Everything Everywhere Once A Week (9/01/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week.The discourse is genuinely pretty rancid this week and it was one of the few times where I was hoping Twitter or X or whatever the hell they call it now actually did go down as opposed to all the times it wasn’t supposed to break but did anyway. That doesn’t stop the news from coming down anyway!

Volition Studios Shutdown

This week, it was announced — well, presumed based on some vagueposting and LinkedIn updates and then announced — that Volition studios, the Illinois-based game developer behind the Saints Row and Red Faction series, is closing down. Founded as Parallax Software, the studio has been around since 1993 with the aerial shooter Descent and had their biggest run of success about 12 years ago with Saints Row the Third and Saints Row IV.

In more recent years, however, the studio has faced somewhat of an identity crisis after the closure of THQ and subsequent acquisitions by Deep Silver and then Embracer/THQ Nordic. Games like Agents of Mayhem and the most recent Saints Row came out to muted receptions and it seemed that Embracer was banking on big returns from the latter, to the point where they did not mince words about the closing studios earlier this year. Volition it seems was just the first to get the ax.

Of course, to put all this on the shoulders of Volition or Saints Row would be silly, no matter how much Embracer wants that to be the implication. The truth of the matter is that Volition’s closure is the end result of a series of ill-placed bets from Embracer, who has been borrowing tons of money from South Korean banks to fund their acquisition spree. There was a belief within the company that revivals of older IP like Kingdoms of Amalur were simply waiting for cult status and an eager audience, but the remasters failed to really stir any audience of note.

Eventually the debts had to be paid off and their prospective reported cash infusion from the Saudi Investment fund failed to materialize — most likely because it would go to paying off acquisition debt and that’s not really how the PIF rolls with its investments — so something had to give. It’s unfortunate that the people who suffer here are the ones who make games and not the people who made the bad decisions in the first place.

Most ghoulishly, Embracer chose to close the studio at the very end of the month, ensuring that no one gets health insurance beyond their employment. Severance health insurance usually lasts through the rest of the month, but not if you lay everyone off on the final day of August.

Reviewers Don’t Really Have Agendas So Shut Up About It

God, I don’t know why this needs to be said, but it apparently does. No one reviews a video game just to give it a bad score. Maybe your small sites where people get paid $5 and a review code for the review, but by and large, no one is risking their professionalism and job to tear down a game regardless of its quality.

If you’re arguing that someone isn’t being completely objective and is subconsciously holding something against a game without being fully aware of it: yeah! That’s humanity, baby! That’s how criticism works, you come in with different contexts and life experiences and you leave a piece of art with different interpretations and thoughts. The people who don’t like open world Zelda should be allowed to review Tears of the Kingdom, people who don’t like guns should be allowed to review GTA, etc. If you’re suggesting you would somehow be immune to this, you’re already disqualified for being too stupid to think hard enough about it. Why should I trust you to review a game when you can’t even display a sense of introspection?

Moreover, this isn’t actually about bias or anything like that. People just have extreme emotional reactions when a thing they like is not liked as much by someone perceived to have authority on the subject. To that I say, get over it. Stop being such a baby. People in life are not going to like what you like to the same extent you do, or maybe will like something you loathe, and you can fill as many diapers as you want until you learn to deal with it.

Sony Raises the Price of PSN By Leaps and Bounds

You ever wonder how platform holders sell hardware for minimal or even no profit? Now you know.

Other Things:

• I’m working on getting Materia Possessions back soon!
• I’ve been watching my wife play Sea of Stars and the game looks very cool. I get the Chrono Trigger comparisons, but I think I’d liken the game more to Golden Sun overall than Chrono Trigger.