Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/30/23 at 03:00 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Spring is winding down, and as May comes upon us, the Games Industry has its last gasp in releasing solid Q1 titles to build operating revenue for the rest of the year. Unfortunately for the gamers on the receiving end of the corporate machine, those “solid titles” are more like “solid turds,” dropping from the Industry’s collective rectum and giving us all concussions if we aren’t wise enough to move out of the way. Will we see anything with actual merit released this Spring? Read on as we sift through the sludge together!
In the shovelware category, we’ve got all three varieties represented, once again. In the ‘Licensed Swill’ category, we’ve got a LEGO-themes Racing game, “LEGO 2K Drive,” with such a vague title that the only things we know about it are that it features LEGO bricks and is published by 2K games. There’s also the last-gen backport of “Hogwarts Legacy” coming to the PS4 and XBONE, in …
Netflix to End Discs-by-Mail Service in September 2023 – I Miss it Already
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/23/23 at 10:01 PM CT
This week, Netflix, the company that revolutionized the way we watch movies not once, but twice, announced that after 25 years, the iconic red envelopes and DVDs/Blu-Rays-by-mail inside them will be going away for good come Autumn.
The company started in 1998 with an unprecedented business model: Unlimited movie rentals for a reasonable monthly fee. Even more unprecedented was the fact that these movie rental transactions would be handled via the Internet, and the movies themselves would arrive via mail. Anyone who grew up in the ‘80s like the MJ Crew would naturally be dubious about such a proposition: We lived in a world where every mail-order transaction required “six to eight weeks for delivery” and had a distressingly expensive “shipping and handling” cost tacked-on for good measure. Somehow, Netflix managed to flip the paradigm and beat our old, terrible United States Postal Service into submission, as not only was the turn-around for movie rentals incredibly …
Building a Better Boycott
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/15/23 at 02:20 PM CT
2023 has been an astounding year for boycotts, kicked off by the Fringe Leftist attempt to Cancel “Hogwarts Legacy,” which ultimately backfired and saw the game breaking sales records. Hot on the heels of that dismal failure have been two more boycotts coming from places other than the fringiest fringe of crazy politics, with decidedly different outcomes.
First, there was the organized effort to show disapproval for Wizards of the Coast and their attempts to gut and replace the Open Game License with not one, but two potential revisions, which were so draconian that they really put the ‘dragons’ in Dungeons & Dragons. D&D players cancelled their D&D Beyond subscriptions en masse to the point of crashing the service’s website. In a further attempt to hit Wizards of the Coast and parent company, Hasbro, where it hurts – that is, the corporate wallet – there has been a less-well-organized push to boycott the just-released Dungeons & Dragons movie, “Honor Among …
Sony’s Legal Shenanigans Against the Microsoft-Activision/Blizzard/King Merger Backfire
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/08/23 at 03:01 PM CT
Sony has been losing its mind ever since Microsoft first announced its intention to purchase Activision (along with subsidiaries Blizzard and King) for $69 billion. This announcement first dropped in January of 2022, and Sony has been acting out, like a spoiled child, ever since. First they attempted to show that they are just as capable of buying development studios and publishers by paying a drop-in-the-bucket for former Microsoft studio, Bungie, then proceeded to behave so cravenly and wantonly for the rest of the year that the company topped the 2022 list of MeltedJoystick Fails.
It was, thus, with a great sense of schadenfreude that I received the news that Sony’s legal and financial pot-stirring against the MS-Activision merger has backfired, bringing Sony itself under closer scrutiny by governmental and regulatory bodies. Gamers have long known that Sony has outright paid for games to be exclusive to the PlayStation platform for as long as there has been a PlayStation …
Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/02/23 at 04:06 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! The old saying is that “April Showers bring May Flowers,” but when it comes to the Games Industry, it’s either a torrential downpour of liquid fecal matter or a withering drought of nothing. It looks like we’re in for an April downpour, once again… though I doubt there’s anything in here that’s worth seining out.
Classifiable shovelware is fairly light on the ground for April. There are only two of the major categories present, in Licensed Swill and Annualized Releases. Chris will be happy about the Licensed Swill, since most of it’s in IPs he’s obsessed with: “Star Wars: Survivors,” “The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Chapter 2,” and … “DNF Duel,” which Chris doesn’t obsess over, likely because the anime that inspired the games was released after he had aged-out of his most marketable period. The only Annualized Release is a ‘PGA Golf’ game by EA… what a surprise!
You know, that …
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