Bungie is Bunged
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/04/24 at 01:13 AM CT
Uh oh! Not all is well in the studio that Sony bought in 2022 as hilarious parody of parity with Xbox’s massive merger with Activision-Blizzard. No, it turns out that having one game – “Destiny 2” – a live service at that, and mismanaging it into the ground is not a great way to turn a profit.
After a round of downsizing last year to signal “Destiny 2” winding down and preparing to enter End of Life mode, Bungie just culled over 200 more employees, leaving the studio no longer lean and mean, but downright skeletal. While the studio still allegedly has two new games in the works – one being the reboot of their original MacOS FPS, “Marathon,” and the other being a colorful Gen-Z-friendly multiplayer game code named “Gummy Bears” (HOPEFULLY not based on the candies… but might be kind of cool if based on the differently-spelled classic Disney cartoon). With both titles being so far in the future we know next to nothing about them other than (working) titles, …
Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/28/24 at 02:49 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Summer will be over soon, and all the cute little autists and gender-queers will be heading back to their Postmodernist Deconstruction Indoctrination mills. While, traditionally, Industrial Gaming bigwigs have chosen the end of Summer to start dumping tons of games onto the market, this year’s August schedule looks like a continuation of the Summer Games Drought.
We’ve only got 5 pieces of shovelware coming in August, with only two of the major subvarieties represented. In Licensed Swill, there’s “Star Wars Outlaws” (which we know Chris will buy for full price, since he’s one of, like, 4 people on Earth who enjoyed “The Acolyte”), a 4th sequel in the ‘Gundam Breaker’ series, a new officially-licensed ‘Monster Jam’ title, and “Tiebreak: The Official Game of the ATP and WTA.” I don’t know what either of those acronyms stand for, nor do I care, but based on the genre tag Chris applied in the database, …
It’s Time to Split Xbox from Microsoft
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/21/24 at 02:09 PM CT
My all-time favorite President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, earned a reputation as a Trust Buster, regulating the Wild West of Big Business into a more manageable and publicly responsible form. It seems that today’s Federal Trade Commission has finally opened its eyes and gotten back to turn of the (20th) Century priorities in that it recently attacked Microsoft for increasing the price of Gamepass and removing some features from all but the most expensive subscription tier.
Where was the FTC when Microsoft was purchasing company after company? Why did the FTC allow the Activision-Blizzard-King deal to go through if they knew Microsoft would raise prices as they consolidated control and increased the Xbox Division’s market cap by billions of dollars?
They probably had their heads up their collective asses like all appointees from both the Trump and Biden administrations, worrying about pushing their side of the Culture War instead of neutrally and objectively …
“Unprofitable” Gamepass Undergoes Corrective Surgery, Becomes Even More Useless
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/14/24 at 03:21 PM CT
I still remember when you could buy a brand-new, just-launched console for $200. Now simply “owning” a console costs $240… annually.
Microsoft, the company that first successfully foisted subscriptions upon console gamers after the failures of Nintendo’s Satellaview and The Sega Channel, has made it abundantly clear that the only thing that matters to them, as far as the Xbox Division is concerned, is making their once-optional Gamepass service into a successful, predictable, and perpetual revenue stream. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Gamers haven’t really taken a liking to Gamepass, even among the tiny slice of the pie who are oblivious enough to Microsoft’s past failings to willingly involve themselves in the Xbox ecosystem.
As a result, the company re-branded their Xbox Live service to the Gamepass moniker in an attempt to make the sinking ship appear to be afloat, in spite of being fully underwater. Furthermore, the “introductory pricing” of Gamepass and the …
GOG Sells-Out to “Big Gaming” Company
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/06/24 at 10:57 PM CT
We at MeltedJoystick have been less-than-impressed by GOG – formerly GoodOldGames – and its failure to deliver any meaningful action to follow up its talk. GOG has been making news in Gaming circles since it first launched in 2008 with its novel approach of being a 100% DRM-free marketplace. Subsequently, the company made waves with its FCKDRM Initiative, which quietly went away; and with its GOG Connect program to provide DRM-free backups of select Steam games, which quietly went away; and with its GOG Galaxy client, which was supposed to put all of our digital games in one place, but which is poorly managed, riddled with bugs, and reliant on volunteer coders to maintain most of the third-party store plugins; and the company even made noise about being in lock-step with Gamer culture, while simultaneously kissing the asses of both the Chinese Communist Party and the Marxist Fringe Left.
It should go without saying, but GOG has failed to be the independent, outsider, pro-nerd …
Backlog: The Embiggening – July, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/29/24 at 02:36 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! As July rolls in, most of the MJ Crew is on vacation… except for me, because I never take vacations, since my life is just one long Summer Break as it is. We’re smack in the middle of the Summer Games Drought, and while there might appear to be a lot of games for me to sift through and condemn for your delight, dear reader, that appearance is only due to the ongoing scourge of ports. The Industrial Gaming big-wigs are quite literally showering us with used water (a.k.a., piss) and telling us to enjoy it.
We’ve got a light shovel-load coming in July, since not even shovelware publishers want to release games during the drought… which is so counter-intuitive and ignorant of basic economics, it’s hard to know where to start with it… anyway… We’ve got all three shovel-ready categories represented in July, with a port of a Licensed ‘One Piece’ game and a port of a Licensed ‘Agatha Christi’ game in the Licensed …
What Motivates Your Gaming? Find Out with Help from Quantic Foundry
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/23/24 at 02:09 PM CT
I remember back in primary school when the administration was desperate to figure out what made students tick. Instead of allowing students to “self-identify” and filter ourselves into increasingly-bizarre social Identity groups, as is happening today, we were, instead, given two different Personality Tests, one of which was the perennially popular Myers-Briggs 16 Types test.
Back then, I typed-out as an INTP, but upon taking the test again 30 years later, I’ve turned into an INTJ – ironically the same as my Troll-Dad, with whom I constantly butted heads – with the key difference being that, as a kid I was disorganized and erratic, but as an adult I meticulously keep track of things and make lists because I no longer have a parent to do that kind of mundane stuff for me, and if something isn’t written down somewhere, I WILL forget about it.
Recently I learned that, back in the halcyon pre-plague days of 2019, a company called Quantic Foundry started doing …
Grind is Ground
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/15/24 at 01:56 PM CT
In a SHOCKING revelation during a recent interview, Rod Fergusson, the General Manager of the ‘Diablo’ series, let slip the STUNNING and UNPREDICTABLE fact that videogame players – even those who ostensibly ‘loved’ “Diablo 2” back on the halcyon days of the early ‘00s – don’t like so-called ‘long-chase grinding.’ The definition of ‘long-chase’ being that it can take YEARS of daily play sessions to acquire a single desired piece of loot as a random drop.
Naturally, the sarcasm dripping off of the preceding paragraph is intentional, since I NEVER actually enjoyed the ‘long-chase’ style of grinding, or, generally, random grinding at all. And it turns out that I was just – as usual – ahead of the curve, with modern Gamers making no bones about the fact that they like a quicker, streamlined grind, preferably with guaranteed rewards for time invested, with capped potential for greater rewards based on more time spent grinding.
I’ve been critical …
Windows Recall Gets Recalled, Reveals Microsoft Back Up to Old Tricks
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/09/24 at 02:23 PM CT
When erstwhile MeltedJoystick photog, Matt, asked me what I thought of Windows Recall, I said I’d never heard of it. When he described it as an AI-powered search function that obsessively screencaps and monitors everything you do on your Windows PC in order to “help” you find files or websites you may have “misplaced,” my response was immediate, without any need to pause and think about it:
“That sounds like an enormous invasion of privacy and an equally enormous waste of system resources.”
And I guess my knee-jerk reaction to Windows Recall was spot-on, since Microsoft has recently backtracked (or maybe “recalled”) their decision to turn this feature on by default in the face of massive backlash.
Yup, good old Microsoft, whose Xbox Division has been bending over backwards in recent years in an attempt to seem customer friendly when compared to the likes of Sony, Nintendo, and Apple, just let the mask slip. What a “surprise,” then, that the same …
Review Round-Up: Spring 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/02/24 at 02:07 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:
My Spring quarter started off fairly strong with 4 reviews of big games. But then I got engrossed in the gamified activities of “Get Rid of All My Late Parents’ Junk” and “Redecorating,” and really dropped off toward the end of the quarter. I even bought a bunch of new releases, expecting to get engaged and invigorated by the new hotness, but my first taste of “Eiyuden Chronicle” was so bland and uninteresting that I would literally rather clean and play Dailies in “Warframe” than actively play new releases. Maybe if I can get the cleaning and redecorating done this Summer, I can pick up more gaming to reward myself.
“Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag” – 2.5/5
“Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince” – 4/5
“No Man’s Sky” – 4/5
“Pikmin 4” – 4/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Wow, for the first …
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