State of Gaming - "Dark Age in the Gaming World"

00:00:00Let's say hello and welcome to the State of Gaming. We are back, and we are actually back for reals this time. Not joking, y'all. Or something. Or are we? I wish we were. This is a somber episode. Oh, yeah. With flakes of good times sprinkled in there. Maybe we should start by saying that this is State of Gaming, but it's not a monthly edition because it's been a while. Yes, it has been a few months. Yeah, a legitimate break, but also a break. So we are calling this the fall edition because that usually sells, right? Oh yeah, everything falls, sells. It does. Even whales fall, which is something I learned. When a dead whale goes down to the bottom, it's a whale fall. Oh, that's cute and disturbing at the same time. It is.

00:00:58But let's face it, they're pretty big. So if they're not moving around, I guess they would eventually just sink to the bottom. Yeah. Is there a big, like, bomb when they hit the bottom? I wish so. But it's one of those cases with the tree in the forest, right? Oh, yeah. You don't know. But I think we're already in a philosophical territory here. So State of Gaming, it is fall edition. And we have a big, big list with a mostly negative. touch and you'll see what we mean eventually but before we do do we need to brush up on what this is maybe yeah so this is basically when it's in its most pure form us talking about what has happened in the world of gaming the past month so usually we have like state of gaming april and things like that but we have bundled four months together into summer and fall edition so that's that

00:01:57But otherwise, that's what it is. And it's the English news podcast from Spelfarsan. So we have our Swedish weekly show. For those of you who are like dual language wielding folks, you might have the same news in, well, you might hear the same news in the weekly shows and in this one. But sometimes, or most of the cases, we actually have some unique stuff in the state of game. So it's not only a rehash. Was that clear to anyone? Yeah, I think it's clear. Also, we've had more like a week to ponder news. So we might have some different angles here. So it might be more interesting. Sometimes we have some hot takes or some cold takes or just different takes. Mostly different. Yeah. So anyway, one of the things we do in all our shows, disregarding which one it is, is the following.

00:02:57Uh-oh. Oh, bongos. Actually, in the last couple of shows, I've cut the bongos because I think the uncomfortable silence is even better. So it's now just metaphorical bongos, but it's bongos. It's bongos time. It is bongos. The anticipation each time when I open a can is always like, this time maybe, and then I see on your faces that no. It might be the time when everything is hey, okay again, but not this time. Not this time. I have a double IPA from Gainesville, I think. Nice. Gainesville, Georgia. It's a mighty banyan. It's actually a pretty... Isn't it a tree? Yes, it is a tree. And incidentally, they have a tree on the can. They do. And these trees are so huge. Yeah. They take up, like, blocks.

00:03:55Yeah. I'm not sure. Is the banyan tree one of the ones that they have in the swamps? I'm not sure if they do, but they have a lot of them on Hawaii at least. And I think Southeast Asia is also. Yeah. I always get them mixed up because the red oaks are also huge, but I don't think they are in wetlands. But there are trees that you can find like mainly in the wetlands. Yeah. We have to go to Georgia. The Spanish moss trees. Oh, yeah, we definitely have to go there. So this is in memory, I think, because I'm not really sure what happened to the big banyan tree that they had in Lahaina, Maui. It might have burned down, and that took up a whole block in the city. That would be a shame. Yeah, it was old. It was so very old. But then again, to be fair, if nature has its way,

00:04:53A fire would eventually have killed that tree, I would imagine, at some point. So, you know, good life. But how is the ale, though? Oh, this is actually really strong. Does it have a tree-ish taste? Oh, it does somehow, yeah. Oh, nice, nice. Well, I'm not even sure if that is nice, but, you know, it's good in many ways. It's a little bitter, but it has nine ABV, so it's... It's a strong one. It's a punch. Oh, yeah, it does. I was about to segue because I have punch, but no, I don't. I hate that stuff. Oh, yeah. But I do have a gin and tonic. Yay. Oh. I also had, I don't know why, but I brought a big mug for it. So it would be easier to drink. But it also made me pour a bigger drink because a small drink in a big glass looks pathetic. Yeah. That's the danger of a big mug for a...

00:05:52For a spirit-based liquor drink, yeah. You did yourself a big favor. I did. So if I go off the rails like halfway through the show, then the drink was too good. Oh, I hear you. Me too. Full disclosure. So, Oskar, what are you drinking today? I have something kind of exotic due to a friend that recently been in the Philippines. So I'm drinking something called, like, it's a vodka based on coconut. It's called, and then I'm going to try to pronounce this, but Lambango. I have no idea. It looks cool, though. So anyhow, it's just like Sprite and vodka, basically. Sounds pretty good. No one's going to be sober for this episode. Yeah, might be one of those episodes which, you know, never gets out. Of the backroom catalogs. It could be. It's strong. It's very exotic, though. Yeah. There's something that is not really... Of course, maybe you can import it, but it's more of a... What do you call it? Domestic thing. It's not the top shelf type. Domestic consumption. Okay. So now we are all set up for...

00:07:17delving down in some depressing stuff. So the theme of this episode is called, what is happening in the gaming world right now? What's going on? What's going on, folks? And people might say, well, everything is going pretty great. We have a lot of good games. We do. It's a good gaming year, but the gaming world, that's different. So we touched upon the first theme on our list on multiple occasions. Actually going years back, because we started talking about Embracer, the big, big gaming corpo from Sweden. When they were on the rise, when they were gaining traction, buying a lot of companies, merging with a lot of companies, buying a lot of IPs, going big, basically. And we were thinking like, this could be a potentially really good thing. We were excited. We were so excited. And maybe a little proud. I think we actually said that we were.

00:08:14cautious also about it. A little bit. I was about to say, we also had the, I don't know. The cynical touch. Yeah, that, I mean, yeah, let's face it. We kind of, we said like, this could be good, but it could also, you know, spending all this money and doing it over such a short period of time, like a couple of years, could be, you know, a little shaky. And then they went out and bought like all the indie companies, a lot of them, like 100 plus. in the studios and then they bought the ips from square enix when they laid off their western studios and then they bought the rights to lord of the rings and then well we're basically up to current time now and then they had them i think they the bad time started when the leak was made that they had lost a deal for two billion dollars somewhere that they were counting on

00:09:08And then the fiscal year report said that they had actually lost close to $4 billion and $2 billion they had kind of scheduled for. But the other two, they hadn't. And they basically said like, yeah, this is not, we have some issues and we are well aware we have some issues. We might have to do something here. And they didn't want to go into detail, but we have some details now. It started, I think it's like a couple of weeks ago now, when they closed down Volition, that had just turned 25 years old, the studio that is most famous for the Saints Row franchise. So they were closed down on the spot, basically. They hadn't had any plans of doing that, and they didn't know about it. But that was 430 people out on the streets just overnight. And they blamed the failure of this last Saints Row.

00:10:08reboot on them closing it down. And then they continued, so they are now starting to cut people from Crystal Dynamics, which was one of the studios that they bought from Square Enix. And this is weirder, I think, than closing down Volition, because that's kind of a given, more or less. But Tomb Raider is such a big franchise, and it's so popular. The last three games, the revival, if you want to call it that, did good money. A lot of money, actually. They were sold off from Square Enix because they have a ridiculous expectation module for almost anything. If you don't make some hundred millions back, you're a failure. So they sold off all their Western studios, and Crystal Dynamics went to Embracer, and now Embracer has started cutting people.

00:11:03Only 10 people so far, but they are looking into the overall structure of the company. Although they are saying that the Tomb Raider team will not be affected. So maybe they had some other projects on the side that they are now scaling back or closing down. We do not know. But yeah, so they're starting there. And they also had layoffs at Beamdog. I don't know exactly what they were working on. Yeah, they were. And also at Gearbox, which is probably one of their more famous studios as well. That's interesting. That's the Borderlands franchise studio. And Gearbox Publishing has some layoffs. And also, some rumors are now claiming that they are actually looking to sell off Gearbox entirely. To make some fast money. That's sweet cash. But it would be kind of maybe a good thing if they got on their own feet. Or at least in... Yeah.

00:11:59in a controlled... I mean, it's kind of weird because Gearbox is a big company all in on itself. And also Borderlands 3 was a bit middling, but it still has a lot of fans out there. I guess this is emphasizing getting some fast money. It's a rumor, so we don't know for sure. And also, to add into the Embracer thing, they basically said that We're going to make a lot of Lord of the Rings stuff from now on. We're going to milk this baby until it's dead. And then we're going to milk it some more and sell you the ashes. Because we need to cash in big time. Yeah. They said that. Unfortunately, I think that's the right thing to do for them. I mean, fiscally. Like, they have to do it for money. But it's the bad thing to do because it's probably not going to be great. No. But they're going to get the cash.

00:12:57I don't know if they're going to get $4 billion by doing that. They will not get $4 billion. The hype for Lord of the Rings is well over its Senate. It's still there, but the peak has gone years back. $4 billion, it's a lot of dollars. A serious amount of dollars. And also, I don't remember who said it, but they basically said that... shareholder companies are not in it to make great games. They're in it to make shareholders happy. And you have Embracer and any other giant gaming corp on one end of that spectrum. And then you have Larian Studios on the other end. And those companies are not very many around, at least on that size to this day. they are able to churn out great games that make the gamers happy. And the other companies are able to churn out games that make the shareholders happy. And sometimes gamers and shareholders are happy at the same time. But not always. It doesn't have to be like that. Definitely not. That's the Embracer situation. So it's very shaky right now. And we mentioned this in our Swedish show, but if you are struggling in the studio, don't go the Embracer way right now. Nope.

00:14:22Oh, no, definitely not. Just keep doing what you're doing, because that's probably going to be better, and all the gamers are going to love you. You might be poor and struggling, but at least you're not poor, struggling, and stressed out because you have to do the right type of game in order not to get closed and kicked out on the street. That's, yeah, it's sad. I mean, as Oscar said, we were a bit cautious, for sure. It turns out we were right to be cautious. But we were so hopeful. Yeah, they turned sour so quickly when they started. But I think maybe this is also a wake-up call for the good for many of the indie studios that are out there now that be a little more cautious before you sell out to whomever that pays most. Yeah, even if it looks really good, have some serious thinking before you.

00:15:19sign that contract because when they own you they they own you that's how that goes so yeah uh moving on from one big corp that are doing some weird stuff to another big corp that is doing some weird stuff so sega has um this is one of the best bullshit terms out there but they have started a redundancy consultation process at creative assembly and always think about office space when they have the the two consultants them i don't know what was it them i don't remember the name i don't remember i think it was the bob and bob so the bob oh yeah yeah that's i think one of them was like bob slidell or something and it was the question they had was like so what would you say you do here so that that's always when you have that

00:16:17train of thought you know that you have some bullshit corvo term for getting rid of people and yeah i think that consultation process is a good one oh yeah it's definitely very creative we're gonna creatively make sure that your job goes away without having to pay you anything um so one theory of why they're calling it like this is because we have a lot of laws in europe and i think creative assembly is uk based so you can't just fire people overnight because you feel like firing some people you actually have to have a reasoning behind it because of unions and this is a way of getting around that you call it something else and you make people leave so yeah um so this has to do with sega canceling the game called hyenas i know never heard of it right that game yeah so uh unfortunately no one has had um it was

00:17:14I do remember, I think we saw a trailer for it at some show. It looked pretty crap. And unfortunately, it was kind of crap. But it's one of those chasing the dragons genre games. So it's an extraction looter shooter. Yay. They want to be topical. And no one has managed to copy that. That is now history. So that game is dead. And the people... working on it, are probably the ones now facing the redundancy consultation process. We should maybe say what Creative Assembly are better known for. So they are the studio behind the Total War series, which is doing really, really well. I think they actually have a new game out right now, like Total War Egypt or Pharaoh or something like that. So parts of this company, I mean, they're still...

00:18:09doing really well and going strong, but this Hyena project is over. Also, wasn't it Chris Creative Assembly that did Alien Isolation? Might have been. So my little question is, why are you working on Hyenas when you could be working on Alien Isolation 2? Right, because that was a good game. It's called Total War Pharaoh. And it was released in May-ish. Yeah. So, I mean, parts of the company is still doing great. But I think they should have done more aliens and less hyenas. Yeah. That didn't work out. Yeah. But, yeah, hopefully things will look up for the people involved in this process. And no more hyenas, please. More aliens. Yes, more alien isolation. Even though I've never played a game to the end, it's a good game. It is a very good game. So, yeah.

00:19:08Moving on to another thing that we thought were done and dusted because the UK approved this just a couple of weeks ago. And we're talking about the Blizzard Activision Microsoft deal. And now, when they're done in Europe, the FTC are back. And they have issues. Oh, no. So I'm going to read this in its whole. So for those of you who aren't in on what's going on, Microsoft are trying to... by Blizzard Activision for a sizzling $69 billion. And a lot of people had issues with this, because if they do get it, they will be amazingly big in the gaming space. And they could just move a lot of stuff to their platform. And some argue that they would be controlling, well, they already have a big slice of the pie. But now maybe they would have a pie all on their own, which isn't always a good idea.

00:20:05i'm going to read what the ftc has put out the ftc announced its plan to move forward with its in-house trial after a pause put in place during the summer however without a preliminary injunction the ftc cannot prevent microsoft from closing the deal before october 18th deadline so basically they can't kill the deal but they can be a nuisance after the deal So they can say, we don't think this is right, but you can go ahead with it, because we can't really prevent you from doing anything. Either that, or they can actually sue them after the deal is done, and then lock them in court for years. Yeah, but Microsoft has a lot of money, so I guess... Microsoft has a lot of money, but the FTC is the state. So they have the power, either way. Uncle Sam has a lot of Uncle Sams. Oh, yeah.

00:21:00I guess there is a couple of law firms that are popping this champagne because the train is rolling. We got things coming in the pipeline right now. Get George on the project. Years of years. A lot of suits are being pressed and ties are being bought right now. So we'll see. Either this will be a smooth sailing. I have my money on there. The last word in this process has not. No. So that's where we stand. UK and EU are done and dusted. But we're back in the States with this. So we'll see. We'll see. Moving on. Epic Games. Yeah. The company that wanted to make it big and are still offering free games every week, actually. They announced that they're cutting around 930 jobs, which is the equivalent of 18% of the entire company. And they had Tim Sweeney, who is the CEO and also a majority shareholder of Epic Games stock, put out a very long letter where he basically fell on the sword.

00:22:22but it turned out it was a rubber sword so he came out of it okay. So he basically said that he thought things would be great forever because Fortnite was a massive massive massive hit and he was raking in the billions but due to some poor choices that he himself had made he actually said that so I guess that's one point in his corner of the ring. Due to him not taking the right strategies and choices Things have for a number of years, I think, actually, they have been losing money and they've been losing a lot of money. And now is the time to do things about that. And what they decided to do was to cut almost 20% of their company. So that's that. One of the weird things about this was that he made a big thing about them being the company that raised the, I don't know, the post-COVID era the best.

00:23:17He had a picture of some Roman legionnaires on Twitter with their shields up and like, yeah, we know how to brace for impact. And one month after he killed 20% of the company in a classic Roman thing called reduction, where you kill every fifth guy. So that's humor. It is. Oh, also, we should say that they are selling Bandcamp. which is the independent music storefront platform, which is very popular with indie musicians. And that they just bought like last year. So that was a quick one. Are they selling it with profit or? They always said they were selling it. So I'm guessing they were trying to cut costs as much as they can. But yeah. Can't help but think of American Pie anytime I hear the word band camp. Yeah. And those were some bad times.

00:24:15Yes. For a lot of people. I remember a trumpet that ended up in a very, very wrong place. And a lot of people will probably tell Tim right now to stick that trumpet right up the same place. Because he basically talked about one of the biggest reasons that they are losing so much money, and it's the metaverse. The weird project that he has plowed billions into. And no one really knows what That for some reason haven't really got the traction that he thought that they would get. Not a lot of traction, but it costs a lot of money. Very expensive verse. Yeah, it's not really raking in anything as far as I could tell. I don't think so. But he's not giving up. He's a trooper. So that's how he closed the letter that now that we have freed up some resources, we can plow on with this.

00:25:13Amazing endeavor. Yeah, and also they still want to stick it to Apple. He mentioned that as well. Oh, because that's so important. Yeah, because they just lost one big battle with them. I guess they want to have another one. Do they want to lose another one? I mean, against Apple, no one's going to ever win. The fact that he is willing to sacrifice 930 people in the cause that he is determined to win, that will never happen. It's so weird. One of the things that he didn't cut back on was his salary, incidentally. Of course. He still makes over a million dollars a year. And someone said, so cutting back on everything aside from Tim, I guess. And yeah, he didn't answer to that tweet. He didn't. No, because he can just go into his money pool and just have a swim. He's not a gold-plated yacht, because times are tough. Yep.

00:26:13So for all of you who might be wondering why he's not getting the sack, well, he has to do that himself because he owns the majority share of Epic stocks. So there's that. No one can get rid of him aside from himself. And I don't think he will. Let's face it. He'll stay. Tim's pretty happy where he's at. Weird thing, though, is a lot of people talk about Tim as a brilliant, brilliant developer. And he... made Epic into what it is. But I'm thinking maybe he's also the guy who's going to kill Epic in there. Exactly. You're getting praise for what you did, which probably is okay. But then if you go and do this, then maybe you shouldn't get any more praise. This is the end of it. But since he's the majority shareholder, I guess nobody can really do anything. This is why you shouldn't be a CEO of a company or whatever. Is he the CEO? Yeah.

00:27:11You can't be that and also be the majority shareholder. It feels illegal. Who's going to tell you that you're dead wrong? When you can just fire anyone and it's your baby. It's literally yours to do whatever you want. I guess the only one that got away with it was Jobs, basically. Yeah, because he died. That's how he got away with it. I'm winning, y'all. Peace out. But he was, on the other hand, winning. Yeah, he was winning. He was definitely winning. So this is a weird thing. And all 930 jobs, that's a lot of people. And they are having an event where they're going to have the Unreal Engine Festival. And that entire team has been sacked. So that's going to be interesting, obviously. The little sherry on top of the garbage pile is that the severance pack is actually pretty good. Well, that's OK, then. For the industry.

00:28:09So they get six months of full pay. So yeah, this is... The weird thing is that I can understand that they had to cut back, but why not kill that weird little... The project that made it go south. Like, this is what you should... I mean, if I had Epic, I would have done... If I wanted to build some weird new tech platform that I don't really understand, I would have had that as like a little side project or like a... A smaller business that was owned under the same umbrella. Something that you could kill off if it didn't work out. You don't bundle it into the main corporation and then kill off the entire thing. You don't kill the thing that feeds you. That's actually feeding you, yeah. So weird. I'm not sure what Tim is smoking right now, but I don't want to have one of those. Well, he's got a million dollar salary, so he's not going to care.

00:29:06No, he's not. He can smoke whatever he wants, but he's been smoking the bad stuff. So anyway, that's our list of the weird state of affairs in the gaming world right now. Do you think this will end? Or do we have to have some major bankruptcies before people start realizing that they're actually killing off their entire industry by doing things like this? I think due to that, we had a couple of years where money was basically free to get in one way or another. And it's not just the gaming world. It's overall with startups in all sections. Now, when it's the opposite, we will pay the price, so to speak. So it will take at least, I would say that it was at least 12 months more of a turmoil before the market has corrected itself and like weed out the weeds and so on and so forth. Yeah.

00:30:00Yeah, I think so too. And I think also like part of it is that the gaming, like the industry has changed so fast in such a short time. Like we've been used to like buying our game for like, I don't know, $80, $60. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and we have the physical game and we play it on our console or. And now we've been so spoiled with everything going so fast. And they get to put out games that are not actually done. So they can just update it along the way. And then we have a lot of indie studios, which have had the technical platforms to release games, like Steam and things like that. So it's been expanding too much too fast, maybe. Yeah. Some of this could be down to growth pain, for sure. But I am...

00:30:50pro like liberal economies and everything like that but i think that the shareholders chasing the dragon at the end of the rainbow thing has a big part of a lot of these big companies losing their way because they're not they're not focused on the the let's say the company should be focused on the gamers because if they're happy they'll sell more But the focus has instead become the shareholders. And they don't care about games. They care about growth. Some of them may do, but most of them. Yeah, no, exactly. And I think a lot of these, let's call them businessmen, I don't know. I don't think they really anticipated the kind of money that's in gaming. And when it got to grow so fast, they were also blinded by all the money. Yeah, let's face it, like Epic.

00:31:46Just to take them as an example. We're raking in billions on one game. And a lot of people say. I want a slice of that. I don't care about the gamer. I want to have some of that money. How can I get it? Let's see what we can build off of this. And I think that has been affecting. A lot of these big gaming companies. For sure. Definitely. But as we said. The market will mature. And hopefully. It will be. a better outcome in 24 months or something like that when we see what's... Definitely, I think so. We're in an overall recession anyway. And gaming, I guess, is a kind of a luxury thing that you don't really have to buy. Sure. And also, I think we should mention that AAA games... The thing that I think is bad about AAA games is that almost exclusively...

00:32:44AAA games are now made by giant global corporations because they cost so much money. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars. So that makes it tough to even start one of those games without the kind of corporations that we don't really like. So maybe I wish we could go back to the era where we had AA games. We knew that they weren't like... graphically the most beautiful or 100 hours long or had like the best of everything. But they were solid games. They cost a lot less. A smaller team could make them and they didn't take as long to make. And those companies weren't always owned by big global conglomerations like today. So I think that would be a good thing if that happened. I think that the Kurd situation will force that once more. Yeah, I hope it does. I really hope it does.

00:33:39But at the moment, I guess they're all stuck between a rock and a hard place. Like, how are we going to... Yeah, it's tough. They usually point fingers at Larian and say, like, yeah, how did they do it? And to be fair, they didn't do it overnight. They've been doing this for like 15 years or something like that. Growing slowly, growing steadily, and they're super focused. They're doing big RPGs only. That's all they do. So they managed to become really, really good at that in every game they put out. was a little better. They learned some stuff. And they would probably suck if someone threw them the Doom franchise. But they are smart enough to know that we're good at one thing. A lot of these companies are failing because they're trying things that they are not very good at. To my knowledge, there will only be one really successful company doing multiple genres and so on. That was Rare when Rare was a thing. Oh yeah, back in the day. Definitely. It's a very tough

00:34:37gig to get where you are big enough to do super ambitious AAA games, but you're not owned by the likes of Sony or Microsoft or Squeenix or anything like that. No, because you're rare. Oh, nice. Or epic. No, no. Anyway, we're almost out of time, but I wanted to... And on a positive note, and going back to the games we're actually having that are pretty good. So we talked about these games in more detail in the other news programs, but Baldur's Gate 3 from Larian Studios actually did do the thing we were talking about. They're independent, and they managed to create a really, really good game that a lot of people are loving right now. So kudos for that. Also, Starfield is out, and it didn't suck.

00:35:29Which surprised a lot of people. And some would even say it's an amazing game. A lot of people say it's a good game. So I think overall, Bethesda went above the hype. I would say it's an 8 of 10. Yeah, a lot of people would say that as well. And with modding, it might... It depends on what your criteria is. But if it's pure, like for me as a... On the Bethesda scale, it's one of their better ones, I would say. And it will only get better. So that's also positive, for sure. And we have, for those who are like me and Oskar, lovers of the Golden Age RPG, we have games like Sea of Stars from Savitar Studio, which is also doing. It's amazing. Yeah, and then they had, if I understood correctly, met their own expectations.

00:36:25and gone beyond. So that's great. That means that they can do more games that the fans want. That sounds wrong, but seeing as we talked about fans not always being the end customer, this is actually a great thing, that some companies are still able to create games because they love doing those types of games. So there we have it. So that's a bit of a positive ending for this horror train. Oh, that felt good. Oh, Horror Train, because this is the beginning of the horror season. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We are at the beginning of Horror Month, so hopefully we'll have the yearly horror show up and coming. The Halloween stuff. Yeah. It's a lot of good. Or horrible. A good horrible sauce coming your way. In the near future. Anyway, I'm pushing this...

00:37:21Sourdough over to Oskar's corner to put it in the oven and take it away. Sourdough, that was a long time ago. But sauerkraut, baby. Nah, but I would say that keep up the hope. Continue to support the indie studios. And hopefully we will get on the better side of this. So until next time, bye-bye. Have a good one. Bye. Bye-bye.