Everything Everywhere Once A Week (5/05/2023)

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. It’s Cinco de Mayo, which a lot of people use as an excuse to pack bars and pretend there’s a reason for it. It always kind of struck me as odd when we celebrated it in schools — not because we shouldn’t learn about other cultures, we should, but because no one actually really explained what it was about. We would just say it’s a Mexican holiday and then eat tacos or something. But also the casual racism of primary education is another subject entirely! This week, we’re going to cover Microsoft, Zelda leaks (not the leaks themselves, but the furor around them), PixelOpus, and more.

Let’s, as we often do, start with Microsoft and a not very good week.

The Ghost of Bethesda

This week, Redfall reviews came out. I have tooled around with the game a little bit, as I preinstalled it via Game Pass the moment it became available to do so, and figured I might as well invest at least as much time into playing the game as I did downloading it. As much as people want the salacious headline of “Redfall is literally the worst game of all time,” the sad truth is that it’s mostly just boring and mediocre. The real bad parts, the bugs, aren’t particularly funny to look at, as they take the form of lost button inputs or scripting errors.

The game was delayed a year, so I don’t believe that Microsoft or Bethesda rushed this out the door out of some obligation to a clamoring public or an assumption that it would do well whenever they released it. I suspect Arkane Austin simply ran out of runway and things that needed to get fixed weren’t given enough time with all the other fires that likely needed to be put out along the way. An extra few probably could have stamped many of those bugs out and put it more in line with the 60FPS patch, but — purely as an informed guess — that was most likely off the table the second Starfield got pushed to September.

Also, like, this is neither here nor there but I’d probably stay away from mass vampires as enemies in games in the first place. There’s a suspected floor of intelligence of vampires cultivated through years of mass media and popular art that is very, very difficult to replicate in an action video game. That’s true even at the best of times, it becomes much more immersion-breaking when their AI itself breaks and they can’t find their way through a door.

But, well, bad games happen. This one is more notable because it’s a big first-party game from a company that doesn’t have that very often. It contributes to a narrative that Xbox fans desperately want reversed, that Microsoft’s best first-party efforts are from smaller out-of-nowhere titles like Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush and the bigger, marketing-driven titles are failing to stand up to the other platform holders’ first-party efforts. Which is, like, true. Whether or not you think that’s not the same game Microsoft is or should be playing, it is true that their current first-party AAA portfolio is not in the same arena as its contemporaries.

That said, let’s talk about why.

Full Spencer

On this week’s Kinda Funny Xcast, Xbox chief Phil Spencer joined in to answer some questions and talk a bit about the overall Xbox strategy recently. Spencer likely expected a more jovial sitdown, but considering Redfall’s reviews and the relative dearth of major Xbox titles recently, it became a lot more interrogative than I imagine he was hoping for when he originally agreed. Still, the Xbox chief is always known for being candid, and he did answer questions in a way that generated headlines and talk about how rare and refreshing it is for an executive to speak this way and admit to mistakes.

For example, Spencer took responsibility for Redfall’s response, stating “There’s nothing that’s more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community, and just kind of watch the community lose confidence [and] be disappointed.”

At another point, Spencer said “We're not in the business of out-consoling Sony or out-consoling Nintendo. There isn't really a great solution or win for us.”

And these are very candid, human things. You tend not to hear this from other media-trained executives that know exactly what to say to keep the market from fluctuating based on a misplaced vocal pause, but Spencer tends to come out every year or so and admit the faults and promise to do better in the directions that Xbox thinks it should go. It kind of helps that the stock market tends not to care that much about the Xbox division.

But, well, among other problems, one issue is that he has done this multiple times. Going back to sitting on a couch with Jeff Gerstmann and taking the brunt for games being delivered unfinished, Spencer does live out the mantra of the buck stopping with him, a sign that Harry Truman famously placed on his desk in 1945. But after enough years of saying it, I’m less concerned with where the buck stops and who is taking responsibility for these things than I am in ensuring these things never happen again. I acknowledge that’s not easy, it’s not like they’re choosing to flick a switch that says “Release unfinished games on it,” but man, it shouldn’t be as hard as they’re making it look either.

I also think perhaps Spencer should not have done this interview at all. All love and respect to my former colleagues at Kinda Funny, but if I were Spencer, I would have canceled for any number of common executive scheduling reasons to maybe come back on a week where you don’t have to explain yourself. This interview won him candid points, but winning those points with the audience means you have to give them up somewhere else.

If I were at Arkane Austin and I were already having just a not-great week, I imagine morale at the studio would plummet when the head of your parent company’s gaming division is out there taking the blame for the game being bad and talking about how you didn’t meet your internal goals. He would have looked silly defending it, too, but also that’s exactly why he shouldn’t be giving an interview the week those reviews came out.

I think what Xbox fans want is for the company to fight on Sony’s turf with the exact same weapons and strategies and see who emerges from a bloody, bitter battle that benefits consumers. I kind of have to respect their decision to not waste ammunition on a war they don’t think they can win. Spencer said in this interview that the worst generation to lose was the Xbox One/PS4 gen, where everyone was building their brand loyalty and digital libraries and wasn’t going to switch.

He’s right and he’s wrong. It was a bad generation to lose, but it wasn’t as irreparable as he thinks. Pretty much every one of these console manufacturers has bounced back from a failure and they largely did so on the strength of the games. Spencer’s correct that an 11/10 game would not get the audience to sell their PS5s to buy Xbox consoles. But multiple high-quality games at a decent frequency? That’s a different story.

All that said, man, I do not envy Starfield. The pressure on that game to deliver right now is actually ridiculous.

PlayStation Shutters PixelOpus

PlayStation Worldwide Studios developer PixelOpus, the small development team behind Concrete Genie, announced its closure today via a tweet. IGN later confirmed with Sony who gave them a weirdly cold statement affirming the closure.

“PlayStation Studios regularly evaluates its portfolio and the status of studio projects to ensure they meet the organization’s short and long-term strategic objectives,” the statement reads. “As part of a recent review process, it has been decided that PixelOpus will close on June 2.”

I suspect this means they don’t make the AAA games that sell 20 million copies and they don’t make GAAS games, so they don’t really fit into the current or future models PlayStation wants in their portfolio.

A few years ago, I got to visit PixelOpus at their new offices located on the PlayStation campus in the Bay area. Actually looking up the preview, I think this actually might have been one of the last trips I took for Game Informer before I got laid off a few weeks later. The visit involved playing the game for a little bit and then taking a tour of the new studio space, which they had moved into a few months prior, and finish it off with an interview with the PixelOpus heads.

Everyone there seemed extremely jazzed about not just the game, but the closer working relationship with PlayStation. During the interview, they spoke about how reaching out to producers and PlayStation contacts to talk was more about walking across the campus or even across the hall to show someone concept art or new ideas. They were excited about it and that excitement was infectious.

I’m glad they got to put out the game they were working on and it’s a shame they no longer fit into PlayStation’s current vision. But, whether it’s because of the timing or that excitement, I’ll probably remember that visit throughout my career.

Tears of the Kingdom Leaked: Is it Okay to Write About?

Excuse me while I pop my collar shortly before putting my head in the lion’s mouth.

This week, an early copy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaked through what is most likely a Collector’s Edition stolen from a store. It soon made its way onto the internet for anyone that wanted to download and play. Undoubtedly this will end with Nintendo finding that person and suing them into oblivion like with New Super Mario Bros. Wii in Australia, but it’s also not entirely unexpected. It’s happened before and the only way to ensure a store gets enough supply of a game on day one is to ship them there early.

I’ve not read the leaks and I’m also not in a position where I would have to make a call about whether or not an outlet I am working for would write about them. My process usually involves asking how something would serve our readers — is this something they need or want to know about? That’s not always an easy question to answer. There’s no right or wrong there, as I might say no and another person might say yes. Hell, different segments of the audience can be served independently and oftentimes contradictorily, so one might be served and another might be aghast. That’s kinda just the way it works.

That said, I do not think there’s anything inherently wrong with writing about the leaks. I think linking to a torrent of the file would probably be a step too far, but otherwise, journalism often looks at information that is publicly available and then disseminates it for people in a digestible way. It’s not about taking part in some company’s PR campaign.

One of the biggest tech reports of the last decade was from someone just finding an unreleased iPhone at a bar and reporting on it. It’s interesting news! It serves the readers! It’s also ethically dicey. It didn’t cross a line, but there’s absolutely some debates that could be had about it. But once that information is out there, it’s out there, and anyone else that reports on it is well within their rights to do so.

There’s also been conversations about blacklists and there’s some deserved ones over the years — cutting out shitty, harass-y sites, removing people that flagrantly break embargo and NDAs, etc. — but there’s never been a case of a justified blacklist that involved simply reporting on things a company doesn’t like. Companies are free to do it, sure, but they should get constant shit over it. That said, I also maybe wouldn’t punctuate my point about blacklists being bad by comparing said companies to nazis, but your mileage may vary.

Other Things:

• There’s a Materia Possessions (Episode 13) this week that went up…right now! This week we talk Jedi Survivor, Roots of Pacha, and a surprising amount about Honkai Star Rail.
• Every single time I break a treasure chest in Jedi Survivor and a new beard or hair style pops out, I absolutely lose my shit. It’s the funniest non-diagetic game mechanic I’ve seen in years. I’m willing to forgive how absolutely silly it is if they intended it to be as comedic as it is in execution.