Everything Everywhere Once A Week (2/24/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a newsletter driven by your Patreon contributions. This week, I’m writing the newsletter from Atlanta, Georgia while I do research on a book about Yoko Taro’s Nier and Nier Automata titles for Press Run Publishing. That book should, in theory, be out later this year. But before all that, we have some stories to run down from this past week.

Microsoft and Nintendo (And Others) Reach 10-Year Call of Duty Deal

As part of the ongoing and seemingly never-ending Activision-Blizzard acquisition, Microsoft is handing out party favors left and right without trying to compromise the main reasons they’re actually acquiring Activision-Blizzard. A few months ago, they announced an intention to strike a deal with Nintendo for Call of Duty ports on Nintendo consoles and this week finalized the deal with Nintendo and more skeptical parties like Nvidia, with the obvious caveat that the acquisition deal has to close for these things to happen. So, for better or worse, these companies have become stakeholders in the deal in a somewhat indirect way.

Tossing Nintendo Call of Duty has some benefits, such as accessing an audience of 130 million and hoping that Nintendo’s successor system follows suit. Microsoft is also, by their own admission, pursuing the mobile market with the King third of their ABK acquisition and having experience with mobile chipsets like the Switch (and the presumed successor) likely aids them there. But ultimately, the biggest benefit is that it’s a balloon to float when a regulatory body says Microsoft is acting anti-competitively with very little lost to direct competition.

Offering day-and-date Cloud releases of PC Game Pass titles on Nvidia’s GeForce Now service is a bit more of a painful deal, however. While Microsoft may not view Nintendo as competitors for the same market that the Xbox is in, Nvidia is sure as hell in the same market that Xbox Cloud Streaming is in and is a direct competitor for Microsoft. I am not sure if this is an immediate reaction to the Competition and Markets Authority of the UK, which has expressed vivid skepticism about the deal, or just about Nvidia’s own incredulousness about it, but it probably helps to wobble some pins at the end of the lane. For their part, Nvidia has withdrawn their opposition to the acquisition after the GeForce Now announcement, quelle surprise.

I’ve been asked here and there if I think Microsoft will withdraw their bid for ABK in the face of all this resistance and I’m of two minds on it. On one hand, they clearly would not have even attempted to do this if they weren’t insistent upon the need for Activision-Blizzard in their portfolio. When they began this journey, Nadella and Spencer were likely prepared for a lot of regulatory opposition. On the other hand, the CMA has a laundry list of things that would mitigate what they view as monopolistic acquisitions, many of which are going to be completely non-starters for Microsoft. They’re unlikely, for example, to divest themselves of Call of Duty and let an external company run it outside of their umbrella. And if the CMA does not get on board, the deal is just straight up not happening. The FTC can be beaten back, the CMA must be acquiesced to.

Though, who knows? Maybe this is all more intransigence than they thought they would face. At some point, the sunk cost might get to be too much and an Activision-Blizzard-King that has to, say, spin off Blizzard into its own company might not be worth it if it comes to that.

Shinji Mikami Leaves Tango Gameworks

The creator of Resident Evil and founder of Tango Gameworks under Bethesda has confirmed through Bethesda that he’s leaving the studio 13 years after starting it. No reason has been given, but as someone who spent plenty of time close to the situation, I can tell you Mikami has considered leaving more than once. Ultimately he has always decided that Tango would likely get shut down without him, which either means he no longer thinks that, or that it’s not his problem anymore.

There’s been a lot of speculation that he will be going to M-Two, a development house under Capcom that was more or less created specifically to lure him away into working on the Resident Evil 4 Remake. I am not positive that’s the case, but I wouldn’t necessarily be shocked if he did. I think he may be done with big corporations. I could also see him in theory joining Ikumi Nakamura’s studio, as everything about her departure from Tango seemed really fishy.

After Mikami left Capcom and worked freelance with PlatinumGames — he was never an official employee of the company — he has wanted to make a sci-fi game that he frequently described as “a Mass Effect-style shooter.” Bethesda reportedly kept deferring this dream project, insisting that first he provide them a Resident Evil, though his heart was not entirely in The Evil Within according to people I talked to about the subject. Mikami isn’t the type to bear grudges, but I do wonder if he occasionally bristles at Starfield existing when his own game couldn’t achieve liftoff.

Mortal Kombat 12 Announced Offhandedly

During a Discovery-Warner Bros. earnings call, Mortal Kombat 12 was announced as almost an aside among listing reasons for optimism in the coming calendar year. I don’t have a lot to say about this other than it’s probably the worst kept secret in gaming. To the point where I wonder if even WBD thought it had been announced.

I mean, obviously not. But damn, I’ve been on podcasts with people that offhandedly mentioned the existence of this game to me. I’ve talked to people who have been told the story concept and setup! Though one person did tell me a different name than Mortal Kombat 12, so I wonder if that’s true or still to be revealed.

Anyway, Mortal Kombat 11 had a four-month turnaround from announcement to release and I suspect they’ll follow something similar for this game. Maybe a Summer Games Fest reveal with a September release date?

Suicide Squad is a GAAS and That’s Kinda Boring

A blowout reveal for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League took a hefty chunk of this week’s State of Play and it confirmed what we already kind of knew: Rocksteady’s new title is a looter-shooter GAAS. But it’s, like, a GAAS with all of the bad parts and none of the good ones? By all appearances, it’s a straight campaign with a definitive ending to the content, but it’s also always-online, has colored loot, and looks like the kind of fake video game you would see in a movie.

Maybe it’s unfair to hold a studio’s success against them, but seeing the originators of a simple-but-iterated-upon melee combat system that spawned dozens of successors create a bland shooter is inherently kind of disappointing. Throw in the long wait between Arkham Knight and this game’s release, even accounting for things like COVID, and it’s hard to really raise up a lot of excitement for Suicide Squad outside of pedigree.

I’m open to being surprised, but I’ve been open to being surprised for like six years and all that’s gotten me is disappointment.

Nintendo is Not Attending E3

It’s been reported for some time that Nintendo is not going to have a presence at E3 this year on the show floor and Venturebeat has confirmed with Nintendo that they will indeed be skipping the Los Angeles show this year. Citing that E3 does not fit in with their strategy, the company has not announced any alternative plans or if there will be a coincidentally-timed Direct or anything of the sort.

We can quibble all day about why Nintendo isn’t attending — there’s reporting that they simply have nothing to show (I don’t really buy that), or maybe they’re not on great terms with the ESA. I don’t think the reasons matter as much as the fact that even a Nintendo that had reasons not to attend E3 would completely pull out when E3 mattered more.

In other words, the story here is that E3 is not as relevant a show if Nintendo didn’t feel the need to have the floor all to themselves.

Which, well, also isn’t that much of a story. It’s more of a reiteration of a thing we already knew. But it’s still wild to see happening in real time.

Go Watch the Doublefine Psychonauts 2 Documentary

It’s a long watch but I’m pretty sure if every gamer watched the whole thing, we’d get a lot less toxic discussions about video games and how they’re made. Part of the reason those discussions fester the way they do is because secrecy breeds this assumption that greatness comes naturally and easily. Ergo, any game that for any reason looks like it’s struggling in development must not be something worth paying attention to. Which is wrong.

Anyway, go watch the thing.

Other Things:

• No Materia Possessions last week due to me being out of town, so we got it this week! Expect discussions of Like a Dragon: Ishin!
• Speaking of which, you can also find my review for the game here.