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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (2/10/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once a Week, a weekly newsletter powered by your Patreon contributions. Every week, we run down the biggest stories in gaming with a mixture of news and personal thoughts. While the obvious news to cover is the Nintendo Direct this week, we did kind of aptly cover that show with this week’s Materia Possessions, though I will be touching on a few bits from it. First, I want to talk general Nintendo numbers.

The Switch is Currently the Third Best-Selling Console of All Time But That’s Not the Important Number

This past quarter, the Switch overcame the Gameboy and the PlayStation 4 to become the third best-selling console of all time. It is only behind the DS and the PlayStation 2, which are themselves only a million apart at 154 million and 155 million respectively. To beat either of those consoles, the Switch would have to sell another 30 million units and change, which is not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Logical thinking suggests it will probably come up short of that number in the autumn years of its life, but games like Tears of the Kingdom and the inevitable next Pokemon could be the exact right titles to drag it over that line.

That software is key, though, because the number no one is talking about is that the Switch is closing in a billion software units sold. That would make Nintendo’s hybrid platform the second console ever to reach this number. The first is the PlayStation 2 with over 1.5 billion games sold, a number the Switch is almost certainly not going to reach, though it reached most of the way there in significantly less time on the market.

The reason this number is significant is because it is both representative of the way the gaming market has changed in the last two decades and that it also gives Nintendo important data about how Switches are purchased. It might seem odd for there to be more Switch games sold than on consoles with higher userbases, like the DS, but that there are gives us insight into how much digital distribution has changed things. It’s a lot more convenient to buy games from a digital store now and variable pricing that this opened up — giving options that range from $2.99 to $69.99 — means that a lot of smaller purchases are made more often. This seems obvious, sure, but try telling yourself in 2008 that this is how numbers will inflate.

It also tells us that while Switch hardware sales can in some way be attributed to people buying multiple systems, it’s either statistically marginal or that the Switch has somehow tapped into a game buying audience far beyond other hardcore gaming platforms. I think it’s just more likely that the Switch hardware is mostly selling to unique players, if not unique households.

That said, this household has two people and four Switches so maybe I’m arguing against myself here.

Game Numbers!

• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is at 52 million units. It’s not GTA6 numbers, but nothing is. Assuming the DLC has kept the sales momentum going, it might be fair to credit the Expansion Pass as the most successful post-launch DLC a video game has ever had.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sold more in the last quarter than Bayonetta 3 has period.
• That said, Bayonetta 3 did surprisingly alright. At 1.04 million, it’s clear there was a Switch bump for the game as anticipated, but it’s a little lower that I expected. It has sold exactly as much in one quarter as Bayonetta 2 on Switch had sold in two years.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3, despite all indications that it should have blown past Xenoblade 2 and Xenoblade: Definitive Edition in sales, is selling beyond the latter and slower than the former. It is entirely possible that Xenoblade 3 does not end up outselling Xenoblade 2. Part of that could be that the first year of the Switch had, by definition, a smaller library and thus far fewer options. It could have been that, as derided as they were, Xenoblade 2’s hornier designs did appeal more to a silent JRPG audience. Xenoblade 3 could also in theory just rally with DLC or a slower spring season. At the moment, though, the series occupies a niche that is less consistent than expected.
• There is a possible argument in these two examples that, for the more “hardcore” games that aren’t named like Mario or Zelda, fans took their bites of the apple already and are satiated or in some other way done with the Switch. Maybe Astral Chain did better because it was an interesting new thing that came out when the Switch was hotter. Bayonetta 3 looking comparatively “old” despite being a better game might mean slower sales than expected, but that’s also assuming a lot about the future.
• Pokemon Scarlet & Violet clock in at 20.61 million copies, a number I’m admittedly conflicted about. Great sales for a surprisingly well-designed Pokemon game, but as much as sales can send a message, I wonder what this says to Nintendo and Game Freak. That game is embarrassing in a lot of bad ways, but it’s also clear that much of the audience just doesn’t care. Is that a good thing? Should not caring about some actual real, fucked up issues with a game be laudable? I guess we’ll have to see with the next Pokemon game whether Game Freak takes it on their own shoulders to improve or if the modus operandi from here on out will just be “Ship it and fix it later if we have time.”
• Splatoon’s lifetime sales were 4.91 million and it was enough to convince Nintendo the game was a hit. Splatoon 2 matched those sales in five months. Splatoon 3 has doubled Splatoon 2’s five-month sales in four months.
• In its various permutations, News Super Mario Bros. U has sold around 20 million units. To put it another way, massive success Marvel’s Spider-Man sold about the same amount combining PS4, PS5, and PC sales.
• Kirby and the Forgotten Land is chugging along, having picked up nearly a million extra sales in the last quarter. It broke the series record before that, but is extending its lead over Kirby’s Dreamland, the previous record holder.

If Games Are Selling This Well, Why is the Price Going Up?

Honestly not a terrible question and one that has new relevance in the face of Nintendo announcing that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to a game that has sold 30 million copies, is going to cost $10 more than the first game did in 2017. There’s been a lot of shock and annoyance about this and people declaring with absolute certainty that it’s not justified. But is that accurate? Well, kinda?

[For simplicity’s sake, I’m mostly going to use American prices and talk about the market here, I know games cost more elsewhere.]

Video games are shockingly resilient against inflation. Cartridge prices made the 90s kind of a wild west of inconsistently exorbitant MSRPs, but the disc era and beyond kept prices per-platform pretty level. We also treated those prices as a direct consequence of the technology of the platform — handheld games were cheaper because those games were not as pricey to make, which made sense to the average consumer. Game prices went up with the HD era because the technology got better and the argument that HD assets cost more — higher definition, uh, by definition — is easy to swallow.

For marketing purposes, pairing those increases with technological arguments makes total sense. It is easy to visually look at Gears of War compared to, say, The Bouncer and say the former is a $60 video game while the other made sense at $50. But it also meant that game companies just kicked the can down the road for the next price increase. Game prices going up should have been treated as an inevitability, but that argument rightfully makes consumers upset, so it was framed differently to just get it through the door. As a result, we started treating games as requiring a visual upgrade to justify the cost.

You can see this on a different scale with indie games. There was a time where the idea of any game on XBLA costing more $14.99 was treated as an affront. I have burned into my memory a rumor that Castle Crashers, a hotly-anticipated arcade brawler, was going to be $19.99 and people got so upset that the developers had to publish an image of one of the knights shrugging with a shocked look captioned “The price has not been announced yet!!!”

And still today you see resistance to games with pixel art or simpler graphics being over $30 or $40. A game that’s locked to a 2D perspective costing $60 genuinely upsets people and if you press them on it, you will usually be told that it’s seemingly less work to put out a game like, say, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze than Horizon: Forbidden West.

Which it may actually be, but it allows people to think that they are getting a deal for a massive game with significant 3D artwork at full price and anything that does not hew to that standard is not a deal. So when that ceiling raises, they are no longer getting that deal. But the complexity of art design is not where the money in game development generally goes, it’s everything about a game. Design, iteration, stubborn bugs, inspiration from other material, etc. It’s hours paid. Yes, those hours go up with higher definition assets, but it’s only one part of the overall package of things getting more complex and taking longer.

Games cost more to make largely because teams are bigger and they take longer.

And it’s easier to say, well let’s cut down on long development cycles, celebrity voice actors, game length, etc. But we also celebrate those things openly and in many cases reward them with sales and awards and cultural cache far beyond the games that don’t do them.

The question then comes to justification, does a publisher making profit on their games need to raise the prices on their games? Probably not. There are probably solutions and workarounds to it. They could scale the games back, though we’ve talked about why they don’t do that. They could be less reactive to market trends, they could work with smaller teams, etc. They have decided, however, that the better solution is to up the game cost. They do not “need” to raise costs, but they have decided other options do not work for them.

It’s worth noting that when Breath of the Wild came out, it was $59.99. That same $60 is equivalent to $73.52 now. The problem with accounting for inflation is that wages remain stagnant as buying power decreases and cost of living skyrockets, so raising prices makes for tighter wallets rather than an equivalent purchase at a higher number. Games traditionally resist this, but as luxury items, I’d probably rather they go up than, like, food. Unfortunately both just go up.

But I understand fully why people get upset about it. I don’t think it’s greed — not directly, at least. It’s greed in the sense that companies are trying to maintain a status quo, but the $10 price raise does not significantly raise bottom lines.

I think people are right to be wary of price increases. And I think people should measure where they think their own personal line is for how much something is worth and either buy at that price or not. But stop thinking this is just about how a game looks. That’s a path that’s only going to make this untenable.

Other Things:

• A brand new Materia Possessions this week covering the Nintendo Direct and games we’ve been playing like Infernax, Hi-Fi Rush, Magic the Gathering, and more.
• I had not yet finished Infernax when we recorded that podcast, but I have now. I think that game’s fine but a lot of the cheap parts really frustrated me. I suppose when we want the nostalgic feel of old games, we want them to also feel more modern in the right ways. This game has some ol’ bullshit here and there that I’d rather do without.

Materia Possessions 08 - Podcasting with Determination ~Iwatodai Station Remix~

Welcome  to Materia Possessions! This week, Nerium, Andrea, and Imran talk about finishing Fire Emblem Engage, the Simon's Quest-ness of Infernax, Hi-Fi Rush, Magic the Gathering, Persona 3 Portable, and even a weird digression into Big Bang Theory. Why? I assure you that none of us know.

The crew also covers this week's Nintendo Direct and talks a bit  about how the $70 video game price is coming for us no matter what we do about it.

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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (02/03/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once a Week, a Patreon-fueled weekly newsletter where we talk about the biggest stories in gaming over the past week. There’s a lot to cover this week, so let’s just roll right into it.

Every Games-As-A-Service is Shutting Down (Except the Big Ones)

This week, we got sunsetting announcements from Knockout City, Crossfire X, Crime Sight, Apex Legends Mobile, and Rumbleverse in a span of around five days. The timing on all this is grim and conjures up the image of a reaper gliding through a field of games and scything everything along the way. That’s kind of what happened, except that the grim reaper is “unrealistic market expectations” and it was summoned by “financial year timing.”

Most of these games are under a year old, some are quite successful, and some are huge failures in one region that are popular elsewhere in the world. There’s actually quite a variety in the situations here, but ultimately they’re all kind of coming down to the same resolution: there probably is not a ton of room for lifestyle games in the marketplace right now.

We’ll start with Knockout City, because they had a surprisingly candid blog post about the entire thing. In the post, developer Velan is fairly concise about the problem of trying to maintain a live-service game that is growing beyond your means:

“Despite over 12 million players and billions of KOs around the globe, there are several aspects of the game in need of major disruption to better attract and retain enough players to be sustainable. Since we are a small, indie studio, it’s simply impossible for us to make those kinds of systemic changes in the live game while continuing to support it. So it became clear to us that we needed to take a step back and pave the way for Velan to do what we do best by innovating.”

So in Knockout City’s case, the game got too popular too fast, leading to them not being able to keep up in terms of resources or innovation. The developers are releasing a private-server version of the game and also just making all the items free.

In the case of CrossFire X, the Xbox release came along with Remedy’s single-player campaign and both were lambasted to hell and back by critics and fans alike. The only thing more likely than someone disliking playing CrossFire X is them not knowing what CrossFire X is in the first place. Pair that with the multitude of options available on Xbox Game Pass, including Halo Infinite multiplayer, Fortnite, or Apex Legends, and you have a recipe for a completely invisible game.

Rumbleverse, the melee-focused battle royale, lasted barely six months but by all accounts was fairly popular and well-liked. Developer Iron Galaxy didn’t state the reason for closure, nor did publisher Epic Games, but it seems reasonable to assume that there is a number somewhere higher that the game did not hit.

These three examples are almost entirely unique from each other despite all being live-service games. In Knockout City’s case, they grew too fast and couldn’t scale up in time being a smaller indie studio despite initially being backed by Electronic Arts. For Rumbleverse, they were published by Epic who has multiple battle royale and F2P games, but didn’t establish itself fast enough to make a cut. CrossFire X just seemed to be an all-around failure despite internationally being one of the most popular online games in the world and they decided to just call it rather than keep trying to make it happen in the west.

But that all kind of leads to the same truth: if you cannot get established immediately, or have such low overhead that your game can sit in the background until it pops off, there’s almost no chance to fit your “lifestyle” game into an already crowded market. And that establishment has to be a linear upward curve — the game has to be so popular that you can hire people to keep it current and has to grow so consistently that you can justify those hirings both retroactively and for the future. That’s an insane metric that will never work for most studios!

Compare Rumbleverse to Epic’s other free-to-play games, for example. Both Fall Guys and Rocket League were already established and Epic simply acquired the studios rather than launching something new. They did go free-to-play afterward, but they had an existing base, monetization model, and cultural cache. Then there’s Fortnite, which had none of those things, but came into a relatively empty market and already had a warm nest capable of massively scaling up once it started taking off.

To get to that same level, Rumbleverse would have had to become an utterly massive success within around three months and over-justify the number of people working on it so it had the room to scale up. This isn’t a scenario where a game like Among Us can just blow up a few years later, these games are built on a hope that is exceedingly unlikely to ever come to fruition and must be handled perfectly when it does.

Imagine you’ve decided to start running in the morning and your goal is to hit six miles on the second day. Also, there’s already established runners on the trail who will knock you over by just existing near you. That doesn’t sound very conducive to a long-term habit.

I am not sure how you really solve this problem. I guess my main advice here is, unless you have a real good hook to your multiplayer game or have scoped it in such a way that you’re comfortable existing with a lower ceiling, it’s probably not a sustainable path right now.

Electronic Arts Cancels Unannounced Single-Player Titanfall/Apex Legends Game

According to a story at Bloomberg, EA this week axed an unannounced Titanfall/Apex game that had been in development at Respawn. Codenamed Titanfall Legends, the game would reportedly have the return of Titanfall 2’s BT alongside characters from Apex Legends to bridge the two series’ shared universe together.

I’ve not tested this Patreon to see how you guys feel about me going “Yeah I had heard about that too,” but we’re going to test it this week because I’m going to do it twice. As far as I am aware, this project has been in development for roughly two years and Respawn had been incredibly excited about it. I can’t speak to what caused the cancellation, but staff had mentioned to me that they were worried about EA’s unofficial “ten million or more” threshold for single-player games coming back to bite them.

It seems unlikely that would be the only reason a game like this would get canceled, especially with major critical successes like Dead Space and Jedi Fallen Order coming from the publisher, but who knows. It’s possible that the closure of Apex Legends Mobile may have required shifting of resources to rebuild that internally at Respawn without Tencent as a partner.

Either way, this is disappointing. Titanfall 2 deserves a follow-up.

E3 Likely Loses Major Console Platform Holders

In an exclusive by IGN, the outlet reports that Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo are all intending to skip out of the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June of this year. This would mark the first time in the event’s history that all three major platform holders are choosing not to have any presence on the show floor, though that definition gets a little sweaty the more you try to categorize it.

You may remember that I said something similar last week, but IGN did great work in confirming it through strong reporting. The overall feeling about this year’s show had been optimistic until it became time for companies to start planning their presence in Los Angeles this year. For most major exhibitors, E3 is costly at its most basic, and an increasingly-unjustifiable expense for the bigger booths. Even just being near E3 with your own adjacent conference is expensive, not to mention it’s a lot of money to spend to inconvenience the people who are there to see you.

I suspect most people reading this have seen a fair few arguments of why E3 is dying and, I would guess, are fairly tired of them. I have seen people complaining about game journalists — the cabal that we are — are dancing on the show’s grave when it’s responsible for so many good memories of them. More than once, I have seen people mourn the loss of the “gamer christmas” that E3 represented.

Here’s the thing: of fucking course it’s gamer christmas for you. It’s like you have 30 parents and all of them are divorced and vying for your attention. It just sucks for those 10, or 20, or 29 parents you don’t pay attention to and have spent a small fortune trying to win accolades.

Which doesn’t take away from you being able to enjoy it, but you’re an adult, understand why this thing is unfeasible now. There was a perfect middleground where streaming was becoming bigger, so you could see these events live, but it was not so big and easy that these companies realized they did not need to physically be in one place to get their marketing out. That era has mostly passed.

E3 doesn’t force anyone to give you announcements or trailers, it merely provided an excuse to do so if they were already inclined. I understand mourning what E3 was, but let’s rush ahead through the transition of whatever the next thing is, because the things you loved about E3 are the things you loved about communal experiences and are inherently ephemeral anyway.

You Can’t Put Ashley in a Dumpster Anymore and That’s Good

Some new Resident Evil 4 remake details have come out this week courtesy of my former workplace Game Informer, including some changes to how Ashley works from the original game. Notably, Ashley functions more like a character you need to escort than one you can just put into a garbage-suitcase safe from bad guys until you’ve cleared them out.

Now, I’m not someone with a lot of complaints about Resident Evil 4. If you press me, I’m sure I can tell you that some writing has not aged very well, or the island is not as good as the castle, or whatever. I don’t think that putting Ashley in hiding places was bad at the time, but I think having her stick by you in the midst of the action and the danger is for sure better.

I know, I know, I am asking for more escort mission-like changes, but hear me out here.

In Resident Evil 4, Ashley is essentially an extension of Leon’s character. She does not move unless you have pressed a button telling her to move. She is as much a playable character as Leon is, just without as much to do. By placing her in a box while you do cool action guy stuff, you’re essentially eliminating a mechanic for a little while. It’s like putting on armor for a fight.

Does this drastically change anything? No. But it says to me they realize keeping Ashley safe — a character who does not run off on her own or do anything without your say-so — is a fundamental part of the game. That excites me, because they’re thinking about how all the gears fit together.

If You’re Using Twitter to Log In to Things, Stop

This week, the brain geniuses at Twitter decided that they are no longer going to make Twitter’s previously-free API quite so free now. They intend to make API calls, which include things like the Ace Attorney Bot or the Daniel Craig Weekend Bot or, it turns out, logins into services using your Twitter account, cost money now. At least one game is ringing the alarm bell about this.

Hoyoverse, the developers of Genshin Impact, have asked that players who have previously signed up for accounts through Twitter go into their account pages and switch their linked accounts to Hoyoverse ones instead. They state that if players don’t do this, they’re at risk of no longer being able to log in to their accounts, which could contain quite a lot of invested time and money.

While I haven’t seen a lot of other developers issue this warning, I think it would probably be good sense to follow the same advice. In fact, maybe just don’t log in to other services using a Twitter, Google, or Facebook account. You never know when an idiot will take over and just fuck the whole thing up.

Anyway, I wonder how Hoyoverse feels about all their Elon Musk references these days?

Other Things:

• We’ll have a new Materia Possessions next week with Natalie, Andrea, and Nerium! Will there be a Nintendo Direct to talk about? We'll see!
• I’m close to the end of Fire Emblem Engage and I’m kinda baffled at the mediocre reviews. I suppose that’s a matter of priority, as many of them cite the admittedly paper-thin story, a thing that does not matter much to me here. The actual tactics are so good that I can’t really be bothered by that.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (1/27/2023)

It’s sort of grim that last week’s newsletter is already slightly out of date — not in the sense that any of the information in it is incorrect or that I wasn’t hard enough on the corporate apathy of human lives angle, but that there’s been a lot more layoffs since then so my already non-exhaustive list has several more notable exclusions. In that vein, I’ll dedicate this week’s newsletter to the life and death of Washington Post’s Launcher vertical, perhaps once the best evidence that mainstream news organizations are taking the giant gaming industry seriously as both a craft and an economic force. I myself have published writing with them before. They got unceremoniously dumped by the Washington Post this week days after Walking Thumb and owner Jeff Bezos visited the newspaper. A man that makes more money in minutes than any of the laid off journalists make in a year decided those people needed to lose their livelihoods. I guess a thing to think about the next time Amazon Prime raises its prices while simultaneously banning bathroom breaks.

Anyway, on that cheery note, let’s get into this past week’s news.

All Things Xbox

After essentially no-showing The Game Awards, Xbox seemed keenly aware that they were letting the communications pipeline with their audience wither slightly from disuse. Their not-E3 showing last June was strong and was itself relatively future-proof by promising that everything shown from Silksong to Starfield was coming out in the next year. The enthusiast audience doesn’t seem to believe that in and of itself is a license to skip big events, however, so Xbox produced a Developer Direct this week to give some updates and a new announcement to stop the incessant knocking at the proverbial door.

Was it successful? I suppose that depends a lot on the intention, but it shut some people up and accentuated the volume of a lot of other questions.

The key complaint about Xbox over the last generation and a half is that their first-party lineup has been barebones at the most generous and lackluster at the worst. There’s occasional bright spots, like Pentinment, but as bright as those spots are, they’re never intended to be comparisons to first-party efforts on Switch or PlayStation 5. Inevitably, however, they get compared to things like God of War Ragnarok and Breath of the Wild because there aren’t a lot of other comparison points, and it gives the impressions of a Microsoft on their back heels rather than one trying desperately to get games out.

This livestream didn’t, like, solve that. It was not a coming out party for the next few years of Xbox’s first-party software or a surprise debutante ball shocking everyone that actually 2023 is going to be absolutely chock-full of banger AAA titles every month or two. That was an unrealistic hope to begin with and no one, or at least no one with any sense of practicality, seriously thought that was possible. It did dive deep on a few games and showed off a few others.

I’m not sure what anyone wants me to say about Minecraft Legends or Forza Motorsport; they’re games that are going to serve their audiences well and the particular ways they do so will more or less be beyond me. Cars look good, I hope Minecraft Legends is fun and I am glad that series is doing well after creator Hatsune Miku retired.

I had to catch Redfall later, as we recorded an episode of Materia Possessions in the middle of it. Catching it later, though, Redfall looks good. I was going a bit more cynical about the game after the initial reveal, if only because CGI tone trailers don’t really do it for me anymore, but actually taking time out to explain the game and realizing that it will come with a built-in Game Pass audience probably helps a decent bit.

The only actual reveal of this Direct, which did not advertise itself as a reveal-heavy stream, was Hi-Fi Rush from Tango Gameworks. So let’s talk about that for a second.

The Devil May Cry’s Chord

Hi-Fi Rush was both announced and shadow dropped this week, which is usually a sign that the game was probably not worth a marketing budget. In this case, however, revealing and then letting people immediately play the game provided a sense of being utterly blitzed by something innovative, colorful, and self-assured in a way most games don’t really feel like these days.

The newest game from Tango and The Evil Within 2 Director John Johanas is sort of like Devil May Cry by way of Crypt of the Necrodancer, establishing an entire battle system around the beat of the world. Essentially, actions are performed on-beat and you’re rewarded for timing your button presses to the music, though not punished for failing to do so. This concept is aided by a great artstyle and fun writing.

Moreover, I think Hi-Fi Rush actually got me rethinking a firmly established idea in my head. I love modern Capcom games, but there’s no argument that the publisher is different from previous decades — most publishers are, really. The kind of Capcom that let developers experiment with weird shit like Viewtiful Joe mostly doesn’t exist anymore and is more tuned-in to their greatest hits of games like Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, etc. This is not without exception, but it is more or less true.

The Capcom that birthed Clover, you would logically assume, became PlatinumGames because that’s where those actual people went. But the soul of that Capcom, the kind of cultural “We Can Make Anything From Horror Movies to Saturday Morning Cartoons” mentality has permeated a lot of different studios, with Tango obviously being one successor to that spirit. Hi-Fi Rush seems like it could have slotted perfectly right next to any of the Capcom 5 on the GameCube, which is a hell of a compliment.

Xbox Does Not Commit to E3

In an interview with IGN, Phil Spencer confirmed that another Xbox event will probably once again be held in the summer, but wouldn’t go as far as to say it would be related to E3.

But, when asked outright if Xbox would have a presence at E3, Spencer stopped short of any kind of confirmation one way or the other.

"Well, we pick our time for our showcase specifically so that we're there," he said. "E3 is just, to me, one of the seminal moments of gaming. I love the history of going down to LA, thousands of people there, getting to see great new things...getting to see people in the industry, the fan events that we've had. I definitely want that to continue."

It’s entirely possible that Spencer, who presumably by the summer will own several large chunks of the Entertainment Software Association, does not want to directly tie the show to E3 and make an unintentional show of force. They also might want to save those specific announcements for closer to the June show.

I personally have been hearing more and more consternation with E3 over the last year and would not be shocked if none of the major platform holders have E3-branded events. That doesn’t mean there won’t be shows in June, just that they’re distancing themselves from the Electronic Entertainment Expo itself. Until or unless the ESA specifically says the company you’re looking forward to seeing will be there, I would maybe hold off on buying a ticket to the convention center.

Dead Space Remake Seems Good

I’m not necessarily surprised, but it does seem like critics and fans alike agree that the Dead Space remake is a winner. I’m quite interested to see how well it sells, especially with The Callisto Protocol as a comparison point. The latter sold about two million copies before the end of the year, a number that publisher Krafton said fell short of their expectations of five million copies, so I’m curious if Dead Space can beat that.

Assuming it does do well, what does that mean for Motive and for the series going forward? Remakes of Dead Space 2 and the fairly-maligned Dead Space 3 seem obvious, but I think pitching a Dead Space 4 or something like that might be a better, smarter call. It seems especially logical from a publisher that is pursuing similar seq-boots in Mass Effect and Dragon Age at the moment.

We’ll see! For now, Motive should just be happy they’ve got a critically-acclaimed game out there, because the past few years have not been kind to them.

Kenny Omega and Rahul Kohli Are Cameos in Like A Dragon: Ishin

SEGA YOU HAVE MY MODEL DATA JUST PUT ME IN THE GAME

I’M BASICALLY A LESS ATTRACTIVE RAHUL KOHLI

Check Out This Trailer for Granblue Fantasy: Relink

The action-RPG Granblue Fantasy: Relink has been very delayed over the years, but CyGames has finally released a new trailer for it and it looks exciting. You can check it out here.

I can never publicly share what I heard about the original version of this game, but I’ll always kind of wonder how that would have shaped up if it had ever come to fruition. I did see a gameplay demo of it behind closed doors once that was impressive, but who knows how much of that was really a game at that point.

Neil Druckmann Comments On Sequels for Uncharted and The Last of Us

We’ll close things out on this story for the week, because it speaks to how much cache Naughty Dog has been allowed with their series. In an interview with Buzzfeed, Naughty Dog chief Neil Druckmann commented on possible sequels to Uncharted and The Last of Us, stating:

“For us, Uncharted was insanely successful — Uncharted 4 was one of our best selling games — and we’re able to put our final brushstroke on that story and say that we’re done. We’re moving on. Likewise, with The Last of Us, it’s up to us whether we want to continue or not.”

There are probably a lot of people who don’t think Uncharted should end, but I see no better time for it to end than when the creators are explicitly done with the story. Similarly, I see a lot of wishing for a TLOU Part III, but I think the last thing any narrative-based series needs is an attempt to strain for longer than it needs to. (Though I am also of the belief that I maybe didn’t need a Part II, either.)

Other Things:

• Hell of a Materia Possessions this week, where we talk about Forspoken, Fire Emblem Engage, Season, and picked what games we are excited about for 2023.
• Check out Natalie’s review of Season
• I like The Last of Us TV show but I don't like the changes from spores to tendrils/hive mind. Feels like they just didn't want to put their actors in masks.
• I started Pikmin 3 and right when I was at the point where I was like “Oh finally the game is about to open up,” it ends? Like, fairly abruptly? Very oddly paced game.

Materia Possessions 07 - (Don't) Burn Your Life Savings

It's Materia Possessions time, maybe the most popular gaming podcast in New  Zealand! This week, John, Natalie, Mike Williams, and Imran get together to speak about Forspoken, engage about Fire Emblem Engage,  and....season about Season. Is the clowning on Forspoken's dialogue  justified? Does Fire Emblem Engage have what it takes to stand among the series' best? Could Season genuinely be a transformative experience? Listen to the podcast this week and find out!

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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (1/20/2023)

It’s been about a month since the last newsletter, which is my fault, as I’ve been traveling for the holidays/work and been generally busy. Combined with a lack of news for January, I kind of let the newsletter slide a bit. It’s understandable if you deleted your Patreon subscription, but the next few months should have quite a bit more content than usual, so I’d be pretty appreciative if you would like to come back. Regardless, there’s still a lack of news, so I wanted to cover one topic in-depth this week.

What’s With All The Layoffs?

In the past six months, there have been layoffs at IGN, Gamespot, Giant Bomb, Game Informer
Unity, G4TV, Microsoft (343, The Coalition, general software and engineering), Riot, Vox
Vice, TechRadar Gaming, Android Central, Windows Central, iMore
Motherboard, Upcomer, Hangar 13, Alphabet

Oh, right, and Fanbyte.

And this is far from an exhaustive list. At some point, the incidents become a pattern, the pattern becomes data, and that data becomes something to analyze with suspicion. What on Earth is happening in the gaming industry, both in journalism and development, that mandates or in any way justifies this level of people losing their jobs? Is there even anything that comes close?

I think to start discussing this, we need to ask ourselves if layoffs themselves are ever justified. In principle, sure. There are times where a company has massively overgrown, or the pay differential between the top of the company and the bottom is not so large that cutting the top’s pay would save jobs, etc. Sometimes a company is staring down the barrel of insolvency unless jobs are cut and, under the capitalistic system we’ve decided will be our preferred yoke, layoffs are the only option to tanking the entire company. It sucks, and isn’t morally correct, but it makes sense. Weirdly, there’s a Yakuza 4 quest about exactly this.

Now that we have established in what cases layoffs are justified, let’s start talking about the rest of this garbage truck on fire that’s been happening the last six months and why it’s not at all justified.

“The Games Industry is Booming”

Any mainstream news story about the video game industry starts by talking about how the industry itself is making lots of money. “Gaming is bigger than movies,” they might say. “It’s not just Pac-Man Fever anymore, gaming is a billion dollar industry!” a news presenter will proclaim with a sense of awe above the bafflement bubbling just underneath.

A booming gaming industry, at least in theory, should lift all gaming-related boats. More money in means more money going to the people that create games and then create analysis, reviews, etc. about those games. In terms of growth, the industry is getting bigger, with more people involved in making a game than ever before, which means games cost more than ever before to make. So when you’re looking at a sheet of numbers and costs, salaries come right off the page to slap you in the face and are an easy target for layoffs. Tuck this idea into the back of your head, because I’m going to come back to it later.

On the game journalism side, content creators are constantly at the mercy of external factors. The game industry may be booming, but what happens if the content people are looking for does not leave itself open for constant coverage? A game like Elden Ring will have a burst of attention and then probably slowly ebb off as the game fails to put out new content whether by intention or otherwise. Which leaves dozens of outlets competing for coverage on games like Destiny 2, Apex Legends, Warzone, etc. with guides and suggestions and very little completely unique writing or analysis.

And even if you do that, dedicate your outlet to only hitting the known beats, you have to hope that Google smiles on you. Most of the world does not go to a website directly and scroll through until they find something interesting. They Google “best Raiden build genshin” and if your website is not one of the first three on the Google list, you may as well be seven pages down for all it matters. Google’s search engine algorithms are not visible to the people who need that information the most and the little information that is given is oftentimes inscrutable.

So on the occasion that you’re doing good work buttressed by useful Google numbers and placement, you in theory should be totally safe from layoffs, right?

Unfortunately, none of these factors matter in the long run. Sure, success can be a decent shield against losing some, half, or your entire staff in one day, but it’s far from a guarantee. The dirty little secret of game industry layoffs is that most of the outlets that suffer them are making money and are successful. They just have people in charge that view success as an incidental consequence of constant growth. They are also wholly beholden to the single most dangerous word in the business world.

Recession

If you ever want to strike fear into the heart of corporate America, or corporate anywhere really, you just have to mention the inevitability of an oncoming recession. The word can mean different things to different people — it is, in some sense, a financial babadook — but the core issue at the end of the day is that it means less money than a company and its top brass are currently making. They want to stave that off at all costs. Layoffs are, if you’re a suit sitting in a tower crossing names off a list, a way to pretend you’re doing something preventative without actually doing anything that might cost you money.

It’s equivalent to seeing the iceberg in the distance and dumping glasses of water off the deck of the Titanic as a means of preventing the boat from sinking. Like, yeah, you got rid of some water, but--

So a lot of these layoffs, especially right now, are coming from the perspective of trying to remain financially unburdened by cutting jobs of people and roles they determine to be unnecessary to the core business. In essence, they are predicting that at some point money flow might be slower in the future, and they are building their money forts right now using what used to help pay for someone’s rent or their medication or food.

And at this point it’s probably important to mention that we’re going on what these companies are saying about these layoffs and assuming that it’s true while simultaneously assuming they are lying. We can take them at face value that layoffs are preventive measures while also realizing that they are not necessary measures. I can, and do, assume this is also executives testing to see how well they can run a company by stretching resources — people — into other roles. Basically, layoffs are a way of making more money with less money by screwing your labor force and I am convinced that this is a major factor in the layoffs at gaming outlets over the last six months.

A Question of Labor

Remember when I asked you to tuck the bit about salaries being easy cuts away until later? Let’s bring that back out, because the culture of layoffs in both game development and games writing is leading to a brain drain of institutional knowledge driven by greed and I’m going to explain why.

Recently, the state of California made it mandatory for companies to post salary ranges for incoming jobs, which introduced ranges that spanned $150,000 between maximums and minimums or thereabouts. The reason those ranges were so wide was because there has to be room for salary growth in a role, which implies that seniority and time spent doing a job will pay you more over time. The longer you’re doing a thing, the more they have to pay you to keep doing that thing.

So once again put yourself in the mental space of that executive who does not know any of these people, does not know what they do, doesn’t know their hardships or their contributions, but does see how much money they make on an Excel spreadsheet in your uptown office. Also, if you have morals, imagine you don’t have those momentarily. Obviously you’re going to start trying to save money — and your multiple boats — by cutting people with higher salaries.

As those people with higher salaries go, their knowledge goes with them, especially if they’re so burned out and jaded by the experience of being kicked off a ladder by a suit that they never want to work in the same industry again. And then their positions get filled with the next people in the firing range and then newer, younger, entry-level people come in to caulk the gaps for pennies on the dollar.

There will never be a shortage of idealistic developers or games writers straight out of college willing to do the work despite mistreatment and little money. The people who know what they’re worth after years of being told they’re worthless are the first on the chopping block in this manufactured culture of layoffs that corporations actively perpetuate. There will never be a shortage of executives that think a plurality of paid employees is too many when a smaller number could do. And that’s before even getting into the ghoulish AI-written magic tricks those same executives seem to be salivating over.

It’s a great time to be someone whose lifestyle is solely derived from the quest for more money and a terrible time to create anything funded by those people.

So What Can Be Done?

Layoffs aren’t going away. In fact, I imagine things will get worse, as everyone got very bullish about their own abilities to grow during the pandemic and are now making the people who didn’t make those decisions pay for it with their jobs.

I think an obvious answer is that unionization is entirely too slow in the games industry, though the seeds have been planted and seem to be sprouting in studios here and there. They might not wholly stop layoffs, but they can provide more warning than finding out your badge doesn’t work one day or being let go while asleep in another country. Under most union dynamics, the employer has to justify their layoffs to the union or face a struggle they usually don’t want to face. They also empirically net better severance packages and extended health insurance benefits post-termination.

(As an aside, Polygon and Nicole Carpenter wrote up an excellent guide to unionization in the gaming industry which you can find here.)

Beyond that, we have to stop fearing economic factors as a bogeyman to scare us away from doing work. You know what causes a recession? 200,000 tech workers and writers suddenly being unemployed and all looking for the same 1000 jobs only to sit in fear for the next year that the axe will come down on them again. That doesn’t stimulate the economy, it stimulates yacht manufacturers.

But there’s also a societal mentality we have to combat: the idea that doing 12-15 jobs in your lifetime is a normal thing. No, that sucks. It sucks to constantly worry about whether your boss is going to strike your name off the list because you work from home instead of the office. It sucks to need to work outside your normal hours because you have to set up your brand for a potential next gig if things don’t go your way this time around. The gaming industry has been abused to the point where this is just considered part of it and, man, it really does not have to be.

Much of what we take as normal just does not have to be.

Other Things This Week:

• Materia Possessions is new next week with John, Natalie, and Mike Williams! We’ll talk about Fire Emblem Engage among other things.
• There was also a Materia Possessions last week if you missed it!
• A Game of the Year list is still coming, but it became so gargantuan I had to strip it down to brass tacks. Also, a game got moved up from my original rankings.

Materia Possessions Episode 05 - Sneaking Up on Miyazaki

It's the final Materia Possessions of the year! Join Imran, Natalie, Michael P. Higham, and Mike Williams in covering a bevy of holiday games like the end of God of War: Ragnarok (minimal spoilers), Crisis Core and Final Fantasy VII Remake (slightly more spoilers), Midnight Suns, Please Be Happy, and the Forspoken Demo. We then roll through every major announcement from The Game Awards and then argue our own opinions of what should have won and some bafflement over what got nominated. Like, really, Hogwart's Legacy for Most Anticipated over Street Fighter 6? Really?

Find us on your favorite podcasting network, assuming your favorite is one I have heard of and was able to put the podcast on. Happy Holidays!

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Everything Everywhere Once A Week (12/16/2022)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter where we cover the most interesting things happening in the world of video games. Well, usually. This week’s a little light as we wind down the year and many of the biggest stories are simply continuances of last week’s late-hitters. Still, a few interesting things did happen, including a story that I feel like got surprisingly little discussion or attention, so let’s just start with that one.

Amazon Games Publishing Next Tomb Raider Title

Just yesterday, Amazon Games and Crystal Dynamics announced an agreement that the Bezos-owned game initiative would “support and publish” the next major Tomb Raider title. The game itself was actually announced roughly eight months ago during an Unreal Engine presentation and not by Square Enix — which maybe should have been a major sign that the Japanese publisher was looking to unburden itself of its western branch sooner rather than later. Square Enix sold Crystal Dynamics and Eidos to Embracer group for a surprisingly low sum of $300 million dollars, relative chump change in the high-pricetag world of game studio acquisitions.

Embracer, which publishes games under the THQ Nordic and Plaion labels, all but outright said they would keep these major projects rolling under their stewardship. Fair enough, they should have the money to do so. Which makes it all the more curious that Amazon Games, a publisher that definitely has not really hit it out of the park with their gaming focus, has picked up the oars on this one.

Embracer is not exactly a stranger to AAA publishing, but it would be decidedly generous to say they’re experienced at doing it successfully. The most recent mainstream release was the reboot of Saints Row, a game they have admitted did not meet expectations. Perhaps this is the other shoe to drop, where Embracer is also admitting they may not have the wherewithal to guide and publish a brand new Tomb Raider game all the way to the finish line. I am not positive Amazon has the experience but they sure have the money.

I mentioned that Embracer “should” have the money to do all this, but it’s not clear if they actually do. Their acquisition spree — buying up everything from PS2-era classic licenses to The Lord of the Rings — gives the impression that they’re an aggressively wealthy company that has money to burn. The reality is that a lot of those acquisitions have been paid for by loans and Embracer has accrued quite a bit of debt in grabbing all these studios and IPs up over the last few years. This also explains their risk-averse business strategy of primarily concentrating on remasters, remakes, and the very rare new game like Saints Row or Biomutant that often does not work out.

Ultimately there’s not a hero or villain in this story, but it is interesting to see just how fragile the Embracer Empire seems to actually be. There’s no way they would have agreed to this unless they absolutely had to.

Forspoken Demo Out on PS5

This past week, Square Enix put out a playable demo for Forspoken, their first big current-gen title from their Japanese studios. Well, it is from FFXV developer Luminous Productions, but a big part of their marketing has been the western writers at the forefront of creating the world and the characters. This demo is the first place everyone gets to see that put into action and, well, it’s kind of messy.

From a technical perspective, I’m not sure if this demo is particularly impressive. I think the HDR might be just straight up broken, because every time you step outside it feels like this.

There’s ray-tracing and performance modes. Ray-tracing looks nice but feels bad in combat. Performance feels fine but then dips fairly frequently and then also has some fairly rotten texture quality. The Digital Foundry report confirms some pretty hefty drops when fighting. This is a demo, it’s not necessarily indicative of the final game that comes out in a few weeks, but it definitely did not impress from a technical standpoint.

The actual gameplay kind of has me fence-sitting, too. There’s more to the combat than the demo tutorializes, but they give you a simultaneously boring and overwhelming spell kit at the beginning that just feels like an immediate turn-off. For the rock spells, tapping the trigger releases a bullet-like attack and holding it produces a larger rock formation.

Which means if you’re just trying to shoot at some jumpy enemies, you have to keep repeatedly individually pulling the trigger which is like having to pull an assault rifle for every shot. In playing the full game, I am definitely moving those actions to the L1 and R1 buttons instead if I can’t just completely change that behavior wholesale.

Then that leaves the writing, which is…kind of dire. The protagonist Frey and her magic bangle talk a lot, with almost nothing of value to say, though buried in the accessibility options is a slider for reducing the frequency of their “Well that just happened” style of dialogue. But on the other hand, the inclusion of that slider essentially admits that none of that dialogue actually matters and acknowledges that there’s a good chance you’re going to find it annoying.

I understand that having good dialogue that’s paced well is an art and not a science but starting it at “Looney Tunes” and putting the onus on the player to figure out where it belongs feels like a weird dereliction of design even if it is overall better to modify it than not.

All that said, I did come away from that demo thinking this game could be fun once I get a chance to really learn it and tweak it, but this demo didn’t really do it many favors. I’m curious how reviews are going to end up, because this is an anticipated title that might end up with higher expectations than it can meet.

Game of the Year

Either next week or the week after, depending on available time, I’ll be writing a full Game of the Year list in lieu of a standard newsletter. I’ll be going out of town for the holidays and should be lugging a laptop around, but hopefully no one minds too much if the schedule’s in flux for a little bit.

We’ll also do some other awards like biggest disappointment, biggest news story, etc. along the way, too. It’s the end of the year, let’s talk some shit.

In Other Things

We’ll have a new Materia Possessions this week, then we’ll be taking some time off for the holidays.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (12/09/2022)

What a week for video game news. Also, what a week for having to lock down my Twitter account, huh? I’m less mad and more just completely disappointed that people on the internet can still act like this in 2022. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let’s leave it at that and you can investigate if you really need to. Apparently the story made it to a few subreddits, which is always what you want to happen when a fanbase goes specifically nuts at you. Anyway, let’s not waste time thinking about people who don’t warrant it when there is so much to actually talk about it.

The Game Awards [Announcements]

We’re not really kidding anyone when we frame The Game Awards as a place for announcements first and tertiary awards second. This doesn’t mean that the winners of said awards don’t have anything to be proud of, but the commercials are usually what turn the screens on and the volume up, so let’s go through a non-exhaustive list of what I think the most exciting announcements were.

• Hades II - This was on my prediction list from last week, but I was still pretty excited to see it there, and was pretty surprised to see a direct sequel. Hades is the first unmitigated hit Supergiant has had, so in retrospect it makes sense, but it’s always shocking to break precedent. A while back, I was talking with Supergiant to request that I embed with them for six months or so and write a book about the studio, its past, and its upcoming game. They ultimately refused after some back-and-forth for the justifiable reason that having a guy hanging around and writing about everything they do makes creative waves crash against the rocky shores and even a little bit of that is more than they want. Disappointing, but honestly, having to hold in for months that they were working on Hades II probably would have driven me up the wall.
• Armored Core VI: Fires of the Rubicon - Another correct prediction on my list, though it’s hard to take credit for this one as it literally leaked from a focus group earlier in the year. The initial focus group story described the game as a shooter with long range elements and it’s also been confirmed that Masaru Yamamura — Lead Designer on Sekiro and the character for whom Bloodborne's wandering samurai lost in past Yarnham was named — will be directing the game. This might be Armored Core’s big breakthrough moment.
• Death Stranding 2 - I don’t know what this game is about but it seems weird so I’ll probably play it. I’d honestly really like it if Kojima followed up on MGSV’s gameplay, which is one of the best stealth games ever made, but I guess we’re walking across America again or something.
• Earthblade - The new title from Extremely OK Games, the team behind Celeste, is briefly but effectively shown. This whole game could be terrible and it would still be worth it for the Lene Raine soundtrack, but we’ll have to wait until 2024 to find out if any of that is true.
• Bayonetta Origins - I think I am the only person in western media who found all the book keys in Bayonetta 3 because there’s literally a straight up demo for this game in Bayo 3.
• Odd, I think, for Microsoft first-party publishing to just completely skip the show. Perhaps they’re trying not to distract from Redfall and Starfield. Maybe they have their own show coming soon. Or whatever they have to show soon might be redundant from their June showcase, where they said everything in the show is coming in the next year, of which we are only halfway through. I’m happy to give them a charitable interpretation, but they really do need to get on the ball soon. At some point, not showing up to the game comes off as mistaking yourself for being in a position of power.
• Other assorted thoughts: The first six months of 2023 are jam-packed even if a lot of things get delayed, I can’t believe anyone is still making Chuck Norris jokes, they somehow made a trailer for a Transformers game without showing a single Transformer, Don’t Nod’s new game reminds me of Remember Me, I don’t know what Blue Protocol is but I’ll try it, I am glad we get one last Kevin Conroy performance as Batman but please, please do not market on this.

The Game Awards [Awards]

If you ask me my opinion about The Game Awards as an awards show, it probably changes day-to-day. On one hand, its existence is actually a good thing. We have other awards shows, like GDC and DICE, but a consumer-facing one is also fairly important. I think it matters when the brilliantly-designed (though grodily-written) It Takes Two beats AAA titles for Game of the Year. I think it matters for a wide consumer audience to see Tunic nominated for Best Action/Adventure game even if it ultimately did not win. Maybe most won’t care, but it does open up options and avenues for people to take a look at these things they might otherwise have never seen.

That said, the actual winner selection is probably more like those yearly tales we hear about the Oscars voters than we would like to think, and I say this as someone who has been on the jury multiple times. From a practical perspective, it is impossible to play every game worth playing in a year. Some incredible gems might exist that most games press will never even hear of and almost certainly will never get a chance to play.

The games that win game awards tend to be games that voters most reasonably have played. Xenoblade 3 would never have won, but that it’s a long JRPG from a company that’s incredibly stingy with codes? That it even got nominated boggles my mind. Meanwhile, Bandai Namco and Sony furnished everyone and their mother with enough codes to play their GOTY candidates. Even if you didn’t get handed a code, you were going to have to play Elden Ring or God of War: Ragnarok to participate in your own outlet’s own Game of the Year discussions, to be part of the discourse, or just keep abreast of what the biggest games are.

This is not an argument that those games should not have won, but that they are highly likely to win. I can tell you from experience that, when I’m writing about games, it’s very difficult to find time to play games outside of what I know will be good or worth writing about. I think this is how games that are fine but popular — I don’t want to name any names because I did overall like Stray but, whoops — get into and win categories that feel like they should be flourishing with way better nominees.

You can’t force people to play more than the three most popular games of the year, but until that somehow happens, we’re going to keep getting awards where the bold but flawed will always, always, always fall to their knees in front of the iterative and polished.

The Game Awards [Kid]

As The Game Awards closed out and Elden Ring won Game of the Year (I’ll add, rightfully), one of the strangest moments in the show’s decade-long history happened. A young boy who had walked up with Hidetaka Miyazaki and his entourage and lurked in the back of the stage, grabbed the microphone and ranted some dumb shitposter joke that is only funny to him and his friends. Maddy Myers did a good write-up and interview on it at Polygon and comes to the correct conclusion that this whole thing is absurd and hopefully that kid realizes he’s an idiot.

But I do think the larger story here is that this is embarrassing for The Game Awards. Luckily, this kid seemingly didn’t have anything nefarious in mind. He didn’t grab the microphone and call for violence against a marginalized group, though there appears to be a lot of people grasping at the idea that he was speaking in antisemitic code. He didn’t start wailing on the back of Miyazaki’s head or trying to push someone off the stage. He didn’t have a gun and start shooting to make for the 600th mass shooting in America this year. There are a lot of ways in which it could have been worse.

But that it wasn’t worse wasn’t because everyone did a great job preventing it from being worse. Until he grabbed the microphone and said his inside jokes, no one really knew what was going on or what he would do. It was only this year that the Prime Minister of Japan was murdered by someone shooting him up-close in a crowd. Author Salman Rushie was stabbed repeatedly by someone running up on stage during a talk. That something similar didn’t happen here is mostly thanks to no one intending for that to happen.

I don’t know, it’s hard to scold people for nothing truly terrible happening, but I have to imagine a fair few people learned some lessons about how to proceed next year.

Microsoft vs. The U.S. Government

Another story on Friday is that the Federal Trade Commission officially filed a lawsuit against Microsoft to prevent the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King on the grounds that letting it go through would constitute a monopoly in the video game market. There have already been a lot of takes on this and most of them have been wrong in some way or another, so I’m going to keep this as simple as I can to avoid misinformation and also to decrease the chances of me personally being wrong.

I suppose the first question…well, actually, the first two questions here are “Can the FTC block this acquisition?” and “Will they block this acquisition?” They absolutely can do so. This year alone, the FTC successfully stopped a book publishing monopoly in the form of Simon & Schuster/Penguin House merging and also terminated Lockheed Martin’s acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne, both for monopoly reasons.

Both these cases were also extremely clear-cut. Aerojet Rocketdyne was the last independent supplier of missile components in the country, meaning that war profiteers at Lockheed Martin would be able to do said war profiteering unimpeded by competition from other companies. Simon & Schuster and Penguin House effectively would have eliminated all major contract competition from publishing deals. Authors would have to go through them or no one for nationwide distribution signings.

That’s how we get to the “Will they?” question. The answer there is, well, probably not. This lawsuit effectively has to prove that Microsoft, in acquiring ABK, will have a monopoly over the video game market in the U.S. If they called me as an expert witness to state what I thought on the record, I’d probably say no, they won’t. You can’t own a monopoly on a gaming genre, at least not in legal terms, so even if it were true that buying Call of Duty gives them the entire FPS market, it’s not grounds to block the sale. The FTC is going to have a hell of a time trying to prove that and most likely will not succeed in doing so.

But they should do it anyway.

Yes, this is a use of taxpayer money on something that ultimately probably will not succeed. That said, the FTC should absolutely be using every dollar of its budget to investigate, interrogate, and generally poke every major corporate merger and acquisition they possibly can. An aggressive FTC never would have let Facebook buy Instagram. They should have stopped the rash of hospital mergers under single companies over the past decade, which they’re doing to a great extent now. They should absolutely be reining in the tech industry over its out-of-control M&A spree. Which brings us to the next question: “If there’s no point in winning, what will this actually do?”

One, I think dragging this out another year is going to force Microsoft to make more concessions. Their recent 10-year deal with Nintendo, clearly announced because they realized this suit was coming down the pike, is an example of them needing to give up more to keep it kosher. Sony clearly wishes to remove any kind of time-limit to the deal and the FTC lawsuit may eventually push Microsoft to agreeing to that.

Two, it makes Microsoft wary of doing anything this big again. Picking up a dying Nokia or a VOIP service is one thing. $70B for a company that has caused years of headaches in the acquisition process might push them to keep their investments much smaller from here on out. This obviously suits the FTC, which outright wishes to break up big tech, but is happy to also teach long-term lessons to the rest of Silicon Valley.

Now, for a final question, I’m going to ask something that probably does not actually have an answer — “Is it moral to keep ABK as it is right now?”

I’m a firm believer that the bigger a company gets, the harder it is to keep it ethically sound. The capitalistic pursuit of more money at some point becomes abstract as a goal of its own and you end up with grotesque chimeras made of so many different parts that they’re barely recognizable. Making a big company bigger to the tune of a $70 billion dollar acquisition should feel ethically dubious, and it does.

But there’s also a company of people waiting for Bobby Kotick to get forced into retirement that are going to have to deal with a shitty management structure for at least another year, if not in perpetuity. This sucks for them. I have been told that in off-the-record talks with Xbox leadership, the company’s executives are aware of the task in front of them in cleaning up ABK. I am at least relatively confident, or as confident as you can be in American corporatism, that Microsoft would be a net positive for this company’s workers. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place right now.

There is no perfect solution and thus no real answer to the question posed above. I hope that however this goes, every actor involved gives consideration to how this will ultimately affect people and society, even if just for a moment. And I hope fanboys who are either cheering or booing because they want a win for their team join every other shitty fanboy in a soundproof box at the bottom of the ocean.

Also Check Out:

• Materia Possessions is new this week and has a RSS feed! Wow!

Materia Possessions Episode 04 - Gauge

We're back! After taking a break for Thanksgiving and various life to-dos, we've returned with a gigantic two-and-a-half-hour behemoth of an episode and we somehow didn't even get to all the segments we wanted to hit.

This week, John, Nerium, Andrea, and Imran run down an exhaustive  list of everything we've been playing. That includes Harvestella, God of War: Ragnarok, Callisto Protocol, Marvel's Midnight Suns, and some brief digressions into why the spider from Lord of the Rings is a hot lady in Shadow of War. We're really not sure still!

This is a behemoth of an episode that was recorded before The Game Awards, so we'll cover all those things next time.

And! Finally! We have options to listen!

RSS Feed: https://anchor.fm/s/d4b33ad8/podcast/rss 

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The podcast is also submitted to Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts, so hopefully they should be up soon. If you prefer to just listen on the Patreon page, it's still being uploaded here.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (12/02/2022)

Hello everyone and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once a Week for the first-ever December edition. They say time moves faster as you age so years pass by much quicker than they would if you were younger, which is observably true, but there’s a kind of weird stasis that the last few years have felt like where they’re simultaneously super long and passed by in a blink. I suppose I need to start thinking about Game of the Year soon.

Summer Games Fest Returning In 2023

We’ll probably never know the full story of what happened to E3 over the last few years. I’ve heard enough about it to say that their pandemic caution and cancellations were not the full story on why the ESA has skipped two of the last three years, the strained relationships with multiple partners being the first and foremost reason. One of those partners was in fact Geoff Keighley, who took the already-existing Gamescom show and expanded it out to fill the Summer void.

Now Keighley is directly positioning Summer Games Fest against a planned E3 event for June 2023, meaning that it’s not a simple matter of Keighley’s event replacing an absent E3 this time around. Granted, the ESA could once again fail to get their shit together and leave SGF as the lone show again, but at the moment they are scheduling toward a collision course.

While Keighley has somewhat of a vested interest in running E3 out of town, the mere existence of other publishers and platform-holders doing showcases of their own probably doesn’t do Summer Games Fest any favors. Microsoft held a not-E3 show last year that pulled a major title or two from SGF and ultimately weakened Keighley’s show. If more than Microsoft decides to hold a Summer show, then that means SGF is likely not going to be the destination for the huge drops.

Keighley also might be in danger at some point of just running too many shows. The Game Awards is next week, then he still runs that aforementioned Gamescom show, then there’s also Summer Games Fest. Something’s gotta give, even before you factor in your Nintendo Directs, Ubisoft Forwards, and whatever Microsoft calls their shows.

Maybe it’s time we stop expecting so much of live video game reveals as we transition into a world where they can’t all become huge events with megatons each.

The Callisto Protocol Reviews are Mixed

A few weeks…months? ago, I wrote impressions of The Callisto Protocol where I described it as a combat puzzle that is definitely not going to appeal to most people. That seems to mostly be bearing out in the reviews, where a handful of reviewers really picked up what the game was putting down and a large swath of others did not.

I think Kotaku’s review is the most interesting, not because I necessarily agree with it, but I think it’s finding something to like about the game that is far from universal. The reviewer seems to find all the game’s weird dissonant moments and odd pacing to be what works about it rather than what doesn’t.

“The Callisto Protocol also plays with the pace of this journey, often forcing Jacob to crawl quietly through tight cave walls or around blind biophages or thud his large, spacesuited body into a heavy sprint,” Kotaku reviewer Ashley Bardhan writes. “Confronting so many different textures at so many different speeds feels great with haptic feedback—even grabbing an ammunition box or in-game currency, Callisto Credits, triggers a satisfying, unique thwack. Callisto is like tangible cinema in this way, slow and steady, which might require readjusting some expectations if you were hoping for on-your-toes horror.”

I don’t know that I agree with this takeaway, but I find the idea that someone thinks the hurk-and-jerk pacing is a positive really quite fascinating. I’m all for finding those weird games we think are diamonds in the rough and that their turbulence is actually one person’s treasure. Maybe Callisto Protocol will be that for you, too?

We got code, but I passed it along to John for next week’s Materia Possessions, so we’ll find out what he thinks then.

Sonic Frontiers Fans are Warring with Genshin Impact Fans

So the Game Awards have a viewer’s choice category that, unlike the rest of the categories, heavily weighs fan online voting over anything else — though in this case I think the weight is 100%. The poll has multiple choices for fan-voted Game of the Year, including Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Cult of the Lamb, Sifu, Sonic Frontiers, and Genshin Impact. The blue blur was handily winning the poll initially, more than doubling runner-up Elden Ring, but Genshin Impact has since taken over, punting Sonic to the #2 position.

Sonic fans, who have been reveling in what is at best an alright game as if they just walked away with all the gold at the olympics, are not taking this well. Some of those fans on social media seems convinced that Mihoyo is bribing Genshin fans to vote or Genshin fans themselves are botting the vote to get the free-to-play gacha title up higher. Neither of which is out of the realm of possibility, but Mihoyo does not seem to be exchanging anything for votes as near as I can tell.

During a Reddit AMA today, one angry commenter asked, “What are you and your team going to do about the obvious vote bribery and botting that is currently occuring in the players' voice award?”

Keighley responded, “I don't know it's bots - I think it's fan bases activating to support a game, or a game promoting its nomination to its fan base. This is part of the reason we don't have 100% fan voting in the main categories. It tends to be which companies promote their nominations and which fan bases activate the drive the voting.” He finished off by adding, “But we'll looking into this now!”

I don’t really know where I am with Genshin Impact these days in terms of whether I like it or I feel obligated to keep playing it, but I’m inclined to agree with Keighley here. It’s probably just a fanbase getting together and voting a game they like to the top. That’s kind of how these online polls work. Hell, you could argue that’s how voting works as a whole. Campaigning isn’t cheating unless it’s not the result you want, then all of a sudden it’s a problem.

The Game Awards Predictions

As mentioned several times, The Game Awards is next week. As hard as I am on Keighley for a lot of his shows, The Game Awards usually does okay in terms of announcements. I think it’s a little too celebrity-obsessed for its own good, but maybe that’s me being out of touch instead.

That said, I think I’ll try and predict what we’re going to see at the show in terms of announcements. So let’s give this a shot.

• I don’t think we get a Tears of the Kingdom trailer, but I think we get the next Xenoblade 3 DLC in a short video.
• I believe here is where FROM makes Armored Core official.
• I would not be surprised if we got another Street Fighter VI character reveal, maybe even a date (which I expect to be post-March)
• Microsoft usually brings something to the show. Hellblade’s been a pretty consistent bet, though maybe bringing a clip for the third time is too much. Perhaps Everwild?
• We don’t really have a good sense of Sony’s 2023, this would be a fantastic place to debut a Spider-Man 2 trailer.
• I don’t necessarily expect Alan Wake 2 yet, though if they have something to show, Keighley would likely welcome it.
• We’re two years removed from Hades, if Supergiant is going to try Early Access again, I think this would be a good time to announce it.
• Who knows what is going on at WB Games right now, but assuming they’re going full-speed ahead, then I predict Wonder Woman will get a gameplay debut here. Maybe also a new Suicide Squad trailer.

Next Week:

• New Materia Possessions with John, Nerium, and Andrea! We'll talk The Callisto Protocol, Harvestella, Midnight Suns, and more.
• Right after posting this, I'm going to guest on Jeff Grubb's Jeopardy show to defend my title. I'll try not to spoil it this time.
  

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.)

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (11/19/2022)

Hi and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week! We’re a little late this week because I am in Tokyo and also misunderstood how timezones worked. I have spent most of my time here in Japan working in an office, but this weekend I had a little time to hit both the Nintendo Store and Pokemon Center. It’s good that Japan is open again, but man, visiting both those places when 1) Japan was still closed to tourists and 2) on a weekday morning is definitely a different beast than going to Shibuya on a Saturday night. Anyway, people got presents and I spent too much money, hooray for me.

Yuji Naka Gets Arrested

This past week, prosecutors in Japan have formally charged former Sonic head honcho and Balan Wonderworld creator Yuji Naka with insider trading. What they’re alleging is that, when Naka worked at Square Enix, he became aware that developer Aiming Inc. was working on the Dragon Quest Takt free-to-play mobile RPG before it was publicly announced. Naka allegedly then went and bought $20,000 worth of stock in the company anticipating it would go up after the public announcement.

I’m no prosecutor and this will probably plea down regardless, but it does cap off an extraordinarily weird few years for Naka who once headed a major franchise. By his own admission, he was fired from Balan Wonderworld in the last six months of the game’s development by multiple people at Square Enix and developer Arzest. There’s reason to believe that Naka’s story about only being fired because he was pointing out all the problems with the game is fairly one-sided, though he very clearly still holds a grudge about the whole thing.

He sued Square Enix over it and seemingly lost.

With Balan Wonderworld’s reception and the subsequent fallout seemingly ruining Naka’s career, he retreated into self-developed mobile game creation. This arrest, which will probably not result in anything resembling hard time, is such a weird coda to an already pretty depressing story.

I’ve met Naka a handful of times and couldn’t really give you an impression of the man. Not sure I really have feelings about this, other than that the stories about him being difficult to work with are repeated with frequency in Japanese game development circles. Maybe this will be the thing that finally gets him set in whatever correct direction he needs to take.

Boy, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet Run Badly, Huh

I did not review the new Pokemon game. In fact, I planned to skip it entirely. I did get to observe the entirety of the game, however, and man...I just do not understand how the biggest IP in the world puts out a video game like this. I came away from watching that game feeling like this is the Pokemon game that would have revitalized my interest in the series but the performance would have made me quit long before I got anywhere near the most interesting parts.

In my time observing the game, I saw lighting that changed based on cursor position in the menu, cameras and models that clipped through doors, relatively horrific loading times in battles, NPCs running at single-digit framerates even up close and literally disappearing like ghosts from a few feet away, and so much more. I know a lot of people puff their chest about being able to ignore this, but like, why? Even if you enjoy the game, call this out! Don’t actually let it be acceptable!

A lot of people want to explain this away as a publisher problem and not at all on Game Freak’s shoulders, but that’s partially true and mostly wrong. Game Freak is not an idle observer in when these games release, they’re willful participants in maximizing the profit that Pokemon makes the entire Pokemon Company, of which they own a third. The narrative that’s being pushed that they’re a trodden-upon developer being coerced by a willful publisher is easy and also incorrect. It doesn’t even make sense on its face, the publisher would be Nintendo, which pushes back games all the time.

Anyway, if you can ignore all the performance and technical problems with the game, the new Pokemon title seems very enjoyable. But we should maybe be demanding better than below the bare minimum.

The Game Awards 2022 Nominees are Out

We got the reveal of the Game Awards nominees this week and for the most part they seem fine. I was not part of the nomination process this year, but it’s always puzzled me how opaque they are for non-voters. People who are part of the process are bound not to explain how the process works, which feels like an unforced error in getting people to take the awards seriously.

That said, I know how the process works and even I’m a little baffled at how Stray found its way into the Game of the Year nomination. The game’s fine, don’t get me wrong, but fine is just about right. It’s better than the sum of its parts and the cat animations are extremely impressive, but a Game of the Year nomination feels like several steps beyond where it exists.

Ultimately all award shows, from outlet Game of the Year to The Game Awards to the Oscars, are a collection of opinions that may or may not match your own. That’s all or as little credibility as they need.

Blizzard and China Cut Ties

Blizzard announced this week that they will soon be cutting off support of their entire profile of online games with China after failing to come to an agreement with partner NetEase. Blizzard largely implied that NetEase was insisting on policies that Blizzard could not agree to, though stopped short of actually detailing what those policies were.

This means that games that have been running in China, like World of Warcraft, will no longer be able to after the current deal expires next year.

While being very careful to point out that I am not talking about any companies i used to work for and have signed non-disparagement agreements about, I’ll say it is not surprising that Chinese companies like NetEase are getting more aggressive about how they publish games in their home country. Government regulation on game publishing is cracking down hard, or in many cases just apathetically not allowing anything through.

It seems entirely likely that NetEase is demanding things that help it avoid the eyes of government regulators that are anathema to Blizzard. The western company also possesses the enviable negotiating position of just being able to walk away from all of this because of an impending acquisition by a company with a lot of money.

NetEase, for their part, has only implied that Blizzard’s issues begin and end with someone being a jerk. I could also believe that, sometimes people are jerks. I suppose we’ll never really know for sure.

Next Week

• As far as I know, there’s no Materia Possessions scheduled for Thanksgiving week. Partly because of the holiday and partly because I’m in Japan. So we’ll take a week off and come back for the next scheduled episode!
• It’s probably about time I write some Steam Deck recommendations.

Materia Possessions Episode 03 - Bold New Frontiers

This is the third episode of Materia Possessions and most likely the last one on Patreon hosting without a RSS feed! That process has been delayed by many things, including travel and getting sick, but we should finally get rolling.

This episode also features theme music for the first time from producer Jordan Mallory (@jordan_mallory). I gave him the instructions of "something like a SNES/PS1 JRPG title screen" and he knocked it out of the park.

This week, Nerium, John, Michael, and I talk about Bayonetta 3, God of War Ragnarok, Sonic Frontiers, and more. Does the FFXVI excuse about racial homogeneity make sense? What's going on with Mick Gordon and the Doom Eternal soundtrack? Listen to us discuss that all in this week's Materia Possessions!

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

Hi and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week! I’m still recovering from COVID, but I’m at least out of the woods and onto the grassy path back home at the moment. I’ve got a few topics I wanted to cover this week, though, so let’s start a little spicy to clear our throats.

Genshin Impact Should Feel A Little Embarrassed About How Hard It Stans for Elon Musk

None of us are prophets. We can’t always tell when something will turn, or when a person we think is cool will turn out to be dumb and terrible, but it’s also not always super hard to guess. Genshin Impact, for whatever reason, decided to put a lot of chips on Elon Musk early on with two small references: a character named Ella Musk and a fairly important high-level area called Musk Reef.

On these own, these are kind of nothing. You could even try and convince yourself that Ella Musk, a character whose motivations are bridging the gap between humans and monsters through language, is not a particularly flattering analogy for Elon. But it got less subtle in 2021 when developer Hoyoverse held a contest just centering entirely on Ella and Elon Musk.

People who followed @Paimon2themoon — itself an already groan-worthy meme by October of last year — would win the fantabulous prize of watching Musk stream the game. At the highest possible threshold, Hoyoverse would invite Musk to their studio so their CEO could meet him. That was the contest.

The whole thing was canceled as people made it well known that Musk is kind of a clown and this weird level of king worship that Hoyoverse was paying was, at best, cringe. Musk then also seemed to be convinced he was going to be in Genshin Impact as himself, using that emoji that he uses constantly when he’s extremely mad.

It’s not like this was unforeseeable. Even by the time his name was put into the game, he was already throwing temper tantrums about people making fun of him, talking mad shit about trans people, and calling cave divers pedophiles for no apparent reason.

As the dude seems to be speedrunning destroying a pillar of communication on the internet in the last decade with stupid idea after stupid idea, my Genshin dailies still have me talking to Ella Musk and going to Musk Reef. I don’t think it should be changed, but they should feel a little embarrassed.

Just Admit You Want to Be Breath of the Wild, Sonic Frontiers

I’ve only played Sonic Frontiers for an hour or two and will probably play it for longer but I’m not exactly blown away by the experience. Maybe it gets massively better, but I’m a little surprised by the positivity around the game from the reviews.

All that said, as I am playing this game, I keep going back to this quote from Takashi Iizuka, head of the Sonic Team.

"From the development [team's] perspective, they're going out and making an action game. They see Breath of the Wild as a role-playing game, it's not similar at all to the action game that they're making," says Iizuka.

Which, first of all, what an actually insane thing to say. You don’t begin and end comparisons at genre, especially when they’re as fluid as both Sonic Frontiers and Breath of the Wild. Second, holy shit this game wants to be Breath of the Wild so bad and it’s so fucking weird they’re just not admitting it.

There’s musical motifs that are identical! The game clearly wants to ape one of the best games of all time and I don’t get why they’re running away from that comparison under than having to admit it doesn’t match up.

Honestly, more games should take influence from each other and they should do it openly. The idea that ideas have to spring completely uninfluenced from someone’s brain to be good is specific only to creating video games. We don’t tear down a movie for being influenced by Scorcese or a book for smelling a bit too much like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

If we admit these influences, we can also probably start applying them better. Sonic Frontiers apes a lot of Zelda’s superficial aspects, but doesn’t take the influence to heart to rethink the fundamentals of Sonic. That’s what a Breath of the Wild moment for the series should mean, not soft piano music over a sweeping vista.

A Couple of Interesting Notes From Nintendo’s Quarterly Report

• Kirby and the Forgotten Land has become the best-selling game in the series.
• We’re roughly four million units, or one holiday season, away from the Switch outselling the PlayStation 4 and the Game Boy.
• Splatoon 3 has sold nearly 8 million units since launch, which puts it at over half of Splatoon 2’s total lifetime sales.
• Xenoblade Chronicles has sold 1.72 million copies, which indicates it’s starting at a higher floor than either Xenoblade 2 or Definitive Edition, but it might peter out a little lower than I personally expected.

Other Notes This Week:

• I’ll be in Tokyo for a little while soon, so some schedules will get messed up. But things should still get published, just when is a valid question.
• New episode of Materia Possessions this week where we talk about God of War Ragnarok, Sonic Frontiers, and more! Did I solve the RSS thing yet? No! I had COVID!

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (11/04/2022)

Welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, the weekly newsletter where I run down some news in games from the past week. Well, usually that’s the case, but this week it’s a COVID edition. After nearly three years of dodging this ridiculously communicable airborne disease, I finally got infected due to a flight from Baltimore where some guy in our row who insisted “it was just a dry cough” refused to put on his mask. And of course there’s no more rules saying he has to, so I’m probably not the only person he gave COVID to at that time.

I remember, in the first year of the pandemic, thinking I would very likely die if I got COVID. Being diabetic and having a weakened immune system already, also not having health insurance due to being between jobs, I’d probably have tried to wait it out and not been successful. I’ve had flus that knocked me flat on my ass and by all accounts this seemed worse. It’s a testament to the vaccines and boosters that I’m able to sit here writing this as well as I am, as those things kept COVID from just destroying me.

Anyway, the one benefit if any is that I was able to take this time to finish Bayonetta 3.

Something You Might Not Have Known About Bayonetta 3

A question that got asked a lot since Bayonetta 3’s announcement was a fair one: what on Earth took so long? We’re accustomed to games coming out usually within a few years of their announcement, but Bayonetta 3 ended up sliding just under the five-year door.

The answers are mostly not shocking — it was announced very early, there was a pandemic that really slowed things down, the initial director left fairly early on in the project, etc. But another reasons that most people don’t know is that, at one point in development, Bayonetta 3 was scoped as a semi-open world game.

The design was going to draw more off Astral Chain than Nier Automata, but the idea was that a large hub world would send Bayonetta (or whoever else) to different worlds which would themselves be fairly open. Maybe Super Mario 64 would be a good reference point for this. There was a lot of work and experimentation on this idea, but it kept falling apart when it came to pacing, and eventually Nintendo wanted them to scale back. It was, I hear, also not particularly well-performing on the Switch hardware either.

There’s still a lot of vestiges of the semi-open world design in the final game. The hub world, Thule, is broken up into smaller pieces that Bayonetta and Viola navigate to get into the next major world. The chests were redesigned a bit to be searched for in larger areas and provide a lot more variety to make use of the environment. Even the various weapon transformations were going to play into traversal a bit.

This was never a meaty enough story to report as its own thing, so it feels like it can slide in here and no one is going to care in a negative way after the game itself is already out.

I’m of the opinion that if it didn’t work and the developers don’t think it worked, then we’re probably not missing anything huge. Still, Platinum Games tends not to throw away old ideas, so I would not be shocked if something else gets this treatment later.

Also I liked the game. Finished it today. Very easy to see where the supposed cameo Taylor was offered was going to fit in and, had she taken it, I think people would have been celebrating that role.

Final Fantasy XVI is Too Realistic for People of Color

IGN had a fantastic interview today with the leads of Final Fantasy XVI, including well-known straight shooter Naoki Yoshida. The interviewer, good friend Kat Bailey who has her own Patreon here, asked Yoshida about the lack of people of color in Final Fantasy XVI. Yoshida said, well, let me just post the quote here.

Naoki Yoshida, Producer: This is a difficult question, but not one that was unexpected, seeing as diversity in entertainment media has become a much-discussed topic as of late. The answer I have, however, may end up being disappointing to some depending on individual expectations.

Our design concept from the earliest stages of development has always heavily featured medieval Europe, incorporating historical, cultural, political, and anthropological standards that were prevalent at the time. When deciding on a setting that was best suited to the story we wanted to tell—the story of a land beset by the Blight—we felt that rather than create something on a global scale, it was necessary to limit the scope it to a single landmass — one geographically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world in an age without airplanes, television, or telephones.

Due to the underlying geographical, technological, and geopolitical constraints of this setting, Valisthea was never going to realistically be as diverse as say a modern-day Earth...or even Final Fantasy XIV that has an entire planet (and moon) worth of nations, races, and cultures at its disposal. The isolated nature of this realm, however, does end up playing a large part in the story and is one of the reasons Valisthea’s fate is tied to the rest of the world.

Ultimately, we felt that while incorporating ethnic diversity into Valisthea was important, an over-incorporation into this single corner of a much larger world could end up causing a violation of those narrative boundaries we originally set for ourselves. The story we are telling is fantasy, yes, but it is also rooted in reality.

Conversely, the Final Fantasy series of games have always inherently dealt with conflict and struggle, especially between the empowered and those used and/or exploited by those privileged few—a prominent trend in human history. In a game that, by design, allows players to experience that conflict and struggle first- hand through dynamic, realistic battles, it can be challenging to assign distinctive ethnicities to either antagonist or protagonist without triggering audience preconceptions, inviting unwarranted speculation, and ultimately stoking flames of controversy. The best part of pulling inspiration directly from history, however, is that it allows us to revisit and re-examine our own pasts, while also allowing us to create something new.

In the end, we simply want the focus to be less on the outward appearance of our characters and more on who they are as people—people who are complex and diverse in their natures, backgrounds, beliefs, personalities, and motivations. People whose stories we can resonate with. There is diversity in Valisthea. Diversity that, while not all-encompassing, is synergistic with the setting we’ve created and is true to the inspirations from which we are drawing.

So, hrm. Where to start. First of all, if you knew this question was coming, how the fuck did you end up with this answer? How did Square Enix PR not go “Hey, they’re going to ask you about how this game is whiter than a Downton Abbey fantasy camp, let’s think of a good answer” and immediately shove “We’re going for realism” into the trash bin?

Second, let’s talk about the fallacy of historical accuracy for a bit here and how it works toward a self-reinforcing end result of the white default. Yoshida points out here that what they were going with in Final Fantasy XVI is realism with some magic on top of it and that it doesn’t really make sense for a medieval country that is isolated from the rest of the world to be ethnically diverse. I’m going to take issue with that because it only doesn’t make sense because you say it doesn’t make sense.

You created this world! You’re basing it off the existing idea that people of different races largely stayed homogenous for much of our existing history and going “Oh well that’s just how it works then.” It works that way because one continent colonized a lot of the world, wiped a whole bunch of other people, enslaved a continent and outlawed intermingling, and then found itself largely genetically homogenous through a plague. If you’re going to say, yeah, FFXVI worked exactly like this also, then damn, get some better writers. It’s like me being asked to worldbuild for my fictional fantasy story by starting with “A man started typing in Google Doc at his desktop computer…” and patting myself on the back for it.

Also, historically speaking, this is not true. There were all sorts of people of color in these historically white countries, people that were born there after generations even. You wouldn’t even need to tell a story of emigration and could still have a cast roughly as diverse as Big Bang Theory.

The reason anyone, and I’m presuming Yoshida is included in this, thinks that it was this completely immutable mass of white is because media keeps reinforcing that. And media keeps reinforcing that because media before them kept reinforcing it. Final Fantasy XVI is falling into the same pattern that caused this problem in the first place and using that problem to justify the decision they made.

It's also especially weird coming after Final Fantasy VII Remake, which was surprisingly diverse and had plenty of NPCs of color wandering around Midgar.

Anyway, we can stick this one on the board next to a “very hip-hoppy kind of walk.”

A Yakuza Quote I Keep Forgetting

When I was in Tokyo two months ago, I had this quote from RGG Studio head Masayoshi Yokoyama I keep forgetting to post here. I asked him if Ichiban Kasuga, Yakuza: Like A Dragon protagonist and Dragon Quest fan, would have played Dragon Quest XI.

“Absolutely not,” Yokoyama said. “He does not have that kind of time.”

As I transferred everything to my new OLED Switch this week and made the call to really, actually, for sure finish DQXI this time, I can relate.

This Week is Iffy

I’m hoping to be back in time to record Materia Possessions this week, but if not I’ll make sure everyone else gets on some microphones to talk about it. If I’m not, well, hopefully there will be something!

Materia Possessions Episode 02: The Larry King Affair

Hey! It's the second episode of Materia Possessions! This week, we've got Nerium Strom, Andrea Shearon, Michael Higham, and I talking about the Final Fantasy XVI trailer, other podcasts that we have shouted on major platforms that are not this podcast, Gotham Knights, The Callisto Protocol, and more.

Next episode in two weeks should bring a blast of professionality with different hosting, an RSS feed, and music! Probably! Until then, listen to this one on this page and enjoy!

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (10/28/22)

Welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, the weekly newsletter where I try to go over some gaming stories from the past week and provide my thoughts on them. This one is going to be a bit shorter because I’m currently writing it from a Baltimore hotel room while I attend a friend’s wedding, but I’ll try to pack in what I can here.

The Witcher Remake Announced

A few weeks ago, CD Projekt Red announced essentially their next ten years in projects, including a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 and three new Witcher games. One of those Witcher titles was announced at GDC earlier in the year and another has been revealed just this week — a remake of the first CDPR Witcher title originally released in 2007.

It’s not hard to understand why CDPR wants to go back to the original Witcher title over a decade later. While I wouldn’t call it unplayable, that first game is definitely on the archaic side. It had a lot more to do with planning and strategy than swinging your sword good and more streamlined versions of those mechanics made it into later games. A lot of the character designs of the comparatively lower budget game also don’t match the more modern ones, especially for returning characters like Triss.

Moreover, the game had a decidedly weird collectible where, upon Geralt sleeping with a woman as he does in nearly every village in the game, you receive a collectible card with nude art of said woman to keep. It has no real purpose, though I am unsure if a purpose would make it better or worse. I have to imagine they’re kicking this particular antique to the curb for the remake.

With new fans coming in through word of mouth and the TV show, I am guessing CDPR wants to put their best foot forward by remaking the game while removing cruft like that.

That Bayonetta Thing is Still Ongoing

I won’t get too deep into it this time as most of it is still covered by last week’s post. The main updates are that Taylor essentially confirmed Bloomberg’s report about the $15,000 number and has asked fans to donate to charities instead of buying the game, one of which being a pro-life Kentucky charity that puts up anti-abortion billboards over the south.

Read into that what you will, though not much deep interpretation is required there. Taylor also, more generally, implied that Schreier's report is part of a conspiracy by the gaming industry against her. You do you, I guess, but I'd probably not insinuate that the most prominent Jewish game journalist is part of a cabal that's trying to take you down at this moment in history.

Either way, the game is out. I’ll play it and write something about it in the coming days and weeks. I think that Taylor’s 15 minutes in this whole thing are probably over.

Rocksteady Studio Founders Leave Ahead of Suicide Squad

Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker, two co-founders of Arkham series developer Rocksteady, have announced that they are leaving the studio for “a new adventure in gaming” before the release of Suicide Squad next year. It’s surprising to see the pair leave before their next major game in nearly a decade and we can only really speculate on why, as it does not seem like they’re leaving gaming, just Rocksteady.

My guess is that they sense WB Games is likely not long for this world, whether that means a sale or a closure, and they would probably be better off leaving now than waiting to see what happens next. I know that publicly DIscovery has said that they are standing behind their gaming division, but I am of the belief that they’re saying that publicly because they want to fluff up the price for a sale and tilt any negotiations to the idea that they can walk away at any time.

But I also suspect that these things are not going their way so far and their likely plans to be out of the video game development business by late next year are probably not achievable. So who knows what happens when Suicide Squad comes out with whatever demands WB Discovery is making and they still haven’t found any wholesale buyers who are also willing to license the IPs that those studios made famous in the gaming space.

Especially when it’s very, very clear that Gotham Knights came out much earlier than it should have from a game quality perspective. I genuinely do not think Discovery has the stomach for the investment-forward game development business anymore. We’ll see!

Game Pass Prices Will One Day Go Up, Obviously

Closing out this week, let’s talk about a recent quote from Xbox chief Phil Spencer from a recent Wall Street Journal live event.

"I do think at some point we'll have to raise the prices on certain things, but going into this holiday we thought it was important to maintain the prices," Spencer said. "We've held price on our console, we've held price on games, and our subscription. I don't think we'll be able to do that forever. I do think at some point we'll have to raise some prices on certain things."

This is, like, kind of a nothing quote on its face. Spencer is correctly pointing out that eventually prices on things will have to go up, with the unsaid implication being that there’s a recession, supply chain issues, and just general cost adjustments that affect the top consumer level at some point or another. Unlike Sony, Microsoft has said they will not be raising the price on their consoles right now, but that’s not a guarantee that they will never do it.

I have seen some people freak out about the idea of Game Pass raising prices, suspecting that we’re in for a Netflix-style bamboozling of constant price hikes and largely original programming. Which…yes, probably! That’s always the path things like this will eventually take! I think people who are pretending this will never happen in even broad terms are crazy, but the way it happens absolutely matters.

I’ve been beating this drum for years, but a successful execution of Game Pass eventually runs into the Netflix problem. The more successful the service — be it Netflix or Game Pass or whatever else — the more money it costs to put content on that service. So you have to start making your own content to fill the holes that licensed content creates when the owners decide to raise their prices. It may end up more expensive but at least you own it.

Xbox, for their part, saw this coming and was very proactive with acquisitions. Ignoring whether those things are good or bad for the industry health as a whole (it’s complicated) for a moment, for Xbox it’s an absolute good to have developers constantly making games that fill a Game Pass library up and never go away or get renegotiated.

But that doesn’t come at zero cost. It comes at a massive upfront cost and then a slightly more manageable constant cost from then on. Those multi-billion dollar acquisitions have to be paid for somehow and as much as Call of Duty sells, it’s not going to subsidize the entire bill on its own. Someday, maybe soon, Game Pass prices will have to raise to start paying the piper.

Is that unexpected? Shouldn’t be! Does it make Game Pass a worse deal? By definition, yes, but also the trade off might be more content in the library so value is in the eye of the beholder. Either way, it will happen one day and people should not be shocked when it does.

Other Things This Week:

• For Inverse, I wrote about my time playing The Callisto Protocol, which I think is a very interesting combat puzzle box.
• I also interviewed Glenn Schofield, who had thoughts about the Dead Space remake, how the original game arose from frustrations with Resident Evil 4, and crunch at Striking Distance Studios.
• It’s not up yet so check the Patreon feed later, but Nerium Strom, Michael Higham, Andrea Shearon, and I recorded the second episode of Materia Possessions! We broke down the FFXVI trailer, talked about a lot of games, and clarified who is and is not Larry King.

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (10/21/2022)

Welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week. We’re a little late this week because there’s a lot to talk about. Also I think, unless Patrons feel really strongly the other way, this newsletter might just go fully public too. Undecided, but I think it’s best to just make it public while I’m hemming and hawing on it.

Bayonetta Voice Actress Pay Dispute Gets Complicated

A few weeks ago, a small story in this newsletter was about Bayonetta’s voice actress being replaced with Jennifer Hale taking on the role as Bayonetta 1 and 2 voice actress Hellena Taylor left the role. In that story, I wrote that we’re unlikely to ever fully know why it happened, and that’s still true, but we know a bit more than before and it has gotten worlds more complicated since then.

On October 15, Taylor posted several tweets and videos explaining her reasons for not returning to the role, which turned out to be non-voluntary. Taylor stated that, after years of voicing the character (2008 for Bayonetta, 2014 for Bayonetta 2), she was only offered $4000 for her role in Bayonetta 3. She said this was especially bad considering that Bayonetta is a $450 million dollar franchise even before considering merchandise sales. In the second video, she stated that “fat cats cream off the top” and that “nurses are going to food banks” in England as related statements. She entreated the viewer that if anyone cares about people, they would boycott Bayonetta 3.

In the third video, Taylor describes the back-and-forth with PlatinumGames, stating she was required to audition for the role again and was given “an insulting offer” in return. She said she wrote to Hideki Kamiya, Vice President of PlatinumGames and director of both the original Bayonetta and Bayonetta 3, and received a reply that resulted in the $4000 offer. Following that, she indicted Jennifer Hale as not being the real Bayonetta, merely a parrot of her original voice.

She also suggested that PlatinumGames is working on a spinoff based on Jeanne, telling the audience not to buy that either.

It was an explosive allegation, one that hit many emotional beats and fed into a comfortable and well-worn narrative of large companies like Nintendo paying pennies for voice work. That narrative works so well because it is, as far as anyone can tell, incredibly true. Voice work in video games gets peanuts compared to other mediums, where things like residuals and royalties are part and parcel of the gig. Taylor’s plea struck a chord with many people even when several of the things she was saying seemed fairly suspicious at the time.

Kamiya, who Taylor said she had written a letter to, subtweeted the videos by calling them untruthful and, anticipating a backlash from Twitter accounts, warned people about his rules that land people on his hefty blocklist. He eventually had to temporarily delete his Twitter account, which was a cause for celebration for many.

A Bloomberg story this week indicated that Taylor’s videos were not all they seemed to be and cast a new light, or maybe a new shadow, on the truthfulness of all her claims.

For most of the rest of this newsletter, we’re going to talk a bit about this whole thing in detail, and how there’s really no winners or losers here. Any third party taking a victory lap over guessing Taylor was being deceitful is probably kind of an asshole.

Something’s Off

That said, let’s start off by being kind of an asshole. Taylor’s initial statement just straight up did not make sense. If it were still my job to be an investigative reporter, I probably would have come in that morning trying to figure out what on Earth she meant by Bayonetta being a $450 million dollar franchise. Bayonetta barely survived to make a sequel, if it were a $450 million dollar franchise, I am pretty sure Sega would never let it be exclusive to Wii U or Switch.

That number, across two games, would be about a quarter of Grand Theft Auto IV. Now, granted, those two games have been ported around here and there, but we’re probably talking about a ceiling of three million in sales at likely massively discounted prices. Sniffing at GTA numbers is extremely unlikely.

The only thing I can guess is that Taylor googled Bayonetta’s sales, used VGChartz — which has always been an estimation at best — added up every number on there including the redundant ones, and came to 7.5 million sales. Then she multiplied that by $60 and got $450,000,000. There’s so many reasons that doesn’t make sense to do, but it’s the most generous possible interpretation of that number.

The other time Taylor gives hard numbers is the other eyebrow-raising detail of her testimony: a pitifully low $4,000 offer. I am fully willing to believe that video game developers and publishers lowball voice actors all the time. We found out fairly recently that even the anime dubbing industry does it to a genuinely monstrous degree, with the actors in the massive Jujutsu Kaisen movie getting only $150 - $300 for a movie making tens of millions of dollars.

A problem comes roaring in at that point that offering Taylor that number and then going to Jennifer Hale, a decidedly prolific voice actor who certainly commanded a price far above that, means Taylor’s story is at best incomplete. If they offered her such little money and then went on to pay Hale a decent rate, then they must have been trying to buck Taylor for some reason or another. If that’s the case, it raises way more questions than Taylor’s video answers.

But because of how charged her videos were, and how easy it was to believe the injustice of it, there was not a lot of breathing room for those questions. Which is a shame, because a good narrative that overrides the truth only harms the cause when the truth eventually comes out.

Investigative Journalism

As mentioned above, Bloomberg came out with a story this week that disputed Taylor’s account. Jason Schreier, who had seen documentation concerning Taylor’s proposed contract, said that Taylor’s accusations about only being offered $4000 were essentially lies of omission. She had been offered $3000 - $5000 a session for around five sessions. After Taylor countered with a six-figure price, PlatinumGames sought out Hale. The developer offered Taylor $4000, the number she stated in the video, for a cameo role presumably after her letter written to Kamiya.

When asked to respond, Taylor charged that PlatinumGames is lying, though did not supply her own copy of the offer despite having already broken NDA and disavowed its power over her. She said she wished to move on from the series, a surprising tone after spending half a video declaring that she was the only true Bayonetta and that it mattered greatly to her.

I have seen some people suggest that these documents could have been fabricated. As someone who has done this job, let me tell you that the chance of that is so infinitesimal that it’s laughable to even suggest it. Somewhere in the possibility chances in the universe, yes, Jason Schreier could have been fooled by these things and not done any verification of them at all.

But investigative reporting is a job that involves skills. I feel that’s what people miss when they suggest that the evidence might be faked or that journalists should give up anonymous sources. It’s a job where you get better at it through experience, but you also cultivate skills that most people who don’t do this job don’t have and are never going to need.

Taylor likely thought that Nintendo and PlatinumGames would never have spoken up about it, which they probably would not have. Even in PlatinumGames’ statement, they don’t really talk about the meat of the accusations at all and merely ask people not to harass the voice actors. I don’t think she figured someone would go digging. After all, why would they? It’s only video games.

The Kamiya of It All

Shortly after the videos, Kamiya posted his tweet, and began blocking people left and right that replied and quote-retweeted to dunk on him. This resulted in a lot of people pushing even harder to attack him for what Taylor named and shamed him for: mistreating workers as a financial fatcat and as a Twitter asshole. Eventually, Twitter locked his account because the sheer amount of replies and blocking convinced the algorithm he must have been hacked.

I’ve been following Kamiya on Twitter for a long time. As a director, he made a lot of games I like a lot, like Devil May Cry, Resident Evil 2, Okami, and Bayonetta. Early on, he would respond to every single person that tweeted at him with a question. He liked using it to practice his english, he said. The account was mostly questions about Resident Evil 1.5, what kind of ice cream Bayonetta likes, and him showing off retro games and his modest little apartment.

Around 2012, a years-long wave of harassment from console warriors started bubbling up. It was mostly over Bayonetta 2, but a surprising amount also came from talking about other video games. He said he wanted to make Star Fox, which lead to constant tagging of him every time fans begged for a new game. He posted that he thinks God of War should influence Devil May Cry 5, which lead to people calling him a race traitor, a washed-up hack, and a bald fuck.

In 2019, I saw Kamiya lounging on a couch in a back room at GDC, and I sat down and talked to him. PR did not want it to be an on-the-record interview, so we just chatted a bit with a mutual friend acting as a translator. I asked Kamiya about his Twitter account and if he disliked interacting with the trolls so much, why doesn’t he just delete Twitter for his mental health.

“Because then they’d win,” he told me.

The actual man is polite and meek, a far cry from his Twitter persona. He just wants to talk about Japanese sentai heroes and TG-16 games. But years of harassment have clearly made him combat-ready whenever he logs on to Twitter. Which, honestly, I get. At some point — and that point is probably over 10,000 followers — Twitter can become a genuinely hostile place.

It’s very hard to express to people how it feels to wake up to Tweets from people you have never met but who genuinely, truly believe that they hate you with every fiber of their being. You don’t know what it’s like to post engagement pictures and see people making fun of your fiancee’s teeth on one of the happiest days of your lives together. Most people live under the radar and while I’m not saying every aspect of having a large following is bad, the considerations of what it does to your mental health absolutely have to be acknowledged.

When the Taylor situation broke, so did Kamiya, to an extent. He has “rules” about tweeting at him in english as he says that’s where most of the harassment comes from, but he’s always still answered questions in english. This time, though, he put up every shield he had, including aggressive ones. And that just made people angrier with him.

Which, again, if I were getting tweets like this, I’d go on a rampage, too.

There's a relatively famous picture of a teenage Kamiya posing next to his mother. A Resetera user posted this picture in the thread about Taylor's accusations, stating that it was no wonder that Kamiya's mother ran away when he was younger.

A lot of people felt justified at the time how they interacted or viewed Kamiya’s flameout on Twitter. As someone that has met him, I was kind of upset by it. Maybe he should have just shut up and let PlatinumGames handle it with a statement rather than letting it explode on him, but the glee in which I saw people root for the explosion gave me pause.

An Actual Labor Problem

One thing I have seen a lot of people ask after Bloomberg’s story came out is a fairly reasonable question: Why would Taylor ask for six figures (at least $100,000) for Bayonetta 3, a game that is definitely not going to break any sales records and has a fairly modest budget? My guess is probably Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which features Bayonetta as a playable character.

In the credits for Smash Bros., Bayonetta’s voice is credited to Taylor, though only as archival use. That means that Nintendo reused Taylor’s voice clips from previous work, notably the Bayonetta games. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate went on to sell 28 million copies so far. Now you and I can say that it probably didn’t sell that much solely because Taylor’s voice is in the game, but if I were an actor in a piece of media that made a billion and a half dollars, I’d probably be pretty miffed at the lack of residuals too. I’d probably demand a pretty high price point for my next role.

I heard a story recently where Ernie Sabella, the voice of Pumbaa in The Lion King, went to go see Toy Story in theaters. At one point in the movie, about one and a half seconds of Hakuna Matata plays, and Sabella is understandably confused by this. He calls up his agent, who finds out from Disney that they completely fucked up and they forgot to get Sabella and Nathan Lane’s blessing for this even though Disney owns the song because they were the performers. So the pair have gotten paid hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years with every Toy Story release because of one second in a major product.

This doesn’t happen in video games. Residuals aren’t a thing, royalties aren’t a thing, not for voice actors, not for programmers, not for marketing, not for level designers. All of those people should be getting some piece of the pie, but they won’t, because no one wants to change incrementally since it leaves others briefly behind and no one wants to change everything because it’s too hard.

Going off timing, my belief is that Taylor saw the Game Informer quote stating that she wasn’t voicing Bayonetta due to an implied scheduling conflict and, without really thinking it through, filmed some videos that were misleading in nature to really stick it to PlatinumGames and Nintendo.

Was Hellena Taylor being deceitful with her claims? Considering the evidence, probably. Was she correct that video game voice actors are being screwed? More definitively yes. Did the fallout from not thinking it through harm the overall discussion of voice actor pay? Also probably yes.

If Taylor had done the same videos but used the number $15,000 or said she was in a video game that has sold nearly 30 million copies but she hasn’t seen a cent, I think people would have still been pretty incensed on her behalf. Maybe not as much, but still enough to jumpstart the conversation. She didn’t need to use a low-blow to win, but in doing so, she kind of muddied the waters for everyone.

But I don’t think this has to be a discussion of Hellena Taylor at all. It should be a discussion of the Breath of the Wild voice actors, who were paid a pittance for their role in a game that sold 25 million copies. Or of the Mob Psycho 100 actors who were punted from the english cast for trying to hold to their union guidelines. Hell, it should be about how everyone in the game industry should be paid better than they are and given contracts that respect them as human beings rather than manipulable labor resources.

Oh Yeah, That Thing…

One thing I haven’t talked about is the social sleuthing that went on combing through Taylor’s social media accounts after all this blew up. People found that she was following a lot of problematic people on Twitter including the Trump family, had a difficult time showing support for trans rights and not actually doing it, and really seemed to buy into Blue Lives Matter rhetoric. The reason I’m not talking about that is I don’t think it factors into the labor discussion.

What it does factor into is that I think she probably sucks. It factors into the idea that the same people who sell MAGA-labeled gold bills to idiots also realize those skills work on emotional pleas to an audience that is expecting outrage. So she can fuck off all the way into space for that stuff.

Other Things This Week:

• Hey it’s those impressions I wrote of the remake of Resident Evil 4 
• Is Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope bwah or blah? 

Things to Look Forward to Next Week:

• A new episode of Materia Possessions with Michael Higham, Andrea Shearon, and Nerium Strom
• We can talk about a recent horror game I played
• Gotham Knights is bad and I don’t want to play more of it but I might write about it

Resident Evil 4 Hands-On Impressions

So, let's start this off with a mea culpa: some reporting I did about Resident Evil 4's remake early this year was wrong in spots. Specifically, the bit about the early game setpieces being changed to night. I am not sure if my sources were wrong or things were changed back, but it was my bad for printing something that was not 100%. Multiple people I talked to at the time confirmed that was a change, but it may have been more tenuous than I thought or everyone could have just taken me for a ride. Either way, it's my bad.

Now for the impossible transition to actual impressions. Capcom brought me to their offices recently to play Resident Evil 4 — every time I tried to append the word "Remake" to the title, I was gently corrected — and be one of the first people in North America to do so.

I have played Resident Evil 4, across its GameCube and subsequent ports over the past decade and a half, somewhere north of 20 times from beginning to end. Maybe it's because of that game's indissoluble legacy that I was keen on seeing what a remake could, and would, do differently. After about half an hour with the reimagined Resident Evil 4, I'm eager to see more.

The demo I played is ostensibly the opening of the actual game, complete with a narrated intro cutscene where Leon explains that he is part of a secret operations team. After that, you are dropped into gameplay to begin your search for Ashley.

The beats are pretty much identical to the original: Leon enters a house, he gets attacked, he wanders through the woods to the village clock tower, and a big fight ensues. On paper, Resident Evil 4 remake follows this same structure for its pre-title card gameplay. In practice, it's different enough to keep you on your toes.

The initial house where you ask a villager about Ashley and are subsequently attacked is differently shaped and has more enemies. It's not a major revolutionary change, but it's lit to be a bit dimmer and spookier.

But the real dissonance is in how a Resident Evil 4 veteran approaches combat in the remake. In the GameCube original, ammo was plentiful, so it's easy enough to go through the entire game guns blazing. In later ports and revisions, ammo dropped less often, making it so you had to be more judicious in how many shots you take at a villager walking toward you with a pitchfork.

So at some point, the strategy in RE4 becomes a leg shot or headshot, a kick for melee, or running up to the enemy and slashing them over and over with your knife. It's the most efficient way to use your ammo.

Resident Evil 4 (Remake) hews far closer to the latter revisions than the GameCube version, with ammo being rather precious. You can still kick people hard and they make a simultaneously gruesome and gratifying crunch against the walls, too. But the knife strategy is no longer feasible for every enemy. Like Resident Evil 2 Remake, the knife is a consumable (though presumably repairable) durability resource.

Its primary use is going to be fighting off enemies who grab you by stabbing them and pushing them away. But every swing of the knife and every stealth kill using it diminishes its durability a certain amount. So if you were planning to cut apart every villager from here to Saddler, that's probably not very likely. 

This is a big change to my RE4 combat loop, but I will admit it also made the village fight section a lot more tense. I could not rely on my old strategies of holing up in the shotgun room, shooting a dude in the knees, and running up on him like I'm a D&D rogue. It worked for fifteen years, it does not work here.

The addition of a crouch also makes sneaking around more tense and allows you to even duck some thrown objects.

I'll close out these impressions by mentioning that my main worry with RE4, being viewed through a RE2 Remake framework, is that it would lose a quippy Leon. Sure, it was corny then and is cornier now, but Leon cracking action hero jokes at unimpressed villains has been part of the soul of the game. I'm pleased to say that, at least in the demo, Leon is still a smartass.

He says "I'll see myself out" moments before jumping out of a two-story window. He still asks if everyone is going to bingo. I imagine he will once again ask Salazar if his right hand comes off.

I don't know if this demo is going to be commercially available — hell, it might be as of writing this, honestly. If it is, I suggest giving it a shot. It's RE4 through a different lens, but that's exciting in its own right.

Resident Evil 4 releases on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on March 24.

Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope

[Code for this game was provided by Ubisoft but there was no discussion, nor would I ever allow discussion, of content aside from embargo timing.]

The original Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle from 2017 is maybe the foremost example of a leak helping a video game. Had it been the E3 surprise at Ubisoft’s show that people expected, it might have been difficult for people to look past Rabbid Peach and the bwah-isms at the actual fun strategy RPG underneath it. But since it leaked early, people got the shock out of their systems in time to appreciate a game that released only two months after its official announcement.

But now the Mario + Rabbids formula is a known quantity, the sequel Sparks of Hope has to rely more on just novelty. It has to expand on the previous title without losing what made it good. Does Sparks of Hope accomplish that?

While there’s some pain points here and there, I think the latest Mario + Rabbids game is quite a lot of fun and a major improvement in most ways on the original title. It’s a much bigger game than that previous title, too, for better and for worse at times.

While I loved the strategy gameplay of Kingdom Battle, there was very little to do between those battles. You’d usually run in a straight line, solve a block-pushing puzzle or something of that nature, and earn some coins to get better weapons. Sparks of Hope massively expands the exploration portion between battles by giving you worlds to explore and sidequests to take. There is a critical path, but you’re generally encouraged to try and explore everything if possible.

The side quests usually have an assigning character who needs ice cubes to build their igloos or to traverse their lab to help remove the corruption. They often end with you fighting a battle and getting a planet-specific currency to spend on weapon skins since there's no more weapon upgrading. It’s not the best side quest writing I have ever seen, but it’s a Mario triple-jump over the previous title.

That said, it being an improvement should not dismiss any criticism of the side quest design here. There’s some quests, like “Destroy 3 [X] Enemies” wandering around the world that don’t activate until you talk to the quest giver, at which point you have already probably wiped out several of those enemies and have to reload the area to repopulate them to battle once again. The quests also pretty much repeat on every world, so their repetitiveness becomes apparent early.

Sparks of Hope moves from a grid-based tactical battle system to free movement, which I initially dismissed as an unnecessary change, but it really adjusts the planning and strategy required for battles. Since all characters can move until they make an attack, team jumps and positioning become far more critically important, meaning that you have to think long and hard about where you want everyone to be at the end of a turn. Kingdom Battle kind of begged you to go on the offense in comparison, but Sparks of Hope opens itself up to different kinds of solutions. The variety of “puzzle boxes” the battle systems can create here dwarf Kingdom Battle’s in number.

To that end, Sparks of Hope removes battle rankings, choosing not to punish or reward the player for beating the fight under a certain turn par. While this first felt like a step backward or the dreaded casualization, not having to worry about how many turns a strategy might take opens the design up to let you tackle battles in different ways. I could try to jump down a ledge and go tussle with six big enemies, or I could let them come to me and more cleverly use my skills and Lumas to take them out.

The aforementioned Lumas are also an interesting wrinkle added to the battle system. You can add multiple Lumas to a character, not only giving them skills like Electric Dash or Toxic Quake, but also changing their resistances. A character with a fire-based Luma can’t be burned and will take less damage from fire-based attacks, encouraging you to move Lumas around or move characters around and take advantage of your entire roster. If an ice enemy is ruining your day by casting Frostbite, which keeps you glued to your spot for the next turn, then having an ice Luma equipped really reverses their fortunes.

The hybrid Rabbid-Star creatures level up individually, but feeding them star bits does not have the same feeding animation from Super Mario Galaxy, which I think is a missed opportunity. No, really, I'm serious. That's the kind of thing that adds personality to a game and it's noticeable when it's missing.

Kingdom Battle rather famously, or perhaps infamously depending on how you felt about it, got pointedly difficult toward the end of the game. Sparks of Hope’s normal difficulty curve is somehow both more gentle and more steep. By the end of the first world, you can’t fuck around and do whatever anymore if you want to survive. Enemies will take advantage of every little mistake you make and you can end up losing a character a single turn into a fight if you’re not careful.

Healing is also no longer free, as it costs in-game coins to heal before a battle. Every character can use items like mushrooms, and Rabbid Peach is still a capable healer during combat, but just because you can scrape through a battle doesn’t mean it won’t bite you in the ass later. It is also another way the game encourages you to use every party member and not just your favorites.

That said, despite the game encouraging you to rotate through the entire cast, it’s kind of frustrating that Rabbid Peach is your only lifeline for most of the early game. I’m simultaneously being told to switch around while feeling obligated to keep this character in a permanent slot because the enemies can be brutal if given a chance.

We’re at a point in the Switch’s life where it’s hard to tell if a game was meant for better hardware that Nintendo isn’t releasing or if the games are just doing their best with aging hardware. There’s times where Sparks of Hopes runs like a champ and times where things look dire. Rabbid Luigi’s exhaustion skill has a cutscene that drops frames literally every single time and I am not sure why. Sometimes scanning a stage too fast results in slowdown.

The first world of the game, Beacon Beach, is also rainy and muddy by design, but it makes the entire game look like it’s stretching way beyond its capable resolution. Things eventually clear up, but man, I would not have started the game with that world because it sends a bad graphical impression.

Presentation is now a little strange as Rabbids talk this time, but not consistently. They all have some overworld barks or things to say in battle, but cutscenes are still largely silent tableaus. Talking to NPCs out in the world can elicit a similar feeling, as only a few main characters like Beep-O have full voice acting, some characters only say a few words of a dialogue box, and many just don’t have any voice acting at all. It leaves things coming off as weirdly inconsistent and they might have done better to do less overall with fewer voice clips.

The music — which is composed by Grant Kirkhope, Gareth Coker, and Yoko Shimomura — is round-the-table fantastic and you can definitely tell which composers touch which tracks. Whether it's an immediate recognition of Shimomura's strings and bells, Coker's swelling crescendos, or Kirkhope's actively jumpy tempos, you'll be bopping your head up and down to the whole soundtrack. It's almost a little annoying that the rest of the presentation is not as good as the music is.

But at some point all of that is nitpicking. Sparks of Hope is in almost every way an improvement upon Kingdom Battle. They sat and designed new ways to fix the flaws and issues with the first game and made some changes to accommodate their new solutions. Improved does not mean perfect, as there’s a lot of parts of the game that feel designed to annoy rather than challenge, but the space-faring sequel is the kind of leap forward more new series entries should be.

Verdict: Move aside Kingdom Battle, Sparks of Hope is the crown jewel of this series, which means something even when there's only two games competing.

8/10

Everything Everywhere Once A Week - 10/14/2022

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week. This is one of those weeks where I assumed I had way more time than actually exists, so I’ll be integrating some stuff I planned to write over this week into this newsletter. There’s kinda just not a lot in the news this week, so!

We're experimenting a bit by making things public here so let's see if it works!

Street Fighter 6 Could Be A Game of the Year If I Stop Being Bad At It

This past weekend, I participated in a very-closed beta of Street Fighter 6, a game I have played several times since June and think is just aces. The previous times I have played it, however, I did so usually capturing footage or playing against Linkshell’s Michael Higham, who is good at Street Fighter but I’m not going to get infuriated at my friend. I am going to get very infuriated at Timmy426 or whatever that guy’s name is, though, because I know I was better than him and still got my ass kicked.

Like, I lost badly. I am sure I am not that bad, but I was on tilt. And it’s a testament to how absolutely great Street Fighter 6 is that I kept playing despite getting so mad that I turned to my partner and said “I legitimately hate this person.”

Do I actually hate them? Probably not! Was I still having fun losing as Kimberly? It may be hard to tell through my furrowed brow and general scowl, but yeah, I was. Street Fighter 6 still plays smooth as butter and it’s a testament to the modern control scheme that I kept getting my ass handed to me by someone using it. It did not feel unfair, I felt like I was losing for reasons that were largely my fault.

But more importantly, Street Fighter 6 feels like the definition of a lesson learned. Games are as iterative as any other creative endeavor and someone took the time to sit and look at Street Fighter V, and possibly the rumored doomed Ono version of Street Fighter 6, and saw what did not work. They studied it. They sanded the edges without compromising the ethos.

There’s been no release date for Street Fighter 6 so far, but it’s fairly obviously going to release in 2023. Even with some heavy hitters already announced for next year, I do wonder if SF6 can make a genuine run at Game of the Year. Maybe its ability to top that list for me will be inextricably linked to my own ability to beat people I think I should be able to beat. Or maybe the act of getting actually good enough to do that is what’s going to vault it over that line. We’ll have to see.

I Wanted to Review She-Hulk But Instead I’m At Kinda Funny’s Studios

Whoops! The newsletter you’re reading today was actually written yesterday. I’m spending today helping my old friends at Kinda Funny with their new studio launch. And by helping, I mean hanging out backstage and eating their food. Unfortunately, at time of writing, I have not seen the final episode of She-Hulk yet. I expect I will actually review that next week, but I’ve liked everything so far.

I’ll also, while I’m talking about streaming TV here, mention that Andor is really damn good. Like, if you like heists and character writing, go watch that show.

It kind of baffles me that there’s a new Game of Thrones show, a Lord of the Rings show, and a great new Star Wars show but it’s somehow the one getting the least discussion and buzz. I kind of wonder if you can lay that at the feet of the not-great Star Wars things in recent years or even at the actually good things that have nevertheless contributed to overall fatigue.

Either way, if you feel like you can take some more laser sound and ship whooshes, Andor’s definitely a thing you should watch.

There’s Going to Be A $1500 Meta Quest For No One

At this week’s Meta Connect — formerly Oculus Connect for what was formerly the Oculus VR family of headsets — the company that may or may not have permanently ruined western culture talked about VR. In this time, they announced that they are releasing a new Meta Quest, their wireless headset, called Meta Quest Pro.

For $1500 American dollars.

Now, the logical answer here is that Meta is aiming this headset at enterprise users who need a headset for…something. And they’re intendending to sell this headset, whose battery lasts one (American or non-American) hour, to companies en masse so they can have VR headsets for their meetings. The logic, I think, is that ten headsets is cheaper than an office but also that math doesn’t make sense if you think about it for longer than ten seconds or that Zoom is cheaper than either.

Meta is taking it as a given, for some reason, that we’re all just going to move into VR spaces for work and is trying to get ahead of that inevitability by charging a premium for access. Which is a lot like me assuming that we’re all going to start needing cat hair to live and shaving my cats proactively to sell their hair to people for $1000 each. No, really, you’re going to need this, I’m not going to explain why, I’m just saying you need this and have to pay me money for it.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this is Meta ceding the gaming market, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. I think they’re ceding the AAA VR market, with your Resident Evil Villages and what have you, to PlayStation. Their acquisitions of Camouflaj, Twisted Pixel, and Armature indicate they’re still in for a lower-end market of cheaper and cheaper-made games. But they’re rapidly running out of road to explain what this vision looks like for anyone.

Is VR the future, a future, is it for gaming, is it for work, is it neither, is it both, or is it being shoved down people’s throats but not even the people doing the shoving know whose throats they should be aiming for?

Overwatch 2 Stumbles Out of the Gate and then Back in the Gate and then Back Out the Gate Again

It’s been a rough launch for Overwatch 2, the muted sequel to one of the biggest multiplayer shooters of the last decade. Having gone free-to-play, Overwatch 2 wanted to stop accounts from evading bans, so they required phone numbers for new accounts. But to be an effective deterrent, they banned prepaid numbers, which effectively cut off a number of people who don’t have extensive long-term cellphone plans. I used to sling phones at Best Buy and can tell you sometimes people just don’t want the newest phone or a 5G network or to sign on for a two-year contract with Verizon. Sometimes they can’t afford it and that’s a perfectly valid reason, too.

Blizzard ended up kind of partially undoing this unlocking the phone requirement for people who already owned Overwatch 1, and thus would be losing a fair bit of their entitlements if they popped a new account to ban evade, but leaving it in place for everyone else. Which feels a bit like the appearance of doing something without actually doing anything or simply doing it for a small subset of people but not actually fixing it.

This would be an own-goal in a vacuum, but it’s set against the backdrop of just everything going wrong with the game. Overwatch 2 is technically Early Access but only insofar as the main campaign — the reason it is called Overwatch 2 — is not anywhere close to ready or available yet. In theory, it also gives Blizzard space to let things go wrong without much criticism or mockery, but things are going wrong and they’re being both criticized and mocked.

Both Bastion and Torbjorn, characters from the now-dead Overwatch 1, have been disabled due to glitches.Torbjorn is still available in Quick Play, but Bastion has been so thoroughly nuked from the game that even attempting to access its character profile just quickly shifts to Cassidy instead in a sitcom-like act of shifting your attention.

It happens, especially as games become both more complicated to make and more of a service than ever. But it makes Overwatch 2 an easy target because the game itself feels so unnecessary to exist. Why is this called Overwatch 2? Why did Overwatch 1 die, not just with the recent shutdown but the slow strangulation that occurred over the years of petering out, for what essentially amounts to lighting changes? Is it so we could relaunch and remove Bastion because he literally got too powerful?

You Can Put Custom Video Files On Your Steam Deck Opening So This Guy Put The Entirety of Shrek So He Has to Wait For It to Finish Every Time

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/y3htzd/help_ive_set_my_boot_video_to_shrek_and_now_i/

He seemingly regrets it.

Materia Possessions First Episode

Hey! We recorded the first episode of Materia Possessions! I have to, uh, replace the file for some EQ reasons and I have not quite figured out how to both make it public and make Patreon host it, so we’re going through some growing pains here. This episode talks about Overwatch 2, Natalie’s orthodontist telling her not to get sunlight on her wisdom teeth extraction, and absolutely no publicly bad feelings about any former employers any of us might have.

Since I have to replace the file I won’t link it directly, but you can find the first episode (and presumably all other episodes) on the Patreon feed.

Things to Look Forward to This Week

• A bunch of embargoes are expiring in the next week or two, so expect some of that writing here!

Materia Possessions Episode 1: Overwatch Out

This is...really ramshackle! I'm sorry! But here's the first ever episode of Materia Possessions, the newest podcast from the former 99 Potions crew.

You might be asking questions like, where's the RSS feed? How can I actually listen to this? And to that I have to answer: I had not adequately prepared for how to do any of that. I assumed Patreon would take care of that, but since I want these podcasts to be public and not patron-only, it does not seem like Patreon is going to give me a public RSS feed to just hand out.

Which means I have to figure some other stuff out! Sorry again! But I am indeed going to start working on it and trying to figure this stuff out, so any help or suggestions are welcome.

In the meantime, enjoy the inaugural episode, with John Warren, Nerium Strom, and the unbullyable Natalie Flores joining me to talk about Overwatch, tonsilectomies, Nihon Falcom games, and more. Once I get a RSS feed going, this will also be on that! Probably!!

Previews & Reviews Will Be Public From Here On Out

Okay, so, when I had planned this Patreon out, I figured that the first few things would be public and everything after would go Patron-only. The hope would be that Patrons would get everything and feel like the Patreon cost is worth it.

But, upon discussing this with a friend in PR, I realized something crucial: it turns out PR is not super keen on giving coverage opportunities to things only a hundred or so people can read.

Which is understandable! So we're making a small adjustment here in that previews & reviews of games will be public. In terms of writing, the rest of the stuff will be behind the Patron wall at the moment. I haven't yet decided where Materia Possessions will sit, but I'm open to feedback.

Hopefully this works out!

Jeff Grubb's Jeopardy Game Show with Me!

Hey all! I'm about to be on Jeff Grubb's Jeopardy show! Hopefully I do not completely embarrass myself, but win or lose, I'm going to donate $50 to Trans Education Network of Texas (TENT). 

You can watch us here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG1powk2l9U

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (9/30/22)

September 30, 2022

Hello and welcome to the weekly Patreon newsletter, Everything Everywhere Once A Week. This is the inaugural edition, so we’re still working some kinks out in terms of formatting, production, etc. But let’s check out this week’s biggest news stories in video games and whatever else suits my fancy.

This first issue is public so people can get a sense of what this newsletter offers, but further ones will be Patron-exclusive!

E3 is Hellbent on Being Back

The Electronic Entertainment Expo is coming back in 2023, this time run by PAX purveyors ReedPop instead of the Entertainment Software Association per usual. After three off-years, one of which was technically on but online, the ESA has ceded the reins to Reed to better manage an E3 people might want. So far, I can’t say they’re doing a bad job.

Reed has announced that E3 2023 will be pursuing a show that’s more like Europe’s Gamescom, where the public and business sides of the show will be separate. Tuesday June 13 through Thursday June 15 will be business days for press and exhibitors, with Thursday being a hybrid transitioning to public days called “Gamer Days.”

The digital events, the ones people actually like watching E3 for at home, will begin on June 11 and precede the business days. It’s honestly not a bad direction to go and will certainly make it easier for the press to do their jobs.

I was once at E3 taking some demos and doing an interview with a major publisher in their meeting room, which was decked out with the demos along the walls in fake arcade machines. During the interview, someone came in and asked if they could come play one of the many empty arcade machines and was told that they were there just for the press. I remember thinking, man, it must absolutely suck to pay to come here and see this room FULL of empty demos and be told you can’t play them. This should in theory ease that a bit, too.

EA and Koei Tecmo Reveal Wild Hearts

WILD HEARTS Official Reveal Trailer

Announced last week, Koei Tecmo and EA revealed official gameplay of Wild Hearts this week.While it looks quite a bit like Toukiden, Koei Tecmo’s previous monster-hunting game, it is apparently quite different. The developers, Omega Force, say they have been working on the game for four years, which is a described timeline that strikes me as essentially saying “Someone saw how well Monster Hunter World was trending in the west and they greenlit this to try and capture some of that.”

But some of the best games ever released have been iterations on existing, successful ideas so why the hell not.

Wild Hearts is out February 17 on PS5, Series X|S, and PC.

Skull and Bones Delayed Once Again to 2023

Originally scheduled to release in November of this year—actually, scratch that. Originally intended to release in 2018, Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones (previously Skull & Bones but I guess that’s less marketable?) has been delayed four times, this week marking the fifth. The game is now intended to come out on March 9, 2023.

The competitive ship-based combat game has been the subject of a lot of consternation within Ubisoft, with some sources telling me the company needs a morale win and Skull and Bones is unlikely to be it. Other sources within the company think the game could catch on, but they’re in for rough waters (my pun) with the introduction because people have a definite idea of what this game should be and it’s probably not what this game actually is.

Ubisoft says they’re delaying the game due to feedback from the beta, which indicates that maybe those fears have at least so far been well-founded.

Skull and Bones is seemingly ditching last gen systems and is releasing on PS5, Xbox Series S|X, PC, Amazon Luna, and I guess now has been canceled for Stadia. It will be Ubisoft’s first $70 game with no options for a cheaper MSRP.

Oh, Right, Stadia’s Dead

This week, Google confirmed the inevitable, that they’re backing away from Stadia and will no longer keep the service usable after its end date at the start of 2023. The cloud-based gaming service was not the first of its kind, but it was the mega-corporation’s first major stab at creating a gaming competitor to rival other platform holders.

Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you feel about the concessions you have to make in terms of game ownership and preservation — Stadia did not rise to those lofty ideals. The business plan was wonky, the technology was there enough but not quite there enough, and everyone had this feeling in the back of their minds that Google would inevitably kill the service like they do everything else. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy if you like, but Google did just that two months to the day after swearing up and down they wouldn’t do that.

When I first saw Stadia, what I had hoped for was the most interconnected company in the world leveraging cloud gaming in a way no one else would be able to. I wanted to email a level bookmark in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to a friend so they could, from their browser, check out the boss fight I wanted to show them. I wanted to click on a YouTube video of a dungeon in Destiny and be instantly placed there in my own game. These goals may have been too far for the technology to really accomplish right now, but no one else aside from Google would have really been able to make it happen, so it’s kind of a bummer they’re closing shop on it.

On the other hand, it’s also a pretty resounding rejection from the audience. If Google can’t make it happen, who can? I don’t think Amazon’s Luna is really setting the world on fire, though it’s seemingly at least doing well enough to not be taken out behind the shed. Perhaps Microsoft has the right idea that cloud gaming is merely a value-add to an existing service and is not a service in and of itself.

I believe that there’s an avenue for success somewhere, but the value argument of not needing to buy a whole new console kind of washes away under the scrutiny of what you do need: high-speed wired internet, siloing off your userbase, rebuying games or buying them in the first place with no guarantee that you’ll always own them, and just generally unproven technology. Maybe one day we’ll get to that point, but it feels equally likely we just won’t ever.

As we sunset Google Stadia, here’s a question I have to ask: what’s to become of the things that only existed on the service? Are they going to be ported to something else or are they just…gone?

Saudi Arabia Wants to Buy a “Leading Game Publisher”

One of the less-reported stories over the last few years is Saudi Arabia’s encroaching investments in gaming. People point out Tencent quite a bit — something a contingent of people reveled in trying to point out to me as if I both did not know and was also somehow involved — but the human rights track record of Saudi Arabia only really comes up when discussing the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s 96.18% ownership of SNK. Through investment programs, the Saudi government also owns minor stakes in companies like Capcom and Nexon, too.

Now, the government has announced plans to invest $37 billion into the industry, with $13 billion of that being specifically for a “leading game publisher.” I have no idea who that is. There’s a host of publishers they already have money in that would make sense as acquisition targets, but I don’t really have an inkling of who has enough public shares to get acquired like that.

There are some companies that MBS could maybe buy outright with a check, but I am hoping that we can circle back to that human rights thing for a bit here. Saudi Arabia has a lot of different people in it, so we can’t paint the entire country with one brush, but we sure as hell can do that for the government. MBS has inflicted numerous crimes upon his own populace including banning travel, protests, women’s rights, and liberally — one might argue, capriciously — applying the death penalty for minor crimes. If I were writing this paragraph in Saudi Arabia, I do not think I would make it to the end of this sentence.

The crown prince has also credibly been accused of murdering journalists in gruesome fashion, something they freely get away with because we’ve decided international relations are more important than individual lives. Hell yeah world leadership.

Lots of game companies do things wrong. In the interest of time, I didn’t include a story in this newsletter about Nintendo engaging in union busting. I’m far past the idea of telling you what you should support or play or whatever, I’m too exhausted at this point in my life to control anyone besides myself. What I will say is, I hope that any company thinking of taking that check from MBS thinks long and hard about who they’re getting in bed with.

I just want the game industry to have fewer armies and assassins on the payroll.

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my Patreon! A lot of what you're here for is spelled out in the welcome message, but here's a quick rundown of what you can expect from this Patreon.

• Weekly Newsletter — Every Friday, I'll send out a newsletter to Patrons that lives as a place for the week's news, my commentary, and links to other things I'm doing for the week. It's like my Twitter feed but with more words.
• Ranking Roulette — Going through different series, chosen from a list of options by Patrons, and writing a piece ranking the games from the series. What's the best Assassin's Creed game, and which one is the worst? We'll find out together!
• Game Previews & Reviews — I am still involved in the game industry and still doing previews and reviews. I'll do those here! I want to play the latest and newest games and tell you all what I think about them.
• Materia Possessions — If we hit $400 a month, I'm going to make sure that the former 99 Potions crew gets together twice a month to talk video games and gets paid. While I imagine most of the stuff on this Patreon gets shared outside of it, this podcast will be exclusive to Patrons only.

I chose the $5 tier because of the way credit card transactions and Patreon cuts work. If you can't afford it, that's okay! I know a lot of people have other Patreons to support and adding one or two more can actually make it a bridge too far. This is just for the people who want it. Let's all go on this fun journey together!