A couple of weeks ago, I made an alternative argument for Microsoft to fight the FTC on. One that showed a bit more humility than Brad Smith’s “We tried peace” (which, having spent several decades working with government agencies, runs the risk of catalyzing this issue along bipartisan lines and backfiring on MSFT). Out of due dilligence, it is necessary to entertain another notion, one that looks at the realistic argument that Microsoft has not been ‘good for gamers’ since the start of console generation 7, and therefore the acquisition by said entity cannot possibly be ‘good for gamers’ as an outcome.

Maybe MSFT should argue that if it weren't for them, there would only be two competitors on the gaming market, since Sega departed the platform space 21 years ago. That other companies tried and failed: 3DO, CD-i, Neo Geo, Turbo GrafX. That Atari folded before that. That there

— Red Reddington (@Hamp_LeeHampton) December 15, 2022

Let me first say, if you are fighting this fight on idealogical lines, as 99% of Gamer Twitter is, get out now. This post isn’t for you. If you are someone who has discounted Microsoft’s financial strength as an anti-competitive risk, because “money can’t buy you loyalty”, that’s what the definition of following loss-leader strategies is; using money and the ability to absorb a loss as a means to grow market share and thereby increase customer loyalty by offering cheap products. That’s how Game Pass got a foot-hold. If you then skate by the argument that Game Pass is not a value for everyone at $180 per year, deflecting that with “but Game Pass is $1”, obviously XBox has not gotten to nearly $3bn dollars of Game Pass revenue through customers buying Game Pass for $1. And as recent history has proven out, the economic scenario that once a company following loss-leader strategies gains market share, especially around lifestyle products that consumers deem “essential”, they can raise prices unobstructed. As has been the case with Amazon. Hulu. NetFlix. Gillete. and BMC. Let’s be honest; you are not interested in hearing an alternative line of reasoning if you have already entrenched. That being said, let’s proceed.

Generation 7: the Red Ring of Death. Microsoft started getting reports about XBox 360 failures as early as just after its launch in late 2005. Public admission, the extent of the problem, and the extension of the warranty was not done until mid-2007. And even then, XBox 360s that were already seeded in the user-base were all at risk. It was not until 2010 that the manufacturing problem was actually fully removed with the launch of the XBox 360 S or slim. Microsoft was able to proceed down this path because it could absorb taking the $1.15bn loss from extending the warranty. As well as the additional costs of re-design / re-engineering. We all make this out to be Microsoft did the right thing, and was a good guy. But in truth, they were under duress from class-action lawsuits, individual lawsuits, as well as a disc-scratching lawsuit that lingered through 2016/2017, and went all the way to the Supreme Court. These are additional legal costs that, again, would be difficult for a smaller outfit to shoulder, nor would it have the expert legal team required to fight some of these off. No one can argue that the RROD was ‘good for gamers’. More problematic, buy selling at a lower price than the PlayStation 3, the XBox was able to gain market share. So much so that it indoctrinated its customer base to accepting the shoddy worksmanship of the XBox 360 for several years until it solved the problem. A delaying tactic. Anecdotally, I had my own repaired multiple times and even then bought an XBox 360 Elite. Which also got a RRoD.

And indie developers, who had soured on developing for the XBox in the late 360-era due to strict guidelines that increased developer cost and the friction of administrivia, were baited by ID@Xbox, and then given the switch of the XBox Indie Parity Clause.

Microsoft has an equality clause for indie developers that makes it impossible for an indie dev to bring its game to Xbox One if it has already launched on Playstation 4. The only way Microsoft allows an indie game to hit both consoles is if [it] launches within the same window on Xbox One

Windows Central

The XBox One was outsold 2:1 by PlayStation 4, and by this point in the timeline, Microsoft’s focus for XBox was Game Pass and acquisitions, not games as a first-order. Again, tell me how a DRM-scheme that bit gamers in the ass even this year, a higher price, muddled leadership, and antagonizing indies, yielding fewer indie games on their platform for their gamers, while concurrently investing less in the development of exclusives was ‘good for gamers’?

Generation 9: Microsoft is one of the foremost companies in building and selling collaboration tools for development teams. They make Micrososft Teams. They own GitHub. They build tools that link development communications to office applications; office applications that they are the market leader in and own the vast majority of market-share in, so much so that it constitutes a natural monopoly. If any company should have been able to weather the impacts of COVID, move its teams remote, and transition to non-realtime collaboration, it should have been Microsoft, with only Google nearing any level of parity. And even Spencer is (finally) quoted as saying this year that using COVID as a reason for the low productivity of their development pipeline is an excuse. And yet the current output of their nextgen games is lower than PlayStation 5’s. To that, many will argue that PlayStation put out a lot of remasters and remakes in 2022. But it should be considered that Sony does not have the financial strength and warchest to engage in loss-leader strategies and take the routes Microsoft does. Sony could not take the potential loss of customer erosion by putting out no exclusives in a year. It only has $11bn cash on hand. Microsoft has $107bn. Let’s stop acting like Microsoft is the David to Sony’s Goliath. It is quite the opposite. Microsoft has delivered a nextgen console that ‘eats monsters for breakfast’, and it has pulled greater market share this gneration than last on the Game Pass offering, XBox All-Access, and only three or four exclusives of critical and commercial noteworthiness. All while impinging the industry’s legacy model by creating a low-cost alternative that grabs market share that other competitors cannot meet head-on, encouraging mass consolidation as evidenced by the moves from Tencent, Embracer, NetEase, and Sony. So how is mass industry consolidation, which actually leads to less choice for gamers in the long-term, not more, providing debt-coupled means of consumption in XBox All-Access, & following a business-model that is less-incentivized to produce AAA, critically acclaimed content due to the crutch of a subscription model ‘good for gamers’?

All of this is to say that only a company like MSFT could weather these three cataclysms, all created by its own doing, & still remain the number an operating platform holder and in the top ten of the industry players that make 65% of the gaming industry revenue. The arguments that I made before for them, their case, also work in reverse. 3DO, CD-i, Neo Geo, Turbo GrafX, Atari; none of them had the firm footholds in market adjacencies & capitalization base that would allow them a third do-over, additionally consuming smaller players along the way. Not even Sega, who made similar mis-steps across two generations, was able to hold on long enough to make a third go before it folded and went game-publisher only.

In making these arguments, my goal is only to say, there are two sides to this coin. It is not anywhere near an open-and-shut case, and it requires a lengthy period of due diligence and legal opinion. It is hilarious to me that the “anointed” of Gamer Twitter claim that any who make arguments opposing Microsoft’s case are not being open to other perspectives, when they themselves cannot hear their own intolerance in levying that accusation. That they would dismiss the concerns that many, many other gamers have on what the impact of this acquisition will be on the industry.

Should the acquisition go through, Activision will also have a different set of incentives that may not be beneficial to consumers. In the failure of Call of Duty: Vanguard, ATVI had a lot of pressure on Infinity Ward and the support studios to pull off a reversal. Activision is not as insulated against enduring multiple years of commercial slippage in its crown jewel. But under Microsoft, there will not be incentive to make good when a CoD is not as well received. CoD will be more places. It will be available to people at a reduced cost. Cloud-spend will no longer be a factor as part of Cost of Goods Sold to Activision. The pressure will be less. And with a wider-spread market share, and cheaper consumption models compared to Battlefield, competition will be inherently less. With greater resources to throw at CoD, the likelihood of a threat from an independent such as 1047 Games and Splitgate is unlikely. Who will want to play Escape from Tarkov when there are greater player numbers on CoD and it is available for cheap? Could a PUBG ever happen under that scenario? Almost absolutely not.

Let me also kick the legs out from underneath the table of the “regulators need to protect consumers, not competitors”. That’s bullshit. It is much easier to defend a “protect consumers” line of argument because in the argumentive distance from supplier to consumer, anti-competition lines of questioning become diluted. But even in that obfuscation (a great legal tactic, and great for consle warriors too), it does not upend the economic truth in a capitalist, competitve market: that the presence of more competitors eventually makes a better overall situation for consumers. Microsoft acquiring Activision is not expanding consumer choice. It is a reduction and consolidation of the total number of competitors in the upper echelon of revenue generating gaming industry players. It makes fewer gaming companies, not more. That simple math should be readily apparent even to the most STEM-challenged of the Twitter populace.

How it does not raise competitive barriers for other industry players now and any new competitors that seek to enter later. We already have a state where we have not seen another console competitor enter the market for 21 years. How does MSFT acquiring Activision increase the possibility that we will? The fact that we have not seen one yet does not invalidate anti-competitive concerns. In fact, the history of the last two decades shows that barriers to entry have already had impact that has not been good for consumers. And it is not the regulatory agency’s job to just shrug their shoulders and allow that vector to continue unmitigated just because it’s already bad now.

Should the merger/acquisition go through, other 3rd party publishers will have additional financial and competitve incentive to do the same; seek other competitors to merge with or seek sale to one of the other Big Tech 5, or another Entertainment congolomerate that can leverage adjacencies in similar ways to Microsoft. We’ve seen similar behavior in the video entertainment industry. NetFlix disrupted the legacy cable television model such that a flurry of M&A’s was kicked off to move to the new model. Disney moved to buy key properties. Warner Bros merged with Discovery. NBCUniversal bought Sky. All of these moves have yielded more and more content being moved behind paywalls. There is ZERO argument that that has been good for consumers. The problem when similar behavior starts gaining momentum in the gaming industry, which it will by letting this merger go through, is that there is no Fubo, TiVo, Roku, and Vizio to create a disruptive middle tier. In fact, everything that industry is showing us is that mass consolidation around the strongest financial players could result in NetFlix itself being acquired by…you guessed it…one of the Big Tech 5. These are valid concerns that consumers and agencies have that are easy to see. That is, if green lenses and console warring do not make you dismiss them outright and refuse to even take five minutes to say that they need to be weighed carefully.

Much ado is made about the Microsoft Activision-Blizzard merger and acquisition. That includes various noise made by yours truly. But the fact of the matter is that while it is a newsworthy headline in the here and now, by next console generation it will have been forgotten. One of the truisms that are a result of not only our society, but of the gaming community in particular in their inability to recall (or be bothered to do research on) the history of the gaming industry.

Nine years ago, Apple first went to jury trial, accusing Samsung of violating several US patents for the iPhone. I would spend months trying to find a person with both a smartphone in their hand and the ability to remember the name Lucy Koh, the presiding judge over the first trial. Or who could recall that that case went all the way to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts presiding. Gamers can barely be bothered to recall even current events, as evidenced by the XBox fans that cried out that their first-party games were going to PC…oblivious of the well-known and advertised fact that both XBox games and PC games share the DirectX APIs to address hardware. The same people who were of limited awareness then are no more enlightened today.

We’re going on the second year of people calling Arkane’s Death Loop less impressive in play than it was in its 2019 E3 showing and after its three delays; memories of Dishonored and Dishonored 2 are no bulwark against that. And of course much of the hardware that typified our gameplay in 2012 is gone, rarely given much thought to, and hardly considered relevant: the Vita. The 3DS XL. The Wii U. And I don’t even remember the Neo Geo X. The point being that gamers are a fickle crowd. With short memories.

Gamer Twitter would like to convince itself otherwise, however, like it always does. There are maybe 57 million Twitter users in the US. Of those, maybe 37 million at most are gamers, running a range from uber-casual to mainstream and a smaller wedge, still, of hardcore (hardcore meaning “those who usually buy more than ten games a year and play more than 20 hours [a week]”). Of the ~215 million gamers in the US, that’s 17%. And yet every week, Gamer Twitter lathers itself up, telling itself that it is representative of the mainstream gaming market.

But they are also often argued because someone voiced an opinion on the topic. Unfortunately, legal opinions are like opinions on the Bible. Many will voice them; voicing them does not make them right. In this country we allow the law to be interpreted. And one person’s view of the law can vary widely from the next. Especially when those people are judges, or corporate executives, or people with skin in the game on how the court case is decided. Which is the textbook definition of bias. Or those opinions are formulated by their own past experiences, which is anecdotal. And so regardless of domain expertise or position, every legal opinion rendered on this matter is just that…an opinion. And opinions are not fact. Name-dropping whose opinion it is does not change that. Only one opinion will have judicial weight and the ruling of law. That of the judge assigned to the case.

Every company is doing what it needs to do to influence the outcome that best serves its own needs. The notion that any corporate entity is on some altruistic crusade, trying to protect the hearts and minds of gamers everywhere, is laughable. Or that they are religiously charged to protect the rights of the small percentage of gaming industry employees who want to unionize. These companies pay millions of dollars every year to lobbyists, while incrementally increasing how much they charge consumers for product. Their intentions are math-based. Capitalist. And Game Pass is no different. It’s availability for cheap is to obtain one goal and that is market share. It’s not because Spencer was visited by three ghosts one Christmas and decided to change Microsoft’s ways.

The reality is that, given the ridiculous things that are happening, the Supreme Court is likely to have to get involved again. Microsoft’s argument that an agency that is 107 years old, and has been charged with participating and leading anti-competitive regulation in this country since inception, is now holding unconstitutional proceedings is a bit of a reach. A union-busting executive vomiting a Twitter thread in support of the merger is cringe. And 10 gamers who either struck it rich in crypto or convinced an ambulance chaser to work pro bono filing a lawsuit against Microsoft to stop the merger is just weirdo AF.

While this case has been interesting to follow, just as Apple-Samsung was, COMCAST-NBC-Universal, Disney-Fox, Oracle v Google, and Epic versus the world (yes, some of those were mergers, some of those were patents, some were anti-trust; point being…court…judge…legal), just like all the others, the nitpicking over the dry-bones and minutiae by the general public has gotten as droll as it always does. The case is going to a judge and is in the US legal system and however it comes out, I think that, in and of itself, is the best thing. That way, the gamers who have their egos symbiotically entwined with plastic boxes will have no recourse for their tears. In the meantime, gamers should still be playing games. And Microsoft and Sony both have work to do that should not be on pause. The former to get its production pipeline up to a velocity commensurate with the number of studios it already owns. The latter to round out a portfolio that has to-date almost solely been characterized by cinematic, narrative-driven near-linear wide-path game-design and architecture. 2023 should include work efforts by both beyond myopic focus on this one issue. And gamers should do the same.

Two days ago, OnePlus announced that its next major flagship smartphone – the OnePlus 11 – and new earbuds will saunter onto the smartphone scene at an event in February. Given that I just recently replaced my OnePlus 9 with the Google Pixel 6, and talked at volume about the absolutely horrible experience it was using the former as a daily driver for the past year, I should have been apathetic about this announcement, to say the least. And yet, here I am, a mild bit tingly in my nether regions about the potential of a solid B-team phone entering the fray. As nonplussed as I am about that emotion, one need look no further than the absolutely barren landscape that is the American smartphone market to understand why.

While OnePlus promises to “elevate the user experience from Cloud 9 to Cloud 11” [OnePlus marketing has always been one non-sequiter after the other, but gorram, we just had the OnePlus 10! WTF does this even mean??], I found that the OnePlus 9 drove in the complete opposite direction. I heard much better things about the OnePlus 9 Pro, which also supposedly played better on Verizon, with the network dynamic possibly being part of the root of the problem. But, of course, I’m neither OnePlus nor Verizon. That’s their problem. I just want a great phone that works on a great network. The big tell on whether or not I dare to get back in the pool with OnePlus is what its global availability is at launch and whether or not the OnePlus 11 Pro will release alongside the base model.

But my eyes will be peeled. Because God knows there is nothing else of interest to buy on the US market. There is no more Essential phone, and the Nothing Phone, what could have been seen as a spiritual replacement, was more a ghostly echo of those times than a real contender. Razer is making a handheld, but it’s been tough for me to nail down its usability as a phone. I have zero problem using a tablet as a phone, and at 6.8 inches, it is only slightly larger than some of today’s superphones. And I use a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3, which is larger in tablet mode. But none of the Razer or Verizon marketing show the Edge in use as a phone, so I am not going to bank on it providing a good phone experience. The NextBit Robin was an interesting notion, but nothing further has been heard from that tech and we assume whatever special sauce it had has been incorporated into the Edge since Razer acquired Nextbit.

Huawei and ZTE are gone. Using an ASUS ROG phone on US carriers is always a risk whether it and its antennas will be fully supported. And of course full support for Poco phones, amazing tech at rock bottom prices, and anything of Xaomi, Honor, or Oppo will grant you a nice digital paperweight and screen in the US, but not much more. Nope. Today we just get the Samsung Galaxy in 19 different flavors, the iPhone in about 10, and the Pixel. There has not been anything of whiz-bang nerdiness on the scene since foldables. So I guess my curiosity in the OnePlus 11 Pro will have to do, regardless of my nightmarish experience the first time and last time out with OnePlus. Fingers crossed.

That crack appears to have been a portal, though, like the one in Stranger Things and the only thing I got out of the the first Duo was a demogorgon in the car that converted to a Mind Flayer at home. Let’s hope OnePlus brings something nicer to our shores in 2023.

Protected Groups Don’t Need to Stop Playing Video Games – Bigoted Gamers Do

It cracks me up to no end the entitled gamers today who do not believe in holding themselves accountable for their own behavior and blame everything on corporations and other gamers. That those gamers then extend their hypocrisy to gate-keeping around demographics of different minorities…the disabled, people of color, sexual orientation…this anti-woke movement is a joke, and just a euphemistic cover for bigotry. We live in an era of modern gamer appropriation, where generations of new gamers colored by prejudices try to exclude vertical demographics of gamers new and old, despite that the fact that they were not here at the inception to make gaming a thing in the first place.

If we want to exclude certain gamers, my vote would be to get rid of a large swath of the mainstream gamer that started gaming after 1990. The rise of the dude-bro gamer in console generation seven is a societal shift that we can draw lines of attribution to for most of the strife and misery in gaming today. Not only has that generation’s bulk and the ones that follow it had a severe negative impact on the gaming community as it attempted to evolve to include social media (what has now become anti-social media, as my man EJ describes it), but more damaging has been the manner in which it consumes interactive entertainment. A locust-like devouring of only AAA content, voracious gluttony of micro-transactions, and an ignorance of independent games that drives production costs higher, and drives publishing houses towards consolidation and extreme risk aversion.

But that has largely gone away, as gaming has become the new superficial trend that people hang ego-importance on like they used to do clothes or sports or good looks.

Without the trappings of a consumer demographic that needs to have its ego fed in Twitter Spaces or YouTube, game creators had a lot more latitude to focus on creativity rather than commerciality. While games have always been about business, and there have always been metrics around player engagement and player spend, today developers have to worry about gamers who have zero knowledge about software development criticizing their game based on the accusation of lazy devs, as an example of the toxic consumer that the industry now has to navigate.

That is the aversion and cowardice of man-babies. I am ok with those demographics having increased content that caters to them because they are not ruining games.

It’s the weak and the close-minded, the gamers that want to bury their heads in the sand and blame everything on everyone else, that is ruining games. And none of us that truly love games need them at all. It amazes and disappoints me that the consumption of an art-form is so inundated with lunks and Lemmings that the art has started to contract in some ways from its vector of 40-years ago.

There’s a contract that I make with games that I expect to be fulfilled. I expect games to introduce me to new worlds. To the worlds they have constructed. I expect to be taught rules about those new worlds. How things work. What things harm you. What things help. What things constitute sustenance. What things constitute tools. What things can be used for crafting. What things must be transformed before they can become useful. And then I expect them to keep those rules consistent. To not arbitrarily change them. And for them to remain in tune with the narrative, if there is one. I am unforgiving in this regard. Uncompromising. It is the contract that I make with games and their developers.

It is one of the reasons that I like flight sims and racing sims so much. They are physics based. Even when the fidelity of the physics model is not inherently 1:1 with the real world, by and large, except when there is a glitch or a bug, those rules remain consistent. There are things that make you faster, and things that will put you at a disadvantage. The only license they really take is within the framework of the rewards system. The only one they should take. And so I fall off a bit in the crevice that separates racing sims from just racing games, where, in the latter, there can be things like rubber banding. It’s not that those games are not fun, or that I refuse to play them, they just sit in a stack of things that will never be my favorite.

It is in fact, by and large, why I have historically hated the typical boss battle. It is why I tend more so towards military shooters, which tend not to change the laws of physics mid-stride, but just give you different tactical situations that place you at various disadvantages to think your way out of. It is also one of my principal detractors from Stray.

While a wonderful and whimsical title, I very much pushed back form the table at the arbitrary changing of physics as you went from puzzle-to-puzzle. The way you could clear vertical distances up or down in one puzzle but couldn’t in the next. The way you could jump to points on some walls but could not on others. And especially the way in which you could not walk on the tops of fences with flat horizontal surfaces until the final quarter of the game. Do those things make Stray bad? No. They just mean that it was not created with the design intent of appealing to gamers with my physics OCD. As bad as I am, there are gamers even further on the spectrum, who will nitpick every physics model to death, and slag a flight sim that does not reflect the specific tire pressure in an aircraft’s landing gear when the runway is at 4400 meters above sea level. I don’t think that is a fun way to live either.

There are games that meet this rubric and ones that don’t. It doesn’t make them bad. It just makes certain ones more suited to my preferences than others. But I don’t want every game tuned to my specific preferences. That would be an incredibly boring product landscape in the gaming art medium. And so while I have my preferences, I am glad to partake in the titles that try to meet them, as well as the ones that boldly choose to say “Eff you and your preferences; this is my creation. Imbibe and be merry. Or don’t”

I started building gaming PCs in 1999. I had to get a PC for grad school. Interestingly enough, being in a curriculum that was oriented around people who would hold fiduciary responsibility for procuring technical equipment, the school felt it was important that we understood how a computer was built, along with some minor web design. I took the store-bought Packard Bell that I’d purchased from the local Circuit City and started modifying it. That fall, I moved it into an industry-standard ATX case, divested myself of any proprietary parts (it was quite an experience as I was exposed to what a proprietary motherboard was and why the hell it did not mate with an industry-standard front-panel connector harness 😂), and started to become very familiar with the stretch of California highways that lay in between me and the Fry’s Electronics in San Jose. Good times.

I was still gaming on consoles; three generations of PlayStation and two of the XBox have come through the studio in the time since. And I got into livestreaming, finally having moved to places where I had and continue to have access to bandwidth that readily supports it without workarounds and compromises.

The lifestyle has meant getting very little sleep, as I continue to work in a field where I have been granted yearly increases in responsibility. On the side, in addition to just gaming, I have thrown myself at times into writing, having worked for several paid sites, as well as a handful of fan-supported ones. And done stints as a game reviewer, hardware reviewer, and livestreamed my own personal gaming diary of sorts along the way. I completed that second tour of grad school to earn my Masters in Software Engineering; but despite the work and family and house, there has always been gaming, and specifically there has always been PC gaming as my primary.

But my life would definitely be easier if I just bought gaming PCs. Or even just consoles. The side-gig has had its downsides. The expectations of everyone to fix their computer problems. My role as the wider-family cell-phone device and plan administrator. But building PCs has had professional knock-on effects in keeping me more in tune with how industry technology is moving. It’s actually been directly beneficial, as I have had to change-out parts or do significant changes in the field for navigation and machinery control PCs. And it’s given me a thing to write about to honor my commitments to my college Creative Writing professor.

I grew up in those early years reading the likes of Gordon Mah Ung, Greg Vederman, and Norman Chan. Some of my favorite podcasts have been Buzz Out Loud, and the Engadget Mobile podcast back when it was Myriam Joire and MWC was a thing. I also read copious amounts of Andy McNamara, Andrew Reiner, Dan Stapleton, Matt Bertz, Andy Mahood, and Thom McDonald across Game Informer and PC Gamer. I’ve had the opportunity to interview Cliff Bleszinski and do a few other neat things. Being a gaming journalist, or just a journalist in general, would have been a neat junket. But I was always focused elsewhere for work, and PC building and gaming has just been a hobby. A really great hobby.

I dunno. As you get older, you start forgetting more than you remember. But you also start focusing on the people that are important. And less so on the ones who don’t matter. And in doing so, reassert your orientation to a trajectory that constantly drives you forward, and continuing a path of discovery. There are people who are small, and reside within their own snide bubble, and you remember how irrelevant they are. And so I felt like taking this trip down memory lane for whatever it’s worth. To remind myself why and how this whole thing started. And to remind myself about the importance of the things I get out of it. And to push down the irrelevancy of all the BS that gets in your windshield along the way.

The fervor over Hogwarts befuddles me. As a licensed property, I need to see a lot more to be interested. Reviewing the combined track record of PortKey Games and Avalanche Software shows a publisher who has only released mobile games, all of them bad except for one. And a developer that has released mostly bad games, with a few games in the mediocre to average range; nothing that has ever really stuck the landing in terms of critical or commercial acclaim. Excitement over licensed IP’s and other elements often gives me pause and forces me to hash some pointed critical questions in my mind before I settle on how I feel about a game in the zeitgeist and receiving universal approval. I have my own rubric of what I need to experience to ensure that I am not just going along with the crowd. And while today I open with thoughts that flummox me on everyone’s regard for the Hogwarts Legacy preview, I have been equally concerned over having a very measured take on my Elden Ring experience. [Sorry; needed to get the Hogwarts assessment off my chest 🙂]

The world has been gushing. And so I have been wanting to be very reserved, thoughtful, and introspective about what I have been feeling with regards to the latest effort from FromSoftware. I have always felt that the Souls games were niche. And that a large part of the dynamic of the support behind them has been fueled by the bravado of gamers who like to chest-thump and declare their superiority over other gamers. And so I have long held on to the notion of trying to discern any support for their value for credible critical commentary or fanaticism.

I was glad to see it go away in the early 2000s and have not been pleased to see FromSoftware bring it back. But there is rune-farming, levelling, the occasional loot-drop, and Torrent, all of which combine to make re-do’s a but more worthwhile, faster, and not as tedious. The addition of the Stakes of Marika make for a reduction in the old trudge back to a fight through a number of attrition funnels that the old games had.

I enjoy the geometry of the outdoor environments and the notion that elevation matters. You can use it to your tactical advantage, and, if a fight is approached foolishly, it can also work against you. I like that the do-loop of levelling has been tuned so that there are opportunities for you to feel powerful and not simply at the mercy of iFrames and stagger-based combat physics that impact you far more than they do the enemies. But within these first eight hours I have found ways through to actually feel the differential between my Wretch at level 1 and my Wretch at level 17 and many step-ups in between. The old games, I felt, made you feel ineffectual and powerless but for those gifted with The Dance, making average gamers often feeling clumsy and inelegant and then…well…dead.

But the single-most thing here is the provenance given over to the player in layering the open-world design on top of the SoulsBorne formula. It is not simply a matter of the additional locomotion provided by Torrent. A lot of gamers have described the ability to jet as one of the most positive aspects of this new spin on the Souls formula. I think that is very simplified view. I do not think that perpetually running away from enemies is a positive gaming experience, nor a very sophisticated one. And I do not think that Miyazaki’s design intent was that flat. Playing the cheekiness of managing the battle-space geometry to avoid aggro-ing enemies while dispatching ones of your choosing is the same, whether you are mounted or not, and so I do not think that labelling an Elden Ring advantage over past Souls games simply because “it’s open world” is a sufficient depth of scratch.

Elden Ring is no exception and suffers from this weakness, too. For some it will be a Souls game. For others it will just be a 3rd person action-adventure game. For me, a map akin to the Elden Ring implementation becomes a strategic endeavor. One in which I choose to plan out how I traverse the map and chart a course of discovery, outside of any recommended path or notion of a mainline campaign. From Gatehouse Ruins in Limgrave, I have struck out East, seeking the edges from where (theoretically) the sun rises. I have both chosen and simply run into engagements along the way. I have deliberately sought out and hunted bear from the Artist’s Shack. I have seen tree ents trudging a carriage behind them, chains attached to the carriage through spikes driven through their chests, and despite their ginormous size, have spurred Torrent towards them, brandishing my sword and whispering “Thataway”. And I have spied enemies on the horizon that I have noted for later engagement. I’ve disregarded any feeling of accountability for the storyline (it is threadbare in its native presentation) and, most importantly, shifted my posture from one of fear to one of exploration and curiosity. And i have have not consulted a guide or a wiki.

I am sure the game will hammer me back into submission at some point and, sheerly by the weight of time, incentivize me to get back to the beaten path. But by then I hope to be well-travelled and Elden Ring-worldly and as such, to regard the coming adversity as simply another piece of the puzzle to be figured out. I think the challenge of Elden Ring in gamerverse uptake (because I do not believe that the sales numbers are representative of actual long-term player engagement and hypothesize that there is a cliff of fall-off after the 21 – 25 hour point of people who will not come back for a return engagement) is that there is a valley where this game sits most comfortability as an experience. There is a very basic panache where it will be attractive to hack and slashers who think that boss-battles are sophisticated and enjoy the accolades of defeating them. This an approach that in many ways truthfully does not feel more complicated than Pokemon, Monster Hunter, or Shadows of the Colossus. Then there is a high-functioning end where some will find a gamification in the many metas that there are in the game. Metas that in previous installments have been rigid, non-existent, or so Byzantine as to be almost invisible, and most pointedly only observable through intense investigation, trial and error, or seeking a guide. There is a swath of gamers in the middles, arguably the largest demographic of the gamer-population, for whom this game will still not be a fit. The game’s narrative that I’ve seen so far does not go that deep. I still think this is a Souls game first, and an open world game second. The world is not lived-in in a way that a Morrowind game is, and that will be a steep fall-off for many people seeking that kind of experience. I do not know that someone who loves the narrative of a God of War, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Spider-Man, or Horizon Zero Dawn – Forbidden West will like this game, unless they are decidedly on the lookout for a disparate experience.

While it has its open-world hooks into me, I still feel like Elden Ring is a murder-simulator. That sits on a holodeck rendition of the 9 circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno (the literary piece, not the game). People will need to consider that, I think, in order to determine if they will make it past the onboarding into the meat of the game. That jury is still out for me as I continue to trudge through my own Rembrandt of the experience.

Since rising from the ashes in this new incarnation, I’ve said that I would skew away from the lecture-y, preacherly litany of the past. I’ll renege on that aspiration for one moment. These past few months have seen a barrage of cyber-attacks on game companies, plying for the sweet, succulent sensitive financial information of those of us who broadcast far too much about our personal lives on the internet every day. When we are lucky, they just make off with source code, which does not impact us consumers directly. But sometimes they get our information, too. Most recently, Ubisoft was the one who found itself in the crosshairs, as reported over on Game Developer, formerly Gamasutra. In this case, supposedly no player data was compromised. But far too many of us live cavalier lives in the face of rising cyberthreats, and are far too exposed to continue doing so.

Most of you streamers out there tell the world whenever you buy some new piece of gaming or production gear, mention where you bought it from, indicate what carrier delivered it, and let your followers and anyone else in earshot know how much you paid for it. Congratulations. You just divulged a honey pot of information sufficient for a bad actor to call and use that to corroborate the “last purchase made” question that is typically used to screen someone calling in to request a password or, far worse, an email address change to the one associated with the account. Most of the other information they need, you’ve divulged before; this would be the last peice. Trust for the security of these companies should be held with high skepticism, but I trust the people manning the customer service lines even less (sorry; you guys all do good work, but I doubt the average call-center person in the account access section has their Security+ or CISSP).

Someone will guess that, and then combine it with that “qwe4rty7” password that you patted yourself on the back for for your ingenious trickery, but isn’t a strong password and will be easily toppled over by a brute-force effort.

While it is true that I am not a fan of the many behaviors that monetization drives in content creators (because it spawns many of the 🤡), I will encourage people to be more prudent about the security of things that drive their livelihood. Last time I checked (and maybe partners get bennies I don’t know of), YouTube and Twitch do not offer health care, life insurance, short or long-term disability, or, hell, even pet insurance or discounted legal service for its content creators, even if it’s what you do full time. If you lose access to one of these accounts or, worse, people use flow-across social engineering to gain access to multiple resources as the domino effect from knocking one account down (such as financial accounts you have tied to your gaming, social media, or content creation accounts), you’re farked, to say the least.

On this note, I will also mention that protecting yourself is not limited to password protection. The number of content creators who stream, game on, or otherwise create content from a PC that do not have a backup or disaster recovery solution or redundancy in place is staggering. The number of tweets I see about someone saying “No stream” or “My channel will be offline” because their PC is down hard slash crying emoji and has to be rebuilt, typically because the OS got borked, is far too many for people who are monetizing and reliant on daily interaction with their followers to maintain their revenue base. Or some of the even worse cases, like people who have serious physical repair problems with the location they stream from but refuse to get insurance….SMH.

Back to passwords. Don’t just set up 2FA. Also consider using a password manager or a local encrypted vault. Some people don’t like password mangers and worry about the companies that own them and what happens when those LLC’s change hands. OK; fine. Local vault then. Better yet, get a physical key.

Two standard tenets to live by:

• If there are less than 3 copies of a thing, then you don’t have a backup (I’m leaving out the geographic separation, because mainly I am talking here about images to restore your PC and I recommend you just make full images and I wouldn’t worry about shipping those out to your cousin on the West Coast)
• Account security should be based on a thing that you know, and a thing that you have, so if your account is compromised by the first, they still cannot get in without having the latter in their possession

Cool? Cool. Now go play games.

Long title. A lot to unpack this morning. But we’ll try to move quickly. I’ve been molting. As a lot of you know over the past couple of weeks I’ve been transitioning to only playing on PC, after 20 years of playing on 3 or more platforms, and twice as much time gaming in general. Tonight will be the second or third episode of the Enough 2 Keep Going podcast that I’ve recorded since this process started. Grooming the agenda this AM, I noticed that we didn’t have the most recent State of Play down for discussion. I was about to be ok with that. The new show format is supposed to be the games we’ve been playing as a priority, and any news associated with those games as a secondary matter. And I haven’t played anything associated with the PlayStation brand this past week. In the transition, I got rid of my XBox Series S, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 5. And I’d taken a break from SIE’s God of War on PC. I scanned over the State of Play, and once again considered how my decision was going to cut me off from the PlayStation ecosystem. I had settled on this path forward, but a recent conversation with a friend had given me cause to once again consider whether or not I was going to miss the PlayStation exclusives.

I’ve never been a big SIE exclsuives fan. For the most part, I can take them or leave them. My other gaming interests have always made it difficult to fit those games in. That being said, over the past few years, I’d had immense fun playing the Uncharted franchise installments, Miles Morales, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Death Stranding. And the PS4 was my Destiny 2 main for a very long time. Maybe I should do PlayStation Now? Lemme come back to that.

And when there is a SKU that is, there will be even more powerful hardware available on Desktop. The Steam Deck has the potential to meet its specific use-case better than anything in recent history, but the comparisons to desktop power are kind of ludicrous. For me, there is no way that a 7 inch OLED will ever rank as being “better” than one of my 27″ curved IPS 1440p 144Hz HDR displays. Again, it will meet its use-case as a couch-device, but it willl never exceed the desktop in other areas. And so those who embrace power over portability will never embrace it as the “best”. Better in mobile situations, better in bed, better on the couch, better on travel, sure. But let’s stop the flat-earther takes on where it sits in comparison to desktop power.

The Steam Deck is a decidely casual PC gaming value-proposition, where someone wants it for scenarios where they can’t use a desktop, or for the crowd of PC gamers for whom “good enough” is just that. Again. Casuals. I know that that latter category of PC gamers is growing, led by an army of livestreamers who had to buy PCs for streaming because you can only do so much production quality streaming directly from a console; and then once there, flipped over to be a PC gamer out of convenience, and now run out to buy 3080s and 3090s so they can play Fall Guys and PUBG. That and other influences are creating an additional demographic of PC gamers out of a knock-on effect. So there are more and more people in the PC gaming space who don’t build their own rigs, and will be ok getting by on low-power compute on a heavily optimized operating platform because their performance demands are not high. And as an alternative to lugging a 10 pound package of gaming laptop + power supply brick, the Deck is a viable alternative. In fact, I am sure it will be an alternative to my current PC gaming travel solution, Google Stadia.

When that happens, it frees up room in my subscription space for PlayStation Now. And so I spent time after grooming the agenda this morning to litmus test whether or not the service would be a fit for my requirements. There’s a host of technical reasons why it wouldn’t be, in its present state. But the first litmus test I wanted to run was for content. I’ll be set for Uncharted for bit once the PC version of the 4 + Lost Legacy Remaster drops for PC. But none of the other titles I mentioned earlier are available on PS Now. Spider-Man I think is, which I guess means the official list of PS Now titles isn’t up-to-date? I couldn’t find it this morning under Spider-Man or Marvel’s Spider-Man. And it would need to include Miles to secure my interest. Ghosts is not and Death Stranding is not.

Sony’s approach to its streaming service is weird on the landscape of streaming media. Streaming media is a very specific business model, so don’t take umbrage to my perspective based on the way the gamer thinks about it, because it’s not the same value-proposition that streaming and cloud content have established themselves as across the entertainment lansdscape. In every other strategic approach to streaming delivery, recency is key. And the value of delivering things so far beyond day-and-date that they are only nostalgia plays or collector plays is a weak hand. I know that rumblings and rumors of Spartacus are likely to change that outlook. They’ll need to in order to encourage me to renew my relationship with PlayStation again anytime soon.