Newsletter

#373: Serious hat

Be grateful I don't write newsletters this long.

Hello! Hit Points has been a bit quiet of late; my humble apologies for that. I am finally emerging, bedraggled and frayed, from the busiest few weeks of all my years in game consulting. There has simply been no time for newsletters. There has been very little time for anything, to be honest, apart from hammering my way through a bunch of unfinished games and writing several thousand largely coherent words about them. It’s almost like being back on Edge again, except the games are a bit more rickety and there’s actual money at the end of it.

I learned the hard way that when you’re self-employed — and particularly when you’re self-employed and dealing with game developers — that you cannot afford to say ‘no’ to anything. For a while there I thought I could be master of my own schedule, turning down offers of work because they would clash with another project. But in this line of work, things get delayed all the time. The enquiry for April eventually pitches up in August, and the fates will find a way to ensure it clashes with something else. So these days I’m a ‘yes’ man. I try not to look at the calendar, safe in the knowledge that something will get delayed like always, and everything will somehow be fine.

Ah. Ah and bugger and shit. What’s got two thumbs, a big bushy beard, and suddenly found himself saddled with three projects, all for juicy exciting triple-A things, all kicking off on the same day?

It’s fine. I’ve done it, and I did it well. And to be honest I really needed it. Over the last five years, while I’ve been building up what apparently is these days called a ‘portfolio career’, I’ve often thought of my consulting work as the thing that pays the bills, and the newsletter as the thing that keeps me sane. I might spend most of my week digging into the minutiae of a game’s UI, or combat system, or story or whatever, but when Friday comes I can cast off my enchanted Hat Of Serious Analysis and have some fun, tell some jokes, call some C-suite goon a bellend, etc.

I now realise that consulting keeps me sane, too, because in my experience there is no balm for the soul so effective as talking to game developers about their work. This dates back to my Edge days, when you’d be completely worn down by a deadline or some other everyday disaster, be teetering ever-closer to your wit’s end... then spend an afternoon on the phone or in a meeting room, talking to someone about the game they’re making, and everything would suddenly be right with the world.

The healing powers of this stuff have never been greater, I can assure you. With all these layoffs and closures it is very helpful indeed to be reminded that behind the headlines, away from the investor reports and the endless witterings of AI hypemen and C-suite know-nothings, there remains this cadre of smart, creative, ambitious people doing their damnedest to make cool shit. The last few weeks have been absolutely exhausting, sure, but I feel a good deal better for the experience. (Now it’s over, anyway.) I needed it.

The ‘industry’ might be in the doldrums, but you wouldn’t think it to look at the release schedule, would you? I’ve only been in consulting mode for a few weeks but I’ve already got so much to catch up on. Pragmata! Saros! Titanium Court and Mixtape, and the most stacked May I’ve ever seen still to come. One of the weirder, and in a way the most painful, aspects of the industry’s endless woes is the fact that, from a purely creative perspective, it’s never been in better health. You don’t need to get on the phone, or a Zoom call, with these people to appreciate their healing powers; just settle down in your comfy chair, pick up a controller, and it will all unfold before you. With my avalanche of work finally behind me, I shall be doing precisely that.

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Well that was a bit different, wasn’t it. A bit... upbeat? Let’s hand things over to the game industry, I’m sure they’ll sour the vibe immediately.

Yep, yep, here we go. Nintendo is finally bowing to investor pressure amid the RAMpocalypse and is cranking up the price of Switch 2 by $50/€50/£dunno. Company president Shuntaro Furukawa blamed “changes in market conditions” and “the global economic outlook”, as you do. I imagine there are a number of you who’ve been on the fence about Switch 2, and are wondering whether you should take the plunge before the price rise takes effect in August. I’ve been a bit disappointed with it so far to be honest but look, things will never get cheaper again. It’s just price rise after price rise until we die. And there’s bound to be a new 3D Mario at some point, right? Go for it imo.
Nintendo’s platform-holder rivals have been in absolute galaxy-brain mode this week. Despite both Microsoft and Sony reporting significant declines in hardware sales—thanks, in no small part, to their endless price rises amid the RAM-thing—both have spent the week chuntering about their next-gen offerings. Microsoft stuck up a presentation about Project Helix, which I refuse to watch because it’s 85 minutes long; apparently it’s just a recap of the stuff the firm had to say at GDC, but next-gen VP Jason Ronald says the Xbox crew “will have more to share about Project Helix later this year.” Over at Sony, meanwhile, the company has sought to explain away a reduced revenue forecast for its current financial year on “an increase in investments for the next-generation platform”. Lads! Read the room! And if that doesn’t work, come check my bank balance. Even if I thought a new generation of hardware was necessary—and I really, really don’t—I wouldn’t be able to afford it at the prices you’re inevitably going to have to sell it at. For pity’s sake.
While I’m here, please can we come up with a better word for this nonsense than ‘RAMpocalypse’? I really feel we’re collectively capable of more. Answers on a postcard, please; best one goes straight into the Hit Points style guide.
Sticking with Xbox for a moment, new boss Asha Sharma continued to flex her muscles this week. A management reshuffle has seen a handful of her old buddies in Microsoft’s CoreAI division brought over, which seems rather at odds with her subsequent commitment to “begin winding down Copilot on mobile and stop development of Copilot on console” but I’m sure she knows what she’s doing. She’s also ordered a refresh for the Xbox Series boot screen in shiny new/old Xbox green, which rolls out next week.
All hail Atari, freshly minted custodian of the Wizardry IP. Or is it? Japanese publisher Drecom says it owns Wizardry actually. Bit weird, this; it seems Atari has bought the rights to the first five games while Drecom owns the rest of the series and the underlying IP, but it’s all a bit he-said-she-said at the moment so god knows.
Build A Rocket Boy has reportedly laid off 170 employees in its third round of cuts in less than a year. An object lesson in How Not To Do It, this lot.
GameStop has proposed a $55.5bn buyout of eBay. I’d rather not write about this because it’s just a rich guy fiddling with share prices so he can get even richer but, look, it happened, it’s news and here it is.
Clint Hocking has formed a new studio following his departure from Ubisoft. Hocking left his gig as creative director on a mysterious, and apparently quite experimental, Assassin’s Creed game codenamed Hexe back in February. At his new studio, Build Machine Games, he will seek to finally revive a career that has yielded just one shipped game — 2020’s Watch Dogs Legion — since Far Cry 2 launched in 2008. The greatest reputation-to-output imbalance in industry history, this bloke, and it’s not even close. Probably should have gone his own way years ago.
Speaking of going your own way, EVE Online maker CCP Games is an independent concern again, after buying itself off parent company Pearl Abyss. The deal, which sees CCP renamed Fenris Creations, cost $120m — a shade over half of the $225m Pearl Abyss paid in 2018. How has Fenris raised all that cash? By going cap in hand to the AI scene and making the right noises, obviously. Valley investment fund Omega Ventures is involved to so deep an extent that one of its partners now chairs Fenris’ board; the renamed firm has also entered a ‘research partnership’ with Google’s Deepmind mob in a deal that sees Google become a minority investor. “I’ve known Hilmar for many years and long admired his work,” Gemini’ed Demis Hassabis, Bullfrog alumnus and Deepmind CEO. “I’m thrilled to partner with him and the fantastic team at Fenris Creations to explore new gaming experiences and advance AI research safely inside a player-driven universe as amazingly complex as EVE Online.”
Lastly, happy trails to Nintendo legend Takashi Tezuka, who is retiring from his role as executive officer next month. Tezuka worked with Miyamoto on the first The Legend Of Zelda and his credits list since then is just a laundry list of bangers. Man, once this generation is gone we will never see their like again. All the best, old stick.