#347: Belle époque

I was swilling the dregs of last night's final glass of wine when I decided to stay up for The Game Awards. I figured I might as well. My sleep schedule’s been a mess for weeks already, after setting all those 3am alarms so I could get my heart broken by the cricket. Sure, I could just go to bed like a normal person and scrub through the big announcements in the morning, but where’s the fun in that? I settled down on the sofa to see how much of it I could stand; I passed out after about an hour, and woke in a strange position, with a very sore back, at daybreak. Not the best decision I’ve ever made, honestly. Should probably learn my lesson at some point. (I will not, obviously. There's cricket on again next week.)

This was, indeed, another instalment of The Game Awards. The only real deviation from the usual formula was the sight of Geoff Keighley, a man who has persistently refused to acknowledge the dark clouds swirling around the game industry when he takes to his stage, opening proceedings by talking about his own personal annus horribilis. It sounds like he’s had a rough year, don’t get me wrong; his house burned down in the LA fires, and his father passed away in September. Hit Points may not be the man’s biggest fan, but that doesn’t mean he is totally exempt from my sympathies. But it was nonetheless a reminder that, for all his frequent homilies to games, the people that make them and those of us that play and love them, The Game Awards is first and foremost a celebration of Geoff Keighley. “That’s my show” indeed.

For once, that opening speech aside, Keighley wasn't the night's main character. This year it belonged to Sandfall Interactive, French developer of the excellent Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, whose nine wins set a new Game Awards record. The Sandfall mob, there in significant numbers, rocked up in Breton stripes and berets, which I thought was a bit silly until I remembered just how low the bar is at this thing, sartorially speaking. Personally I think that if you’re going to do something like this, you should go all in — baguette, string of onions, Gauloises-smoking accordion player during acceptance speeches etc — but perhaps they’re saving that for their second game. Got to have room to grow, haven’t you. It would take a harder heart than even mine to begrudge Sandfall its success, a first-time independent team no one had heard of two years ago taking on the industry’s traditional big boys and knocking them senseless. For the first time, three indie games were nominated for Game Of The Year; Keighley acknowledged this but didn’t learn from it, once again bumping the Best Indie Game award to the preshow, where it was bafflingly rattled through in a bundle with other unsexy-but-important awards for accessibility, mobile games and esports.

Elsewhere this was largely same old, same old. And I do mean old! There was Hollywood stardust from a bygone era: Mila Jovovich, Tricia Helfer, an apparently ageless Lenny Kravitz and a cringily flirty Miss Piggy. There were big-ticket game reveals, many of them similarly rooted in the past: a two-pronged Tomb Raider revival, a new Old Republic, and a hilariously brazen Yakuzalike from Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi. Every so often Geoff popped up to try and say something deep and meaningful before returning to safer ground, i.e. trying to sell us something. Plus ça change, as they presumably say at Sandfall.

As Hit Points has observed in the past, Geoff Keighley and The Game Awards are never really going to change, however much we might plead and complain. The only change that matters around here is that, each year, the numbers somehow get bigger. The audience grows. The stream spreads to new platforms (this year it debuted on Prime Video, hence the abundance of Amazon ads). And behind the scenes, Keighley sprinkles extra zeroes on his rate card to juice the number that matters more than any other. “Games have this incredible ability to hold us when we’re hurting,” he said in his opening monologue. “To lift us up when we feel small. To give us somewhere to go when the real world feels unsteady.” They also have an incredible ability to net him more than a million dollars per three-minute trailer. If nothing else, at least we’ve helped put the smile back on his face after what sounds like a horribly difficult year. It’s his show, remember, and his platform. The rest of us, Sandfall Interactive included, are merely passing through.

IT’S READER AWARDS TIME!

It is! (Actually, it should have been time last week but I failed to get a newsletter out. Sorry about that.) Every year, paid subscribers are invited to send in up to 150 words about their personal game of the year, with the best entries collated, gently edited and sent out in the final newsletter of the year. If you’d like to get involved, please email me with the subject line ‘Reader Awards 2025’ no later than Friday, December 19. Sorry for the short turnaround! You can take the man out of the magazine, etc. Thank you in advance!

MORE!

• Before I forget, a shoutout for a few of last night’s announcements that I thought were genuinely exciting: Bradley The Badger, a spoofy mascot platformer from Mario + Rabbids legend Davide Soliani; Orbitals, a Switch 2-exclusive Split Fictionlike with a luscious 80s anime aesthetic; and No Law, an open-world cyberpunk-ish thing that is quite the ambitious step up for Neon Giant, developer of The Ascent. Probably some others too, not sure, need sleep.
• One company conspicuous by its absence from last night’s shindig was Microsoft. Probably can’t afford Keighley’s rates anymore lol. Xbox Studios boss Matt Booty assured Variety that there’ll be a Developer Direct in January, as is tradition: “We’ve got a lot of stuff that we’re shipping next year.” It’s! Always! Next! Year!
• The fallout from Rockstar’s controversial firing of 31 employees, for gross misconduct or possibly trying to unionise, reached the UK Houses Of Parliament this week, with our increasingly hapless prime minister Keir Starmer calling it “a deeply concerning case”. Rockstar continues to insist everything’s above board, telling IGN: “Claims that these dismissals were linked to union membership or activities are entirely false and misleading.”
• Activision will no longer release Modern Warfare or Black Ops games in consecutive years following the apparent failure of this year’s instalment, Black Ops 7. Data shared with GI.biz has the game at about a fifth of the sales of last year’s Black Ops 6 on Steam, and while that doesn’t tell the whole story — COD hasn’t always been available on Steam, these days it’s a PC Game Pass freebie, and this year it’s had competition from Arc Raiders and an actually good Battlefield — it’s clearly Not Looking Good over in CODland. Microsoft’s running this thing into the ground even quicker than I thought it would. Some achievement, really.
• Netflix’s proposed takeover of Warner Bros for an absolutely-fine-everything’s-great $82.7bn has some pretty rum implications for Warners’ gaming division. What, after all, would a streaming video platform, that’s already tried and failed to make a go of games on its service, do with all that triple-A stuff? Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters told investors that his firm “didn’t attribute any value” to Warner Bros Games when crunching the numbers on the deal. “They’re relatively minor compared to the grand scheme of things.” Ouch.
• Square Enix’s third-largest investor has had a big old moan about the publisher’s poor performance over the last few years. In a statement, 3D Investment Partners hit out at “a pronounced stagnation in revenue growth and profitability”, calling for a “fundamental reassessment of the medium-term management plan”, and complaining that Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu isn’t returning their calls. Awkward. Better get that Balan Wonderworld sequel out the door asap.
• The parent company of GDC has announced a new game-industry conference, debuting next year in cheery human-rights paradise Saudi Arabia. Best of luck with that. There’s definitely a window for something like this given what’s going on in the US, but my god. Not like this.
• Tekken legend Katsuhiro Harada is leaving Bandai Namco at the end of the year, after more than three decades in the company’s employ. "To everyone who has supported me, to communities around the world, and to all the colleagues who have walked alongside me for so many years, I offer my deepest gratitude,” he sobbed. Happy trails, old stick. Heck of an innings. My first on-the-road assignment for Edge was a Street Fighter X Tekken preview event in That London, at which both Harada and cuddly Capcom mascot Yoshinori Ono were in attendance. Harada walked in, strode up to the bar and ordered a pint of lager and two shots of tequila. It was 4pm. Absolute lad.
• Lastly, some important promo duties for the Hit Points chums. MAILBAG regular Ferruccio’s passion project, an im-simmy rogue-thing named There’s Nothing Underground, launched on Steam this morning; Jump Punch Kick’s sporting deckbuilder Card Cricket Quest has a demo that the HP Discord crew are mildly obsessed with; and Awaysis, the physics-y combat game from Max HP alum Jake Kazdal and the crew at 17-Bit, is available in demo form on the ol’ Xbox (and the Xbox app on PC). Check 'em out immediately imo. They’re clearly all people of taste.

That’ll do I reckon! Sorry again for the lack of email last week. Nothing much was happening in terms of news, my head was full of end-of-year stuff, and while I bashed away at something for a bit, I quickly realised it wasn’t going anywhere. There’s some fun stuff coming your way over the next couple of weeks, which I hope will make up for it. Have a lovely weekend!