Daily Briefing: Monday 28th February

GabeN Spotted Hand-Delivering Steam Decks (And Giving Some Away!)

Valve boss Gabe Newell has been spotted doing what seems like Steam promotion in Seattle, hand-delivering signed Steam Decks to customers in the area while followed by a camera crew. Multiple reddit accounts have shared stories of this, including one who claimed that they spotted him, shouted “Hi Gabe!” as he was delivering to his neighbour’s house, only for Gabe to bring over a few over for him and his housemates after.

• Sounds like a dream come true - and of course it’s a PR stunt, but it still seems like an awesome experience. Especially if you got one for free! Mythological appearances like this are what make Gabe a beloved figure in PC gaming.

GabeN Says 50% Of Bitcoin Transactions Were Fraudulent

While speaking to PC Gamer about the Steam Deck, Gabe was asked about the crypto and NFT ban, as well as crypto in general. He said that a lot of actors in the space aren’t ones they want interacting with customers - highlight that 50% of crypto payments being fraudulent. He also noted that Bitcoin fluctuations resulted in a bad user experience for customers. One day, $10, the next, $100. He went on to say that there’s interesting technology in blockchains, but that people haven’t figured out why we actually need a distributed ledger. “And that's sort of where we were at with the blockchain-based NFT stuff: so much of it was ripping customers off. And we were like, 'Yeah, that's not what we want to do, we don't want to enable screwing large numbers of our customers over,’”

• One thing that’s always been fantastic about Valve is that they’ve had the eye on the customer the entire time: They know the user experience of Steam in terms of finding good games, buying and playing them is paramount. Anything that doesn’t serve that isn’t worth dealing with, and I think that attitude is why they’ll forever be the king of PC storefronts, with the community-revered Gabe at their head. That’s a man who speaks the truth for the customer, unafraid of anything.

MiHoYo Spend Genshin Impact Money On Nuclear Fusion (Seriously)

MiHoYo’s Genshin Impact has pulled in over $2 billion in revenue from mobile alone, and while funding a ton of game content across Genshin Impact, Honkai Impact 3rd, Tears of Themis and likely a ton of internal projects, $63m of that money is going to Energy Singularity, a research and development firm attempting to develop nuclear fusion. In short, harnessing nuclear fusion would provide an abundant source of extremely clean energy for the entire world - they have a design concept in mind that should, theoretically, work.

• MiHoYo have a very memorable motto in their logo: Tech Otakus Save The World. Making Genshin Impact isn’t saving the world - it’s entertaining the world and providing culture, but becoming very rich and using that money to solve energy problems... that’s true to their original vision. They previously helped establish a lab to investigate brain-computer interfaces and their potential use in treating depression. That’s two hyper-successful mobile devs taking mobile money and funnelling it elsewhere: Before this, Cygames, makers of Granblue Fantasy, claimed their goal was to make enough money to fund full new AAA titles, and have been working on one for years now.

Bandai Namco Give Employees Substantial Payrise

Bandai Namco, on the heels of Elden Ring’s explosive success, are bumping their employee pay (in-house dev pay only, since they don’t control pay of studios like From) by a substantial amount: basic pay is going up around $5k yearly, with a $2k yearly bump for starting salary for graduates and entry-level employees. A machine-translation of their press release suggests this, along with allowing employees to choose where they work, is part of increasing access to human resources in various fields.

• Basically, they’re treating employees right, but cynically, getting ahead of any potential story. The breadth of employees affecting is unclear, whether Japanese only on including international, but it comes at a time of great success across a line of Bandai Namco games - Tales of Arise and Scarlet Nexus have released to critical success, Tales specifically destroying franchise records and, of course, they publish Elden Ring, which is dominating Steam despite poor PC performance.