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In any successful industry there are typically multiple different companies vying to make their product the king of the hill. As suggested by the featured image above, an example of this is Marvel and DC in the comic book industry. Many fans out there love a specific brand and treat any rivals to that brand as the devil itself. What most of these fanboys and fangirls fail to realize is that in actuality, these brands get along quite well.

Yes, there’s a bit of a brand “rivalry” between Marvel and DC, but neither wants the other to fail. In a recent live Facebook chat, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige briefly touched on the subject. “The rivalry is much more amongst the press, I think. Geoff Johns is a very good friend of mine. We grew up together in the business and recently celebrated Richard Donner, who we both used to work for. So, I applaud all the success he’s had.” For those who don’t know, Geoff Johns is the President of DC Comics and Richard Donner is well-known for his Superman movies way back.

Feige is also one of many people involved with the Marvel brand who have applauded the recent success of Wonder Woman. Besides Feige, this includes Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Lupita Nyong’o, James Gunn, Karen Gillan, Rosario Dawson, and so on. Continuing with Feige’s quote on the Facebook live chat, he says about the movie “I really just look at it as a fan. When the movies perform well and are well received, it’s good for us which is why I’m always rooting for them.”

What he’s getting at here is the idea that superhero movies have become their own genre at this point. If a DC movie like Wonder Woman does well, then Marvel benefits since it reaffirms to both that superhero movies will do well. The same is true the other way around if the upcoming Spider-Man: Homecoming is successful. Of course, both want their movies to do better than each other since it is a mutualistic rivalry. However, neither wants the other to fail since it would be bad for the industry and they all respect one another.

Something similar was discussed in a recent GameSpot interview with Xbox Head Phil Spencer. The rivalry between Marvel and DC is very similar to the rivalry between PlayStation and Xbox in that regard. After praising Sony’s Spider-Man PS4 game and Nintendo’s Super Mario Odyssey, this is what Spencer had to say about the brand rivalry in the gaming industry. “It’s a great time to be in this industry and for people to try to make this industry about fighting with each other as opposed to growing the industry itself I just don’t think is a long-term view on an activity that I love, which is playing games.”

Ever since Spencer took over as Head of Xbox a few years ago, this has been his approach to the industry: industry first, brand second. The fact that he’s so enthusiastic about gaming and that he was the first one to bring into the mainstream the idea of cross-play between platforms highlights this. He goes on the sum up what I have been saying this entire time. “We don’t have to see another company fail in order for us to succeed. That’s just not part of the math of running the business.”

With that in mind, Marvel fans shouldn’t be distraught by Wonder Woman’s success nor should DC fans hold any kind of disdain for how well the Marvel Cinematic Universe is doing. By the same token, PlayStation fans shouldn’t hate on the affordable 4K gaming device that is the Xbox One X and Xbox fans shouldn’t hate PlayStation for taking the lead this generation.

In both cases, both brands are doing fine. One is clearly doing better than the other but that isn’t a bad thing. Both exist to keep the other in check. This means the “rivalry” between the two is more a respectful and friendly competition rather than a war of black and white opinions. Not to mention the fact that both sides respect one another and want nothing more than success all around.

I spend most of my days working towards my Writing and Rhetoric degree at the University of Central Florida, but I spend a lot of my down time keeping up to date on the best TV, movies, and video games the industry has to offer. Here I put all of that extended time to use discussing each of them in-depth.

Gaming

Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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Gaming

You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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Gaming

This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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