By Nelson Schneider - 12/29/23 at 04:45 PM CT
We’ve completed another circuit around the Sun, and survived to tell the tale. 2023 was a real shit-show when it comes to world events, cultural milestones, and even something as trivial and silly as videogames. Here’s a rundown of MeltedJoystick’s favorite flops and unexpected successes from the year World War III started.
Top 5 Fails
5. Epic Games is Hemorrhaging Money
Would-be Steam competitor, Epic Games, is doing so great they had to cut 16% of their workforce to stay in the Black for the end of 2023. Between their frivolous spending on timed exclusivity deals, their frivolous spending on lawsuits around monetization and walled-garden app ecosystems, and their continuous giveaways of… really BAD games in an attempt to lure in a larger customer base, it’s shocking – yes SHOCKING – that the company isn’t doing better. I mean, where is all that “Fortnite” and Unreal Engine money going?
4. Cooperative Campaigns Sacrificed on the Altar of PvP
In 2023 we got the grim news that “Fortnite: Save the World” and “Overwatch 2: Hero Mode” have been scrapped. These cooperative, PvE modes were the only reasons the MJ Crew were even remotely interested in these games. Yet, as is far too often the case, potentially-good traditional game modes continue to be left on the cutting room floor as the development team chases fads. While “Fortnite: Save the World” has been in limbo for a few years already, and the Other Shoe finally fell, “Overwatch 2” just came out. Not only is “Overwatch 2” very new, the team at Blizzard insisted that the original “Overwatch” had to go away in order for the sequel to be bigger, better, and offer everything to everyone. It seems that Blizzard may have… over-promised a bit.
3. Games Journalism is in the Toilet
After a decade-plus of self-congratulatory praise and infusions of venture capital, the corrupt and indulgent industry of Games Journalism faced a reckoning in 2023. Scads of mainstream media outlets cut their gaming coverage sections, while even dedicated gaming-only news outlets, like The Escapist, have faced falling revenue and relevancy. This mismatch between what Games Journalists provide and what Gamers want came do a head during the release of “Hogwarts Legacy,” a generally-well-made game that was eviscerated by “professional” game critics based on its connection to J.K. Rowling, NOT the game itself, exemplified by Wired Magazine assigning their coverage of the game to a trans-activist instead of a videogamer or ‘Harry Potter’ fan. Even as Games Journalism as an industry crashes and burns, the worst of the worst are still trying to defend their case. Yeah, I agree that we need expert criticism of videogames… but I don’t think the Journalists and the Gamers will ever agree on the definition of “expert.”
2. Unity Engine Sets Itself on Fire
What do you do when you own one of the two biggest canned engines that developers from across the videogame spectrum – from mobile, to Indie, to single-A budget titles – use as the basis of their products? Why, obviously, you attempt to change the licensing agreements to wring more money out of each and every one of those developers… and even better, you make that change retroactive! That’s just what Unity, the company behind the quirk-tastic Unity Engine, decided to do in 2023. Naturally, the backlash was swift and severe, with game developers of all stripes banding together in solidarity, with many vowing to jump to other engines and rebuild their games from scratch instead of supporting Unity in its depravity. While the company fired its Chief Executive, John Riccitiello, as a sacrificial scapegoat in an attempt to make amends with the game development community, no amount of sacrifice can make up for such egregious sin.
1. Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro Roll a String of Natural “1s”
When you start the year with an epic failure that threatens the very heart of your business, surely you’ll want to be on your best behavior for the remainder of the year. Maybe throw out some great freebies… kiss some asses, bow, scrape, genuflect, and BEG your audience to forgive you.
Not Wizards of the Coast! The company that owns both the biggest tabletop RPG in Dungeons & Dragons and the biggest collectible card game in Magic: The Gathering nearly self-destructed thanks to an attempt to change the Open Game License to grant the company far more draconian control of who could use it to publish what. While at first it appeared that Wizards of the Coast was just being greedy, trying to wring as much profit as possible out of incredibly popular third-party books and expansions, that was only part of the story. The company was also obsessed with controlling the exact type of content third-parties were allowed to publish, ensuring that only those third-parties that subscribed to Wizards’ own DEI, ESG, and generally Woke parameters would be allowed to continue.
The backlash from the tabletop gaming community was vicious, with boycotts and un-subscription drives stripping profit and success from a wide array of Wizards’ (and parent company, Hasbro’s) endeavors. As the year came to a close, Hasbro was forced to gut 20% of its workforce… including many central figured within Wizards of the Coast itself. It’s truly sad that such a promising generation of tabletop gaming that started with the release of the 5th Edition Core Rulebooks in 2014, has been so corrupted by corporate greed and corporate Wokeism that it’s preferable to let it burn itself to the ground than do anything to save it.
Top 5 Wins
5. Elon Musk Throws a Cherry Bomb Down Twitter, Flushes
While it’s not explicitly gaming-related, X, the terrible social media platform formerly known as Twitter, touches on all aspects of public discourse these days, including gaming. Indeed, Twitter was where much of the public hostility from Woke Leftists toward “gatekeeping” nerds and geeks whose favorite hobbies, stories, and IPs needed to be “adjusted” to promote “The Message,” originated. Fortunately, when the eccentric emerald-mine billionaire and buyer-of-ideas, Elon Musk, was forced to follow through on his ass-talking threats to buy-out the platform, he immediately began destroying it from the inside. Twitter is less relevant and influential than it has ever been, yet its entrenched nature and the utter lack of creativity amongst its users have combined to prevent any real mass-exodus to a new platform, meaning that every stupid, childish, rude, or politically incorrect thing Elon does reverberates through the pipes like illegal fireworks in the sewage system.
4. Microsoft Promises to Exit Gaming When They Fail to Hit Earnings Milestones
We here at MeltedJoystick have a long history of hating-on, bashing, disparaging, and otherwise calling out Microsoft’s Xbox consoles as the complete wastes of space they are. Thus we were overjoyed by the number of stories coming out of the Xbox Division in 2023 in which Microsoft baldly admitted that Xbox wasn’t profitable, Gamepass wasn’t profitable, and that they had never been profitable. Xbox head, Phil Spencer, even went so far as to state publicly that Xbox would exit gaming if (read: when) their new acquisitions and endeavors fail to make the division profitable by Xbox’s 25th anniversary in 2027. We’re getting our Champagne ready already!
3. Live Services Suffering, Fully Un-Alived by Chinese Communist Party
In 2023, Live Services – those perpetually-online “Games as a Lifestyle” experiences – really took it in the shorts. Live Service features in single-player games and also-ran Live Service titles that never managed to reach a critical mass of players dropped like flies as publishers shut down servers left-and-right. What’s more, in late-breaking news, as a Yuletide gift to the world, the Chinese Communist Party completely banned Live Service gaming monetization models (as well as the globally-reviled Loot Box monetization model) inside the country. While I personally think China’s importance as the world’s “second-largest economy” is highly overstated and primarily a product disinformation, propaganda, and greed, this ban will likely ring the death knell for the plague of Live Servic-ification we’ve been seeing from “AAA” publishers like Ubisoft and Square-Enix. It’s really ironic that it comes down to China swinging the executioner’s axe, considering that Live Servic-ification, microtransactions, and – ultimately – the entire concept of Freemium Gaming originated there, as a means of wringing money out of a huge, game-hungry audience that would just pirate or bootleg instead of buying retail-priced products (even with sweet, sweet regional pricing).
2. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is a Huge Success
A far cry from the terrible “Super Mario Bros.” movie from the ‘80s, 2023’s CGI cartoon, complete with all-star vocal cast, managed to do justice to Shigeru Miyamoto’s True Begotten Son for the first time… on the big screen, at least. The MJ Crew went to see “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” in the theater together, and generally had the best time we’ve had at a videogame movie since the original “Wreck-It Ralph.” Let’s hope that Universal Studios can keep this kind of fun, authentic feel with more Nintendo collaborations in the future.
1. Peak Woke: The Normies Strike Back
Ever since the Orange Clown, Trump, was elected President in 2016, the Culture Wars have been even more toxic than the baseline. We have seen the most brazen censorship, shaming, and cultural vandalism in modern memory… ironically coming from the so-called “Liberal” Left Wing. Of course, we’ve all seen that The New Left isn’t actually “liberal” or even “progressive,” in spite of their self-identification as such. Instead, they’ve become the most domineering and authoritarian force in Western Civilization since Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan mobilized the so-called “Moral Majority” of the Religious Right (yet again, another group that is neither “moral” nor the “majority” in spite of their self-identification).
Sadly, we’ve been at the mercy of the Woke Left for nearly a decade now as they fulfilled Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions,” coopting education, the media, entertainment, government, and, ultimately, culture itself, bending them all toward the singular goal of activism to push “The Message” of Postmodernism. Thankfully, 2023 saw numerous instances where the actual majority – those of us in the center, from center-left to center-right – have had enough of the bullying, canceling, indoctrination, and pushing of absolutely insane ideas and pushed back.
2023 is full of feel-good stories about the Woke Going Broke, ranging from Anita Sarkeesian’s anti-gamer Feminist Frequency propaganda outlet shutting down, to RPG script writer Chris Avellone being vindicated and cleared of all charges in a trumped-up #metoo case, to the hilarious failure of the Trans Lobby’s boycott of “Hogwarts Legacy” based solely on their hatred of J.K. Rowling’s perfectly legitimate position that trans-women are men, with nothing to do with the actual game.
Outside of gaming, Woke messaging has flopped across the board, with dismal failures riddling Disney, the BBC, Netflix, and other media companies whose flops were on full display for all to see, what with the lack of other media content thanks to the confluence of both a screenwriters’ AND screenactors’ strike in the same year. Let’s hope this trend continues and we’re able to return to a meeting in the middle.
