What's Up With Video Games? (June 2022)

Hey patrons!

I wrote this month's newsletter to you from a coach ride I was taking up to Manchester, which is a bit of a trek from Brighton, frankly. If you're from the UK, you'll know last week saw the largest railway strike in decades and so trains were firmly out of the question. However, in this household we support unions fighting for better pay and working conditions, so I shouldn't complain. It'd just be nice to have had a table to type on. Expect typos.

Let's take a look at some video games reporting, shall we?

Special mention: PMG in the Washington Post, lol

[Read in 9 mins] Meet the YouTubers exposing the dark side of making video games

Nathan Grayson from the Washington Post wrote a profile piece about People Make Games this month and the whole experience was kinda weird, from my perspective at least.

Nathan was absolutely lovely to talk to and I think he's been very kind about our work, so there's no complaints there (although the headline does make me cringe a touch), but more than that, it served as a reminder of how strange – and sometimes uncomfortable – it feels to be interviewed by a journalist.

Telling somebody else your story and trusting them to interpret and communicate it fairly can bring up all sorts of anxious feelings, I found. Not to mention the very legitimate worry that you'll just come across as a complete plonker regardless, as you read back what you've said in black and white.

Being interviewed is partly about giving up control of your own voice and it turns out, I don't love that! And given I'm usually the one asking other people to do exactly that for our work here on PMG, I think that's likely an important lesson to take with me going forward.

But hey, I don't mean to let my anxiety make me sound ungrateful here! I also got to tell my parents that we've been written about in the Washington Post, which isn't likely to be something I'll get to do again, and we also got some fun, moody photos of the team to boot.

Not-E3

I feel like I should have a lot more to say about Summer Game Fest and the live events that have surrounded it, but I came away from the whole thing feeling extremely cold. It's perhaps a sign of the times, as the industry continues to adapt to a new and often remote way of working, but yeah, not much here that got me hot under the collar.

Am I being miserable? Tell me what I missed please.

[Read/Watch in ???] Here’s Everything You Missed at Not-E3

Waypoint have wrangled together a decent list of games/announcements from across most of the various events, if you want to have a quick skim through some of the highlights. Shoutout to Obsidian's Pentiment, which was probably one of my personal highlights.

[Read in 12 mins] Summer Game Fest: The Journey to Evolve What E3 Left Behind

“It was daunting when I was streaming the PlayStation 5 DualSense reveal just off my PC, [because] there was no backup,” he said. “Usually, I’m used to having all these satellites and redundancies and things like that for The Game Awards. So I was like, ‘Hey, I hope the power doesn’t go out.’”

[Read in 3 mins] E3 video game convention will return in 2023, says parent company

E3 will be back again next year, in-person and online, says the ESA. But has video game's biggest, silliest, most corporate show been left behind?

A landmark moment for the US games industry

Okay so this one snuck in at the end of May, but is definitely worth a mention: staff at Activision Blizzard studio Raven Software successfully voted to form a union, making it the first of its kind at a large scale games studio in the United States, despite what appears to have been significant pushback from the parent company itself.

[Read in 4 mins] Gaming Gets Its First Union At A Major U.S. Studio

“Our biggest hope is that our union serves as inspiration for the growing movement of workers organizing at video game studios to create better games and build workplaces that reflect our values and empower all of us.”

[Read in 3 mins] Activision Illegally Threatened Staff, Labor Officials Find

Ahead of this union ballot, Activision Blizzard was accused by the National Labor Relations Board of illegally threatening staff and enforcing a social media policy meant to suppress workers from communicating. Not a great look for a company trying to repair trust with its workforce (not to mention the playerbase) after months of scandal.

[Read in 20 mins] The Human Toll Of Fallout 76’s Disastrous Launch

Speaking of a need for better working conditions in the games industry, Kotaku published a damning report detailing the experiences of several former Bethesda/Zenimax staff who'd worked on Fallout 76 and suffered as a result.

"One QA source recounted how badly they wanted to stop working, despite their financial need. When they almost broke a bone on the stairs, they fantasized about the prospect of being too injured to go to work the next day."

Other bits and pieces

[Read in 8 mins] The Shaky Future of Activision’s Overwatch League

"By the end of the first season, the league wasn’t even able to count on filling seats in its hometown Blizzard Arena in Burbank, Calif. “It was very common to only have 100 people in the audience,” says the former e-sports executive. The company would bus in employees or hand out free tickets to students when it knew Kotick or other VIPs would attend a game."

[Read in 12 mins] Stepn, ‘Move-To-Earn’ Games Try To Convince Doubters They’re Not Ponzis

Motherboard looks into the latest crypto trend called 'Move-To-Earn' games. As is often the case, this whole thing seems built on the extremely shaky idea that new users will continue to join and continue to plough more and more money into the platform. One person interviewed for this piece had already dropped $15,000 on virtual trainers. Yikes.

[Read in 18 mins] Inside the $100K+ forgery scandal that’s roiling PC game collecting

"Before last month, Enrico Ricciardi was one of the most respected members of a niche community of classic PC game collectors, with a practically unrivalled collection of rarities that he regularly bragged about on social media. Today, he’s a pariah in that community, the central figure in a wide-ranging alleged forgery scandal that has changed the way many collectors look at their hobby."

[Read in 4 mins] Loot boxes have mostly avoided the hammer of legislation - for now

"Ultimately, some dominoes did fall -- but only a couple. This week's launch of Blizzard's new F2P title, Diablo Immortal, marks a good opportunity to take stock of where this side of the industry has ended up."

What have we been playing?

Chris - Dicey Dungeons (PC, Xbox, Switch, iOS, Android)

After feeling a little burned out over recent weeks (see earlier comments about Summer Game Fest), Dicey Dungeons has been a delight. Although Anni makes fun of me when she sees me playing it, pointing out that it looks like I'm playing some kind of edutainment kids game designed to help me learn my times tables, I know the TRUTH.

Dicey Dungeons is a brilliantly inventive roguelike in which your character (who is a dice), battles their way through an increasingly difficult set of dungeons while using dice to activate the set of abilities and equipment that you've steadily been building up between encounters. It's a bit of a tricky one to describe actually and I'm not sure I've made it sound particularly fun, but it is. Designed by Terry Cavanagn (Super Hexagon, VVVVVV), it's been a breath of fresh air this month.

Anni - Loot River (PC, Xbox)

The unique thing about Loot River is the ability to move the platform that you're standing on as you make your way through its flooded dungeons. This leads to interesting situations of tetris-like puzzle solving and also provides an additional combat tool. You can charge up an attack and then slam your platform up against an enemy’s, land some damaging blows and then fling yourself back out of range. That feels pretty great!

However, even with this moving platforms mechanic, I have a nagging sense that I want something more. Something about the shunting of the platforms makes me want it to follow some kind of rhythmic pulse. I think that the blocky, beat hopping energy I got from playing Crypt of the NecroDancer is influencing how I want to play Loot River. Although Crypt doesn't have moving platforms, music and rhythm are so fundamental to its adrenaline-pumping gameplay that I'm having similar expectations here.

That being said, I’m not that far into the game and I'm excited to keep on exploring. As I get to grips more with what makes this particular underworld unique, I'm hoping some of those feelings change.

Quinns - Dislyte (iOS, Android)

This month I've been playing Dislyte, an improbably funky and involved phone game where you unlock sexy people (who are Gods!) to take part in fights (which are turn-based!). It's not a game I'd be quick to recommend, is the thing.  I'm actually playing it because I want to learn more about the genre of gacha games.

Prior to the huge success of Genshin Impact, gacha games were a genre that mostly seemed contained to mobile, but your man Quinns can tell which way the wind is blowing. This business model is rapidly gaining traction here in Europe, and I think the upcoming sequel to Genshin Impact, Zenless Zone Zero, is gonna hit like a ton of bricks.

Which is why this month you'll have found me prodding and tweaking my little Dislyte squad, and experiencing the gentle tug towards spending more money. And then a little more money. And then just a little bit more money…