 Look guys, yesterday was April Fool's, so we don't have a ton of big news for you guys, but you know what, I was able to scourge up about four stories, so I don't wanna waste any of your time. I just wanna talk about the news, that's what we're here for on VG News. So, first up we have some sales updates from the UK, and I find this to be quite interesting because sales updates can be quite boring or quite exciting. Let me get into this. It's interesting when looking at sales charts every week because it either tells the story of a great triumph for a new release or a tale of failed expectations, right? Failed? Man, can you be a failure in life? I mean, of course you could, but I think you're actually probably a success in life. You're watching VG News, you're already making a good choice today. Anyways, as we look at this stuff, we gotta dive into a particular game here because this past week, a new South Park game came out, Snow Day. Look at that game. Looks good on the surface. Let's dive into this. The multi-platform game dropped in at number three in the United Kingdom sales charts for video games. But of course, like most of these charts, there isn't any actual numbers unless you're the Famitsu charts in Japan. You know what we call actual sales data in Japan? Context, I know. It's a foreign concept in the video game world. Context isn't something that we generally get from charts such as sales charts in the UK and now the quote unquote new and improved Cercana charts in the United States. What I do believe, South Park Snow Day itself deserves more context. So we'll give you some ourselves because I feel like we need to explain this game a bit. The game launched on March 26th and to the surprise of no one that pays attention, it got a 61 overall on Metacritic. That's generally considered a pretty poor score. And while Stick of Truth and Fractured Butthole did perform way better getting in the mid 80s and a 79 respectively. Those games were developed by Obsidian Entertainment who are known for several great games such as Fallout New Vegas, the sequel The Knights of the Old Republic and hey, they also made the Outer Worlds. I do love that one. Well, Snow Day was instead made by Question LLC and Black Forest Games. I basically cannot find any information on Question LLC. I don't know if they're a newer company. I guess it's fitting for their name. But Black Forest Games is known for 67 overall rated destroy all humans too and Gianna sisters twisted dreams. Now that game actually did score in the 80s back in 2012 but they've re-released it several times in different variants with each release scoring worse than the last. We call that milking a success to the point that nobody really cares anymore. In other words, they mostly survived off one mildly successful well received game and while this one is selling decent so far it's probably due to the strong brand it's associated with and maybe even helped a little bit by the reputation of Stick of Truth and Fractured Butthole. Now I could break down every game on the list in this way but you see what's going on the screen right now. FC24, formerly FIFA is at number one, Hogwarts Legacy number two and so on and so forth. It's not really a shocking list to say the least but it gives you an idea of what gamers are interested in with our friends across the pond. Did I use that one yet across the pond? I'm not sure. Well maybe Friends of the North? No, that's the flapping Canadians again. Well whatever, it sales charts with no data or context. Fun. Now I noted earlier at the beginning that we just came off of April Fool's so stories are a bit light but I have to report on something that isn't really a joke. It's been happening for a long time and this time it deals with Ubisoft. Fresh off of firing 124 people last November in Canada most of their Canadian studios. They are now letting go in additional 45 positions at their Asia Pacific locations. Man Ubisoft, Ubisoft in February just reported year on year growth by the way just to throw some context in here and in fact over the last two years they have done twice as much business as the prior two years. So of course it makes sense to shrink the company. Hey, we can't just make some money, we must make all of the money. Hello, I like money. And I know, hey, that's what I do. If I make twice the money this year doing YouTube as I did last year I guess I'll have to make some tough decisions like letting Mr. Pumpkin go. And hey, Mr. Pumpkin makes up 50% of the workforce here at Nintendo Prime. So hey, we're slashing prices, we're making deals, we're making money. We just need to make all the money. Hello, I like money. Ubisoft of course has reasons for deciding that hey, we need to make more money. Sorry, sorry, I got ahead of myself. Cutting jobs in a rapidly shrinking industry we're getting new jobs elsewhere is far from guaranteed with the sheer amount of layoffs that have been going on across the entire industry. Their reasoning, well, let's make sure we read the quotes exactly right. See if this makes any sense. Over the last few months every team within Ubisoft has been exploring ways to streamline our operations and enhance our collective efficiency so that we are better positioned for success in the long term. In this context today, we announced that we are further reorganizing our global publishing central and APAC structures to adapt them to the market evolution with a more efficient agile approach. Those changes will impact 45 positions overall. These are not decisions taken lightly and we are providing comprehensive support for our impacted colleagues. We also want to share our utmost gratitude and respect for their many contributions to the company. Nothing says respect like, hey, pack your and go home. Now remember, this is actually a really bad time to be losing your job. Roughly 10,000 jobs in this video game industry were cut and laid off last year. And you know what, so far in 2024 we're way ahead of last year. Over 8,000 jobs have now been laid off this year in the video game industry. So when we see stories like this, it's just, oh man, it's rough. It's rough out there. But you know what? There's always light at the end of the tunnel and hey, all you guys getting laid off, I'm sure you can end up running over to trillion dollar companies that are always hiring, such as Microsoft. Well, now we're about to have some fun here at the expense of CD Project Red. But I wanna note that I actually like what they're saying but I think the reason they're saying it is just to get some good PR because they probably could use some after that disaster of a launch of Cyberpunk 2077. But by the way, today's a really good game and yeah, it had some great DLC. I'm just noting that man, that launch was pretty rough. So CD Project Red has apparently tried to play fan favorite good guy by stating something most of us understand on a base level, micro transactions. They don't got a place in single player games. Like no crap, why would they? Most of this even mattering is due to the massive backlash Capcom has received for micro transactions in Dragon's Dogma 2. Despite these complaints and the massive review bombing, the game has essentially jumped to the top of every chart since launch, appearing to be the biggest game launch of the year so far in terms of pure sales in 2024. Now look, I played a ton of games both with and without micro transactions and yes, in general, whether multiplayer or single player, I can't seem to find a way that a game is actually better with micro transactions. That's, you know, I like being nickel and dined all the time, right? But sure, they're gonna try to convince me that spending more money every week on the same game makes me have more fun. It's almost like I'm at a casino, except when the game is turned off, my life hasn't noticeably improved. Well, CD Project Red though, is trying to stand on the negative reactions probably to the benefit of themselves with gamers, something they probably want to do since Cyberpunk 2077, literally just had problems working as a video game at launch. So obviously that's all behind us today. Still, they should probably focus on better worker conditions rather than commenting on other companies, smaller companies by the way, not monetizing the way that you are. But nothing says video game industry bullshit, then trying to prop yourself up by putting another company down. In an interview at StockWatch, CFO, Peter Neal-Bulwitz, I'm really sorry, I tried practicing that one, I'm not good at it, said the following when asked about microtransactions in single-player games. We do not see a place for microtransactions in the case of single-player games, but we do not rule out that we will use this solution in the future case of multiplayer projects. In other words, we won't nickel and dime you today, we're just planning the nickel and dime you tomorrow with our next one. Guarantee you they're working on a multiplayer project right now. The video game industry folks. Now, we gotta get into what's gonna be our last story today, and this is dealing with something quite interesting, and that is Nintendo Switch 2. So we need to meet a weekly quota here at Nintendo Prime. I don't know if you're aware of this, we've been accused of doing nothing but covering Switch 2, and honestly we've just had counting yesterday plus today, what is that, nine straight stories without even talking about Switch 2, just a mention here and there, but nothing specifically about Switch 2. So we're already behind our weekly quota with nine stories without a single one being about Nintendo Switch 2. So here we are, story number 10, gonna be about Switch 2. And no, we just came off on April Fool's Day for this episode where there pretty much was hardly any gaming news, and in fact, I guess the Nintendo Switch 3 was apparently announced, yeah, really wasn't into that one much. And then GameXplain tried telling me that we're gonna be playing Metroid Prime 4, sorry, did that make sense? 4, that's right, talking about making a Metroid Golf game, kind of a clever idea, but you know, it's just not something I'm that deep into. But instead, let's get to the last of my notes here, we wanna talk about Switch 2 for a moment because friend of the channel, Andres Restart, asked an important question in his video yesterday. When exactly will Nintendo stop or have any of the Nintendo Switch 2 doesn't exist? Okay, that's not actually what his title was. What he said was, when will Nintendo admit Switch 2 exists? We all know the answer is really whenever we damn well please because that's the way Nintendo operates. But also Nintendo could arguably already has said that the system's coming, how many times have they told us that, hey, we're always working on new hardware, or now multiple times that they said, hey, Nintendo accounts are gonna be forward compatible with our new hardware. In fact, back in 2021, they had a chart that said, hey, Nintendo will account forward compatible to our new system coming in 20XX. But Nintendo's already confirmed the damn thing exists. So it's kind of a weird question on its surface. And we've had obviously court documents and a whole bunch of other stuff. The bottom line is we're kind of sick of the fact that Nintendo hasn't really said anything about it. Right now, this year's looking pretty sparse. Yeah, we got some Luigi's Mansion, some endless ocean and some thousand year door coming and all of that's pretty hype. But let's just be honest, it's been very sparse as content creators. And I think this is what's spurning all these conversations around Switch 2. This is one reason why we launched this very new show in VG News because we found that we were really just falling back into the Switch 2 wagging, coming up with new reasons to talk about Switch 2. And then in our second episode of VG News, we did it again. But the reason we did it again is because it was April Fools. And because of that, there wasn't a lot of actual news going on in the entire industry, let alone anything with Nintendo. So look, these stories here really aren't that relevant. They're kind of weak sauce, but they are at least worth talking about on a surface level. These would usually just be side stories in addition to big stories in a VG News, but this is what you guys get today. Hopefully you're really enjoying this new news format. We back at it again, same time tomorrow, remember Monday through Friday, 10 a.m., probably some additional bonus videos eventually as well. And yes, we're gonna keep our live streams and everything going somehow. I haven't figured that one out yet since a lot of the work for these videos is done at the same time that I do live streams. So see you guys at the next video.