Valve has a new hero shooter in the late stages of development. It's a secret!
Except it's not really, since over 20,000 invites to play the game have been sent out over Steam.
You're not meant to talk about it!
We all know, at this stage, that rumours of the death of the console were greatly exaggerated. This narrative took hold pretty strongly for about a decade, fuelled by the introduction of various smart devices – smartphones, smart TVs, and so on – and by some fairly optimistic notions about 5G and internet speeds in general.
The logic was simple; the world was filling up with devices that you could play games on, and with the potential for streaming games in ways that didn't require a device at all looming on the horizon, selling consumers an expensive, dedicated gaming console seemed like a tougher prospect with every passing day. Even as each successive generation of console hardware boomed, confident prophets told us that decline into irrelevance was inevitable for this sector.
Ultimately, those people who predicted the end of consoles were wrong (so far, at least) for a very simple reason: they didn't actually understand the appeal of consoles in the first place.
What have been the most successful licensing arrangements in games industry history? It's easy to pick out individual success stories – Rare's GoldenEye is the classic example, and some licenses like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars have produced a solid number of hits alongside various misses.
For a really consistent success story, though, you generally have to turn to sports licenses. EA's long-running but now defunct partnership with FIFA certainly takes the crown, spanning as it did almost 30 years and hundreds of millions of games sold – but a tip of the hat is due to Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, a six-game series spanning Summer and Winter Olympic Games from Beijing in 2008 to Tokyo's delayed 2020 games.
Using a license from the International Olympic Committee, and developed and published by a once-unlikely partnership between Sega and Nintendo, the games were by no means a challenger to the commercial success of something like FIFA, but they sold pretty handsomely nonetheless, and were remarkably successful and well-received given how tricky this license is to work with.
Gradually, then suddenly.
Ernest Hemingway was talking about how people go bankrupt, which admittedly gives this quote a somewhat grim tone, but it's often used as an apt description for all sorts of change, from political and social movements to personal success.
It's really an encapsulation of the concept of a tipping point; that there can be many years of seemingly unrewarded slog when it seems like change is impossible, only to suddenly reach an inflection point where everything accelerates and change now seems inevitable.
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