Acquisition break, Venom and Ubisoft's 'big game' | Kaser focus

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Another long week in the books, and luckily this one hasn't been entirely dominated by the Microsoft-FTC-Activision Blizzard brawl. In fact, given that Microsoft and Activision Blizzard have extended their acquisition deadline until October, it looks like the whole event is frozen for the foreseeable future. This gives both parties (and the UK CMA) more time to negotiate. Anyway, if I have to spend one more week chronicling the FTC against Microsoft, I'm going to go a little crazier than usual. Instead, let's talk about other things that happened this week.

Ubisoft reported a slight drop in sales for the first quarter of FY24, although CEO Yves Guillemot remains optimistic, saying this was a "better than expected performance". The company also revealed plans to release 10 games this fiscal year, including Assassin's Creed Mirage, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Rainbow Six Mobile, The Crew Motorfest, The Division Resurgence, Just Dance 24, XDefiant, Prince of Persia The Lost Crown, Skull & Bones (FINALLY), and "another great game." Your guess is as good as mine as to what the latter might be.

PlayStation has released a new trailer for the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, which finally gave us a good look at Venom. They're still very coy about letting us hear Tony Todd's voice — in two trailers, he said nine words. But it still looks great and I can't wait to hear more. Speaking of trailers, Netherrealm released two new trailers for Mortal Kombat 1 today. In the first, we saw three new confirmed fighters: Li Mei, Tanya, and Baraka. In the second, we got our first DLC characters confirmed, and the rumors were true: Homelander, Omni-Man, and Peacemaker are joining the fray, as are returning fighters Takeda, Ermac, and Quan Chi.

As for my personal game plan, I can finally, FINALLY play Final Fantasy XVI now that my husband has finished it. The sacrifices I make for love, honestly. But now I can finally see what it's all about – I've barely played a few hours and I already love how different the game is from previous titles. You know me, I love a good show action game and that's definitely been it so far. I'll probably play Pikmin 4 too now that it's finally out. I've never played a Pikmin game before, so this will be brilliant and new to me!

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