David Hanak If you follow world events, you've probably noticed the mass protests against police brutality and racism in the US. The wave of protests gradually spread to other parts of the world and also affected large corporations, which are now mentally competing to see who will make the biggest (marketing) gesture. As a result, several highly anticipated events scheduled for the following days, including a presentation from Sony, were postponed.
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Microsoft once again passed off PC gameplay as a "console experience"
Let's start easy. Microsoft has once again shown that it is not afraid to reach for misleading solutions when demonstrating the capabilities of the upcoming generation of consoles. As has happened many times in the past, in the case of the recently published demo of the Xbox exclusive Scorn, it was revealed that the demo was not running on a new generation Xbox, but on a high-end PC equipped with a super powerful nVidia RTX 2080 Ti graphics card and a powerful (and unspecified) AMD Ryzen processor. This was confirmed by the director of the development studio Ebb Software Ljubomir Peklar. The trailer for the title Scorn was marked with the message "in-engine footage representative of expected Xbox Series X visual quality", so no one explicitly stated that it was footage directly from the upcoming Xbox. However, for the average viewer, this is an easily overlooked detail, and what they see on the screen will automatically be associated with the new generation of consoles. It should be noted that Microsoft has learned from the past and at least states these disclaimers now. In any case, it can be expected that the visual quality of similar trailers or demo versions will turn out to be much worse in reality, because the new Xbox, however powerful it will be in the end, will not reach the computing level of the RTX 2080 Ti.
Game companies postpone events due to protests in the US
In the United States, since the weekend, there has been nothing but massive nationwide protests against police brutality and racism, which was started by the disproportionate action (leading to death) by members of the Minneapolis police force against the African-American George Floyd. The wave of protests very quickly spread from Minnesota to other US states (and further to the world), just as violence escalated on both sides of the conflict. Currently, parts of the United States seem to be on the brink of civil war, and the media (both local and global) is covering little else. Many famous personalities from various industries, celebrities, but also large corporations have already commented on the current events, which, in addition to God-loving (marketing) statements, have also started postponing planned events.
One such company is Sony, which postponed Thursday's planned presentation of new titles planned for the upcoming PlayStation 5. Another is Activision, which decided not to release new content for the latest installment of Call of Duty because "now is not the right time." The developers from EA Games have postponed the unveiling of the new edition of the Madden NFL 21 title, and the social networks of all major companies in the gaming industry are now abuzz with solidarity tweets with various supporting hashtags. Let everyone evaluate the behavior of these corporations for themselves, but it is necessary to point out that nothing similar has happened following similar world situations.
Streaming services have joined the Blackout Tuesday initiative
In connection with the above, it is also necessary to mention companies that deal with streaming music or video content - Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube and others. They joined the initiative called Blackout Tuesday, which is supposed to express support in response to current events. In the case of Spotify, this is the addition of 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silence (referring to an equally long police intervention) to selected playlists and podcasts, Apple has temporarily canceled the streaming of Beats 1 radio and completely disabled For You, Browsing and Radio functionality for users in most countries in the Apple Music app. In iTunes on Windows, these tabs are also disabled, see the image below. Instead, the company offers to listen to playlists with music from selected artists and other links to current events. However, the Shop tab works quite normally(?). In response to the current situation, Amazon announced a "day of silence" on its social networks, YouTube (as well as others) commented on the situation in the form of a tweet on the social network Twitter. Some American record companies also participated in Blackout Tuesday.
Sources: Arstechnica, Engadget, TPU, The Verge
