#298: Carve it up

Hello everybody! And I do mean everybody. Free readers are getting a taste of the full Hit Points experience this week, in the hope of luring a few more kindly souls over the paywall. If you enjoy the nonsense that follows, and fancy getting it in your inbox every Friday for just £4/$5 a month, you’ll find upgrade buttons sprinkled throughout today’s edition. (Apologies to paid readers, who unfortunately will have to see them as well.) January’s always a rough time for subscriber churn, I’ve just been billed for another year of newsletter hosting and, look, every little helps. Anyway, this week’s edition is a bit of a monster, so let’s get on with it. Onwards!

This time last year Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist and analyst much admired by the investor set, published an enormous blog post, The Tremendous Yet Troubled State Of Gaming In 2024. It was over 16,000 words long, and dry as a bone; it took me several weeks to fully work through it. I would switch to its tab time and again, telling myself that, yes, today would be the day I finally polished it off, only to tap out again after a couple of paragraphs because I was bored out of my skull.

Ball has returned again this year, and has mercifully abandoned last year’s format in favour of a PDF presentation. Unfortunately The State Of Video Gaming In 2025 contains more than 220 slides which, while a winningly ironic commentary on the game industry’s obsession with deckbuilding games, is really a bit much. However! I am not a data-viz guy, not at all. Show me a bar chart and I will mentally flash back to A-Level Statistics class. My eyes will glaze over and my thoughts will turn to 17-year-old-Nathan things: Led Zeppelin, Parodius, Anna from my French class, and so on. Thirty years later, little has changed. (Except the Anna stuff. I don't think about her anymore. Sorry, just wanted to make that clear in case Mrs Hit Points reads today’s edition.) Reading the headlines, and glancing only occasionally at the charts and graphs below them, I got through Ball’s magnum Powerpoint opus in less than an hour. Lovely stuff.

And it was a thoroughly worthwhile exercise, on the whole, to the extent that I am almost prepared to recommend you read it too — providing you go in with your expectations properly calibrated. As a summary of how we got here, it is very good; Ball does the hard yards pulling together publicly available data, and reports from market researchers, to lay bare the state of the game industry at a perilous moment in its history. The vibes are bad, obviously, but I closed the tab with a greater understanding of just why the mood is so flat. None of it is that surprising, sure — most of gaming's growth is in mobile; growth in China has little impact internationally; the console biz has flatlined; there are more new games releasing than ever, but most people are happy playing Counter-Strike and Fortnite, etc — but I appreciate having it all written down in one place. 

But if you go in looking for solutions — which given the length of the presentation is not, I would venture, an unrealistic expectation — Ball has pretty much nothing to offer. That is partly down to the fact that the game industry is a hot mess right now, sure; if there was an obvious way out, we’d already have taken it. But it should also be noted that Ball’s track record in this regard is, well, not great. This, after all, is the man who literally wrote the book on the metaverse — a 2022 text widely shared and cited by no end of C-suite goobers, VC fabulists and sundry Valley nodding dogs during the tech industry’s multibillion-dollar misadventure into the shared virtual future they had planned for us, but has spectacularly failed to happen. This is not, I would suggest, someone particularly skilled in the workings of the ol’ crystal ball. A magic 8-ball, perhaps, but even that feels like a stretch.

One of Ball’s ‘growth engines’ (bleurgh) for the future is user-generated content; by way of evidence of he cites Roblox, a platform whose maker has never turned a profit and whose losses widen the more revenue it makes, and whose only real marker of success is its enormous, ever-growing userbase of kids — an audience relentlessly exploited both by the platform’s cravenly user-hostile economy, and the diddlers that have flocked en masse to its unmoderated virtual playgrounds. In a way, I suppose this is fair enough; it reminds us where Ball’s priorities lie, that he is speaking, primarily, to the investor set. Roblox is never going to generate growth in the classical sense — profits, job creation, a positive effect on the world, that sort of thing — but it remains, despite everything, a solid investment. A few months ago, you may remember, a report by the activist short-seller Hindenburg Research described Roblox as ‘an X-rated paedophile hellscape’. Since then, the firm’s stock price has risen by 62%.

Ball also claims there is hope among game-industry bigwigs that GTAVI will retail for $100, allowing the rest of the industry to raise prices in its wake. Now, maybe this is an earnestly held belief among the suits to whom Ball’s report is primarily addressed. On that side of the table, charging $100 for a videogame probably sounds like some bold innovation. But to those of us who’ve weathered the rise of special editions and Premium Early Access, or who’ve spent the better part of two decades being nickel-and-dimed by post-launch DLC, constantly rotating cosmetic stores, gacha mechanics and battle-pass systems, it feels a bit different. $100 games, you say? What's new?

So, in the absence of any workable solutions, we are left to draw our own conclusions. My takeaway from Ball’s 2025 report is much the same feeling I had when I finally polished off last year’s: we have to stop talking about the game industry like it’s this single, monolithic thing. It is too big and too knotty, the routes and measures of success in each sector too variable, and their fortunes fluctuating too independently of each other, for us to pretend they can all be wrapped up together. The fact that it takes Ball 220 slides, or 16,000 words, to properly sum up everything that’s going on out there says it all.

Pretending we are part of a $200bn global industry might have helped when investors were hopped up on their own hubris, leveraging zero interest rates to splash the cash while they chased their next unicorn. But now the funding has dried up, and so much of the game biz is ablaze, it just seems daft. This industry’s traditional heartlands — PC and console games, made in Europe, Japan and North America — are actually a pretty small slice of the pie, but their corporate overlords seem to have been making decisions like the pie in its entirety is there for the taking. We’re bigger than music! We’re bigger than Hollywood! No, actually. We’re not. And if we’re ever going to climb our way out of this hole, we are surely going to have to admit it.  

GAME OF THE WEEK

Ninja Gaiden 2 might not be the best action game ever made, but it is certainly my favourite. You might prefer Devil May Cry; I have always found its style meter a source of stress, a sign I am playing it wrong, and I have never vibed with its emo aesthetic. Bayonetta? Witch Time, while one of the great mechanical innovations of its era, slows the game down too much. Ninja Gaiden 2, by contrast, is a lightning-fast, always-on, cool-as-fuck festival of high-stakes bloodletting in which style is entirely optional and failure is part of the plan, and I absolutely love it.

Until last night I assumed it had been lost forever. Then Xbox’s Developer Direct showcase brought word not only of Ninja Gaiden 4, an all-new series entry developed by the action-game masters at PlatinumGames due later this year, but a full-on Unreal Engine 5 remake called Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, released onto multiplatform download stores the moment the showcase ended. I played a blissful hour or so last night. My skills are, to put it mildly, not what they used to be. But from the depths of my muscle memory I managed to summon the input string for the iconic Izuna Drop and, within seconds, I had fallen in love all over again.

Currently the Ninja Gaiden 2 community is racing through the game, trying to work out how much of the original release has survived the transition to today’s hardware, and how much of it is based on the divisive 2009 revision Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, which made a number of controversial changes to the OG version. Some of those tweaks were necessary, technically at least — base NG2 is notoriously uneven, apparently because director Tomonobu Itagaki resigned in fury before the game was finished, and took a number of the development team with him. But NG2 is beloved not in spite of its many little flaws, but because of them. The flaws are entirely the thing. 

The most memorable of them all is a particular fight set on on a seemingly innocuous stairway. As you climbed, an absurd number of enemies jumped onto the screen — far more than the Xbox 360 could ever have hoped to handle. Creaking under the load of it all, the framerate plummeted into the single digits. This, needless to say, is in theory a bad thing. In the moment, though, it was a beautiful, cinematic spectacle, the frantic ultraviolence slowed right down so you could appreciate its every frame. It almost felt intentional, though it definitely wasn’t. It’s why I’ve bought the game on PC, rather than console; when the moment comes I will turn off DLSS and frame generation, pump the resolution up as high as it will go, and try my damnedest to turn my powerful PC into something more akin to a pocket calculator, capable of little more than a slideshow. I honestly cannot wait.

MORE!

Crumbs, lots to get through this week. The new-year slowdown is well and truly over.

• The UK’s antitrust regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, is having another look at how Apple and Google run their app stores. Legislation introduced last year gives the regulator the ability to designate the two firms as having Strategic Market Status, which the smarter-than-me bods at Eurogamer reckon “would grant the authority fresh powers to intervene in how Apple and Google’s mobile operating systems and app stores are run”. Any excitement at the prospect of a Big Tech clampdown should probably be tempered by the news that the UK government has just removed the well-regarded head of the CMA, and intends to appoint Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK, in his stead. Sheesh. 
• Warner Bros Games boss David Haddad has been given the boot after overseeing a miserable run of form for the publisher, headlined by the $300m loss incurred after the failures of Suicide Squad and Multiversus. Hang on a sec. An executive carrying the can for their own bad decisions? Weird.
• Someone tell Sony about that! The PlayStation maker tossed another game on its roaring live-service bonfire this week, cancelling NCSoft’s Horizon MMO. Here’s a Hit Points conspiracy theory for you: Hermen Hulst has realised he’s got a rapidly shortening window of time before these games stop being Jim Ryan’s legacy and start being his fault instead, and is cleaning house at mach speed while he still can.
• EA has, to use the common parlance, ’slashed’ its forecasts for the current fiscal year. The worst people on the internet have tried to pin this on the sales performance of Dragon Age: The Veilguard — its sales of 1.5m were apparently half what EA had expected — but the real culprit is a holiday-season slump in revenue from EA Sports FC 25. EA now reckons net bookings for the year will be a shade over $7bn, down from the $7.5-7.8bn originally forecast.
• Insomniac bossman Ted Price is retiring from videogames after 30 years at the helm of the Spider-Man studio, which was acquired by Sony in 2019. (An alternate headline for this news: ‘Ted Price has completed his earnout, and will see you suckers around’.) “I felt it was simply time to step aside and let others pave the way for our team,” Price blubbed, mopping his tears with a $100 bill. He will be replaced by Chad Dezern, Ryan Schneider and Jen Huang, all serving as co-heads of studio. I think, but am not entirely sure, that I had a very pleasant, thoroughly jetlagged dinner with Mr Schneider, and Mark MacDonald of Enhance Games, in Tokyo a few years back, and he seemed a thoroughly good sort, so hurrah. (Mark, if you’re reading, please let me know. I simply cannot trust my memory anymore.)
• Marvel Snap was briefly taken offline in the US last weekend, in some unfortunate collateral damage from the US government’s short-lived TikTok ban; the shortform-video hellscape’s parent company Bytedance also owns Snap’s publisher Nuverse. Service was soon restored, but developer Second Dinner is a bit cross, and hungry (ha!) for change. “To make sure this never happens again, we’re working to bring more services in-house and partner with a new publisher,” the studio thundered on not-Twitter. “This is the start of a new era for Marvel Snap.”
• Inevitably, Japanese studio Pocketpair is moving into publishing. The first confirmed beneficiary of its stack of Palworld cash is Surgent Studios, the developer of last year’s Tales Of Kenzera: Zau helmed by Assassin’s Creed voice-chap Abubakar Salim. Good stuff, this, given Surgent’s widely documented funding struggles that left it perilously close to the wall. Salim says the studio's sophomore release, an unnamed horror game, will release later this year. 
• EA is shutting down its widely loathed PC app Origin. Rejoice! The firm has blamed the news on Microsoft ending support for 32-bit software, and warns that players who fail to move across to the marginally less odious EA App risk losing access to their libraries. 
• Cognosphere, the maker of Genshin Impact known in western climes as Hoyoverse, has been fined $20m by the FTC for shenanigans related to lootboxes and children’s privacy laws. While Cognosphere takes issue with some of the FTC’s arguments, it has agreed to the settlement on offer. Not the hardest of decisions given that Genshin Impact was recently estimated to have made $5bn in revenue from China alone since its launch in 2018, and is on track to hit $10bn globally this year. 
• Hit Points got a nice shoutout today in a video from popular YouTube sort Skillup. That’s nice, isn’t it. If you read this, sir, thank you very much!
• Remember Hollow Knight: Silksong? There’s news! Sort of, anyway. Developer Team Cherry told a fan on not-Twitter this week that “the game is real, progressing and will release”. Mmm. It is now more than four years since Edge put that game on the cover. There’s a running joke in the Hit Points Discord, perpetuated entirely by yours truly, comparing Silksong’s lengthy development to The Stone Roses’ struggle to make a second album, but this is no moment for gags. I do hope they’re okay. A very tricky position they’re in.
• In more ‘difficult second album’ news, Celeste developer Extremely OK Games has cancelled Earthblade, an action platformer announced in April 2021. While the project’s downfall appears to have been sparked by the breakdown of relations among the development team amid a dispute over ownership of the Celeste IP, studio director Maddy Thorson says Earthblade’s development had “been a struggle for a long time [...] Celeste’s success applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting.” Very sad. Celeste is an absolute all-timer, and I was hungry for more from this phenomenally talented bunch.
• Team 17 Group, the plc that runs the eponymous game publisher as well as sim outfit Astragon and appmaker StoryToys, is changing its name to the infuriatingly downcapped everplay. Rather distasteful timing given the recent death of co-founder Martyn Brown, if you ask me — as I understand it, they haven't even had his funeral yet — but what do I know.
• On a similarly downcast note, word arrives this week of the death of Jonathan Nash, a brilliant, defining and inspiring UK game critic that a short-trousered Hit Points first encountered in Your Sinclair magazine in the mid-1800s (subs please check). The first byline I can remember being excited to see on a page. John Walker has a lovely tribute, with snippets of Nash’s consistently brilliant work, over at Kotaku. Do give it a read.

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