Phil Spencer Threatens to Kill-Off Xbox When Gamepass Fails
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/24/23 at 03:48 PM CT
The legal proceedings happening around the still-not-finished Activision/Blizzard/King merger with Microsoft’s Xbox Division continue to be a goldmine. Recently, Xbox head, Phil Spencer, who is frequently viewed as a messianic figure by the miserable and paltry community of Xbox Fandom online, had something very interesting to say to the court.
Apparently, Microsoft doesn’t see a future in traditional console style gaming (which we here at MeltedJoystick have been saying for years). Their push to turn gaming into a subscription-based hellscape via their Gamepass service is really the only thing Xbox cares about, as a way to penetrate further into the healthy and robust PC gaming ecosystem and establish themselves as a source of non-mobile-style games on mobile platforms.
Phil Spencer’s vision for Xbox is so intimately intertwined with the mass-adoption of Gamepass, he went on the record stating that, if Gamepass doesn’t hit specific financial and growth targets by 2027, …
Unity Engine = Finished
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/17/23 at 12:42 AM CT
This week, the corporate overlords that control the second-most-popular canned game development engine, commonly known as Unity, followed in the footsteps of Wizards of the Coast in being the second American corporation in 2023 to completely self-destruct after announcing intentions to reform their basic licensing structure in order to capture more profits. Not content to receive flat licensing fees from studios that wish to use their engine, and no longer feeling magnanimous with their engine’s free “Personal” licensing tier, Unity’s corporate overlord, John Riccitiello, came up with a scheme to charge developers who use Unity a so-called “per-install” fee, requiring them to pay upwards of 20 cents every time a game is installed – NOT purchased, but INSTALLED!
In a show of… ahem… unity, gamers and the predominantly-Indie-tier developers who use the engine have collectively decided that Unity is now WORSE than multi-year-worst-corporation-winner-loser, Electronic …
Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/09/23 at 08:24 PM CT
Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2023
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Summer’s over and all the little darlings have gone back to school, while the most of the MJ Crew has returned our dear mothers to the Earth. Can the Games Industry do anything to improve our collective mood? Not bloody likely!
The shovelware is OVERWHELMING for September, with all three major subvarieties present in the great, seething mass. In Licensed Swill, there are games based on ‘RoboCop,’ ‘Paw Patrol’ (which still disappoints me by not being ‘Papa Troll’), ‘Ninja Kidz,’ the ‘Fate’ anime, ‘Cry Babies Magic Tears,’ the auditory abomination known as ‘Baby Shark,’ ‘NASCAR,’ ‘Rainbow High,’ ‘House Flipper,’ ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender,’ and – inscrutably – an ancient Western movie that I have surprisingly never seen, ‘Bud Spencer & Terence Hill.’ That’s quite the load, and it includes both IPs I’ve never heard of because …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/03/23 at 01:21 PM CT
Welcome back to another installment of the MeltedJoystick Review Round-Up. Here’s what our staff has reviewed since last time:
Nelson’s Reviews:
If Spring was unkind to me, Summer was as malicious and vindictive as possible. Most of the games I played through were definitively mediocre or slightly above average, but nothing to get excited about, with “Bug Fables” being the only real standout experience. But on top of everything else, my mother got the bad news of a terminal cancer diagnosis during the last week in July, and didn’t survive until the end of August. So on top of a frustrating gaming experience, I’ve been dealing with a heaping helping of despair. Thanks a fucking lot, Universe.
“Ruzar: The Life Stone” – 3.5/5
“Bladed Fury” – 3.5/5
“Middle-Earth: Shadow of War” – 3.5/5
“Front Mission 1st Remake” – 1.5/5
“Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling” – 4.5/5
“Riverbond” – 3/5
“Yaga” – 2.5/5
Chris’ …
RobotCache Introduces Open Markets for Digital Videogames
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/25/23 at 03:50 PM CT
Recently, a new startup calling itself RobotCache has started advertising in the gaming community. The service bills itself as a “game changer,” in that it is yet another digital videogame storefront, but that it also includes the incredibly-common-sense feature of allowing users to sell their games to each other when they’re done with them.
This is the type of thing I’ve been advocating as a killer feature for the Steam Community Market for as long as there has been a Steam Community Market. However, without being attached to any of the major players in the digital game sales space, like Steam, GOG, Humble, or even Fanatical and Greenman, it really feels like RobotCache has an uphill battle ahead of it to gain market share. After all, most people who are into digital game purchases already have sizeable libraries elsewhere, and without the ability to bring in those licenses into a universal bucket, RobotCache really only offers the tantalizing possibility of being able to …
Paizo’s ORC May be Worse than the OGL?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/20/23 at 11:33 PM CT
The world of tabletop roleplaying has been thoroughly shaken-up in 2023, with the OGL debacle that has seen long-lasting tankage of Wizards of the Coast’s sales numbers, including their movie endeavors with “Honor Among Thieves.” In the aftermath of Wizards’ attempt at taking draconian control of tabletop gaming, numerous other options started crawling out of the woodwork. The last time Wizards tried this ploy, with the GSL and D&D 4th Edition, Paizo Publishing, the third-party printer who had been publishing Wizards’ Dungeon and Dragon magazines for years took the opportunity to bite the hand that fed them, resulting in the release of Pathfinder 1st Edition and a massive schism in the player community between the huge exodus of players fleeing official D&D for Pathfinder and the smaller number of players who insisted that D&D 4th Edition was somehow good.
Paizo is, of course, back at it, with their Pathfinder 2nd Edition. But not only that, the publisher has also …
What a Surprise! America’s Economic “Dynamism” Being Strangled by IP Rights
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/13/23 at 03:58 PM CT
This week, Fortune Magazine published a fantastic little article revealing the root of the United States’ economic woes. In a surprise to no one with two functioning synapses, it turns out that overweening copyright and Intellectual Property laws have been stifling economic ‘dynamism’ for the last 40 years.
Based primarily on the economic theory of a Turkish economist from the so-called Chicago School of economics, a man with the too-epic-for-English name of Ufuk Akcigit, the article opines that the American economy’s decades-long creep toward a small group of enormous business monopolies has edged-out a force known as “Creative Destruction,” which we have really only seen in recent decades in the form of the DotCom Bubble and the huge number of formerly-analog business services transforming into online-only things, but in the process further entrenching themselves as the only option in their respective sectors.
And how do businesses entrench themselves? Simple: …
Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency is Broke and Shutting Down
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/06/23 at 02:55 PM CT
There’s a saying… something something Woke something something Broke. And it is being proven true with ever-increasing frequency as the general public – typically referred to as “Normies” – and dedicated fan communities for products, IPs, and/or hobbies have become fed up with the neverending torrent of bullshit raining down upon us from the Ivory Towers of Identity Politicians.
Thus is also the case for Anita Sarkeesian and her non-profit organization, “Feminist Frequency,” which was founded in response to the pushback she and likeminded 4th Wave Feminists received from the videogaming community immediately surrounding and in the aftermath of the GamerGate controversy, in which gaming nerds expressed anger at perceived corruption within Games Journalism, with some of the less well-adjusted nerds going so far as to issue a variety of toothless threats which were taken at face value. Of course, from its initial appearance, Gamers always knew that Feminist Frequency …
Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/30/23 at 01:31 AM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! August is nearly here, and I’ve already gotten the worst gift possible. The very same day, I decided to pre-order the next volume of the “DragonLance Destinies” trilogy in spite of my trepidation about where this newest series will ultimately take my favorite High Fantasy campaign setting. Let’s see if the Games Industry has anything that will make me feel any happier… I doubt it.
There’s quite a bit of shovelware coming in August, and it covers all three subcategories of crap. In the Licensed Swill category, we’ve got an ‘Agatha Christie’ tie-in, “Smurfs Kart” (Do today’s kids even know what a Smurf is?), a licensed tie-in for “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” Horror movie IP, and “House Flipper: Pets Edition,” which is either based on the “House Flipper” reality TV show or should have a different name to avoid confusion. In the 2Cazul category, there’s a new entry in Sega’s …
Google Wants to DRM the Whole INTERNET?!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/23/23 at 01:26 AM CT
Back in the Spring of the Plague Year 2020, I warned of major players in the corporate Games Industry attempting to smuggle Digital Rights Management schemes – a.k.a., DRM – into our modern games under the guise of ‘protecting’ law-abiding players from evil, filthy hackers and cheaters. Unfortunately, there was no line drawn in the sand by the gaming community, what with the confluence of a global pandemic, race riots, and the start of a new presidential administration.
Now, there’s an even worse ‘DRM as protection’ scheme on the horizon. It’s being pushed by none other than the aging search/advertising giant, Google, and its target is the ENTIRE Internet.
Web 3.0 has been in the planning and speculation stages for quite a few years now, and the brief explosion of blockchain technology revolving around cryptocurrencies lead tech journalism to the belief that Web 3.0 would provide each individual user with significantly greater privacy, security, and control …
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