushsquare.com

Who's got two thumbs, but can't use them?

Retro-futurism is one of my favourite things. Seeing what people thought the future would look like in now decades old science fiction is so revealing of the time in which is was created, conjuring visions of gleaming optimism or grimy despair for our future. Out in PC Early Access and Xbox Game Preview (and Game Pass!) today, The Anacrusis lands somewhere between; an idyllic swinging sixties style of futurism that’s showing signs of wear and ultimately falls apart as an alien menace suddenly emerges. What I’m trying to say is that The Anacrusis is Left 4 Dead by way of Space Channel 5. The game is set upon a huge starship on the edge of explored space that has suddenly found itself swamped by an extra-terrestrial threat. These are the face-hugging kind for the most part, completely incapacitating the ship’s population and turning them into mindless hosts, but a handful of survivors remain – Nessa, Guion, Liu and Lance. They’re a diverse bunch, which is always nice to see, and you quickly pick up from their incidental dialogue that they’re not that well equipped to take on an alien invasion by themselves. They’re going to try, though! The Anacrusis follows a lot of the standard co-op shooter traits ingrained in the subgenre’s well-worn formula. Each episode is broken down into stages that are bookended by safe rooms – in this case well-stocked airlocks. The whole ship has been overrun by aliens that act like a zombie infestation and you’ll have to battle your way through the pretty mindless throngs that are just milling around until you disturb them. That would be far too simple though, and a devious AI director works in the background to spice things up from time to time. This means throwing hordes of enemies at you as well as more than a few special aliens that go far beyond the “thing on a human body” design. There’s a few Left 4 Dead tropes with the big lad Brute, the long-distance Grabber, and the Gooper that will slow you down and fix you in place, but things get more interesting from there. The Spawner creates ball aliens that roll around and unfurl to shoot at you like some kind of Droideka, while the Flasher isn’t an alien that shows an inappropriate amount of skin, but rather one that fills its surrounding area with blindingly bright light that makes it difficult to make out what’s going on. Perhaps my favourite enemy in the game is the Egg (or “Babies” as we started calling them for some reason). Acting like the Witch from L4D, they don’t react until triggered, but when they do? Hoo-boy! You better be ready for a flood of impossible-to-deal-with spiked balls that roll toward you and fill your entire view of the world until you die. They’re so overpowered they can absolutely wreck a run. They’re the best. Good eggs. Dealing with all these enemies means using an arsenal of weapons that might be appropriately sci fi, but feel a bit bland to use. They all come from a brand of ‘pew-pew’ laser guns that just isn’t particularly interesting, even if they will send the regular enemies flying or take them out in a couple of quick shots. The Anacrusis almost makes up for this by having an array of fun grenades to throw into the hordes. The Stasis grenade slows anything that moves through its bubble, which is a godsend when dealing with Brutes, while the Vortex grenade sucks everything in toward a mini black hole and then spits them out again. There’s also special pick up weapons that can arc electricity through closely-packed throngs, place a defensive turret, and more. The highs and lows of the weapons are echoed through some of the level design. As cool as the kitschy 60s sci-fi vibe is, the opening stages of the first episode just feel like running down a series of similar feeling vibrantly coloured hallways. It takes a bit too long before you get to step out into something that really feels completely different – a huge artificial garden under a fake sky. After that point, it continues to riff on similar themes, though there’s more and more signs of how damaged the ship is becoming through the invasion. There are some fun set pieces thrown in that do help spice things up, like holding off waves of enemies in a blaring disco, the first episode’s climactic battle on the bridge of the starship, and some fun times with sluices – this game’s a shoe-in for the Best Sluices GOTY 2022 award – though some levels come in feeling like they’re a bit on the long side. Part of that is also down to the AI-driven difficulty. The Anacrusis falls into the same trap that Back 4 Blood did of throwing too many special enemies at you in combination for a sudden difficulty spike. The balance is currently a bit off for enemies like the Gooper, which is able to repeatedly stick a player in place just seconds after they have been freed, especially when a team is struggling to deal with a string of half a dozen specials. It’s also a bit much when the same enemy type spawns in multiples or in quick succession. They don’t really feel so special anymore at that point… As The Anacrusis heads into PC Early Access and Xbox Game Preview today, it’s clear that there’s some way to go before it can go toe to toe with Back 4 Blood, Vermintide and Left 4 Dead. Of course, the point of Early Access releases like this is for a developer to get players invested, get their community’s feedback and make adjustments while growing the content. There’s potential here, and I hope that Stray Bombay can grow The Anacrusis into a great example of the co-op shooter at its best.