Well folks, Gamescom Opening Night Live has now come and gone. We had some predictions about how the night could’ve gone including an appeal to finally get a single crumb of a Sonic The Hedgehog 3 trailer for the upcoming movie and a Hideo Kojima sighting, as has become the norm around events put on by Geoff Keighley.…
This week, Destiny 2 maker Bungie was hit by massive layoffs, leaving the future of the company’s popular looter shooter in some doubt and spurring waves of criticism of its CEO, who remains at the studio. We also saw streamer Dr Disrespect once again posting online, just 36 days after he confessed to sending…
Welcome to the first weekend of August! The weather is still hot in various parts of the world (like, way more so than it’s been lately), so what a wonderful time to stay the hell in doors, in front of an air conditioner, with some video games.
This past week gave us no shortage of things to talk about, from just how strong the final year of the Nintendo Switch is looking to just how absurd the latest Acolyte controversy is. We’ve also got a hands-on with the gorgeous Dragon Quest 3 remake and impressions of the great mafia-themed immersive sim, Fallen Aces.…
Nintendo’s big June Direct showcase delivered the biggest headlines of the week, with its reveal of Echoes of Wisdom, a new Zelda game in which you actually play as the titular princess, as well as a new Mario & Luigi RPG and, yes, Metroid Prime 4. Read on for all the reveals from that event as well as some of the…
It is now officially summer. Yesterday, the solstice (Litha, as it’s known to some) brought us our longest day of the calendar year, and now we march on to ever darkening days. But right now, we’re just marching on into the weekend to spend that time off in some delightful digital realms.
Whether you want to know about Elden Ring’s New Game + modeor master Ubisoft’s new free-to-play Call of Duty-like shooter XDefiant, we’ve got tips for you in the pages ahead.
It was eclectic week of gaming news, and we’ve got a diverse sampler platter for you with the week’s biggest stories, or at least, the biggest ones from before Summer Game Fest kicked off on Friday. For more on that, see our roundup of everything shown off at this year’s Keighley-fest, and our look at the games shown…
Destiny 2’s upcoming expansion The Final Shape is going to be a big deal, as it will conclude the series’ 10-year story to this point, but it’s also going to be quite literally enormous. This week, Bungie finally revealed just how much space The Final Shape is going to take up on your hardware, and the numbers make me…
It’s the middle of May 2024 and that means we’re nearly halfway through the year. What has this year been like in video game news? Tons of layoffs (sad), lots of new games (glad), and some weird outliers, as usual. This week, we saw set photos and official shots from The Last of Us season two, dove back into the…
Another week, another round of opinions and spicy takes for you to sift through. Rather than making you search the site and find them yourselves, however, we’ve gathered our best opinion pieces of the week right here. From Diablo IV’s loot game change making it a good game again to a wild Tetris story, we’ve got…
This past week started with a shock, as Microsoft announced it was closing a number of studios including Tango Gameworks, responsible for the very well-liked Hi-Fi Rush, leading many to wonder just what a studio has to achieve in this day and age to be deemed successful enough to exist. Also, one of the most…
Whether you have a bunch of free time or hardly any at all, whether you’re playing on console or PC, there are plenty of great games to obsess over right now. Our recommendations for what to play this weekend include everything from sci-fi thrillers and loot-driven action-RPGs to esoteric puzzle games and action…
It’s the first day of a new month, and Sony has announced the latest set of free games you can get as a subscriber of PlayStation Plus. It’s not an amazing list, but what’s on offer is pretty solid if you’re looking for something to play as spring gets going. In particular, there’s an adorably brilliant fox adventure…
It is going to be one of those Fridays where I am going to uncork a bottle of frustration and rant a bit about various business deals and statements, each of which has managed to make me progressively more annoyed. When I started this post I thought I might have to divert to Twitter to add in some of the more recent screw ups Elon has made. But no, the video game industry continues to provide, and the main problem was limiting myself to a few stories and ranking them in the order of how likely they were to make my head explode.
Back in the EG7 Q4 2023 financials it was stated that the PlanteSide IP had been sold. The actual mention was:
Daybreak successfully closed on the sale of a non-core IP for USD 5.9 million. The transaction provides EG7 with further improvement to its liquidity. This transaction will not affect EG7´s business plan and performance other than the P&L effect from the asset sale.
Closed a deal! Sold the IP! That must mean something, right? A publicly held company can’t just straight up lie about this sort of thing, can they?
It came out later that PlanetSide was the IP in question and that the trademarks had been transferred to Bay Tower, a private equity firm, but that there was some sort of Jason Epstein connection in that and what the hell was that even about and what did it mean to the actual game, PlanetSide 2? Let me just repost all the links from that point in time in case you are interested.
And I guess we don’t know the answer to a lot of that, but apparently PlanetSide 2 has been moved within Enad Global 7 to fall under Toadman, the smallest of the EG7 studios, which posted a net loss of $5 million SEK in Q4 2023.
That toad looks like he works in capital management
So now they had PlanetSide 2, in contention for the worst performing title in the Daybreak stable, has been moved to the worst performing studio in EG7’s stable.
Yay?
Some coverage:
Still, I should not be too hard on Toadman as, on their site they say they have done work for hire for a range of Daybreak titles including PlanetSide 2 and might have been responsible for the console port. Maybe them taking over PlanetSide 2 will mean a PlayStation 5 native client for the title? Who knows?
Meanwhile, that still doesn’t answer the question about the IP being sold, who really owns it, why they bought it, what they plan to do with it, or what it means to EG7, though I suspect part of the sale must had included the right to keep using the IP for PlanetSide 2 because to do otherwise would have been insane.
Back on the first of the year I made a prediction that UbiSoft would do something that would piss me off, and thus help sustain me in my beyond two decades grudge against the studio. And, of course, they obliged almost right away by declaring their Skull & Bones title a AAAA game.
But, just in case that wasn’t enough, we have how they are handling The Crew, their 2014 racing title, which they are pulling the plug on and removing from player libraries. If you try to find the copy of The Crew you paid $60 for, UbiSoft will suggest maybe you should buy something new rather than playing that raggedy old title. They managed to come across so badly that the whole thing is driving a call for game preservation. Some coverage:
Now, live service games are always going to be problematic in this arena. At some point the game will stop earning enough money to pay to keep the servers running… and keeping the servers running costs more than you probably imagine.
On the other hand, a title that charges full price up front better have a plan for when the servers go down. The servers to support the back end portions of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl were taken down years ago, but I can dig out my old cobalt blue Nintendo DS Lite and STILL PLAY the core portion of those titles.
Saying “Screw you, buy another game!” and yoinking purchases out of player libraries is not a plan, it is a way to bring the wrath of fans down on you.
This is UbiSoft management just being their usual shitty selves. Business as usual. I vowed not to give them another nickel when they made it clear they hated their customers more than 20 years ago, and they continue to keep proving it every year for me.
I was vacillating between making this its own Quote of the Day post or just ignoring it completely because it was so dumb, then hit a middle ground an decided it fit into this piece. Mike Ybarra, former head of Blizzard, thinks we should be able to tip devs if they make a good game.
That is pretty innocuous in and of itself. A charmingly naive desire to reward somebody for making a good game would earn a pat on the head from many sources.
However, a former President of Blizzard who demonstrated no issue with paying women less than men for the same job, only giving a mild bleat when Jen Oneal resigned because she was being paid less as Co-President of Blizzard in partnership with Ybarra, and who was blatantly trying to gaslight employees by pleading poverty while cutting bonuses for those outside the executive management boys club, coming out with that sort of statement against the background of mass layoffs in the video game industry just proves he is either completely unaware of reality or a complete shitheel… though, as always, I have to add “why not both?”
People rightfully dogpiled on his since edited tweet to point out the many problems with his sentiment. Leaving aside the whole “everybody wants tips these days” and the fact that any such mechanism would likely go to the publisher who would extract their cut before passing anything on to the people who did the actual work, the whole thing would encourage publishers and executives to keep industry salaries low by pointing out that tips were now considered part of the compensation package.
If you want to help somebody out, but another copy of an indie dev title you played the hell out of. That will probably help somebody. But tips… those will go into somebody elses’ pocket without a doubt.
Coverage:
Also, here’s to hoping Mike Ybarra fades into even greater irrelevance so I won’t feel the need to ever mention him again.
We got something of a two-fer from Jeff and Annie Delisi Strain, the husband and wife duo who run/ran Prytania Media which funded several game studios.
The first up was the abrupt closure of Crop Circle Games, which was shut down in late March with little notice and no severance for employees. A publisher treating game devs as disposable trash? Must be a day that ends in “Y” I guess. Crop Circle’s site was replaced by a terse statement about being able to secure funding after two years. Normal industry stuff, callous but no surprise.
The weird bit is that on April 4th Annie Delisi Strain appended a long rambling statement making the whole situation about herself and the fact that Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach was going to bring her health issues into a story (something that never happened and Kotaku denies was ever planned) that was so strange that even an AI wouldn’t be that incoherent.
Once that bizarre addition got some attention, the site was shut down completely, but not before I went and made sure the Internet Archive had backed it up. When gaming execs show you who they really are, don’t let them memory hole it later.
Then, a week or so later, Jeff Strain announced another sudden studio shut down (images of his statement), Possibility Space, this time because he alleges that employees were leaking information about their project to the press. The common thread here is again Kotaku, which was implicated as the reason, with their reporter Ethan Gach being named once more.
“Somebody leaked something so let’s burn the place down!” isn’t a normal business take.
Sure, the games industry isn’t doing well right now, contracting as it is from the pandemic highs when we all stayed home and added to our Steam library in search of distraction, so there are lots of reasons studios shut down. But when your funding publisher shuts down two studios while attempting to blame one reporter at Kotaku… well, it feels more like the Strains live in some sort of paranoid bubble where Kotaku is out to get them.
Then we’re back to the Embracer Group, which has been struggling to survive by shutting down projects and laying of developers, all due to some extremely poor and dubious even at first glance business decisions made by CEO Lars Wingefors… who still has his job.
Embrace This
But in an interview over at IGN about Embracer Group Matthew Karch, who is CEO of Sabre Interactive, which managed to break free of the disaster that is Embracer, paints a picture of Lars merely being naive and feels that people are being unfair. While the interview covers other topics, other sites like Game Developer immediately picked up apologist nature of Karch’s statements. Incredulity was a common response.
The only things I can come up with for Karch’s narrative is that there is a non-disparagement aspect to his contract taking Sabre out of Embracer’s grip, that he doesn’t want to say anything that will come back to haunt him if/when he too turns out to be an incompetent boob and lays off a bunch of staff, or just solidarity among the capitalist class and feeling the need to protect themselves from all those greedy workers demanding to be paid, as they really eat into CEO bonus potential.
Anyway, back here on planet earth Lars Wingefors, whose compensation package no doubt dwarfs any of the people who actually make the things that Embracer sells, is paid based on the clearly flawed assumption that he is SO SMART AT BUSINESS. Yet he foolishly bet on the line always going up despite obvious signs there was going to be a reduction in demand, negatively impacted the lives of thousands of people. And in doing that, the only consequence he has suffered is being publicly called out for it… and dammit, Matthew Karch says that is going way too far! CEO’s have feelings too man!
It is clearly too much to ask that a CEO be at all responsible for their decisions. Accountability is for suckers. Get a job where other people have to pay for your mistakes.
Maybe CEO should get tips.
Then, not really on the topic of video games, I saw a nice article over at Vox about how private equity firms… also known as equity management and other innocuous terms… have been simply destroying everything they touch in the name of milking every last cent out of companies and then casting them aside to let them fail.
They kick off with the example of Toys R Us and how it was bought stripped, and left to die as a deliberate business plan, but you can find many more examples. The plan is to find the victim target for the same tactic, where a private equity firms buys it out, brings it private, loots it of all value, saddles it with debt, then had a final cash grab by going public with it again in the hope that a familiar name would fool people.
It happens over and over again and the firms that do it set everything up so they get the cash but bear none of the responsibility for what they have done. Anyway, if you want to get mad, you can read that and how even Taylor Swift has had to fight the vultures of private equity.
There is the constrain refrain from the boss class in the US about “nobody wants to work anymore” that one can trace back over 100 years that is mostly a lament that people kind of expect to be able to live on their wages.
The irony in that is today it feels like nobody on Wall Street wants to run a business, they just want to get paid, either by demanding companies deliver all profits directly to them or through these private equity looting frenzies that destroy a company in the long term in order to get paid today.
We need more regulation in the market. That’s it. That’s the message.
It is going to be one of those Fridays where I am going to uncork a bottle of frustration and rant a bit about various business deals and statements, each of which has managed to make me progressively more annoyed. When I started this post I thought I might have to divert to Twitter to add in some of the more recent screw ups Elon has made. But no, the video game industry continues to provide, and the main problem was limiting myself to a few stories and ranking them in the order of how likely they were to make my head explode.
Back in the EG7 Q4 2023 financials it was stated that the PlanteSide IP had been sold. The actual mention was:
Daybreak successfully closed on the sale of a non-core IP for USD 5.9 million. The transaction provides EG7 with further improvement to its liquidity. This transaction will not affect EG7´s business plan and performance other than the P&L effect from the asset sale.
Closed a deal! Sold the IP! That must mean something, right? A publicly held company can’t just straight up lie about this sort of thing, can they?
It came out later that PlanetSide was the IP in question and that the trademarks had been transferred to Bay Tower, a private equity firm, but that there was some sort of Jason Epstein connection in that and what the hell was that even about and what did it mean to the actual game, PlanetSide 2? Let me just repost all the links from that point in time in case you are interested.
And I guess we don’t know the answer to a lot of that, but apparently PlanetSide 2 has been moved within Enad Global 7 to fall under Toadman, the smallest of the EG7 studios, which posted a net loss of $5 million SEK in Q4 2023.
That toad looks like he works in capital management
So now they had PlanetSide 2, in contention for the worst performing title in the Daybreak stable, has been moved to the worst performing studio in EG7’s stable.
Yay?
Some coverage:
Still, I should not be too hard on Toadman as, on their site they say they have done work for hire for a range of Daybreak titles including PlanetSide 2 and might have been responsible for the console port. Maybe them taking over PlanetSide 2 will mean a PlayStation 5 native client for the title? Who knows?
Meanwhile, that still doesn’t answer the question about the IP being sold, who really owns it, why they bought it, what they plan to do with it, or what it means to EG7, though I suspect part of the sale must had included the right to keep using the IP for PlanetSide 2 because to do otherwise would have been insane.
Back on the first of the year I made a prediction that UbiSoft would do something that would piss me off, and thus help sustain me in my beyond two decades grudge against the studio. And, of course, they obliged almost right away by declaring their Skull & Bones title a AAAA game.
But, just in case that wasn’t enough, we have how they are handling The Crew, their 2014 racing title, which they are pulling the plug on and removing from player libraries. If you try to find the copy of The Crew you paid $60 for, UbiSoft will suggest maybe you should buy something new rather than playing that raggedy old title. They managed to come across so badly that the whole thing is driving a call for game preservation. Some coverage:
Now, live service games are always going to be problematic in this arena. At some point the game will stop earning enough money to pay to keep the servers running… and keeping the servers running costs more than you probably imagine.
On the other hand, a title that charges full price up front better have a plan for when the servers go down. The servers to support the back end portions of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl were taken down years ago, but I can dig out my old cobalt blue Nintendo DS Lite and STILL PLAY the core portion of those titles.
Saying “Screw you, buy another game!” and yoinking purchases out of player libraries is not a plan, it is a way to bring the wrath of fans down on you.
This is UbiSoft management just being their usual shitty selves. Business as usual. I vowed not to give them another nickel when they made it clear they hated their customers more than 20 years ago, and they continue to keep proving it every year for me.
I was vacillating between making this its own Quote of the Day post or just ignoring it completely because it was so dumb, then hit a middle ground an decided it fit into this piece. Mike Ybarra, former head of Blizzard, thinks we should be able to tip devs if they make a good game.
That is pretty innocuous in and of itself. A charmingly naive desire to reward somebody for making a good game would earn a pat on the head from many sources.
However, a former President of Blizzard who demonstrated no issue with paying women less than men for the same job, only giving a mild bleat when Jen Oneal resigned because she was being paid less as Co-President of Blizzard in partnership with Ybarra, and who was blatantly trying to gaslight employees by pleading poverty while cutting bonuses for those outside the executive management boys club, coming out with that sort of statement against the background of mass layoffs in the video game industry just proves he is either completely unaware of reality or a complete shitheel… though, as always, I have to add “why not both?”
People rightfully dogpiled on his since edited tweet to point out the many problems with his sentiment. Leaving aside the whole “everybody wants tips these days” and the fact that any such mechanism would likely go to the publisher who would extract their cut before passing anything on to the people who did the actual work, the whole thing would encourage publishers and executives to keep industry salaries low by pointing out that tips were now considered part of the compensation package.
If you want to help somebody out, but another copy of an indie dev title you played the hell out of. That will probably help somebody. But tips… those will go into somebody elses’ pocket without a doubt.
Coverage:
Also, here’s to hoping Mike Ybarra fades into even greater irrelevance so I won’t feel the need to ever mention him again.
We got something of a two-fer from Jeff and Annie Delisi Strain, the husband and wife duo who run/ran Prytania Media which funded several game studios.
The first up was the abrupt closure of Crop Circle Games, which was shut down in late March with little notice and no severance for employees. A publisher treating game devs as disposable trash? Must be a day that ends in “Y” I guess. Crop Circle’s site was replaced by a terse statement about being able to secure funding after two years. Normal industry stuff, callous but no surprise.
The weird bit is that on April 4th Annie Delisi Strain appended a long rambling statement making the whole situation about herself and the fact that Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach was going to bring her health issues into a story (something that never happened and Kotaku denies was ever planned) that was so strange that even an AI wouldn’t be that incoherent.
Once that bizarre addition got some attention, the site was shut down completely, but not before I went and made sure the Internet Archive had backed it up. When gaming execs show you who they really are, don’t let them memory hole it later.
Then, a week or so later, Jeff Strain announced another sudden studio shut down (images of his statement), Possibility Space, this time because he alleges that employees were leaking information about their project to the press. The common thread here is again Kotaku, which was implicated as the reason, with their reporter Ethan Gach being named once more.
“Somebody leaked something so let’s burn the place down!” isn’t a normal business take.
Sure, the games industry isn’t doing well right now, contracting as it is from the pandemic highs when we all stayed home and added to our Steam library in search of distraction, so there are lots of reasons studios shut down. But when your funding publisher shuts down two studios while attempting to blame one reporter at Kotaku… well, it feels more like the Strains live in some sort of paranoid bubble where Kotaku is out to get them.
Then we’re back to the Embracer Group, which has been struggling to survive by shutting down projects and laying of developers, all due to some extremely poor and dubious even at first glance business decisions made by CEO Lars Wingefors… who still has his job.
Embrace This
But in an interview over at IGN about Embracer Group Matthew Karch, who is CEO of Sabre Interactive, which managed to break free of the disaster that is Embracer, paints a picture of Lars merely being naive and feels that people are being unfair. While the interview covers other topics, other sites like Game Developer immediately picked up apologist nature of Karch’s statements. Incredulity was a common response.
The only things I can come up with for Karch’s narrative is that there is a non-disparagement aspect to his contract taking Sabre out of Embracer’s grip, that he doesn’t want to say anything that will come back to haunt him if/when he too turns out to be an incompetent boob and lays off a bunch of staff, or just solidarity among the capitalist class and feeling the need to protect themselves from all those greedy workers demanding to be paid, as they really eat into CEO bonus potential.
Anyway, back here on planet earth Lars Wingefors, whose compensation package no doubt dwarfs any of the people who actually make the things that Embracer sells, is paid based on the clearly flawed assumption that he is SO SMART AT BUSINESS. Yet he foolishly bet on the line always going up despite obvious signs there was going to be a reduction in demand, negatively impacted the lives of thousands of people. And in doing that, the only consequence he has suffered is being publicly called out for it… and dammit, Matthew Karch says that is going way too far! CEO’s have feelings too man!
It is clearly too much to ask that a CEO be at all responsible for their decisions. Accountability is for suckers. Get a job where other people have to pay for your mistakes.
Maybe CEO should get tips.
Then, not really on the topic of video games, I saw a nice article over at Vox about how private equity firms… also known as equity management and other innocuous terms… have been simply destroying everything they touch in the name of milking every last cent out of companies and then casting them aside to let them fail.
They kick off with the example of Toys R Us and how it was bought stripped, and left to die as a deliberate business plan, but you can find many more examples. The plan is to find the victim target for the same tactic, where a private equity firms buys it out, brings it private, loots it of all value, saddles it with debt, then had a final cash grab by going public with it again in the hope that a familiar name would fool people.
It happens over and over again and the firms that do it set everything up so they get the cash but bear none of the responsibility for what they have done. Anyway, if you want to get mad, you can read that and how even Taylor Swift has had to fight the vultures of private equity.
There is the constrain refrain from the boss class in the US about “nobody wants to work anymore” that one can trace back over 100 years that is mostly a lament that people kind of expect to be able to live on their wages.
The irony in that is today it feels like nobody on Wall Street wants to run a business, they just want to get paid, either by demanding companies deliver all profits directly to them or through these private equity looting frenzies that destroy a company in the long term in order to get paid today.
We need more regulation in the market. That’s it. That’s the message.
If you loved the Fallout TV series and want to dive into a game that’s like it, but not too like it, we curated a list for you. We’ve also got some hidden Nintendo Switch secrets to make the most of the handheld console, lingering Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth help, and yeah, we’re back into Destiny 2. Read on for the major…
We got our first good look at the highly anticipated Hades 2 this week, and we have a lot to say about Supergiant Games’ first-ever direct sequel. But there’s also some Starfield news to get into and unpack, and some fan-casting to do. Read on for our spiciest opinions of the week.
Fallout fans ate good this week, thanks to a kickass Amazon TV series and tons of people getting back into the games because of it. But a good video game adaptation isn’t all that went down this week, so read on for the biggest news.
If you’re still looking for a PlayStation 5, Best Buy has you covered. Right now, you can pick up Sony’s latest console for $50 cheaper than usual, and the best part of the buy is that it comes bundled with a digital copy of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
Let me be clear: I have never played a Final Fantasy game. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth may be out very soon, and the series may be one of the most influential in the history of video games, but I have never touched one. Aside from tangential knowledge gleaned against my will via the internet and coworkers, and what I’ve…
Every week, out of the kindness of its bulging heart, Epic gives a game away for free on its PC games store it desperately wishes you’d use instead of Steam. Pure altruism, no doubt. At the time of writing, for instance, you can pick up Dakar Desert Rally gratis. From February 22, it’ll be Super Meat Boy Forever…
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