Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/24/23 at 10:38 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Winter and the last dregs of 2022 are officially behind us, once again, as Spring spoings into our lives, bringing with it superstitious Paschal holidays, seasonal allergies, crazy weather, and probably a whole bunch of terrible videogame releases. Let’s check on that last one…
We’re starting off Fiscal Year 2023 with corporate publishers pushing shovelware in all three major categories. In the Licensed Swill category, we’ve got “Peppa Pig: World Adventures” and “DC’s Justice League: Cosmic Chaos.” In the 2Cazul2Liv category, we’ve got the cringe-inducing “Parents vs. Kids” mini-game slop. And in the ‘We Release This Every Year Because You’re Dumb Enough to Keep Buying It’ category, there’s “EA Sports PGA Tour,” “WWE 2K23,” and “Monster Energy Supercross: The Official Videogame 6.” Yes, that’s actually the title!
Moving on to old crap pretending to be new crap we’ve got… OH …
Live Services: Not So Lively Anymore
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/19/23 at 02:32 PM CT
Just a few years ago, every Games Industry publisher and their dog was trying to get in on the hot fad of Live Service gaming, where a slow, steady drip-feed of grindable content keeps players engaged and playing a single product for years upon years. Live Service gaming is, ultimately, just the latest incarnation of an Industry model that has been around for decades, first exemplified in the MMORPG boom of the of the early 2000s, when the success of games like “EverQuest” and “World of WarCraft” saw a proliferation of similar games using similar monetization strategies.
Our current – and rapidly ending – Live Service bubble can be attributed directly to the success of Epic Games’ “Fortnite,” which popularized the now-infamous “Battlepass” mechanic, essentially transforming a Free2Play game into a subscription-based game through the power of FOMO. In spite of “Fortnite’s” ongoing success as a Live Service, numerous copycats – including …
“Hogwarts Legacy” Reveals Insane Media Bias
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/12/23 at 04:07 PM CT
“Hogwarts Legacy,” the brand new game from Warner Bros. based on the ‘Wizarding World of Harry Potter’ by British novelist, J.K. Rowling, just released. What should we expect from a new Licensed piece of shovelware based on a series of novels aimed at children-through-teens? Well, according to Wired Magazine it’s a ‘mid’ game (as expected), yet is deserving of the absolutely deplorable 1/10 mark of shame… due to J.K. Rowling’s ‘transphobic’ insistence that sex is biological and women are different from men.
Yup, in the most recent display of insane behavior from the mainstream media – which has been going on for at least a decade at this point – Wired is in hot water with the gaming community over the fact that it assigned the review for “Hogwarts Legacy” not to a videogame critic, but to a deranged person-who-identifies-as-female whose prior articles for the site have been reviews of sex toys and coffee. Makes sense? (Nope!)
Surely this was some …
D&D Now Stands for ‘Debacles & Disasters’
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/05/23 at 04:15 PM CT
Wizards of the Coast had a very busy January, as the Hasbro subsidiary and owner of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPG since 1997 set about the process of… burning itself to the ground.
It all started with Wizards’ new President, Cynthia Williams – a typical ‘Professional Executive’ who came to the tabletop games company from Microsoft’s Xbox Division – taking the lead in setting up heavy monetization for the next generation of Dungeons & Dragons: An Internet-powered, subscription-based thing known as ‘OneD&D.’ As part of the effort to ensure than any-and-everything about OneD&D was primed and ready to be transformed into a revenue-generating microtransaction, Wizards’ leadership took the bold step of updating and revising the Open Game License – known colloquially as the OGL. However, the revision was leaked to the public before Wizards was officially ready to reveal it.
The OGL was originally created simultaneously with D&D 3rd Edition in the Year 2000, …
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