Sony is not giving up on single-player games despite investing a lot into live-service games over the past few years, with plans to release at least one “major” single-player game every year “from next fiscal year onwards.”

The company released its Q2 2024 financial report on Friday, and there was a lot of good news for the video game division despite the high-profile failure of live-service title Concord. Earlier this year. The hero shooter only wracked up a few hundred players on Steam at launch — only 697 concurrent users at peak, according to SteamDB. Sony Interactive Entertainment took the game offline two weeks after launch before eventually sunsetting it and shutting down developer Firewalk Studios.

Sony has also been at the center of issues with Destiny 2 developer Bungie, which laid off more workers this year and restructured to create a new studio inside PlayStation.

However, single-player games have done well for Sony this year. While there haven’t been many first-party releases, the family platformer Astro Bot was a big hit for the company. According to the financials, it’s sold over 1.5 million copies over the first nine weeks. It even managed to convert users, with 37% of Astro Bot buyers not having bought a first-party game from Sony over the past two years. It’s also the highest-rated 2024 game on Metacritic at the time of this writing (tied with Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree). 

“We intend to build an optimal title portfolio during the current midrange plan period that combines single-player games, which are our strength, and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP, with live service games that pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release,” the presentation transcript reads.

So basically, Sony will continue to release big single-player games based on their established IP, like Ghost of Yotei, the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and Marvel’s Wolverine. While the company hasn’t officially announced other games that would fit in this category, fans can be on the lookout for another Final Fantasy 7 Remake entry, another God of War title, a game to cap off the Horizon trilogy, and more Marvel titles as reported in the Insomniac Games leak.

It’ll also retool its live-service strategy a bit, with the company “improving our live service game processes” and sharing lessons it learned from Concord‘s development and shutdown.

The company has also been riding sales of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. And while Helldivers 2 is a live-service shooter, it’s been a big hit for Sony on both PC and PlayStation 5.

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Ultra is perhaps the best smartwatch available for outdoor enthusiasts who use an Android device, and right now you can pick it up for a pretty good price thanks to Samsung’s current deal on the watch. Normally the Galaxy Watch Ultra would cost you $649.99 if you were paying full price, but at the moment you can get the watch for as low as $250.

There are some caveats to this super low price though. Right off the bat you get a $50 discount as Samsung has the watch on sale for $599.99. On top of this, you can save up to another $350 with an immediate trade-in credit. So you won’t be guaranteed to get the Galaxy Watch Ultra for $250. That price is dependent on what the value for your trade-in device is. That being said, any trade-in credit is going to save you money on the Galaxy Watch Ultra purchase and that money will be deducted from the total end cost of the watch at checkout.

All-in-all, a great deal, and really the best price we’ve seen for the watch since it was launched. Samsung’s Galaxy watch Ultra has plenty of awesome features but one that really stands out from other Wear OS smartwatches is the Quick Button on the right-hand side. With this button you can assign any number of actions you can think of and quickly launch into that function with a single press. So it’s all about convenience.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra is a bigger watch with a noticeably heavier weight compared to the Galaxy Watch 7, though. So that’s worth keeping in mind. However, the Galaxy Watch Ultra was also built to be rugged, and has a titanium case. So it will stand up better to dings and such.

Buy at Samsung

Black people throughout the country, in more than 20 states, have been getting racist text messages that order them to report to a plantation for slave labor, and numerous other outlets. The texts reference “slave catchers” and “picking cotton,” in addition to warning the recipients that they will be searched upon arrival.

These hate-filled messages have been received by both kids and adults. The “texts appear to be targeting Black and Brown individuals, including students,” New York’s attorney general Letitia James said. Various AG offices from other states have also issued statements.

The texts all come from unknown phone numbers and began ramping after the election on Tuesday. NAACP president Derrick Johnson said that “these messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear that many of us are feeling after Tuesday’s election results.”

The mother of a University of Alabama student who received one of the messages said that “it’s eerie that it’s the day after the election. It’s eerie that it came to my daughter’s personal phone. It’s eerie that it’s only going to Black students.”

A spokesperson for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign wrote in a statement that it “has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages.” The FBI in a statement, noting that it’s been in “contact with the Justice Department and other federal authorities on the matter.”

It remains unclear who sent the texts and how they did it. The messages targeted people of color, suggesting that the senders had biographical information on the recipients. Many of the messages were sent through TextNow, a free app that provides phone numbers, texting and calling services.

TextNow told CNN that it believes this is a “widespread, coordinated attack.” The service lets people sign up anonymously and sends texts via randomly-generated phone numbers. It says it has been busy “rapidly disabling the related accounts.” The company is also “working alongside our industry partners to uncover more details and continue to monitor patterns to actively block any new accounts attempting to send these messages.”

If you have received one of these horrific texts, lawmakers encourage you to reach out to your state’s AG or email . It’s currently unknown how many people have received the messages.

The goal of Amazon Games, the game publishing and development arm of Amazon, is to become a world-class top publisher in the game industry, says Laura Naviaux Sturr, GM, Operations, Amazon Games. The studio has launched three chart-topping titles so far: New World, Lost Ark, and Throne and Liberty.

At GameBeat Next, Naviaux Sturr spoke with Stanley Pierre-Louis, president and CEO, Entertainment Software Association (ESA), about the studio’s future portfolio and the ways its investments will come to bear over the next three years. That includes titles like the upcoming action brawler King of Meat and a new collaboration with Maverick Games on a future narrative-led, open-world driving adventure game, and big-swing investments in IP like Tomb Raider and The Lord of the Rings — and looking for breakout opportunities.

“The industry is at an inflection point right now,” she said. “We want to take two to three big bets a year and figure out the ones we can dial up a few notches. In our portfolio strategy, we need the blue chips with the dividends, some growth opportunities and engines and then taking some fun experimental bets. If you fast forward 10 years from now, what is Gen Alpha and Gen Z expecting from their gameplay experiences?”

Generating growth through IP

Media giants like Warner, Disney, and even Netflix are seeing great success exploiting their IP across media streams, and that’s a big part of the Amazon Games’ strategy. They’re all growing IP to take to transmedia, as well as leap at opportunities to secure established IP.

“Big IP will always matter, always carry with it this extraordinary fandom,” Naviaux Sturr said. “The big ones in the video game world are trying to get that commentary out of the depths of the internet into real-life experiences or through film and television or theme parks, like what you see with some of the very biggest video game IP. That’s an interesting vector in terms of finding new growth.”

For nascent video game IP, careful planning is crucial during the creation process, such as giving secondary characters potential for their own stories, considering what a prequel might entail, making sure the story could move throughout the timeline of your world in a compelling way and more.  

“It’s more of the franchise planning at the outset that I’m seeing developers be very smart and strategic about. Look at how IP is being invented from the corners of the internet,” she said. “You have the Alexa Fund as an early investment vehicle at Amazon. We invested in a company called Superplastic. Their whole thesis was, how do we take Unreal and this ubiquitous technology that presumably will become very common, a skill set that a lot of developers have, and invent IP through social media?”

Demographics, attitudes and IP

In this year’s ESA study, “Essential Facts About the U.S. Video Game Industry,” they looked at Gen Alpha’s playing dynamics for the first time, and found that 79% percent play video games, with Gen Z’s numbers not far behind at 76% — a massive addressable market of people who love games. The average age of gamers is increasing over time, suggesting that more and more folks are lifelong gamers, playing not only new titles, but the titles they grew up with. Bringing those consumers along the journey of an IP they love requires some strategy, Naviaux Sturr says, which depends on the maturity of the franchise, consumer expectations and what the fans want.

With early-stage IP, there’s a lot more flexibility in the ways that you can expand and grow. But big IP holders like Roblox and Amazon Games, which see players across generations, have hard decisions ahead of them about how much player agency you’re going to allow this generation to have with your IP.

“In these user-generated worlds, micro-communities playing with a few people, watch parties — they expect to be able to have different rule sets and modify the game and do that in a way that feels very modern, seamless and easy,” she said. “For most of them, the common denominators are that they’re online, they play highly social experiences, and typically competitive ones, and some form of PvP (player vs. player). It’s my personal belief that this will still be their expectation 10, 20, 30 years from now.”

But she points at other statistics like the 53% of gamers who want single-player experiences. Addressing those consumers will require developers to challenge conventions: does every single-player game have to be 30 hours long, or have a single ending, and so on, and what will these games look like in the future?

“Our capital is always in terms of long-term value creation,” Naviaux Sturr said. “We’re taking that long view in making these stories, characters and narratives, and allowing them to come into these various spaces, whether through transmedia or the game itself, and telling new stories that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.”

After a career as an incident investigator with risk management firms like Kroll and FTI Consulting, Aaron Narva was working with a big international bank client at compliance software maker Exiger. He was responsible for monitoring that client’s legal compliance after it had made headlines a decade earlier for a money-laundering scandal.

“While I was at Exiger, we acquired some software businesses, including an AI software tool that helped pull risk out of unstructured public records. And we built a tool to help identify corruption and sanctions risk in business relationships for very large companies,” Narva told TechCrunch.

That work gave him the idea for Conflixis. Hospitals and other big medical practices face similar risks from corruption as banks. Drug companies and device manufacturers get so famously chummy with doctors that doctors are required to disclose conflicts of interest: junkets, consulting fees, sponsorship of research grants and the like.

Much research shows that those who get too chummy are more likely to prescribe those drugs and devices, whether they would produce better outcomes for the patient or not. The risk is so great that the government runs a database called OpenPaymentsData.com, where anyone can see conflict-of-interest disclosures.

Yet disclosing such conflicts doesn’t stop the problem, which puts hospitals at legal risk. A host of laws prohibit such behavior by doctors, everything from the Stark Law, to the Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS).

At the same time, commercial interests do need to work with physicians – the medical experts – to help them research new drugs and build devices. So not every interaction is forbidden.

Narva envisioned an AI-powered software-as-a-service that would identify for hospitals and big medical practices the actual situations that put the hospital – if not the patient – at risk. 

“A big health system might have 200,000 relationships between its doctors and vendors and suppliers,” Narva said. “Which of those 200,000 relationships is impacting you from any one of like six risks?” 

Risks range from running afoul of laws to unfavorable medical outcomes. The federal government also provides a database that publishes hospital quality-of-care information. 

Narva called a friend he’d known since the eighth grade, Joseph Bergen, director of engineering at Buzzfeed at the time, to ask Bergen’s opinion of the idea. Bergen liked it so much, he quit his job and became a cofounder.

Conflixis works by ingesting data from OpenPaymentsData.com, the hospital’s procurement data, claims data, patient outcomes records, conflict-of-interest forms, other sources. It analyzes all conflict points to identify the ones that a hospital should investigate.

“Ok, we looked at all 5,000 or 10,000 relationships [and] here are the seven that you need to actually look at,” Narva describes as an example. “Like, we boiled the ocean and here are the seven.”

Conflixis takes it a step further and can also predict a hospital’s spending and suggest ways to reduce it. For instance, is the hospital buying a more expensive piece of equipment based on a recommendation from a doctor that has a relationship with that vendor, instead of a less expensive one?

“We can make it so that hospitals are reducing their regulatory risk significantly, increasing their trust and transparency with their patients, yes, but also making better operational decisions about what they’re buying,” he says.

Founded in 2023, the company already has a handful of clients with just under $5 million in revenue, Narva said. It just announced a $4.2 million seed round co-led by Lerer Hippeau (the fund founded by BuzzFeed’s former chairman Kenneth Lerer) and Origin Ventures, with mark vc, Springtime Ventures, and pre-seed investor Cretiv Capital participating.

Conflixis joins a crowded field of health industry compliance software companies like Compliatric and Symplr, alhough some are more focused on protecting patient data than on corruption and procurement.

Narva says what sets Conflixis apart is the way it has married its employees’ careers in investigative work with LLMs. It modified off-the-shelf models to look for patterns in the data based on “our backgrounds in transaction monitoring and corruption in big data investigations,” he says.