Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/29/20 at 04:46 PM CT
Welcome to the final look into the future for the Plague Year of 2020! It’s been a long, tiresome, awful ride of a year across the board, not just for Games Industry watching, and it’ll be good to start fresh in 2021 with a new President, a new COVID vaccine, new consoles… and the same old gridlock, polarization, and crappy game releases. Some things seem like they will never change.
With the Holiday season coming up, of course there’s shovelware, as publishers frantically scramble to push licensed trash out the door in time for ignorant gift shoppers to be bamboozled by name recognition. But this month, the licensed shovelware looks a little different than it usually does: We’ve got games based on the TV show “Peeky Blinders” and the choreographed-violence movie franchise, ‘John Wick.’ Usually, licensed shovelware is targeted toward kids and based on whatever shonen anime or educational pre-school show happens to be ‘popular’ at the time. But these two IPs …
10 Dead Series that Need to be Revived in the 9th Generation
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/22/20 at 04:25 PM CT
Way back in 2012, I wrote up a listicle of 10 sequels in long-running series that should have been released during the soul-crushingly awful 7th Generation, but weren’t. The good news is, FOUR of those ten sequels that didn’t manifest in the 7th Gen actually did come to light in the 8th Gen, with “Final Fantasy 15,” “Half-Life: Alyx,” “The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes,” and “Baldur’s Gate 3” all appearing on my last list (though not necessarily by their exact names). The bad news, of course, is that “Final Fantasy 15” is crap, “Half-Life: Alyx” is shackled to expensive VR hardware, “Triforce Heroes” is crap, and “Baldur’s Gate 3” is still in Alpha. What can you do?
Now, as the 8th Generation comes to a close, it’s time to take a look at what other dormant IP the Games Industry is still sitting on, denying we the gamers the joy of experiencing them, while denying they the corporations the profits to be had from them. Not only are these …
Australia’s Culture War
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/15/20 at 03:01 PM CT
Recently, news broke of a ridiculous new legal situation in Australia, the Land Down-Under. Usually, those of us in the West who are irritated, exasperated, frustrated, and fed-up by our own nations’ governments’ (and citizens’) inexhaustible levels of stupidity like to fantasize about moving to Australia, much like Alexander, when he had his “Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day,” since, compared to the United States, Europe, and Russia, nothing bad happens down there.
Unfortunately, that’s all changed. Hot (no pun intended) on the heels of Oz catching fire and a large part of the continent and its wildlife being reduced to cinders, the Australian government changed control. In May 2019, in a shocking reversal that caught everyone by surprise, the Conservative Coalition won control of Australia’s federal government in an upset, swung, unsurprisingly to Americans, by Australia’s own Religious Right.
Oz’s politics are as alien as its collection of …
Pause! The Killer Feature No One Has Figured Out Yet
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/07/20 at 08:10 PM CT
As they did with TV, movies, and music, subscription services are now trying to consume the world of videogames. While Microsoft endeavors to become the “Netflix of Gaming,” Netflix itself has already fallen prey to the next step in subscription saturation – that is fracturing into many separate subscriptions as rightsholders withdraw their consent from Netflix to broadcast their content, in favor of ‘rolling their own’ solution, thus allowing them to keep more of the profits.
But as subscription services change from monolithic to marginal, the end user, the customer, the gamer, is the one who suffers, forced to shell out ever more money every month just to maintain access to what they had before. Customers are suffering from subscription fatigue and wasting hundreds of dollars per year as individuals, which all adds up to untold billions of dollars wasted worldwide.
This begs the question: Why stay subscribed to all these services all the time? After all, most people …
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