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A new Mafia game is in the works, but don’t expect it anytime soon

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Mafia franchise, Hangar 13 has announced that the studio is working on a new installment in the series.

“I’m happy to confirm we’ve started work on an all-new Mafia project,” General Manager Roman Hladik said in an interview. “While it’s a few years away and we can’t share anything more right now, we’re really excited to keep working on this beloved franchise and to entertain our players with new stories.”

There aren’t any more details about the new Mafia project, but earlier this year, Kotaku reported that Hangar 13 was working on a prequel to the Mafia trilogy code-named Nero. It would also be reportedly built using Unreal Engine 5, the same engine powering the recent Mafia and Mafia II remasters.

Bloomberg later reported that studio President Nick Baynes was trying to greenlight a sequel to Nero while the game was still in development. Hangar 13 suffered a round of layoffs earlier this year when two of its major projects, code-named Volt and Mosaic, were reportedly canceled. Both of these cancellations reportedly left many employees with little work to do, and the purpose of greenlighting the Nero sequel would be to make sure that employees could transition smoothly between projects after Nero wrapped up development.

Hangar 13 is also reportedly working on a tennis game, code-named Hammer, but there is no other information known about it right now.

Given that the new Mafia project is years away, it’s possible that it could ditch the last generation of consoles and focus on just PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, like games such as Gotham Knights did.

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George Yang
George Yang is a freelance games writer for Digital Trends. He has written for places such as IGN, GameSpot, The Washington…
PlayStation VR2’s best launch game isn’t the one you we’re expecting
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With the PlayStation VR2 out now, all eyes are on Horizon Call of the Mountain. The action-adventure title is Sony’s first big exclusive for the platform, acting as its tentpole launch title. While it’s a must-buy for anyone picking up the device on day one, it's more successful as a strong technical showcase for the headset rather than as a fun game that stands on its own. If you’re looking for the latter, you’ll want to check out PSVR2’s real hidden weapon: Fantavision 202X.

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Don’t expect Zelda’s $70 price to become the new Switch standard, says Nintendo
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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo's first Switch game to be priced at $70. News that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed titles on the system, will have an increased price compared to its predecessor came as a surprise over three-and-a-half years after its announcement. It also raised questions about what the future of pricing for Nintendo games will be, especially as Sony, Microsoft, and third-party publishers all upped the cost of their new games in recent years. 
While Nintendo will release Tears of Kingdom at $70, a spokesperson for the company tells Digital Trends that this will not always be the case for its first-party games going forward. 
"No," the spokesperson said when Digital Trends asked if this is a new standard. "We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." 
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Official Trailer #2
To get more insight into the price shift, I spoke to Omdia Principal Analyst George Jijiashvili, who explains what has caused the price of games to go up in recent years and how Tears of the Kingdom demonstrates that Nintendo will "remain flexible about first-party title pricing." Ultimately, Nintendo fans are finally starting to feel the impact of inflation that's been sweeping across the game industry, even if it's only "on a case-by-case basis" for now.
The price is right
Nintendo claims that not every one of its significant first-party game will be $70, and we can actually already see that in action. Preorders just went live for Pikmin 4, which launches on July 21, after Tears of the Kingdom, and it only costs $60. Still, Zelda's price tag indicates that going forward, Nintendo will at least consider raising the price of its most anticipated games to $70. But why start with Tears of the Kingdom?  
When asked why it chose Tears of the Kingdom as its first $70 Nintendo Switch game, a Nintendo spokesperson simply reiterated that the company will "determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." Still, it's a surprising choice for Nintendo to make that pricing change to just one exclusive game almost six years into the Switch's life span. Jijiashvili thinks the choice to do this with Tears of the Kingdom was a pretty apparent one for Nintendo, although it won't apply to everything going forward.
"If you are going to make a game $70, it's going to be the follow-up to one of your most critically acclaimed and bestselling games ever," Jijiashvili tells Digital Trends. "I don’t think that this means that $70 will become the standard price for all major Nintendo releases. It's worth noting that Metroid Prime Remastered is priced at $40. It's clear that Nintendo will remain flexible about first-party title pricing."

It makes basic financial sense for Nintendo to ask for a little bit more for a game it knows will be one of the biggest releases of 2023. But what factors in the game industry and world's economy at large caused Nintendo to make this decision? 
Priced Out
For more than a decade, people got comfortable with AAA video games being priced at $60. Of course, there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but it was seen as an industry standard until the dawn of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Publisher 2K was one of the first to announce a price increase, and companies like EA, Sony, and Microsoft have all followed suit. Jijiashvili chalks this up to inflation-related pressure on game publishers.
"The games industry has already been experiencing a lot of inflationary pressure," he explains. "AAA games are much more expensive to make now than they used to be, but prices have actually been declining in inflation-adjusted terms -- if prices had risen with inflation since 1990, they would now be over $90. On top of that, we’ve had a big burst of general inflation, meaning that publishers are looking at big increases in everything from salaries to tools. It’s going to be really hard for most publishers to avoid passing on all those extra costs at some point."
Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened. 

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With so many remakes filling up 2023’s game release calendar, I find myself asking a simple question: Why? That’s not a cynical question directed at the overall concept of remakes, but rather one that’s worth asking on an individual project level. Why is 2023 the right moment to reboot a series? What will this remake do to deepen my understanding of the original game? Are more modern graphics enough to justify a retread into a 15-year-old game that still plays well by today’s standards, or would that time and money have been better spent moving forward?

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