We are officially in summer, with the summer solstice having passed just yesterday.  Happy Midsommar to all who celebrate.  May your sacrifices protect you and bring a bountiful harvest once more.

I was a bit surprised that the Steam Summer Sale did not kick off yesterday.  Steam has a pretty solid track record of landing summer and winter sales on the first day of each season.  But this year it won’t start until the 27th. [Addendum: Though if I had looked back to 2023, I would have seen it didn’t start until the 29th, so just another issue in my brain.]

So no post about that today, as I had sort of planned.  Instead, some things are launching or announcing dates for launch.  Time for a pass through that I guess!

• Tarisland Launches

Tarisland goes live today, doesn’t it?  Technically it is going live world-wide and will have launched everywhere on the list by the time this post gets published.  At 11am eastern time it was supposed to go live here in North America, the last of its launch regions after Asia, Europe, and South America.

Now here and Free to Play

Derided repeatedly as a WoW-clone in a world where it is tough to be an MMORPG without that comparison, it is available on PC, Android, and iOS as a free to play title.

I have said several times that I wanted to give it a try, if only to see if all this WoW-clone talk had any merit.  But I have I downloaded it yet?  I have not.  Maybe it will strike my fancy this weekend.

Anyway, there is a launch announcement with details on how to join in on your platform of choice.  They have even partnered with an emulator to try and make the game playable on MacOS.  You need an M-series Mac, no Intel models need apply, and there are hoops to jump through, but you could make it happen if you were dying to play.

Finally, looking at that logo, is it Tasisland or Taris Land?

Meh, I’m not going to worry about it.

• Throne & Liberty Launch Date

Amazon Games, fresh off their good times trying to pretend New World isn’t an MMORPG, has announced the launch date for their next venture, Throne & Liberty, which promises to bring online RPG gameplay into a new era.

Throne and Liberty and totally not an MMORPG

Also it is multiplayer.  And a lot of people will be able to play together.  I mean, they literally use the word “massive” later on in the text to describe the PvP and PvPvE experience.  It is almost like it is… I don’t know, another MMORPG?

Amazon, why won’t you say that?  They have literally banished the term from their web site.  They make zero MMORPGs if you believe what they say.

Anyway, a title that I nearly put on the “won’t ship in 2024” list for my new year’s predictions… seriously, it was on there, then I realized I had one too many for the point count, so I removed it, will in fact ship in 2024, landing on September 17th.

So I dodged that bullet.  That and the whole refusal by Amazon to use the term “MMORPG” are the key takeaways from this bullet point.

• Valheim Board Game

Valheim has apparently hit the level of success where somebody felt they needed to make a board game out of the experience.

Please Odin… now in physical form

This will be a crowdfunding campaign and run by another company, which is probably good because Iron Gate has like three devs and they still have a biome to finish some time this decade.   The campaign will be run on Game Found, an off-brand Kickstarter clone for board games which you can find here.

There is a teaser video, but I am not going to bother to embed it because it is 17 seconds and tells you less than I’ve already written.  If you are interested you’ll have to go sign up at Game Found to get alerts as to when the campaign will go live… as they haven’t bothered to tell us yet.

• EVE Online Paragon Store for SKINs

The next stage of the Equinox expansion hit yesterday, which included the launch of the Paragon store in game, which allows you to take those rather pricey SKINs you can make with the new SKINR utility and list them on the market.

Want to buy a lime green Harpy SKIN?

And, of course, it is a mess.  The store front is there and you can do some sorting, but as an online shopping experience it rates ahead of the Pokemon Go in-game cosmetic store, but only just barely, and Niantic at least has the poor excuse of having to work within phone sized devices.

Anyway, you can find it in game… not easily, but you’ll get there if you persist… and read the CCP optimistic take on it here.  Or you can go over to r/eve and see what players think.  It isn’t pretty.

• EVE Vanguard Solstice

CCP’s decades spanning desire to make a successful first person shooter game despite all the signs indicating it is a bad idea carries on with a new round of EVE Vanguard testing which starts… wait, it started yesterday, didn’t it?  Yes.

The Solstice is here… which means it will just get darker from now on

The play test… because it is still in alpha so all two dozen fans will get angry and remind you of this should you criticize any aspect of it… features a second map, weapon SKINs, and… um… well, there is still just one gun, but you can now change its stats with chip sets you can find in game.

The play test runs to July 1st, so there is plenty of time to join in.  You’ll need to download it in the EVE Online launcher because CCP is determined to handcuff this potential corpse to its one viable game.  And, of course, they are offering SKINs to people who join in… which feels kind of odd now that they have blown up the SKIN market with SKINR, but whatever.  That is the bribe they have to offer.

You can read more about it here.

• Hearthstone Perils in Paradise

Finally, over at Blizzard they are cranking out yet another Hearthstone expansion.  It isn’t exactly a “month with a vowel in it” level of phenomena, but they do seem to get two or three out every year.

Maybe the WoW team could learn something from them.

Or maybe not, as Hearthstone goes where it pleases with the lore, with the new expansion being called Perils in Paradise, featuring a lot of perhaps unlikely Azeroth activities on the splash screen.

Perils in paradise

Anyway, among the features of the expansion are tourist cards that act as a conduit to bring in cards unrelated to your class in order to spice up your deck.  Blizz is also introducing catch-up packs, which I think was mentioned back at BlizzCon where I made some joke about ketchup packs… wait, here is the joke… was it worth it?

How this helps you with deck building I don’t know…

Anyway, those are here now.  The whole thing launches on July 23rd and you can read more about it here.

That is what I’ve got for Friday.  Did I miss anything?

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.

• EG7 Sold PlanetSide and then What Happened?
  

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.

• • EG7 – Investor Relations Page
  • Massively OP – EG7 Q4 2023
  • Massively OP – Daybreak sold PlanetSide for $5.9M
  • Game Whisperer – PlanetSide IP sold to Shell Corporation
  • Inventory Full – Games for Sale
  • Massively OP – Daybreak’s DC Universe Online studio Dimensional Ink hit with layoffs
  • Gaming Idustry.biz – Daybreak confirms “less than 15” layoffs

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:

• • Massively OP – EG7 transfers PlanetSide 2 development from Daybreak to Toadman
  • MMO Bomb – Remember How Daybreak Sold the Planetside IP?

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.

• UbiSoft Says Screw You to fans of The Crew

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:

• Massively OP – Ubisoft pulls The Crew 1 from player libraries, encourages them to ‘check the store to pursue your adventures’
• Massively OP – Stop Killing Games is a modern games preservation initiative prompted by The Crew’s cynical sunset
• MMO Bomb – Ubisoft’s “The Crew” Fiasco Is Just One Example Of Why We Need Games Preservation And Physical Media

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.

• Mike Ybarra say Let Them Eat Tips!

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:

• Massively OP – Former Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra thinks players should be able to tip developers for their work
• Rock Paper Shotgun – Former Blizzard boss reckons you should be able to tip developers ‘another $10 or $20’ on top of $70 games

Also, here’s to hoping Mike Ybarra fades into even greater irrelevance so I won’t feel the need to ever mention him again.

• The Strains of Im-Possibility Space

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.

• Pity Poor Naive Lars who Blew Up Embracer Group!  Oops!
  

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.

• Random Rant about Private Equity

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.

• Vox – What is private equity, and why is it killing everything you love?

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.

• EG7 Sold PlanetSide and then What Happened?
  

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.

• • EG7 – Investor Relations Page
  • Massively OP – EG7 Q4 2023
  • Massively OP – Daybreak sold PlanetSide for $5.9M
  • Game Whisperer – PlanetSide IP sold to Shell Corporation
  • Inventory Full – Games for Sale
  • Massively OP – Daybreak’s DC Universe Online studio Dimensional Ink hit with layoffs
  • Gaming Idustry.biz – Daybreak confirms “less than 15” layoffs

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:

• • Massively OP – EG7 transfers PlanetSide 2 development from Daybreak to Toadman
  • MMO Bomb – Remember How Daybreak Sold the Planetside IP?

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.

• UbiSoft Says Screw You to fans of The Crew

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:

• Massively OP – Ubisoft pulls The Crew 1 from player libraries, encourages them to ‘check the store to pursue your adventures’
• Massively OP – Stop Killing Games is a modern games preservation initiative prompted by The Crew’s cynical sunset
• MMO Bomb – Ubisoft’s “The Crew” Fiasco Is Just One Example Of Why We Need Games Preservation And Physical Media

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.

• Mike Ybarra say Let Them Eat Tips!

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:

• Massively OP – Former Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra thinks players should be able to tip developers for their work
• Rock Paper Shotgun – Former Blizzard boss reckons you should be able to tip developers ‘another $10 or $20’ on top of $70 games

Also, here’s to hoping Mike Ybarra fades into even greater irrelevance so I won’t feel the need to ever mention him again.

• The Strains of Im-Possibility Space

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.

• Pity Poor Naive Lars who Blew Up Embracer Group!  Oops!
  

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.

• Random Rant about Private Equity

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.

• Vox – What is private equity, and why is it killing everything you love?

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 a cold Friday in March, I turned a year older this week, and I am in a bit of a mood for no good reason besides being a cranky old guy.  So perhaps it is time for some bullet point bile, broken up into three categories.  Can you put each in its correct place?

• The New York Times to Impose Its New Wordle Order

The self-proclaimed “paper of record” took a bit of time from its nearly non-stop headlines about President Biden’s age to go after anybody who was out there peddling any games that seemed even Wordle adjacent.

A bit on the nose, eh Wordle?

The New York Times bought the game from its creator about two years back.  The game wasn’t original, the concept wasn’t original, and even the name had been used before.  But it became a hit during the pandemic and the Times wanted to expand its word games.  One does not live by the Sunday crossword alone I guess.

This week their lawyers began sending out copyright based take down notices to “hundreds” of Wordle-like titles.

This should have been no surprise.  The Times has a long history of sending its lawyers after any hint of what they consider infringement.  I remember back in the 80s when Infocom‘s company newsletter was called the New Zork Times.  They too received a cease and desist letter threatening legal action and had to change the name lest somebody mistake it for a product of the New York Times, which might cause confusion in the marketplace and tarnish the brand of the paper.

None of the regular sites I hit has gone down yet, but I will keep an eye out.

• Nintendo Shuts Down Yuzu

Elsewhere out on the legal front, Nintendo won its lawsuit against Switch emulator creator Yuzu, who acceded to the mounting pressure from the video game giant who had been framing Yuzu’s intent as being to circumvent DRM, which would put it in line for violating the DMCA.

In addition to ceasing all development and support of its emulator, Yuzu also had to agree to pay all of Nintendo’s costs, which totaled up to $2.4 million by their calculation.

Nintendo has long been as fierce as the New York Times in sending its lawyers after anybody using their intellectual property, including some innocuous fan projects, and vigorously stomping out anything that might cause one less hardware unit to sell.

Anyway, I am kind of sad I missed out on Yuzu because, for me at least, the worst thing about playing games on the Switch is actually being required to play them on the Switch.  I’d much prefer them on my PC.  Alas, no longer and option.

• Apple and Epic at it Again

Epic went spoiling for a fight with Apple and Google a few years back because… well, Tim Sweeney wants to be as rich as possible I guess.  As with his fight with Steam, he just wants to be the person collecting the tax and resents other who got there first.

The fight with Apple has gone back and forth since then and it had looked like things had settled down with Epic getting some of what it wanted, including the ability to have its own storefront.  And then Apple banned Epic’s developer account in the EU.

Sweeney was immediately out with histrionics, but Apple was also declaring that Epic was “verifiably untrustworthy” and would not live up to the developer agreement they had signed.  This will all draw the attention of EU regulators again, who will be wielding their Digital Markets Act, it “tax the US tech companies” regulations.

How do I feel about this?

Survey say… let them fight!

It is hard to feel sad when rich people are fighting to be incrementally more rich.

A follow up about how Apple is embracing the drama and that the EU is its real foe in this battle.

• Elon Invents Blogging

Having chased away all serious, paying advertisers on the Twitter platform… we have Cheech & Chong, Crypto scams (still!), and nazi ads left, and I block all of them besides Cheech & Chong… Elon has been thrashing around trying to find SOMETHING that will make money for his $44 billion boondoggle.  And so they have announced Articles.

From the @write account

You can have BOLD, ITALIC, and STRIKETHROUGH text.  And images!

Freaking amazing, right?  RIGHT?!?

Oh yeah.  Who needs quote blocks or inline links, just give us money and we’ll let you do long form and give them a special icon and tab on your profile.  We totally won’t change our mind in three months and disappear the whole thing the next time Elon has a brain fart, we promise!

I am just waiting until he finally gets around to re-inventing Twitter… a version without him on it.

• EA Jumps on the AI Bandwagon

I mean, EA has a long tradition of being dumb, or at least not being able to read the room.  And they are ramping up to lay off 5% of their staff.  So they have to give the investors SOMETHING to be positive about, and AI is the magic wand currently.  Just say that and Wall Street will love you, right?  So how did EA CEO Andrew Wilson do on that?  Let’s go check over at PC Gamer… and… oh my!

Truth in Headlines

I am not positive the bong hit was verified, but Andrew did ramble on about 3 billion people using EA tools to make games while he painted a picture of a future where EA simply didn’t have to pay any of those pesky creative or technical people who actually make literally everything they sell today.

There was some law of hiring I recall where bad managers only hire people dumber than they are, so when we’re at a point where the CEO of EA wants to fire everybody and I am starting to suspect that we are seeing this in action.  Dumb guy achieves life goal, promoted to CEO and fires everybody.

That is probably being too hard on him.  As we all know by this point, as a public company you must meet the infinite growth demands of Wall Street, and when you’ve got nothing you have to make shit up.  This is a classic “making shit up” performance.  He’ll probably get a huge bonus and lay off even more staff.

• Cataclysm Classic Closed Beta Begins

Finally, Blizzard announced that Cataclysm Classic, which will remake the WoW Classic progression servers now lingering in Wrath of the Lich King into a new world, has started its closed beta test.

Can you re-run a cataclysm?

I’ve actually been waiting for this to show up, having worn out on Wrath Classic after five characters.  However, closed beta doesn’t mean we’re close to actually getting it, and the roadmap that Blizzard put out at the beginning of the year made it seem like we would be into summer before the cataclysm hit.  Still, it is nice to see it is finally in motion.

And on that bit of upbeat news, it is off to get through the day and to the weekend.

Once again I have some bullet points about New Eden related topics on Friday.  The EVE Online login server was down earlier today (I had half a dozen updates in my email from the EVE Status alerts page) but things seem to be up and running, so off we go to the bullet points.

• The Expiration of the Null Sec South Eastern Agreement

A year back, with the collapse of the FI.RE coalition and their retreat clockwise through null sec, where many of the parties landed in the now defunct B2 coalition (though a few kept on going clockwise and passed into alliance with Fraternity and PanFam), there was a question as to what would become of the power vacuum left in the southeast of null sec.

That led to the South Eastern Agreement, in with the major null sec coalitions pledged not to attack, take space, or put allies into that area with the idea of letting new non-bloc aligned organizations get a footing in null sec.  The agreement was set to last for one year, a timeline that ran out last week.  Some details:

• • Reddit – The South Eastern Agreement Details
  • TAGN – Southeastern Null Sec Declared Open to Non-Bloc Alliances
  • Reddit – The Coming End of the Agreement
  • NEP – The South Eastern Agreement’s Final Days in Eve Online

The agreement was not renewed mostly because neither side in the current bi-polar bloc structure of null sec felt it was in their interest.  Pandemic Horde attacked, took space, and put allies into the are during the agreement, letting everybody know they could not be trusted, and the Imperium had no interest in protecting the space or being the enforcer, especially since PH seemed keen to provoke a war out of the situation so they could get their allies to assist.  So the agreement ended.

Did it do any good?  Maybe.  Some groups lived there in fairly relative peace.  Now, however, unless they are well out of the line of fire, they are likely going to have to pick sides or be ground down in the ongoing PH attacks on the Imperium down there.

• A Successful EVE Online Kickstarter

The War for New Eden Kickstarter campaign ended earlier this week as well, with the project successfully funded, bringing up the success/failure ratio for EVE Online related campaigns a bit.

EVE Strategy Board Game

The campaign closed out with a number considerably over their initial goal.

The final totals for the campaign

If you are just hearing about this and feel like you have missed out, you can still put in a post-campaign pledge at the War for New Eden web site.  Some links for those interested:

• • War for New Eden Kickstarter Campaign
  • War for New Eden web site
  • Kicktraq details for the campaign

Now, of course, the question is when are backers going to get this rather large board game with so many pieces and board segments?  The promise is by Christmas, but I will be surprised it that happens, even with 10 months to go.  We shall see.

And what were the other EVE Online Kickstarter campaigns?  There are a number of failed ones including the EVE Online Control Panel, a spiffy bit of hardware, and the badly mishandled Fountain War Book campaign.

And the successes?  Andrew Groen’s Empires of EVE Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.

• Havoc Patch Notes

CCP did a fairly big update that included the return of LP trading and a balance pass through a several ship classes.

Honestly, this felt like something that would have been a dev blog in the old days, but they just stuck it in the February patch notes and rolled on.

There are changes to command ships, marauders, entropic disintigrators, and rapid light missile launchers at the top of the list, along with a host of smaller items.  You will, for example, now be able to pre-heat modules while still cloaked and invulnerable after a gate jump, so you’ll be ready to rock when you break invuln and decloak.

You can find all the updates in the patch notes for February 20th here.

There is also a write up over at TNG about it.

• CSM 18 Winter Summit

I haven’t thought about the CSM since the last election, but they are still at work and went to Iceland for the winter summit.  CCP Swift posted the summit agenda back at the end of January, and we have been getting some updates and peeks into what happened over on Reddit, including the following posts:

• CSM 18 Summit Presentation – Industry Overview 2024
• CSM 18 Summit Presentation: Faction Warfare and Low Sec Iteration Non-NDA
• CSM Summit Updates (Dark Shines, INIT.)
• A little CSM update.
• Another CSM Update, Post Summit

Since the EVE Online news ecosystem has pretty much collapsed I am not sure how much else we’ll hear about the summit.  CCP has run hot and cold on minutes of the meetings over the years, so maybe we’ll get something, or maybe we won’t.

Anyway, it is Friday, the weekend is at hand, and it is going to be warm and sunny here in Silicon Valley, all the better to dry us out after the most recent atmospheric river pass.

Once again I have some bullet points about New Eden related topics on Friday.  The EVE Online login server was down earlier today (I had half a dozen updates in my email from the EVE Status alerts page) but things seem to be up and running, so off we go to the bullet points.

• The Expiration of the Null Sec South Eastern Agreement

A year back, with the collapse of the FI.RE coalition and their retreat clockwise through null sec, where many of the parties landed in the now defunct B2 coalition (though a few kept on going clockwise and passed into alliance with Fraternity and PanFam), there was a question as to what would become of the power vacuum left in the southeast of null sec.

That led to the South Eastern Agreement, in with the major null sec coalitions pledged not to attack, take space, or put allies into that area with the idea of letting new non-bloc aligned organizations get a footing in null sec.  The agreement was set to last for one year, a timeline that ran out last week.  Some details:

• • Reddit – The South Eastern Agreement Details
  • TAGN – Southeastern Null Sec Declared Open to Non-Bloc Alliances
  • Reddit – The Coming End of the Agreement
  • NEP – The South Eastern Agreement’s Final Days in Eve Online

The agreement was not renewed mostly because neither side in the current bi-polar bloc structure of null sec felt it was in their interest.  Pandemic Horde attacked, took space, and put allies into the are during the agreement, letting everybody know they could not be trusted, and the Imperium had no interest in protecting the space or being the enforcer, especially since PH seemed keen to provoke a war out of the situation so they could get their allies to assist.  So the agreement ended.

Did it do any good?  Maybe.  Some groups lived there in fairly relative peace.  Now, however, unless they are well out of the line of fire, they are likely going to have to pick sides or be ground down in the ongoing PH attacks on the Imperium down there.

• A Successful EVE Online Kickstarter

The War for New Eden Kickstarter campaign ended earlier this week as well, with the project successfully funded, bringing up the success/failure ratio for EVE Online related campaigns a bit.

EVE Strategy Board Game

The campaign closed out with a number considerably over their initial goal.

The final totals for the campaign

If you are just hearing about this and feel like you have missed out, you can still put in a post-campaign pledge at the War for New Eden web site.  Some links for those interested:

• • War for New Eden Kickstarter Campaign
  • War for New Eden web site
  • Kicktraq details for the campaign

Now, of course, the question is when are backers going to get this rather large board game with so many pieces and board segments?  The promise is by Christmas, but I will be surprised it that happens, even with 10 months to go.  We shall see.

And what were the other EVE Online Kickstarter campaigns?  There are a number of failed ones including the EVE Online Control Panel, a spiffy bit of hardware, and the badly mishandled Fountain War Book campaign.

And the successes?  Andrew Groen’s Empires of EVE Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.

• Havoc Patch Notes

CCP did a fairly big update that included the return of LP trading and a balance pass through a several ship classes.

Honestly, this felt like something that would have been a dev blog in the old days, but they just stuck it in the February patch notes and rolled on.

There are changes to command ships, marauders, entropic disintigrators, and rapid light missile launchers at the top of the list, along with a host of smaller items.  You will, for example, now be able to pre-heat modules while still cloaked and invulnerable after a gate jump, so you’ll be ready to rock when you break invuln and decloak.

You can find all the updates in the patch notes for February 20th here.

There is also a write up over at TNG about it.

• CSM 18 Winter Summit

I haven’t thought about the CSM since the last election, but they are still at work and went to Iceland for the winter summit.  CCP Swift posted the summit agenda back at the end of January, and we have been getting some updates and peeks into what happened over on Reddit, including the following posts:

• CSM 18 Summit Presentation – Industry Overview 2024
• CSM 18 Summit Presentation: Faction Warfare and Low Sec Iteration Non-NDA
• CSM Summit Updates (Dark Shines, INIT.)
• A little CSM update.
• Another CSM Update, Post Summit

Since the EVE Online news ecosystem has pretty much collapsed I am not sure how much else we’ll hear about the summit.  CCP has run hot and cold on minutes of the meetings over the years, so maybe we’ll get something, or maybe we won’t.

Anyway, it is Friday, the weekend is at hand, and it is going to be warm and sunny here in Silicon Valley, all the better to dry us out after the most recent atmospheric river pass.

We are coming into the Lunar New Year weekend, and CCP is embracing its sizable Chinese user base with some specials in the EVE Online store.

New Eden Lunar New Year

It is the Year of the Dragon and CCP has some dragon themed SKINs and apparel for players.

• New Launcher Mandatory Now

The new launcher became available and was made the default for anybody new showing up back in November because it was required to support the bolt-on addition of EVE Vanguard.  While CCP would remind you about this launcher, you didn’t have to use it.

Well, now CCP says you have to use it.

something, something, new launcher

I have been using the new launcher since November and… it is fine.  As I noted back then, you can configure the login process to behave like the current launcher and drop you into character select the way you are used to.  Or you can leave it at its default and do character select in the launcher.

The news item promises it will move all your credentials over, but it totally failed to do this for me on my laptop this week.  The recommended recourse is to just install from scratch and reconfigure.  That they include this in their instructions means they know they have a problem.

On the topic of problems, they also can’t seem to fix the fact that everytime they update the launcher it disappears from your pinned start menu options and you have to go re-pin it again.  New launcher problems.

• The Ongoing War for New Eden Kickstarter Campaign

The War for New Eden board game Kickstarter campaign carries on.  It is now past the half way point of its 28 day run.

EVE Strategy Board Game

The campaign broke out and almost tripled its goal on the first day and was closing in on 5x by the end of the second, but has since fallen into the usual mid-campaign low interest rut so common when a company doesn’t have a mid-campaign plan. (Or has a plan that is indistinguishable from having no plan at all.)  You can see the halftime slump in progress over at Kicktraq.

War for New Eden so far

The chart will likely end up with a spike in the last few days as people who were on the fence finally commit, but I always wonder if going a full four weeks is worth the effort, especially for a physical box item like this that they will likely be selling as a retail item eventually.  They will be selling this retail, right?

• January 2024 Monthly Economic Report and Minerals

The January MER dropped this week while I was travelling for work.  I will find some time this weekend to do something about destruction, but I always peek in on the economic side as well to check and see if… for example… CCP has managed to fix the isogen bottleneck that has kept the mineral price index up near its all time high.  And did they?

Jan 2024 – Economic indicies

No they have not managed to address the isogen shortage that they created.  Their rather paltry “blue star” strategy appears to have had little to no impact.

But that doesn’t mean CCP is punishing players pursuing a production path in New Eden, right?  Right?

• SCC Tax Increase

Over at TNG Noizy has a post up about the SCC industry surcharge increase that popped up in the patch notes at the start of the month.

The SCC surcharge component of the Industry Job Installation Fee has been increased from 1.5% to 4%.

Yes, that isn’t technically a “tax,” but only because they gave it a different name.  It has the same goal of any take, which is to take money out of the economy and… as any economist will tell you… dissuade people from participating in that activity.  Taxes are disinicentives, and CCP has bumped up this one.  Does that mean CCP wants fewer producers or that they do not understand economics?  I think the ongoing isogen issue might argue for the latter.

Anyway, happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrate!

Blizzard had a few things happen in the last week or so, which means it is probably time for a quick catch up.

It’s a Blizzard in here

I don’t even have much of a side story for the opener.  It is raining here.  That is something, though it is hardly a Blizzard.  Also, “first Friday” is a thing with some groups, a day to go out and have dinner or just hang around with pals.  Sometimes it is a civic thing.  Not something that I have ever observed, but it was either that or a Groundhog Day reference, so let’s move on.

• A New Blizzard President

After the blood letting of last week Microsoft has announced a new leader over at Blizzard to replace the mediocre Mike Ybarra who either jumped or was pushed, depending on who is telling the tale, from the pinnacle at the company.  Either way, he had a golden parachute to soften the blow considerably and is gamely talking about exciting new opportunities as though his caretaker stewardship of Blizz was a monumental achievement.

Replacing him will be Johanna Faries, who starts in the position on Monday, but who has already sent out an anodyne and artificially upbeat company-wide email heralding her arrival.

Faries previously headed the Call of Duty franchise on the Activision side of the house so, while I know nothing about her, she at least knows how to deliver content more than once every other year, something Blizzard and the WoW team could likely learn from.  There are a bunch of new articles about this, but I was most amused by the Venture Beat entry which breathlessly asks if she can save the studio!  SAVE THE STUDIO that is probably still bringing in close to a billion dollars annually.

Save us Johanna Faries, you’re our only hope!

I for one welcome our new Call of Duty overlord!  Please don’t make me regret that statement.

Also, I do wonder if she is getting the Mike Ybarra or the Jen Oneal compensation package, because Mike’s compensation was high than Jen’s.

• A Pet from Prime Gaming

Blizzard once more has something for you in retail WoW over at Amazon’s Prime Gaming.  This time it is a companion pet.

Cap’n Crackers Arrives

Once claimed on your account you can summon your new pet and interact with it.

Sail the seas of Azeroth with Cap’n Crackers. Just don’t say anything you wouldn’t want repeated for the next 20 years. Cap’n Crackers is interactable: if you /whistle at this pet, Cap’n Crackers will sit upon your character’s shoulder. This pet is summonable at any level.

Now, is it any good at pet battles?  Or is it just another generic avian?

WoW Instructions page for collecting this pet.

• Season of Discovery Update February 8th

We already knew that phase 2 of WoW Classic Season of Discovery was coming up in February… next Thursday to be exact… and some of the more general information about it, like Gnomeregan being converted to a raid, but Blizz now has a post with much greater details and it is up on PTR which means the data miners are going crazy.

Josh Greenfeld has some words about the data mining over on Twitter:

I wanted to take a moment to talk about datamining and the PTR.

You will see many things in datamining if you seek it out, some of it is real, some of it is experimental things that will never see the light of day. I’d take all of it with many grains of salt. Additionally, any stats or abilities are subject to change at any time.

Re: PTR – The only thing testable normally on the 1.15.1 PTR is non-seasonal Era and Hardcore, and you may be wondering “Why did you put 1.15.1 on the PTR at all?” and that’s a fair question. The full and real answer is that by having no PTR for the SoD content itself, we put a lot of pressure and stress on our live operations and support teams that help us run the game as we may have increased live support requirements around our launch for any issues that may escape to live.

Having no Era PTR for the patch at all compounds this further because then we can’t catch systemic problems such as server issues and crashes that will affect all versions of vanilla classic, and we run the risk of making the launch unstable for many players.

So don’t believe everything you read I guess… or just don’t go digging into that stuff if you don’t want spoilers or disappointment when things seen do not come to pass.

Meanwhile, in emphasizing the raid-centric view of the WoW team, Blizz was all over social media about how phase 2 would not allow GDKP for raids going forward.  That led me to two questions.  First, what is GDKP and, and second, what is Blizz going to do about it?

Google answered the first, at least somewhat generically.  Blizz, on the other hand, has been less than informative.  But there assumption up front seems to be we all know what it means, what they’re on about, and what they’re going to do.

It is one of those things where Blizz reveals what they care about and who they are really communicating with.  If you don’t raid you aren’t on their radar.

Anyway, even once somebody explained it to me in a jargon free way, I was still kind of “so what?”  But PC Gamer, they assert that this change has SET THE COMMUNITY ON FIRE!

Save us Johanna Faries, you’re our only hope!

• Which Diablo is This Diablo?

In a surprisingly low key announcement Blizzard announced that the first two Warcraft titles, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, were now available in the Battle.net online store, along with the original Diablo.

And I have questions.  We got versions of those, including the original Diablo from GoG.com a few years back.  Is this the same version of the game as that, including the same issues and limitations?  Is this something new and better, or at least something that has updated compatibility.  But over at the Battle.net store it is as quiet as the Sphinx, posing a riddle it will not answer:  What am I getting for my ten bucks?

Which Diablo are you really?

If it was improved I might consider it.  If it is the same as the one on GoG.com, I already own it and am not keen to buy yet another copy of the game simply to get one that is tied to Blizz directly.

And the same applies to the two Warcraft titles.  I can’t tell if this is deceit or indifference on the part of Blizz.

We are coming into the Lunar New Year weekend, and CCP is embracing its sizable Chinese user base with some specials in the EVE Online store.

New Eden Lunar New Year

It is the Year of the Dragon and CCP has some dragon themed SKINs and apparel for players.

• New Launcher Mandatory Now

The new launcher became available and was made the default for anybody new showing up back in November because it was required to support the bolt-on addition of EVE Vanguard.  While CCP would remind you about this launcher, you didn’t have to use it.

Well, now CCP says you have to use it.

something, something, new launcher

I have been using the new launcher since November and… it is fine.  As I noted back then, you can configure the login process to behave like the current launcher and drop you into character select the way you are used to.  Or you can leave it at its default and do character select in the launcher.

The news item promises it will move all your credentials over, but it totally failed to do this for me on my laptop this week.  The recommended recourse is to just install from scratch and reconfigure.  That they include this in their instructions means they know they have a problem.

On the topic of problems, they also can’t seem to fix the fact that everytime they update the launcher it disappears from your pinned start menu options and you have to go re-pin it again.  New launcher problems.

• The Ongoing War for New Eden Kickstarter Campaign

The War for New Eden board game Kickstarter campaign carries on.  It is now past the half way point of its 28 day run.

EVE Strategy Board Game

The campaign broke out and almost tripled its goal on the first day and was closing in on 5x by the end of the second, but has since fallen into the usual mid-campaign low interest rut so common when a company doesn’t have a mid-campaign plan. (Or has a plan that is indistinguishable from having no plan at all.)  You can see the halftime slump in progress over at Kicktraq.

War for New Eden so far

The chart will likely end up with a spike in the last few days as people who were on the fence finally commit, but I always wonder if going a full four weeks is worth the effort, especially for a physical box item like this that they will likely be selling as a retail item eventually.  They will be selling this retail, right?

• January 2024 Monthly Economic Report and Minerals

The January MER dropped this week while I was travelling for work.  I will find some time this weekend to do something about destruction, but I always peek in on the economic side as well to check and see if… for example… CCP has managed to fix the isogen bottleneck that has kept the mineral price index up near its all time high.  And did they?

Jan 2024 – Economic indicies

No they have not managed to address the isogen shortage that they created.  Their rather paltry “blue star” strategy appears to have had little to no impact.

But that doesn’t mean CCP is punishing players pursuing a production path in New Eden, right?  Right?

• SCC Tax Increase

Over at TNG Noizy has a post up about the SCC industry surcharge increase that popped up in the patch notes at the start of the month.

The SCC surcharge component of the Industry Job Installation Fee has been increased from 1.5% to 4%.

Yes, that isn’t technically a “tax,” but only because they gave it a different name.  It has the same goal of any take, which is to take money out of the economy and… as any economist will tell you… dissuade people from participating in that activity.  Taxes are disinicentives, and CCP has bumped up this one.  Does that mean CCP wants fewer producers or that they do not understand economics?  I think the ongoing isogen issue might argue for the latter.

Anyway, happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrate!

Blizzard had a few things happen in the last week or so, which means it is probably time for a quick catch up.

It’s a Blizzard in here

I don’t even have much of a side story for the opener.  It is raining here.  That is something, though it is hardly a Blizzard.  Also, “first Friday” is a thing with some groups, a day to go out and have dinner or just hang around with pals.  Sometimes it is a civic thing.  Not something that I have ever observed, but it was either that or a Groundhog Day reference, so let’s move on.

• A New Blizzard President

After the blood letting of last week Microsoft has announced a new leader over at Blizzard to replace the mediocre Mike Ybarra who either jumped or was pushed, depending on who is telling the tale, from the pinnacle at the company.  Either way, he had a golden parachute to soften the blow considerably and is gamely talking about exciting new opportunities as though his caretaker stewardship of Blizz was a monumental achievement.

Replacing him will be Johanna Faries, who starts in the position on Monday, but who has already sent out an anodyne and artificially upbeat company-wide email heralding her arrival.

Faries previously headed the Call of Duty franchise on the Activision side of the house so, while I know nothing about her, she at least knows how to deliver content more than once every other year, something Blizzard and the WoW team could likely learn from.  There are a bunch of new articles about this, but I was most amused by the Venture Beat entry which breathlessly asks if she can save the studio!  SAVE THE STUDIO that is probably still bringing in close to a billion dollars annually.

Save us Johanna Faries, you’re our only hope!

I for one welcome our new Call of Duty overlord!  Please don’t make me regret that statement.

Also, I do wonder if she is getting the Mike Ybarra or the Jen Oneal compensation package, because Mike’s compensation was high than Jen’s.

• A Pet from Prime Gaming

Blizzard once more has something for you in retail WoW over at Amazon’s Prime Gaming.  This time it is a companion pet.

Cap’n Crackers Arrives

Once claimed on your account you can summon your new pet and interact with it.

Sail the seas of Azeroth with Cap’n Crackers. Just don’t say anything you wouldn’t want repeated for the next 20 years. Cap’n Crackers is interactable: if you /whistle at this pet, Cap’n Crackers will sit upon your character’s shoulder. This pet is summonable at any level.

Now, is it any good at pet battles?  Or is it just another generic avian?

WoW Instructions page for collecting this pet.

• Season of Discovery Update February 8th

We already knew that phase 2 of WoW Classic Season of Discovery was coming up in February… next Thursday to be exact… and some of the more general information about it, like Gnomeregan being converted to a raid, but Blizz now has a post with much greater details and it is up on PTR which means the data miners are going crazy.

Josh Greenfeld has some words about the data mining over on Twitter:

I wanted to take a moment to talk about datamining and the PTR.

You will see many things in datamining if you seek it out, some of it is real, some of it is experimental things that will never see the light of day. I’d take all of it with many grains of salt. Additionally, any stats or abilities are subject to change at any time.

Re: PTR – The only thing testable normally on the 1.15.1 PTR is non-seasonal Era and Hardcore, and you may be wondering “Why did you put 1.15.1 on the PTR at all?” and that’s a fair question. The full and real answer is that by having no PTR for the SoD content itself, we put a lot of pressure and stress on our live operations and support teams that help us run the game as we may have increased live support requirements around our launch for any issues that may escape to live.

Having no Era PTR for the patch at all compounds this further because then we can’t catch systemic problems such as server issues and crashes that will affect all versions of vanilla classic, and we run the risk of making the launch unstable for many players.

So don’t believe everything you read I guess… or just don’t go digging into that stuff if you don’t want spoilers or disappointment when things seen do not come to pass.

Meanwhile, in emphasizing the raid-centric view of the WoW team, Blizz was all over social media about how phase 2 would not allow GDKP for raids going forward.  That led me to two questions.  First, what is GDKP and, and second, what is Blizz going to do about it?

Google answered the first, at least somewhat generically.  Blizz, on the other hand, has been less than informative.  But there assumption up front seems to be we all know what it means, what they’re on about, and what they’re going to do.

It is one of those things where Blizz reveals what they care about and who they are really communicating with.  If you don’t raid you aren’t on their radar.

Anyway, even once somebody explained it to me in a jargon free way, I was still kind of “so what?”  But PC Gamer, they assert that this change has SET THE COMMUNITY ON FIRE!

Save us Johanna Faries, you’re our only hope!

• Which Diablo is This Diablo?

In a surprisingly low key announcement Blizzard announced that the first two Warcraft titles, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, were now available in the Battle.net online store, along with the original Diablo.

And I have questions.  We got versions of those, including the original Diablo from GoG.com a few years back.  Is this the same version of the game as that, including the same issues and limitations?  Is this something new and better, or at least something that has updated compatibility.  But over at the Battle.net store it is as quiet as the Sphinx, posing a riddle it will not answer:  What am I getting for my ten bucks?

Which Diablo are you really?

If it was improved I might consider it.  If it is the same as the one on GoG.com, I already own it and am not keen to buy yet another copy of the game simply to get one that is tied to Blizz directly.

And the same applies to the two Warcraft titles.  I can’t tell if this is deceit or indifference on the part of Blizz.