What's Up With Video Games? (Feb 2022)

Hello everyone and the warmest of welcomes to this very first edition of ‘What’s Up With Video Games?’, our brand new newsletter.

Once per month, this will land in your inbox like a lovely little parcel full of newspaper clippings, pointing you towards some of the biggest stories and very best games reporting we’ve been reading and watching.

As you might expect, given our work on People Make Games and our games journalism podcast The Games Press, we spend a lot of time keeping up-to-date with this stuff and so the hope is that we can provide a curated list of stories for you to catch up on over a mug of coffee and a chocolate digestive.

We’ll also have some thoughts at the end from Anni, Quinns and myself about some of the games we’re playing too, so hopefully you’ll be able to pick up some decent game recommendations to boot.

Lovely stuff! Let’s get started, shall we?

Record-breaking acquisitions

Starting about a month ago now, as Take-Two revealed it would be making the biggest video games acquisition of all time and swallowing up Zynga for a cool $12.7 billion, the whole industry proceeded to lose its goddamn mind.

Microsoft quickly announced its own acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, breaking Take-Two’s extremely short lived record by a multiple of about five. Sony bought Bungie, which is… I mean… wow. And who can forget the real shocker, as the New York Times swooped in and grabbed the Internet’s latest obsession, Wordle, for somewhere in the "low seven figures".

Let’s see what people had to say about all that.

[Read in 11 mins] The Consequences of Microsoft Buying Activision Blizzard Are Dizzying

“It's fair to say that once an industry hits a certain level of consolidation, the only big deals left to do are the ones that are so enormous that they were almost inconceivable before they were announced.”

[Read in 4 mins] Hit Points #93: Capital idea

Nathan Brown talks to video games consultant Dr. Serkan Toto about why Japanese games companies might not be such easy targets for foreign acquisitions and how PlayStation could stand to benefit from this.

[Read in 6 mins] Activision Blizzard’s Workplace Problems Spurred $75 Billion Microsoft Deal

You might run into a paywall on this one, sorry, but the Wall Street Journal continues to have some of the juiciest insight into what’s been happening at Activision-Blizzard. This article suggests that CEO Bobby Kotick is indeed expected to leave the company following the acquisition, which is perhaps unsurprising, but also claims that prior to the deal going through, he was discussing the idea of cleaning up the company’s image via the purchase of a games media brand like Kotaku or PC Gamer. WHAT.

[Watch in 25 mins] The Abridged Videogaming History of Big-Money Buyouts & Mergers

Superbunnyhop takes us on a whirlwind tour of the gaming industry’s rich history of companies buying other companies for totally staggering amounts of money.

The Blockchain backlash

Ho boy, when will they learn? Following Ubisoft’s incredibly unpopular NFT announcement in early December, we’ve watched in awe as others have very willingly followed them into the same controversy. Voice actor Troy Baker and indie games publisher Team17 have both revealed NFT projects in recent weeks, only to receive a huge backlash from their fans and then quickly cancel the whole thing.

[Watch/Listen in 62 mins] Talking to Troy Baker about his NFT tweet | Play, Watch, Listen #90

In what ends up feeling like some kind of intervention, Troy Baker’s podcast co hosts confront him about his recent NFT announcement and the extremely negative reaction it received on social media.

[Read in 12 mins] Inside Team17, following the Worms NFT firestorm

“Speaking to Eurogamer under condition of anonymity to protect their careers, more than a dozen employees have said they felt let down by how Team17 handled the announcement, and that the company's refusal to listen to staff concerns has added additional pressure to a workforce already worn thin.”

[Read in 3 mins] Zynga outlines its ambitious NFT gaming plans

Zynga is betting big on NTFs. I don’t include this article to advertise what sounds like a pretty soulless endeavour, but rather to point out that despite the backlash previously mentioned, some companies are steamrolling ahead with these plans regardless. People Make Games wishes them a speedy and expensive failure.

[Watch in 138 minutes] Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs

Not strictly gaming-related and I imagine some of you will have seen it already, but just in case, here’s Folding Ideas with perhaps the best takedown of the blockchain, crypto and NFT world that we’ve seen to date. It’s a long one, but well worth it.

Other bits and pieces

[Read in 3 mins] How ‘Vampire Survivors’ Went From Obscurity to 27,000 People Playing at Once

Just a quick one here, but I’ve got a real soft spot for games that find an audience after initially releasing with little to no fanfare. Vampire Survivors may be one of the first surprise hits of 2022, but back in December it struggled to attract more than 20 concurrent players at a time.

[Watch in 72 minutes] The History of Grand Theft Auto, Lemmings & DMA Design

This one’s actually from December, but I’ve only just gotten around to watching it, so it still counts! Noclip delves into the history of DMA Design and the things it made that paved the way for the ultimate game changer, Grand Theft Auto III.

[Read in 9 minutes] The Next Video Game From BioShock’s Creator Is in Development Hell

“Just as critics grant Levine credit for the artistry of his games, many Ghost Story employees readily blame him for their tortured project.”

What have we been playing?

Chris - Vampire Survivors (PC)

I’m aware that this game is a bit tricky to sell with a screenshot, but Vampire Survivors is pure chaos and I love it dearly.

Although you can move your character around as you please, their attacks always happen on a timer and you just need to ensure that you’re standing in the right place at the right time to make full use of them, as new enemies steadily drift towards you. To begin with, when you’ve just got a single whip slash to worry about and a handful of bats, this might not sound like much, but things quickly begin to escalate.

Once you’ve mowed through enough enemies, you’ll begin to upgrade your weapon and add new ones to your arsenal, with totally different actions and timers to consider. Within minutes your whole screen will be choked full of horrible plants, zombies and the occasional giant praying mantis, as you dish out more attacks than you could ever hope to keep track of.

At this point, Vampire Survivors becomes something else entirely, with you threading your way through the carnage based more on feeling than anything else. It costs about two quid on Steam and comes highly recommended, but if you want a better handle on what to expect, it was Northernlion’s Let’s Plays that convinced me.

Quinns - Returnal (PS5)

I finished Returnal this month, which was a delight from start to finish. I was sad that the *relentlessly* moody mystery that the game has instead of a story never cohered into an ending (the final level of Returnal barely manages to cough up a finale), but the action was so good that I still walked away totally satisfied.

As a roguelike, death in Returnal means going back to the start of the game, but - if we imagine Returnal as a lengthy, intimidating tightrope walk - the action excels at making you teeter and wobble and panic on the tightrope without fully knocking you off it. Your grip on any given situation always threatens to escape you, but so long as you focus you tend to make it through. It's just gorgeous.

Anni - Unpacking (PC, Xbox, Switch)

After hearing lots of people talking about it, I finally played Unpacking; a game about moving between different houses and filling them with your belongings as you go. Small details hint towards relationships, hobbies, what kind of people cohabit the space. You'll notice when objects come with you from house to house and how, over time, they'll begin to look worn.

The way these items are designed is really satisfying, the objects feel sturdy. This feeling is emphasised by the attention to detail in the sounds they make as they slide, plonk and clink onto surfaces. The pixelated style isn't just about nostalgia but also suits the feeling of things slotting into place. Moving the objects along in increments of pixels makes positions feel purposeful.

However, in real life I really don’t enjoy unpacking, it’s a chore. Not just a chore in the same way washing up is, mindlessly moving cups and bowls from the sink to the drying rack. That process has no real meaning beyond keeping your house from looking gross. The action of unpacking is an emotional chore, in which you're not just rearranging objects but unpacking the sentiment attached to them. I think because of this I found that, in a game where the objects weren’t my own, something was missing. Getting things all lined up and stacked neatly is certainly satisfying, but it always felt like I was unpacking a stranger's belongings rather than my own. In this version of unpacking, neatness became my priority, whereas in reality things don’t always snap into place in a pixel-perfect arrangement. Unpacking can take me days where I leave things strewn all over surfaces. Nostalgia makes me deliberate over where things should live or if I should bin them. These moments of reflection are what separates unpacking from tidying.

Although I didn’t enjoy playing it as much as I’d hoped, going through the motions of unpacking in-game did make me reflect on the relationships I have with the objects that I do own, which ones I've had for a long time and which ones I’ll be ditching when I next move home.