Daily Briefing: Wednesday 2nd March

GMG Union On Strike

Union workers at Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, Lifehacker and The Root are striking. The GMG Union has made proposals to G/O Media’s counsel five times, but rather than counterproposals, they have been sidestepped and delayed each time. They’re striking on 6 specific things: Refusing to codify healthcare improvements, paying too little to retain talent, not providing family leave, insisting on a return to the office despite WFH success, delaying conversations on diversity efforts and threatening forced relocations for staff.

• G/O Media has a grim history of treating employees poorly, high turnover and a whole ton of issues across their entire portfolio of sites. This is just another black mark in the digital media world, unfortunately.

Bandcamp Bought By Epic Games

Music distribution & creator-first purchasing platform Bandcamp have been acquired by Epic Games. Bandcamp claim there will be no changes except access to Epic’s resources.

• These seem like a great match as far as values go for open platforms and artist & user experience, but it also comes with a lot of question marks. Why? Will Harmonix, also owned by Epic, now make a music game with Bandcamp’s resources? Hopefully, we don’t eventually regret this.

Destiny 2 Not Supported On Steam Deck: Try & Get Banned

Bungie’s help page for Destiny 2 has been updated to say that Destiny 2 does not support Proton or the Steam Deck, and “Players who attempt to bypass Destiny 2 incompatibility will be met with a game ban.”. Bungie have not commented, but elsewhere, Epic refuse to support the Steam Deck with Fortnite. When asked why, Tim Sweeney said “We don’t have confidence that we’d be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations including custom ones.”

• The awkward thing is that BattlEye is supported by Linux, so it should be feasible - but Bungie are clearly afraid of their game being ruined by cheaters. A reasonable fear to have, given the state of other online multiplayer shooters, but it just doesn’t feel good for customers.

Steam Deck Stick Drift Fixed! It Was A Software Problem

The issues users were reporting with stick drift on the Steam Deck wasn’t physical, but a firmware issue with deadzone calibration. They’ve pushed a firmware update to fix it, so that’s a major crisis averted - good work, Steam.

• Hopefully, other hardware manufacturers can learn from Steam and stop this pervasive, industry-wide problem.