Everything Everywhere Once A Week (9/30/22)

September 30, 2022

Hello and welcome to the weekly Patreon newsletter, Everything Everywhere Once A Week. This is the inaugural edition, so we’re still working some kinks out in terms of formatting, production, etc. But let’s check out this week’s biggest news stories in video games and whatever else suits my fancy.

This first issue is public so people can get a sense of what this newsletter offers, but further ones will be Patron-exclusive!

E3 is Hellbent on Being Back

The Electronic Entertainment Expo is coming back in 2023, this time run by PAX purveyors ReedPop instead of the Entertainment Software Association per usual. After three off-years, one of which was technically on but online, the ESA has ceded the reins to Reed to better manage an E3 people might want. So far, I can’t say they’re doing a bad job.

Reed has announced that E3 2023 will be pursuing a show that’s more like Europe’s Gamescom, where the public and business sides of the show will be separate. Tuesday June 13 through Thursday June 15 will be business days for press and exhibitors, with Thursday being a hybrid transitioning to public days called “Gamer Days.”

The digital events, the ones people actually like watching E3 for at home, will begin on June 11 and precede the business days. It’s honestly not a bad direction to go and will certainly make it easier for the press to do their jobs.

I was once at E3 taking some demos and doing an interview with a major publisher in their meeting room, which was decked out with the demos along the walls in fake arcade machines. During the interview, someone came in and asked if they could come play one of the many empty arcade machines and was told that they were there just for the press. I remember thinking, man, it must absolutely suck to pay to come here and see this room FULL of empty demos and be told you can’t play them. This should in theory ease that a bit, too.

EA and Koei Tecmo Reveal Wild Hearts

WILD HEARTS Official Reveal Trailer

Announced last week, Koei Tecmo and EA revealed official gameplay of Wild Hearts this week.While it looks quite a bit like Toukiden, Koei Tecmo’s previous monster-hunting game, it is apparently quite different. The developers, Omega Force, say they have been working on the game for four years, which is a described timeline that strikes me as essentially saying “Someone saw how well Monster Hunter World was trending in the west and they greenlit this to try and capture some of that.”

But some of the best games ever released have been iterations on existing, successful ideas so why the hell not.

Wild Hearts is out February 17 on PS5, Series X|S, and PC.

Skull and Bones Delayed Once Again to 2023

Originally scheduled to release in November of this year—actually, scratch that. Originally intended to release in 2018, Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones (previously Skull & Bones but I guess that’s less marketable?) has been delayed four times, this week marking the fifth. The game is now intended to come out on March 9, 2023.

The competitive ship-based combat game has been the subject of a lot of consternation within Ubisoft, with some sources telling me the company needs a morale win and Skull and Bones is unlikely to be it. Other sources within the company think the game could catch on, but they’re in for rough waters (my pun) with the introduction because people have a definite idea of what this game should be and it’s probably not what this game actually is.

Ubisoft says they’re delaying the game due to feedback from the beta, which indicates that maybe those fears have at least so far been well-founded.

Skull and Bones is seemingly ditching last gen systems and is releasing on PS5, Xbox Series S|X, PC, Amazon Luna, and I guess now has been canceled for Stadia. It will be Ubisoft’s first $70 game with no options for a cheaper MSRP.

Oh, Right, Stadia’s Dead

This week, Google confirmed the inevitable, that they’re backing away from Stadia and will no longer keep the service usable after its end date at the start of 2023. The cloud-based gaming service was not the first of its kind, but it was the mega-corporation’s first major stab at creating a gaming competitor to rival other platform holders.

Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you feel about the concessions you have to make in terms of game ownership and preservation — Stadia did not rise to those lofty ideals. The business plan was wonky, the technology was there enough but not quite there enough, and everyone had this feeling in the back of their minds that Google would inevitably kill the service like they do everything else. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy if you like, but Google did just that two months to the day after swearing up and down they wouldn’t do that.

When I first saw Stadia, what I had hoped for was the most interconnected company in the world leveraging cloud gaming in a way no one else would be able to. I wanted to email a level bookmark in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to a friend so they could, from their browser, check out the boss fight I wanted to show them. I wanted to click on a YouTube video of a dungeon in Destiny and be instantly placed there in my own game. These goals may have been too far for the technology to really accomplish right now, but no one else aside from Google would have really been able to make it happen, so it’s kind of a bummer they’re closing shop on it.

On the other hand, it’s also a pretty resounding rejection from the audience. If Google can’t make it happen, who can? I don’t think Amazon’s Luna is really setting the world on fire, though it’s seemingly at least doing well enough to not be taken out behind the shed. Perhaps Microsoft has the right idea that cloud gaming is merely a value-add to an existing service and is not a service in and of itself.

I believe that there’s an avenue for success somewhere, but the value argument of not needing to buy a whole new console kind of washes away under the scrutiny of what you do need: high-speed wired internet, siloing off your userbase, rebuying games or buying them in the first place with no guarantee that you’ll always own them, and just generally unproven technology. Maybe one day we’ll get to that point, but it feels equally likely we just won’t ever.

As we sunset Google Stadia, here’s a question I have to ask: what’s to become of the things that only existed on the service? Are they going to be ported to something else or are they just…gone?

Saudi Arabia Wants to Buy a “Leading Game Publisher”

One of the less-reported stories over the last few years is Saudi Arabia’s encroaching investments in gaming. People point out Tencent quite a bit — something a contingent of people reveled in trying to point out to me as if I both did not know and was also somehow involved — but the human rights track record of Saudi Arabia only really comes up when discussing the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s 96.18% ownership of SNK. Through investment programs, the Saudi government also owns minor stakes in companies like Capcom and Nexon, too.

Now, the government has announced plans to invest $37 billion into the industry, with $13 billion of that being specifically for a “leading game publisher.” I have no idea who that is. There’s a host of publishers they already have money in that would make sense as acquisition targets, but I don’t really have an inkling of who has enough public shares to get acquired like that.

There are some companies that MBS could maybe buy outright with a check, but I am hoping that we can circle back to that human rights thing for a bit here. Saudi Arabia has a lot of different people in it, so we can’t paint the entire country with one brush, but we sure as hell can do that for the government. MBS has inflicted numerous crimes upon his own populace including banning travel, protests, women’s rights, and liberally — one might argue, capriciously — applying the death penalty for minor crimes. If I were writing this paragraph in Saudi Arabia, I do not think I would make it to the end of this sentence.

The crown prince has also credibly been accused of murdering journalists in gruesome fashion, something they freely get away with because we’ve decided international relations are more important than individual lives. Hell yeah world leadership.

Lots of game companies do things wrong. In the interest of time, I didn’t include a story in this newsletter about Nintendo engaging in union busting. I’m far past the idea of telling you what you should support or play or whatever, I’m too exhausted at this point in my life to control anyone besides myself. What I will say is, I hope that any company thinking of taking that check from MBS thinks long and hard about who they’re getting in bed with.

I just want the game industry to have fewer armies and assassins on the payroll.