prosekhans

Everything Everywhere Once A Week (12/09/2022)

Added 2022-12-10 03:30:51 +0000 UTC

What a week for video game news. Also, what a week for having to lock down my Twitter account, huh? I’m less mad and more just completely disappointed that people on the internet can still act like this in 2022. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let’s leave it at that and you can investigate if you really need to. Apparently the story made it to a few subreddits, which is always what you want to happen when a fanbase goes specifically nuts at you. Anyway, let’s not waste time thinking about people who don’t warrant it when there is so much to actually talk about it.

The Game Awards [Announcements]

We’re not really kidding anyone when we frame The Game Awards as a place for announcements first and tertiary awards second. This doesn’t mean that the winners of said awards don’t have anything to be proud of, but the commercials are usually what turn the screens on and the volume up, so let’s go through a non-exhaustive list of what I think the most exciting announcements were.

Hades II - This was on my prediction list from last week, but I was still pretty excited to see it there, and was pretty surprised to see a direct sequel. Hades is the first unmitigated hit Supergiant has had, so in retrospect it makes sense, but it’s always shocking to break precedent. A while back, I was talking with Supergiant to request that I embed with them for six months or so and write a book about the studio, its past, and its upcoming game. They ultimately refused after some back-and-forth for the justifiable reason that having a guy hanging around and writing about everything they do makes creative waves crash against the rocky shores and even a little bit of that is more than they want. Disappointing, but honestly, having to hold in for months that they were working on Hades II probably would have driven me up the wall.
Armored Core VI: Fires of the Rubicon - Another correct prediction on my list, though it’s hard to take credit for this one as it literally leaked from a focus group earlier in the year. The initial focus group story described the game as a shooter with long range elements and it’s also been confirmed that Masaru Yamamura — Lead Designer on Sekiro and the character for whom Bloodborne's wandering samurai lost in past Yarnham was named — will be directing the game. This might be Armored Core’s big breakthrough moment.
Death Stranding 2 - I don’t know what this game is about but it seems weird so I’ll probably play it. I’d honestly really like it if Kojima followed up on MGSV’s gameplay, which is one of the best stealth games ever made, but I guess we’re walking across America again or something.
Earthblade - The new title from Extremely OK Games, the team behind Celeste, is briefly but effectively shown. This whole game could be terrible and it would still be worth it for the Lene Raine soundtrack, but we’ll have to wait until 2024 to find out if any of that is true.
Bayonetta Origins - I think I am the only person in western media who found all the book keys in Bayonetta 3 because there’s literally a straight up demo for this game in Bayo 3.
Odd, I think, for Microsoft first-party publishing to just completely skip the show. Perhaps they’re trying not to distract from Redfall and Starfield. Maybe they have their own show coming soon. Or whatever they have to show soon might be redundant from their June showcase, where they said everything in the show is coming in the next year, of which we are only halfway through. I’m happy to give them a charitable interpretation, but they really do need to get on the ball soon. At some point, not showing up to the game comes off as mistaking yourself for being in a position of power.
Other assorted thoughts: The first six months of 2023 are jam-packed even if a lot of things get delayed, I can’t believe anyone is still making Chuck Norris jokes, they somehow made a trailer for a Transformers game without showing a single Transformer, Don’t Nod’s new game reminds me of Remember Me, I don’t know what Blue Protocol is but I’ll try it, I am glad we get one last Kevin Conroy performance as Batman but please, please do not market on this.

The Game Awards [Awards]

If you ask me my opinion about The Game Awards as an awards show, it probably changes day-to-day. On one hand, its existence is actually a good thing. We have other awards shows, like GDC and DICE, but a consumer-facing one is also fairly important. I think it matters when the brilliantly-designed (though grodily-written) It Takes Two beats AAA titles for Game of the Year. I think it matters for a wide consumer audience to see Tunic nominated for Best Action/Adventure game even if it ultimately did not win. Maybe most won’t care, but it does open up options and avenues for people to take a look at these things they might otherwise have never seen.

That said, the actual winner selection is probably more like those yearly tales we hear about the Oscars voters than we would like to think, and I say this as someone who has been on the jury multiple times. From a practical perspective, it is impossible to play every game worth playing in a year. Some incredible gems might exist that most games press will never even hear of and almost certainly will never get a chance to play.

The games that win game awards tend to be games that voters most reasonably have played. Xenoblade 3 would never have won, but that it’s a long JRPG from a company that’s incredibly stingy with codes? That it even got nominated boggles my mind. Meanwhile, Bandai Namco and Sony furnished everyone and their mother with enough codes to play their GOTY candidates. Even if you didn’t get handed a code, you were going to have to play Elden Ring or God of War: Ragnarok to participate in your own outlet’s own Game of the Year discussions, to be part of the discourse, or just keep abreast of what the biggest games are.

This is not an argument that those games should not have won, but that they are highly likely to win. I can tell you from experience that, when I’m writing about games, it’s very difficult to find time to play games outside of what I know will be good or worth writing about. I think this is how games that are fine but popular — I don’t want to name any names because I did overall like Stray but, whoops — get into and win categories that feel like they should be flourishing with way better nominees.

You can’t force people to play more than the three most popular games of the year, but until that somehow happens, we’re going to keep getting awards where the bold but flawed will always, always, always fall to their knees in front of the iterative and polished.

The Game Awards [Kid]

As The Game Awards closed out and Elden Ring won Game of the Year (I’ll add, rightfully), one of the strangest moments in the show’s decade-long history happened. A young boy who had walked up with Hidetaka Miyazaki and his entourage and lurked in the back of the stage, grabbed the microphone and ranted some dumb shitposter joke that is only funny to him and his friends. Maddy Myers did a good write-up and interview on it at Polygon and comes to the correct conclusion that this whole thing is absurd and hopefully that kid realizes he’s an idiot.

But I do think the larger story here is that this is embarrassing for The Game Awards. Luckily, this kid seemingly didn’t have anything nefarious in mind. He didn’t grab the microphone and call for violence against a marginalized group, though there appears to be a lot of people grasping at the idea that he was speaking in antisemitic code. He didn’t start wailing on the back of Miyazaki’s head or trying to push someone off the stage. He didn’t have a gun and start shooting to make for the 600th mass shooting in America this year. There are a lot of ways in which it could have been worse.

But that it wasn’t worse wasn’t because everyone did a great job preventing it from being worse. Until he grabbed the microphone and said his inside jokes, no one really knew what was going on or what he would do. It was only this year that the Prime Minister of Japan was murdered by someone shooting him up-close in a crowd. Author Salman Rushie was stabbed repeatedly by someone running up on stage during a talk. That something similar didn’t happen here is mostly thanks to no one intending for that to happen.

I don’t know, it’s hard to scold people for nothing truly terrible happening, but I have to imagine a fair few people learned some lessons about how to proceed next year.

Microsoft vs. The U.S. Government

Another story on Friday is that the Federal Trade Commission officially filed a lawsuit against Microsoft to prevent the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King on the grounds that letting it go through would constitute a monopoly in the video game market. There have already been a lot of takes on this and most of them have been wrong in some way or another, so I’m going to keep this as simple as I can to avoid misinformation and also to decrease the chances of me personally being wrong.

I suppose the first question…well, actually, the first two questions here are “Can the FTC block this acquisition?” and “Will they block this acquisition?” They absolutely can do so. This year alone, the FTC successfully stopped a book publishing monopoly in the form of Simon & Schuster/Penguin House merging and also terminated Lockheed Martin’s acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne, both for monopoly reasons.

Both these cases were also extremely clear-cut. Aerojet Rocketdyne was the last independent supplier of missile components in the country, meaning that war profiteers at Lockheed Martin would be able to do said war profiteering unimpeded by competition from other companies. Simon & Schuster and Penguin House effectively would have eliminated all major contract competition from publishing deals. Authors would have to go through them or no one for nationwide distribution signings.

That’s how we get to the “Will they?” question. The answer there is, well, probably not. This lawsuit effectively has to prove that Microsoft, in acquiring ABK, will have a monopoly over the video game market in the U.S. If they called me as an expert witness to state what I thought on the record, I’d probably say no, they won’t. You can’t own a monopoly on a gaming genre, at least not in legal terms, so even if it were true that buying Call of Duty gives them the entire FPS market, it’s not grounds to block the sale. The FTC is going to have a hell of a time trying to prove that and most likely will not succeed in doing so.

But they should do it anyway.

Yes, this is a use of taxpayer money on something that ultimately probably will not succeed. That said, the FTC should absolutely be using every dollar of its budget to investigate, interrogate, and generally poke every major corporate merger and acquisition they possibly can. An aggressive FTC never would have let Facebook buy Instagram. They should have stopped the rash of hospital mergers under single companies over the past decade, which they’re doing to a great extent now. They should absolutely be reining in the tech industry over its out-of-control M&A spree. Which brings us to the next question: “If there’s no point in winning, what will this actually do?”

One, I think dragging this out another year is going to force Microsoft to make more concessions. Their recent 10-year deal with Nintendo, clearly announced because they realized this suit was coming down the pike, is an example of them needing to give up more to keep it kosher. Sony clearly wishes to remove any kind of time-limit to the deal and the FTC lawsuit may eventually push Microsoft to agreeing to that.

Two, it makes Microsoft wary of doing anything this big again. Picking up a dying Nokia or a VOIP service is one thing. $70B for a company that has caused years of headaches in the acquisition process might push them to keep their investments much smaller from here on out. This obviously suits the FTC, which outright wishes to break up big tech, but is happy to also teach long-term lessons to the rest of Silicon Valley.

Now, for a final question, I’m going to ask something that probably does not actually have an answer — “Is it moral to keep ABK as it is right now?”

I’m a firm believer that the bigger a company gets, the harder it is to keep it ethically sound. The capitalistic pursuit of more money at some point becomes abstract as a goal of its own and you end up with grotesque chimeras made of so many different parts that they’re barely recognizable. Making a big company bigger to the tune of a $70 billion dollar acquisition should feel ethically dubious, and it does.

But there’s also a company of people waiting for Bobby Kotick to get forced into retirement that are going to have to deal with a shitty management structure for at least another year, if not in perpetuity. This sucks for them. I have been told that in off-the-record talks with Xbox leadership, the company’s executives are aware of the task in front of them in cleaning up ABK. I am at least relatively confident, or as confident as you can be in American corporatism, that Microsoft would be a net positive for this company’s workers. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place right now.

There is no perfect solution and thus no real answer to the question posed above. I hope that however this goes, every actor involved gives consideration to how this will ultimately affect people and society, even if just for a moment. And I hope fanboys who are either cheering or booing because they want a win for their team join every other shitty fanboy in a soundproof box at the bottom of the ocean.