Category Archives: Commentary
Gaming News Roundup
A lot of gaming news came out this week. Here is what I have been keeping an eye on.
Fable (Feb 2027)
I never got into the Fable series back in the day, as they were XBox exclusives for a long while. Technically, the first and third entries are in my Steam library, but Fable 3 crashing during an auto-save didn’t cut it in 2016, let alone a decade later. What is cutting things, is this 30-minute gameplay trailer.
The systems presented are very gamified, as I am sure the originals were as well, but I was impressed nonetheless with the overall game vibe. “Romance any random NPC” telegraphs that romance isn’t that deep, but maybe that doesn’t matter if you take a shining to a particular barkeep or general narrative. No doubt there will be forum posts detailing RimWorld-esque grotesqueries such as swooning the orphan whose parents you murdered for no reason.
But you know what? Good on them. When you build a sandbox, sometimes you are going to uncover some buried shit.
Anyway, I’m excited. It’s also going to be on Game Pass, so there’s that too.
Palworld 1.0 (July 10th)
After my original forays into Palworld two years ago, I have not touched the game since. While the zeitgeist has moved on, I was waiting for precisely this particular bit of news, e.g. a version 1.0 release. I do not have grand delusions that any developer takes versioning seriously, but if you are going to pick a particular point in time to make final determination as to the quality of a game, I figure 1.0 is about as good as anything.
You can watch the latest trailer here. It has nothing on the very original teaser trailer, but then again, nothing else really could.
Valheim 1.0 (September 9th)
Same deal as Palworld. Played for almost 50 hours five years ago, and stopped once I ran out of Early Access road (and encountered placeholder monster drops). I have some concerns about what I have heard about the Mistlands experience already in the game, but we shall see. Trailer here.
Abiotic Factor: Entropic Break (Autumn 2026)
I almost didn’t include this one, as I am not entirely sure how I feel about it. Specifically, Abiotic Factor is getting a DLC released later this year. Which is good! But I spent nearly 160 hours playing the game already, and I’m not certain whether I want (or am able to be) sucked in back in. Trailer here.
Guild Wars 3, Anti-Hyped
I had intended to make a post earlier in the week, when rumors that ArenaNet were planning a big reveal at Summer Game Fest began surfacing. But since things were going to be revealed on Friday, I figured I may as well wait. In any case, the rumors are true: Guild Wars 3 is a thing.
I could not be any less hyped. In fact, I feel negative hype.
The trailer is whatever. It’s fine. The issue is that this announcement effectively kills Guild Wars 2 for me.
Although I haven’t been posting too much about it, I have low-key been playing GW2 for several sessions each week pretty consistently. My goals have mostly revolved around completing the weekly Wizard Vault quests to earn currency to purchase some of the account upgrades in said Wizard Vault (bag slots, etc), with some farming routes on the side. From a game perspective, both of those activities were in service of working towards additional Legendary items to share amongst my characters. And remember, getting a Legendary means you never have to worry about that specific gear slot again.
…until there is an entirely new game that obsoletes all your work.
This isn’t my first rodeo – I’ve played WoW for more than a decade, and every expansion had green gear better than your raid purples. The continuity though came in the form of cosmetics/transmogs, titles, mounts, toys, Achievements, a sense of pride and accomplishment, gold, etc. There will undoubtedly be Hall of Monuments deal wherein you can get some exclusive skins in the new game for having X or Y achievements in GW2, just as there was coming from GW1, but it is not the same.
I dunno. People still play “dead”/maintenance mode MMOs all the time. Of all the alternatives out there, GW2 remains a fairly unique example of one where horizontal progression means you can indeed do most anything you want to as soon as you hit the level cap. If I were solely interested in exploration or drinking in the scenery or whatever, then there would still be a lot to like. However, I still prefer form and function, and if not for the hitherto meaningful function of Legendary crafting, I don’t see much marrow left on the bones for me. Nevermind how difficult it will be acquiring the hundreds of components of these items once the population winnows down, events fail for lack of players, and economy withers.
We shall see, I guess. Guild Wars 3 is going to launch into beta in Fall 2027. No word yet on any plans for future content in GW2 leading up to that (or afterwards).
About that E33 MoCap
I heaped a lot of praise about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s (E33) character animations already, and yet I feel a bit remiss for not showing what I was talking about. Below is a Youtube link to a “behind-the-scenes compilation of several early-game scenes, which includes both the finished game sequence (sans official voice actors) + the motion capture actors.
I would not consider these to be spoilers, as they occur within the first 5ish hours of the game. But…
In my First Impressions post, I said the following:
Nearly 14 years ago, I was blown away by Mass Effect’s wink, and here in Expedition 33 I just witnessed a character search another’s eyes to see if they truly meant what they said. You know, her face close, the silence, her eyes going back and forth with purpose, debriding the layers of your soul. I don’t know how, but they captured it. The bar has been raised again.
Feel free to watch the whole four-minute video, but the soul debridement happens at around 3:25.
All of it is so ridiculously good that I had to look up whether Sandfall Interactive had invented some secret tech or whatever, because why isn’t every new game coming out like this? Did they pour 80% of their budget into mocap or something?
Near as I can tell… nope. Or, technically nope. Most of the magic outside the performances themselves comes from off-the-shelf features of Unreal Engine 5. So, in many ways the “secret sauce” had a lot to do with being a new, smaller team without a lot of tech debt being able to pivot to an entirely new game engine at the perfect time. As this article points out, most of the work they did in UE4 had to be redone entirely due to the engine differences. One could imagine how much work would be thrown away if instead it was in a custom-made engine. A larger studio with 500 developers with 15+ years of experience on a proprietary engine is thus unlikely to be able to match E33 anytime soon (if ever).
Which… goddamn. Talk about perfect time and place.
In any case, I am a bit more optimistic about the (gaming) future. Sandfall Interactive probably doesn’t quite qualify as an “indie” studio, but I do consider these smaller teams to be the best path through the coming industry implosion. That we get to enjoy premium facial animations while doing so is all the more a bargain.
GameNative
It took me several hours to set up my Retroid Pocket 6 (RP6) with all the emulators and copies of 30+ year-old games. Then I downloaded an app called GameNative, and within minutes had access to over 2000ish of my games across Steam, Epic, Amazon (?!), and GOG. And it is seriously changing the way I look at games and how I play them.
Probably.
In the likely event you haven’t been watching RetroGameCorps or TechDweeb videos for the last year, the handheld gaming scene is having a Renaissance moment. The nostalgia mining element has always been there – “Here is a $80 GBA-looking thing that plays PlayStation 1 games!” – but there are only so many of those veins to go around. Then the Steam Deck came and kind of blew open the more premium tier of handheld devices. In the last year or so, though, there have been some serious developments on the software side of things that allow for Steam to more easily communicate on Android devices without a lot of workarounds. This includes automatically applying drivers and settings and tweaks to get games to function correctly.
I don’t know all the technical stuff, but as Todd Howard would say: it just works.
…for most games. The RP6 I own has a chipset which is the equivalent to a 1050ti graphics card, for example, and only 8 GB of RAM. I’m not going to be playing Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur’s Gate 3 on this thing. However, most of the games I have (by volume) aren’t AAA titles. Hell, I spent like 200+ hours in March playing Mewgenics and Slay the Spire 2. And guess what? Both games fully work on the RP6 and include cloud saves. Granted, Mewgenics isn’t as controller-friendly as I’d like, but still!
As mentioned earlier, all this is changing the way I look at games in general. For one thing, it has me reexamining my entire decade+ Steam/Epic/Amazon/GOG libraries to see if there are games that I may have otherwise ignored/missed that could be more fun by virtue of playing on a handheld.
For example, I just played through the entirety of Celeste on the RP6. Was it a better experience than just playing on my PC with a controller? Probably not. In fact, I ended up purchasing a separate grip for the RP6 because I was getting hand cramps after playing more than an hour straight with the RP6. Although that might be more due to Celeste’s control scheme and precision platforming. The fact remains that I did stick with it and beat Celeste in little 15-20 minute increments in-between meetings, while waiting for other games to load, and eventually just in straight-up long sessions. Celeste is certainly more amenable for this sort of gameplay experience than other games might be, but it’s a proof of concept for me. Plus, as an Android device, the software manages to perfectly (thus far) suspend the game at a moment’s notice if something were to come up.
After reviewing my existing catalog, I have begun to pay more attention to all those ancillary (bundle) sales that I may have hitherto ignored. Just this past week, I picked up Journey and Donut County for just over $3 apiece. I haven’t played Journey in just about 13 years and I would probably enjoy it more on a larger screen… but the fact that I could play it (natively!) on a handheld? Yes, please. As for Donut County, that looks precisely like the sort of goofy fun I wish to be able to conjure up to fill in the gaps between moments.
Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, of course. I was initially excited to finally have an excuse to play Rain World, but everything looks tiny on the RP6 and there aren’t any in-game graphical options to correct it. Slay the Spire 2 has controller support already, but not touchscreen support that I can tell. As mentioned, Mewgenics is playable, but there’s no way I’m going to move the mouse cursor around with a thumbstick the entire game when I just want to move a few squares. I anticipate many such idiosyncrasies as I load into various games.
Overall though, I’m finding GameNative to be a game-changer for me. In many ways, this functionality was what I was waiting for the Steam Machine for. The Retroid Pocket 6 has video out capability, so it technically fulfills that portion too, if I were so inclined. All that is left, really, is to check its MineCraft capability. And wouldn’t you know, MineCraft is on Android and this is an Android device.
So, my guess is: “pretty good.” Better than on Switch? We shall see.
Retroid Pocket 6 and Nostalgia Horizon
I previously purchased and just now received (a month later) a Retroid Pocket 6 (RP6).
The total was $275. “But, Azuriel, don’t you already have two retro handhelds?” I do. “Then surely you are using them so much that an upgraded experience is warranted?” Hahaha.
Here’s the thing: I considered the RP6 a defensive purchase. Do I need it? No, my PC plays everything I could possibly want, including the very games being emulated. But will I always be able to power my PC to play some dumb game or another? Who knows. Plus, prices are only going up.
I’m not here saying that the RP6 is necessarily a prepping item, but I do know that it is a complete package that is capable of playing all the games I have nostalgia for. My prior handhelds could do up to PS1/N64, but the lack of an analog stick made those difficult (despite the PS1 not having a stick…). Plus, you know, it also does Switch, a bunch of Steam games via GameNative, Android ports, and some fancy shit like plugging into a TV and operating like a mini-console. We’ll see how that works out.
That phrase though, “All the games I have nostalgia for,” got me thinking. When I look back, the PS2 is very much the caboose of my nostalgia train. I technically had a GameCube and a PS3, but the library of games I played on those two combined are dwarfed by anything I played elsewhere. I never purchased a PS4 or PS5, nor any Xbox console. I pretty much went from PS2 to a straight PC, playing Battlefield 2, then Magic Online, then World of Warcraft, then a decade-long fugue state and yada yada here we are.
But… why? Why do I feel no nostalgia for games past PS2?
The simple answer that comes to mind is the coincidental end of an age: I had graduated college and started the 9-5 drudgery of adult existence right when the PS2 “ended.” That feels about right. At the same time though… it doesn’t really explain why I don’t feel nostalgia for games like Command & Conquer, Diablo 2, DOOM, and Fallout 1 & 2, all of which I played on PC within that same window.
Is it because the PC “era” more fuzzy? I have changed computers several times over the intervening decades, but still interact with the games using the same keyboard and mouse interface. In contrast, I had to relearn like nine different controller types in that same period. Hmm. Nah, that doesn’t feel like a legitimate reason.
The only thing left that comes to mind is, perhaps, that the nostalgia is tied to specific (social) memories. Games like FF7 blew my high school mind, but it was further cemented in memory when I then started bringing all my friends over to watch the cinematics (after loading one of the many specific save files curated for that purpose). There was nostalgia for GoldenEye after probably a dozen or more weeks of split-screen multiplayer deathmatch parties. Facility + Proximity Mine only = hilarity ensued. I have some very formative (and social!) memories surrounding Command & Conquer that I may share at a later time, but few other kids my age had PCs available, let alone games for them.
Anyway, there it is. Retroid Pocket 6 acquired.
[E33] Back on the Horse
After a quick, 250-hour detour through Mewgenics and Slay the Spire 2, I am back on the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (E33) horse.
It’s a very beautiful horse. Very sleek, powerful. Just wish I didn’t have to muck the stall all the time.
As before, it all comes down to the combat system. In short, I do not find it fun at all. There are certain aspects of the pre-combat planning bits that I do find engaging. There is a ton of customization when it comes to choosing which Pictos (passives) to have active, with synergies and combos galore. Indeed, the whole thing actively reminded me of Final Fantasy Tactics and the the Job system, where you could mix and match certain abilities together. Every time I pick up a new Picto, I start reviewing the whole list and see where it generates new interactions.
The actual battle execution is just not my cup of tea. I’m no longer “punishing myself” by trying to Parry every enemy attack, and just using Dodge instead. This has improved the experience quite a bit, or at least lowered the frustration, but fundamentally combat is still just a long series of Quick Time Events. You have to Dodge/Parry in games like Dark Souls too, but you can also strafe, run away, approach at different angles, and so on, which makes the Dodge/Parry feel less binary overall. Not so in E33.
It also doesn’t help that all the fun and exciting parts of combat are heavily focused on the Dodge/Parry mechanics. If you successfully Parry every attack in a sequence, you gain AP and deal immense counter-damage and greatly increase the Break bar. With the right Pictos, you also heal and get a bunch of other bonuses. Dodging attacks gives you like 1 AP total, if you have the appropriate Picto equipped. Granted, certain Picto combinations can give you AP for face-tanking if you don’t want to press buttons at all, but the point is that very clearly the game puts the ideal “Parry everything” reward front and center. So even though I am progressing through the game just fine, it certainly feels like I’m just not engaging with like half of it.
Which… is probably accurate, honestly. If this wasn’t Expedition 33, I would have stopped playing.
Luckily (?), it is Expedition 33, and I am committed to seeing it through. All the positives about the characters, the emotions, the evocative environments that remind me of Journey are still there. There is something special to be said about a game that compels you to take 5-10 screenshots a session, including of the dialog.
And so, I continue on. For those that come after.
Entry Point
I am flabbergasted how any of us beat videogames as kids.
Little Man has been playing a lot of videogames with me lately, with some mix of modern and retro titles. The struggle is finding what I would consider a good entry point to the medium. Back in the day, we obviously had no choice in the matter – “you get what you get, and don’t throw a fit.” I personally started on the NES with Super Mario Bros and eventually Super Mario Bros 3, but I always remembered how much better Super Mario World felt once the SNES came out. So, having tandem-completed Super Mario Odyssey (twice!), I thought that handing over the controller (or specifically the RG35XXSP) to Little Man and letting him play Super Mario World solo would be a good idea.
Spoiler: it was not.
Even when I took over to help him out of a particularly hard part, I came to realize how much of Super Mario World consisted entirely of hard spots. It is also difficult to fully appreciate how bizarre the concept of holding down the run button 100% of the time is in a platformer. Seriously, just try playing any non-3D Mario game without running. It’s painful. And yet… why build it that way in the first place?
Anyway, I backed off of Mario platformers and introduced him to Kirby instead. Specifically, Kirby Super Star for the SNES. This ended up being a much better entry point, for several reasons. First, Kirby has an HP bar, which means you can take multiple hits from enemies while you learn their attack patterns. Second, Kirby can float, which eases you into platforming elements. Third, you can create an AI companion any time you have a power, which immensely helps you with bosses and surviving the level in general. There were still some tricky bits to the game, but the “training wheels” helped Little Man build confidence and develop controller-based skills.
Once Kirby was exhausted, we moved back to Super Mario Wonder on the Switch. There is a lot to like how Nintendo designed co-op in Wonder. When one player dies, they come back as a ghost that can float around for 5 seconds, reviving if they touch the surviving player. Later on though, there are some levels in which being revived will result in you immediately dying again, and “giving up” simply means draining both players of any extra lives. At that point, I had Little Man play solo and try a given level 3-4 times before he could tag out. It took a while, and I ended up playing the final parts of the game entirely myself, but we beat Wonder a few weeks ago.
The next game I wanted him to try playing was Super Mario 64. “It’s got platforming, but you don’t die in one hit. Should be fine.” Spoiler: it was not fine. In fact, it was one of the most disillusioning experiences I’ve had in quite some time. I remember spending a lot of time with Mario 64. I remember fully completing the game with 120 stars. I remember it being a great game.
What I apparently didn’t remember is the godawful camera. Like, legitimately bad. Even I had issues walking inside the castle, camera gyrating wildly while Mario starts drunkenly spinning in circles. Did the novelty of three dimensions paper over the terrible-feeling controls and camera? I let Little Man play for a bit, and then helped him get a few of the Stars to unlock other levels. I went into the Snow level and then tried the slide race… five (5) times. Never even made it past the first turn. WTF, mate.
Maybe it’s the official Nintendo emulator, maybe it’s the joy-cons, maybe the N64 claw controller was better at that specific task, maybe I’m just older and/or used to other (better) control schemes. Regardless… it just feels bad. It’s one thing to know you can’t go home again, but it’s another driving there anyway only to be surprised at the smoking ruins of your remembered youth.
Of course, there are games from that era and before that do hold up. I have no doubt that Super Mario World will make another appearance once Little Man is a bit older and has more platforming skills under his belt. And once he can read at an appropriate level, there are some classic RPGs that I would love to introduce him to. That said… yikes. I purchased Super Mario Galaxy 1 + 2 recently as a sort of Odyssey replacement (plus I never played them), and I’m starting to sweat. Surely this won’t be another Mario 64 moment… will it? And what do kids even start playing these days?
[Fake Edit] It’s been a while since I drafted this post, but we have since beat Mario Galaxy and are on the tail-end of Galaxy 2. Thankfully, it was not as bad as Mario 64… but it’s still a bit rough. For one thing: holy nausea, Batman! I cannot remember the last game that made me motion sick from its inherent design, but Galaxy’s whole schtick of running across little planetoids has not landed well.
That said, Little Man has made some significant progress in terms of timing and problem-solving in a 3D space. There are some aspects he Nopes right out of immediately – usually having to do with countdown timers and such, which is totally understandable – but there have been a few times where he has completed a full level by himself. Can’t wait to see if I can get him into the Zelda series next.
Game Development is Expensive for Dumb Reasons
The average AAA game costs $300 million or more to develop. And as Jason Schreier points out, all that money is for… salaries.
Exact budgets of video-game productions can be tough to corroborate (more transparency from publishers would be nice!) but the numbers I’ve heard floating around AAA game dev these days are $300 million or more — sometimes much more! — which I think helps explain the current state of the industry
To address some frequently asked questions:
- These are US and Canada productions. If you’re wondering why game X cost so much less, it was probably made elsewhere
- These budgets are almost entirely dev salaries + overheard and have nothing to do with executive compensation (which is mostly stock)
Schreier also has a potentially paywalled article that goes into a bit more in-depth, but the short version is that an employee in LA can cost $15,000-$20,000 per month, when considering the full compensation package (salary + benefits). Average that out and a 100-person team budget is $21 million per year. Double that for a 200-person team, etc. That’s your starting point. Now factor in that the game is going to take 5-6 years to develop, and there you go.
But the question we should be asking is: why does it take 5-6 years to develop a game?
The answer may surprise you!
…or not, if you’ve ever worked on a group and/or work project before. It’s scope creep, mismanagement, executive meddling, and a whole lot of hurrying up and waiting. And not anything about fancy graphics.
Everyone who’s worked in the video-game industry for more than a few years has their own horror story. There’s the feature that gets canceled because the CEO’s teenage kid didn’t like it, or the level that everyone knows is going to get axed but that they all have to keep working on because the cancellation hasn’t officially been communicated yet. Or maybe it already has been canceled and nobody told the audio team.
It’s worth noting that video games do need ample iteration to be good, and some of the most successful games have been the result of so-called “wasted” work. Cuts and cancellations are not always a mistake. But there are also countless examples of teams of hundreds floundering in pre-production as they try to figure out what a game’s “core loop” will actually look like.
The very latest example is Edios Montreal cancelling Wildlands, a game that made it all the way into the final debugging phase before being axed this week. Reportedly, it had been “struggling for years, with 4 different game engines used throughout development, narrative direction conflicts, and a budget that had exploded to several hundred million.” The boondoggle also caused a new Deus Ex game to be cancelled, which makes it extra tragic and dumb to me. Nobody asked for this.
The corollary are games in which devs just sort of muck around or go down blind alleys for 4+ years, and then suddenly a completely different finished product emerges 18 (crunched) months later. My favorite example of this is Mass Effect: Andromeda. Instead of following the winning formula of the epic sci-fi trilogy that created it, the devs thought it fruitful to… have the protagonist explore hundreds procedurally-generated worlds.
“They were creating planets and they were able to drive around it, and the mechanics of it were there,” said a person who worked on the game. “I think what they were struggling with was that it was never fun. They were never able to do it in a way that’s compelling, where like, ‘OK, now imagine doing this a hundred more times or a thousand more times.’”
Nearly all of the shortcomings of Andromeda originated from this outrageous scope, along with being forced to use the Frostbite engine. Plus, all the staffing changes, directors leaving, downtime from having devs in three different timezones working together, etc, etc etc. So maybe a lot of things.
Another example? The as-yet unreleased Subnautica 2. Sure, the obvious issue was Krafton’s CEO trying to personally sabotage a payout to the founders. But a hitherto unreported element to the overall story is how the team was floundering. This part was deep within the court records (PDF):
Despite their distance from the heart of the studio, Cleveland and McGuire’s involvement paid off. In the spring of 2024, McGuire teamed up with Cleveland to build a prototype of Subnautica 2 to help guide the team. When it became clear that the existing leadership structure was not working, the Key Employees made a change. The studio replaced Kalina and elevated Anthony Gallegos to lead designer. “[T]he progress of the game . . . completely took off.” This successful course correction set the stage for Cleveland and McGuire to formalize their new roles.
Now, I’m not going to sit and claim that game development is easy in a Rest of the Owl type of way. Any commercially creative endeavor involves a lot of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. But what I think we as consumers need to start scrutinizing more is the volume of spaghetti, and why the throwers keep getting spun around a bunch of times before the toss. Or why people who can’t boil water and hate pasta anyway are making spaghetti in the first place.
The bottom line is that there’s not a good reason for games to cost $300+ million, nor is there a compelling reason consumers should subsidize these costs with higher MSRPs or microtransactions. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, won 436 industry awards, including Game of the Year, on a reported budget of less than $10 million. It apparently still took 5 years to develop, so clearly the Sandfall devs weren’t making LA money. Nevertheless, try and argue with the results.
Or maybe we just… let nature take its course as the industry winnows itself.
Priced In
If you haven’t heard the news, Sony announced that they are raising the prices of the PlayStation 5. Again. The disc-less version is now $600, and the Pro costs $900 MSRP. Nine hundred dollars. This comes on top of price increases of last year. As a reminder, the disc-less version launched in 2020 for $4001. Sony isn’t alone with price increases, of course, with Microsoft hiking the price of their lagging console several times in addition to Game Pass Ultimate. It seems inevitable that Nintendo will eventually follow suit with the Switch 2, despite trying to raise peripheral prices to compensate.
Meanwhile, game studios have been shedding workers at breakneck speeds. Just this past week, Epic Games laid off over a thousand people (with $500 million in additional cuts) amidst lower Fortnite engagement. Overall, the industry lost 45,000 jobs in the last four years. Some of this is attributed to a post-COVID correction, when apparently every studio hired anyone they could and greenlit even the dumbest of live-service games (Concord, Highguard, etc), ironically chasing (fewer) Fortnite dollars.
The other part of it is simple economics. If the average budget for a AAA game is $300 million, even with no storefront cuts and a price of $80, it would still require 3.75 million copies to be sold to break even. A more realistic figure would be 70% of a $70 game, putting it at 6.2 million sales. Again, just to get back to $0, let alone show any profit. GTA 5 sold 225 million copies worldwide, so yeah, it’s still possible to make bank on certain bets. I’m also guessing that GTA 6 will make back its $1 billion budget.
On the other hand, if people have to buy a $900 console just to play it… I dunno.
This very well may be the tipping point beyond which AAA no longer becomes economical viable. Think about the PlayStation 6, which is assumed to be coming out in late 2027 or 2028. Do you believe the base model will be coming out for less than $700? And if you’re willing to drop that amount of money for the next-gen system, will you be satisfied with games that do not require the level of graphical fidelity it would provide? At the same time, it’s going to be difficult for game developers to hit those break-even sales figures if the userbase is balking at the price of the console.
One thing that I think about is whether this whole trajectory is already “priced in,” so to speak. Game development cycles are 5-6 years long, so it makes sense how all these live-service games, started in the most irrational of COVID exuberances, are simultaneously returning to Earth at terminal velocity. Concord et tal failing is one thing though; Fortnite eating its own tail is quite another. Remember when everyone started releasing MMOs trying to chase that World of Warcraft subscription money? After that development cycle of failure – during which WoW declined all on its own – we did not see a renewed interest in full-priced subscription MMOs. The industry moved on to F2P and live-service.
Well, the tides are shifting again. But where is the next sandbar? Are there any left? And if there is, can anyone afford to build on it again?
I suppose we’ll find out around, uh *checks calendar*, 2031. Just in time for Fallout 5.
1 Inflation puts $400 in 2020 as being $750 today. Which… holy shit. Nevertheless, that isn’t how it normally works.
In An Age 
Stop Killing Games Stopped, Possibly Killed
Jun 19
Posted by Azuriel
You may or may not have heard about the Stop Killing Games movement, which was an attempt to raise awareness and foster legislation around the games industry predilection towards, well, killing games they sold. For example, it is not uncommon these days for single-player games to authenticate or “phone home” on start-up. If the publisher decides to shut down that authentication server, whoops, your game is bricked. Other multiplayer games may feature both online and local multiplayer modes, but will still be nonfunctional even via local connections if the overall game is shut down.
Recently, the movement made it all the way to the European Commission, where it had perhaps its best hope of achieving something actionable. Unfortunately, it fell short.
My title is a bit sensationalist, as the movement continues on along other avenues. In the US, there is the Protect Our Games Act moving forward in the California legislature. Back in the EU, I believe the focus is now on the Digital Fairness Act, where some of the goals may still be achievable.
What I really wanted to talk about with this topic though, is the frustrating counter-arguments surrounding it. Specifically, the sort of “you can’t just legislate that” or “how it is achievable needs to be expressly defined” arguments. Uh, no. As demonstrated by the apparently worldwide age verification push – and insane attacks against VPN usage – shit gets mandated by fiat all the damn time.
I understand that that is… perhaps not the sort of comparison that invites sympathy to a movement. Nevertheless, the sort of reductive, prescriptionist mindset of “you can’t do that because it doesn’t work that way” grinds my gears when, in fact, people have to put up with crazy, non-consumer-friendly changes all the time. See also: Congressional approval for wars longer than 60 days, repaying unconstitutional tariffs, rampant corruption, etc, etc, etc. Just because we have normalized “buying” revokable licenses to play the games in question doesn’t mean we have to accept it forever.
Hell, go nuclear with it: force game companies to replace the words Buy/Purchase with RENT, if it’s in fact just a revokable license. Let GOG and any other storefront that allows for offline downloads continue to use Buy/Purchase, assuming the game can still be played with the servers shut off. “But Azuriel, what constitutes ‘playable’ if it requires 100 TB servers to function?” “What if the devs ‘update’ the game to be Pong in the last patch before shutdown and claim that they made the game playable?” Simple – see ya in court! Maybe have some teeth in there so that there is an automatic refund (to include DLC and cash shop) mechanism until/unless the publishers demonstrate they were in the right.
Things don’t have to be shitty. We used to own things, no matter what the EULAs said. If you still have a functioning Playstation 2 and a PS2 game, you can go play it right now. Warner Brothers doesn’t get to remotely delete the DVDs on your shelves just because the studios merged and then shut down. Your books are (probably) not written in disappearing ink that takes proprietary lamps to display.
“But what about all the potential games this could hurt?” Fuck’em. No, seriously, if the economic viability of your entire design is predicated on smoke and mirrors and otherwise leaving town before the bill comes due, maybe don’t make that game. Maybe nothing of value will be lost.
I dunno, guys. I never played Anthem, even when it was “free” on Game Pass. But it’s gone now for everyone, including the people who bought it, forever. Even though, technically, you could spin up a private server, assuming you don’t get sued. Sure, IP owners own the IP, so if they don’t want to sell it anymore, that is their right; Disney used to “vault” their classic movies on a rotating basis, presumably as a marketing ploy or whatever. If you had bought Cinderella though, you could still watch it. If someone can prove they purchased Anthem, what’s the actual harm in letting them run a copy?
The industry just seems to keep coming back around to having pirates offer the superior version of the product, e.g. one that works. I understand why things are set up this way, but they don’t have to be. Nor do I have to figure it out for them. Maybe fewer $80 game rentals is exactly what we need.
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Tags: Piracy, Rant, Rent, State of the Industry, Stop Killing Games