Issue : Games : Nidus

Artifact is a game about small talents.

Artifact launched in late November and died in early December. That's just the way things go here now. Did the world need another card game, "Sure, why not, said Valve." It's something to do, I guess. It's only gonna get worse from here for big companies. I think it is as it should be. I have been hurting for a while when it comes to video games. Why shouldn't they?

I feel like publishers and developers lost touch with the audience, I feel like eyes have been larger than stomachs, I feel like the industry has been rotting from the inside thanks to toxicity. It's been a solid decade, something had to give.

Riot's COO received a two-month suspension for habitual harassment. That's normal. C-Suite antics are legendary in video game workplace life, it's just how things go, part of the culture. If you are not a culture fit, as in, you don't like to be molested at work or things of the like, it's not gonna go well. You will find yourself outside of the industry looking in, no suspensions for grunts.

I never thought I would be the type of person to hope all falls apart, but when you feel so helpless for so long, wow do you root for what was once the bad guy. You just didn't understand the bad guy was the good guy and there are no good guys and it shoudn't be all guys and freedom isn't really free for all. Then you do, but by the time you do, it's too late.

I assume the game industry will chase its own tail till it runs out of money, or friends, or autonomy. Or some version of the three. Which is fine, because games will somehow live on without all of the money and the whatnot.

Artifact isn't a game Valve should have bothered making. The worst people in the company should not be the bosses. Publishers and Developers shouldn't run esports, it's a conflict of interest. People that legitimately care about video games should be able to find and keep work. Rank and file employees should have a voice in the industry to protect them. Fans should be taken seriously. None of that is happening, so this is why this is happening.

Maybe we will all get better next year.

Shouts to information, rest in peace TC, rest in peace Tall T, love is wise, hatred is foolish, get out there and do great things. I believe in you, I really do. Need a tank, you know where to find me. Also Jerbz.

The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue: People: Nebulous

Issue : Games : Perennial

Gris is a game about metastasis.

Signs on the wall point to esports battening down the hatches for next year. Blizzard is getting out of the HoTS business, majors like Fox and Optic are scaling back, China cut half the world off, and street fighter is still pressing buttons. But esports is doing fine, just check your Linkedin account, it's gonna take over any year now.

Old heads look at all of this going on and say, "Yep, esports is gonna be fine, shouts to antifragility, but all of these companies that are getting funded on some imaginary payout in two years, nah."

Let's look at Heroes of the Storm for example. It planned on the continued success of the MOBA genre of game but once battle royale came along the writing was on the wall. Out of Dota, LoL, and Blizzard, one of them had to go, first. The rest will follow.

I am not mocking MOBA's but that has been the reality since the nineties. Fighting games lost ground to FPS which lost ground to MMO which lost ground to MOBA which lost ground to Battle Royale. Games cost millions of dollars to make and years of time to develop properly.

Battle Royale games started around 2012 with Minecraft and ARMA mods. They matured around 2015 with the H1Z1 and PUBG era into what they are now with Fortnight. That is about seven solid years of life for the style, which is on pace with the decade-long lifespan of a top-tier game genre. Just enough time for a generation in the pocket to adopt, grow up with, and move on from. Life of a mayfly.

So back to Heroes of the Storm. How late in the game they got into MOBA's sets them right on pace to make this move-out. The market doesn't care how popular you are, there is only so much energy, training, streamers, and time to invest in a type of game. Esports isn't what everyone thinks it is.

Either way, esports is gonna be just fine but I want esports to win the long game, I want the companies to grow, I want the players to make a living and be happy. But that will not happen in this current meta, where anyone and everyone is throwing bad money over good into the dreamer's pit.

Also shouts to info I see you out there, Also I forgot to talk about it sorry but Gris is dope please play it, also rest in peace TC, rest in peace Tall T, also get out there and do great things, make cool shit, be the good person. I believe in you, you got this. Also Jerbz.

The Protoculture Mixtape: Issue: People : Abiding

Issue : Games : Lunette

The Hex is a game about protagonists.

The Chinese government banned Fortnight. So what, right? China bans a lot of things. That is what the public is saying, but not the business entities that rely on the gaming ecosystem for year over year growth.

To them, this news makes them a casualty in the trade war going on that was inevitably going to evolve into a culture war. Had to happen.

Wasn't just Fortnight. The Chinese government's online ethics review committee had about twenty games on the chopping block. Some have been banned, like Fortnight and PUBG, some have been put on notice, like League of Legends and Overwatch.

Sucks to be Tencent right now; sucks to be NetEase, sucks to be the organizations from Chinese cities that went 20 mill in on the Overwatch league. Sucks to be Blizzard, who are going hard into mobile territory. Losing the China market is like losing the game in that arena. Oof.

So what happens now? Well, Huawei doesn't make a buck in the states with hardware or 5g. Apple can't manoeuvre on the cheap in Shengen anymore. Video game companies can't play global ball without each government having a say, taking a cut, or outright locking the gate. Companies can't make a unified sku and have to make a thousand little variations to each which costs money, so that means they can't afford to take chances so innovation stagnates.

Which episode of Black Mirror is this?

Winter came early, as it is want to do. The world has gone tribal, the global connection has exacerbated old global arguments like the aunties at the bbq who can't let go of the fact that one auntie got grandmas piano all those years ago, so no one gets to play it until we all figure out who the rightful owner is. Such is life.

Anyway, The Hex is a solid game, you should play it. Also Jerbz.

The Protoculture Mixtape: Issue: People: Cresentic 

Issue : Games : Slumgullion

FURI is a game about action arrangement.

People forget that the hard thing is not only hard, it's also expensive. Ubisoft did the hard thing a while back by auto-banning toxic players in Rainbow Six Seige. Today they did an abrupt about-face, claiming that the auto-ban feature was intrusive to the non-toxic part of the communities gameplay experience.

I cant... I just.... wow.

Any parent knows that the second you tell a kid they can't get ice cream they will throw a fit. You have to let the kid get through that because if you turn around and give the kid that ice cream, your word ain't your word anymore, it's a negotiation and that tantrum becomes the Trump card.

Ubisoft is one up-ing this by giving the kid the ice cream and explaining that it gave the ice cream to the bad kid because the good kid was traumatised by how the bad kid was behaving. For fuck sake.

There is an unspoken rule among gangsters, thieves, and other assorted criminals. The rule is, once you walk into Disneyland, you are off the clock. there are no shenanigans to be had there. It's the worlds largest and longest cease-fire area.

A crip and a blood spot each other walking around Futureland with their kids the most that pass is a cold stare, on dire occasions maybe some strong words. That happened because Disneyland took a hard stance on the issue. "If you misbehave, you will leave, and you are not welcome back." So in a sense, Disney is the biggest gangster because it played by gangster rules, as in, "My word is my word."

It took a long time to set, but it did set because Disney stuck to its guns, Disney understood there is more long-term yield in positive customers than negative, and because Disney offers a product so piff that any and every person that walks in there understands the hell they will catch if they are the one that got their kids kicked out of Disneyland.

Video games think toxicity is part of the culture, it's not. Video Games are a microcosm of society, almost all societies begin with toxicity because people accept what they can't change until they realise it has to in order to survive. Toxicity never survives to the survival stage of any society because when push comes to shove toxicity is not important to the machine. It's pineapple on pizza. 

I don't think video games will understand this until winter comes. Government regulation, oversight, and fines, is winter. If you were wondering. It's on its way, and honestly, at this point I get it.

Much like social media, the video game industry is getting bullied by its audience and just not showing that it is capable to stand up to itself, and there are children being put at real risk. There has been a lot of time to fix this problem, and reactive measures or blaming the victim isn't a long-term fix. Something's gotta give.

Shouts to information, I know the job search is hard. I'm going through it myself. Keep your head up, your eyes open, and don't give up. The industry needs you more than you know. Also Jerbz.

The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Gullion

Issue : Games : Immure

Hot Girls VR is a game about exactly what it says on the tin.

The VR conversation got real awkward, real quick, didn't it? A looot of money being thrown around those parts up until summer. Then a lot of people from startups being let go. Not heard a lot from Oculus or HTC in a hot minute.

Valve is just selling porn with it now, which is the smart move. Because the porn folks adopt early, adopt quietly, and never fade into the nut-stained night. VC's and the open public on the other hand...

Look, I don't know what to say. The tech market likes to quietly walk away from flops. Hardware gets ghosted like an awkward tinder hook up through stealth removal of the marketing collateral.

The tech industry is still too insecure to admit things fail. Products, business practices, the idea of open offices. They say things like, "It was successful, so successful we have pivoted our focus to other things." Ok.

It's ok to fail in new industries, folks. Maybe if we all take a deep breath and admit VR isn't adapting so well and is super expensive and the headsets hurt to wear and the games are bad and the software is buggy and maybe it is just not time for the tech to try for the mass market, maybe we could feel better about where the tech is today. Just a thought.

Did I play hot girls VR? Nah, it played me. I stand by that dad joke and it is what it is, information. Also Jerbz.

The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Entomb

Issue : Games : Galumph

Subnautica is a game about submergence.

I don't think anyone really wants Valve to fail or Epic to win. I think its more about people wanting Valve to have legitimate competition and people wanting Epic to have a legitimate value sell. Epic is entering the current meta promising Developers a larger cut of sales. That's cool and all, but we all know the issue for platforms hasn't been sales. The issue is curation.

Valve proved the business model thanks to a trial and error process and surviving tons and tons of hate. For the young boppers who were not around in the early-2000s when the service launched it was a total shitshow that everyone hated. No developer wanted to take a chance on them and no publisher trusted them. Now Valve has a different problem, they have become a victim of their own success.

There are simply too many games entering the service every day. Valve is now Ellis island and crooks are sneaking in and no one is waiting at the dock to greet the new members of the family. They kinda just throw things into a messy room and every once in a while make room in their above the fold scroll wheel for games not called "Assasins Call of Hitman Theft Auto Strike Farcry 10." (I would play that.)

Epic, instead of looking at this problem and entering the market with a solution, decided the move was to promise more money to any developer that decides to play ball with them. So far there is no indication they are even going to try to attract publishers as large at them. And I get that, at this point why try?

At least Valve is giving curation an attempt. They have a discovery queue, highlight titles trending among friends, and even implemented a curators section where so-called famous streamers dig through the mire for the vox populi to suggest diamonds in the rough. Is it working, lord knows, but its a direction.

So yeah, Epic is just another company trying a thing, a thing that is literally a cash grab because they are offering developers cash to grab in order to get them in the building. Epic isn't worried about cash to grab because they know they have at least a year and a half of profitability from Fortnight before they have to start scaling back and firing people because the bubble burst out of nowhere just like it does for ninety percent of meteoric rise games in that timeframe. Shit they haven't even launched the game yet, technically. What a world.

But I don't care who wins this war honestly, because I know how it ends.

Gaming companies will fight among themselves for market leadership until all of the hard work is done without realising the that this particular digital platform endeavour cannot be won by a publishing or gaming company because it is simply not in good business interests for any company allow a competing company to get even as powerful as Valve has by giving their product to the enemy.

It will be an outside force like Google that swoops in after the big battles and offers a simple compromise, "Let us sell them for you. We will direct people to your launchers to buy them. You guys get all the moneys. We will basically be hype men for you."

The companies say ok like dumbasses because money, without realising that Google types only care about the users, which are the true currency in any digital business focused on the economy of scale. Google gets known as the plug, and Valve and Epic are pushed out of the market by sheer force. Big fish eat little fish.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe not. Either way though, gamers will be able to discover and purchase video games digitally, and isn't that the point of all of this?

Anyway, shouts to information, can't wait to be lost with you at 5am in Kyoto. Also JErbz.

The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Tread