Daily Briefing: Tuesday 4th January

Square Enix's controversial NFT pledge causes share price uptick

Square Enix's unexpected (and distinctly unwanted) pivot into NFT and blockchain technologies has already proven to be one of the biggest stories of the admittedly young year, but it's worth talking about again because it already seems to be doing the trick. As poorly received as the news was by fans and observers across the internet, Yosuke Matsuda's pledge to incorporate the controversial technology has caused a surge in Square Enix's stock prices.

• According to a new report from Bloomberg, Matsuda's enthusiasm surround NFTs, blockchain, and all those other buzzwords used in his New Year letter, drove an 8% jump in share prices - Square Enix's biggest single jump since August. Matsuda's comments have caused no small amount of outcry online following an apparent suggestion that players who simply "play to have fun" won't be good enough for Square Enix's new future. Yikes.

Things aren't looking so good at Ken Levine's new studio

That's according to a new report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who writes that “Levine’s managerial style has led to burnout and, former employees say, caused a lot of pain.” Levine's Ghost Story Games studio is seemingly not a great place to be, with half the company's founders having quit alongside a huge chunk of the studio's workforce. Oh, and there's still no sign of a game after eight entire years.

• Levine is obviously best known for his work on the BioShock franchise, and formed Ghost Story Games in 2014 following the closure of BioShock developer Irrational Games. The stated goal of Ghost Story was to focus on narrative-led projects but, according to Schreier, not much has really happened besides a less than stellar working environment. Considering that Levine formed Ghost Story off the back of mass layoffs at Irrational despite the critical and commercial success of BioShock Infinite, then we start to get an idea of how he handles things. Not well, in other words.

Steam breaks its own concurrent user record again

Valve's digital marketplace went through most of 2021 consistently breaking its own concurrent user records thanks to a lot of people still being at home for obvious reasons we're not even going to bother to name. Towards the end of the year things were believed to have evened out somewhat because, really, there's only so many people that can be using Steam at the same time. However big that number, it is still finite and should top out eventually, right? Probably, but it is not this day.

• Steam broke its record again over the weekend, topping out at a fairly crazy 27,942,036 people all Steaming around at the same time. The previous record was just shy of 27m set last year, so we've had a bit of a jump since then. According to analytics site SteamDB, around 8.2m people were in games at the same time while the sizeable remainder were likely browsing the enormous winter sale. Will we see another record break any time soon?