#286: On one

Hello! Today, if you'll forgive me a rare moment of self-indulgence, I thought I’d talk a little bit about ON, a new print publication about the ol’ videogames (and the new ones too!) that launched this week. The brainchild of Edge design genius Andrew Hind, it features some of the best and brightest in modern game journalism, and also, erm, me. I’ve written several thousand words of my customary nonsense — about the run-based games, such as Slay The Spire and Balatro, that have consumed so much of my gaming life over the last few years — and am also apparently editor-in-chief? Huh. 

One afternoon towards the end of my time on Edge, I was summoned to a strategy meeting with some of the editorial higher-ups, and was asked what I thought, in a perfect world, the future of the magazine — and, in a way, of print in general — ought to look like. I'd been thinking about this for a while, and let loose. You would dial back the cadence, turning a four-weekly production cycle into a quarterly, biannual or even annual one; you’d vastly increase the page count, and ramp up the production values. You would abandon any pretence at timeliness and embrace slow journalism, talking about the past, present and future of your chosen subject matter on your own schedule, in your own terms. You’d sell direct to consumers, cutting out retailer middlemen and eliminating commercial considerations. And you’d fuck off all the ads, thank god. It’d cost more and take longer to make, sure. It’d be more expensive to the end user. But it’d be a better product, made in far healthier circumstances, and a more sustainable business model.

Obviously I was politely sent on my way. (I later realised they were looking for quick fixes, the sort of overnight tweak that could do for the print side of the business what programmatic advertising had done for the online bods, and here was me pitching what was effectively a complete corporate and commercial restructuring. Fair enough, really.) But the idea stuck with me, and when Andrew mentioned over a catch-up lunch last year that he was starting to feel the itch again — that he was thinking about making a new magazine, and that perhaps I might like to make it too — the ol’ cogs started turning. Why not give it a go?

Our goals for ON are, to my mind at least, quite simple. Gather up a bunch of writers we like, and invite them to write the feature of their dreams. Give them lavishly long deadlines and pay them a decent rate. Marry it all with Andrew’s incredible eye for a page layout, stick it in an absurdly beautiful print product, and sell it directly to readers through something called a ‘website’ (weird). So that is what we did. It seems to be going down quite well.

There’s an alternate-universe version of this post where I frame ON as being the saviour of game magazines, of the games media more broadly, or of print as a medium; putting it in the context of the long decline of newsstand sales, the recent closures of Game Informer and Play, and the wider malaise that’s caused so many job losses in the online media over the last year or two. If I had any kind of marketing brain I might consider that a decent strategy, but it’s fucking gross, and I don’t believe it in any case. This is, at its core, about two old friends wanting to work together again, and to do so in a way that lets us do all the things we always loved about making magazines, in a healthier way than we used to. Personally speaking, I just wanted to make good shit with cool people again. I work largely alone these days, and that’s fine; it’s interesting work and I’m good at it, and in any case, other people are kind of annoying. But there’s something very special about collaborating with smart folks who have good ideas, and the talent to do those ideas justice. I didn’t realise quite how much I’d missed it.

Whether it sells or not, whether this is a one-off or the start of something bigger, remains to be seen, but for now I'm happy enough just to have made the thing. It’s UK-only for the moment — a disappointment, I realise, given Hit Points’ surprising international reach, but we’re hoping to sort something out on that front in due course. To those of you who’ve picked it up, thank you so much, and if you have a moment I’d love to hear what you make of it. You can email me any time here. 

GAME OF THE WEEK

An unexpectedly busy week of consulting work (yay!) has meant I’m only 15 or so hours into Metaphor Refantazio, the screamingly terribly named new JRPG from the team behind the Persona series. To my surprise, I am quite disappointed that I have not been able to play more of it. Fifteen hours is usually more than enough time for me to spend in a JRPG; enough time to appreciate the richness of the world and the systems, to get my head around the combat, then realise it’s not for me, put it to one side and move on. I respect the craftsmanship on show in this genre of games, but never really love them, and in the course of my 40-odd years playing games I reckon I could count the number of them I’ve actually finished on the fingers of one hand. Last week Hit Points chum (and ON contributor!) Keza MacDonald described JRPGs as “the operas of the videogame world” and yes, I agree with that, in the sense that they are very noisy, and far too long, and I’m never entirely sure I understand what’s going on in them. (Not entirely sure that was Keza’s point, admittedly.) But Metaphor? It's early days, of course. But I think this might be the one that sticks.

I have always liked the rhythm of the Persona games — the way they limit you to a certain number of activities per day, and put a fixed deadline on your calendar for the next big narrative beat to make you think carefully about how you use your time — but as the years roll by I find myself progressively less interested in their style and set dressing. My high-school days are an increasingly distant memory; if I wanted to hear about the travails of modern youth I would simply take the padlock off the dungeon door and let the children out for half an hour. Metaphor, though, is built on some rather more mature themes — it is ultimately a game about politics, based around an election campaign in a fantasy world rife with racism and demagoguery — and while much of it is delivered with a rather sixth-formy sledgehammer subtlety, it is at least more my sort of thing than a Persona game's surprise Maths test followed by an afternoon trip to the mall. And, praise the sun, there are no romance options, as far as I can tell. (Even as a younger man, that side of Persona made me feel like a right old perv. These days it makes me feel like my name ought to be on some sort of list.) Anyway, I like it an awful lot. Apparently there's 100 hours of game in here before you reach the credits; let's see how much of that these jaded old bones can endure.

MORE!

• French publisher Don’t Nod is is unfortunately in all sorts of bother. The firm has blamed “deteriorating results […] in an increasingly demanding and competitive ecosystem” for an abruptly announced restructure that will put 69 jobs at risk. Sad stuff, this. Jusant was such a banger.
• That’s nothing compared to Bandai Namco, which according to Bloomberg is trying to engineer a workforce reduction without falling foul of Japanese employment law, after cancelling a number of unannounced projects. Supposedly the publisher is “sending workers to rooms where they are given nothing to do, putting pressure on them to leave voluntarily”. Crumbs. 
• More than a fifth of all venture-capital funding raised by videogame firms last quarter went to companies “related to or referencing [ML]”, it says here, which is more than double the amount from the previous quarter. Ugh. The slight silver lining is that there’s less money being pumped into this dreck than there was going into blockchain in 2021. 
• IO Interactive is publishing MindsEye, the action-adventure-thriller-thing in the works at GTA legend Lezlie Benzies’ studio Build A Rocket Boy. “There is no finer partner to publish our first title,” the Benz honked. Righto. 
• Unity 6 launched this week. Does anyone care? New CEO Matt Bromberg certainly does, saying he wants to see the engine “at the heart of game development for years to come”. Stop laughing at the back!
• Craig Duncan, hitherto boss of Rare, has been promoted to head of Xbox Game Studios. Rare has, of course, shipped just one new game in the last decade, making Duncan the perfect candidate to oversee Xbox’s famously prolific studio operation. (Sorry, cheap shot, couldn’t resist. Met him once and he seemed very nice.) 
• The Analogue 3D looks absolutely sumptuous, but is $250 worth it for what will probably turn out to be a single afternoon of Snowboard Kids multiplayer with the wife and kids? Probably, actually. I am going to hide my wallet before I uncork the first drink of the weekend, when such mistakes are most commonly made.
• Your weekend treats: the EGM Compendium; some satisfying bricklaying; a highly desirable Witcher kids’ book; and the most disgusting Xbox special edition you’ll ever see. An absolute hate crime, that last one. God.

There you go! Sorry for the self-promo, which I hate and am terrible at, but I genuinely thought/hoped you all might be interested in the thought process behind it all. I am now tired and will retire to an easy chair, with a tall glass of something nice. Have a grand weekend, whatever it has in store, and I’ll see you all next time. Bye!