Everything Everywhere Once A Week (11/25/2022)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once a Week, the weekly newsletter in which I talk about video game news and my own thoughts about whatever is going on in the world of gaming and entertainment this week. Happy Thanksgiving to all those who celebrate it — it’s perfectly valid to spend Thanksgiving on your own just doing or eating whatever. The second it becomes a holiday in which you are obligated to spend time with people you’d rather not, then it kind of sucks as a time of rest no matter how good that food is. So whatever you did this Thanksgiving or do in future years, it’s probably totally fine.

Reports of Ninja Gaiden’s Revival May Have Been Exaggerated

A few weeks ago at a talk in South Korea, it was reported that Team Ninja head Fumihiko Yasuda announced planned reboots for both Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive. According to a Ruliweb posting, Yasuda mentioned these series specifically while introducing a slide talking about successful reboots and revivals under the Koei Tecmo banner. Koei Tecmo later reached out to VGC to clarify that, no, this is not what he actually said, and that they had nothing to announce about those series at the time.

I had planned, before this clarification, to write about why a Dead or Alive revival probably wouldn’t work unless they fundamentally rethink their own relationship with that series, but it is seemingly moot. That part is still true, at least; Koei Tecmo lost sight of what audience it wanted to serve with DOA6 and I can’t imagine has really figured that out yet. But the fact that they’re not actually announcing a new DOA seemingly implies that they know that too.

The tougher nut to crack might actually instead be Ninja Gaiden, which is one of many game series that I think are running into the “This could do well, but well enough to justify the cost?” problem many 2000-2010 series find themselves pushed against. The kind of game action fans want is not inexpensive and the best-selling ones of recent years — God of War, Devil May Cry, Nier Automata — are different enough that there’s no real blueprint to follow.

In a world where Nioh 2 alone weren’t selling a third of the entire Ninja Gaiden series’ sales, it might be a no-brainer to try, but they’ve already got a pretty successful action thing going here. Plus there’s Lo Wong coming soon to bridge that Ninja Gaiden gap a bit that maybe makes the continuing adventures of Ryu Hayabusa a little less feasible.

Also possible: they actually did mean they are rebooting these series, fucked up and said it too early, and now they’re backtracking.

Pokemon Scarlet & Violet Sell 10 Million Copies In Three Days

Now that Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet’s online is turned on and final reviews are in, a larger discussion has seemingly emerged over whether the game’s myriad technical problems — which include glitches, terrible performance, and bad texture art — should subsume all the good design work the game is doing. After watching my partner finish the game, it was to my mind probably the best Pokemon generation since Gen V, my previous title holder, and possibly even better in some key spots. But the things that hold it back do so with such aggressiveness that calling the package as a whole mediocre may be entirely too kind.

There are observably people out there for whom Pokemon’s lackluster (or anti-luster) performance is in fact No Big Deal, a thing that I’m happy for them for even if they choose to be annoyingly prideful of this personal preference prioritization as if it were a virtue all on its own. That’s great that this stuff doesn’t bother you! It’s even more incredible if you somehow had the unicorn playthrough where nothing really went wrong. But it’s clear that this isn’t the norm at this point and it probably should be appropriately called out.

However, Nintendo proudly announced this week that the game has sold 10 million copies in three days, marking it as one of the fastest-selling games of all time. This doesn’t ensure that no lessons will be learned, but it certainly implies that no lessons will be learned.

When I was in Tokyo, I hit two different Pokemon Centers on launch weekend. They were packed with purchasing customers and employees in blue shirts and orange ties were running between the stock room and the shelves to replenish all the Fuecocos and Sprigatitos and Miraidons that were being stuffed into shopping bags. It was, if nothing else, an illustration of why these games are so ridiculously rushed. The series has generated $61.1 billion dollars of merchandise over the years and a Pokemon game that gets delayed two months or five months or God forbid a year means losing out on all those people tearing plushes from Pokemon Center shelves.

There’s no real solution beyond telling people to make less money. Game Freak’s designers may be interested in their games not being dragged for poor performance, but the C-suite executives there are just as much a part of the decision-making process as any other entity and they like profits as much as anyone else. I have to imagine even if there was interest in “fixing” Scarlet & Violet, the studio is likely already pivoting most of its resources toward the next game they will not have time to finish in three years. Or maybe it’s a Pokemon Legends or a Let’s Go or a DLC that doesn’t actually fix any of this. Who knows at this point.

There’s no motivational force quite like the endless, voracious need for more money. (Please subscribe to my Patreon.)

Masahiro Sakurai Hints At Kid Icarus: Uprising Remaster

I’m a sicko that really liked Kid Icarus: Uprising, one of the first major games revealed for the Nintendo 3DS way back in 2010. The problem for many is that the game utilized a control scheme that was painful at worst and cumbersome at best: Using the analog stick for movement and the touchscreen for aiming and camera movement. For the way the game was designed, the scheme made sense for the best possible shooting. For the way human hands are designed, it pretty much needed specific positioning to be viable.

People have long been asking for a modern remaster of the game that simply uses dual-analog controls, but Nintendo has weirdly failed to acknowledge the title much at all, and director Masahiro Sakurai has only referred to the game’s development as “difficult.” Sakurai himself, though, may be hinting that a remaster is in the works in his latest YouTube video about designing the original 3DS title.

“It sure would be nice to play Kid Icarus: Uprising on a home console,” Sakurai says at the end of the video with a wry smile. “I wonder if someone out there will ever port it?”

Sakurai usually doesn’t talk out of school and give hints. He’s no Tom Holland just openly discussing future MCU plans in interviews. If he’s hinting about a remaster, it’s safe to say Nintendo has given him permission to publicly hint about a game that is currently in development. It seems exceedingly unlikely that Sakurai is trying to create interest in a project that has not been greenlit or is talking about an unannounced game unofficially in any capacity.

In April of this year, Bandai Namco put up multiple job listings for a “3D action game project” on a Nintendo contract. The job in question was to remaster 3D backgrounds to HD. There’s nothing indicating this is Kid Icarus: Uprising, but I would not be out-and-out shocked if it were.

The Microsoft/Sony Activision Acquisition War Has Gotten Absurd

This past week, as European Union and U.K. regulators examine Microsoft’s $70 billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard, both Sony and Microsoft have upped their arguments over the deal into a genuinely absurd war of the words.

In recent documents, Sony has suggested that Microsoft is trying to essentially box PlayStation into a Nintendo-like arena devoid of first-person shooters. Microsoft countered this by pointing out that Sony just acquired Bungie which, exclusivity or not, definitely shoots holes into the “we will have no shooters left” argument. Microsoft also tried to argue that Call of Duty is not that big a deal, considering it never wins any Game of the Year awards from critical outlets. Sony then correctly points out that Call of Duty finishes at the top of the NPD every year so it’s not like critical acclaim is the only thing that matters here.

There’s two fronts on which this war is being fought: Concessions and PR. Let’s talk about PR here first. It very much benefits Sony to openly complain about what a big fucking problem this whole thing is. They want the industry to take notice that Microsoft is actively buying huge chunks of it and that, to Sony’s perspective, causes an unfair shift in the competition. Realistically, I am not sure Jim Ryan thinks they can stop this deal from going through on their own, but a narrative that Microsoft is screwing video games so that they can get you on Game Pass — and then, who knows, maybe do something nefarious like jacking up the price because they no longer have to compete — could help mitigate this loss for them.

It also paints PlayStation as an underdog in a market where they’re largely dominating in the next-gen console space, which is useful for when you want to raise prices of your own.

The other front here is concessions. Even if Sony believes that they cannot stop the acquisition, they can use regulatory pressure to extract more concessions from Microsoft. Phil Spencer has offered numerous timeframes for how long they expect to keep putting Call of Duty on PlayStation and that number has increased as Sony continues to needle the deal. Given significant pressure, it’s possible that Sony could come away from this deal by keeping Activision games on PlayStation platforms as well beyond Call of Duty, like Tony Hawk or future Diablo games or Crash Bandicoot.

Or, most importantly, remove that time limit from Call of Duty altogether.

All of which they might actually get, as Politico reports that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking to file a lawsuit to block the acquisition as soon as next month. Such a lawsuit is not unheard of, but this would easily be the biggest example of the FTC trying to block a merger in this administration. This is not confirmed yet and the FTC’s commissioners could swing the other way on it, but it’s very likely they will at least move forward with a heavy investigation.

Just this past week, the FTC successfully blocked the merger between publishers Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, finding that the deal would substantially lessen competition in the U.S. market by combining the top two bidders for publishing rights of major books. If they find something similar in the U.S. gaming market, which is definitely not out of the question, they could take it to trial and could also successfully block the Activision acquisition.

It remains an open question of what happens after that. It might severely blunt Microsoft’s acquisition spree and would likely stop the company — which has spent over a year on this purchase so far — from any other large-scale acquisitions. Once bitten, twice shy, they say.

Even if absolutely everything from Activision were on all consoles from here on out, it benefits Sony to ensure that they do not fold into the Microsoft umbrella. While Call of Duty on PlayStation in perpetuity is great for Sony, a $70 Call of Duty on PlayStation that is not also part & parcel of a Game Pass subscription across the aisle is even better for them.

I suppose it all remains to be seen. If the FTC truly does decide to pursue this, it is certainly possible that the whole thing does get blocked. But I’d never, ever count out that entities with money can kinda just do whatever they want in America. As I said earlier, there’s no motivational force quite like the endless, voracious need for more money. (Please subscribe to my Patreon.)