"This cycle of test, of iterate, of test again, that is such a key component of the live service success both leading up to launch, but also throughout the life of the game and we're committed to continuing to leverage our learning to maximize engagement and player satisfaction throughout the lifecycle of the title."

That's how PlayStation Studios CEO Hermen Hulst recently described the making of Marathon to shareholders. He was reading from a teleprompter. It sounded like a threat. A week later the game was indefinitely delayed.

The vibes around Marathon have been tanking since an April alpha test. There were plenty of specific critiques going around but the basic problem was that too many people just weren’t having that much fun. It felt conservatively designed and a bit vanilla.

The art was cool—a cinematic short was more compelling than anything in the alpha test—and the Bungie feel was there but the extraction shooter loop as a whole just didn’t have the juice. Then an art theft scandal torpedoed remaining good will as naysayers weaponized the issue to write Marathon off completely.

Bungie wrote in a blog post this week that player feedback had been "strong and clear" and that the team needed more time to craft a game that "truly reflects your passion” and work on "deepening the relationship" with fans. That also sounded like a threat. A new release date will be revealed in the fall.

Hulst’s corpo-speak during a recent Sony business briefing is a perfect distillation of what makes so many players instinctively recoil at the phrase “live service” despite loving so many of the most successful ones. It conceives of online games as platforms where user telemetry is analyzed to keep people playing and monetize every minute of it.

Instead of buying a game, beating it, and moving on you’re essentially paying to hop onto a perpetual treadmill where the primary design consideration is to keep you running whether you’re enjoying it or not. Sometimes that’s a compelling gameplay loop. Sometimes it’s battle pass rewards. Often it’s just the fact that you’re friends are all still hanging out there.

“I was catching up on the Marathon delay news, and this quote by Herman Hulst perfectly sums up why these games aren't for me anymore,” wrote the lead developer behind 2024’s best retro FPS Selaco in a post that resonated with many on Bluesky. “Every single time all they talk about is analytics, test groups, engagement and research data. The word ‘Fun’ is never used in any of those interviews.”

Hulst’s comments were a mea culpa for Concord, a live service hero shooter that instantly flopped and cost Sony hundreds of millions. The biggest question at the time was how such a big publisher could launch such a mid game. Didn’t they have mock reviews? How did user testing miss the red flags? Why did they launch with such poor pre-order numbers?

One reason is that you just never know. Pre-launch marketing for Helldivers 2 made it clear Sony did not think that game would become even half the hit it turned out to be. Concord had a special edition PS5 DualSense at launch. Helldivers 2 famously did not.

“I don't trust any marketers that say they can forecast game sales," Shuhei Yoshida, the last guy in charge of PlayStation Studios, said in an interview after leaving Sony earlier this year. "You look at the commercial side of things but in the end you have to trust your gut."

Sony’s gut has not been very good lately. The PlayStation 5 generation has no identity. A dozen live service projects were greenlit and most have all been canceled or delayed. Helldivers 2 is the exception that proves the rule. Arrowhead is prototyping its next game and won’t be working with Sony on it.

"Arrowhead’s philosophy has always been 'a game for everyone is a game for no-one'," Jorjani explains. "That is the company slogan. It’s how our games are designed. You can feel it in every feature. I think it’s one of the big reasons that Helldivers 2 has been so successful. It feels fresh because it does a lot of unpopular stuff.”

Helldivers 2 is not a live service game that Arrowhead tried to make fun. It’s a fun game that happens to be a live service. That distinction can be profitable. There are around 2.5 million players every week. It’s still the second most-played game on Steam. It makes half of its revenue from microtransactions.

Here’s how Hulst talks about making games: "We've introduced much more rigorous processes for validating—for revalidating our creative, our commercial, our development assumptions and hypotheses, and we now do that on a much more ongoing basis," Hulst said. "That's the plan that will ensure we're investing in the right opportunities at the right time, all while maintaining much more predictable timelines."

Here’s how Nintendo’s Shiguro Miyamoto talks about making them: “For me it's much more fun to see if the thing that I made is actually going to sell well. Rather than me trying to create something that I think other people will like, I just keep making things that I like and then I just see if other people like them too.”

Live service interrupted

Dune: Awakening has a deep desert problem. The end-game map is split between PVP and PVE zones, and lone players are getting decimated by rival gangs. There are memes about just staying in the starting Hagga Basin area as a result, but certain resources can only be gained by venturing into the griefers’ wasteland. In addition to some performance issues, quick respawn timers also mean that players you just killed can quickly find you again. Less than half of all players have ventured beyond Hagga Basin.

“We have a lot of plans to address your points about respawn times and revives,” creative director Joel Bylos wrote in a long-ranging Q&A on Reddit. “Full loot is a decree that can be obtained via the Landsraad (so compete there if you want to make it a reality), there are control points in the deep desert already, we have no plans to reduce the DD size. As we work on the game we will continue to work on making PvP more rewarding (I am sure you will note I am not being very concrete but that is because we are planning and watching how people are playing and finding the right points to address).”

FBC: Firebreak players have been skipping it’s most important resource. Lost Assets are folders of classified intel players can pick up during missions. “A whopping 90% of our players have never picked up a single Lost Asset,” Remedy Entertainment confessed on Friday. An emergency update made them easier to identify and tried to fix a host of other onboarding issues, including separating out cosmetic unlocks from upgrades that impact gameplay in the shooter’s Helldivers 2-like battle pass.

Another big change addresses how players unlock missions. They consist of multiple sections, and originally players had to finish one section to unlock the rest, re-doing everything in-between each time. No longer. The enemy variety, combat, and objectives were a bit sleepy for me but there are some really neat ideas unique to the Control setting like a post-it note debuff that turns you into a paper monster if you’re not careful.

Final Fantasy XIV has cracked down on a stalking tool that fans were freaking out about earlier this year. The makers of PlayerScope, which lets users track players anywhere in the game, following them from one server to the next and exposing alternate accounts, have abandoned development following a cease and desist. Given the issue still exists at the level of the MMO tech itself, it’s unclear if copycat trackers will continue proliferating in the background until Square Enix fixes the underlying problem.

The publisher is also fixing the Occult Crescent's Forked Tower raid that has only been cleared 400 times since it was added. That’s because it’s a 48-player activity that requires everyone to filter in through 8-person instances, making it a nightmare to coordinate outside of the most devoted guilds. As of update 7.3 in August, alliances will be able to queue all at once, director Naoki Yoshida confirmed in a recent livestream. He also said that thanks to the development team’s hard work, hats will soon be available to all characters. Metal helmets, however, will take some more time.

• Mario Kart World has an online meta and it revolves around driving the Baby Blooper and picking random. That’s because the random category automatically filters out transition tracks from one course to the next, letting players engage in traditional repetitive laps rather than road trips with long straightaways. Some brave Baby Blooper truthers, however, are arguing that other karts are just as viable.

• Elden Ring Nightreign has a new hardest boss: Enhanced Gaping Jaw. I’ve already spent three nights and nearly 10 hours trying to kill it to no avail (we got soul crushingly close!) but am still, somehow, hungry for more punishment. By far the most taxing part isn’t the fight itself but the 30 minutes of racing around the open world map trying to maximize loot and XP. Also this fucking guy.

• Rematch is a third-person action soccer game from the makers of martial arts RPG Absolver. “Rocket League but with people and no flying,” is how one fan put it. There are teams of five with no fouls or out-of-bounds. Players are already demolishing one another by chaining headers together right outside the goal.

• Peak is a co-op climbing game from the makers of Another Crab’s Treasure. It’s $8 and sold a million copies in its first week. From one Steam review: “Told my friends with panic in my voice that the lava is rising even though it wasn't, one friend panicked and died because of it. 10/10 game.”

Patch notes

Lies of P version 1.9.0.0 will now let players start the Soulslike’s new Overture expansion at chapter 5 instead of chapter 9. It also reduced the stats of rank-and-file enemies and nerfed the difficulty of the DLC on new game plus after veteran players complained about it being unfair.

War Robots: Frontiers season 2 added new mechs, pilots, rewards, and balance changes. The update stemmed the tide of mixed reviews on Steam by nerfing some of the PVP shooter’s “most toxic weapons” like Noricum missiles which low-effort trolls were spamming in every match.

Escape from Tarkov patch 0.16.7.0 received a host of quality-of-life fixes like the ability to finally search items in your stash by category or name. Players won’t have to manually convert junk to cash to buy new items anymore either.

Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.3 has been delayed. The new patch will be similar in scope to the last “final” one, which included new character creation options, custom cars, and Keanu Reeves riding shotgun.

Other links

• Alzara Radiant Echoes was an indie JRPG that raised over $300,000 on Kickstarter. Now the studio behind it is shutting down. “We used that success to develop a new demo of the game incorporating the latest advances on Alzara,” Studio Camelia wrote in an update. “We attended various events (Tokyo Game Show, DICE…) to meet with potential partners from around the world. We had in-depth discussions earlier this year, but unfortunately, none of them resulted in a contract.” One commenter wrote back, "“So this campaign was for a demo? Would have been nice for that "little" disclosure at the beginning.”

• Third-party game sales on Switch 2 outside of Cyberpunk 2077 are disappointing, The Game Business reported. Circana game research director Mat Piscatella says it’s too early to really know. Two big contributing factors might be the fact that most day-one buyers have access to all the games they already bought for Switch 1 and that most third-party releases are ports of old stuff. Batman: Arkham City came to Wii U a year late. Yakuza 0 is already 10 years ago.

• Borderlands 4 is getting a combat radar in response to fan requests. With double jumps and gliding it’s becoming more and more like Destiny 2 everyday. The skill trees will be bigger than Borderlands 2 and 3 combined.

• Fortnite Blitz is now the battle royale’s most popular mode with abbreviated matches that can take as little as five minutes to complete. Online PVP for the TikTok generation.

• Riot's Minecraft-like sandbox RPG Hytale is dead. Revealed in 2018 and banking on a 2021 release, it kept getting delayed. Hypixel co-founder Noxy said the project got outpaced by the rest of the genre. “We looked at reducing scope, adjusting timelines, and finding new angles to keep moving forward,” Noxy wrote. “But each of those options would have meant compromising on what made Hytale special in the first place. It wouldn’t have been the game we set out to make.”

Last week’s Nintendo Direct had a surprising number parallels to the 2013 Xbox One debut. Microsoft led with the console’s motion censing Kinect camera and cable TV set top box capabilities, features that were part of a plan to dominate the living room the same way the iPhone was dominating people’s pockets.

Those features turned out to be things that players didn’t care much about and Sony swooped in by making the PS4 cheaper and pitching it as being a gaming machine for gaming fans. Microsoft’s message was additionally hampered by lots of confusing messaging around an ever-worse sounding DRM initiate that would help people share digital games but completely destroy the used game market (the genesis of the how to share a PS4 game video that “won” Sony the generation).

Nintendo’s Switch 2 rollout followed a similar pattern. It spent a lot of time touting new Joy-Con mouse controls, a dedicated GameChat button for voice chat, and video sharing capability via web cam peripheral so players can show their faces while playing games. There are neat and interesting arguments to be made on behalf of each of these features, but my guess is that, at the end of the day, most people don’t care about them and they won’t be meaningfully implemented in most games, even Nintendo’s.

Then there was Nintendo’s needlessly obfuscatory rollout of the things people actually wanted to know about like how much the Switch 2 cost and how to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom at 60fps in 4K. Fans went looking for the info themselves and some ended up on Spain’s Nintendo Store which surprisingly listed Mario Kart World as €80 for the digital version and €90 physical for physical copies.

Since the Switch 2 Direct I have listened to 10+ hours of podcast recordings breaking down the reveal last week, all of them hastily recorded in the immediate aftermath of the event, and listened to tons of people raise the digital vs. physical price discrepancy question in real time without any clear answers because Nintendo never provided any (I emailed PR for clarification at 10:29 AM on April 2 and never heard back).

Eventually, U.S. retailers like Best Buy and others listed the physical version of Mario Kart World with no price discrepancy, but the physical and digital divide remains in Europe, including the UK where retailer GAME called it “a challenging” and a “tough message for a customer,” especially when it comes to one of the last predominantly physical game buying fanbases left out there.

Nintendo’s bad messaging bit it in the ass again over the weekend when it was discovered that physical copies of Switch 2 Edition are just the Switch version with an upgrade key. Buy Kirby and the Forgotten World for Switch 2 and you’re actually just getting the Switch game with a code, something that contradicted how Nintendo had framed the news in the Direct (“The Nintendo Switch 2 Edition games you just saw will be available as both physical and digital versions.”) The source of the apparent confirmation? A random Nintendo support rep. [Update 1:57 p.m. ET: According to YouTuber Nintendo Prime, the My Nintendo Store informed him that Switch 2 Editions will actually come fully loaded on the physical cartridge. More confusion that underlines the larger point!]

But while there are clear similarities in the rollout, the Switch 2 departs from the Xbox One in two meaningful ways: the camera is optional and it has big exclusive games. That might have been enough to change the Xbox One’s fortunes and it will certainly make Nintendo’s new hardware mostly immune to any initial bad buzz.

It took Microsoft’s Xbox 360 successor almost a year to get Sunset Overdrive. In that time Switch 2 will have Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, Hyrule Warriors: Imprisonment War, and The Duskbloods, not to mention superior versions of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Pokémon Legends: Z-A.

A few more thoughts on the Switch 2 reveal before we move on.

• Nintendo’s strategy with the Switch 2, which will almost certainly sell less than its predecessor, seems to be to extract more revenue per fan per year with higher prices, similar to what Sony has done with the PS5. It just recently ditched a generous 5% cash-back discount on all digital purchases.

• According to Nintendo’s 2021 business presentation, Switch is more popular among 40-year-olds than 10-year-olds. Nintendo products are an important entry point into console gaming for kids and pricing them even higher seems to risk pushing even more of them into free app rivals like YouTube and Roblox.

• Higher prices also risks a lower attach rate. Instead of buying eight or nine games on average like they did on Switch, those on Switch 2 might only grab five or six. Third-parties and indies seem likely to be the biggest losers of Nintendo trying to take a larger piece of a shrinking pie.

• There will never be another Wii U situation for Nintendo because after consolidating its handheld and home console lines every console will have multiple Pokémon games on it.

• The way modern consoles make a lot of money is by collecting fees on third-party transactions. That traditionally consisted of digital game purchases, but increasingly means microtransactions. Better social features make Switch 2 more conducive to the types of live service hangs that generate social cosmetic purchases.

• These games also require paid Switch Online subscriptions. This is why Nintendo wanted a multiplayer game from FromSoftware. The Switch 2 should also finally be powerful enough to run forever games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Rocket League (as as well as newcomers like Marvel Rivals) without major concessions.

• There’s a Mario-sized hole in the Switch 2’s launch year lineup. I’m convinced Nintendo is waiting to reveal a 3D Mario coming sometime in the fall, maybe even within a week or two of Grand Theft Auto 6. It’ll probably be announced around not-E3 in June, a week or two after the Switch 2’s official launch. My pet theory is it’s Mario Galaxy 3 and Nintendo was teasing it at last week’s New York preview event.

• Speaking of which, I left out one of the most important details in last week’s gossip about the event: Nintendo staff clapped for attendees every time they entered the Mario Kart demo room, whether they arriving for the first time or just coming back from the bathroom.

• The Switch 2 cases are ugly as hell.

Trump take Switch

It feels incredibly quaint to be doing any commentary on the Switch 2 at all when pre-orders for it in the U.S. are currently on hold as Trump sends the world economy into free fall over a nonsensical tariff regime born out of a 17th century conception of global trade. So far he’s refusing to back down even in the face of panicking cable news anchors.

Taxes that would raise the price of Switch 2 and other gaming products by as much as around 30-45 percent are set to go into effect April 9, the day pre-orders were set to begin. Unless Trump reverses course, it won’t just be Nintendo fans in the U.S. that are screwed. The entire game industry would be set for unprecedented pain amid panic around the biggest economic recession in decades.

Long before the “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced, anti-Trump protests were scheduled to take place across the country on April 6. People marched against the ransacking of the federal government and the trampling of human of rights. Luigi was there. So was Pikachu. Also fake gamer memes. While the incoming economic damage will be devastating and widespread, gamers are currently at the vanguard of seeing all the shit they care about getting more expensive and taken out of their hands.

The only thing falling faster than the S&P 500 is Elon Musk’s favorability. He’s the first toxic asset of this new economic crisis, and seems likely to be jettisoned by the Trump admin at any moment. He can’t even play Path of Exiles 2 on his private jet without being obliterated in the online world chat. His actual gameplay wasn’t much better either. “This is like the level of play of a cat sitting on a controller lol,” one person wrote.

Marathon et al.

Bungie’s first “completely new project” in over a decade continues to look like it might be the most visually beautiful game the studio has ever produced. It’s a squad-based extraction loot shooter where players explore the “mysterious planet of Tau Ceti IV” using disposable cybernetic bodies. In classic Destiny fashion, a gameplay trailer debut date of April 12 was revealed after players solved a series of ARG puzzles embedded in new teaser materials.

Marathon’s aesthetic (there’s a great breakdown here) is led by franchise art director Joseph Cross who was a lead concept designer at Bungie for years helping to shape Destiny’s melding of post-apocalyptic dilapidation and whimsical sci-fi idealism. He was also art director on Sony’s failed sci-fi live shooter Concord very early on but left amid disagreements with the game’s director about, among other things, that game’s art style.

Marathon’s radioactive color palette and ghostly tech sensibility have immediately grabbed players’ imaginations, but the durability of that vision will come down to whether modern Bungie can deliver on a complex PvPvE experience, interesting character progression, and an intriguing world that makes fans want to grind for hours on end.

Previous reporting by Insider Gaming suggests key distinctions for Marathon are slowly depleting oxygen tanks that put every mission on a timer and lightning quick load times to cut down on the friction of queuing up. Other reporting has pointed to some big internal development hurdles, including the firing of former director Chris Barrett in early 2024.

In some ways it feels like Bungie’s entire survival hinges on whether Marathon can recreate Destiny’s magic a decade ago following a brutal year of layoffs and restructurings after selling to Sony for over $3 billion. Not because the studio will be shutdown if it doesn’t, but because whatever is left of the Bungie mystique and legacy for modern fans will have evaporated, and potentially any meaningful creative leverage it still has within the broader PlayStation portfolio.

A few more things floating around in the gaming ether this week:

• Microsoft has used generative-AI to hallucinate an entire fake version of Quake 2 and people hate it. PC Gamer did not mince words. Friends at the Table podcaster Austin Walker also has a great thread on the subject too.

• Insider Gaming reports that Ubisoft is working on a Rainbow Six Siege XCOM-like, which Dead Game can corroborate. My understanding is its code name is Slice & Dice and the project is being led by Ghost Recon: Breakpoint game director Elie Benhamou. It’s one of the many interesting-sounding Ubisoft games that have struggled to see the light of day that I alluded to in last week’s newsletter.

• Lots of old, seemingly canceled Nintendo games are leaking online, including one from Retro Studios called “Harmony” about a fairy character that can transform to solve puzzles, according to VGC.

• The first interviews from last week’s Switch 2 event are coming out. VGC confirms it won’t have Hall Effect joysticks, Nintendo of America’s Bill Trinen explains why Mario Kart World is $80 but won’t say who’s m making Donkey Kong Bananza, and big boss Doug Bowser claims tariffs aren’t why the Switch 2 costs $450, suggesting it is about to cost way, way more in the U.S.

Nintendo’s Switch 2 Direct felt like Christmas. It took forever to arrive, the expectations kept building up, and now that it’s over there’s a post-holiday hangover punctuated by painful dollar signs.

Highlights from the reveal included Mario Kart meets Forza Horizon and a 3D Donkey Kong with shades of Mario Odyssey that sports impressive destructible environments. Games can output at up to 4K resolution on a display, run at up to 120fps in handheld mode, and Switch Online is finally getting GameCube games with graphical enhancements.

Less impressive was the mysterious C button’s new GameChat function, a suite of built-in voice chat and screen sharing features best described as Discord but worse. It will also be paywalled after the first year. Hitpoints’ Nathan Brown described it as a “button you have to pay in order to press, a regrettable first for the videogame industry.”

Most important of all was what Nintendo didn’t mention in the Switch 2 Direct. The price of $450 trickled out via a press release, followed by Mario Kart World breaking the $80 barrier, and Donkey Kong Bananza establishing $70 as the new standard next-gen pricing for the platform.

The vibes quickly soured as each new bit of info trickled out. Battery life worse than the original Switch, physical games potentially priced $10 more than their digital counterparts in some territories (Update: the U.S. seems excluded from this), and some physical game cards just being glorified DRM keys requiring full downloads. Features like QR codes for sharing creations in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom locked behind a $10 upgrade fee.

By the time Nintendo tried to share gameplay deep-dives of its exciting new releases in Treehouse livestreams on YouTube the chats were just flooded with people shouting “drop the price.” The gloom cast by Trump’s unhinged trade war announced the dame day that would threaten fresh 34-46% taxes on imports only made things worse.

This is not the stuff Nintendo wants people talking about. Someone who works at a PlayStation studio claimed to me it was “all fist bumps” after the announcement. The Switch 2 is the same price as an all-digital PS5 where games like Elden Ring and Final Fantasy VII Remake are already available and much cheaper.

Alongside the Switch 2’s online rollout, the company was hosting a parallel event IRL for hundreds of media and content creators in a New York city showroom full of demo stations for Mario Kart Tour, Donkey Kong Bananza, and third-party ports like Cyberpunk 2077 ($70 and only 40fps in docked).

The event began in a separate building with coffee and pastries where press and influencers watched the Direct in real-time. “One of the loooudest audience reactions was the laughter that erupted in the room when Switch 2 World Tour was announced as a paid digital game and not a pack-in title,” one attendee told Dead Game.

They were later shuffled into another building where a very small picture of Mario on a very big TV screen apparently greeted taste-makers at the sign-in desk. Multiple adjoining rooms included demo stations for lots of stuff shown during the Direct, including the World Tour which actually has some really cool mini-games. Different color wrist bands denoted how much time attendees got to spend on the mini-E3-style show floor.

There was a press Q&A roundtable with Nintendo staff where the company told people not to ask about politics, according to Game File’s Stephen Totilo. When a European outlet asked about the controversial pricing strategy, Nintendo reps shutdown the question before it had even been finished being translated, another reporter present told Dead Game.

“Sitting and watching the Direct, then quizzing a panel of Nintendo developers, was 100% the Nintendo E3 playbook,” Totilo told me as I in turn quizzed him on the meta-strategy surrounding the announcement.

He was actually surprised by the amount of time devoted to performance benchmarks—“not sure I ever heard Nintendo brag about frame rates for a new system before”—and sees it as Nintendo trying to prove what fans are paying for with Switch 2 (a pitch it struggled to make with previous iterative upgrades like 3DS and Wii U).

But the new hardware also arrives as game companies are more guarded than ever, and Nintendo doesn’t like to go off script. “The hardware team said multiple times that they didn't want to bore us or go into detail about certain technical aspects of the consoles despite that being the exact reason we were there,” one reporter told Dead Game.

Gamertag Radio’s Danny Peña managed to get Switch 2 producer Kouichi Kawamoto to confirm that improving the eShop performance was a key priority for Switch 2, though what specifically they did to accomplish that is unclear.

Is Joy-Con stick drift fixed? Hardware design lead Tetsuya Sasaki was similarly oblique. “They have been designed to have bigger movement and smoother movement,” he said. How long will a single charge last? The developers wouldn’t clarify despite Nintendo already listing a range of 2-6.5 hours on its website.

Why ditch the Switch’s recent OLED upgrade? “There was a lot of advances in LCD technology,” Sasaki said. “During our development, we took a look at the LCD technology that was available to us now, and after a lot of consideration, we decided to stick with LCD.” The real answer, no doubt, is keeping down costs, and upselling fans on a Switch 2 OLED in 2027.

We go through a similar song and dance every time a new Nintendo console comes out and ultimately most of it just ends up being noise. The only thing that really matters are the games. Nintendo lives in its own world is a frequent refrain among competing gaming execs and industry analysts.

As much as there can be a tendency put it in competition with the Steam Deck or PS5, the Switch 2 will succeed or fail primarily on the quality of its first-party games. What Nintendo is selling is, as The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost points out, first and foremost an appliance for powering go-karts, and the initial buzz is that it does that very, very well.

Early impressions from those who went hands-on is that Mario Kart World is great, according to Kinda Funny’s ‪Blessing Adeoye Jr., with a new Knockout mode that might be the best twist on battles since the franchise launched. Donkey Kong Bananza is deceivingly fun with expressive gameplay and fun tunneling mechanics. “I took a survey of the press at the event, and everyone said Donkey Kong was the best game there,” wrote The Verge’s Ash Parrish.

Another hit, at least for demo purposes, was the longest-titled game ever: Super Mario Party Jamboree – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV. “Everyone was testing Mario Party Jamboree and the webcam and mic features so you'd periodically hear loud cheering and a lot of game journalists jumping up and down,” one reporter told Dead Game. It might have just been Giant Bomb’s Dan Ryckert the whole time.

What was the least popular? A certain open world wizarding sim. Multiple attendees told me the Hogwarts Legacy Switch 2 Edition demo section remained largely abandoned throughout the event. The Washington Post’s Gene Park agreed, though it’s unconfirmed if that’s because of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s transphobia or the fact Hogwarts Legacy, despite being a best-seller, is quite boring. “To be fair I fucking hate the game too,” Park said on the Punching Up podcast.

The most divisive takes coming out of the Nintendo event ended up not being about the Switch 2 (solid), or the games (excellent), or even the price (ouch), but rather the onsite catering. What do you feed over 200 people who will tell the world whether the next-gen experience you’re selling is worth $450?

“Some chicken stir fry and a bit of tofu stir fry, and some veggies,” one person told me. “It was perfectly fine! It wasn’t like takeout food. It was well prepared.”

Another was more helpful.

“Lunch was a Chinese buffet of sorts with orange chicken, rice, mochi and Matcha brownies,” they said. “Then before the roundtable they had some more pastries. Lunchtime was bustling. All the creators and journos sitting at big round tables either working or just taking a load off, chatting with industry folks and felt very high school cafeteria (in a good way).”

But one person virulently disagreed.

“THE FOOD SUCKS,” they said, describing the core spread as consisting of gochujang beef and orange chicken. “It was on catered black table cloth draped tables with fancy name cards and everything and it was just…terrible.”

Playing games is sweaty business. What about drinks?

“Coffee, tea, and lemonade that was more lemon than ade,” they told me. “I love lemonade, a bit of a connoisseur. It was bad too. It was funny contrasting the terrible food with such buttoned up service. Guys were in suits! Not black shirts and pants with an apron but FULL SUITS carrying away everybody's mostly full plates of food.”

Was one of them Mario? No, there was no one present in a Mario suit, multiple people confirmed to me. Why do you keep asking me about food, they said.

Totilo had the beef. “It was fine. It was free. What is wrong with people?”

Ubisoft is using its most valuable franchises as collateral for a $1.25 billion bailout from Tencent. I joked on Bluesky that this is the equivalent of Obamacare for keeping the French publisher family owned, by which I meant a complex mechanism for moderately improving things without fundamentally changing the status quo.

My take on the deal is that it buys the Guillemot brothers who cofounded Ubisoft almost four decades ago a couple more years of control over a vast and uneven game making empire. If the company ships some hit blockbusters and the stock rebounds they can exit on their own terms. If Ubisoft continues to struggle, then Tencent gets first dibs on Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege.

How did things get here? The short explanation is that Ubisoft rapidly doubled in size but its revenue stayed almost flat or went down. In 2017 it had a headcount of 11,907 and reported around 2 billion in revenue. In 2022 it had a headcount of 20,665 and revenue of around…$1.85 billion. By comparison, Electronic Arts has a rough headcount of 12,730. Its total revenue last fiscal year was $7.6 billion. That's $597,014 per employee. Ubisoft currently projects revenue of just $110,361 per head for the last 12 months.

Part of that difference is what happens when you don't sell popular annual sports games with money printing gambling machines inside of them. But it’s also what happens when a bunch of big games take way too long to make and don't ultimately deliver. Would-be Call of Duty-killer xDefiant did not live to see its one-year anniversary. It's hard to see Skull and Bones ever getting anywhere close to breaking even.

Assassin's Creed and Far Cry haven't been perfect either. The first used to come out every year. Now it's every two or three, with five years between Assassin's Creed Shadows and the last mainline entry. Far Cry is also set to have the longest gap between mainline entries ever, without even a mid-gen spin-off like Primal or New Dawn. Even Even DLC for The Division 2 keeps getting delayed.

Ubisoft didn't just double in size during this period, its core gameplay formulas also grew stale. It faced upheaval from the pandemic. Blockbuster budgets and workloads exploded in the shift to PS5 and Xbox Series X. And the company's longtime chief creative, Serge Hascoet, departed the company in 2020 amid allegations of sexual harassment, leaving a power vacuum which was never quite filled (his court trial over the allegations resumes in June).

Things came to a head in 2022. Ubisoft's only major release that year was Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope (remember Rainbow Six Extraction? I didn't think so). It was an excellent game but a Switch exclusive coming out near the end of the console's life. VGC reported the game sold around 3 million copies. My understanding is that's not even half of what Ubisoft hoped to achieve. A cost-cutting plan was revealed the next year, as well as a $537 million write-down of R&D expenses.

In some ways, Ubisoft is what many players say they want from EA: a major publisher that still experiments with smaller games and new franchises. It hasn't panned out financially. There could be a lot of reasons for that. A lack of clear vision and strong creative leadership at the top? A Byzantine co-dev structure that moves slowly and is too conservative? Premium games that are expensive to make and then go on sale for 50 percent off six months later?

The plan for a new Ubisoft within Ubisoft (Newbisoft?) consists of the rights to Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six Siege and the following studios: Montreal, Quebec, Sherbrooke, Saguenay, Barcelona, and Sofia. Some of these are obvious. Montreal and Quebec both lead Assassin's Creed. Others are less so. Saguenay spearheaded the failed battle royale Hyper Scape and last year shipped a fantasy football app. Barcelona handles the Hungry Shark mobile games (and the union there filed a labor complaint against the company over its return-to-office policy, something other studios have being striking over as well in addition to bad pay).

Notable Ubisoft studios missing from this new group include Toronto, which co-developed Far Cry 6 and is working on the next Far Cry, and Massive, which shipped Star Wars Outlaws and leads The Division. The Paris studio is leading the next Ghost Recon and Montpellier is where Beyond Good and Evil 2 remains in development for a decade now and also a new Rayman.

Note on the above chart: Scores were taken from the platform with the most reviews except when they were tied in which case I took the average. The lowest scores came the year Ubisoft tried to release two Assassin’s Creed games simultaneously. Shadows is right in the middle of the pack.

Ubisoft is currently an 18,000-person factory spread across multiple continents designed for shipping massive sequels to blockbuster games. Breaking it up would be like trying to sell off two or three pieces of major equipment on the factory floor along with the employees who work them. It would leave major gaps in the production pipeline and also what would anyone else who isn't making The Division 3 or Far Cry 7 do with those things?

This is a gross oversimplification but one I think gets at the fundamental trouble of deconstructing a modern AAA game publisher, especially one like Ubisoft which spent decades hoovering up local subsidies to set up shop all over the world so that it could annualize Assassin's Creed. One way is a devastating series of studio closures and layoffs.

That was the grim takeaway implied in last week's announcement. Ubisoft told investors it didn't know how many employees the new company within a company will consist of, and told employees that it doesn't have all the answers yet, but will work on providing more details before the deal closes at the end of the year.

Ubisoft Annecy, founded in the '90s, is one studio that sounds like it could be at risk. It's working on Pathfinder, a PVE shooter where teams race through different zones filled with AI-enemies to be the first to kill a boss at the center of the map. The multiplayer project was rebooted last year though. The team went from over 100 developers down to around just 30 as it went back to the drawing board, I'm told.

It's the latest in a long line of promising-sounding projects that the company just can't seem to figure out. Others include The Division: Heartland and Ghost Recon Frontline. The Prince of Persia remake's problems are well-known at this point, and my understanding is that the Splinter Cell remake has faced challenges as well.

Newbisoft potentially offers the Guillemots a way to jettison much of the messy baggage from the last five years of their decision making. I can't imagine currently working at the company and waiting to see who they ultimately allow into the escape capsule with them and who instead is left to burn up on re-entry.

Almost everything about the Switch 2 leaked ahead of time, including when Nintendo would finally show the world what it’s been working on. A two-minute trailer dropped with zero pomp and circumstance showing it's bigger, it has magnets, and it's going to play a new Mario Kart.

Otherwise there was no release date (probably after June and before Christmas), price (likely between $400 and $500), or even confirmation of the handheld's new size (maybe 7.9 inches). To learn anything else about the new console fans will have to wait until an April 4 Nintendo Direct at which point live demos will take place across several major cities. Analysts predict plenty of inventory whenever the Switch 2 does eventually arrive.

Nintendo showed only the bare minimum it needed to and nothing more. Fans will be feasting off of a few seconds of Switch 2 Mario Kart footage for months (24-player races? Fuel tanks? Changing character art styles?). Otherwise the presentation seemed tailored within an inch of its life to signal the company's intent to build on the Switch's legacy rather than revolutionize it without revealing anything major as it continues squeezing every last drop of blood from its current eight-year old stone (Donkey Kong Country Returns HD is out now, Civilization VII next month, and Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition in March).

There are two camps of reaction to the Switch 2 reveal. One is put off by how boring it seems. Digital Trends' Giovanni Colantonio laments that the game console as high-tech toy era is over. "In a world where upgrades are inevitable, iteration is enough," writes Polygon's Austen Goslin, comparing the reveal to a slick new iPhone tease. Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese is worried Nintendo has been sucked into a vortex of “iterative updates and sensible-ness.” My own colleagues at Kotaku debated if the Switch 2 is weird enough after contributing editor John Walker foreshadowed our collective disappointment.

The other response ranged from grudging respect to outright relief that Nintendo didn't do something crazy like make it foldable or turn it into a AR/VR headset. Chris Dring argues at VGC that Nintendo's reputation for reinvention was spurred by business necessity rather than sheer whimsy and in 2025 the business case for upgrading its most successful home console ever is obvious. "Reinventing the wheel is overrated–just ask 12,000 years of wheels," quipped Chris Kerr at Game Developer. IGN's Matt Kim argued if it's not broke, don't fix it, and suggested the only thing wrong with the current Switch is the horsepower.

The original Switch reveal video garnered 11.4 million views when it was released making it Nintendo's most-viewed YouTube video at the time. The Switch 2 video is already over 17 million views with tons more across social media. Despite the obvious business case for staying the course, Wall Street was less impressed. The stock was down almost 5 percent from the news.

The Switch 2 is a historic inflexion point for Nintendo. Andy Robinson points out that this will be the last console launched by its first class of famed developers like Shigeru Miyamoto. It is also the first new hardware generation completely developed after the passing of former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. His last Nintendo Direct appearance was April 1, 2015, ten years and one day before the bigger Switch 2 showcase coming in the spring.

Iwata had a warning for Nintendo at this very moment. "Speaking personally, I think nothing is more hazardous than staying the course," he says in his posthumously published memoir Ask Iwata. "Nobody can say for sure when to make a change. When Nintendo takes a different tack, there's no telling whether it will take one year, or two, or three, or even five for people to catch on."

He continues, "But staying the course means not having a future. If you maintain the status quo, you wind up fighting for survival, and gradually your fanbase disappears. That's the one direction I'm always trying to avoid. There's always the question of how far you can shift and still have people understand and follow along. However, forging straight ahead will get you nowhere."

This philosophy grew out of something Iwata's predecessor, Hiroshi Yamauchi, told him early on. "If Nintendo tries to fight, it's gonna lose. Don't waste your energy on fighting." Yamauchi was the one who told Iwata and Miyamoto to make a game console with two screens. They thought it was a metaphor for "do something that hasn't been done before." Eventually, Nintendo released the DS. It's still the company's best selling device ever.

The company's worst selling console ever is also a significant data point. The Wii U was a disaster. Coming off the incredible success of the Wii, Nintendo tried to "shock people in a good way" and arrived at a set of trade-offs nobody wanted and new ideas that weren't quite ready. But probably the biggest reason the Wii U flopped is the games just weren't any good.

The Switch launched with arguably the best Zelda ever (Breath of the Wild), and one of the best Mario games ever (Odyssey), in its first year. It was bolstered by a deluxe port of the best Mario Kart most people had never played (MK8), Splatoon 2, and a bunch of indie games perfectly suited to the new formfactor. The Switch didn't succeed because it was a portable console, it succeeded because it was a portable console that could play some of the best games of the last decade.

Capturing that lightning in a bottle a second time will be the real challenge.Nintendo's next slate of first-party games is what really matters and it's the one thing that hasn't leaked about the Switch 2. If Nintendo can somehow find a way to once again reinvent 20-year old franchises, it'll be forgiven for otherwise launching the most boring-looking new console in its history.

[Instead of trying to track the notoriously secretive workflows of Nintendo’s various internal teams I’ve shared the rough number of years since the last major release in each of Nintendo’s best-known franchises. This includes externally developed games and splitting some franchises up into 2D and 3D variants, as well as fudging some of the delineations between Switch ports and truly new releases.]

So what will we actually be playing on the Switch 2? Outside of I and a bunch of likely third-party ports of PS4 games and some older PS5 games, a new 3D Mario seems like a good bet for its first year (it might even be the first truly open world game in the series if it builds off of the excellent side-experiment Bowser’s Fury). Metroid Prime 4 could be a cross-gen release like Breath of the Wild, perhaps making use of the apparent mouse functionality of the new Joy-Con to differentiate it on the Switch 2.

Despite remasters of older Donkey Kong Country games, its been more than a decade since the last new game in the series, and Nintendo put the titular ape front and center in its recent Mario Bros. movie. We’re also due for a new Smash Bros. (director Masahiro Sakurai left his YouTube side-gig over a year ago), Luigi’s Mansion, and Yoshi’s World. A new Animal Crossing can’t be too far off either. Are Kid Icarus, Star Fox, and Punch-Out about to make a comeback? I’d bank on at least one new franchise being debuted alongside the Switch 2 as well.

Finally, the most important Switch 2 reaction of all: my kids’. I showed them (5 and a half, 3 and 10 months) the reveal the day after before their afternoon quiet time (playing alone in their rooms). The youngest responded in three acts.

"It's a Switch! It's a black Switch! I love a black Switch!" he shouted gleefully.

The oldest stayed completely silent. Neither understood it was a “next-gen” Switch or what that entailed. They were both more impressed with the Super Mario Bros. Wonder art showing backwards compatibility than the tease for Mario Kart, which didn’t scan to them as a new game either.

So I explained what Nintendo didn’t: this was a new console that had a bigger screen and controllers and would play new games they didn’t currently have.

“Oh, oh, like maybe a new Zelda?” my oldest piped up, finally getting exited. He suggested maybe it would be the Zelda game from the picture in his room (an old GameStop promotional poster of 2009's Twilight Princess). Or maybe even a new Pac-Man game. "Remember when you chomp the ghost?" he explained.

“It'll be out later this year,” I told them. They immediately knew when: "For Christmas?!"

Live service interrupted

Former PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan has said a lot of things that came back to bite him in the ass.

“I was at a Gran Turismo event recently where they had PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 games, and the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?” he told Time magazine in 2017. “I get a little bit frustrated at still being hit over the head with this one,” he later told Axios when reflecting back on the flippant comment.

"We do believe in generations…we are thinking that it is time to give the PlayStation community something new, something different, that can really only be enjoyed on PS5,” he told GamesIndustry.biz in 2020 before proceeding to release a bunch of those PS5 games on the last-gen PS4.

And then in 2022. “Through close collaboration between Bungie and the PlayStation Studios, we aim to launch more than 10 live service games by the fiscal year ending March 31, 2026,” Ryan told Sony investors at the time. Three months later that number jumped to 12. That was right after it spent $3.7 billion to acquire Bungie.

Ryan is now long gone and Sony has one more year to make good on that forecast, but it’s a lot better at cancelling live service games than shipping them. It’s biggest success story so far, Helldivers 2, feels like something Sony stumbled into by accident (it was also developed externally building off an existing and already popular franchise).

[The above chart is collected from official announcements, press reporting, and credible rumors. It’s impossible to know which games Ryan was thinking of when he made his original forecast, and it could include things that still completely unknown to the public. Neon Koi, formerly Savage Games, was working on a mobile game for example, though it was aimed at being a live service loot shooter before the studio was shuttered.]

This past week, Jason Schreier reported that Sony had thrown two more projects onto the live service pyre: a multiplayer God of War spin-off from Bluepoint and an online game from Bend Studio. Jeff Grubb said Sony is “shell-shocked” after the unprecedented failure of Concord last year and taking a harder look at its first-party portfolio, especially live service projects.

Sony now appears to have canceled at least as many live service games as it once promised to ship, though it still has at least half a dozen more currently in development or rumored to exist, including Bungie’s Marathon, a sci-fi extraction shooter that was already facing a rocky development and will now face even more scrutiny.

It’s obvious why Sony would be so committed to making live service games: they have exponentially more upside if they succeed than single-player games. But the way the company’s gone about executing on that strategy seems, in hindsight at least, rushed, chaotic, and full of hubris.

BioWare’s Anthem came out in 2019. The risks of pivoting a single-player, story-driven studio (which almost all of Sony’s teams are) to a live service model and then asking it to ship a a new blockbuster IP from scratch were made resoundingly clear, only to be echoed against last year by the similar failure of Rocksteady Studios’ Suicide Squad.

But then sometimes it works and you get Rare making Sea of Thieves which launched rough, grew into something truly novel and special, has reached over 40 million players, and is no doubt headed to Switch 2 this year or next (that’s an educated guess, not insider info).

"Forecasting sales is a black magic," recently departed PlayStation veteran Shuhei Yoshida said on Kinda Funny Games this week. “After so many years in making games and in the industry I don't trust any marketers who say they can forecast game sales. Who would have predicted Helldivers 2 would sell more than Spider-Man 2 so that's the nature of the business.”

The former exec said Sony didn’t remove resources from single-player games but rather flooded the zone with additional money to take risks on live service bets. Yoshida said if he had still be in charge of PlayStation studios at that point, however, he probably would have "tried to resist that direction,” before joking that maybe that was why Sony replaced as head of studios with then-Guerrilla Games studio head Hermen Hulst.

"You cannot plan a success in this industry,” he concluded. “That's the most fun part of this business.”

Some quickfire updates from the rest of the live service gaming world:

• Pokémon TCG Pocket has announced the first details of its card trading system and players hate it. In addition to a resource requirement you can’t share the game’s rarest cards, like golden Charizard Ex, which is mostly what the most diehard players (and those who spend the most in the game) are still hunting for.

• Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League just revealed its central premise was scam. A final story update capping off the troubled multiplayer shooter’s short-lived life told players that every hero they had killed was actually a clone and Batman planned it this way all along, except for Wonder Woman and Robin who did actually die. It was a fitting sendoff for the ambitious but unfortunate misfire.

• Genshin Impact will pay a $20 million fine to settle charges from the FTC that it was misleading players, especially young kids, about loot box odds for its rarest characters. The regulator has proposed an order, which still needs to be reviewed by a judge, that would “prohibited from selling loot boxes using virtual currency without providing an option for consumers to purchase them directly with real money.”

• Marvel Snap has been Thanos snapped out of existence in the U.S. following a Trump-proposed, Biden-endorsed ban of TikTok. ByteDance, the Chinese owned company that publishes both apps, seemingly removed the popular superhero card game from former Hearthstone devs out of spite. They were as surprised as everyone else. “Marvel Snap isn’t going anywhere,” Second Dinner wrote on X. “We’re actively working on getting the game up as soon as possible and will update you once we have more to share.” You can still download it on Steam but there’s no way to login.
  
  [Update 1/21/24 10:06 a.m. ET: Marvel Snap is back online following the surprise outage but still inaccessible from the app stores. The team announced it’s working to make sure something like this never happens again, including finding a new publisher that isn’t owned by ByteDance. Second Dinner has also promised fans will be “compensated” for timed-rewards, missions, and other content they missed while the game was offline in the U.S.

Patch notes

Lost Castle 2 v0.6.1.2 “Fixed the issue where the character's height may be abnormal when using skills with the single-handed weapon ‘Barbarian Bone Axe.’”

World War Z patch 1.64 is all about tweaking casino chips in its Las Vegas episode. Among the fixes are more jackpots and clearer prompts for picking up chips from slot machines.

Diablo IV build 2.1.0 for season 7 addresses a major loot complaint by making Ancestral items drop more frequently and making the minimum Legendary affix stat roll no worse than the max roll on a non-ancestral item.

The Axis Unseen version 1.091 reduced the number of save backups from 100 to 20 to save space, and also removed the Sasquatch from the demo area so players don’t get wrecked before figuring out how to play.

Gunfire Reborn season 4 adds new stages, weapons, and lots of hero adjustments. It also added a customer service feedback entry on the loading screen so players can ping devs with complaints while waiting to load into the online lobby.

Links and other stuff

• Esports has utterly collapsed but the culture around competitive Overwatch is thriving and maybe enough to mount a comeback. (Katelyn Burns / Defector)

• Go read Polygon’s latest feature series called Culture Shock about all of the weird and fascinating ways international games and local audiences collide. (Multiple / Polygon)

• Super Mario Bros. speedrunner Niftski’s latest record has brought the historic game within .03 seconds of “absolute perfection.” (Damien McFerran / Time Extension)

• How Microsoft nixing a private doctor for staff at Candy Crush maker King sparked unionization efforts. (Rebekah Valentine / IGN)

• Heaven’s Vault writer Jon Ingold has a harsh assessment of writing in games more generally, including the "massively overwritten and really tedious" critical darling Disco Elysium. (Samuel Horti / NY Times)

• Parents of a child killed in the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history helped make a game to educate people on the harrowing and increasingly familiar tragedy. (Simon Parkin / The New Yorker)

It's either a very elaborate hoax or almost everything you'd want to know about the Switch 2 has already leaked ahead of Nintendo officially announcing it. Accessory maker Genki was passing around physical 3D-printed mockups of the new handheld its products will be based on at CES 2025.

It made the press believe it was based on real specs before later saying "just kidding" after Nintendo broke its silence and released a non-denial denial that the displayed products were "not official." But behind closed doors at least one accessory maker claimed to have access to the finished console. You can get it on the black market "if you put up the money," one manufacturer told Numerama.

According to one French journalist, Genki said Nintendo's lawyers even visited its booth after its Switch 2 mockups went viral. “He told me that Nintendo had already sent lawyers their way," Julien Tellouck claimed. "But Genki has nothing to worry about because they’ve never signed any papers with Nintendo, no confidentiality agreement, no NDA." What a mess!

It could all be lies and self-serving stunts by companies rushing to market to support what could be this year's hottest new gaming device, except what's been shown all seems to line up with every other existing alleged leaks about the Switch 2. It's pretty hard to believe that what Nintendo will eventually reveal is secretly something completely different than what effectively amounts to a Switch Pro fans have been waiting on for years.

Nintendo faces impossible expectations with the Switch 2. It's unlikely the company can strike lightning twice. An underpowered gaming handheld in 2025 faces a completely different landscape than the original Switch did when it was the only game in town.

There's no reservoir of existing, underappreciated Wii U exclusives to pull from to support another all-time best launch-year lineup. It's hard to imagine getting another revelation like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild this year. It will never be 2017 again. Sigh.

The only thing that hasn't leaked yet are the games. Can Nintendo surprise us in other ways? Will the next 3D Mario platformer dazzle and delight in ways no one can yet conceive of? Will Metroid Prime 4 catapult the 3D metroidvania shooter into the upper-echelon of gaming franchises? Is there a completely new tech feature that expands the existing vocabulary of gaming in new and unprecedented ways?

Or will the Switch 2 deliver known quantities at higher resolutions and better framerates alongside a bevy of late-generation, third-party PS4 ports like Elden Ring and Diablo IV? In other words, will it be just as disappointing as the rest of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S console generation, providing incremental performance gains in service of very familiar faces and formulas?

Nintendo might finally give fans what they claim they've always wanted and the results might end up being kinda "meh." Some analysts are already predicting weaker sales in the first year than the original Switch. My prediction is that the Switch 2 ends up being supremely underwhelming as a machine but Mario Kart 9 will still sell 50 million copies.

Marvel Rivals Digest

NetEase's comic book hero shooter is more popular than ever. The free-to-play game just broke its Steam concurrent record with 642,333 players overnight. It's the most-downloaded game according to Valve and remains in the top five on console. It's raked in an estimated $136 million in microtransaction sales since launch.

This comes after the release of season 1, which includes the Fantastic Four as new heroes, a $10 battle pass featuring 10 additional skins, and more stuff to buy in the item shop. One of these is Malice, a $14 costume for Invisible Woman's dark alter-ego, which is a perfect example of how Marvel Rivals has leaned into the hyper-sexualization of its print source material to great effect. Players online immediately lost it. "Marvel adding a barefoot vampire gf," one wrote. "These devs are cooking." New datamining leaks point to Professor X and a ton of other new heroes joining later this year.

The developers recently revealed the most picked heroes in the game so far. Jeff the Land Shark, the adorable fish with the terrifying OP ult, was at the top of the list in quickplay (21.18 percent pick rate) despite having a less than 50 percent win rate (a new patch just nerfed his ult's range). Storm was the least popular (1.66 percent pick rate) despite high-level players singing her praises when used correctly (her damage and survivability were buffed).

The update also nuked mod support for the game which fans were using to play as Dragon Ball Z's Vegeta, Pochita from Chainsaw Man, and 19-inches of Venom, AKA Nude Venom, AKA Venom with a massive dong. Removing Squirrel Girl's clothes was a day three mod for the game.

Even prior to NetEase's official intervention, NexusMods was forced to step in and moderate user content when players started putting Donald Trump into the game. Moderation, skin sales, and preventing cheating and hacking are just a few of the reasons the company might crack down on mods, points out game developer Del Walker.

Live Service Interrupted

Final Fantasy XIV fans are freaking over a new stalking tool that recently surfaced called PlayerScope created four months ago by a Discord user called Generall. As PC Gamer reports, it's effectively in-game doxxing and circumvents Square Enix's friends list blacklisting option which was updated last year. Harassers can even trace players' alt accounts with it, and the creator will only remove people's account IDs from the tool if they fill out a Google form.

In addition to a stalker's "wet dream," some players are also hailing it as an unprecedented surveillance device for the entire MMORPG. "So in theory, if I walk up to the Balmung Quicksands with this thing on I'm going to upload the data of everyone that is there," wrote one player who recently used PlayerScope. "This also means most likely that most people's data is already in the crowdsourced server since it does the uploading without human input."

The big question is how Square Enix will intervene, if at all. Some feel the company has a sort of "don't ask, dont' tell" policy toward mods. Individual players will be sanctioned for egregious behavior but there's no crackdown on the use of various plugins more broadly.

In the meantime, FFXIV players also continue to face frequent service interruptions. The results can be painful but funny. One player calculated the most talkative character in the game. It's the brainiac everyone loves to hate Alphinaud. The developers have temporarily suspended routine auto-demolition of in-game houses due to players impacted by the fires waging in Los Angeles this week.

Destiny 2 players just want to go back to Destiny 1. The first game's social hub recently got an unexpected holiday glow-up. Bungie says that was purely a mistake. Don't expect a Destiny 1 remake, or even a legacy edition revival, anytime soon (though you can still play the original game just fine). Load up Episode Revenant Act III which went live this week and you'll see why.

It's a narrative mess of hopscotching between conversations, repetitive and annoying enemies, and no real payoff in the world. Though it teases eventual travel to new worlds, It's a far cry from the magic and mystique the game's sci-fi world held for players a decade ago even as they were complaining about missing content and unrewarding grinds. Destiny is on life support. It needs a dramatic reboot.

“I think you can look out in the broader game industry right now, and it's rough out there, and I really feel for a lot of things going on in the game industry, and that's something that is going to be one of our biggest challenges,” Bungie design lead Tom Farnsworth recently told Gamesradar. “What's the right way to give players what they want and let them have agency of experience, while also finding what you were saying about the sustainable path forward?"

Apex Legends players share why they're abandoning the game. Common complaints are "I left because I graduated college and work a full time job now," wrote Travisgrr. "With my now limited time I don't want to waste it in sweaty lobbies where I get destroyed." Common complaints include cheating, community toxicity, and recent controversial changes to Pathfinder's grappling hook. For others it's just a lack of new content.

"I recently 'left' because the game just isn't updated enough for my liking," wrote YouTuber TimProVision. "4 legends in 2 years and 2 of them aren't great imo. One map in 2 years and then it was removed during the first half of the split next season. 1 New weapon in 2 years. Support meta isn't that fun to me and makes most legends kind of pointless to play. Apex is still a solid game, just doesn't have the same magic it used to."

Fallout 76 players are tired of all the goofy items. It's been a longstanding complaint among some wastelanders that the post-apocalyptic MMO lacks enough mood-appropriate microtransaction merch. "I really dislike how skewed the shop is towards whacky stuff," one player recently wrote. "I just want items to best blend my camp into the wasteland," another responded. "Junk items please!" Instead, this week's discounts were on more Nuka Cola bundles.

Warframe players trade tales of the game's worst grinds. The list includes: Corrupted Holokeys, Pathos Clamps, Grendel, Dagaths unique resources, Duviri intrinsics, Hema research, and Mining in Cambion Drift, to which EducatorTough9264 wrote, "HOLY FUCK, SAME!! fuck heciphron."

Dune: Awakening players died a lot in the recent closed beta, but a tally of the carnage last month revealed that sandworms were only slightly more dangerous than dehydration.

A Path of Exile fan shares their one-of-a-kind collection of rare loot you can't get in the 10-year old game anymore. "These are all 100% clean items and untouched," wrote Present-Plankton-734. "This is the only collection and first collection to ever have all untagged."

Patch Notes

• Manor Lords version 0.8.024 introduces bridge building, stone wells, new maps, and more. Cliffs are "less ambiguous" now, stall setup is instant once workers are assigned, and marketplace grain reserves are less vulnerable to hungry peasants. "Instead of eating from the marketplace, villagers sometimes eat straight from the granaries to reduce the marketplace supply fluctuations."

• Valorant patch 10.00 adds new hero Tejo and switches from episodes to a year-long season roadmap consisting of six individual acts. Other changes include a new type of cosmetic called FLEX which are basically custom fidget spinners.

• Attack on Titan Revolution version 2.5 lowers the armored shard cost to 24,999, extends the battle pass 2 by 14 days, and reworks Fritz with new passive abilities. It's a Roblox game I don't understand at all but I love this note: "Maybe fixed losing random body parts when ragdolled(?)"

• Forza Motorsport update 16 tweaks the 1976 BMW #1 BMW 3.0 CSL for the GTX Sportscar Series multiplayer races. Its tires were upgraded from stock to 325 front and 375 rear and the engine power was increased 22 percent.

• Halo Infinite's final winter 2024 operation adds a capture the flag mode called Castle Wars that takes place across eight eclectic maps including one called Megalopolis that looks ripped right out of Rocket League.

One word I kept seeing in the YouTube chat for The Game Awards 2024 was “slop.” Stalcraft X Operations was more live service slop. Dungeon & Fighter: Arad was more anime slop. A term previously reserved for soulless AI-generated crap was now being used to make snap judgements about upcoming games, quickly sorting them into the competing piles of “looks cool” and “who cares.”

This isn’t altogether new or even unfair, but it does feel in part like a reaction to the increasing unwieldiness of what it means to follow, play, and care about video games. Over 19,000 games were released on Steam last year, according to SteamDB. That’s nearly six times more than a decade ago. Thousands of those games are things almost nobody played but many of them did find an audience.

Over 900 of the games that came to Steam in 2024 had an 85 percent user rating or above. Song of Conquest, an excellent strategy RPG in the mold of Heroes of Might and Magic, was one that fell just shy of that, ranked 1,014th user ratings. No one can keep up with that. The best you can do is pick a spot, dip your toe in, and feel the river rush past.

But the river metaphor suggests the games come and go. Instead, they hang around for longer and longer, especially when it comes to big-budget blockbusters and live service hits. Each new success story—Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate III, Helldivers 2—gets added to a growing list of perennial best-sellers and most-played games.

Steam’s long-tail, meanwhile, offers a labyrinth of genre tags and recommendation queues to load up your back catalog with any time there’s a big sale. Only 15 percent of all time spent on Valve’s storefront last year was in new games. The deluge is less overwhelming on consoles, but even more pronounced relative to its cyclical past. Roughly 60 percent of playtime in 2023 was spent in games that had come out in 2017 or earlier.

This is what sticks out to me the most in lists of top charting games. Nearly half of the best-selling boxed games in 2024 did not come out in 2024. The weekly active user reports are dominated by annual franchises and a handful of forever games like Fortnite and Rainbow Six Siege. Compare that to 2019 when when only five of the top-selling games that year had come out in a previous one.

And yet there are more great games than ever. Annual top-10 lists have been expanded to top-50s. 2024 had 155 games with an 80 or higher on Metacritic, two more than 2023, one of the best years ever for new releases. Everyone’s backlog is only ever growing. It’s a wonder we play anything new at all.

At the same time the supply of games is exploding, the traditional tools for funneling attention to them have collapsed. Digital games media is in free fall. YouTube is an algorithmic cesspool. Twitch has faded. Twitter is a mess. And even the largest publishers promoting the biggest franchises seem like they’re just rolling the dice, as evidenced by Suicide Squad, Star Wars Outlaws, and Concord.

Crap shoots are fine for players flocking to whatever eventually hits but they aren’t conducive to humane or sustainable development. Steam is a disaster, and yet it’s still light years ahead of console and smartphone storefronts when it comes to helping people find cool new stuff. The App and Google Play Stores, on the other hand, are slop-ruled hellscapes, and the console stores, which feel like they’ve barely changed in a decade, aren’t much better.

I’m not surprised the average Xbox and PSN player defaults to throwing more money at Call of Duty or Roblox when trying to find something new to play is worse than picking out what to watch next on Netflix. And a $250 billion video game industry built entirely on monetizing branded crossovers, exploiting user-generated content, and perniciously designed time-wasting skinner boxes seems like a huge waste.

Here are 50 of the games that died in 2024, were delisted, or had their server shutdown dates announced. Concord is currently at the top of the live service speedrun leaderboard, lasting even fewer weeks than Steam asset flip grift The Day Before. Suicide Squad and Foamstars are still running but content abandoned less than a year after release. Like Suicide Squad, Islands of Insight’s developers introduced an offline version in the final update. And there were plenty of games that didn’t officially die in 2024 but are fading fast. Spectre, a neat-looking tactical shooter with a clever gameplay twist, is just one of many that doesn’t look long for this world unfortunately.

Live Service Interrupted

Marvel Rivals proved there’s still room for newcomers in the hero shooter space. It’s dominated on Steam and console throughout December. Enthusiasm might cool in a few months but people are Having Fun and it Looks Cool which is more than enough to set it up for longer term success, even if falls out of the top 10 by summer. The Fantastic Four stuff already looks very cool.

The First Descendant and Once Human both collapsed from their peaks last summer but might be sustainable at their new concurrent levels (10K and 25K respectively). Both still seem to occupy a positive if much smaller space within their niches (sex bot looter shooter and post-apocalyptic home renovator respectively). These games seem to have settled into a good level of reasonable success but I could see both sunsetting by early 2026 if their respective publishers were banking more on moonshots more in line with the player levels back at launch.

Helldivers 2 is so back after its excellent free Omens of Tyranny update. The new Halo: ODST-fueled alien urban warfare has injected some much needed new lore and meme-fodder into the ongoing galactic war effort. I think many players are still burnt out on the core loop though, and unless that gets dramatically remixed at some point the baseline attrition will continue. The thing that was most refreshing about Helldivers 2 at launch—no progression treadmill—is also what keeps me from popping back in once or twice a week. I’d love to see new difficulty levels, specialty dungeons, or bigger narrative events heading into the one-year anniversary.

Apex Legends really fell off this year. Previously firmly in the top-10 on consoles it now barely cracks the top 20 now. It’s rapidly approaching its lowest Steam concurrents since its surprise launch in 2021. There’s a general malaise around character balancing, monetization, and matchmaking, and players are desperate for substantive new content that meaningfully shakes the game up. CEO Andrew Wilson promised a major expansion of the battle royale formula in 2024 and it never came.

Destiny 2’s vibes are even worse lately. It got a major boost from its Final Shape expansion in June and then immediately receded as players completed the 10-year story arc and all but the hardcore fans stopped playing again. There’s been a series of high-profile bugs recently and the hit to Bungie’s resources from major layoffs has clearly impacted the game especially around things like player support and quality assurance.

While still cracking the top-15 weekly active users on Steam, December was Destiny 2’s lowest month ever for concurrents on the platform. 2025 is the year we find out if the game can survive. What form that takes remains to be seen. My guess is the game’s future is as a much less ambitious but still satisfying roguelite shooter that emulates Dead Cells and Hades.

The Year In Apologies

• Helldivers II creative lead Jhan Pilestedt apologized for developers "horrible" comments making fun of players complaining about a balance patch and also for the game's controversial PSN login requirement on Steam when review bombing turned its user rating negative.

• Dragon's Dogma II's developers sincerely apologized for "any inconvenience" associated with the Steam backlash over the single-player RPG's gameplay altering microtransactions.

• Peoria, Illinois Police Chief Eric Echevarria apologized for a widely derided recruitment poster that read. “Stop playing games and answer the Call of Duty."

• Cities: Skylines II publisher Paradox Interactive was "truly sorry" for trying to sell beachfront DLC before it had finished fixing major complaints with the underlying game.

• Sony apologized to Last of Us director Neil Druckmamn for publishing an interview with him that included several made-up quotes which were subsequently made fun of on social media.

• Bungie apologized for launch issues with the Final Shape expansion that prevented fans from playing or made them miss out on important cutscenes.

• Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida apologized for several issues in the game's Dawntrail expansion at launch, including "memory fragmentation" on Xbox.

• Bend Studio community manager Kevin McAllister apologized to Days Gone fans for previous studio leadership continually feeding "false hope" of a sequel that never got greenlit.

• Crowdstrike apologized for breaking the entire internet and thanked its employees for working around the clock to fix things with $10 Uber Eats coupons.

• Ubisoft apologized for Assassin’s Creed Shadows footage using a historical reenactment group's flag without permission, promotional materials that "caused concern within the Japanese community," and for a pair of character statues that included an "insensitive design" of a broken torii gate.

• Jaime Lee Curtis, who starred in the terrible Borderlands movie, apologized for calling recent Marvel movies bad. "My comments about Marvel were stupid and I will do better," she tweeted.

• Lionsgate offered its "sincere apologies" for a Megalopolis trailer that used movie review quotes made up by AI.

• Persona 3 Reload producer Kazuhisa was sorry fans on three seperate occasions that they would never get the portable version's female protagonist Kotone added to the remake because it would have cost too much and taken too long.

• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai apologized to fans who spent thousands of hours playing his games instead of doing more worthwhile things with their time.

• Streamer Zack “Asmongold” Hoyt sort of apologized for a racist rant that got one of his accounts temporarily banned from Twitch saying that he would take a break from becoming the "mean-spirited...psychopathic version" of himself to go clean his room.

• Sony apologized to Australian players for accidentally letting them play Hotline Miami II for almost a year over a ratings board mix-up.

• Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann apologized for the "awful launch experience" of the latest version of the game. "The infrastructure simply could not handle the amount of requests and started to fail," he said on a livestream.

• Square Enix apologized for "confusion" around a new FFXIV hairstyle called "Doing The Wave" that used a fan art contest winner as a reference but ended up making it look much worse due to "polygon count."

• NBA team the Charlotte Hornets apologized for appearing to gift a kid a PS5 during a Christmas half-time show and then taking it back afterwards.

Nearly 15,000 people were laid off from dozens of development teams in 2024. At least 49 game studios shutdown, including several that had been around for decades, as well as ones that had only popped up in the last few years and never even got to ship their first game. OlliOlli maker Roll7 was one of the groups shuttered after Take-Two, on the eve of making up to $1 billion off of GTA 6 pre-orders alone, decided to ditch its small game publishing label Private Division.

My Top 10 Games Of 2024

1000xRESIST: haunting, intimate, frustrating

Animal Well: felt like playing Fez and Metroid for the first time again but more fun

Arco: FTL: Faster Than Light meets a Paul Thomas Anderson revenge Western

Astro Bot: convinced me that finding fun in simplicity isn’t cheap and shallow but actually incredibly hard and rewarding

Balatro: this game is almost perfect and that music rules

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth: they really messed this one up but it still enraptured me

Helldivers 2: the bros and I will never forget

Kunitsu Gami: Path of the Goddess: knows what it does well and focuses almost exclusively on that except for the idiotic base building

Pepper Grinder: my kids made me play it and then they went to sleep and I died for hours trying to beat that damn skeleton

Thronefall: city management and tower defense strategy stripped down to their basics and meticulously refined until both elegantly simple and beautifully minimalist

Honorable mentions: Star Wars Outlaws, Pacific Drive, Thank Goodness You're Here, Stellar Blade, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marines 2, UFO 50, Solium Infernum

Things that might have made my list if they’d come out sooner: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

Other games I haven't finished yet because they're way too long: Metaphor: Refantazio, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Unicorn Overlord, Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Stuff I'll get to eventually: Mouthwashing, Threshold, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure, Frostpunk 2, The Rise of the Golden Idol

On a particular Thursday night in early December for several years now, you will find thousands of gaming's developers, media, content creators, and fans descending upon the Peacock Theater in downtown LA to witness a three-hour long marathon of gaming announcements, performances, and tributes in person. Millions more watch online as everyone waits to see which game from the prior 12 months will be memorialized as the unofficial Game of the Year (GOTY for short). 

It's modeled after the Oscars, and creator and host Geoff Keighley has worked hard for a decade now to turn The Game Awards into the annual capstone for a nearly $200 billion global industry with an unusually obsessive fanbase. But it's as much a sporting event as an arts gala, with people as invested in the horse race around who's winning, who's losing, and what those narratives say not just about the companies involved but about the individual identities of the players rooting one way or the other. 

Keighley revealed the 2024 nominees for his black tie showcase on Monday and it included the perfect amount of predictable picks, unexpected drama, and low-stakes controversy to sum up the decade-long venture shining a spotlight on the best and worst of gaming culture and the techno-artistic objects with which it's obsessed. Though unlike previous years, he's managed to focus debate more squarely on the games themselves than the often confusing, absurd, and neutered platform upon which they're being celebrated. 

Elden Ring's DLC, which most players couldn't even access when it came out, could be this year's GOTY while a snub for Black Myth Wukong would be fresh oxygen for anti-woke online rage-baiters. Metaphor: Refantazio offers a beloved but familiar RPG formula while Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is wildly ambitious and deeply flawed. Then there's Balatro which people are obsessed with but whose dark patterns people feel kind of icky for loving, while Astro Bot is pure joy but just shy of truly revelatory. 

Oli Welsh has been tracking the game awards race this year over at Polygon where he’s senior editor through a new column called "GOTY Watch" that's focused more on the conversation around the games than the games themselves. Before joining Polygon, he spent over a decade at Eurogamer. Prior to that, he reviewed games for Edge Magazine as a freelancer. He said his first formative sense of a game being important for the medium was probably The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998. Early memories of feeling a duty to advocate for the significance of particular releases included 2005’s Ōkami and 2006’s Shadow of the Colossus.

Similarly monumental releases Halo 3 and Super Mario Odyssey followed in 2007 which Edge both gave 10/10 scores to, a much bigger deal back in the day than an Oscars-like GOTY race. (“I think they're both justified, but some Edge people think that's the beginning of the end. If we give out two 10s in a month it can't possibly be right.”) It wasn’t until the late aughts and early 2010s that the GOTY moniker gain more purchase on the imaginations of fans and critics.

Everything in the online age has a meta, including game of the year discussions. So I sat down with Welsh recently (prior to the nominees being announced) to pick his brain about why the GOTY competition is interesting, the unspoken rules of how it plays out, and what its significance says about the culture around gaming.

For starters, there’s a clear GOTY type, at least when it comes to Keighley’s awards show, which is voted on by media and content creators from around the globe, but with a slight emphasis on English speaking critics in the U.S. and UK. (As Keighley is at great pains to point out every year, he’s not involved in the voting at all). If a studio were designing a something from scratch to win the Best Game category, what would Welsh recommend they make based on his recent survey of past Game Awards ceremonies?

“I would say that it needs to have strong narrative elements, so it should be quite story forward, ideally, performance should be quite a big part of it. So you want to have it be fully voiced, maybe even motion capture performance, high production values…like AAA narrative-led action adventures or RPGs,” he said. “I've analyzed the nominees between the genre categories and Game of the Year, and you nearly always have an overlap of four out of the six Game of the Year nominees are in the action adventure category. The overlap with RPG is smaller, but they are, if anything, more likely to win if nominated.”

Welsh pointed to exceptions that prove the rule like Overwatch winning in 2016, a rare coup for a competitive multiplayer game with no campaign, and It Takes Two, a co-op indie adventure that benefited from a series of pandemic-era delays. “The Last of Us Part II won the Game the Year award where it was virtually every site awarded its Game of the Year to Hades,” he said of 2020.

“But Hades as an indie game, and as an action game, was quite far outside the comfort zone for Game of the Year nominees and winners, and it didn't manage to break through on that occasion. Whereas The Last of Us Part II has the performance element, it’s got very emotive performance capture, it's very cinematic, and it's got very ostentatiously serious themes to its storytelling as well, all of which tend to go down well with the jury.”

Welsh also thinks the march of technology that underpins the economics around games contributes to an inherent valuing of big-budget spectacle above pure game design. “It's very deeply embedded in the gaming community, this idea that the shiniest, most ambitious, most technically accomplished stuff is is the best,” he said.

“And I note as well that if you look at the Game Awards’ language around it, they always say technical and artistic achievement. Technical is always in there whereas in the Oscars, you tend to talk about the above the line and below the line categories. Above the line is director, actor, screenplay, below the line is production design, score, cinematography—there's kind of an upstairs, downstairs thing in movies with the art and with the craft. In the Game Awards, they put them both together at the same time.”

Deeper than the event’s bias toward expensive blockbusters—there are three separate categories for indie games to make up for the fact that they are rarely nominated, let alone win—is the priority critics seem to perennially give to story-driven games over system-driven ones. Management sims and strategy games, which often thrive on Steam in terms of both sales and player reception, but lack the gravitas associated with a season of HBO prestige TV, rarely get a mention.

“Geoff makes no secret of the fact that his his motivation with the Game Awards is he wants video games to have a moment in the calendar and a celebration that is as important as the Oscars or the Grammys or the Emmys, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that at all,” Welsh said. “But I think that motivation comes from the striving that the video game medium continually has to compare itself, or the industry continually has to compare itself, to those other media.”

He continued:

The actual biggest games in the world are not God of War, they're League of Legends. They are deeply systemic games, or social games, or like Fortnite, that are operating in a in a completely different sphere. Those games have their own little corners within the Game Awards where they can be celebrated, but they're never going to be a Game of the Year.

Another part of that is just that this is just an incredibly diverse medium, right? The gulf between, I don't know, a frat boy comedy movie and the highest minded Oscar contender or the weirdest art house film is still much smaller than the gulf between a mobile puzzle game, an online MMO, and a fancy console action-adventure.

Those are barely the same thing at all, but we still lump them under this same umbrella. So I've got a lot of sympathy as well for both Geoff and his organization and all of us in the in the gaming community trying to make sense of all this. We we're calling video games one thing, which they are patently not. I think that’s where that inferiority complex tends to make us think, well, this culture ascribes these other things value, so the parts of gaming that are most like those other things must be the parts of gaming that have the most value. But I don't think that's true.

GOTY Watch Q&A Cont.

Dead Game: What’s the most exciting category this year?

Oli Welsh: I think almost any year that indie is the most exciting category. I do think it's super exciting this year because you've got three or four games that have over 90 Metacritic scores…plus games that are widely played and have great reputations, UFO 50, Animal Well, Balatro, and many other strong contenders as well—Arco, Lorelai and the Laser—it's always an exciting category, but I think it's a really exciting category this year.

I think Best Ongoing Game one of the most fascinating categories. The Game Awards is designed to reward live service games and so far it's been working as intended, perhaps a little bit too well, in that there's been maybe 10 games just swapping those five nominations for Best Ongoing Game over the over in the years that it's been in operation. Fortnite's been nominated every year for six years in a row now…there's potential for all sorts of newcomers in that award as well, such as Diablo IV, Stardew Valley with a 1.6 update—that could be really interesting.

Dead Game: Who are your frontrunners and dark horses?

Oli Welsh: I would say Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. I initially had it at the top of my picks. This is right in the core of where Game Awards voting resides. A 92 Metacritic, story-led RPG, handsome production values, but I think that its chances have effectively been killed by Metaphor Refantazio, which is a much more niche and less Game Awards-y game, but in a very similar genre and [with] an even better critical reputation. And I think the RPG vote is going to be split between those two and I think Final Fantasy VII is the one that's probably going to come off worse out of it [Editor’s note: Rebirth’s chances were buoyed this week thanks to its seven total nominations, tied with Astro Bot for the most]

Dead Game: What’s a past game that was snubbed at the time but deserved a GOTY nod?

Oli Welsh: Invisible, Inc by Klei Entertainment…it's basically a cyber punk heist tactics game, and it's just absolutely marvelous. It's procedurally generated, but it never fails to construct really exciting, really tense scenarios…it's the true potential for organic storytelling within games where the story is not written. It’s constructed by the game systems and the player working together to create fun, exciting scenarios.

Dead Game: Would you want Keighley to reveal the Game Awards popular vote?

Oli Welsh: It probably would lose its mystique. You don't want to reveal too much of these things. Obviously, as a journalist, I want all of the info, but if I put myself in Geoff’s place, no, you probably do want to keep it a little bit mysterious. I would love to know rankings within each category and within Game of the Year. That's the data that I would really love to have, and I think the people would really, really love to have as well.

Dead Game: Why even bother covering the GOTY race to begin with?

Oli Welsh: It was just something that we thought would be fun to do, to engage in the kind of punditry that you see around those other media, and not just fun, but useful in a way, because the conversation around it is all about picking out the things that are resonating with people—the things that are resonating with with the industry, with the creative community, with critics—and just like having a sustained conversation about the best games of each year, and the ones that are most important, and that there's a whole entire industry around this…

…I'd say it's all part of elevating the medium and part of elevating the medium is saying, ‘This is nonsense, I just want to talk about Arco,’ and part of elevating the medium is saying, ‘Why does, I don't know, why is Dragon Age far more likely to get nominated for a Game of the Year award than Arco?' What are the systems that support that?’ We can clarify that for people and maybe it will will change some thinking, we will change some mind.

[From a follow-up email after the nominees were announced]: Today we've seen massive traffic to our nominations coverage, no doubt due to the authority we've built up on The Game Awards and GOTY over the months. That's nice for us, but the really amazing thing is seeing people click through (in VERY significant numbers) from the nominations post to our (arts-led) reviews of games like Balatro, Metaphor, and Neva—games that they might not otherwise know about, and that they probably didn't discover when we recommended them first time around. This is kind of the best-case scenario of what awards and awards coverage can do—expand the horizons of a larger audience, and bring more good games to the fore.

Final thoughts and predictions

The more ridiculous it gets trying to compare hundreds of disparate games against one another to determine the best ones, the more I appreciate having a touch point in the culture for people to celebrate, rage, and debate what’s going on. I don’t know if it meaningfully changes anything or adds to anyone’s understanding of games as art, as technology, or as complex economic arrangements.

I’m sure it’s at least momentarily affirming for the winners who spent the last year or six hunched over a computer full of doubt and self-loathing to see their work, collaborative or solo, vindicated in some way beyond a Steam review, article headline, or quarterly earnings report.

The Game Awards has always had a complex relationship with sponsors, who have in the past included everything from shaving razors to Grubhub. Many of the trailers featured during the show are also sponsored, either as direct ad-buys or as placement purchases for news-making reveals. This year Keighley announced that Amazon is the “exclusive retail partner” for the show.

There will be special deals for those watching live who are Prime subscribers, presumably on everything from accessories and gear to the games themselves. Maybe every time an award goes to Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, a game about saving the planet from an exploitative mega corp, fans will be able to buy the game at a discount from the real life exploitative mega corp currently helping to destroy the planet. If the Oscars are primarily a vehicle for gawking at celebrities from the sidelines, the Game Awards has always been first and foremost about selling stuff, and calling out bad actors, corporate or otherwise, is bad for business, at least as it’s currently constructed.

Here are my own predictions for the Game Awards 2024. First, the event will run too long. The musical performances of the songs will be excellent. There will be at least two celebrity cameos that embarrassingly cringe and at least one that’s awkward but still charming. Hideo Kojima will spend the length of three people’s acceptance speeches talking about how he loves movies and scanning people, and has partnered with another major company on a vague and far off project about pushing the boundaries of interactive storytelling. There will be at least one major tease—Kingdom Hearts 4, a new IP out of Sony Santa Monica—that fans come away from the event remembering fondly and speculating about and clinging to for sustenance throughout the cold winter back log slog.

Someone will collect an award and be on the verge of saying something very profound before they are knocked off mental balance by the hurry up music and shuffled off stage moments later. The theater cameras will get at least one shot of Phil Spencer in the audience looking impatient and exhausted. Josef Fares will banter with Keighley but still not do the one thing everyone is there to watch him do which is turn to the camera and say a naughty word.

Astro Bot will win GOTY because Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and Metaphor: Refantazio will split the 100 hour RPG sicko vote and only like 12 people actually finished Shadow of the Erdtree. Balatro, beloved as it is, just won’t have the juice to push critics to memorialize its clever RNG craftmanship. But it will win Best Independent game of the year, Animal Well will take home the Debut Indie award, and Hellblade 2 will nab the Games for Impact accolade. Everyone will come away feeling a little cheated and swear off the Game Awards forever until next November rolls around.

America currently has a chance to do the funniest thing ever and put a degenerate gamer in the White House. Win or lose, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has established himself as a very likable politician and all-around-not-weird dude. He seems authentic, an ineffable vibe that some people have and others never will, much like the Dreamcast he once coveted and now belongs to a ResetEra poster.

It is hard to keep summoning the energy to be properly freaked out about the latest most important election of my lifetime. I took my 10-month old with me to go vote around noon when the power temporarily went out at my house because the energy company decided to be a petty tyrant over the $150 I still owe them from last month.

Speaking of petty tyrants, I voted against Trump again for the third time in eight years. The weather was beautiful outside my son’s school where my precinct is located. He asked me why he was off today and what an election was. I said it’s when everyone writes down who they want to be in charge of everything.

He said that he hopes they choose me and that I’ll probably win because I’m always writing things down and probably very good at it. I told him we only get to pick between two people. Who are they? You’ve probably seen them while you’re trying to watch your Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom all-bosses runs on YouTube. Oh my gosh you’re right I have!

I’m fascinated with the new betting market around this election, in which political prognostication is turned into a stock market simulator where people get to feel like the main characters of both Succession and the West Wing all at once. Polymarket is one of the exchanges that caters to the growing market for political junkie DraftKings power users and it sounds like a mess.

Despite a neck-and-neck race, Trump’s odds of winning based on Polymarket activity swung up to 60 percent last month an anonymous account boosting Trump reportedly dumped a combined $30 million into the crypto-backed exchange. This person later told The Wall Street Journal “I have absolutely no political agenda.”

He stands to make $80 million if Trump wins, but if Harris wins he’ll lose the $30 million which he described as “the majority of his available liquid assets.” Unfortunately, it’s too late to try and pull his money out. Because he holds so many of the bets, trying to sell them to others would immediately crash the market. But others are apparently still buying in. Other mystery accounts are flooding Polymarket with tens of millions in additional bets on Trump in the final hours of the election.

Big name streamers are also getting in on the action. Adin Ross, who started as a content creator making NBA2K and GTA V videos before pivoting to online white supremist brain rot, placed a $1 million wager Trump’s reelection (he previously gave the former president a Cybertruck during a Kick stream). Ex-Overwatch World Cup star, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, put $700,000 on the convicted felon. It’s essentially online roulette for alt right crypto bros.

Ricky "FaZe Banks" Bengston did not get in on the action but he did make an 11th hour endorsement of Trump, apparently spurred on by an 11th hour appearance of Elon Musk on the Joe Rogan podcast. “Illegal immigration’s gotten so bad that even the people furthest on the left have conceited to it being a major issue,” he tweeted. “You have Kamala Harris, in 2024, before GTA 6, talking about building a fucking wall at the southern boarder.”

Last month, a clip of Hasan Piker went viral talking about the right wing’s content dominance among young men online. This has manifested in pre-election polling showing there is a giant split in GenZ support for Trump between men and women. But not everyone thinks the gamer vote is real or will lead to Harris’ defeat.

GOP strategist Brad Todd said on CNN yesterday that the real threat to the ex-President earning a second term is American’s third-place gaming console. "I like to say that Trump's enemy tomorrow, or his opponent tomorrow, is not really Kamala Harris—it's the Xbox,” Todd said. “He needs a lot of younger men who don't care much about politics—and like video games a little bit more—to go and vote." News anchor Jim Acosta chuckled. “Mom’s basement,” he said interjecting as Todd nodded along. The Xbox tax strikes again.

But it could be replaced by a worse one if Trump wins. 'Is Switch 2 Delayed For The U.S. election?' That was the title of a post from yesterday on the r/Games subreddit by user Quiet_Proposal4497 that I can’t stop thinking about. It linked to a story at Ars Technica looking at how Donald Trump’s tariffs would jack up the prices of everyday electronics like smartphones, laptops, and even video game consoles. The implication that Nintendo might be sitting the most important system reveal in nearly eight years was completely without evidence but tantalizing.

The only basis for the outlandish suggestion was the fact that everyone assumed the Switch 2 would be announced already. What could possibly be keeping the Mario maker from making history? Launch games taking longer than expected? Concerns about upstaging the existing holiday lineup? Eleventh hour supply chain hiccups? A world historic U.S. presidential election that looks like a 50/50 tossup?

The post was eventually removed from r/Games for being “low-effort.” No one was buying it. Commenters responded with things like “Switch fans don’t care how much it costs” and “the U.S. election is not the center of the universe.” One person was more direct. “You are silly if you think that a Japanese company, the king of entertainment around the world, is waiting for the USA presidential election lol,” they wrote.

Except that the UK still has an actual king and when his mom died Nintendo literally altered its plans for the company’s big The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom showcase due to “this period of national mourning.” Prior to that, Nintendo delayed its Advance Wars 1+2 remake for an entire year because of “recent world events” like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

There are a dozen more likely reasons that we haven’t officially heard about the Switch 2 yet but I’m not convinced the election connection is as completely outlandish as some seem to think. Nintendo’s latest earnings report shows its U.S. sales account for almost as much as Europe’s and Japan’s combined.

Trump’s 60 percent tariff plan is full of caveats, including whether he actually even plans to try and do it, but reports cited by Ars Technica estimate they could raise the price of gaming consoles anywhere from 25 to 40 percent. That would make the PS5 Pro nearly $1,000. A Switch 2 with a planned launch price of $400 would shoot up to $500. Imagine the Nintendo of America tweets breaking that news.

“This is Miyamoto. After consulting with Toad, our financial advisor in the Mushroom Kingdom, we decided to move the raise the price of the Switch 2 by $100. My deepest apologies but I promise it will be well worth the wait. We finally got rid of friend codes.”

Patch notes

Enshrouded v0.7.0.1 has its first major patch since the base-building survival MMO launched into early access in January. One of the big ticket items? “The recipe for the rake is now correctly unlocked.”

Starfield 1.14.74 beta update nerfs a classic Bethesda exploit: “Fixed an issue where the player could receive additional credits by extorting the target and then killing them.”

Stardew Valley version 1.6 added a bunch of new content but also some performance issues. “If you are experiencing performance issues in Stardew Valley 1.6, remove all hats from pets,” recommends its creator. “We will address the problem as soon as possible.”

Until Dawn patch 1.06 tries to address a bunch of character performance issues in the remaster. They all read something like, “Fix for Sam's face appearing swollen during the Chris introduction in Chapter 1.”

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 update version 1.13 tweaks a bunch of fighters, including Rocksteady. The TMNT mutant no longer has a bug “Slime Special Down Bombs would not explode upon touching the ground.”

Some light election night reading

Superman is the white whale of video game superheroes (Patricia Hernandez / Polgyon)

Netflix Announces Big AI Gaming Push Just Days After Closing A Studio (Luke Plunkett / Aftermath)

NPC Miles Morales is the street performer of the internet (Ana Dias / Polygon)

A Game Designer Who Wants to See Ideas He’ll Hate (Christopher Byrd / NY Times)

‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’ Is Bioware’s Best Game in Ages. Here’s How They Got There (George Yang / Rolling Stone)

The Follow-Up to One of 2024’s Best Games May Never Happen (Megan Farokhmanesh / Wired)

The Vatican’s Anime Mascot Is Now an AI Porn Sensation (Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media)

Concord is officially not coming back. Sony shut down Firewalk Studios this week. It laid off all 174 members starting November 1 (bringing Sony's total gaming cuts up to 1,290 for the year). I reported, based on two sources familiar with the agreement, that the game's development deal was $200 million, putting the total cost of Concord even higher. It might be the most expensive failure in PlayStation’s history.

"Firewalk’s innovative approach to connected storytelling and its commitment to high-quality gameplay continues to exceed our expectations.” That’s how Hermen Hulst, described the game in 2023 when the studio was acquired. "I think fans will be very pleased when they see what Firewalk has in store for them.”

But they were not pleased. "Certain aspects of Concord were exceptional, but others did not land with enough players,” he wrote in an email to staff just 18 months later. "I am a big believer in the benefits of embracing creative experimentation and developing new IP,” Hulst continued. “However, growing through sustainable financials, especially in a challenged economic environment is critical."

That’s a big 180 for the person in charge of Sony’s first-party portfolio. It almost made it sound like he played no part in the Concord saga. “We did not hit our targets with this title,” the executive added. Who is we? It was similar to the trick Jeff Bezos pulled after lighting 10 percent of the Washington Post’s subscriber business last week.

“It’s our duty to look at our our resource planning, and make sure that we run a sustainable business,” Hulst told Variety prior to the shutdown announcement. “That’s part of being CEO. We never take that lightly, because we know these people personally, and it’s very close to our hearts and the teams and good working atmospheres. But yes, we’ve had some layoffs.”

Concord's very small but very loyal fanbase came together to say goodbye one last time in the game's Discord server before it permanently went offline as well. Just like the game which was deleted from players' PS5 libraries, there is now no trace left of the Concord community that briefly existed earlier this year, its fans scattered to the winds just like its developers. But you can find some of their brilliant work on ArtStation.

A Sakhal true crime confession

Last month, DayZ broke its Steam concurrent record with 78,000 players a decade after comiong out thanks to its recent Frostline Expansion adding an entire new map called Sakhal. It's still not in the top 15 games for player engagement on Steam, but it's clear DayZ's best, most vibrant days are still ahead. 

The immersive zombie survival sim born of an Arma 2 mod arrived in late 2013 with a rocky alpha release. After an initial explosion in players, interest dropped off during a protracted early access period. At the end of 2018, with only the most diehard players still circulating through its austere, hyper-realistic zombie apocalypse on a regular basis, DayZ finally went 1.0. 

"DayZ is still broken, still beautiful, and still unfinished," declared Polygon's Charlie Hall at the time. It took the following six years to slowly and methodically win old players back and find new ones. The before and after pics are impressive but don't necessarily tell the whole story. DayZ's unique blend of MMO and survival sim has yielded a meaningful social sandbox full of fascinating moments.

"After playing with this guy on Sakhal who was SUPER nice to me, for like legit a whole hour...I ended up smashing him in the back of the head while he was cooking meat for the both of us...." wrote Reddit user ThangGoManGo in one of the weirdest missed connections I've ever read. 

"I remember him yelling 'Dude what the fuck, why?!' And I stopped talking and just beat him to death...After that I looted him. Ate all of our food by myself. Played alone for like 1.5 hours after that, until I ended up dying anyways…"

They continued, "Honestly, I felt bad the WHOLE DAY, in real life, after that. Yes it's a game but I still betrayed a real person who was super nice to me and after we both talked so much. Felt like an asshole. And then I decided I would bever ever ever do that again…"

Where is Apex Legends 2.0?

Apex Legends is one of the biggest new live service success stories since Fortnite blew up but it is not big enough for investors. The battle royale hasn't been a top 10 game by weekly active players on any major platform for the last two months, beat out by the much-maligned but still much-played Overwatch 2. Does that mean we can expect an Apex Legends 2 in the future?

No. EA CEO Andrew Wilson shot that prospect down pretty forcefully in the company's earnings call this week. "What we have seen in the context of live service-driven games at scale is the 'version two' thing has almost never been as successful as the 'version one' thing," he told analysts. Instead, the company will focus on a "large systemic innovation," whatever that means. 

We've seen some major sequels stumble recently. Follow-ups like City Skylines 2 and Kerbal Space Program 2 have shown how hard it is to launch a sequel that does everything the first game did, lots of new stuff, and also feels finished. A year after it arrived, Payday 3 still has less than five times the Steam concurrent players as Payday 2.

The live service games feel like platforms, and asking players to jump to leave behind the one they spent hundreds of hours in and dollars on is like making them buy a new console that doesn't have backwards compatibility. It milks fans for more money but fractures the player community.

This is why we aren't getting a Sims 5. Despite some fans perennially begging for a sequel, the decade-old Sims 4 still added 15 million players last year leading to "higher than expected" earnings from the franchise. Instead, EA Maxis is working on Project Rene, a mobile multiplayer version of The Sims meant to complement the existing game, and some remasters of past games like MySims.

The guns were a lie

Destiny 2's latest mass community puzzle was proving that a conspiracy theory about bad loot RNG was actually true despite repeated denials by Bungie. Ten years of loot inflation means the only thing players have left to chase are "god rolls," i.e. versions of weapons with the "best" selection of randomly selected perks. 

This makes it a lot like Pokémon where hardcore players hunt for creatures with the best IVs–hidden stat spreads that indicate whether or not a given Pokémon will ever reach its highest battle potential. A gun without the right IVs, or perks, in Destiny 2 is usually considered garbage and instantly liquidated. 

When a particular grenade launcher's "god roll" in the latest update seemed almost impossible to get, players felt cheated. They started crowdsourcing drop data, sharing elaborate graphs and spreadsheets, and theorizing about how perk RNG was coded into Destiny 2 such that the odds could actually be unfair but Bungie wouldn't notice. 

They turned out to be right. A fix will arrive on November 5. "In the long-term, we're looking at a few options not only to thank many of you for your data-crunching, but to get some weapons in your hands that had perk rolls with lower RNG chances than intended," the studio wrote this week. Free VS Chill Inhibitors with Envious Arsenal and Bait and Switch perks for everyone it sounds like. 

This ordeal is notable for a couple reasons. 1.) It was more interesting than anything actually going on inside the game at the moment. 2.) It underlined the deeper problem with Destiny 2's loot chase, which is both obtuse and bloated, as off-putting to newcomers as it is capricious for mid-to-hardcore player fans.

“Perkgate” was followed by a much smaller scandal: this year's Festival of the Lost event went live with busted loot from 2023. "It turns out that when you fire half your QA team, more things than usual slip through the cracks," wrote Forbes' Paul Tassi this week. 

Live service interrupted

• Pokémon Go recently launched Gigantamax raid battles but the fights ended up being way too hard and stingy with rewards though. Niantic promised to make the fights "slightly" easier and also improve the capture rate for the Gigantamax Pokémon afterwards. 

• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launched with some miserable spawn point issues. Players were getting dropped into matches and killed before they could select a loadout, sometimes appearing right on top of opponents, and even dying multiple times in a single killcam. 

• The Elder Scrolls: Legends hasn't received a new content update since 2019 but it was still online and playable. That will soon change. The game has been pulled from storefronts and will go offline permanently on January 30, 2025. Until then everything in the store will cost just 1 gold. Bethesda's Hearthstone cash-in wasn't as slick or pretty as Blizzard's card game but it had some neat original ideas around board positioning and other mechanics. 

• World of Warcraft's rewards are getting buffed for the fourth time this year. The Blizzard MMO's 20th anniversary event was locking certain daily rewards behind weekly requirements which was messing everyone up and killing the overall vibe. More and better rewards have arrived to compensate for the timegating. 

• For Honor has the weirdest crossover I've ever seen. Ubisoft's seven-year old medieval combat game which still regularly gets meaty updates and maintains a very passionate fanbase received a Destiny 2 mode. It's surprisingly neat and helped fans rally to complete community orders at Helldivers 2 speeds. 

Pokémon TCG Pocket Digest 

We finally have a Pokémon trading card game on mobile that doesn't suck. Pokémon TCG Pocket nails the creature card collecting fantasy with cool art and fun battles. It’s not quite as effortlessly snackable as 2022's Marvel Snap and the game’s free-to-play microtransaction economy is a mess. That hasn't stopped casual players from getting demolished by OP decks featuring Mewtoo and others. And some fans have already convinced themselves that virtual booster packs sporting bent wrappers are much more likely to contain special cards. It's become the playground myth equivalent of holding the B button down on the Game Boy to make hard-to-capture Pokémon stay in their Pokéballs. 

Patch notes

• The First Descendant update 1.1.6 is updating the loot shooter's sexy nun costume to remove the coat tails and show more ass cheek. "The Dev Team is committed to providing skins that satisfy you," the devs wrote. The team also teased a pity system to protect against bad drop rate luck. 

• Helldivers 2 patch 01.001.201 continues Arrowhead Studios' apology tour. The SG-8P Punisher Plasma has been restored to its former glory. Ragdolling while crawling, meanwhile, has been nerfed. Also: "The Service Technician is no longer mourning the death of her beloved pet goldfish 'Goldie' and can now be interacted with again." 

• The Division 2 Shades of Red update introduces a bunch of new modifiers to remix old content. This is also the season that lets players go back to being level 40 instead of needing to create a new character from scratch. But the most important change is this: "Balaclavas now conceal player ears."

• Escape From Tarkov patch 0.15.5.0 added a pin and lock feature that lets players manage their inventories much more sanely. It also changes the in-game season to fall and prevents the game from softlocking when two players try to grab the same weapon out of a container. 

• Guilty Gear -Strive- version 1.4 was a massive rework of its fighters and fans are loving the buffs to the revenge-seeing samurai Baiken. "God these buffs are dumb LMAO 2H Tatami now combos into c.S and cross up Yozansen Vacuum + new 6H bounce height now sets up Tether LOL," is how one player described them. 

Things you should go read

PlayStation urgently needs to rethink its live-service strategy after Concord's failure (Matt Kim / IGN)

What happens when a secretive blockchain company buys your game studio (Bryant Francis / Game Developer)

I’ve given up on trying to predict what Nintendo will do — especially when it comes to the Switch 2 (Andrew Webster / The Verge)

Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Rock Paper Shotgun)

My favorite game of the year is deleting games to make space for other games I then delete for space (Mike Drucker / The Gamer)

Sifting through the slop era of entertainment is a tough task (Cass Marshall / Polygon)

Metaphor ReFantazio works by embracing and subverting fantasy tradition (Reid McCarter / PCGamesN)

After the era of bloat, big video game developers are going smaller (Jason Schreier / Bloomberg)

Games to play

Albatroz

SULFUR

[REDACTED]

You likely heard there was a massive data breach at Pokémon maker Game Freak recently. It was probably the biggest leak in Pokémon history. Despite appearing to originate from a studio employee who fell for a phishing scam, and who seemingly had access to the Nintendo developer portal, the Mario maker has not acknowledged the historic hack beyond some DMCA takedowns. 

But most of the drama around the "Tera Leak" (you can catch up on everything discovered here) has been focused on one Pokémon in particular: Typhlosion. That's because at least one of the files in the hacked trove contained a short story about the Gen II fire starter that suggested it had kidnapped a girl from her family and had sex with her. Fans lost their shit. The devs at Game Freak really were freaks. 

But the bestiality creepypasta sensation was shortlived. It turned out AI misleadingly mistranslated at least some key parts of the hacked files resulting in nuance getting lost in the process. According to a human translation of the story, it's more of an allegory than anything else, likely referencing an established Japanese myth about a badger-looking shapeshifter Yokai. Typhlosion was uncancelled. 

The larger takeaway is that dumping thousands of machine translated files on 4chan and letting social media run wild with it is a recipe for some fun but very likely misinformed nonsense. But also that Pokémon fans are hungry for the series to do more interesting things with their lore and world building. From internal meeting notes to developers' private musings, the Tera Leak delivered some of the most interesting Pokémon story nuggets in years. 

French résistance

Amidst the existential financial and creative crises facing Ubisoft at the moment, hundreds of developers across its studios in France went on strike this week to protest the company's controversial RTO policy. The fight began in Montreal last year and has spread to other studios last month when the three days a week in the office requirement was rolled out globally. "It creates a lot of stress," one developer told me at the time. 

Ubisoft, which is dealing with frequent cancellations and delays of even its biggest games while the ones that do ship miss financial expectations and fail to wow critics, says the RTO policy is about making better games. “We are a creative company, and creativity is boosted by in-person interactions, informal conversations, and collaborating around the same table," head of studios, Marie-Sophie de Waubert, wrote in an email to staff.  

The policy is also likely just as much about trying to make people quit by making their lives that much harder. Insider Gamer reported this was the case at Ubisoft Milan, which shipped 2022's fantastic but underperforming Mario Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, whose director recently struck out on his own. "It is unthinkable that a young person who lives in another region or in any case far from our territory could spend three days a week in Milan, turning their existence upside down," a union rep for the studio told GamesIndustry.biz. 

France's sectoral union bargaining laws have put game developers there on the forefront of pushing back against gaming's bosses. Don't Nod, which released Jusant in 2023 and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden earlier this year, recently said both games (despite being excellent) under performed and 69 employees' jobs are now at risk. 

French video game union STJV sounded the alarm as early as February, blaming management for understaffing, lack of direction, and last minute delays, as well as failing to negotiate with the studio's worker committee. A survey of developers at the time reported 50 percent disapproval of the studio's strategy. "We will not pay for our bosses' mistakes," the union announced this week after the latest threat of layoffs. "I'm so tired," one developer there told me. 

There’s still a huge and unsettled debate around RTO in the game industry more broadly. Some studios have produced great games while fully remote. Others have blamed it for delays and breakdowns in culture. I think the merits and tradeoffs are more complicated than some people are willing to admit, but also that onerous corporate mandates are bullshit and self-defeating and workers should be able to collectively negotiate their own destinies rather than be at the mercy of millionaire c-suite whims.

"In a world obsessed with progress yet haunted by impermanence"

Analogue, the company behind beautiful-looking FPGA-enabled retro gaming consoles, announced the price and pre-order date for the Analogue 3D, a bespoke recreation of the Nintendo 64. The idea is that it works with original controllers and cartridges with zero compromises, outputting image quality in 4K while preserving the CRT-style of the original presentation, all with zero input lag. 

The company, or rather its boss, Christopher Taber,  also has a penchant for dramatic, expletive-filled mythologizing around himself and his projects. It can make for some great quotes and also plenty of hot air. This week the company sounded like it was reciting Proust while describing its $250 Mario Party machine. 

"Just put the fries in the bag bro," joked GameSpot's Tamoor Hussain. "I love your products but please stop posting cringe," wrote critic SpeckObst. "This looks good, but oh my godddd guys, these posts! It's more than a bit much, it reads like parody. I'm not sure there'd be this much aggrandising if God himself popped down," added Lost in Cult marketing director Ryan Brown. God himself would have at least included a controller in the box. 

There are some bigger concerns about Analogue at the moment that were recently summarized by writer Sam Machkovech. He notes the Analogue Duo, the company's TurboGrafx-16 replica, still has compatibility issues with some games. The Analogue Pocket was supposed to get CRT output support at some point but the feature was later removed from the website. 

Pre-orders are going up for the Analogue 3D next week but we still don't have any actual videos or screenshots demonstrating the image quality. Then there's the MiSTer, an open-source FPGA project that works for more than just one console and has come down dramatically in price this year. There's real competition this time around, in other words, and a sleek plastic housing a nice sounding song and dance might not cut it, at least for hardcore retro enthusiasts. 

Patch notes

• Super Mario Party Jamboree version 1.1.0 went out before the game even launched. It "Fixed a bug where the number of times you’ve stopped on an Unlucky Space is reset when you resume from a suspended save in Mario Party."

• Metaphor: Refantazio patch 1.4 fixed anti-aliasing on PC, addressed a camera shake bug, and made the game louder. "Unbeknownst to me, I booted up the game and my poor ears, man…I had to adjust master volume to 1/8 from its previous setting of ½," responded one player. 

• Lollipop Chainsaw Repop version 1.05 fixed some bugs after a pretty rough launch, including a lack of undead. "Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the number of KillZombie to be insufficient in some scenes."

• Dragon's Dogman 2's latest update improves the "processing of NPC thoughts" in order to boost the performance framerate closer to 60fps on console. Combined with a new casual mode I might actually finish it now. 

• Signalis version 1.4 on Switch adds an option to toggle inventory capacity limits and extend its size. This was a big reason why some people didn't enjoy the game originally, and was rolled out on Steam almost a year ago. 

• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate patch 13.0.3 arrives three years after its final balance update and fixes an exploit whereby online players could rage quit to avoid having their rank impacted. Unfortunately the update also messed up GameCube controllers that used third-party adapters.

Live Service Interrupted

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 players got bent out of shape after the latest patch nerfed some things and made the game harder. Some accused Saber Interactive of pulling an Arrowhead, whose similarly beloved squad-based PVE shooter Helldivers 2 torched community goodwill over the course of many months with nerfs to fan-favorite guns and strategies.  

The update limited ammo refills on certain difficulties, made enemies more aggressive, and bosses harder to deal with. "Devs need to stop listening to edgelord 'elite' players that want the most punishing experience possible," wrote one player on Reddit. Negative reviews on Steam spiked for a couple days before the developers announced a hotfix to dial things back. Some fans called on everyone to chillout. "Power never concedes without demands, so we will maintain demands," one responded. 

Still, it's part of a larger philosophical fight over the soul of the game. Kilroywashere1917 on Reddit hit the nail on the head. "That is a problem when I’m playing a game about Space Marines and using their primary weapon isn’t viable," they wrote. "I shouldn’t be forced to use a melee oriented build to 'get gud.'" If the game is supposed to be a grim dark power fantasy about stoic fascists stomping demonic aliens across the cosmic horrors of deep space, why chase a game balance that undermines that feeling?

One way to read this is that Space Marine 2, celebrated for its old-school Xbox 360-style purity, is now falling into the online game trap of fixing what wasn't broken, potentially with an aim to extend the party and keep people engaged for longer by upping the challenge. Or maybe the honeymoon has just worn off and players are getting antsy as they wait for promised new content. 

Tekken 8 is trying to make amends for a microtransaction faux pas earlier this month when it tried to sell players the stage for DLC fighter Heihachi "many illegitimate children" Mishima separately for $5. This meant that even fans who had shelled out $110 for the Deluxe Edition would need to pay extra to fight on Genmaji Temple. 

They couldn't even access it if they randomly got matchmade with someone else who had bought it. Both players would need to have paid to experience the glory of the red maple retreat. Fans flooded Reddit, Steam, and social media comment boxes with things like, "I absolutely REFUSE to pay for GENMAJI TEMPLE as a Ultimate Edition / Season Pass owner."

Father of Tekken, Katsuhiro Harada, apologized, then deleted the apology, then tweeted "Plz check this out" when the team announced this week they would make it up to fans by giving season pass owners a winter stage for free and everyone who plays 500 free Tekken Coins to spend skins and stuff. 

Tekken 8 is the first new entry in the 3D fighter in almost a decade. In that time modern fighting games have adopted the NBA2K school of making everything in-between matches feel like a virtual mall and charging players for hanging out in it. Tekken 8 turned out to be no different, which has caused repeated waves of controversy.  

Harada previously suggested the development team and Bandai Namco aren't exactly on the same page when it comes to what content is sold and for how much, but has also defended charging for things given the investment required. He ballparked the cost of a new stage at $350,000. 

Throne and Liberty has a guild griefing problem. The NCSoft MMORPG published by Amazon Games came out of Early Access recently and has retained surprisingly robust concurrent player numbers on Steam. But some players are already complaining about overly powerful guilds monopolizing activities on certain servers thanks in part to all of the pre-release grinding their members have been up to. 

There's a big PVP focus in Throne and Liberty, and warring guilds are essentially excluding underpowered ones from certain events. "On the server where I play with my friends, the top 4 guilds have monopolized the entire server," wrote Reddit user farkitto. "All they do in all conflicts, all events, all pvp open zones is to kill all the players who try to enter with MACRO and completely prevent entry to the zone. The game is getting really disgusting." 

You can see some of the massive fights between top Throne and Liberty guilds on YouTube. Unlike some other MMOs where players just make guilds for them and their friends, Throne and Liberty uses them as economic hubs for organizing the distribution of potions, loot, and other resources integral to the grind. But the result is that players of smaller guilds on the wrong servers don't have much leverage when trying to just be play and be chill. 

"Why is griefing not only allowed but encouraged in your game?" complained one player. "Junobote just spawned and Sanctum of Desire was closed because it was pvp inside. We tried to hang out in there, but got killed by a huge alliance who wiped everyone out and took the boss for themselves when it was supposed to be a peace boss."

Some players have reported getting ripped off by their guilds. Others are finding the guild application process even more humiliating than applying to regular jobs. There are also accusations that some of the top guilds are relying on bots and scripts to essentially cheat. This week NCSoft took a ban hammer to accounts suspected of botting. One player was not impressed. "'Fair and equal environment' meanwhile it’s a p2w game," they wrote. 

Three Steam Next Fest demos to play this weekend

Ballionaire

Gladio Mori

Beastieball

Final Fantasy isn't selling well, at least not as much as Square Enix wants it too. Despite back-to-back massive entries in the long-running RPG franchise, which even with big flaws were popularly received by both fans and critics, we've entered another speculative doom-spiral around the publisher and its most iconic series. Why can't the company that transformed the imaginations of a generation of SNES and PS1 players get its shit together? Rob Fahey at GamesIndustry.biz blames it partly on Final Fantasy's relentless "appetite for reinvention" driving it into an identity crisis. 

"Ironically, even as Final Fantasy seems to struggle with both an identity crisis and a sales slump, JRPGs more generally are actually in pretty good health," he writes. "Flagship genre titles like Persona and Like A Dragon are very different to what Final Fantasy has become – likely having only a fraction of the development budget, for a start, but embracing their genre roots in ways that have delighted fans while also helping to control development costs to some degree."

I think one of the problems for Square Enix is precisely that it doesn't want Persona 5 or Yakuza: Like A Dragon-sized hits, each of which sold less than their respective Final Fantasy counterparts at the time, though not by much. It wants Final Fantasy to be a hit that transcends the confines of the genre and fandom as it used to dependably do in the past when any new sequel was a top five defining game for a PlayStation console. I have supplied a chart to illustrate this point. Ten million copies sold is a big hit. Twenty million sold is a massive hit. Skyrim and The Witcher 3 are just unparalleled outliers. 

It’s probably fair to say timed exclusivity really hurt the initial momentum of FFXVI and FFVII Rebirth. More people play games on PC than console, and while Xbox sales have been terrible this console generation, my guess is that the first 10-20 million Xbox Series X/S sold go to hardcore players who buy lots of games and Final Fantasy would sell better there than people like to act. I also think the Nintendo Switch being a dominant platform this console generation and not being capable of playing either game doesn't help, especially when the drop off in Xbox sales hasn't been made up for with increased PS5 sales. 

Here is my theory of the case. In the past, Final Fantasy has used incredible graphics to try and overcome the more limited appeal of in the weeds RPG design. It may be that the franchise has hit the point where that's actually a net-drag, not just preventing new entries from being on weaker but larger install bases, but also distracting from more novel gameplay and storytelling. Both Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 have proven just how many players will show up for games with dense systems and challenging mechanics as long as they're in the service of something that feels fresh, novel, and expansive. 

For Square Enix more broadly, what it needs to do is pretty clear: make better games. It's been flooding the zone the last few years with JRPG remasters and remakes, as well as sequels, spin-offs, and one-off experiments in series and genres that I, a superfan, am fascinated with, but which have not felt relevant in years. There are games like Foamstars and Chocobo Racing whose clinical monetization strategies murdered any lasting possibility of fun. In addition to overwhelming a small but lucrative player-base with too many intriguing but middling releases, it often feels like the incubation process at Square Enix is just throwing spaghetti at a wall and then running with the first thing that sticks for more than a second or two. 

Visions of Mana is a good recent example of this. The long dormant franchise used to be an important supporting pillar to Final Fantasy during the SNES and PS1 days. Square Enix had been slowly trying to lay the groundwork for a revival with ports of the best games in the series and a remake of Trials of Mana, which wasn't previously localized in the West. And then it farmed the latest installment out to a NetEase studio for its maiden voyage. The results are not terrible! Visions of Mana is a pretty game with a big world, solid combat, great music, and a neat job system that has some genuinely cool ideas in it. 

But the game also feels overly ambitious for its likely budget and scope. It's made up of big, yawning open world zones with too few battles and little to discover in them. Side stories consist of mostly perfunctory fetch quests. The broad strokes of the story are compelling but the character banter is weak and interrupts all too frequently to no apparent end. And the progression economy of leveling up, unlocking new abilities, buying better gear, and building up your party's power feels very uneven. 

In the end, there's an air of Genshin Impact, action MMO-lite slop about the whole thing, which is not to denigrate the hit gacha game so much as the cavalcade of underbaked copycats that have come after². Visions of Mana far cry from the taught, laser-focused, meat-and-potatoes construction and refinement of the original Secret of Mana. Granblue Fantasy: Relink, which is streamlined to a fault, did a much better job of channeling that energy this year. I would have loved to have seen the Mana motifs–a magic tree, elemental spirits, cute monsters–wrapped around that game's Monster Hunter-lite structure instead and tight arcade action feel instead. 

More importantly, Visions of Mana feels like another game burdened with unrealistic expectations. NetEase closed the studio that made it the same day it came out. Instead of building on the game's strengths and weaknesses for a more distinct, substantive, and polished sequel, Mana seems likely to be uprooted again and either put back on ice or tossed to a new team that has to start over again mostly from scratch. And Square Enix wonders how it became a mono-franchise publisher. 

Live Service Interrupted

Throne and Liberty is the new NCSoft MMORPG that came out in South Korea last year and recently arrived in the U.S. by way of Amazon Games. The game had huge Steam concurrents initially but players are divided on whether it's just another flashy but soulless grind or if there's more than just a byzantine progression system powering its appeal. 

There's a debate about whether it's really pay-to-win, because even though you can spend on microtransactions to buy gear and boost XP the really meaningful upgrades are still locked behind end-game stuff. What's not in dispute is that there's multiple paid battle passes, including one for your character's normal leveling process. 

One thing that sets Throne and Liberty apart is that it's a free-to-play MMO that's also on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, where there are a lot fewer options for that. A less fortunate distinction it has on console is the controls are a mess and the D-pad frequently bugs out. The Xbox store is full of 1-star review complaints and Reddit has multiple guides for how players can bring up an "emergency cursor override" when they get stuck on the menus. 

Final Fantasy XIV has a notorious, neverending housing shortage. Plots are so hard to come by that the game has a lottery to decide who can get them. The latest round just ended with players finding out in the days ahead whether they got lucky. The game has also put a moratorium on home demolition for residents of certain North American servers following the horrific damage caused by Hurricane Helen. Residencies usually get destroyed and recycled if players haven't visited them in the last 45 days. 

But the housing market inFFXIV doesn't matter if nobody can log into the game. The game has experienced 11 outages in the last two months due to DDOS attacks. While it's not clear what's responsible for the massive uptick, players are getting sick of it. Unlike many other online games where it's a bummer and a nuisance, FFXIV fans actually pay directly for subscription time to play and some of them are now calling for refunds. 

Destiny 2 faces an epidemic of crouch spamming. In PVP modes players will rapidly do squats to scatter their hitbox and throw off their opponents. While sweaty try-hard might actually bother to do it manually, more often players use macros, third-party programs, or other external means to automate it. Last week, Bungie announced it will address the problem with a cap on the number of crouches per second (CPS). 

"This limit is something that can be tuned, and because a tactical crouch or two during an engagement is an expression of skill and not something we want to discourage, we verified in our playtesting that our first pass was set so that it would be difficult to tell a limit existed if you were crouching at a normal cadence," the devs wrote. "However, our goal is to reduce the amount of untargeted crouch spamming, done either manually or via macros, encountered while playing Crucible, and we can further change the value as needed to prevent this behavior."

The Simpsons: Tapped Out (TSTO) is calling it quits. After 12 years the EA mobile game about building and maintaining your own version of Springfield through constant, Farmville-type dopamine hits. The game will be removed from app stores on Halloween and go offline in January. People who have been playing for years are freaking out and begging EA not to pull the plug. "Please don't destroy this," wrote one player on Facebook. "I've been playing so much recently, it brings me so much joy!!"

"Don't end the game 12 years got me thru so much and release all characters I'm missing a few," wrote a second. Others are saying goodbye to the towns they spent a decade building, through school and college, marriages and divorces. Fans on the game's subreddit are worried about the future of their community. Recommendations for what to replace TSTO include Family guy, Goosebumps: Horror Town, SpongeBob Moves In! and Fallout Shelter. "Without sounding bitter, I don’t want to invest anymore time in a similar game if it’s just going to shut down somewhere down the line," wrote one fan who does finally sound tapped out. 

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League received its season three update that adds a new playable character Lawless (Zoe Lawton) who happens to be Deadshot's daughter. The third character added since the game launched, her traversal ability is a gadget that lets her manipulate gravity and fall in any direction. The new season also adds a mission that takes place in an alternate reality Gotham. The free update debuted to less than 300 concurrents on Steam. That's less than half of Concord's max. 

Players still lurking on the official Suicide Squad Discord mostly can't seem to believe why Rocksteady Studios would invest so much time in adding a character no one knows or cares about. What diehard players do seem pumped about is a patch that finally fixes a bug that was mysteriously erasing Codex entries since the game came out. "Time to get back into the grind this weekend," wrote one player on Discord. "The game is soo dead waste of money and download," wrote the person immediately after them. 

XDefiant, on the other hand, is definitely not dead, the executive producer recently promised. "I just want to quickly address the status of the game. i.e. is the game dying?" wrote Mark Rubin in a September blog post that raised questions already answered by his blog post. "No, the game is absolutely not dying." It was a very unusual moment of candor from the former Infinity Ward man who worked on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare during its heyday. 

Rubin seemed to be responding to a report by Insider Gaming claiming XDefiant was on borrowed time and bleeding players. Or maybe it was the players on the subreddit complaining about being unable to find matches. It did not help when Ubisoft admitted to investors that the free-to-play, class-based FPS is struggling. It's apparently banking on a resurgence when season 3 arrives in December. By that point it will be directly competing with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. 

Patch notes

Elden Ring patch 1.15 fixed a bug where "Rellana, Twin Moon Knight would sometimes perform unexpected actions when interacting with objects in the battle area." She was getting caught on chairs and skipping to her second phase early. 

Starfield update 1.14.70 makes it so 9,999 is no longer the max damage that can be displayed. Also "healing items now preview the amount of health restored." 

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess's latest title update has capped the maximum number of sorcerers that can be used to speed up the cooldown for its map-nuking magical summon.  

Zoochosis patch 1.01 "Fixed the issue where a mutated moose, tranquilized with two darts during the first phase, would kill an animal after the player returned to the train." The indie horror game came out last week and is full of weird bugs. 

Stellar Blade update 1.007 made the game even more horny or, in the language of the patch notes, brough "visual improvements of conflicts between EVE's body." Players have done rigorous before and after testing to reveal all of the changes, from wind blowing up the cyborg's skirt to her breasts getting smooshed together when she bends over. 

What they're saying

"I think in the future, there will be many things that are like a hybrid of movies and games. But of course, the business side of things are also important, so you have to time it right. I don’t want to be in the red, but I don’t concentrate on making big profits; I just want to be the first one to do something." – Death Stranding director Hideo Kojima 

"Heihachi has numerous illegitimate children. I doubt if he remembers Reina very accurately." – Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada

"We are an entertainment company. As such, our objective is not to endorse any specific agenda." – Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot 

 "This year, more people are playing with Xbox across all devices in Asia than ever before. We've seen the largest number of Xbox console players in the region to date." – Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer  

"We didn't think there was an option to just leave [PS5 Pro support] on the table. But we are getting great support from Sony in terms of helping us figure out what we're going to do with that. – Monster Hunter producer Ryozo Tsujimoto

"No one knows when anything is going to come out, what quality it will be—including our players—and it terrifies everyone...When every game is a  Schrodinger's Box, why not over invest into a few titles and hope for the very best? It's something that we have become very used to doing. It is not how the industry existed forever. It is where we are now." – I Am Your Beast developer Xalavier Nelson Jr.

"One of the manifestations [of that change] we're seeing right now is that a lot of games are released with high budgets, and they're not selling nearly as well as expected whereas other games are going incredibly strong. What we're seeing is a real trend where players are gravitating toward the really big games where they can play with more of their friends." – Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney 

"You can also choose a male or female [version] of the protagonist, but we cannot write it as 'choose from Male or Female;' it became 'Type 1 & Type 2.' I wonder who the heck are going to complain about 'Male and Female?' I don't understand." – Dragon Quest designer Yuji Horii

Five games to play this weekend

Shadow of the Ninja - Reborn

Mecha Ball

Kill Knight

That was a bizarre PS5 Pro presentation from Mark Cerny. Nine minutes and 40 seconds, the first third of which was spent talking about the old hardware, the rest of it focused exclusively on showing older games running slightly better, and looking a little bit prettier, on a machine that will cost twice as much as a used PS5. The YouTube video has over 193,000 downvotes. It all had the vibe of "we were promised flying cars but all we got were sharper textures in Spider-Man 2 performance mode." 

I think the surprisingly vocal backlash to the PS5 Pro reveal speaks in part to a general angst right now about where high-end console gaming is headed. Sony has yet to show off any new first-party franchises or innovative sequels that set the PS5 apart from the generation that preceded it except Astro Bot, a GOTY frontrunner that was nowhere to be found in the PS5 Pro presentation. Horizon Forbidden West, God of War: Ragnarok, and Spider-Man 2 were bigger and more beautiful than their predecessors but still fundamentally the same games. 

Four years in, it still doesn't feel like the PS5 has had a The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild moment. The most exciting and novel gaming experiences, many from indie developers, now predominantly originate on PC, and the most exciting hardware innovations are in handhelds, with the most hype for a Switch 2 that won't even be half as powerful as the PS5 Pro. Sony remains the dominant player in gaming, but it feels like the real party is happening somewhere else. 

A less big brain theory of why the PS5 Pro reveal went down like a lead weight is that it tried to carve out a niche no one is interested in. Vergecast producer Liam James suggested Sony's real mistake was not making the PS5 Pro $1,000, and making it feel like a real top-of-the-line PC gaming experience for people who play on consoles rather than this weird in-between device that that's too pricey for an upgrade but not impressive enough for those with money to spend. 

Sony got away with this last time with the PS4 Pro because tech was cheaper and the jump to 4K was more noticeable. Paying a premium to get a slightly higher fidelity at 60fps just isn't the same proposition. It's actually just kind of a bummer. The PS5 is great, has an incredible library of games, and all of them will look even better on PS5 Pro, and the main result won't be selling more consoles to more people but charging the same people more money to enjoy them. 

Phil Spencer's final days at Xbox

The Microsoft gaming CEO joined the Windows maker as an intern in 1988. He started working on Xbox in 2001. Over two decades later, he's in charge of the whole division and seems to have no ideas left about what to do with it. Under Spencer, Xbox drove innovation on gaming accessibility, backwards compatibility, closed the gap between console and PC with play anywhere, championed cross-play, launched a subscription service, a cloud gaming initiative, and capped off an Xbox studios acquisition spree with the largest merger in gaming history. And what does the platform have to show for it?

This week, Microsoft announced another 650 layoffs across Xbox and Activision Blizzard. In addition to the 1,900 earlier in the year, the total cuts account for almost 20 percent of the publisher's total headcount at the time it was acquired. Spencer wrote in a memo that most of those laid off were in support and admin roles, insinuating this was part of the normal flow of post-merger streamlining, but those posting jobless notices on LinkedIn after the fact ranged from artists on Call of Duty support teams to engineers for last year's mobile spin-off Warcraft Rumble. 

"For the past year, our goal has been to minimize disruption while welcoming new teams and enabling them to do their best work," Spencer wrote in the opening of his email telling hundreds of people they were fired. "Throughout our team’s history, we have had great moments, and we have had challenging ones," he continued. "Today is one of the challenging days." That was the extent of his attempts to contextualize the cuts in some larger story about Xbox and its future. 

Maybe that's because he doesn't know what that future looks like, or it's one that won't include him. Ten years is a long time to lead a platform. Spencer's counterparts at Nintendo and Sony have all been replaced or moved on during that time. The longtime company man has always been good about sharing his enthusiasm for games and Xbox, a passion grounded in his public user profile that always shows him playing tons of different games. But lately he's seemed much more subdued. 

It began in May 2023 following the disastrous launch of Redfall, the first Xbox exclusive to come out of Microsoft's 2021 acquisition of Bethesda. Spencer went on the Kinda Funny podcast and, appearing solemn and apologetic, basically said Xbox would never be the leading gaming platform again. It was an odd message for an exec to deliver to millions of its most loyal fans, especially in the midst of a regulatory fight to buy the biggest gaming publisher in the country. 

In more recent interviews Spencer has talked about the pressures of capitalism, the need to run a business, and lots of other economic constraints that sound less like a leader rallying the base than someone who is actually no longer in control of it. One way to read this is that the pity party is just a way to deflect tough questions about brutal cuts across the gaming division, including at Tango Gameworks, maker of the one Xbox exclusive of the past decade that people unabashedly loved. 

I think that it's more genuine than that though. Read the leaked internal email from when the PS5 was announced. Spencer sounds excited and confident that the Xbox Series X/S, with the wind at its back from all of his other gaming initiatives, will be back in contention this console generation. Instead, sales are tracking behind even the Xbox One as its exclusives slowly begin getting ported to other platforms. Game Pass is getting worse. And cloud gaming is still a side-show. 

“We've got a goal of being able to deliver a game, roughly, every three to four months,” Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty said in 2019. And 2021. And the summer of 2023. And the fall of 2023. The company has indeed managed to release at least four notable first-party games every year, but just barely, despite the dramatic increase in its first-party portfolio, and the results are still very “lumpy” to use Booty’s phrase.

Senua's Saga: Hellblade II is the only one for the first 10 months of 2024, with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Flight Simulator 2024, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle all crammed into the final quarter (and without spending $69 billion on Activision Blizzard the company would have still been one game short). And nothing in the pipeline looks like it will transform Xbox’s fortunes. It feels like the only thing that might be able to do that is an Xbox handheld that bridges the gap between the breadth of PC gaming and the convenience of consoles. Will that be Spencer’s parting gift to platform?

Patch notes

• Visions of Mana update 1.03 fixes the duration of the snowman effect that was wrecking players. "This brings improvements to overall game stability, bug fixes, and adjusts the mechanic to dispel the frozen status effect on allies."

• Elden Ring update 1.14 buffed a Brass Shield that players already thought was one of the best in the game. "Dude I wasn't expecting them to make it even more ridiculous lmfao it now has a 75 guard boost at +25 which is higher then some greatshields," wrote Reddit user N_audio. "Amazing."

• Star Wars Outlaws title update 1.1.2 tweaked early stealth sections to make them less annoying and also made players less likely to be detected while rolling. Even better: "Many additional idle animations for NPC have been added across all planets."

• Spectre Divide's new patch makes the grind more generous, doubling most XP rewards. "To our surprise, Weekly/Daily Contracts and Crew Score Progression have been slower than intended, so we’ve increased the amount of XP and Fame from Daily and Weekly contracts." 

• Deadlock's latest update refined the minimap and players hate it. "Neutral Camps are now represented by a highlight glow on the buildings they are located within," reads one of the changes. The new minimap is more elegant but shows much less details and information and players want the old one back.

What people are saying

"I see it as a price change rather than a price increase." — PlayStation co-CEO Hideaki Nishino

"[Gaming] still where the action is, and it's like the pandemic but now you're going to have to take a few…figure out how to get through it, drive an Uber or whatever, go off to find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year." – Ex-Sony executive Chris Deering

“When you think about it from a business perspective, making [Palworld] a live-service game would extend its lifespan and make it more stable in terms of profitability.” – Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe 

"Palworld was never designed with that model in mind, and it would require too much work to adapt the game at this point…We apologize for any concern this may have caused, and we hope this clarifies our position." – also Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe

"Everybody pays too much attention to and cares too much about Metacritic scores. It's gotten to the point where there's almost a set formula – if you want to get a high Metacritic score, this is how you make the game," – No More Heroes creator Goichi 'Suda51' Suda

“Animal Well is the kind of game that doesn’t really communicate very well why it’s special. It’s a game about secrets and holding back information, and I think that’s what makes it interesting to play, but it’s hard to market a game like that – I can’t just show the best parts.” – Solo designer Bill Basso

Other links

• Indie hit publisher Annapurna Interactive has imploded after the entire staff quit over a dispute with the owner (Bloomberg)

• Game engine maker turned advertising tech company Unity has reversed its controversial developer fees a year after becoming a lightning rod for industry ire (Unity)

• Maybe Astro Bot is the live service game Sony should have been chasing all along (GameSpot)

• Another Zelda game has leaked ahead of launch amid Nintendo’s ongoing war against Switch pirates and emulation enthusiasts (Eurogamer)

• Twitch is in disarray and its new CEO isn’t helping morale as staff complain about his distracting goodwill tour (Aftermath)

• What comes after life in game development when the industry pushes people out? (Aftermath)

• Ubisoft’s stock price had a no good, very bad month as activist shareholder accuses it of delaying games on purpose and analysts search for the French publisher’s infinite moneymaker (Gamesindustry.biz)

Three games to play this weekend

Caravan SandWitch

Wild Bastards

I Am Your Beast 

It takes very little time on any platform or online game to realize it is mostly geared at maximizing the average user's engagement and not helping you take care of your kid who it may or may not be actively trying to solicit to join its "community," which can vary from cutesy Squid Games variant to metaverse sweat shop. It's not intentional harm, just  indifference. So when reading Bloomberg's report on Roblox's fight against child groomers by Olivia Carville and Cecilia D’Anastasio, what struck me most was how oblivious the game company's representatives seem to be about what they are doing and why it's perceived with such cynicism by so many people. 

Imagine dropping your five-year old kid off at Chuck E. Cheese's and leaving. It's free to hang out there but all the cool stuff kids are doing costs money. There are a bunch of adults running around talking to one another but also maybe some of them are chatting with the kids. Everyone has masks on, you see. They start offering them extra money and pizza to play games together. And  maybe there are some cool toys outside in their car. And the people who all work at Chuck E. Cheese's aren't actually there in person. 

They are in a room somewhere else monitoring what's happening via a chat log transcribed in real-time, but there are so many conversations happening constantly they rely on algorithms to flag anything going on that shouldn't be. And then when you come to pick your kid up and they aren't there the person on the Chuck E. Cheese's helpline says that none of this is their problem. Every part of this would be insane, including the idea that Chuck E. Cheese's is such an invaluable resource for social connection and play that any accidental child predation facilitated by its core business proposition is a worthwhile and necessary tradeoff. 

In a blog post that coincided with Bloomberg's story, Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman cited its last annual transparency report that "only" 12,831,544 pieces of content were flagged as inappropriate during a three month period. Only! And these are only the pieces flagged by Roblox's systems, not any violations its tools were unable to capture. Not great but not terrible. Elsewhere Kaufman notes that Roblox employs "10% of our full-time employees and thousands of contractors who focus exclusively on trust and safety" tasked with monitoring 60 million violations a year from over 78 million active users. The company says this already costs hundreds of millions a year. Maybe that’s a sign there’s a fundamental problem with the entire enterprise.

Live service interrupted

No Man's Sky players are pressing F to pay respects to the once beautiful planets where they made their bases that have since been transformed into eye-sores by the game's otherwise much-praised Worlds Part 1 visual overhaul. "What have they done to my boy," wrote DefinatelyNotACunt on the subreddit alongside pics of a once bucolic paradise turned into a trippy sci-fi desert. "This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me," wrote Plus-Hair-8619 showing once purple fields turned into a puke covered bog. Not everyone’s home planet got ruined. Mostly players are still discovering wild things and creating incredible stuff. 

Not on Xbox, however, at least not yet. Microsoft's platform still hasn't received the update and some fans are pissed. No Man's Sky is part of Game Pass on both console and PC, but subscribers still don't have access to the new content update. A blog post promoting it on Xbox Wire simply said it's coming "soon." Players on Nintendo Switch have also been left out so far, though they're not holding their breath the update looks anywhere near as good on the seven-year old console as it does on PS5 and PC. 

Helldivers 2 is getting its biggest update since launch on August 6 adding an even tougher difficulty mode, a fresh mission type, new enemies, and more. It will mark the game's six month anniversary and is exactly what I've been waiting for to come back. Despite shedding most of its concurrent players on Steam, Helldivers 2 was still the fifth-most played game on the platform earlier this month ranked by people who played at least once, according to market research firm Circana. 

One of the big issues Arrowhead is looking to tackle in the update is grief kicking. Instead of players getting removed from a mission right before they can earn anything because people are being dicks, the session will be duplicated and they'll have a chance to earn all the same rewards as the players who gave them the boot. "This will make kicking easier in a good way," noted one player. "Now, hosts can kick without feeling like the kicked player loses out on any contribution they did."

Apex Legends has launched a Void Reckoning Event at the worst possible time. It has been 15 days since EA announced an overhaul of the battle pass system to jack up prices and take away the ability to pay for them with currency earned in-game and so far the company hasn't acknowledged a widespread player backlash that's included over 70,000 negative reviews on Steam. 

The new event features the free-to-play battle royale's first-ever 12v12 Deathmatch mode called BIG TDM, the announcement of which was just full of players raging about the current state of the game. There are complaints about the maps and brief match lengths, as well as the loot packs for collecting all of the new skins. That's on top of an apparent spike in the lag players are experiencing. Fans are flaming the event as a money grab. 

Fallout 76 is sorta broken (again) after its latest update. It was a small patch aimed mostly at bug fixes and glitched quests that seems to have accidentally messed up the UI and some other stuff. Teammates and their games are invisible, the map keeps defaulting to the top left corner, quest markers are disappearing, and Pip-Boys are locking up during combat. Bethesda is investigating the issues, but one player had the misfortune of trying to launch a nuke during the fritz. 

"The damn map to launch has zero landmarks and objects on it so I’m lost," wrote Mamagueboo. "Decide to launch it at the bog purely guessing where it can spawn the queen event. I FUCKING MISS BY A LITTLE 😫 probably more than an hour of work for nothing. It doesn’t even show the area of the nuke in my map lmao." Other players are used to this sort of thing by now. "Yes, it’s update day," wrote IronMonopoly elsewhere on the subreddit. "The game always breaks unplayably on update day, and stays that way for about a week until the inevitable hot fix."

Concord is in trouble and it's not even out yet. Sony's PVP mashup of Destiny and Overwatch did not set the Steam concurrent numbers on fire in its second, free beta weekend. Steam concurrents aren't everything, but it certainly reinforced many people's anecdotal feeling that no one was really talking about the game. It's fine, even fun, but hasn't yet showcased any hooks that can set it apart from every other similar deathmatch mode shooter on the market, especially for $40. It's giving Foamstars all over again. 

It's premature to count Concord out, and I'd love to have a Guardians of the Galaxy-style PVP game that feels good and pulls me in for a match or two every other night. But everything is shouting "yikes!" right now, from the incredibly negative trailer reception to the fact that it comes out on August 23, wedged in-between Black Myth: Wukong and Star Wars Outlaws, followed by an onslaught of late summer and fall releases. The community is already in shambles comparing it to Marvel Rivals' open beta with threads like "Concord is missing the COOL," "Concord cannot launch like this," and "I Think A Delay May Be The Best Way Forward."

The First Descendant digest

Some are calling it sexy Destiny. Others are saying it's Warframe for (straight) gooners. The First Descendant is a free-to-play sci-fi loot shooter where you can spend a lot of money dressing up characters butts and a lot of time (200 hours) grinding for your next dopamine hit. After striking many as a derivative copycat, and then quite literally stealing, and later apologizing for stealing, artwork from Destiny 2, the Nexon-made also-ran has racked up 10 million players despite its hollow story, repetitive missions, and "mixed" reviews on Steam. Something about The First Descendant has resonated with players. 

It's certainly not the tutorial robot that talks so fast players can't learn how to play the game, or the microtransactions that charge players for each use of a shader. Maybe it's the accidental loot cave the developers created and are now leaving in the game in order to "be adored by our players for a long time." You know an online game has legs when fans start feuding over etiquette. After Nexon added the ability to report players for going AFK while others around them did the hard work, players ended up getting reported anytime they stopped moving, even when it was to quickly change out their equipment.

Patch notes

• Pacific Drive's summer content update adds a photo mode and a jetpack for your jalopy. 

• Multiversus season 2 will cut the price of the Joker in half and is rewarding more offensive play with changes like, "Fighters now maintain their ground momentum into a ground jump even if it exceeds their maximum air speed."

• The Sims 4's latest update adds "romantic boundaries" that let players toggle what makes their Sims jealous. Also, "Sims who are not part of the Date interrupt conversations less often."

• Tekken 8 patch 1.06.01 makes Lidia Sobieska available and improves the volleyball mini-game by adding a practice mode in-between matches and fixing how the ball reacts to item techniques. 

• Ready or Not's home invasion update has the most unsettling change log I've read in a while. "Suspects should be better about not fake surrendering or exiting their surrendered state if multiple SWAT are watching them."

• Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess' first title update lowered the controller volume on PS5 which was out of the control. 

• Manor Lords' next update will add fishing ponds which will eventually be accessible all-year round, including in the winter for ice fishing. 

• Halo Infinite is getting the fan-favorite VIP mode last seen in Halo 3. 

• Another Crab's Treasure's minor patch v1.0.103.8, "fixed a BUNCH of missing NPCs that were supposed to be in the game!!!"

What they’re saying

“With Sony, there was an increasing motive to make more highly budgeted games, and it wanted to go that way with the Japan Studio brand…My motive was always to create original games. I feel I can do this without a massive budget." – Silent Hill and Gravity Rush designer Keiichiro Toyama 

"We still have award shows that we're going to. Because they're important, and we really appreciate it" but it "would be cool if everybody could agree to do it all at the same time…it is surprisingly draining on the soul…we've all been more emotional because we can't get closure. And you want to have closure at the end of a project." – Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke 

“Isn’t that a shame when you put so many years of your life into iterating on those systems or building technology or building the start of a community, and because the operating costs are high, you get terrified when you see the numbers drop and you leave. We’ve seen this with amazing releases that I  think have massive potential, and I think they eject too soon.” – Warframe maker Digital Extremes CEO Steve Sinclair

"Creators have the duty to create sequels fans are wanting to see. Although I sound all high and mighty, it's been a while since I've moved on from Okami. But I still feel like I haven't fulfilled my duty. So Capcom-san, please, let's do it together…Same sentiments for Viewtiful Joe 3. I'd be more than happy." – former Capcom director and Bayonetta designer Hideki Kamiya

Microsoft has a way of taking something that feels logical, perhaps even inevitable, and then doing it in the worst way possible. Sometimes that’s pitching a next-gen console as a general purpose home entertainment device and DRM-filled prison for dying media, and sometimes it’s raising the price of a Netflix-style subscription service to compensate for the arrival of a major blockbuster that cost $69 billion to acquire.

Game Pass Ultimate is now $20 a month, or $240 a year, to stay plugged into the Xbox hive mind. It’s the only one of three confusing tiers that gives you day-one access to new first-party releases and the ability to play games online, both of which are required for Call of Duty Black Ops 6, likely to be the best-selling game of the year. That is $1,440 over a six year console generation, or about the cost of three Xbox Series Xs, or the price of a decent gaming PC and a Steam Deck combined. And at the end of it you own nothing but the memories you made along the way.

That is very close to the vision laid out for the original Xbox One that was so ill-received Microsoft has been playing catchup ever since. And in 2024 a lot of people think it’s a pretty good one, even if it means GOTY contenders occasionally going away and eventually disappearing forever. Though at the time that vision revolved around spending a lot of money on a machine. Now Microsoft is marketing the fact that you don’t need an Xbox to play Xbox games as one of its biggest strengths.

Christopher Dring believes that the price hike signals Microsoft is serious about keeping Game Pass around and making it sustainable. While the service has been blamed for training Xbox players not to buy games, he makes the interesting point that it could end up being an alternative to platforms like Roblox and Fortnite that actually encourages players, especially younger ones who are used to being engulfed in one all-encompassing live service game, to actually engage with the rest of what the game industry makes.

It’s an interesting theory, but I’m pretty much done trying to connect every new Microsoft glitch into some grand strategy for making money. I think there’s a lot of throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks and, at this point especially, pressure to squeeze more returns out of any parts of the business that are still strong. I also think there’s only so much longtime loyalty and goodwill you can cannibalize for short-term gain before it shows up in the long-term health of business.

A blue ocean play for untapped audiences on PC and mobile is all well and good, but in the meantime it’s people buying Xboxes and spending money on that storefront that keeps the rest of it alive. There’s been some revisionist history, in my opinion, about how much Microsoft does or doesn’t care about competing in the console space. How do you read Phil Spencer’s 2020 email to his bosses, Satya Nadella and Amy Hood, about the PS5 reveal and not think that Microsoft was fully committed to the console race and, if not winning it, at the very least clawing back market share.

As I wrote this week in my own take, Game Pass felt like the last think Xbox had going for it and whatever the business case is for the price hikes and next moves, the retreat from that with nothing else to put forward beyond “a bunch of cool upcoming games that would have been made anyway may or may not be timed Xbox exclusives” seems like an existential problem for the sales pitch of “go buy this thing.” I’ve soured on subscriptions myself, but I think it’s a lot easier to make the case for building a sustainable program to support bold new projects when you don’t shutdown the studio behind Hi-Fi Rush.

At least one person seems to be finding some catharsis in that: former SIE Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden. He tweeted a GIF of Ron Swanson muttering “predictable” when the price hike news broke. The former PlayStation exec, ousted in 2019, had been on the record for years arguing that the costs of development meant giving away first-party games for free was a dead-end.

But the meme response mostly caught my eye because Layden also did a Gob Bluth spit-take last month in reaction to Spencer saying Black Ops 6 wouldn’t have Xbox-specific bonuses because, “I want to give you the choice on how you play your games, and who you play with, and not try to do slimy platform things to force you to do what I want you to do.”

It was a dig at Sony paying for exclusive content and marketing deals for Call of Duty for years, something that Microsoft had also done throughout the Xbox 360 years. “Phil be talkin outta his ass lol,” read one of the many comments calling bullshit that got favorited by the ex-PlayStation boss. A far cry from when Layden, Spencer, and Reggie Fils-Aimé all appeared on stage together as collegiate pals at the 2018 Game Awards.

One final thing I want to note about the Game Pass price hike is how it wasn’t messaged. There’s no Xbox Wire post about it and why it will be better for subscribers in the long run. No Xbox executive mentioned the shift either, including head of marketing, Aaron Greenberg. The closes there was to an acknowledgement was Spencer retweeting Dring’s approving assessment over at GamesIndustry.biz. Maybe the Microsoft Gaming CEO will give him the exclusive on what this means at Gamescom next month.

Concord is better and worse than it looks

Sony’s next live service game experiment, Firewalk Studios’ Concord, left me underwhelmed during its first beta this weekend. The retro futurist, we already have Guardians of the Galaxy at home online shooter feels decent to play and has some very fun abilities unique to each class but nothing about its worldbuilding seems meaningfully married to what you actually do in the game which is run around a map shooting people in the head.

Firefly-lite cutscenes sizzling with corny humor and beautiful loading screens flying you into each planet don’t have anything to do with the modes your playing, the objectives in them, or the opponents you face. Concord plays like underwater Call of Duty with a galactic cast of Saturday morning cartoon aliens. the meta game revolves around completing arbitrary milestones like sprinting a bunch during a match and unlocking cosmetics.

I enjoyed the couple hours I played, especially a fungus character who releases spores that they can teleport back to at anytime, but it’s hard to see anything that would keep me coming back week-after-week for each new cinematic vignette the developers have promised. And the game is $40. Everything about it seems like an uphill battle. Players have spotted a mention of PVE in the credits though, which would certainly be a much better fit for what the game’s currently presenting.

Live service interrupted 

Apex Legends also raised prices this week. Every season will now be divided between two-mini $10 battle passes instead of following one bigger one, with premium versions that cost $20 each compared to $30 previously. Adding salt to the wound was the fact that the battle passes must now be purchased solely with real world money rather than in-game currency, meaning dedicated players grinding out every season's rewards could no longer roll those over to keep ranking up premium battle passes for free. 

I noted in a write-up this week that frustration with Apex Legends has been slowly boiling up for a while now due to server issues, bugs, and cheating, and the popular free-to-play battle royale is reportedly no longer among the top ten games by monthly active players across console or PC. The mod team for the Apex Legends subreddit, which boasts 2.8 million members, is calling on fans to review bomb the game on various platforms with civil but honest feedback. 

There have been 15,000 negative reviews on Steam in the days since the announcement plunging the game's rating into "overwhelmingly negative." The success of Helldivers 2 players getting Sony to reverse course on its controversial PSN login for PC is a clear proof of concept for the collective action. But the rate of negative reviews has already started to taper off and publisher EA still hasn't issued any updates on the subject despite the Apex Legends Twitter account continuing to get hammered by angry players every time it posts. 

My guess is that EA will walk back some of the prices enough to quell the rebellion but stick by closing its grinding Apex Coin for free battle passes loophole and the mini-season approach. The motivating factors here seem very similar to the Game Pass situation: soak your existing customer base to juice the quarterly earnings report amid a stalled (or even shrinking) live service game. 

Once Human is bailing on a controversial microtransaction idea. NetEase's new post-apocalyptic survival MMO takes the unusual step of resetting players' characters every six weeks. It also locks purchased cosmetics to those individual characters rather than being account-wide. The company has since tried to clarify that while level and map progress resets with each new scenario, blueprints, currencies, and some crafting materials all stay intact. 

And after discussing player complaints with Twitch streamer Jason "Thor" Hall has also decided to make microtransaction unlocks available for all characters. "Damn, y'all might actually be one of the only devs in recent time with such clarity in communication with your player base," responded one player. 

The Division 2 is also dealing with fallout from an unpopular reset mechanic. The Tom Clancy loot shooter, which instead of dying beneath the shadow of Destiny 2 has continued to thrive in its own small but respectable way, announced a new season model for Year 6 last month. The big take-away was that it was going to follow in Diablo IV's footsteps and make players create new characters from scratch every new season to engage with the seasonal content. 

The idea makes sense on paper: make it easier for new players to hop in and force hardcore fans to grind anew every so many months. But the backlash was swift and relentless and now the Ubisoft team at Massive tweeted this week that it's "re-evaluating" the idea. The team will return ahead of the fall update to show players its revised plans. Personally, I think more loot shooters need roguelite modes. 

Around the industry

The CEO of Manor Lords' publisher went semi-viral this week for a quote-dunk on LinkedIn rejecting the "ever-accelerating treadmill" of Steam Early Access expectations. Tim Bender's post was in response to one by Hinterland CEO Raphael van Lierop pointing to Manor Lords as a poster child for the pitfalls of launching a game in Early Access without a plan or the capacity to deliver a steady drip feed of meaningful updates. 

Bender said that despite the content lull, the hit medieval sim sold an additional 250,000 copies last month. "Success should not create an ever raising bar of new growth expectations," he went on. "Not every game should be aimed at becoming some live-service boom or bust." It's easy to see why the sentiment spread like wildfire given the pressure people on all slides of the gaming industry feel to chase unrealistic goals amid skyrocketing competition for people's time and money. 

But I also take Lierop's point that Manor Lords is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to how to survive in Early Access. His own team's game, The Long Dark, has received over 100 updates since launching in Early Access on Steam a decade ago. He's since removed his original post and apologized to the developer behind Manor Lords, Slavic Magic, citing an online backlash that was aimed not just at him but also his team at Hinterland. 

More links

• A call for liberating kids and reinvesting in third spaces for them in the face of gaming and screen addiction panics (The Guardian)

• A long-time indie developer talks about the arms race when it comes to Steam Next Fest demos (Gamesradar)

• Apex Legends tournament organizers mess up prize payments with some losers getting thousands incorrectly dumped into their bank accounts (Polygon)

• Nintendo’s accused of systemically miscrediting people for its external translations (Game Develop)

• Indie studios open up about the great gaming industry rapture no one’s talking about (Wired)

• A former Pokémon Company and Bungie lawyer talks about tracking down leakers and why they ruin their careers for a little clout (Bloomberg)

• The Switch is officially the longest a Nintendo console has ever gone before getting a successor (VGC)

• All your favorite games are actually retro now (Digital Trends)

• Summer days are hear again: a dialogue on yard work and long JRPGs (Remap)

Programming note: It’s been over two months since the last issue of Dead Game. Time flies! It turns out juggling the chaos of three kids and a full-time job is not conducive to writing a weekly summery of depraved gaming culture and industry nonsense. You have no idea how many times I sat down on the couch late at night to type up one of these newsletters only to instead curl up in the fetal position and pray for one night of uninterrupted sleep. But here we finally are again.

I think part of the problem is that I’ve been psyching myself out too much about the length, format, and topics covered in each issue. So instead of trying to kick each piece off with some Big Idea™ I’m going to try a looser approach and see where that gets me, and of course all of you, Dead Game’s loyal readers who have subscribed and generously donated a small sliver of your most precious, personal, and limited resource: time. When Dead Game does end up miraculously appearing, I hope it feels like pulling an old wrinkly coat out of the closet and finding a five dollar bill inside. Onto this week’s issue!

Fallout 76 hit a new concurrent player record of over 72,000 on Steam a week ago. The popularity of the Amazon Fallout TV show pushed the uneven multiplayer survival sim back into the spotlight almost six years after its original, buggy launch. The top two questions when you Google Fallout 76 are "is it crossplay?" and "is it good now?" The answer to the first one is no, sadly. Xbox Game Pass players can't even play with Game Pass PC players, let alone with ex-vault dwellers on PSN. Progression doesn't carry over either, despite character data for the always online game being stored remotely on Bethesda's servers. 

The answer to the second question is a lot more complicated. Like many live service games, Fallout 76 was never as bad as its detractors made it out to be nor as good as its true believers claimed. The gaming consensus often dismisses broken games as also bad ones, while at the same time racing to announce a comeback after just six to 12 months of dedicated updates.

The promise of Fallout 76 made by Bethesda at the E3 2018 announcement was a post-apocalyptic playground where players created the world's stories instead of NPCs. Rather than a few memorable moments like Megaton's undetonated atomic bomb in Fallout 3, the MMO would offer a rich history drawn from players' own discoveries, struggles, and triumphs. That turned out not to be the case. 

The player count per server was too small and the options for interacting with one another too limited. The old Fallout engine wasn't a good foundation for a Rust-like after all. The PVP systems resulted in boring encounters or tedious griefing. So eventually Bethesda stripped out everything ambitious in Fallout 76, added NPCs and middling story quests, and settled on just making it a loot crafting game a la Destiny 2 with base-building. 

This is how I find myself perennially returning to the game hoping it is suddenly a world-driven multiplayer Fallout RPG and not a resource scavenging game with events you grind for extra gear and fun guns. This can be its own kind of fun which is how I found myself up until 2 a.m. earlier this week harvesting fusion cores for my power armor at the Poseidon Power Plant workshop. Almost every "how do I do X" question from new players on the subreddit has the inevitable answer of "spend a bunch of time dumpster diving in random parts of the map."

Once you break through the inertia of the early game and learn to ignore the defanged survival mechanics it can be a lot of fun to explore the wasteland harvesting resources for your camp. The answer then to whether Fallout 76 is good now depends a lot on whether your gamer-sense starts tingling upon hearing the words "janky post-apocalyptic Stardew Valley." I also think Fallout 76 could have been a lot more successful a lot more quickly if it didn't seem like the game was constantly trying to fight against this fate. The game's map will dramatically expand for the first time ever with the Skyline Valley expansion in June. 

Live Service Interrupted

One of the messier wrinkles in Fallout 76 is its monetization model. Bethesda made all updates and expansions free and instead charges for camp items, cosmetics, and a monthly subscription that gives paying players various bonuses like an additional campsite that make the game a lot less tedious to play. This membership, called Fallout 1st, is normally $13 a month, on top of needed Xbox Live (now Game Pass Core) or PS Plus to play Fallout 76 on console. It's clearly intended to milk the whales who are over level 600 and have been playing for years. Other helpful items like a Fusion Core recharger are sold a la carte for real money. It's an overwhelming mess to navigate if you're just getting started with the game today.

What's really been bothering some players recently, however, is an overhaul of Fallout 76's season pass. Originally introduced in June 2020, the earned rewards were laid out like a board game that players progressed through by completing various objectives. It had plenty of problems but was a novel approach to the standard punch card approach many other games have taken. 

With the launch of season 16, Duel with the Devil, on March 26, Bethesda switched back to a Fortnite-style booklet. Players unlock new pages by completing challenges, earning tickets that can be used to collect rewards. It's much more streamlined and much less creative. Plus reaching level 100 isn't even enough to unlock everything. "It gives you the illusion of choice but what's the point," wrote one player on Reddit. "Now instead of getting an item per level you'll have to get multiple levels for enough tickets for a single item. It's an objectively worse version of what we had."

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League feels like its at a point where Rocksteady Studios needs to address the elephant in the room which is that nobody wants to keep playing this game. The game made headlines this week for falling to just 200 concurrent players on Steam. Windows Central reported that Suicide Squad has dropped off much faster than Marvel's Avengers, recently even had fewer concurrent players than the already killed-off superhero live service game. "At What Point Do You Abandon A Live Roadmap?" asked Forbes writer Paul Tassi. 

Instead of a frank discussion with prospective players or the remaining community, Rocksteady released another developer update that feels a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It outlined future changes coming to the game when episode 2 drops, which is expected to add another playable character and boss fight but still doesn't have a release date. The improvements teased all have to do with recalibrating the loot chase and end-game progression, as well as a few quality-of-life fixes like mission mutators moving from negative modifiers to gameplay bonuses. 

None of this addresses the fundamental problem with Suicide Squad which is that there's no content. The main game ends on a cliffhanger after a reskinned boss fight, and most of the game's activities are remixes of the same three missions. I think there's a meaty arcade combat experience at the heart of Suicide Squad that's complimented by an interesting buildcrafting system. Unfortunately, there's just no reason to engage with any of it, and nothing but new missions and story content can change that. If there's not effectively a Suicide Squad 2 hiding in the post-launch roadmap, it's hard to see anything changing. There's no way there are enough players to sustain the investment a 2.0-style reboot requires. And Rockstead hasn't even hinted that it thinks that's what might be necessary.

Battlestate Games, maker of extraction loot shooter Escape from Tarkov, set its community on fire this week when it announced a new PVE mode and new items would be locked behind a $250 Unheard edition of the game. This even though players who previously bought a $150 Edge of Darkness version of the game had been promised "all future DLC" for free. A community manager on the Tarkov Discord wrote, "It ain't DLC, it's unique feature of the new edition." The studio doubled-down on Twitter in a post that was quickly ratio'd and appended with a community note. A YouTube trailer was downvoted to hell and the Discord and subreddit have been a mess ever since.

On Friday, Battlestate Games tried to quell the community with an olive branch. Chief operating officer Nikita Gupta posted on the subreddit that Edge of Darkness owners would get temporary access to the new PVE mode before needing to upgrade. A day later, he had a new offer: the mode would eventually become permanently free to all current Edge of Darkness owners, while those who pay to upgrade get the first shot at testing it. Less than 24 hours after THAT post, Gupta was back with a new post. "I would like to say that I am very sorry that fans and the game community in general are experiencing these feelings," he wrote. The community still isn't buying it.

"We didn't win anything so far, all of that was just an apology that they got caught and some damage control," wrote a player in one of the many upvoted posts flooding the Tarkov subreddit's front page. "You still have P2W items that affect fights outside of skill. you still have PvE that is behind paywall that won't reach people that need it the most. The ones that just start and want to get into the game." One of the issues at play here is that fans have been complaining about cheaters in Tarkov for a while. A PVE mode would be somewhere they could play free from hacks and other exploits. 

The latest twist is that the owner of FPS event and show organizer Evasion.gg appeared to be booted from Tarkov channels after speaking out against the recent announcements. “What happened to the Tarkov community over the past week is what’s been happening to us for the last two years dealing with BSG,” the organization posted on Twitter. “Promises not kept, gas lighting, event cancelations, control issues, blatant nepotism, all while wasting our time money and efforts.”

Foamstars has been plagued with matchmaking errors recently. "I'd like to apologize for the matchmaking errors many of you may have experienced during your gameplay," producer Kosuke Okatani wrote on the Square Enix website. "We are working to address this and other high-priority issues. 

A May 2 patch will introduce a bunch of changes, including penalties for international disconnects and going AFK, spawn camping, and bug fixes for the hero shooter's Chloe Noir character. The update should also address a memory leak issue that was apparently crashing the game on PS4. But some players aren't even sure if they're matching against other humans. 

"Going into the game play, I was the only one who used any skills the entire match," one player wrote on the subreddit. "Their movements were very unnatural. They'd often get stuck on corners, running into them, then giving up and just standing there. Their aim was not human like at all, they never missed no matter what you were doing."

Patch Notes

• Hellivers 2 1.000.003 just made the game a lot harder for lone players by increasing enemy patrols. It's also now more hardcore in other ways. "Shots that ricochet from heavy armored enemies will now properly hit the Helldiver who fired them. Trigger discipline is highly recommended."

• Dragon's Dogma 2's latest Title Update is "Reducing the infection frequency of dragonsplague and adjusting the signs of Pawns infected with dragonsplague to be more noticeable. For example, when infected, glowing eyes will be more noticeable."

• Minecraft Bedrock version 1.20.80 adds an armadillo mob. "Spiders and Cave Spiders will run away from Armadillos, and only if they are not in a rolled up state."

• Contra: Operation Galuga patch fixes bugs that were freezing the game and turning music off. 

• Granblue Fantasy: Relink Ver. 1.2.1 added new quests and characters. It also, "Improved the visibility of damage numbers that have hit their damage cap."

• For Honor patch 2.51.0 brought a bunch of balance tweaks and a new ecological mode to decrease power consumption on console. Wardens got a nice buff too: " All Shoulder Bash followups now gain Uninterruptible Stance at 100ms

• Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition 1.3.55.0 addressed a performance regression when enabling NVIDA Reflex On+Boost that was making GPUs not give the game their full power. 

Industry News

Embracer plans to break up after years of acquisitions and a brutal regime of cuts, cancellations, and closures last year. How did we get here? CEO Lars Wingefors blames investors for losing their nerve after the cheap money-fueled covid boom. Another possible vector: Embracer took on a ton of debt to buy European board game distributor Asmodee for $3 billion and then a deal for $2 billion in funding from the Saudi public investment fund fell through. As part of the new breakup plan, J.P Morgan and other banks will finance a write-down of the rest of Emrbacer's debt, putting almost all of it with Asmodee.

If you're asking what the hell any of this has to do with games, you're not alone. Gamesindustry.biz had an exclusive interview with Wingefores in which he failed to explain what the original value of Embracer was or how that will change under this reorganization. "I would like the management teams of those businesses to form their own specific strategy in terms of how they operate their business, how they consolidate what games they make, how they monetize, and so on," he said. Lol okay. Wingefors won't be CEO of any of these new entities but plans to stay on as a part owner for many years to come. Has he learned anything from these mistakes? Doesn't sound like it. He won't even admit what any of them were. 

Microsoft is really proud of how many games it sells on the PlayStation Store as Xboxes continue to gather dust. The tech giant reported another 30% year-over-year drop-off in console sales, while patting itself on the back for having the most games in the best-sellers list on PSN of any publisher. "We are committed to meeting players where they are by bringing great games to more people on more devices," CEO Satya Nadella told investors during the recent earnings call. He added that Microsoft set a third quarter record for game streaming hours, console usage, and monthly active devices.

Touting sales on the PlayStation Store is a far cry from when Phil Spencer accused Sony of using its 30 percent commissions to take more games away from Xbox back during the FTC trial last year. "They use that money among other revenue that they have to do things to try to reduce Xbox’s survival on the market," he said at the time. Of course, that was the same trial during which Nadella said he hates console exclusives and would get rid of them entirely if he could. 

People Can Fly decided to cancel its co-op RPG codenamed Project Dagger for a write-down of roughly $20 million. Take-Two walked away from the game in 2022, and either development wasn't progressing or it couldn't find a new partner. The studio behind 2021's underrated grim sci-fi loot shooter Outriders laid off 30 people earlier this year, but it's still working on a lot of other games, including one for Square Enix and another for Microsoft. 

Blizzcon is canceled again. The announcement-laden fanfest came back last year after covid put the in-person event on ice and a 2021 sexual harassment lawsuit through the company into turmoil. Now owned by Microsoft, Blizzard suggested future announcements for Diablo IV's expansion and other content would be sprinkled across other gaming events like Gamescom. At least some of them will no doubt appear at Microsoft's not-E3 showcase in June. 

A bad year for game developers continues with layoffs at Alone in the Dark maker Precision Studios and the shutdown of Bethesda France. The latter was opened back in 2010 ahead of the launch of Fallout: New Vegas. The decision to close it was seemingly part of wider cuts at Microsoft announced back in January. 

Indie Games To Watch

• Centum (Hack the Publisher/Serenity Forge): "Presented as a long-lost game never released, navigate through a series of perplexing scenarios, each shrouded in uncertainty and enigma."

• Promise Mascot Agency (Kaizen Game Works): "Explore the cursed town of Kaso-Machi! Recruit and train mascot friends! Help out when jobs go wrong! Solve the mystery of your exile! Help Pinky work through her many anger issues! Turn Promise Mascot Agency into the best agency in Japan!" 

• Pine: A Story Of Loss (Made Up Games): "Alone in the forest glade he shared with his wife, a woodworker struggles to accept her passing. Help him hold on to cherished memories of their life together as he struggles to care for himself and his now empty home. Pine is a single-serving game focused on telling a beautiful, emotional tale."

Take-Two buried the news it would lay off hundreds of staff and cancel roughly $140 million in internal projects in an SEC filing at the end of business on April 16. It seemed like a brutal reversal of fortunes since CEO Strauss Zelnick had said there were no plans for further layoffs as recently as March, and the publisher’s subsidiary, Rockstar Games, is expected to release Grand Theft Auto VI as early as next spring, which will probably end up being the biggest video game launch in history.

But as Gamesindustry.biz managing editor Brendan Sinclair pointed out in his weekly column, Take-Two has been struggling these last couple of years. “The company has reported seven straight quarters of net losses and its forecast says it will be eight-in-a-row once it reports its earnings next month,” he wrote. It probably doesn’t help that Zynga, which Take-Two spent $12.7 billion on in 2022, doesn’t have anything in the top-ten highest grossing mobile games list and hasn’t for years.

NBA2K24, the latest iteration of the company’s hit sports franchise, had undersold its predecessor by a million copies earlier this year. GTA Online continues to print money and Red Dead Redemption 2 sells millions of additional copies every quarter, but the larger Take-Two portfolio has been looking hallowed out for a while now. Private Division, the company’s publishing label for smaller games, has a spotty track record. The games are often great, but the sales don’t always follow (see Penny’s Big Breakaway from February). Kerbal Space Program 2, the long delayed sequel to the hit PC rocket launch sim, has been sitting with a dreaded “mixed” rating on Steam for the last 12 months.

2K is the cornerstone of Take-Two and it’s also been in a weird place lately. Outside of annual sports franchises and re-issued anthologies, Gearbox Entertainment’s Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands was the only runaway financial success from the last four years. Despite critical-acclaim, Marvel’s Midnight Suns seemed to die on the vine, and smaller games like New Tales from the Borderlands and Lego 2K Drive didn't exactly breakthrough either. 2K president David Ismailer recently suggested this is about to change, promising a “groundbreaking pipeline” for the fiscal year ahead.

“We have managed our 2K business for the long-term, investing in franchises that, in some cases, could take years to grow into successful, meaningful contributors to our portfolio,” he wrote in a Wednesday email to staff, a copy of which was shared with Dead Game. “We’re also starting to see the benefits of our new Business Unit org structure. With our investment philosophy and our new structure in place, I’m confident we will continue to deliver high quality games, build deep player connections, and grow 2K to a multi-billion-dollar label within the T2 portfolio. For the near term, we are focused on our strategic priorities and are poised to release a groundbreaking pipeline of titles in FY25, on the heels of WWE 2K24’s early success.”

Two of the biggest question marks in 2K’s portfolio are BioShock 4 at Cloud Chamber and an unannounced AAA game at 31st Union. Both were teased years ago and we’ve heard nothing about either of them since, even as other studios were rushing to reveal their projects early during the post-covid bidding war for talent. Hangar 13 is working on a new Mafia and Firaxis has teased Civilization 7, though it’s unclear when those games will be ready either. Then there’s Borderlands 4, which I’d previously heard had faced internal delays. Take-Two buying Gearbox for $460 million felt like the studio getting rescued but it could also come with tighter demands for turning around sequels to one of the few other reliably best-selling franchises out there.

Take-Two called its latest cost reduction program “rationalizing its pipeline.” Weirdly, the layoffs won’t be completed until the end of 2024, meaning there’s potentially more than half the year left for some to wonder if they’ll be getting the ax. “Our recent actions to reduce costs across several areas, delay some non-critical projects, renegotiate certain agreements, and reduce discretionary spending will make us stronger for the upcoming FY25 year, when T2 needs our performance the most,” Ismailer told staff. “This is very difficult news for our colleagues who are leaving, as well as for those of you who are continuing to work hard through this moment and support our future. Change is never easy, and saying goodbye to friends is really hard.  Please be kind, empathetic, and treat everyone with the gratitude they deserve.”

Live Service Interrupted

Rocket League is getting X-Men cars inspired by the nostalgia-fueled X-Men '97 cartoon on Disney+. Cyclops, Rogue, Storm, Jeany Grey, Magneto, Jubilee, and Wolverine-themed decals are 1,000 credits ($10) for all of them or you can get the entire mega-bundle for 2,000 ($20). Some players are frustrated that the car soccer maker Psyonix appears to be flooding the zone with new cosmetics instead of content updates or game fixes, especially after killing trading in a contentious update that went live last November. It doesn't help that the X-Men skins are locked to certain vehicle styles, and are "not cross-game eligible" like other ones are.

The Marvel crossover coincides with a fresh blitz of complaints among some top Rocket League players abroad around issues like lag, cheating, DDOS attacks, and alleged missing tournament payments. A burgeoning protest among French players led by Axel "Vatira" Touret whose team previously finished in the top 10 at the 2022 Rocket League World Championship. "The studio behind Rocket League needs to break the silence," reads copy pasta currently being spammed by Touret and others online. "Millions owed to pro players, servers being DDOSed in ranked, and lackluster communication. It's time to invest in those driving esports and evolve for the community's sake!" Benjamin Wagner, coach of the Gentle Mates Alpine team that won last month's Major, begged Psyonix for a roadmap about its plans for the game and its esport moving forward. 

Hearthstone players were up in arms earlier this week when a patch made weekly quests a lot harder to complete. "Some Daily and Weekly Quests have been adjusted to be harder to complete but will grant more XP," read a note hidden near the end of an otherwise exciting update introducing a new Duos mode to battlegrounds. Players now had to complete three times as many quests for an only 20 percent bump in XP earned. "Almost everyone reading this will be familiar with games that use predatory design in order to keep players logged in, whether that be to juice those all-important Daily Average User numbers so beloved of shareholders, or just in the hope that you might crack and drop some dollars in the MTX store," wrote PC Gamer's Tim Clark. "But I would say rarely are these things so nakedly egregious." 

Blizzard backed down almost immediately, mostly. The company wrote that the change was intended to make weekly quests a more rewarding goal for players to work toward. "We’re putting together an unscheduled hotfix patch scaling most of the Weekly Quest requirements back down to a number between what they were before and what they are now," an update read. "We’ll keep the additional XP where it is." Not everyone thought the original quest requirement buff was so egregious. Players have continued to debate on the Hearthstone subreddit what Blizzard could do to make weekly quests meaningful without feeling like busy work that micromanages how they play the game. One fan suggested simply counting the total number of matches played across all modes instead of focusing only on wins in ranked. 

Dota 2's big Crownfall update is not what some MOBA sickos were hoping for. The long-teased overhaul of the game's battle pass arrived without a new hero or major balance patch. The new reward meta-progression is laid out on an overworld map that players progress through by completing various challenges, unlocking narrative beats and new character lore along the way. It seems like a great new addition, even if it's not what some fans were expecting. 

Players who wanted a big annual rework of Dota 2 that would make it feel like an entirely new game have taken to calling the update "clownfall," while others express frustration over Valve's lack of communication and expectation setting around the update. "They specifically state that they will have more consistent communication with more frequent updates, yet leave the community in the dark on what’s what," wrote one player on the subreddit. But the new Arcanas look great, even if they're $35 a piece (though that's still less than Overwatch 2's new mythic skins). 

Destiny 2's free Into the Light update has players flocking back to the sci-fi MMO even if there are plenty of odd choices that make it chafe a bit. A new horde mode called Onslaught is a lot of fun but the 50 wave version takes way too long and isn't as optimized for loot as the shorter one. Bungie has responded by promising to buff loot drops in an upcoming patch. Tedious "attunement" quests to unlock each new Brave weapon from earlier eras in Destiny 2 will remain however, as will not being able to reset the mode's rank-up rewards. All of this is to fuel fans' pursuit of new "shiny" guns that are extra special and can only be earned until The Final Shape expansion launches in June, a grind that is torturing some players with bad luck and others with FOMO. 

Bungie also revealed that the raid that wraps up a showdown 10-years in the making with Destiny 2's final boss will go live on June 7, just three days after the expansion launches. The community immediately freaked out. New content dumps are the rare times players are satisfied, and rushing through them is the opposite of how many like to play, especially with so many questions about what Destiny 2's future will be after this expansion. Bungie project lead Catarina Macedo took to Twitter to try and cryptically assuage fans' fears. "The Final Shape expansion is different: the additional content in the Pale Heart post-campaign and unlocking the raid for everyone is important for getting a cohesive and satisfying story experience," she wrote.

Patch Notes

Mortal Kombat April Update: "Fixed rare situation where opponent would pass through Scorpion after being hit by Spear near the corner"

Enshrouded Patch 2 version 0.7.1.1: "Fixed an issue with lighting that caused the Blue Luminescent Blocks to have a green tint. Sorry to everyone who used the blocks to fake water, the fake water looks less polluted now."

Lethal Company Version 50 The Hopping Update: "Slightly increased the weight of the shovel, to make each player less of a self-sufficient killing machine."

Darktide Path of Redemption Update: "Fixed bots dying when rescuing players hanging from a ledge in Vigil Station Oblivium."

Grounded Fully Yoked Update 1.4: "Fixed a problem where certain stacks of ladders could cause a saved game to never finish loading."

Spider-Man 2 Version 1.002.003: "Addressed an issue where some users' save data would disappear, notably after v. 1.002.000"

Rise of the Rōnin Update 1.04: "Adjusted camera work when nearby walls to now better angles where you can see the character and your opponent better."

Time capsule

Around this time back in 2008, early pirated copies of Grand Theft Auto IV were flooding the internet with players racking up achievements on Xbox 360 and uploading footage online a week ahead of launch. The online group iCON claimed responsibility for uploading the Torrent. Lawrence “Major Nelson” Hryb said Microsoft was investigating at the time.

Rockstar North cofounder David Jones told gamesindustry.biz that games were getting too expensive to make. "Crackdown wasn't that long ago and our development budget was something like USD 20 million, and even that to me now, I don't know if I could do anything for much less than that," he said. Jones confirmed that his studio had secured $50 million for its next project at the time, the open world multiplayer shooter APB: All Points Bulletin. A controversial review embargo set for one week after the game's release didn't stop it from bombing after getting widely panned. 

And Nintendo held a press roundtable in New York where Shigeru Miyamoto said he wasn't sure how Wii Fit would do in America because of all the broken households. "When we asked Miyamoto what he expected from American consumers, he noted that on average, American families are apart more often than those in Japan," Jeff Bakalar reported for CNET's Crave Entertainment at the time. "A lot of families have parents who have separated or divorced, so it's tougher to predict the role family will play in the American response to Wii Fit." The motion control exercise game went on to sell 22 million copies globally.  

Comings and goings

Gio Corsi, previously head of commercial at Iron Galaxy Studios, is now at Nintendo on its third-party AAA portfolio management team. Best known for his developer relations work at Sony during the PS4 years and occasionally flashing PS Vitas on stage at live showcase events, Corsi joins Nintendo as it prepares its launch year lineup for the Switch 2. He announced the move with a picture of his dad wearing a Mario cap. 

Sean Palomino, a 10-year biz dev manager at Epic Games, has been hired back by the Fortnite company as a director after just a year working with indie devs at Sony. His previous self-described job to "evangelize the PlayStation platform to both registered and emerging indie partners" is currently unfilled as Sony looks for a replacement. A listing for the roles was shared on Twitter by Shuhei Yoshida. "I have no formal experience but I know I could do a better job than most," trolled one random user. "Should I apply?" The 30-year Sony man said "no." 

Ray Gresko, former chief development officer at Blizzard, recently joined Disney to lead development of the company's "new games and entertainment universe." Production director on Diablo III and executive producer on Overwatch, Gresko joins the house of mouse after it invested $1.5 billion in Epic Games to collaborate on new joint gaming ventures. The industry veteran founded Nihilistic Software back in 1998 and directed Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption. 

Alice O'Connor, associate editor at Rock Paper Shotgun, is leaving the storied PC gaming publication after 10 years. "Blogging can feel quite disposable, especially on the news desk, but I always liked the thought of brightening readers' days with a few scattered minutes of fun and interest," she wrote. "I'm glad to see that over time, that adds up into you wanting to see me cry, you monsters." 

Cheap Games

• Hades is 50 percent off on Switch

• 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is 70 percent off on PlayStation

• Yoku’s Island Express is 80 percent off on Xbox

• Remnant 2 is 40 percent off on Steam

• Get 373 games from the Palestinian Relief Bundle for just $8 on itch.io

Other News

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is coming this year, will be twice as big as the original, and seemingly feature more diversity (IGN)

Hades 2’s first technical test is blowing people away and making them horny (The Verge)

StarCraft 2 multiplayer lead David Kim has teased a new RTS from Tencent’s Lightspeed studio (VGC)

How Stellar Blade became a battleground for gaming’s latest faux culture war (Inverse)

Take-Two wins copyright lawsuit brought by LeBron James’ tattoo artist (Polygon)

A wild new shortcut was found in the Waluigi Pinball track in Mario Kart DS 20 years after release (GoNintendo)

Why a rushed attempt to rehabilitate Cities: Skylines II after a rough launch is a warning for other sequels (Game Developer)

Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai explains why he thinks that actually 1986 was the best year ever for gaming (NintendoLife)

Jim Ryan’s final act as the head of PlayStation was to go on a podcast and lob one last grenade in the console wars. What was the most memorable part of the 2000s for the veteran Sony marketing guy? “I would say 160 million, “ he responded, “which is the number of PS2s that we sold.” That’s 5 million higher than the previously reported (and hotly debated) number, and an even harder best-selling-console-off-all-time record for the Nintendo Switch, currently at 139 million units sold, to beat.

Hardware rivalries aside, the data point underlines a harsh reality about the current state of gaming that’s driving a lot of anxiety: consoles have hit a ceiling. Despite more players overall, the console market is tapped out, with no new piece of dedicated hardware likely to ever match the PS2’s success, let alone surpass it. This is what former chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, Shawn Layden, had been predicting for years, and what Microsoft Gaming CEO, Phil Spencer, recently blamed for brutal cutbacks at his company and others.

“I don't think we're doing a good enough job finding new players,” Spencer told Stephen Totilo’s Game File earlier this year. “Let's pick consoles as a good example: We found 200 million global households that will play console games. And that number really hasn't changed in the last five, six years.”

Annual spending on gaming consoles, including portable handhelds, peaked in 2008 by a country mile, according to data form Cicana (previously known as NPD). The Xbox 360 was doing well, the PS3 was picking up steam after being outsold by its predecessor for the first year of its life, and the Nintendo DS and Wii were both exploding simultaneously (the Switch would have to sell over 100 million more units to hit their combined total). Then the global recession hit and smartphones started taking over. Console gaming didn’t die like some predicted. It’s still an incredibly lucrative business for the big players involved. But it’s no longer enough to sustain the annual growth shareholders demand.

As analysts told IGN’s Destin Legarie, this means companies are trying to meet players in other places, PC and mobile as well as movies, TV, and theme parks. They’re also trying to soak the ones they already. Some of these moves are completely reasonable and overdue, like simply raising the price of new games. Some of them feel much more manipulative and predatory, like charging premiums for early access and bonus features, or cramming ever more expensive microtransactions into games that aren’t even free-to-play and genres that haven’t traditionally had them.

It doesn’t help that live service games have hallowed out the market for new console releases. A Newzoo report presented at GDC last month claimed that the majority of play time in 2023 was for games that came out six-years ago or longer. The list of top games included Call of Duty, Rocket League, and The Sims 4, but some of the biggest ones were Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. The ones in the first bucket are multiplayer games with storefronts. The ones in the second bucket are social platforms centering user-generated content that happen to have games inside of them.

While this has led to a lot of industry carnage and “avoidable fuckups,” I think it’s also marked an inflexion point for fans of console gaming and fears that it will no longer be the nexus point for the medium. The same way TikTok and YouTube have displaced TV and movies for younger generations, there’s a concern new players will spend all of their time and money in Roblox or Fortnite instead of downloading the latest prestige indie game or premium blockbuster outside of a very small list of first and third-party franchises owned by five companies.

This type of omnivorous console gamer has always been a minority compared to the person who just buys Madden every year. Still, those types of super fans also spend a ton of money, show up on day one of a new hardware launch, and drive the online conversations around gaming that shape its wider perception and culture. But it’s clear they’re a tapped out audience when it comes to the major console makers and publishers, especially compared to the kid nagging their parents for more Robux every time they’re in the supermarket checkout line.

To see what these types of console gamer anxieties look like, look no farther than the App and Google Play stores. What seemed like a promising new affordable delivery system for games pushing the medium forward eventually gave way to a graveyard of junk. Nintendo all but abandoned mobile after a few middling experiments, Microsoft simply bought Candy Crush outright, and Sony is still trying to figure out how to ship something on the platform. The biggest mobile success story of last year was Monopoly Go, a licensed spin-off designed to turn brain chemistry into monthly revenue that spent $500 million just on getting new players hooked.

This month marks the 10th anniversary of Monument Valley, a beautiful mobile puzzle game that gestured at new aesthetic frontiers on a platform that hadn’t yet been colonized by dark patterns. Lewis Gordon has a terrific retrospective on the game’s legacy and how it was intertwined with Apple’s devices over at The Ringer (full disclosure: I’m quoted in it). Games like Monopoly Go and Candy Crush were maybe always destined to dominate mobile gaming. Apple and Google making it impossible to find or learn about more enriching, bespoke, or experimental games on their app stores was a choice though.

“It almost feels like a glimpse into a parallel existence,” ustwo Games’ chief creative officer, Danny Gray, Gordon about making Monument Valley 3 in the year 2024. “One where we didn’t optimize for analytics, monetization, and attention capturing, but one where, somehow, as an industry, we optimized for quality and beauty instead.” It’s easy to dismiss console gaming anxieties as just people being uncomfortable with change, especially when some of the loudest voices associated with it are toxic console warriors or cultural reactionaries. Personally, I think the skepticism is warranted when I see executives point to the platform economics that have led to “enshitifation” everywhere else online as greener pastures for the future of gaming.

Comings And Goings

Yu Miyake, the long-time top producer on Dragon Quest, will step-down to focus on heading up Square Enix's smartphone games following internal delays of Dragon Quest XII, Bloomberg reported. The Japenese RPG publisher's young, new president, Takashi Kiryu, is continuing to shake-up its corporate structure to focus on streamlining production and develop more AAA games in-house.

• The news made at least one person happy. Sonic co-creator Yuji Naka, who is serving a suspended 30-month prison sentence for insider trading about a Dragon Quest smartphone game while working for Square Enix on Balan Wonderworld, accused Miyake of lying to get him convicted. “Finally. I was hoping he would be gone soon because he is the kind of person who would submit a note with a lie (with evidence) to a court of law,,” he tweeted according to VGC. “I have never met him, but the new [Square Enix] president might be a good person.”

Kareem Choudhry is leaving Microsoft after 26 years, Windows Central reported. The “legendary” Xbox VP who was a key figure in recent initiatives around backwards compatibility, cloud gaming, and AI chat bots, departs amid a wider-shakeup within Microsoft’s gaming division. Chouhdry’s team will get folded into the Xbox hardware while a new Xbox Experiences and Platforms team will “re-energize investment in polishing the overall Xbox experience across Windows and Xbox consoles.”

• The Verge reports that these organizational shuffles come as Microsoft is still reviewing additional first-party games to bring to competing platforms like Switch and PS5, with Sea of Thieves being a test case for that strategy. Microsoft will reportedly hold its not-E3 summer showcase on June 9 where there are rumors of Gears 6 and the next Call of Duty: Black Ops set in the Gulf War being shown.

Chief portfolio officer Sandrine Caloiaro is leaving Ubisoft after a decade of service there, the company confirmed to Dead Game in an email. She was promoted to that position in 2021 amid a multi-year reorganization for the French publisher following a workplace reckoning and some disappointing releases like Ghost Recon Breakpoint. With a background in consumer research, Caloiaro led a newly minted Brand Portfolio Management team that used a “player-first mentality” to manage the direction of the company’s biggest franchises. The group was part of a power-struggle within Ubisoft over the broader creative visions for its games, including which ones got made, how its biggest series’ evolved, and how they would be monetized.

• “We can confirm that Sandrine Caloiaro has decided to leave Ubisoft,” a spokesperson for Ubisoft wrote in an email. “Sandrine was instrumental in building and strengthening Ubisoft’s consumer and market knowledge practice and in accelerating the development of our portfolio, brand, and monetization strategies. We warmly thank her for her many contributions. Her teams will now report to Marie-Sophie de Waubert, Ubisoft’s Chief Studios and Portfolio Officer.

• The change comes as the company races to regain momentum after years of delays, cancellations, and stagnation with the upcoming launch of Assassin’s Creed Red and Star Wars: Outlaws (the August 30 release date for which leaked earlier today). The Editorial office, once all-powerful under former chief creative officer Serge Hascoët, who goes on trial in France next year for workplace harassment, has fallen out of favor in recent years, Dead Game understands, with Brand Portfolio Management taking more of the lead.

• “I am grateful to have spent more than a decade working alongside the talented teams at Ubisoft and am proud of our achievements,” Caloiaro said in a statement shared by Ubisoft. “I am confident that Ubisoft’s teams will continue to create great games and I wish them every success in the future.” She did not say why she was leaving or where she was headed next. Ubisoft declined to comment on whether it planned fill her position in the future.

Other Links

GameStop chief operating officer Nir Patel stepped down last week after less than two years with the gaming retailer. The company’s meme stock price was over $30 when he took the job. Now it’s $11. He’ll get 10 weeks severance and a portion of his unearned signing bonus and unvested equity award. (Reuters)

Jump Ship is a really neat-looking coop space shooter with ship combat that’s coming to Steam Early Access later this year. Uses AI-generated voices “where it makes sense creatively.” (Steam)

YouTube’s biggest star, MrBeast, is apparently spending millions per video now. (Garbage Day)

The last unbeaten Mario Maker level called Trimming The Herbs was disqualified from a group’s 100% run of the game prior to the Wii U servers went offline yesterday because it was “cheated” onto the level library using a TAS (tool-assisted run), but dedicated player sanyx91smm2 managed to beat the seemingly impossible death trap anyway just in time. (NintendoLife)

Apple has ditched its ban on retro game emulators for iOS devices following an antitrust lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. (The Verge)

Saber Interactive founder Matthew Karch said “nobody has been guided by more of a sense of fairness and reasonableness than” Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors. That sense of fairness and reasonableness was so strong, Karch facilitated a deal to buy his company back from the Swedish holding company and take it private again. (GamesIndustry.biz)

A recent patent filing shows that Smart TV operating platform Roku is exploring ways to hijack your HDMI cable and display ads directly on your TV whenever it’s not being used. (Lowpass)

Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada thinks fighting games have become less popular because younger players prefer games where they can blame their teammates when they lose. I think it’s probably in-person gaming died and local multiplayer sessions are now as hard to come by as a Street Fighter III: Third Strike arcade cabinet. (VGC)

A group called Stop Killing Games is working to change national laws to make it harder for publishers to shut off the servers for older online games. If successful, it would likely incentivize companies to just ship games with an offline mode from the start. (Kotaku)

If your Pawn is really unpopular in Dragon’s Dogma 2, Capcom will take pity on you and rent it out to “fake” players to help them complete quests and gain more knowledge of the world. Some players were very sad to discover they’d been Truman Showed. (Gamesradar)

Microsoft has setup a dedicated team to “future proof” the Xbox’s library in an effort to support game preservation after rumors the company was going to make its biggest games multiplatform caused some longtime fans to wonder if their digital games would one day disappear. (Windows Central)

A new investigation by Reb Valentine exposed a number of issues at Life Is Strange studio Deck Nine from sexual harassment and crunch to a mysterious Nazi symbol that made it into the asset pipeline for the game without the studio ever saying who was behind it. Those who spoke for the piece also said publisher Square Enix was “outright hostile” to diverse themes in True Colors to the point of actively trying to hide the fact that the game had the series’ first canonically bisexual lead character. (IGN)

Ken Levine's next game has finally come out of hiding. After an initial reveal at The Game Awards 2022 and a story trailer in January, we now know a lot more about Ghost Story Games' sci-fi shooter Judas thanks to two extended, old school-style previews by IGN and the Friends Per Second podcast at the studio's Boston office. While the game certainly looks like BioShock in space, Judas sounds a lot more interesting than that glib appraisal initially lets on. Understandably though, that franchise and Levine's history are saddling the upcoming immersive sim with a ton of baggage. 

Judas is a first-person roguelite where you start a revolution onboard a colony ship controlled by robots that's carrying the last remnants of humanity to the Proxima Centauri star system. There are hand-powers, hacking, and lots of guns–the kinds of things you'd expect from a BioShock successor–but also three fleshed out characters whose personalities, motivations, and relationships the player will purportedly be able to cultivate in multiple ways over the course of the game. That's the part where Judas is apparently trying to push beyond the linear, pre-ordained constraints of the previous games Levine has directed.

The marketing buzzwords that have become synonymous with Levine and Judas to describe these evolved NPCs are "narrative Lego." The concept is derived from a 2014 GDC talk he gave one month after shutting down Irrational Games to form Ghost Story with a much smaller team for his next project. What if you could break a game's story down into pieces that could be secretly reassembled into all sorts of alternative configurations based on the player's actions that made sense and felt meaningful without them ever knowing? Maybe if he'd simply called the new design conceit "modular stories" or something that didn't sound like it was trying to be more revolutionary than it was, some people wouldn't have made as much fun of it as they did. And maybe if Judas was much smaller and had only taken five years to make instead of 10, people would be much more willing to give Levine the benefit of the doubt on whether this was a bold new idea or just clever branding. 

Listening to Levine describe what Judas actually is made me think a lot of Deathloop, another immersive sim with roguelite elements that revolves around shooting your way to a revolution in a world of colorful pastiche and competing egos. Arkane Lyon's 2021 FPS played with repetition and memory in some interesting ways but lost a lot of its magic for me once I understood the limits of its mechanics and how to exploit them. Deathloop funnels you toward one "perfect run" that makes you feel a bit like Neo the first time he sees the Matrix for the elaborate stream of computer code that it really is. It seems clear that Levine's hope with Judas is the opposite–that players go from feeling in control of a familiar game world with a clear set of rules to something that's more opaque, responsive, and potentially unsettling. 

It's a lofty goal Judas, simply by virtue of actually needing to eventually ship, will no doubt fall short of. But I don't want to underrate the significance of Take-Two, Ghost Story's parent-company, funding this quixotic effort for a decade with apparently no questions asked. In an era subsumed by existing franchises and safe sequels, I'm excited to see a bigger-budget game at least gesture in the direction of trying to explore new possibilities for character storytelling and interacting with NPCs. This is, after all, what Nvidia, Ubisoft, and others are promising with large language model-powered chatbots, except that Ghost Story is claiming to do it through the meticulous work of a writers' room rather than machines sucking up huge amounts of energy to spit back out mangled Reddit posts. 

But we've been here before of course and what we got was BioShock Infinite, which is why people have learned to be wary of Levine, his promises, and his auteur mythmaking. The game had a notoriously difficult six-year development cycle. The team at Irrational was rewarded for sticking with it by all getting laid off a year after it came out. And BioShock Infinite  whiffed on more of its big swings than not. I don't think it's bad and there are plenty of interesting things in it beyond its boring "No Labels" centrism and shallow treatment of racial politics. But there was a lot of padding and some really terrible boss fights. Its artistry often felt at odds with the rote juggling of ammo, health packs, and rummaging through drawers for money that drove 99% of its action. Most importantly, its NPCs felt like superficial foils rather than fleshed out characters. Should we blame the technology for that or Levine's own creative instincts? It sounds like Judas will offer an answer. 

Bloomberg reported that Levine's reputation for being a bad boss has continued at Ghost Story where some original members of the team eventually left because they just got fed up. Levine "can be quite charming and charismatic,” Giovonni Pasteris, an AI programmer at Ghost Story early on, told the outlet in 2022. But he could also "become moody and lash out, singling out an individual, while berating them in front of their co-workers." None of this comes up in the recent previous of Judas, despite how inseparable Levine, his management style, and his legacy are from the pitch for the game. That's not a reason to write Judas off, but it is a reason to stop treating Levine with kid-gloves and pretending like the last 11-years didn't happen. 

Live Service Interrupted

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League's long-awaited “free” season 1 update just hit and fans are in disbelief over just how underwhelming it is. The Joker is playable but needs to be unlocked by grinding over a dozen repetitive missions for those who don’t want to pay the $10 for the premium battle pass. The Brainiac boss fight is a reskin of the Green Lantern encounter. There aren’t any new story missions either. Even the true believers are wilting now. Fans on the Discord and Subreddit are in shambles saying they’ve finally given up. “Was a champion of this game,” wrote one player. “Fuck it now.”

Bungie is walking back plans to drip-feed new loot after players revolted. Destiny 2: Into the Light is a free update coming April 9 ahead of June’s The Final Shape expansion. It adds a horde mode called Onslaught and a new Brave Arsenal of weapons from the sci-fi shooter MMO’s past. But instead of unlocking the weapons for players to earn all at once, Bungie was originally going to time-gate them behind regular updates. The studio has now relented, however, and will make most of them available in the first four weeks. Weirdly, the news was shared on Twitter rather than in yesterday’s blog post, suggesting it was a pretty late change.

Helldivers 2 is still going strong with new flying enemies, powerful stratagems, and a Major Order to “disassemble” the Automatons once and for all in some really bloody fights that recall the terror of Malevelon Creek. I’m starting to get lose patience with all of the crashes though. After fixing an arc bug last week, players have now discovered that throwing too many snowballs can crash the game as well. I haven’t thrown a single snowball this week and I’ve still had he game crash at least once or twice per session on PS5. It’s particularly annoying when it happens 20 minutes into a match with strangers where you can’t easily rejoin. I guess it’s a sign it’s time for me to finally give it a break.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 Digest

Here’s everything you may have missed from Capcom’s latest off-the-rails fantasy action-RPG. Some players started freaking out when they discovered Dragonsplague, a disease that infects pawns and can wipe out every NPC if left untreated. Throwing them into the sea is one way to heal it. If your pawns stay health, however, there’s a money exploit where players band together to complete infinite pawn quests for 10,000 gold each. It’s a good thing too because the economy in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a mess. Swords cost half the price of haircuts. Sleeping at an inn is 20 times an Oxcart ride. Time for the mainland to start a Federal Reserve. One thing that’s free are catapults and they can break through mountain paths. There’s not a census yet on the most powerful vocation (classes) yet, but Magick Archer might be completely OP. There’s also an arrow that you can use one time to instantly kill anything. I really could have used that when I got trapped out in the wilderness with no health or camping kits earlier this week. A new update also just dropped adding the option to start a new game, lock the framerate at 30fps, and addressing some performance complaints.

Patch Notes

• Diablo IV’s season 4 update will be tested on a PTR ahead of launch. The patch notes are over 10,000 words long. While the big change is an overhaul of loot to make it feel more meaningful and make it easier to upgrade over time, tons of other things are getting reworked and added as well, including a new Elixir of Momentum that massively buffs speed and experience earned. Power leveling is about to get wild.

• No Man’s Sky’s 4.6 update “Orbital” introduces the game’s first-ever ship editor. Players have been having a field day with it so far. In addition to overhauling space stations and guild benefits, the update also expands the number of alien words in the game. One player doesn’t like the new economy scanner interface. Another has played for hundreds of hours and didn’t even know it existed.

• Tekken 8 version 1.03.01 arrives next week and adds Eddy Gordo to the roster. Among other changes, the game will now invalidate match results when connectivity is especially poor during a fight. More ominously, Bandai Namco is taking a look at “correcting unintended move behavior.” Most of the changes are bug fixes, though some fighters like Zafina did get buffed.

Industry News

Grand Theft Auto VI publisher Take-Two announced yesterday it’s buying Borderlands maker Gearbox for $460 million from sale of new shares of stock. That’s half the amount existing owner Embracer promised pay to acquire the company just a couple years ago, though most of that $1.3 million was stock in Swedish holding company which quickly became worthless and wasn’t going to fully pay out until six years in anyway.

“We have loved partnering with Gearbox on every iteration of the Borderlands franchise and are excited to be in active development on the next installment in the series,” David Ismailer, President of 2K, said in a press release. I previously reported that some new projects had been shelved at the company to focus on Borderlands 4 and a sequel to Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. A number of senior devs on Borderlands 3 left Gearbox in 2022, and there was a leadership shakeup on the upcoming Borderlands game last year. I’d heard it was originally supposed to ship as early as spring of this year. Maybe it will end up helping to fill-in the massive hole in the release schedule for the second half of 2024.

But Gearbox’s acquisition was quickly followed by news of layoffs among some on the public relations and marketing side. While a spokesperson for the company confirmed there were cuts in an oddly worded statement, Gearbox didn’t clarify how many people were let go or from what roles. I understand that several departments were hit, including HR, finance, and playtesting. And that’s not all:

• Sega announced cuts of 240 employees across its European offices the same day as well as the sale of Relic Entertainment to private investors. The Sega of America union, on the other hand, just secured its first contract, a landmark deal that could pave the way for working condition improvements across the video game industry.

• Certain Infinity cut 25 staff in the studio’s first mass layoff in 17 years, a move that comes a few months after a rumored Halo battle royale project was reportedly cancelled.

• An unspecified number of staff have also been laid off at Maxis Games, which manages The Sims for EA. According to one source familiar with the internal announcement, these cuts are in addition to already revealed 800 layoffs and the other ones at Maxis last fall. EA did not respond to a request for comment.

• There’s been another round of layoffs at Ubisoft, too. The company confirms 45 people were cut from various publishing-side roles across the U.S. and elsewhere to “enhance our collective efficiency.” “These are not decisions taken lightly and we are providing comprehensive support for our impacted colleagues,” a spokesperson for the company said. “We also want to share our utmost gratitude and respect for their many contributions to the company.“

Nintendo is restructuring its massive testing department at its North American headquarters. The move resulted in over 100 people having their contracts terminated early or not renewed, with a much smaller number of staff being converted to full-time employees. It’s a bitter sweet moment for a department of undervalued and underpaid permalancers who assisted on everything from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to Luigi’s Mansion 3. In an internal FAQ on the subject, Nintendo stressed that the layoffs were not the result of cost-cutting but instead an effort “to make product testing a truly globally integrated team closely married to our development teams.”

GameStop’s meme stonk days are behind it. The brick-and-mortar gaming retailer announced poor fourth quarter results and layoffs from earlier in the month. I’m told there were as many as 100 let go in the latest round of blood-letting. The stock tumbled 16% as a result, and is down almost 50% from a year ago. In better news, Game Informer, the last U.S. print gaming mag, just re-launched a direct-to-consumer subscription so readers no longer have to deal with GameStop’s hijinks to get a copy.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is still in damage control mode. In a GDC interview with Polygon Editor-in-Chief, Chris Plante, the executive riffed on the prospects of an Xbox gaming handheld, bringing Steam and Epic Games Store to the console, and why the video game industry is such a mess right now. Elsewhere, devs behind indie hits Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon told PC Gamer that generous exclusive deals for Xbox and Epic Games Store have dried up, while Gamesindustry.biz's Chris Dring said some third-party publishers are worried about “flatlining” sales on Xbox in Europe.

• Over at his Hit Points newsletter, Nathan Brown combines it all into a particularly harsh assessment of Spencer’s strategy and Xbox’s future. “If there’s one lesson we can take from the Spencer era it’s that you can enact all the disruptive change you like, but you cannot disprove this industry’s oldest truth: great games sell consoles,” he writes. “A hundred billion dollars later, Xbox still doesn’t have them.”

• The one Spencer quote that caught my attention was about GenZ and TikTok. “This notion that Xbox can only be this one device that plugs into a television isn’t something we see in the Gen Z research,” he told Polgyon. “Because nothing else is like that for them. Some of them will have an iPhone, some will have an Android, but all the games and everything is the same.” As a Google Pixel owner who can’t send videos of my kids to my father-in-law, I have to disagree. In fact, the DOJ is suing Apple in part because of how it leverages exclusive features and content to ruin things for consumers.

Other Links

• Someone used a neural link to play Civilization 6 and said it was awesome. (Shacknews)

• Solo developer Planet Jem Software is keeping the dream of PS2 racers alive with the stylish-looking Night-Runners. (Gamesradar)

• Publishers push back on a class-action lawsuit over video game addiction claiming they can’t be sued for gaming their games too entertaining (PC Gamer)

• The Super Earth Galactic War Data Archive is an attempt to document everything happening in Helldivers 2’s Galactic War. (Gamesradar)

• These Custom 3.5″ LCD IPS Micro PVM Monitors are retro gaming heaven. (Retro Dodo)

• Papers, Please designer Lucas Pope talks about his new Playdate game and the pressure and expectations that accompanies everything he does now. (Techradar)

• Speaking of Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon, As We Descend is a newly announced deckbuilding roguelike that looks like a perfect mashup of the two. (Steam)

• Companies who have worked with Sweet Baby Inc. on various games have mostly been silent about the current harassment campaign against the narrative consulting company. (Game Developer)

• The New York Times Simulator is a free browser game that lets you manage all the news fit to print while boosting subscriptions and currying favor with elites. (itch.io)

• A new fan hack for TMNT: The Hyperstone Heist adds higher difficulties, leaderboards, and a survival mode. (Time Extension)

Capcom's ambitious open world action-RPG is out today after receiving some really rave reviews. Built on the back of its beloved but often overlooked Xbox 360/PS3-era predecessor, Dragon's Dogma 2's director, Hideaki Itsuno, recently said the franchise has managed to break out of "cult-hit" status having finally "sold its way and made its way into many gamers' hearts." Now the sequel is already being described as 2024's possible Elden Ring moment thanks to its deep build crafting, dynamic fantasy sandbox, and rewarding exploration. 

Here's how Austin Walker wrote about the game's approach to quests, the lynchpin of most RPGs, over at Remap:

“If there is one thing that game designers are going to talk about in their weekly design team meetings, or that YouTube game critics are going to make videos about, it’s going to be about the, frankly, fearless decision to make so many open ended, unguided quests in this game. It will be like the year Dark Souls hit big, except instead of saying ‘look at how this game trusts the player to tackle difficult combat challenges,’ they will be saying ‘look at how this game trusts the player to engage with its narrative systems.’”

And here's what some other critics are saying:

• ”’Have you figured out what the name of this continent is? Are we on a peninsula? An island?’ It’s 3 a.m. and my partner is insisting I go to bed, but I have questions and theories, and because of the review embargo the list of people I know playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 is very small. I am vibrating out of my skin about this game and have to share. Austin tells me he just got to a point where it becomes clear this game is for ‘dogma sickos.’ That ‘they made this game for Us.’” — Dia Lacina, Paste Games

• “You're constantly pulled in numerous directions at once and it's up to you to decide which avenues to pursue. It might be a quest given to you by a villager in need, an enticing structure looming on the horizon, or a locked gate and the potential to find an alternative way inside. Backtracking is fairly common, but no one journey is exactly the same as another, so it never feels like a chore when you're retreading familiar ground.” — Richard Wakeling, GameSpot

• “We can’t even tell you the best thing about Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s a game that’s so full of surprises, that each time it dazzles you, you think “Surely that’s it,” but no. The game ramps up show-stopping moments throughout, but there’s one moment that players and developers will reference for decades. It’s a moment that will have your jaw smashing through your floor into your downstairs neighbor, and we can’t implore you enough to experience it and the rest of this magnificent game for yourself.” — Jordan Middler, VGC

All of this unflinching commitment to its world and how players creatively experiment within it makes the decision to attach random microtransactions to Dragon's Dogma 2 feel particularly weird. Wakestones that revive characters and pawns, the game's fancy system of NPCs, can be discovered in rare locations or purchased for $1 per five-pack, VGC reports. Another item called Art of Metamorphosis lets players redesign their characters, and can be found in the world or purchased for $2. Other items like Ambivalent Rift Incense (alter a Pawn's behavior) and Portcrystals that let you add fast travel points to the map can also be purchased for a total of 21 individual DLC microtransactions in the game according to its Steam page. 

Despite breaking publisher Capcom's concurrent player record on Steam with nearly 200,000 at launch, the PC version of the game has a rating of Mixed with just 40% positive reviews as players rage about the microtransactions in addition to performance issues. Capcom wrote "we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience" in response to the negative feedback, stating it's looking into improving optimization on PC and noting that the most controversial microtransaction items can all still be found for free in the game just by playing. 

Oli Walsh at Polygon has a good breakdown that contextualizes the player-backlash and questions if it's an overreaction. Review-bombing a game, i.e. lodging hyperbolic criticism about the overall value of a thing to make an unrelated point, is bad. Capital G gamers farming rage bait over something that's on its face so trivial is cynical and always leads someplace bad. And the disproportionate response and spill damage effect has certainly made it easy to dismiss as just another entitled angry gamer backlash elevated into something more important by internet platform dynamics. 

Still I think the microtransactions low-key suck. The mere fact that you could purchase these items to gain an advantage or save time in the game can do real harm to the immersive illusion of playing it in the first place. Read Walker's initial thoughts on everything interesting Dragon's Dogma 2 is doing to try to organically bring players into its world and not reduce every part of its adventure into an Ubisoft-style chore for reward checklist and it makes letting players pay to access shortcuts seem not only out of place but fundamentally at odds with what the rest of the game is working so hard to achieve. 

I don't think it's an accident that Ubisoft open world icon barf has become inherently linked with the French publisher's own attempts to insert microtransactions into single-player narrative experiences. That monetization-influenced design is part of what makes open world games like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Elden Ring feel so refreshing. So it's extremely jarring to see Dragon's Dogma 2, another game that appears to be working toward a less coercive player experience, embrace pay-to-save-time mechanics. And maybe both things can be true: Dragon's Dogma 2's microtransactions aren't overly intrusive but also don't have a reason to exist outside of padding earnings reports and maximize potential returns. 

Patch notes

• Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's season 1 update arrives March 28 and will nerf its most annoying enemies: rooftop snipers. In addition to hitting from far away and being hard to see, they also teleport as soon as you get near them. After next week's update, which introduces the Joker and a host of other changes, snipers will teleport less quickly and less often. 

• Skull and Bones' Y1S1.3 update this week made a ton of changes to how players grind for gold and various exploits they were using to climb the leaderboards. It upset a ton of players or, depending on who you ask, liberated them from relying on the most tedious resource farming strats. More importantly, Ubisoft has changed the game's climate. The wind, which boosts sailing speed, was apparently too volatile before and will now change direction and speed much less frequently. 

• Stardew Valley's 1.6 update is truly massive and has put the long-time farming sim back in a lot of players' rotations. There are too many wonderful changes to highlight here, like how NPCs will now "shove chests out of their way instead of destroying them," and players can finally "drink mayonnaise and jelly, and eat pickles." Other good news: pans can now give you those tough to find bone fragments. 

• Dune: Spice Wars patch v.2.0.3.31764 has altered various character perks. In House Harkonnen, for example, Councillor Cron Vatia now "gives +2 manpower per empty building slot on oppression, on top of his other effects."

• Brok: The Investigator Update 1.4.7.2 was a doozy at less than five words long: "Added 85 fanarts."

• Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection received the first of what will likely be many updates aimed at fixing the botched release. A tree will no longer be clipping up through the middle of a walkway in the Endor: Bunker map in BF2, for example. The game still has more concurrent players on Steam than Suicide Squad does.

• Lords of the Fallen update v.1.1.626  will kill players faster in PVP with a 10% damage buff across the board. A boss skip was also deleted. You won't be able to dodge the Hushed Saint by jumping on Umbral objects near the bonfire in Forsaken Fen anymore. RIP. 

• Gas Station Simulator Tidal Wave DLC update has nerfed accidental scuba deaths. "Fixed an issue that caused scuba or surfing customers to stay in the water until the durability of the rented item reached 0," the patch notes read. 

• Helldivers 2 patch 1.000.103 fixed the new mechs so they no longer randomly blow up when you fire rockets. It also quietly added flying bugs. Unfortunately, the developers also recently discovered the culprit behind tons of player crashes this week: Arc weapons. The particle effects appear to be freezing people's matches and the team is working on a fix for early next week. I lost 29 samples right before extraction last night to this nasty bug and I don't even use Arc weapons (but everyone I matched with in quickplay did). 

  ---

My 10 games of 2024: February edition

Last year I tracked how my top 10 list evolved over the year on Twitter, alongside the new releases that seemed like GOTY contenders worth paying attention to. I've kept doing that with the latter but figured this newsletter was a better place to track how my personal list is changing, and what it reflects about my tastes and time, and the perennial struggle to try out most of the best games every year. Here’s the current list:

1. Anomaly Agent

2. Balatro

3. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

4. Go Mecha Ball

5. Helldivers 2

6. Pacific Drive

7. Persona 3 Reload

8. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

9. Solium Infernum

10. Unicorn Overlord

I don't normally like to include by-the-book remasters like Persona 3 Reload, but I've just been having a wildly good time with it in ways that even Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Royale never quite gripped me. It's been a special late night chillout treat as I slowly grind through its procedural dungeons and try not to get caught cheating on my school exams. What I like most is how much the PS2 charm of the original feels intact but fresh again. 

Games I'm still trying to make more time for: Tekken 8, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Banishers: Ghosts of Eden. 

In other links:

• Fans of the original Super Mario Maker were racing against time to beat every level ever created before the Wii U severs shutdown at the end of the month. They were stuck on a real torture chamber called Trimming the Herbs only for the creator of that level to reveal today that they cheated (used a TAS) to get it uploaded. The final level actually ended up being the already completed The Last Dance. (Ars Technica)

• Someone disrupted the Apex Legends regional finals by hacking the players live during the tournament just for the lulz. (Techcrunch)

• The PlayStation 5 Pro specs have reportedly leaked with the new console possibly arriving as early as this holiday. (Insider Gaming)

• Larian Studios doesn’t plan on making a Baldur’s Gate 3 expansion or Baldur’s Gate 4. Instead, it’s director said the company will leave the Dungeons & Dragons license behind for now to focus on a new big projects. (IGN)

• Overwatch 2 devs were told earlier this month they won’t get their bonuses for the second half of last year. The sequel has also abandoned all future PVE content. (Bloomberg)

• Bungie replaced the director on Marathon as it pushes to get the extraction shooter out sooner than later amid cancellations and mounting pressure on The Final Shape to bring players back to Destiny 2 and deliver big sales. (IGN)

• Rockstar was hoping to release Grand Theft Auto VI as soon as early next year, but is reportedly rushing developers back to the office in part to avoid any potential delays. (Kotaku)

• Speaking of Destiny 2, a horde mode called Onslaught is coming for free on April 9. It will have 50 waves and seems heavily influenced by Gears of War. (Bungie)

• Ubisoft debuted a new AI chatbot NPC tech at GDC. It did not impress. I’m very curious what data it was trained on because somehow it managed to sound exactly like someone you’d run into in a Watch Dogs game. (The Verge)

• Long-running Pokémon fan game website Relic Castle was hit with a takedown notice (VGC)

• Diablo 4 will delay it’s fourth season by a month and massively re-work its loot system to be more meaningful. (Blizzard)

• Former long-time VP of internal production at Sony, Connie Booth, has been hired by EA to be group manage of RPGs and action games at studios like EA Motive and BioWare. Booth left PlayStation under mysterious circumstances last fall. The Last of Us Online was officially cancelled two months later. (IGN)

• Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth’s game over screen is an absolute mess. (Twitter)

• Kotaku’s Editor-in-Chief and my boss, Jen Glennon, resigned this week after receiving an apparent mandate from management to start almost exclusively producing guides for games. “It is very clear that leadership wants to undermine the people who make these sites special and replace their work with slop,” the GMG Union, which represents me, wrote in response. Since I started writing at Kotaku over seven years ago I’ve posted a mix of news, features, reviews, guides, and original reporting, and plan to continue doing so. (Aftermath)