#383: Paradise lost

Hit Points is five years old! To celebrate this landmark occasion, for a short time you can get 55% off an annual subscription — the biggest discount this humble newsletter has ever offered, by a mile. The offer ends next week! Get in there quick!

We all understand by this point that, across the game industry, everyone is terrified of GTAVI. Rockstar’s billion-dollar opus was nowhere to be seen at not-E3 earlier this month, yet it was simultaneously everywhere, its spectre looming over every showcase, trailer and press release, the condensing of what felt at the time like the entire Q4 release schedule into the month of September making clear just how scared game companies are of straying too close to the sales black hole of the biggest game of the generation.

Yet amidst all that fear, all that that desperate running for cover, the game industry is also desperate for GTAVI to finally arrive. Platform holders hope it will juice the sales of their consoles, as mainstream consumers, so naturally put off by a generation of price rises, find the game’s lure irresistible and finally take the plunge. Publishers are hoping for that too, given the knock-on effect it will have on their games’ addressable markets, while studios hope that a long-overdue upturn in the wider industry’s fortunes will spark a new surge in investment funding. And the media? Hoo boy, they are absolutely clucking for it. There’s an argument they need it more than anyone.

It is hard to overstate the impact of GTAVI on the fortunes of the modern games media. Indeed, it is impossible to overstate how big an impact it has already had, its repeated lengthy delays cratering traffic forecasts and playing a huge, perhaps even defining role in the widespread layoffs, consolidations and closures the media has suffered of late. The consensus view for the media, like for the industry, is that GTA will reverse fortunes overnight. That it will bring, for the first time since Covid, a mainstream, massmarket audience to specialist websites, hungry to find out if the game is any good, where it can be had cheapest and, most of all, how to play it. Guides teams, for years now the beating, traffic-generating heart of corporate games media, will have a field day. Throughout the week of launch and for many weeks thereafter, stuck players will turn to search engines for assistance. The traffic (and therefore ad revenue) payoff, for a game of this size, scope and sheer profile, will surely give the ailing big-corporate games media a much-needed shot in the arm.

Or so everybody thought. This week Rockstar opened pre-orders for GTAVI, detailing its various digital editions and so forth, and nestled in the margins of the announcement are a few signals that I fear will have had games-media bean-counters rending their garments all over again, particularly when viewed through the prism of Rockstar’s conduct over the last few years.

The studio, much as I love it, has always had a paranoid streak — one that has intensified over the last couple of years, after footage of an early development build of GTAVI was leaked by hackers. Rockstar’s confirmation this week that the physical release of the game will be a download code in a box seems designed, above all else, to prevent the game leaking ahead of launch. The last thing it wants, after all these years of anticipation, is for gameplay videos and story spoilers to spill out over the internet a week or two before launch. The question now is whether, and to what extent, the studio’s paranoia — which definitely extends to its dealings with the press; Edge’s copy of GTAV was hand-delivered by a PR flack who’d got the train down from London to avoid the parcel falling into the wrong hands — will affect its willingness to give media outlets access to early code.

The current consensus, backed up by recent reporting from Brazil, is that Rockstar will not send out early code, but will host a good old-fashioned review event — inviting select media to a remote location to play the game before launch in a secure, controlled environment. (Faraday cage, armed guards in every room, critics’ families chained to radiators in the basement, that sort of thing.) While this appears, on the face of things, to be an equitable solution for all involved — Rockstar satiates its paranoia; the press gets reviews online on time, hoovering up much-needed traffic; consumers get the purchase-informing information they need — these events are considered passé for a reason. A few reasons, actually.

Firstly they are a terrible, terrible way to experience big games, which I learned the hard way during my years as a critic. Call Of Duty events were a doddle: you were there for two nights, bashed out the campaign before bed on the first evening, then had a day-and-a-bit to get your head around the multiplayer component. But I also reviewed the first Watch Dogs in a luxurious central London hotel, barely left my room for the three nights I was there because there was so much game to play, and almost lost my mind. Few games of this size are flattered by being rushed through, and while Rockstar isn’t exactly relying on GTAVI's Metacritic average to drive unit sales — it will be the best-selling game of the generation either way — it takes review scores very seriously. Part of me wonders whether they’ll deem the whole thing worth the risk.

Even more ominously, for the media at least, is the impact of a review event on the guides operation. Guide-making is a much, much slower process than a review, even under optimal conditions, making early access to code of even greater importance. You have to play much more of the game for one thing, digging out collectables, delving into sidequests and experimenting with dialogue choices, instead of bombing merrily towards the credits like most critics. You need screenshots and video capture, both to refer back to when writing up, and to sprinkle through the article for the text-averse visitors who found your website through search. For a game of this size, you would likely split the workload across multiple people.

None of this would be possible within the confines of a review event even if Rockstar invited guides teams along for the ride which, needless to say, Rockstar categorically won't. Instead there'll be a mad scramble at launch to get guides up as soon as possible — a situation that naturally favours the largest outlets, who can throw more money and resources at the problem, which isn't exactly ideal. And in any case the rewards in terms of traffic will take a noticeable hit when guides aren't online for launch, the lack of early code meaning media must work to the same schedule as the public, a worrying state of affairs when you're dealing with the sort of game for which people book a week off work.

[I have never written a game guide — I'm a magazine guy to the core, after all. Hit Points extends its warmest thanks to guides supremo Matthew Reynolds, veteran of Eurogamer and Polygon and these days writer of the excellent reader-funded Pokemon site One More Catch, for getting me up to speed on the process this afternoon. Chuck him a sub on my behalf!]

So, the hypothetical website owner can count on having a review online by launch day, providing they get an invite to the event, i.e. they haven’t done anything to upset Rockstar in the last, well, forever. (Long memories, that lot. As someone who still bears grudges that date back to the earliest days of my Edge career — grudges I can no longer remember the origins of, but maintain nonetheless — I respect it.) They likely won’t have guides up for a while, which will hurt, but at least there’s GTA Online, right? Amidst all the resentment of live-service games we often overlook how important they are to the games media, since they extend the conversation, and therefore the coverage opportunities, around a game long after launch day. Thirteen years later GTAV’s online mode is still absolutely enormous; GTAVI’s equivalent, with its lavishly ray-traced Floridian playground, might end up being even bigger. What’s that? Rockstar says in the preorder announcement that only a “singleplayer experience” will be available at launch? And there’s no word of when the online mode might follow? Ah. Ah and bugger and shit.

If all this sounds like small potatoes in the grander scheme of things, well, it is. And if you think that, robbed of the old reliables of reviews, guides and live-service updates, outlets will have to find new angles of approach — which might yield more interesting coverage, and challenge the dominance of the big websites — I agree with you wholeheartedly. But as someone who still, six years after leaving the profession, thinks and frets and cares far too much about the state of the games media — who still believes that for an industry to be healthy it requires an equally healthy press corps to hold it to account, to unearth its secrets, to lift up its achievements and damn its failures; who knows all too well how media bosses react when the numbers don't stack up as planned — I would be lying if I said I wasn't nervous. Not quite as nervous as a Rockstar executive gets about the prospect of an unauthorised screenshot getting out, perhaps, but nervous nonetheless.

MORE!

• Oh god, where to start. Let’s go with Microsoft, which has cranked up the price of Series consoles in the US yet again. A 1TB Series S will now run you $599.99; its price has now risen by 50% during its lifetime, and it is now just $50 cheaper than the far more capable Series X was at launch. Madness. In a blog post announcing the news, Microsoft lamented the fact that “console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027,” a statement of such brazen hot-dog-suit energy you almost have to respect it. Good lord. More strategic brilliance from the modern masters of it.
• Speaking of which, Sony has sent another 292 workers to the dole queue following the end of live-service ops for Destiny 2. Most of the affected are within Bungie, though some Sony roles that supported Destiny day-to-day are also gone. Bungie has also taken the opportunity to trim Marathon’s team a little, which in a way feels even more ominous. PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst delivered the news in a memo so riddled with blandly platitudinous boilerplate that if you take the ‘2’ out of its URL you get his memo about the Concord closure. An absolutely awful, and really quite useless man. Get him gone.
• The Steam Machine is, as expected, very expensive indeed, with even the cheaper 512GB model cracking the four-figure mark in the US. I feel kind of bad for Valve eating all these negative headlines simply because it’s the first company to launch new hardware amid the AI insanity, but it can’t be helped really. I put my name down for one briefly but just can’t justify it at those prices — particularly since, by the sounds of it, it’s a bit of a disappointment in terms of power. That dinky form factor and whisper-quiet performance was always going to come at a cost, obviously. But I’m not sure it’s a worthy enough tradeoff given the sums of money involved.
• I'm sure Valve has already lowered its sales expectations for the hardware, and if the latest Circana sales figures are any guide, that's probably just as well. Microsoft just had its worst ever May for hardware sales, while Sony's dropped 58% year on year in its worst May since the year 2000. I'm sure everything is fine.
• Tencent is pulling out of Japanese investments, Bloomberg reckons, and is so desperate to do so that it’s prepared to sell stakes back to founders at a loss. There are alternatives to closing these things down! Who knew!
• I’d originally planned to spend this week on a subs exclusive about Unreal Engine 6, which Epic announced last week. Then the UK had another record-breaking heatwave, the youngest’s school closed for health and safety reasons, and that was that. To summarise, Tim Sweeney’s grand vision centres around predictably stuffing AI into everything, and interoperability, a word I haven’t heard in a while and honestly thought we’d moved past after the whole NFT thing went so deservedly south. UE6 basically brings the Fortnite creation tool UEFN into Unreal Engine itself, so anything you make with the engine will be compatible with everything else that gets made with it, and naturally all of it will feed into Fortnite if you want it to. Sweeney, bless him, remains absolutely determined to make the Metaverse happen. The dev scene, praise the lord, appears unmoved.

That’ll do! A final shout out for that 55% discount on an annual subscription, which will only be around for a few more days. Have a great weekend!