OK, now what?

I wasn’t sure we’d ever get here, but 21 months later, Microsoft has successfully fended off the FTC, pacified the CMA, and completed its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. One industry leader has merged with another, which means Microsoft, on top of everything else it does, is now one of the highest-revenue video game companies in the world.

It’s not a question of whether Microsoft will earn back that $69 billion, but when.

Activision Blizzard, along with its mobile subsidiary King, controls several of the highest-grossing franchises in the games industry, one of which is the perennial best-seller Call of Duty. In theory, Microsoft could simply allow Activision Blizzard to continue business as usual and throw a few games from A-B’s back catalog on its Game Pass service to entice subscribers.

That has traditionally been Microsoft’s approach to games-industry M&A. Like the Roman empire, the subtle genius of Microsoft leveraging its pocketbook is that it reportedly doesn’t force big changes on its newly acquired studios. It simply changes all the stationery and takes a hands-off approach.

That approach has actually backfired once in recent memory, however, with the notoriously dead-on-arrival vampire shooter Redfall. Initially announced as the next big, stylish Xbox exclusive, Redfall turned out to be a failed attempt to combine developer Arkane’s knack for immersive sims with the more readily monetized mechanics of a Fortnite or Destiny.

At least in theory, Microsoft could’ve stepped in to reverse course on Redfall but didn’t, which gave it a black eye in May. That experience could affect how it handles its integration approach to Activision Blizzard, particularly since A-B could use a lot more work.

The Microsoft acquisition process has served to turn a spotlight on the flaws in Activision Blizzard, many of which are thrown at the feet of departing CEO Bobby Kotick. Activision Blizzard’s games are still licenses to print money, but many of them are also naked exercises in revenue-boosting, primarily through the use of microtransactions.

This year alone, Diablo IV has been accused of making itself actively worse to play through repeated “nerfs,” so an invested player has to spend more time in-game, and is thus more tempted to spend real money on character improvements. Overwatch 2 is also seen as an unnecessary brand refresh that harmed the overall experience.

Essentially, Activision Blizzard under Kotick has been coasting off its own momentum for years, and even before the acquisition, was bleeding both player counts and experienced developers.

While this obviously can’t all be Kotick’s fault, Kotick is seen as the guy who decided to focus on profits above everything else by turning all of Activision Blizzard’s games into Skinner boxes: log in every day, get random rewards, hope for better luck tomorrow.

This has been the status quo at Activision Blizzard for long enough that it’s hard to know what the company will look like at all under Microsoft. We’re headed into uncharted territory for both Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, because neither company’s now-standard rules can usefully be applied.

The recent round of layoffs at Epic Games impacted its office in Bellevue, Wash., with 39 employees affected, according to a new filing with the Washington state Employment Security Department (ESD).

Epic, headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., is arguably best-known as the developer behind the popular online shooter Fortnite. It’s also the creator of an eponymous digital storefront for PC games and the publisher of the Unreal Engine, a high-end toolkit for game development and 3D modeling.

On Sept. 28, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney notified employees via an internal email, later posted to Epic’s public blog, that Epic would lay off “around 16%” of its workforce. This amounts to approximately 830 workers. In addition, Epic has sold its recently-acquired subsidiary Bandcamp and spun off UK-based engagement company SuperAwesome into its own, largely independent entity.

“For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn,” Sweeney wrote, “investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators. I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.”

Affected employees, per Sweeney’s memo, have received a severance package that includes career transition services and six months’ base pay and healthcare.

Sweeney further stated that Epic’s revenue issues were driven by a change in focus for Fortnite, where its growth is now driven “primarily by creator content with significant revenue sharing.” This has seen Fortnite evolve once again, from its initial release as a co-op team shooter, to its free-to-play player-vs.-player Battle Royale mode, which is what grew it to its dominant place in the genre, to its current position as an effective metaverse platform via Fortnite Creative.

“We’re cutting costs without breaking development or our core lines of businesses so we can continue to focus on our ambitious plans,” Sweeney wrote.

“Some of our products and initiatives will land on schedule, and some may not ship when planned because they are under-resourced for the time being,” he continued. “We’re OK with the schedule tradeoff if it means holding on to our abiity to achieve our goals, get to the other side of profitability and become a leading metaverse company.”

Epic Games opened a Seattle-area studio in 2012 to pursue development and QA on Unreal. In 2017, Epic leased 25,000 square feet of office space in Bellevue’s Lincoln Square, where it works out of the same building as Valve Software and the American offices of the Pokémon Company.

Epic still has five job openings at the Bellevue office.

Epic acquired 13 companies between 2019 and 2022, including Kirkland, Wash.-based codec creator RAD Game Tools; artist marketplace ArtStation; the parent company of Mediatonic, the UK-based studio behind the hit viral game Fall Guys; and Psyonix, the developer of Rocket League.

The first couple of times I tried to play Six Days in Fallujah, I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong. I’d take on a mission, head forth into a bombed-out urban sector, and within a few minutes, get shot repeatedly by attackers I never saw.

It turns out that this is exactly how Six Days is meant to work. It’s not a typical video game; it’s more like an urban combat simulator. It’s forced me to unlearn some habits I’ve developed over decades of playing less realistic games.

Six Days in Fallujah, currently in Steam Early Access ($39.99), is a cooperative multiplayer first-person shooter developed and published by two Seattle-area companies, Highwire Games and Victura.

First announced back in 2009, Six Days is a deliberate attempt to use the modern FPS as a template to create an interactive historical reenactment. Specifically, it’s meant to give players an idea of how it felt to be on the ground during the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004, both as an American soldier and as a civilian from the city.

Its arrival on Steam Early Access marks a new chapter in a story that goes back almost 15 years. Six Days initially appeared as a project by the now-defunct Atomic Games with the Japanese company Konami attached as publisher. Upon its initial announcement, however, both anti-war advocates and veterans disliked the idea of turning the Second Battle of Fallujah into a video game, for any reason. Konami quickly dropped the game, which took Six Days off the industry radar for the better part of the next 12 years.

Six Days is more concerned with realism than any first-person shooter that I’ve played in maybe the last decade. Even games like Call of Duty, for all their fascination with modern military hardware, tend to be games first, with all the quality-of-life bonuses that fans have come to expect from their shooters over the years. For example, if someone opens fire on you in a modern shooter, its UI will probably show you which direction the bullets are coming from.

Six Days has no such concerns. In addition to little things like a minimalist UI, it features a realistic approach to both weapons and their relative level of danger. Get shot once, and you’ll need to withdraw to cover to try and patch yourself up. Get shot again after that, and you’re either dead or will need a nearby teammate’s help.

As a result, the game is pure paranoia fuel. Any doorway or window in Six Days’ recreation of Fallujah could hold an enemy with a machine gun. Opponents can stage ambushes, snipe you from blocks away, or drop mortar shells on your position with little or no warning. In a game, this would strike me as unfair, but this is supposed to be a war.

At this point in Six Days’ run in Early Access, the only playable content is its “fireteam missions,” a series of four rotating maps for up to four players that are set in various neighborhoods throughout Fallujah.

In addition, Six Days features an assortment of videos, made up from new and archive footage, that features testimony and stories from both American and Iraq veterans. The project was originally conceived by Eddie Garcia, a Marine who fought and was wounded at Fallujah, with the aim that “video games can help all of us understand real-world events in ways other media can’t.”

Personally, my biggest takeaway from Six Days is that I’d be a terrible Marine. This might be the most realistic first-person shooter I’ve played since some of the earlier Rainbow Sixes, and even that feels like a bad comparison. Just in terms of the sheer tension of the experience, Six Days is already in a class by itself.

The game is built around the expectation of close teamwork, where you’re meant to be able to depend on your squad to cover angles and watch your back. If you run off alone, or worse, try to Rambo your way through the conflict theater, you’ll end up dead in seconds. You’ll want to try to play with a regular crew if you intend to crack into Six Days, and to make sure you’ve all got microphones when you do.

At time of writing, however, Six Days is just a painfully realistic military shooter, set in a series of environments that are identical to any other bombed-out war zone from a recent video game. The fireteam missions are grueling and intense, with little room for failure, but they’re little more than a proof of concept compared to what Victura and Highwire have planned for the project.

Several earlier shooters like the Medal of Honor series have taken real pride in their historical accuracy and reproductions, but Six Days is breaking new ground here, by recreating a recent conflict from an unpopular war in living memory. The developers seem entirely aware and respectful of that, with testimony from real soldiers in every loading screen, but the campaign mode is what’s likely to sink or elevate Six Days in Fallujah.

After more than a week of controversy, Unity Technologies posted an apology letter to its community and promised to undo or roll back many of the changes it had planned to make to the licensing agreements for its game engine Unity.

San Francisco-based Unity is the most commonly used engine in modern video game production, particularly in the mobile and indie spaces. Roughly 70% of all currently and recently developed games used Unity’s tool set, including roughly 80% of mobile games.

Unity, which has an office in Bellevue, Wash., last week announced that it planned to make several updates to the pricing and packaging of its licenses. This included the introduction of a “Runtime Fee,” which would’ve seen developers charged for each end user installation of a product made with Unity that had reached a specific revenue threshold.

The initial announcement was immediately controversial, with dozens of studios criticizing Unity’s new policies on social media and beyond. The Runtime Fee, as originally written, could have easily bankrupted smaller studios, and many companies who work in Unity aired concerns that Unity felt comfortable revising its existing terms of service without notification or discussion.

Unity reacted with several clarifications, followed by a Sept. 17 promise to reverse course.

On Friday morning, Unity Create president Marc Whitten offered an open letter of apology on the Unity blog, along with a new set of changes that replace the original.

“I want to start with this: I am sorry,” Whitten wrote. “We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy.”

Whitten is a Microsoft veteran and one of the founding members of the Xbox design team. Before moving to Unity in Feb. 2021, he spent nearly five years at Amazon as a vice president of entertainment devices and services, including a leadership role on Amazon’s cloud-gaming service Luna.

“You are what makes Unity great, and we know we need to listen, and work hard to earn your trust,” Whitten continued. “We have heard your concerns, and we are making changes in the policy we announced to address them.”

This includes continuing to offer Unity Personal, the free hobbyist version of the software, for free; waiving the Runtime Fee for games built in Unity Personal; and ensuring that no game with “less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue” will incur the Runtime Fee.

The Runtime Fee policy is now only planned to apply to the next long-term service version of Unity, which will ship next year. Games that are already complete or which are currently in development will not be subject to the fee, unless their developers choose to update the game to the 2024 Unity build. Studios will also have the option to switch from the Runtime Fee to a deal where Unity would be granted a 2.5% revenue share.

“We want to continue to build the best engine for creators,” Whitten wrote. “We truly love this industry and you are the reason why.”

As of Friday afternoon, the changed Unity policies have been greeted with tentative enthusiasm by game developers.

“This is about the best outcome we (game developers who use Unity) could realistically hope for,” said Patrick Morgan, studio head at Seattle-based Galvanic Games, in an email to GeekWire. “They listened to the industry’s major concerns and responded with appropriate changes.”

He continued, “At Galvanic, we still plan to explore other game engines for our next game, as this whole mess emphatically reminded us of the risks of depending on one engine.”

One of the less visible reveals from Microsoft’s dramatic document leak is that Xbox head Phil Spencer and the Microsoft board of directors were interested in making a bid to acquire Bellevue, Wash.-based software developer Valve Software.

In this week’s Xbox leak, a number of documents were submitted as exhibits in Microsoft’s ongoing hearings against the FTC, many of which were accidentally made public. This included an August 2020 email between Spencer and Microsoft marketing leaders Takeshi Numoto and Chris Capossela.

The email was primarily dedicated to the chances that Microsoft could acquire or merge with Nintendo, the possibility of which Spencer described as a “career moment.” As a side note, however, Spencer mentioned that Microsoft had a “writeup” on the possibility of acquiring Valve, and that Microsoft’s board of directors was open to the opportunity if it came up.

The Nintendo leak has naturally gotten most of the attention (especially the note that Spencer is/was apparently in touch with at least two parties that are actively acquiring Nintendo stock), but a theoretical acquisition of Valve would have a comparable impact.

Valve is the company behind several of the highest-profile franchises in the modern games industry, the most prominent of which is arguably the Half-Life series. Half-Life, in turn, gave rise to the popular military shooter Counter-Strike, which has a sequel arriving at an indeterminate point in the near future.

More importantly, Valve is the sole owner and operator of Steam, the original storefront for digitally-delivered PC games, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Steam is in a near-constant competition with other digital storefronts, including Microsoft, but has yet to give up its dominant sales position.

Steam also lent its name to Valve’s portable gaming PC, the Steam Deck, which is reportedly on track to reach 3 million units sold by the end of this year.

Valve, like most major players in the games industry, doesn’t usually disclose its internal numbers. Even its annual end-of-year breakdown isn’t organized in a simple, linear order. However, analysts will often attribute anywhere from 50-to-70% of global PC gaming revenue to Steam. It was estimated at bringing in $4.3 billion in revenue in 2017, which was before it broke its concurrent user record several times during and after the COVID lockdowns in 2020.

Valve would be an obvious get for Microsoft’s games division if it only owned Steam. Its lineup of genuinely iconic video game franchises is just icing on the cake. That being said, it’s also difficult to imagine a scenario in which Valve was at all receptive to the deal.

“One of our strengths as a company is that we don’t have any external investors,” Valve’s Robin Walker told me in 2020. “We’re fully self-owned. We have the freedom to look at what’s coming, look at what’s changing, and try to adapt to that. We don’t like to make plans that go too far out because we couldn’t maintain that flexibility.”

A lot of Valve’s identity as a company is tied up in that spirit. It doesn’t need to keep shareholders happy and its president is already an eccentric billionaire. That leaves Valve free to chase whatever strange pursuits it likes, such as randomly deciding to design and sell a portable gaming PC during an international chip shortage. Valve, like Nintendo, doesn’t have to make any sense if it doesn’t want to.

While there is in theory a point at which Microsoft could throw a big enough check at Valve to make the acquisition happen, the resulting company would not be the Valve that its fans and customers have grown accustomed to. It would simply be an Xbox studio with Valve’s name on it.

Obviously, to quote Walker again, “anyone who thinks they know exactly what the state of the video game industry is going to be five years from now is quite likely to be wrong.” It’s possible if unlikely that Valve could somehow crater itself so spectacularly that it ends up looking for a buyer. As the company stands today, however, Valve is so fiercely independent that even a big player like Microsoft isn’t likely to get it to sell out.

In a major leak, Microsoft has accidentally disclosed many of its past, present, and future plans for its gaming division, such as details about its next-generation Xbox, planned acquisitions, and a potential new model of the Xbox Series X in late 2024.

The leak appears to have been caused by a clerical error. Microsoft uploaded a number of files to a federal court website last week as exhibits in the Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing attempts to prevent Microsoft’s acquisition of California-based game developer Activision Blizzard.

The upload accidentally included a number of confidential documents, as per Bloomberg, which included schedules, internal communications, design files, and more. This was initially noticed by users at the video game message board ResetEra on Tuesday.

Microsoft’s ongoing fight with the FTC has been huge for giving fans and press a look behind the scenes at the video game industry. Sony accidentally revealed some key budget numbers during June’s hearing in San Francisco. But this weekend’s leak was effectively an all-access pass for Microsoft’s Xbox plans.

The reveal that’s gotten all the press comes from an August 2020 email between Xbox head Phil Spencer and Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s commercial chief marketing officer, which discussed the possibility of Microsoft purchasing Nintendo.

Spencer noted here that Microsoft was “playing the long game,” as Nintendo was in good enough financial shape in the summer of 2020 that it wasn’t likely to agree to a voluntary merger. However, he also described a theoretical merger between the companies as a “career moment” for himself, and argued that Nintendo’s future “exists off of their own hardware.”

Side note: Both fans and analysts have argued for years that Nintendo would be best-served by adopting a new position as a third-party software developer and abandoning its hardware entirely, as its competitor Sega did in the early 2000s. This was a more sensible argument in earlier software generations, such as with the GameCube, but still resurfaces from time to time, chiefly among PC gamers who would really like to play new Zelda games.

The documents also confirm several reports that Microsoft intends to continue making physical Xbox units. The next-generation Xbox, Microsoft’s entry into the tenth generation of gaming consoles, is reportedly planned for release in 2028 as a hybrid unit, which will combine both current client-side loading with the cloud.

This approach, as noted by the Verge, is similar to how the current version of Microsoft Flight Simulator works. That game runs off its local installation, but also uses Microsoft’s cloud servers to stream photorealistic scenery to your system as you play.

The leak included Microsoft’s planned roadmap for the new Xbox. As per its internal timeline, Microsoft is presently doing the research and paperwork on the project, with plans to move into the concept/pre-production stage later this year. In theory, though, the 2028 Xbox would use both machine learning and cloud technology in conjunction with its own hardware. Relatively little about a 2028 game would run or be rendered locally, or have to be designed ahead of time.

It’s worth mentioning that all of the documents in the leak dated back to last year. Many of Microsoft’s plans could have, and now likely will, change.

Other reveals from this latest Xbox leak include:

• The next generation of the Xbox might not simply be a single console, but would consist of multiple devices that share the same OS. This would further Microsoft’s current “Play Anywhere” philosophy, but would extend it to the production of a handheld system, alongside web browsers, phone apps, PCs, and a “cloud console.”
• There are plans on the table for a new model of the Xbox Series X. Code-named Brooklin, this mid-generation “refresh” of the Series X features a new cylindrical design, 2 TB of internal storage, a single USB-C port in front, no disc drive, updated wireless technologies, and improved sustainability via lower power draw. It’s planned to hit the market at the same MSRP as the original model ($499) in or around holiday 2024.
• Along the same lines, a new model of the Series S, code-named Ellewood, is also in production. Like Brooklin, it would ship at the same price point as the current Series S, but would include 1 TB of internal storage, better wi-fi, and several innovations that are intended to improve the unit’s overall sustainability.
• Brooklin and Ellewood would come with a new generation of the Xbox gamepad. This new controller, code-named Sebile, sticks with many of the design elements of the current Series X|S “Merlin” game pad, but adds haptic feedback, quieter buttons, an internal rechargeable battery, an accelerometer, and improved durability and longevity. It’s planned to be compatible with Xbox, Bluetooth, and “Direct-to-Cloud.”
• Notably, the Sebile would also shed the current “share” button on Merlin pads in favor of the smaller layout that’s currently found on the Elite v2 controller.
• Both consoles and the Sebile are noted to be made with recycled material, and would ship in 100% recyclable packaging.
• At one point, Microsoft had also considered making an offer to acquire Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software, which operates the Steam digital storefront. The board of directors at Microsoft were fully supportive of doing so, as per Spencer’s leaked email, but the leak doesn’t contain details about whether that bid was successful, if it’s ever happened at all.
• Several unannounced games from Xbox subsidiary Bethesda Softworks were mentioned in the leaks. These include remastered editions of Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion; a sequel to the 2022 urban horror game Ghostwire: Tokyo; something called Doom Year Zero; and Dishonored 3, a surprise follow-up to Arkane Studios’ dark fantasy immersive sim.
• The leak contained a number of 2022 emails from Xbox VP Sarah Bond, which included estimates for how much several third-party publishers might ask for in exchange for their games being added to the Xbox Game Pass service at launch. This included Star Wars: Jedi Survivor ($300 million) and Assassin’s Creed Mirage ($100 million).
• Microsoft has been notoriously secretive about the internal figures that surround the Game Pass service, so Bond’s leaked emails provide a rare look at some of the potential math.
• Xbox initially estimated that Baldur’s Gate III would only cost $5 million to launch day-and-date on Xbox. BG3 had originally been announced as a Google Stadia exclusive, which led Xbox to describe it as a “second-run Stadia RPG.” It’s since turned out to be one of the biggest hits of 2023.

Update: Xbox head Phil Spencer took to Twitter on Tuesday afternoon to address the leak, which reportedly follows up on an internal email that was sent out to Microsoft employees.

“We’ve seen the conversation around old emails and documents,” Spencer wrote. “It is hard to see our team’s work shared in this way because so much has changed and there’s so much to be excited about right now, and in the future. We will share the real plans when we are ready.”

ProbablyMonsters, the Bellevue, Wash.-based studio collective that raised a $200 million Series A funding round in 2021, has laid off an undisclosed number of employees.

“Today, we are making the difficult decision to right-size our company,” CEO Harold Ryan wrote in a Sept. 15 post on LinkedIn. “We are eliminating some central services roles while we continue to support hiring in critical areas.”

A ProbablyMonsters representative contacted by GeekWire declined to comment on the number employees affected by the layoffs.

Posts on LinkedIn and other platforms suggest that the layoffs impacted ProbablyMonsters’ live services team, which is responsible for handling content delivery for “games as a service” platforms.

Founded in 2016 by Ryan, the former CEO at Bungie, ProbablyMonsters bills itself as “building a family of sustainable game studios through a people-first culture.” It raised another $50 million last year following the Series A round.

ProbablyMonsters currently consists of two internal game developers, Battle Barge and Cauldron, after selling its internal studio Firewalk to Sony in April. Firewalk later revealed its debut project, a multiplayer first-person shooter called Concord, at Sony’s PlayStation Showcase on May 24

ProbablyMonsters subsequently halted development on Cauldron’s debut project in June, with Ryan saying on LinkedIn that the unnamed project’s “competitive landscape is too uncertain.” Battle Barge, headed by a lineup of talent from Runic Games, Gearbox, and Perfect World, has continued work on an unannounced project.

“We will continue to add resources to our development teams and focus on getting our games to market,” Ryan wrote on LinkedIn on Sept. 15. “Our affected employees are not only great people: they are talented employees. If you have openings, I highly recommend each and every one of them.”

In the wake of a controversial policy change by game engine developer Unity, dozens of small independent video game studios have announced they’ll abandon the engine and/or have called upon Unity to reverse course.

Unity Technologies, headquartered in San Francisco, might be best-known for its cross-platform game engine Unity. For over a decade, Unity has been a go-to toolset for video game production, particularly in the mobile and indie spaces.

Just this year, several of 2023’s highest-profile games were built in Unity, such as Oxenfree II, Dave the Diver, Sea of Stars, Arcadian Atlas, and Venba. For Pacific Northwest productions that we’ve covered on GeekWire, you can also include BattleTech and The Fall Part 2.

As widespread as it is in console/PC gaming, though, Unity is used virtually everywhere in the mobile space. If you’ve played a game on your phone or tablet in the last 10 years, such as Pokémon GO or Call of Duty Mobile, there’s a solid 80% chance it was made with Unity.

On Monday, Unity announced via its official blog that, as of Jan. 1, 2024, it would change the terms by which it licenses its engine. One element of those changes was the introduction of a new monthly “Runtime Fee,” which would be charged each time a qualifying game made with Unity is downloaded by an end user.

The threshold for incurring the Runtime Fee is determined by the version of Unity a developer is using. For example, users of the free Personal package would become eligible for the fee if a single project were to pass $200,000 in 12-month revenue and 200,000 lifetime installations. After that point, Unity would charge a developer a flat 20 cents per install. The installation figures would be detected by Unity Runtime, a separate program that gets installed alongside any game that was made with the Unity Engine.

This would’ve been controversial enough by itself. Unity usually makes money off of its engine by sharing revenue with companies who make successful products, but this changes the deal dramatically in Unity’s favor, using shaky metrics that aren’t readily accessible to companies outside of Unity itself.

Then developers subsequently noticed that Unity had quietly revised its terms of service to suggest that these changes could be applied retroactively, and that they would still apply to companies that signed a licensing contract with Unity before the Runtime Fee’s implementation on Jan. 1, 2024.

“Because revenue and profit aren’t taken into consideration with the per-install fee, there is a possibility that for smaller studios, the installation fees cost more than the total revenue of the game,” said Patrick Morgan, studio lead at Seattle’s Galvanic Games, in an email to GeekWire.

Galvanic recently attended the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle to showcase its upcoming release, Wizard With A Gun, due out on Oct. 17. Wizard was built in Unity.

“Depending on the success of Wizard With A Gun, this could mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra fees charged by Unity that we could not have predicted when we started [development],” Morgan said. “To say we’re mad would be an understatement… they’ve sprung this change to the Terms of Service on us a month before launch.”

Unity’s original announcement didn’t include any details about common, critical user cases, such as game demos, charity packages (i.e. Humble Bundles or the 2022 itch.io Bundle for Ukraine), giveaways, downloads from subscription services like Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass, or even pirated copies of the game.

By charging a fee based on user installations, Unity would effectively penalize any user who, for whatever reason, deliberately makes their made-in-Unity game available for no cost. As an example, Vancouver, B.C.’s Over the Moon once offered its 2014 Unity game The Fall as one of the Epic Games Store’s weekly freebies.

Under Unity’s new licensing agreement, as Over the Moon pointed out via X (Twitter), suddenly being charged per installation for a game that was downloaded millions of times for free would result in a business-killing Runtime Fee.

In fact, by Unity’s terms as written, a user who installs, removes, and reinstalls a full Unity game that had reached the threshold for the Runtime Fee would result in the game’s original developer being charged twice for it. Theoretically, a bad actor could set up a server farm to automate that action, which could force a studio into bankruptcy by running up its Unity tab.

This all created a furious, growing backlash against Unity by development studios from all over the world. The changes drew sharp retorts on social media from multiple affected studios, including Pacific Northwest businesses like Innersloth (Among Us), Aggro Crab (Going Under, Another Crab’s Treasure), Mega Crit (Slay the Spire), and Rose City Games (The World Next Door, Floppy Knights).

Massive Monster, the creator of last year’s viral hit Cult of the Lamb and 2018’s The Adventure Pals, joked in a now-deleted tweet that it would outright delete Cult of the Lamb on Jan. 1 rather than pay Unity’s proposed fees.

In addition, campaigns have begun to boycott the Unity Unite conference in Amsterdam on Nov. 15, and multiple developers have announced they intend to stop using Unity, either immediately or in the future.

Unity later issued a FAQ that attempted to clarify the changes, such as stating that only full games’ initial installations are subject to the Runtime Fee. Developers can also enter into deals with Unity that would diminish or eliminate the fee, such as using Unity’s LevelPlay service. It also denied that the licensing change would be applied retroactively to games released before 2024.

“The Unity Runtime fee will not impact the majority of our developers,” Unity wrote in a Sept. 12 tweet. “The developers who will be impacted are generally those who have successful games and are generating revenue way above the thresholds we outlined in our blog.”

Unity’s attempts at damage control continued for most of the week, but the changes being offered at all have widely been seen as a breaking point for Unity’s user base.

“We believe wholeheartedly that the proper way to introduce big changes would be forward-looking, which allows developers to make an informed choice about whether to use the software for a project, knowing all the financial ramifications and implications,” Tyler Sigman told GeekWire.

Sigman is the co-founder and game design director at Red Hook Studios in Vancouver, B.C. Red Hook’s horror-themed RPG Darkest Dungeon II, built in Unity, left Steam Early Access in May.

“To change a fee model that applies to existing games is the equivalent of you leasing a car under certain terms, and then the leasing company sends you a letter informing you that you will now be charged money each time you start the car,” Sigman said.

Unity may yet walk back these changes, but in the short term, and to a massive degree, the damage has already been done.

“The implication here is huge, because nothing can prevent them from increasing the fees or changing them again,” Sigman said. “For Red Hook, the biggest issue is the uncertainty and trust breach that comes from knowing that the terms can be changed at any time. And we’re powerless, because we spent five years and millions of dollars developing a game that is built in Unity and there really is no practical option to change it to something else. What we can do about it is seriously reconsider what tech we would use on our next projects.”

“This whole fiasco feels like the writing’s on the wall,” Morgan said. “Features and bug fixes on the engine seem to have slowed after the last three rounds of Unity’s layoffs, and now they’re squeezing their existing customer base for extra revenue. We love working in Unity, but it’s hard to justify building a business on a platform that’s entering a death spiral.”

Earlier this month, PAX West 2023 was well attended by an international cast of game developers and publishers. And as usual, the show was a big draw for the Pacific Northwest’s ample development scene.

Some of the biggest players in video games, like Sony and Microsoft, once again skipped the show, and Nintendo was effectively self-quarantined behind its separate Nintendo Live event in the Arch.

It was a great show for indies, however, with teams from Washington state, Oregon and Vancouver, B.C., all turning out. Washington is the second biggest state in the U.S. for video game production, and PAX is effectively its hometown show.

Read on for a recap of some notable titles and other news of interest out of PAX:

The highest-profile local game at PAX this year might’ve been Ironwood Studios’ Pacific Drive, which made a big public debut at the PlayStation Showcase back in June.

It had an open demo at PAX, and as weird as you might think the game is from a trailer, it’s weirder in play. Pacific Drive is set in the Olympic Exclusion Zone, a version of the rural PNW that’s undergone some unexplained disaster.

You’re trying to navigate the Zone in your old rust bucket station wagon in order to figure out what’s happened here. That splits your focus between keeping your car running, with whatever parts you can find, make, or steal, and trying to find your way through the impersonal, constant hostility of the Zone. I left my car for a minute to pick up some vital materials, and a UFO immediately tried to steal it.

It’s not as simple as the usual video game post-apocalypse where a bunch of Mad Max rejects are trying to shoot you. The Olympic Exclusion Zone simply wants you gone, and is willing to violate as many laws of physics as necessary to get you out.

Imagine the most surreal late-night road trip you’ve ever taken, then double it. That’s Pacific Drive. It’s due out later this year as a console exclusive for the PlayStation 5.

On the other end of the spectrum, three locally made games made it into this year’s PAX Rising showcase, and one of them has been on my radar for a while. Spirit Swap: Lo-Fi Beats to Match-3 To is a colorful, musical puzzle game from Soft Not Weak, a worker-owned studio that’s split between Washington and Oregon.

“It was important for us to show joy,” Réjon Taylor-Foster, the game’s UI/UX lead, told me at PAX. Spirit Swap features a diverse cast of characters who are all comfortable in their own skins, with low-stakes conflicts — a bad breakup, a miscommunication — that don’t define their lives.

In the meantime, they all help spirits find their way back home, as performed via a head-to-head match-3 game. You can dispel spirits by arranging them in rows of three or more, as well as use your characters’ unique spells to tip the scales in a close match.

More than anything else, Spirit Swap reminds me of small-press comic books or webcomics. In motion and in play, it feels like its creators made it for themselves more than anyone else, out of a little of all the things they love. It’s not desperately trying to find an audience; it’s just here, and if you like it, that’s cool.

The best of the rest

Counting the Seattle Indies Expo (which is going to have to get its own story), there are usually around 50 locally made games at PAX in any given year. This can range from explicit nostalgia grabs to expensive mainstream productions to incredibly niche indie productions. If there’s one thing PAX always highlights, it’s how much is really going on in the games industry if you’re willing to take even one step away from the mainstream.

Here’s the rest of what I saw at this year’s show, live from the Seattle Convention Center’s expo hall. (Not counting Galvanic’s Wizard With a Gun, which was simply too popular to get anywhere near on all four days of the show.)

A Corgi’s Cozy Hike — Scalisco Games, Seattle

“We saw Candy Crush make so much money,” Daniel Scalise told me, “but where did it all go?”

That led Scalise and his partner Johnson Do to found Scalisco Games, which makes games in order to support Seattle-area animal shelters.

They were at PAX to promote the Kickstarter for their third project, A Corgi’s Cozy Hike, a non-violent, “bite-sized” adventure about a dog that’s out to climb a mountain despite its stubby lil’ legs.

Twenty percent of the money that Scalisco raised via selling merch at its PAX booth will be donated to Dog Gone Seattle.

Another Crab’s Treasure — Aggro Crab, Seattle

The Seattle-based creators behind Subway Midnight and Going Under are back next year with Another Crab’s Treasure, an action game set on the ocean floor. You’re a hermit crab who’s lost your shell. In order to raise the funds to buy a new one, you’ll head out into the hostile regions for salvage, fight sea creatures, and fashion temporary new shells out of whatever you can find.

Aggro Crab’s setting new standards for user accessibility with ACT, but the memory I took away from the PAX demo is a gut punch. ACT has the animation style and color palette of a children’s cartoon, but the tough-but-fair difficulty of an Elden Ring. More to the point, it’s explicitly set in the aftermath of human pollution.

Your crab will use bottle caps and soda cans as a shell, smash through abandoned bottles, and gather microplastics for use as currency. It didn’t hit me just how dystopian this setting really was until a couple of minutes after the demo was over.

Black Jackal — Bad Galaxy Games LLC, Seattle, Wash.

In Black Jackal, you’re the new guy on a crew of salvage specialists, who earn a living on the fringes of spacefaring society by piloting a drone into wrecked starships. While you’re there, grab valuables, dodge security systems, and don’t get caught.

This is the debut project by solo dev Cole Gehlen, a former software engineer at Amazon, who built it out of several of his failed past projects. Black Jackal is a relatively hard science-fiction game that also takes a few satirical potshots at corporate doublespeak and bureaucracies.

“Ships don’t fail in stable situations,” Gehlen told me. “If a spaceship’s organization fails, you all die.”

Black Jackal was one of the three PNW-made games to be included in this year’s PAX Rising showcase. Gehlen is currently looking for a publishing partner.

Clam Man 2: Headliner — Sideby Interactive, Vancouver, B.C.

Solo dev Martin Hanses describes his narrative RPG Clam Man 2 as a game “about what happens when you get everything you wanted and you’re still not happy.” Hanses, who directed last year’s Tails: The Backbone Preludes for Vancouver, B.C.-based Eggnut, is the solo developer on Clam Man 2.

You play as an office worker who discovers there’s a new comedy club being run out of his workplace’s first floor, which leads him to try his hand at stand-up. In the spirit of the recent indie hit Disco Elysium, Clam Man 2 does not feature any combat to speak of. Instead, it’s about the choices you make while you play, and how those change the overall experience. No two players will see the same version of Clam Man 2.

Fae Farm — Phoenix Labs, Vancouver, B.C.

Phoenix Labs’ follow-up to its monster-hunting multiplayer game Dauntless is a relatively non-violent “cozy” farming game, where you and up to three friends start new lives as homesteaders on the magical island of Azoria.

You can take up a role as a peaceful farmer, or if you’d prefer, go on an adventure to investigate the strange forces that are penned up inside the island’s mining tunnels. There’s probably more to Azoria than meets the eye, but you can completely ignore all that mystery drama in favor of peacefully growing turnips and raising livestock.

Described to me at PAX as a passion project for Phoenix’s leaders, Fae Farm launched on Steam and the Switch on Sept. 8.

Journey to Foundation — Archiact, Vancouver, B.C.

The latest project from the makers of 2018’s Evasion is an open-ended, choice-based VR action game based on the Foundation series by Golden Age sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov, but is “doing its own thing” compared to the recent HBO TV adaptation.

Its executive producer, Ken Thain, spent 11 years at Bioware working on the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, and describes virtual reality as “the next level of storytelling, puzzles, and combat.” Journey isn’t a simple shooter, but instead, is a full choice-based narrative RPG in VR.

Set almost 200 years into the Foundation timeline, you play Journey as Ward, a secret agent in the Galactic Empire. You’re initially out to rescue a kidnap victim, but end up in the middle of a conflict between the Empire and the nascent Foundation, and can choose which side to take. Journey to Foundation is due out later this year on Quest 2, PSVR2, and Pico.

Leaf Blower Man — Unbound Creations, Seattle

The small indie team behind games like Headliner and Rain on Your Parade hit both the PAX Rising showcase and Seattle Indies Expo this year with two separate projects, both of which continue the company’s theme of games about being “adorable jerks.”

In Leaf Blower Man, inspired by creative director Jakub Kasztalski’s experience with obnoxious neighbors, you get to rampage across formerly peaceful neighborhoods with a gas-powered leaf blower. You earn points based on how obnoxious you are and how much destruction you can cause, including a stage where you disrupt a town meeting about how they need to ban leaf blowers like yours.

Mirthwood — Bad Ridge Games, Seattle

Described by its developers, Brian Hecox and Daron Otis, as “cozy but not too cozy,” Mirthwood puts you in the role of a war refugee who’s arrived on a smaller continent to start over. That includes starting your own farm, building a house, and other farming-sim staples.

The big difference between Mirthwood and other “cozy” farming games at PAX is largely down to tone. It’s a sort of dark medieval pastiche — the name is intended to be ironic — that takes inspiration from games like The Witcher and Fable. Even in the PAX demo, Mirthwood feels like your character’s fresh start is hanging by a thread, with new dangers and mysteries at every turn.

Rift of the NecroDancer — Brace Yourself Games, Vancouver, B.C.

Back in 2015, Ryan Clark’s Brace Yourself Games got on the game industry’s radar with Crypt of the NecroDancer, which uniquely combined a dungeon crawler with a rhythm game. Since then, BYG has diversified into other projects, including the 2019 spinoff/crossover Cadence of Hyrule, and begun a new business as an indie games publisher.

With Rift of the NecroDancer, BYG goes full rhythm game, as well as moving its setting to the modern day. You’re still fighting monsters to the beat, but also have to make time for your friendships and your surprisingly demanding yoga class. Like Crypt and Cadence before it, Rift‘s soundtrack features a couple of new tracks from Seattle-based musician Danny Baranowsky.

Rivals 2 — Aether Studio, Seattle

Since its founding in 2021, Washington’s Aether Studio has been working on a follow-up to founder Dan Fornace’s “platform fighter” Rivals of Aether. That follow-up was playable at PAX, alongside the announcement of its brand-new, story-based single-player mode, which will be released one chapter at a time after the game’s release in late 2024.

Rivals 2 is being built in Unreal, and features new mechanics like grabs and shields that weren’t possible with the original game’s pixel art. Fornace told me at PAX that the company’s plan involves continuing to expand the Aether universe with spin-offs like this year’s Dungeons of Aether, in order to bring Aether‘s universe up to par with long-running franchises like Street Fighter.

Long-term, though, Fornace’s ambitions are simple: “We want to take Rivals 2 to the main stage at [the Evolution Championship Series],” the largest professional fighting-game tournament in North America.

Wild Country — Lost Native, Portland, Ore.

Made in Portland by a crew of transplants from the U.K., Wild Country is a competitive strategy deck-building game where you try to build a better city than your opponent. The old mayor is retiring, and the potential successors must determine who’ll replace him through an elaborate competition.

Lost Native describes itself as making “approachable games for adventurous minds.” More specifically, its CEO Becky Matthew told me that what Lost Native does is to try and “Nintendify” its projects, in order to make potentially complicated rules simple and approachable. A lot of companies would make a city-building card game intensely complex, but Wild Country is less complicated than it looks. It’s like if Mad Men got recast with characters from Winnie the Pooh.

Returning projects

Perhaps the biggest story for regionally made games at PAX was the surprise reappearance of the Seattle-set horror RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2.

Originally announced in 2019 as a horror RPG from Seattle’s Hardsuit Labs, Vampire publisher Paradox Interactive subsequently parted ways with Hardsuit in 2021. Bloodlines 2 has been running dark ever since, with many fans convinced the game had simply been quietly canceled.

On Sept. 2, Paradox announced the new developer on Bloodlines 2 was U.K.-based studio The Chinese Room (Dear Esther, the forthcoming Still Wakes the Deep), and is aiming at a 2024 release. Players will take the role of an elder vampire who wakes in 2024 during a once-a-century snowstorm, who must navigate both the confusing modern world and the cutthroat occult politics of Seattle.

Other PNW news out of this year’s PAX included:

• Redmond, Wash.-based Studio Kumiho announced that it’s signed a deal with Los Angeles publisher PM Studios to bring its RPG Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game to digital storefronts in 2024. Cricket, an Earthbound-influenced story about a kid on an adventure to reach the moon, has been a regular exhibition at PAX West since 2021.
• Similarly, Seattle’s Unwound Games will publish its slightly-less-cozy-than-most farming game Echoes of the Plum Grove through remote-first indie label Freedom Games. Echoes exhibited at both Emerald City Comic Con and the Seattle Indies Expo in 2022. It was also one of the 13 games in Freedom’s showcase at this year’s MIX Next show at Block 41 on Sept. 1.
• Seattle cartoonist Phil Foglio was at PAX during the mornings of the show to celebrate the launch of Girl Genius, a new adventure game based upon Foglio’s webcomic of the same name. The game, Adventures in Castle Heterodyne, was released on Sept. 5 on Steam and GOG.
• Vancouver, B.C.-based indie developer Max Trest announced on Sept. 6 that his indie game Astrolander will be exclusive to the PlayStation 5, following a meeting Trest had last year with Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida. Trest, 13, began exhibiting Astrolander at several events in 2022.
• 30XX was at PAX to celebrate both its Sept. 1 release on Switch and its recent departure from Steam Early Access. Developed in Seattle by Batterystaple Games, 30XX is a procedurally generated action game that pays homage to Capcom’s Mega Man X series. Now in 1.0, it comes with a level designer, as well as two new stages and a proper finale. According to lead developer Chris King, sales on 30XX are strong, and Batterystaple plans to continue supporting the game “as long as we aren’t wasting money to do so.”
• Festive Vector’s Sail Forth was selected for this year’s PAX Rising showcase, after its full release late last year. It’s preparing to release a major free update that, according to project lead David Evans, will remove all of the game’s loading screens, which allows players to explore its oceans as a true open world.
• Portland-based Doinksoft was at the Devolver booth to announce the official launch date for its pixel-art “noirpunk” action-adventure Gunbrella, which hit digital storefronts on Sept. 13.

To some extent, the Penny Arcade Expo, as a video game show, was defined by who wasn’t there.

Nintendo was at PAX, technically, running its separate Live show in a sealed-off part of the Seattle Convention Center’s Arch building. While many PAX attendees made time to hit both, having access to one event didn’t mean you got access to the other. The two simply co-existed without directly interacting.

Other than that, most of the video game industry’s major players were no-shows last weekend at PAX. Microsoft wasn’t there at all, Sony was reportedly only present via an off-the-books appearance by PlayStation Indies chief Shuhei Yoshida, and if Valve was at PAX, they weren’t obvious about it.

The only real representation at PAX from the big, mainstream end of the games industry — the part that’s usually called “AAA” by analysts — came from the Japanese third-party studios Bandai Namco and Sega/Atlus.

This is arguably part of a larger trend that’s been going on for a while, independently of PAX. For the last few years, many of the big studios in the games industry have been doing much of their own consumer outreach, through branded livestreams, scheduled broadcasts, and other direct marketing methods. This includes Microsoft’s Xbox Directs, Sony’s PlayStation Showcases, Nintendo’s pre-recorded Direct livestreams, and Valve’s near-complete refusal to care about press coverage.

That trend is part of what’s led to the slow demise of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). As recently as 2018, E3 was the big event on the American games industry’s calendar. Now, it’s been canceled for the last thee years running, and right after PAX, news came down that E3 lost its organizer for 2024. E3 as an event might simply be gone for good.

This has all ended up working out in the Penny Arcade Expo’s favor. Back in 2019, when I attended both E3 and PAX West in the same year, it felt like the one made the other irrelevant. As GeekWire contributor Nicole Tanner argued, PAX was dominated by big game publishers, which used up a lot of oxygen in the room that could’ve gone to smaller studios.

Now, in 2023, most of those big publishers have taken their ball and gone home, which has left PAX as a show that’s by and for independent game developers, almost by default. The 2023 show had two separate expo halls that were bursting with new indie projects, as well as an entire separate floor that was strictly dedicated to tabletop gaming.

It’s an effective evolution from the stripped-down feel of PAX 2021, where a relative handful of smaller developers took the spotlight by virtue of being the only people who showed up.

PAX 2023 was effectively one big indie expo, with new projects that ranged from one-person projects looking for exposure to mid-level publishers showcasing their upcoming holiday lineups.

This included Devolver Digital, which was at PAX to exhibit two games, Gunbrella and Wizard With A Gun; Los Angeles-based PM Studios; cozy game publisher Whitethorn Games; horror-themed company Dread XP; Serenity Forge; and Larian Studios, which came to the show to promote this summer’s hit Dungeons & Dragons adaptation Baldur’s Gate 3.

I also saw several different studios that were either looking for a publisher to help them bring their game to market, or which had done so after exhibiting at the last couple of expos. Both Cricket and Echoes of the Plum Grove from PAX 2022 reappeared at the 2023 show with new publishing deals in place, and Max Trest’s Astrolander has since become a console exclusive for the PlayStation 5.

At the same time, I saw enough publishers and their representatives roaming around the show floor that it painted an interesting picture. If PAX has effectively become an indie show, where smaller developers can come to pitch their games to both fans and potential funding partners, then it’s filling an interesting, vital niche in the modern industry. The biggest companies in the business are apparently happy to do their own marketing and even occasionally hold their own events, like BlizzCon; it’d be great if PAX was the show for everyone else.

Another element of that which came into greater focus recently is that PAX has managed to dodge the problems that have confronted a couple of other recent nerd shows, such as the Emerald City Comic Con. PAX is always firmly focused on gaming, in one way or another, without any slumming celebrities or nostalgia trips to slow its roll. Its identity is secure.

All of this seemed to resonate with this year’s audience. Every retailer I spoke to at this year’s PAX said it was a good to great year for them. Cody Spencer, co-owner of Seattle’s Pink Gorilla chain of used-game stores, went so far as to tell me that it had been a “record year” for his booth at the show.

There were really only two sour notes, from where I was standing. One was that roughly a third of the show was in Arch, with most of the rest of PAX spread out across the new Summit building. I had a lot of appointments at PAX, so I spent a lot of my free time sprinting from Arch to Summit, or vice versa.

While I’m obviously an edge case, it would’ve been a better show overall if PAX had copied the layout from SakuraCon 2023. Arch could’ve been saved for space-intensive activities like the arcade setup, with the newer Summit building reserved for the show’s expo halls and panels. As it was, it felt like one big expo hall was inexplicably split between two buildings a block apart.

The other issue is that, in conjunction with state guidelines, PAX relaxed its health and safety measures for this year’s show. Only about half the attendees and exhibitors I saw were masked. Frankly, I’d hoped for better.

Even with Washington state’s relatively low COVID rates at time of writing, the masking policies from the last two year’s shows meant that, for once in my life, I could go to a convention without catching “con crud” a few days later. I’d hoped that masks would become the new normal, at least for potential epidemics like the average nerd expo, but it’s not quite there.

That aside, PAX West feels like a convention that’s in transition. Five years ago, I wrote about my first time at the show, where I criticized PAX for embodying the same consumer culture that the “Penny Arcade” comic strip used to parody.

As it’s been forced to move further away from big mainstream coverage, both due to industry trends and as part of the lockdown fallout, PAX has also steadily become a more worthwhile show to attend. If the future of the Penny Arcade Expo is as an international flashpoint for independent games development, then it’s all been worth it.

This year’s Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle (PAX West 23) started Friday with a well-attended keynote speech by Reggie Fils-Aimé, who took the stage to discuss his personal business philosophies and the principles that have motivated his career.

In the games industry, Fils-Aimé is most famous for his time at Nintendo of America, where he retired as president in April 2019. That was the capstone for a nearly 15-year run that saw Fils-Aimé become one of the public faces of Nintendo as a company, alongside game developers like Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.

Famously, Fils-Aimé’s big debut as a Nintendo employee came at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May 2004, where Fils-Aimé, then a recently-hired executive VP of sales and marketing, took the stage, and famously said, “My name is Reggie. I’m about kicking ass, I’m about taking names, and we’re about making games.”

That moment was one of several in the montage that introduced Fils-Aimé’s PAX keynote, which included several noteworthy commercials and appearances on talk shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live.

In Fils-Aimé’s speech, he walked the audience through his personal history, starting from his childhood as the son of poor Haitian immigrants in New York. When he was young, Fils-Aimé’s family lived in a rough neighborhood in the Bronx, before later moving to Long Island when Fils-Aimé was 8 years old.

“I’m not unique,” Fils-Aimé said onstage. “I’m not the only person who’s grown up in a rough area. I was fortunate to have a loving family… They created the opportunity for me to have a different life and a better future. I took on the mindset to improve myself, to focus on the future and not on the past, so that neither me nor my own family would face similar hardships.”

Fils-Aimé graduated from Cornell in 1983 with a degree in applied economics; spent eight years at Procter & Gamble in its brand management program; and had stints at companies including Pizza Hut, VH1, Panda Express, and Guinness before landing at Nintendo in late 2003.

Elements of the talk drew on themes from his 2022 book, “Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo.”

He credits his successful run in business to a five-step philosophy that he laid out onstage, describing it as “Capability Meeting Opportunity” (above). The five steps Fils-Aimé outlined were:

• your past doesn’t define your future
• learn from the best
• say “yes” to challenges
• when you fail (and you will) fail forward
• make, and live with, difficult decisions

“I can’t tell you how many times I meet people who get stuck living in the past,” Fils-Aimé explained. “You can’t change your past. What you need to do is think about it and apply all those experiences as you walk forward… I believe that the past might shape us, but it doesn’t define us.”

He used further incidents from his career to illustrate each further step of his philosophy, from his childhood and college years to his involvement in the debuts of the Nintendo Wii, Wii-U, 3DS, and Switch video game consoles.

He cited Nintendo’s Takashi Tezuka (“Mario’s uncle, there from the very beginning”), Shinya Takahashi, and Kazuya Ibuchi as three unsung heroes who taught him a great deal while he was at the company, alongside more famous Nintendo employees like Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario series, whom Fils-Aimé calls “arguably the best game developer of all time.”

Fils-Aimé also took time to credit his friend and the late CEO of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, who died from cancer in 2015. Iwata and Nintendo’s “driving mantra” was to “do something unique,” which Fils-Aimé said matched well with his own “passion for disruptive innovation.”

At the time Fils-Aimé joined Nintendo, in 2003, he noted that Sony was far and away the market leader, due to its PlayStation 2 console featuring both backwards compatibility with the PlayStation library and the PS2 doubling as the most affordable DVD player on the consumer market at the time. In 2003, the year Fils-Aimé joined Nintendo, the announcement of Sony’s PlayStation Portable console – a handheld competitor for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance – made Nintendo’s stock plummet 10%.

Simultaneously, Microsoft had entered the console market at the same time as Nintendo had released its GameCube, in 2001. It had a runaway hit in the original Halo; the promise of connected play; and the willingness to lose money until it was firmly established in the sector.

Fils-Aimé was a fan of video games himself, but he noted that at the time he joined Nintendo, he “had not yet been compelled to buy the machine.” The GameCube was technically a powerful console, but famously, would release several classic games – the original Animal Crossing, Luigi’s Mansion, Super Smash Bros. Melee – then endure extended content droughts that could last as long as a year.

“So joining Nintendo in 2003 was a high-risk move,” Fils-Aimé said, “but I said yes to that challenge, and the trajectory of my own life and this video game industry changed forever.”

Other points from Fils-Aimé’s keynote included:

• Fils-Aimé cited the relative sales failure of the Wii-U as one of his examples of “failing forward.” After the Wii sold more than 100 million units, the Wii-U sank like a stone, only moving 13 million consoles before it was discontinued. However, the consumer feedback from the Wii-U’s unique tablet controller was what led Nintendo to develop its current best-selling console, the Switch.
• Fans have called Fils-Aimé one part of the “Nintendo Triforce” with Iwata and Miyamoto, which Fils-Aimé calls “incredibly humbling.” (The Triforce is a pyramid-shaped artifact in The Legend of Zelda, and reuniting its 3 parts has been a goal in several games in the series.)
• One of Fils-Aimé’s earlier challenges as a marketing professional was helping to establish the Panda Express fast-food chain after several earlier false starts. The issue, as Fils-Aimé saw it, was making the transition between the original restaurant and its desire to create a quick-service restaurant, which he worked at by interviewing both Panda staff and their typical customers.
• The Wii-U isn’t Nintendo’s greatest sales failure. That’s the Virtual Boy headset from 1995, which is the only Nintendo console to sell less than a million units. “Luckily,” Fils-Aimé said, “I had nothing to do with that.”
• The original plan for the Wii was to ship it by itself, without any games. Fils-Aimé argued at length with both Iwata and Miyamoto to package the system with Wii Sports, and eventually got his way for Wiis shipped in the Americas and Europe. Those territories subsequently led the market in Wii purchases, setting up the system’s initial momentum. “It was literally a bit of a test as to which approach would move the marketplace forward,” Fils-Aimé said, calling it a “billion-dollar decision.”

Related: Listen to Reggie Fils-Aimé on the GeekWire Podcast from May 2022.

I’ve spent roughly 20 hours on Starfield at the time of this review, which is nowhere near enough to feel like I’ve got a proper handle on it. With a lot of other games this year, reaching the 20-hour mark would put me at, past, or near their end, but Starfield is clearly just getting started.

Starfield is the most self-consciously big role-playing game yet from Bethesda Softworks, a Microsoft subsidiary and the Maryland-based studio behind similarly big RPGs such as Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 & 4.

The common thread between Bethesda’s games is they technically do have endings, but in a real sense, they’re only over when you decide to stop playing. In a Bethesda RPG, there will always be one more choice to make, faction to join (or betray), cave to explore, or monster to fight, and a single run isn’t enough to see everything it has to offer.

Starfield is deliberately cut from the same cloth, to the point where its own director has called the game “Skyrim in space.” If you’ve ever played an Elder Scrolls game or any of the last few Fallouts, Starfield will feel familiar from the moment you take control of your character. Ten minutes in, I was walking around a crowded locker room and realized there was nothing to stop me from filling my inventory with 120 pounds of soap and whiteboard markers. This is classic Bethesda loot gremlin behavior.

Starfield’s big addition to that formula comes from its sense of scale. It feels a little bigger every time I sit down to play it, particularly when I’m out exploring its vision of the universe. There are a few parts of the game that do feel like Bethesda’s copying off its own worksheet, but when Starfield’s in a position to deliver on its core premise, it’s a solidly addictive RPG.

Starfield is set in the 24th century, 100 years after humanity has abandoned an uninhabitable Earth. Humans live throughout the Settled Systems, a loose network of planetary nations, and have stopped exploring any farther into space than what they already control.

At the start of the game, you’re some random blue-collar dope who’s taken a mining job out on the edge of explored space. On your first day, you dig up a chunk of a mysterious artifact, which changes your life on the spot.

Soon, you’re offered a membership in Constellation, a small independent group that’s out to reignite humanity’s love of exploration. You’re given a ship, some crew, and a mission: help Constellation find the remaining pieces of the artifact.

You’re also entirely free to ignore that mission, however, in favor of doing whatever you want. For me that has included bounty hunting, debt collection, setting up remote mining outposts on unsettled planets, a little smuggling, some freelance security work, and a disturbing number of open gun battles with both space pirates and crooked mercenaries.

In my time with Starfield, it has seemed like everyone I’ve talked to has a job for me, whether it’s breaking into an impound yard or a hostage rescue. At one point, I was actually trying to pursue the main story missions, and I still ended up in a fight with a bunch of thugs who were looting a biotech laboratory. It had nothing to do with what I was on that planet to accomplish. It just sort of happened.

(Related pro-tip: Starfield, like Fallout, doesn’t have any systems like level scaling to keep you from blundering into parts of the universe you aren’t supposed to be in yet. Do yourself a favor: whenever you’re in town, buy all of the medical supplies and Ship Parts you can find. You never know when Starfield will suddenly decide it’s time for you to get in over your head.)

At the same time, there’s just enough detail in Starfield’s universe that I’ve often gone exploring just for the sake of learning more about it. Even the most barren moons in its universe often have a few mystery features, like an abandoned lab or smuggler’s cache, that reward you for taking a long stroll across the surface. Of my 20 hours in-game so far, at least one of them was spent just walking around the city of New Atlantis, listening to ambient conversations, finding new stores, and learning more details about the setting’s history.

Starfield is a game where its themes and mechanics have been made to match. It’s a massive, sprawling universe, and Starfield‘s at its best when you’re simply out on your own, doing your own thing, seeing what Bethesda’s vision of space has to offer.

It’s at its worst, however, when it actually does feel like it’s just Skyrim or Fallout in space. The ground combat in particular feels cut-and-pasted from any given Fallout game, with space pirates instead of Super Mutants and slightly different guns. It’s not bad, just sort of dull. Every time a gunfight starts in Starfield, I want to end it as fast as possible so I can get back to whatever I’m actually trying to do.

My other initial complaints mostly boiled down to being on the low end of Starfield’s learning curve. It throws a lot at you from the start — ground fighting, spaceflight, outpost construction, research projects, gastronomy — and I kept losing a few early fights before figuring out what I was doing wrong. Starship combat was a particular issue at first, but a few upgrades and a little practice eventually sorted that out.

There’s a lot riding on Starfield that has little to do with the game itself — particularly its status as a legal football in Microsoft’s battle with the Federal Trade Commission. On June 30, court testimony revealed that in 2021 Microsoft bought ZeniMax Media, Bethesda’s parent company, specifically to keep Sony, a prime competitor, from making Starfield a console-exclusive for the PlayStation 5.

As a result, Starfield is a hot topic in the ongoing social-media flame wars between PlayStation and Xbox fans, particularly since another major Xbox exclusive, Redfall, was a critical failure upon its May release.

Is Starfield the “killer app” that analysts argue the Xbox platform needs right now? The jury’s still out. It’s up against some strong competition in the RPG space, between the recent Baldur’s Gate 3, indie RPGs like Sea of Stars, and other big games from this summer such as Final Fantasy XVI.

This year has been an absolute murderers’ row for the gaming calendar, and it’s not even September. Starfield‘s a good game and runs fine on Xbox Series X, but it’s heading into a packed field.

What I can say is Starfield is better than I expected, after bouncing off a couple of Elder Scrolls games. It’s got the same sprawling, free-form depth as Bethesda’s earlier RPGs, but puts it all together with unique visuals, an interesting new universe, and a lot of room to tell your character’s unique story. It’s worth checking out, as long as you’ve got a couple of hundred hours to kill.

Starfield is out Sept. 6 for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and the Xbox Game Pass. Players who pre-ordered the game can start playing the full version on Sept. 1.

[Bethesda PR provided a digital code for the Xbox version of Starfield for the purposes of this article.]

Seattle-based virtual reality developer Polyarc Games unveiled its next project Tuesday morning. Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss is a multiplayer strategy VR game that’s now available in Early Access for the Meta Quest 2.

Glassbreakers made a public debut last week at the 2023 Gamescom conference in Germany, and Polyarc released its own showcase video Tuesday morning.

The game is set in the same fantasy universe as Polyarc’s award-winning Moss series. In Glassbreakers, players once again take the role of Readers: anonymous people from another dimension who can interact with the Moss universe by reading a magical book.

Here, you’ll play the “Game of Glass” against a single opponent, where the goal is to destroy your opponent’s Glass idol while protecting yours.Toward that end, you can recruit a team of up to three champions, and send them out on the field against your opponent’s, in a combination of real-time strategy and a board game. If you’ve ever played a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, like League of Legends or Dota 2, then Glassbreakers is likely to look slightly familiar from the start.

The difference, however, is that both you and your opponent are face to face in-game.

“Glassbreakers is unique because your opponent is sitting directly across from you,” said Chris Bourassa, the design director, in the prerecorded showcase. “You have the ability to see all their moves and strategy in real-time. This allows you to decide, do you want to counter what they’re doing, or attack with your own strategy and force them to react to you?”

The game initially offers a total of seven original champions, which players can mix-and-match at will. Each champion has unique abilities that can get upgraded over the course of a single game, in a similar fashion to MOBA. You can also collect power-ups, such as adding extra health to a champion, by taking and controlling specific points on the game board.

Winning matches will reward you with tokens and dyes that you can use to customize your Reader and champions, including the ability to make your own team banner or change your Reader’s mask.

Glassbreakers is the mystery game that Polyarc teased back in March with an open playtest. At the time, Polyarc CEO Tam Armstrong told GeekWire that the project was “us beginning to introduce some of the things we want to do in the future with the company,” such as exploring a range of new game mechanics.

Polyarc was founded in 2015 by Tam Armstrong, Danny Bulla, and Chris Alderson, all three of whom were former employees at Bellevue, Wash.-based Bungie (Destiny 2). Polyarc’s debut title, Moss, is a virtual reality adventure where players help guide the heroic mouse Quill on a quest to rescue her uncle. Its 2022 sequel, Moss: Book II, won Best VR/AR Game at the 2022 Game Awards.

At time of writing, Glassbreakers is a free, early-access download from the Meta App Lab for anyone with a Meta Quest 2, with plans for a Steam release later this year. Players who start playing Glassbreakers before Sept. 4 will receive a number of free customization tokens as part of the game’s first Bonus XP event.

In order to address regulatory concerns in the UK, Microsoft has restructured the terms of its acquisition of $68.7 billion Activision Blizzard to transfer its cloud streaming rights to a third party.

The new deal would see French game developer Ubisoft take charge of all cloud streaming rights to current and future Activision Blizzard games on PC and console. Ubisoft is one of the larger video game companies that’s still independent, and is known for franchises such as Rainbow Six, Assassin’s Creed, and Far Cry.

The announcement came via an entry on the official Microsoft blog by vice chair and president Brad Smith.

“To address the concerns about the impact of the proposed acquisition on cloud game streaming raised by the UK Competition and Markets Authority, we are restructuring the transaction to acquire a narrower set of rights,” said Microsoft President Brad Smith.

Under the terms of the new deal, Microsoft yields the right to publish Activision Blizzard games such as Call of Duty or Overwatch as exclusives on Xbox Cloud Gaming. Ubisoft will have the full rights to commercialize Activision Blizzard games, with compensation going back to Microsoft via “a one-off payment and through a market-based wholesale pricing mechanism,” according to Smith.

Ubisoft’s cloud gaming initiatives include a self-named subscription service that lets users stream Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla from its own servers. It also maintains a premium channel by the same name as part of Amazon’s Luna storefront.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had previously blocked Microsoft’s bid to acquire Activision Blizzard in April. One of its stated reasons for doing so was the fear that the acquisition would allow Microsoft to instantly dominate the cloud gaming service, citing an estimate that without Activision Blizzard, Microsoft already controls a 60-to-70% share of that market.

The ball is now in the CMA’s court, with Smith stating he and Microsoft are confident that the review process will be complete before the original acquisition’s extended deadline of Oct. 18.

“This is not a green light,” Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the CMA, said in a statement. “We will carefully and objectively assess the details of the restructured deal and its impact on competition, including in light of third-party comments. Our goal has not changed – any future decision on this new deal will ensure that the growing cloud gaming market continues to benefit from open and effective competition driving innovation and choice.”

Microsoft cleared a major hurdle in the acquisition last month when a federal judge sided with the Redmond company following a challenge from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to block the merger. An appeals court then denied a FTC motion to temporarily stop the deal.

Bungie, creator of the popular online shooter Destiny 2, announced Friday that it’s hiring new remote workers, as part of an ongoing commitment to a “digital-first future.”

This continues an ongoing movement by Bungie, dating back before its acquisition by Sony in July 2022, to focus on a full hybrid work culture.

Bungie is one of a relative handful of mainstream game developers that has vocally committed to not making a return-to-office mandate, despite multiple investments in new office space in the Seattle area. According to a Bungie rep in an email to GeekWire, the company currently has over 1,400 full-time employees.

The new openings at Bungie include positions in animation, art, engineering, and business development, including a full creative lead. Currently approved states for Bungie remote workers include California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin, in addition to Washington and the District of Columbia.

Some of these new hires are being brought aboard to work on an upcoming project from Bungie, which the company describes as a team-based, comedic action game in a “brand-new, science-fantasy universe.” This follows up on reports from February 2021 that Bungie’s roadmap at the time included work on at least one new intellectual property.

In addition, Bungie still plans to revive the long-dormant Marathon franchise with a new entry in the series, a player-vs.-player-vs.-environment “extraction shooter” that was announced back in May at the PlayStation Showcase. The new game, simply called Marathon, has no set release date at time of writing, but will not be a PlayStation exclusive.

Next week, Bungie has scheduled a virtual presentation on Aug. 22 to unveil the next Destiny 2 expansion, The Final Shape, which marks an official conclusion for the overall story arc for both D2 and the original Destiny. This may not bring Destiny 2 itself to a close, but whatever happens after The Final Shape will start a new storyline for the series after nine years in operation.

Bungie previously announced on Aug. 10 that the popular Destiny 2 NPC Commander Zevala will be voiced by Keith David (They Live, Platoon, Mass Effect) as of The Final Shape. David takes the role over from the late Lance Reddick, who played Zevala in every appearance of the character since the original Destiny in 2014. Reddick’s existing lines will remain in-game.

It’s the end of an era.

Seven years after it discontinued production for the Xbox 360 video game console, Microsoft announced Thursday that it will shut down the system’s digital storefront on July 29, 2024.

This will put one more nail in the coffin for the Xbox 360, just shy of the fan-favorite platform’s 19th birthday. After the shutdown, users will still be able to play supported games on a 360 and download any digital games or content that they already own, but will no longer be able to buy anything else.

Multiplayer games on 360 will reportedly continue to function after the shutdown for as long as a particular game’s publisher continues to support that game’s servers. This includes several of the older games in the Call of Duty franchise, which quietly surged back to best-seller status in July after Microsoft quietly fixed their matchmaking.

The end of life for the Xbox 360 Marketplace marks another recent blow for efforts in video game preservation. In March, Nintendo shut down the eShops for its Wii U and 3DS consoles. Sony had previously shut down the digital storefronts for the PlayStation 3 and Vita consoles in March 2021.

In both cases, this effectively took several generations of digital games off the market, some of which are now no longer legally available. The closure of the 360’s Marketplace is likely to have a similar effect.

“The Xbox 360 was an innovative console that gave rise to great digital distribution models. We understand the logistical challenges of maintaining aging infrastructure, but it’s a shame to see that legacy discontinued with the Marketplace shutdown,” said Jonas Rosland, the Boston-based executive director of Hit Save, a nonprofit that’s dedicated to the preservation of video games and their history.

“Many outstanding indie games, arcade classics, and innovative experiences got their start as Xbox 360 digital titles,” Rosland said. “Game preservation is about more than just saving commercially successful titles — it’s about retaining the full creative breadth of the medium.”

This is an endemic issue in the video game industry. A July study by the Video Game History Foundation with the support of the University of Washington found that roughly 87% of the video games that have ever been physically available in the U.S. are out of print and “critically endangered,” in much the same way as the lost films of the ‘30s and 40s.

The closure of the Xbox 360 Marketplace is a setback for preservation efforts. Starting in 2004, the Xbox Live Arcade distribution service made it attractive for both established and independent producers to make new, smaller games and publish them on Xbox. This includes early projects from now-established creators such as Seattle’s Ska Studios (Salt and Sacrifice), which released its first game The Dishwasher on XBLA in 2009.

Analysts currently estimate that there are around 220 games that are still digital exclusives to the 360 storefront, many of which have never been ported forward to later versions of the Xbox. As such, they’ll effectively go out of print when the Marketplace shuts down.

As of the evening of Aug. 17, fans have composed the following rough list of games and unique SKUs that are still exclusive to the Xbox 360 Marketplace, which will no longer be legally available after the shutdown.

This includes individual titles, as well as several unique compilations; special editions or collections that were never released on any other platform; and the original versions of a couple of games that were later ported to other consoles.

A game labeled as “(Xbox 360)” refers to that particular digital SKU, which typically isn’t playable on later Xboxes even if you own that SKU on the same account. For example, I own a copy of Bastion for 360 that only works on my 360. If I want to play it on my Series X, I’d have to buy the game again there.

• 0D Beat Drop
• Abyss Odyssey
• Alien Rage
• Alien Spidy
• AMY
• Ancients of Ooga
• Anna – Extended Edition
• Arkadian Warriors
• Assault Heroes
• Awesomenauts (Xbox 360)
• Backbreaker Vengeance
• Bastion (Xbox 360)
• Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate Deluxe Edition
• Battle Academy
• Battlezone
• Bionic Commando: Rearmed
• Black Knight Sword
• Blade Kitten
• Blazing Birds
• Bloody Good Time
• Boogie Bunnies
• Brothers – A Tale of Two Sons (Xbox 360)
• Bubble Bobble Neo!
• Burnout CRASH!
• Call of Duty Classic
• Capsized
• CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars
• Charlie Murder
• Child of Light (Xbox 360)
• Choplifter HD
• CloudBerry Kingdom
• Cobalt (Xbox 360)
• Constant C
• Crazy Machines Elements
• CrazyMouse
• Crimson Alliance
• Deadliest Warrior: Battlegrounds
• Deadlight
• Death Tank
• Deathsmiles II x (Games on Demand)
• DeathSpank
• Deep Black: Episode 1
• Defenders of Ardania
• Defense Technica
• Diabolical Pitch (Kinect)
• Dogfight 1942
• Dollar Dash
• Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons
• Duke Nukem 3D
• Dungeon Defenders
• Dust: An Elysian Tail
• Dustforce
• Ecco the Dolphin
• Exit
• Exit 2
• Fatal Fury Special
• Fez
• Final Exam
• Fire Pro Wrestling
• Fireburst
• Freefall Racers (Kinect)
• Frogger: Hyper Arcade Edition
• Frozen Free Fall: Snowball Fight (Xbox 360)
• Fruit Ninja Kinect
• Full House Poker
• Fusion: Genesis
• Gel: Set & Match
• Geon: Emotions
• Goosebumps: The Game (Xbox 360)
• Gotham City Impostors
• Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus
• Guncraft: Blocked and Loaded
• Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm
• Haunt
• Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit
• Hexodius
• Home Run Stars
• How to Survive
• Hunter’s Trophy 2 America
• Hunter’s Trophy 2 Australia
• Hybrid
• Ion Assault
• JAM Live Music Arcade
• Kinect Fun Labs: Air Band
• Kinect Fun Labs: Avatar Kinect
• Kinect Fun Labs: Battle Stuff
• Kinect Fun Labs: Bobble Head
• Kinect Fun Labs: Build A Buddy
• Kinect Fun Labs: Googly Eyes
• Kinect Fun Labs: I Am Super!
• Kinect Fun Labs: Junk Fu
• Kinect Fun Labs: Kinect Me
• Kinect Fun Labs: Kinect Rush: Snapshot
• Kinect Fun Labs: Kinect Sparkler
• Kinect Fun Labs: Mars Rover Landing
• Kinect Fun Labs: Musical Feet
• Kinect Fun Labs: Mutation Station
• Kinect Sports Gems: 10 Frame Bowling
• Kinect Sports Gems: 3 Point Contest
• Kinect Sports Gems: Boxing Fight
• Kinect Sports Gems: Darts vs. Zombies
• Kinect Sports Gems: Field Goal Contest
• Kinect Sports Gems: Penalty Saver
• Kinect Sports Gems: Ping Pong
• Kinect Sports Gems: Prize Driver
• Kinect Sports Gems: Reaction Rally
• Kinect Sports Gems: Ski Race
• King’s Quest (Xbox 360)
• Leedmees (Kinect)
• Legend of Kay – Anniversary (Games on Demand)
• Life is Strange (Xbox 360)
• LocoCycle (Xbox 360)
• Lucidity
• Mark of the Ninja
• Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign (Xbox 360)
• Masquerade: The Baubles of Doom (Xbox 360)
• Max: The Curse of Brotherhood (Xbox 360)
• Mensa Academy
• Meteos Wars
• MicroBot
• Mighty No. 9 (Xbox 360)
• Minesweeper Flags
• Mini Ninjas Adventures (Kinect)
• Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection
• Naughty Bear: Panic in Paradise
• NCAA Basketball 09 March Madness Edition
• NFL Blitz
• Painkiller (Games on Demand)
• Panzer General: Allied Assault
• Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode 1
• Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode 2
• Pinball FX2 (Xbox 360)
• Prison Architect
• Puzzle Arcade
• PUZZLE BOBBLE Live!
• Puzzle Chronicles
• R.B.I. Baseball 14 (Xbox 360)
• Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure!
• RayStorm HD
• Red Johnson’s Chronicles: One Against All
• Rekoil: Liberator
• Renegade Ops
• Resident Evil (Xbox 360)
• Resident Evil 0 (Xbox 360)
• Resident Evil 4 (Games on Demand)
• RIDE (American digital version)
• Risk (Xbox 360)
• Risk: Urban Assault (Xbox 360)
• Rocket Riot
• RocketBowl
• Rotastic
• Rush’N Attack: Ex-Patriot
• Sanctum 2
• Scene It? Movie Night: Mega Movies
• Schizoid
• Sealife Safari
• Section 8: Prejudice
• Shooting Love 200x (Games on Demand)
• Skulls of the Shogun
• South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play!
• South Park: Tenorman’s Revenge
• Space Invaders Extreme
• Spare Parts
• Spyglass Board Games
• Star Raiders
• State of Decay
• Storm
• Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting
• Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition
• Streets of Rage 2
• Strider (Xbox 360)
• Super Time Force (Xbox 360)
• Syberia 2
• Takedown: Red Sabre
• Tempest
• The Bluecoats – North vs South
• The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 (Xbox 360)
• The Bridge (Xbox 360)
• The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai
• The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile
• The Escapists (Xbox 360)
• The Fancy Pants Adventures
• The Path of Go
• Things on Wheels
• Thunder Wolves
• TiQal
• TNT Racers
• Totemball
• Trials Fusion (Xbox 360)
• Trivial Pursuit Live! (Xbox 360)
• Tron
• Valiant Hearts: The Great War (Xbox 360)
• Vigilante 8 Arcade
• Virtua Striker
• Voodoo Dice
• War World
• Warlords
• Warp
• Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Special Editions
• Wing Commander Arena
• Wits & Wagers
• Wreckateer (Kinect)
• Wrecked: Revenge Revisited
• Yar’s Revenge
• Yie Ar Kung-Fu
• Yo-Ho Kablammo
• Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s Decade Duels Plus
• Yu-Gi-Oh! Millennium Duels
• Zeit²
• Zeno Clash II
• Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition
• Zombie Driver HD
• Zombie Wranglers

Stephen Kick is having a decent year so far.

In May, Kick’s company Nightdive Studios, headquartered in Vancouver, Wash., finally completed a 7-year journey by releasing a new version of the ground-breaking 1994 PC game System Shock.

System Shock, exhibited on the show floor at last year’s Penny Arcade Expo, was funded through a successful campaign on Kickstarter. It recreates the original game, a notoriously difficult dungeon crawler, as an immersive first-person shooter like its 1999 sequel.

This marks a sort of full-circle moment for Nightdive Studios, which got its start back in 2013 — just over a decade before it released the new System Shock — by digitally re-publishing System Shock 2 for modern computers.

SS2 is one of the most influential video games in modern memory, but its original developer, Looking Glass Studios, went out of business in May 2000. Its assets subsequently ended up in legal limbo, caught between SS2’s original publisher Electronic Arts and the insurance company that had ended up with Looking Glass’ IP rights.

As a result, both System Shock games had ended up as “abandonware.” They were cult classics and well-regarded by a generation of game fans and designers, but like a lot of older video games, had been allowed to go out of print.

By 2012, the only legal way to play either System Shock was to buy a used copy, then use fan-made patches and old hardware to run it. That same year, Kick decided to quit his job as a video game character artist due to burnout, and went on a long trip into Central and South America.

“I quit,” Kick told GeekWire. “My girlfriend at the time and I packed everything into a Honda Civic and we drove across the border into Tijuana.” They spent the next nine months traveling, but one night in Guatemala, they were stuck indoors due to a tropical storm.

“I [had] brought a netbook with me and loaded it up with some classic video games, like Full Throttle, Fallout 2, The Curse of Monkey Island, and the System Shock games,” Kick said. “I got the sudden urge to play System Shock 2, and tried to install it, but couldn’t.”

After unsuccessfully searching for a fan patch or a way to legally purchase SS2, Kick learned that SS2 was out of print, but was also the single most requested game by users of the PC gaming digital storefront Good Old Gaming.

“I reached out to the general counsel of this insurance company,” Kick said, “and sent them an email asking them if they still had the IP. They said they did, and asked me if I wanted to make System Shock 3. I instead proposed that we re-release the games digitally, so people could play them again.”

Kick subsequently returned to North America and co-founded Nightdive Studios in Portland, Ore. in Nov. 2012 with his now-wife Alix, with funding they’d borrowed from friends and family. Nightdive later moved to Vancouver, Wash.

“I didn’t really have a plan at the time, aside from maybe getting some of my friends together from my previous job at Sony and figuring out a way to get [the games] to work,” Kick said. “The only issue was that the trademark that EA had was just about to expire. I came along at the perfect time where I could commercialize the games, and then [the insurance company] could apply for the trademark and secure it.”

Nightdive re-published SS2 on Valentine’s Day 2013. The game immediately sold well, which gave Kick the capital he needed to go out looking for more out-of-print games he could re-publish.

Since then, Nightdive has brought back “at least a hundred” abandonware ‘90s PC and console games via modern digital storefronts. This includes Quake, Forsaken, Doom 64, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and The 7th Guest, as well as a big bundle of educational games from Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert’s Humongous Studios.

Kick’s current focus is on delivering additional content patches for System Shock, including several promised features from its Kickstarter campaign like being able to choose the player character’s gender. He’s still looking for more retro projects for Nightdive, however.

When I asked what Nightdive’s biggest “white whale” was, Kick said the biggest one “is probably No One Lives Forever.”

NOLF, a spy-themed first-person shooter developed by Kirkland, Wash.-based Monolith Productions, has the most famous case of tangled IP rights in the modern video game industry.

The short version is that due to several successive high-profile mergers and acquisitions, no one knows exactly who owns the NOLF IP. It could be Warner Bros., which bought Monolith in 2004; 20th Century Fox, which originally published NOLF through its Fox Interactive label, which means Disney now has the rights; or Activision Blizzard, which absorbed the company that used to be Fox Interactive in 2008.

Kick has been trying to untangle this for nine years now. “We’ve done so much work on that,” he said. “We’ve met with the original developers. We’ve talked to every conceivable party that might be involved, piecing together the chain of title. We have a pretty clear understanding of who owns what; it’s just a matter of getting the various parties to care. Everybody’s doing their own thing right now. It’s a real shame.”

In the meantime, Kick and Nightdive will continue looking for more games that they can put back into print. One of the benefits of Nightdive’s initial success with re-releasing System Shock 2 back in 2013 was that it let Kick go full-time on the company. He now spends “every ounce” of his time on game preservation through Nightdive, in order to continue keeping dozens of older games in circulation and playable on modern systems.

“Are you going to lose a lot of what we’ve learned collectively as an industry if these games aren’t preserved, and are our games going to suffer as a result of that?” Kick said. “It’s wonderful to do this type of work, and it all pays off when someone leaves a comment that says ‘Wow, I never thought I’d play this again.’ That’s the measure of success for me.”

Bellevue, Wash.-based video game developer Bungie has filed a new lawsuit that targets multiple individuals who make and distribute cheat programs for Bungie’s flagship game Destiny 2.

The suit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Seattle, names 56 individual people in the USA, UK, and Australia as staffers, resellers, and the operator of the payment processing service for Ring-1, a website that offers for-profit cheats for multiple popular online video games.

Ring-1’s Destiny 2 cheats, for $59/month, include an “aimbot” that greatly increases players’ accuracy, the ability to tweak render distances so a player can see enemies coming from further away, an “ESP” feature that makes other players visible through obstacles, and infinite ammunition.

It also offers a Pro-level cheat package, for $119/month, that includes the ability to fly (in a game where you typically can’t do that), pass through walls, and instantly revive from death. Both cheat packages are still available for sale at time of writing.

The use of cheat programs like this is typically a violation of the Limited Software License Agreement (LSLA) that users must agree to in order to play a game like Destiny 2. Being caught using a third-party cheat program can have consequences up to and including the permanent loss of a user’s account.

In the lawsuit, Bungie’s representatives write that “the proliferation of cheating is a direct threat to the success – social, commercial, and artistic – of Destiny 2,” and that Ring-1’s cheats are particularly dangerous, as they are allegedly “predicated on an insidious misuse of the hypervisor layer of users’ operating systems that puts their computers and others’ at risk.”

The suit further alleges that Bungie “has lost considerable revenue” as a result of Ring-1’s actions, and that in order to create the hacks in the first place, Ring-1’s staffers have repeatedly violated the Destiny 2 LSLA.

As a result, Bungie’s suit seeks to permanently prevent the named defendants from continuing to play, possess copies of, or develop cheats for Destiny 2, in addition to unspecified damages.

This is the latest in a series of lawsuits filed against for-profit cheat makers by Bungie. So far this year, it’s taken three separate companies to court and won, on charges of making hacks for Destiny 2, the most recent of which was the Indian company Lavicheats in May.

This also marks the latest chapter in an ongoing legal battle between Bungie and Ring-1 in particular. Previously, Bungie had partnered with the French gaming company Ubisoft (Rainbow Six: Siege) to sue Ring-1 for similar charges, estimating in its court filing that around 4,000 players of Destiny 2 were using Ring-1 cheats at the time.

While three of the four defendants named in the suit settled with Bungie and Ubisoft for $600,000 in damages, a California court rejected the companies’ request for $2.2 million in damages. None of the defendants from the 2021 case are among the Ring-1 employees that are specifically named in the Aug. 1 suit.

In a separate case in July, Bungie successfully sued a Destiny 2 player who ran an online harassment campaign against one of Bungie’s community managers in 2022. Jesse James Comer, who was allegedly enraged by a community spotlight on a black Destiny 2 fan artist, used anonymous phone numbers to leave a series of racist voicemails for the community manager and his wife.

Comer was found liable for nearly $500,000 in damages, in a rare, precedent-setting example of strong legal consequences for online trolling.

Bungie’s suit against Ring-1 accuses its employees of copyright infringement; civil violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) act; violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; breach of contract; intentional interference with contractual relations; and civil conspiracy.

Notably, the suit targets six Ring-1 employees by name, ten by their Internet handle, and another 40 as John Does, rather than Ring-1 itself.

GeekWire reached out to Bungie for comment, and we’ll update this post if we hear back.

Bungie’s war on cheat companies continues with another lawsuit by GeekWire on Scribd

If you spend any measurable amount of time with a gamepad in your hand, whether you’re playing on an Xbox, a PC, a mobile device, or a smart TV, it’s useful to invest in a higher-end game pad. There’s a form factor and function with the boutique models, like Microsoft’s Elite Series 2, that you don’t get with the stock Series X controller or its various third-party equivalents.

With the MOGA XP-Ultra gamepad ($129.99), PowerA has tried to make a high-end gamepad that’s flexible enough to work for a varied audience. Out of the box, it’s got the ergonomics and form factor of an Xbox pad with a long-life, rechargeable battery, but you can also pull the thing in half to turn it into a mobile-friendly mini-controller.

Woodinville, Wash.-based PowerA, acquired by ACCO for $340 million in 2020, specializes in making controllers and gaming accessories. In general, I’ve had good luck with PowerA’s products, many of which are cheaper but solid alternatives to first-party gamepads like the Switch Pro. If you’re looking for a second controller for the game console in your living room, or more specialized hardware like a six-button fight pad, PowerA’s got you more than covered.

The XP-Ultra is somewhere halfway between PowerA’s Fusion line of higher-end pads and its MOGA series of mobile-friendly game controllers. The idea isn’t that it can fit any role you need from it, but rather that it can fit every role and switch between them on demand.

Out of the box, the XP-Ultra comes with a gamepad, a long USB cord for charging and connecting, and a mobile clip so you can attach a small phone to the top of the unit. The setup is plug-and-play on Xbox or PC, or a simple Bluetooth job on other platforms. However, while iOS devices will recognize and even connect to the XP-Ultra, it does not, at time of writing, work on iOS.

Running it through its paces with a couple of nights of Street Fighter 6 on Xbox, I didn’t have any trouble with the XP-Ultra’s responsiveness or ergonomics. It’s got a few of the usual PowerA bells and whistles that don’t appear on a standard Xbox controller, like programmable buttons on the grips.

More to the point, it doesn’t quite feel the same. The XP-Ultra’s got all the same buttons as an Xbox pad, but with a few twists, like it’s trying to remind you that it’s not technically the same.

The bumpers are louder, the triggers are shorter, and the face buttons in the center of the unit have been rearranged just enough to screw up my muscle memory. It’s nothing I didn’t get used to in an evening, but there’s a slight learning curve. I’ve got a lot of random screenshots of nothing in particular because I hit the designated share button by mistake.

I never had a problem with build quality or responsiveness, however, whether I was playing wired or wireless. The battery life is a particular highlight, as I got over 40 hours out of the XP-Ultra on one charge.

You can also pull the grips off the XP-Ultra to transform it into a mini-controller mode, which is meant to be easier to transport if you’re planning to do some gaming on the road. It does make the XP-Ultra more compact, but it also inadvertently highlights just how important the grips actually are for a modern controller’s ergonomics.

It might work better for newcomers than professional nerds like me, but I can honestly say I’d never use the mini-controller mode on purpose. Taking away the grips makes it lighter and easier to throw into a bag, but it also makes the unit feel imbalanced, since you’re holding the entire thing with two fingers and your thumb.

In general, the XP-Ultra is a solid option if you play enough video games that you’re looking for something a little more durable and convenient than a stock Xbox pad. It’s got a few quirks and a couple of features of questionable utility, but it’s an entirely serviceable gamepad that stacks up well against similar luxury gaming products like Microsoft’s latest Elite.

Charmed, a Seattle startup that specializes in creating AI-powered video game development tools, raised $400,000 from Madrona Venture Labs.

The funding news comes alongside the recent debut of Charmed’s Texture Generator, which can automatically “paint” colors and surface details onto simple 3D objects, in accordance to a user’s customized prompts. It’s currently in free beta.

It joins a lineup of other browser-based tools from Charmed including Dream Dungeon, which can automatically create textured maps in the style of 3D isometric dungeon-crawling video games like Diablo, Dungeon Keeper, or Red Alert. There’s also a quest generator that lets the user quickly generate blueprints for in-game tasks.

Charmed was spun out from Madrona Venture Labs earlier this year by founder Jeremy Tryba, a 15-year veteran of Seattle’s tech scene who was previously a vice president at Placed, Snap, and Foursquare.

“Generative AI is the first time where, if you have the ability to build a game mechanic but not the art assets, you can start to produce those things with programming tools,” Tryba told GeekWire.

Charmed is among a flock of companies building AI tools for game development, including startups such as Scenario and Versed, along with more established players including Roblox and Microsoft.

Tryba said his company’s AI tools can make prototyping and iteration faster, and can help create maps, characters, animation, or sound effects.

“But all of that still requires great artists to produce that fundamental style,” he noted.

Tryba said AI can empower people who have a creative idea but “don’t have the means of executing on that.” That could be a big studio that doesn’t have the capacity to create enough content for their audience, or an individual creator who doesn’t have programming skills, he said.

With his first tool, Dream Dungeon, Tryba’s goal was getting users “into an integrated game environment as fast as possible,” focusing on the dungeon crawler games he’d played as a kid as an inspiration.

“I came into game development as a technology person who didn’t have art skills,” Tryba said.

Charmed’s website is careful to note that it sees its tools as something that can be used to quickly produce assets and material that a designer can proceed to iterate on. Its various tools are meant as an aid for brainstorming or conceptualizing, rather than something that can be immediately plugged into a game project.

“The way I look at these technologies is that they’re like a water wheel,” Tryba said. “They need some water to push it before they can do something useful. These AI tools will sit inert until you push something through them, and it really matters what you’re pushing.”

“If you’ve got a good idea and you do bring your own creativity to the table, I think these tools can help you create cooler things, faster and more complex than you could do on your own,” Tryba added. “But you know, garbage in, garbage out. If you shove a lot of garbage through these tools, you’ll get what you deserve.”

Charmed currently works with several companies in Seattle’s independent game development community. Fans and interested developers can experiment with beta versions of Charmed’s tools via the company’s website, but its overall business model is still a work in progress.

• Specific details of the deal weren’t available, but it ends a long battle between the two companies.
• In court filings following the acquisition announcement in January 2022, Sony expressed concern that Microsoft would make Call of Duty exclusive to its Xbox platform, though recent revelations from the FTC v. Microsoft case show that may have not been true.
• Microsoft previously inked similar deals with Nintendo and cloud gaming providers to help ease regulatory concerns over the acquisition.
• A federal judge sided with Microsoft last week in a setback for the FTC’s attempt to block the acquisition, and an appeals court on Friday denied a FTC motion to temporarily stop the deal. Microsoft now needs to gain approval from UK regulators.

Larry Hryb, better known to the Xbox player community by his gamer tag “Major Nelson,” announced Friday that he’s “taking a step back” from his job at Microsoft.

Hryb, a director of programming at Xbox Live, has worked at Microsoft since 2001 and on the Xbox project since 2003. He’s been one of the de-facto faces of the Xbox project for almost as long, as a blogger and co-host of the weekly Official Xbox Podcast, formerly known as Major Nelson Radio.

Hryb named his gamertag, Major Nelson, after Larry Hagman’s character of the same name on the sitcom “I Dream of Jeannie.” Under that name, Hryb used to maintain his own blog at majornelson.com that followed news and announcements out of Xbox, including new episodes of his podcast. He also routinely gave away free Xbox games on Friday afternoons via his official Twitter.

Whether it was presentations at trade shows or live chats with fans, Hryb was usually one of the first people you’d see onstage at Xbox events, particularly in the 2000s. During the Xbox 360’s heyday, when Hryb contributed to the New Xbox Experience redesign in 2008, it wasn’t uncommon to flip through tabs on the dashboard to see a recorded presentation by Hryb on new announcements from Xbox.

According to Hryb via his verified Twitter account, he plans to “take a step back and work on the next chapter of [his] career.” The Official Xbox Podcast will go on hiatus for the summer and come back “in a new format.”

A Microsoft representative confirmed the news to GeekWire via email.

Cloud gaming company Antstream Arcade announced Friday that it plans to launch on Xbox on July 21, bringing its library of more than 1,300 retro video games to Microsoft’s gaming platform.

This marks the first time a third-party cloud gaming service will be released on the Xbox platform, as well as the first console to natively feature Antstream Arcade, currently available for Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, Amazon Fire sticks, and Samsung TV.

Antstream works in much the same way as a streaming service would. It’s an app you can launch that gives you access to its library of officially licensed video games, which you can play freely via streaming them from Antstream’s cloud server.

The library consists of an assortment of PC, console, and arcade games from the 1980s and ’90s, roughly ranging from 1982 to 1994. This includes classic computers like the Amiga, Commodore 64, MSX, and ZX Spectrum, as well as old consoles such as the Atari 2600/7800, NES, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Lynx, Game Boy, and the original PlayStation. More games are added on a monthly basis.

Antstream’s game library is primarily from third-party developers such as Midway, Namco, Konami, and Atari. The highlights of its lineup include the original 1992 Mortal Kombat; SNK’s arcade shooter Metal Slug X; the 1981 arcade edition of Pac-Man; and the DOS version of LucasArts’ 1993 adventure game Sam & Max Hit the Road.

In addition to the games themselves, Antstream users can participate in head-to-head tournaments, couch-based cooperative play, custom minigames, and challenges.

“Despite living in an age of incredible technology, I found it wasn’t easy enough to access the games I loved growing up,” wrote Steve Cottam, Antstream’s CEO, in a release. “We believe in the preservation and accessibility of all games: the great, the impossible, and the forgotten or lesser-known too. I’m very proud to bring the Antstream Arcade platform to the Xbox community.”

Both preservation and accessibility are hot topics in the video game industry. Several out-of-print games were abruptly turned into dead media by Sony’s decision to sunset its older digital storefronts. Earlier this year, when Nintendo announced it would close the eShops for its Wii-U and 3DS systems, historians and collectors raced to grab up the games that were exclusive to either platform before they were permanently lost.

A recent study by the Video Game History Foundation discovered that only 13% of the video games released in North America before 2010 are still available for purchase in any format. While projects like Antstream still share the same vulnerability as any streaming platform, where the games in question only exist for as long as Antstream’s licensing stays in effect, there are still a few games in Antstream Arcade’s library that, without it, wouldn’t be legally playable anywhere else.

The Xbox version of Antstream can be purchased as a subscription service with a $29.99 annual fee; lifetime access costs $79.99. At time of writing, the Xbox version of Antstream Arcade doesn’t appear to have a free-to-play edition or any attached microtransactions.

A new study found that the vast majority of video games with a physical release in the U.S. are out of print, which leaves a significant amount of the medium’s history in danger of being forgotten.

The study, “Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States,” was written by Phil Salvador, the library director of the Video Game History Foundation, with the assistance of a team of student researchers from the University of Washington Information School.

In the study, Salvador’s VGHF research team set to find out how many “classic” video games that received an official release in the U.S. were still available for legal purchase.

Out of over 4,000 titles surveyed, only 13% of the total games are still on the market in one way or another, whether through reissues, digital re-releases, HD remasters, or retro collections. The rest are out of print and unplayable without resorting to software piracy.

“For comparison, this is slightly above the availability of pre-World War II audio recordings,” Salazar writes, “and slightly below the survival rate of American silent films. We’re talking about games from the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s, and they’re in just as bad shape as music and movies from back when Calvin Coolidge was president.”

For the study’s sake, “classic” was defined as any video game released before 2010, for any platform, as per the gaming database maintained at MobyGames. 2010 also happens to mark the point when the video game market began to shift from largely revolving around physical media to digital distribution via virtual storefronts like Steam.

Games were considered to still be in print if they were still available for any modern platform in 2023. Remasters and re-releases counted, but remakes did not. For example, the original 2005 PlayStation 2 game Yakuza is considered out of print by the VGHF, even though a full remake, Yakuza Kiwami, was released in 2016.

The games chosen for the survey were a random list from the MobyGames database, which included every game released in the U.S. between 1948 (i.e. Air Defense Simulation, which may be the first computer game ever made) and 2010, to see how many of them were still available for purchase in some way.

In addition, the VGHF team selected three different game libraries – the Commodore 64, the PlayStation 2, and the Game Boy family of products – and evaluated each according to how many titles in it were still available for purchase or play.

This included going through every game released for any version of the Game Boy hardware, many of which went off the market when Nintendo shut down its digital storefronts for the 3DS and Wii-U in March of this year.

As of April, the VGHF found that out of the entire Game Boy library, which is roughly 2,500 titles released between 1989 and 2008, only 5.87% of them are still in circulation. The rest are only available through used game stores or piracy.

The Commodore 64’s library fared worse, with 4.5% games that are still in print. Despite its comparative popularity, only 12% of the PlayStation 2’s game library is available for legal purchase in 2023.

In general, this means that the most popular games for any given system have remained on the market, but that’s left a lot of gaming history to wither on the vine. There are hundreds of cult classics or historical curiosities in video game history that are at real risk of just being lost, much as with the silent films of the 1930s and ‘40s.

The problems confronting game preservationists can range from technical challenges, where old games can be difficult to get running on new hardware; rights issues, where some games were created by companies that no longer exist or are caught in some legal limbo (i.e. the 2001 FPS No One Lives Forever); or licensing problems, where a game can’t be republished in its original state because of music or art that it can no longer legally use.

“We still see libraries and archives as the most logical path forward,” VGHF co-director Kelsey Lewin told GeekWire via email. “The industry can’t, and shouldn’t have to be, in charge of preservation. It’s not the industry’s job.”

In addition to the VGHF, Lewin is the co-owner of Pink Gorilla, a chain of used video game stores in Seattle, which opened a new location in Capitol Hill earlier this year.

“What we’re hoping for with the results of this study is to help libraries and archives get additional legal tools that will help them preserve video games,” Lewin said. “Video games are complex digital objects that face unique copyright obstacles compared to any other medium. This is particularly true for libraries and archives trying to provide remote access to their game collections, which is not possible under current copyright rules.”

The VGHF is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and teaching of the history of video games. In addition to Salazar and Lewin, its board includes founder and co-director Frank Cifaldi, a games journalist turned historian; Amanda Cifaldi, senior staff engineer at Crunchbase; and head of digital conservation Rich Whitehouse, an engineer who’s worked on games like Soldier of Fortune, X-Men Legends, and Star Wars: Jedi Knight II.

Salazar’s team for the study included UW student researchers Lily Dong, Lane D. Koughan, Haohong Tan, Shuoheng “Jasper” Wang, Wayne Wang, and Allison Paige Zwierlein.

Microsoft on Tuesday cleared a significant hurdle to its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, as a federal judge sided with the company in a legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission.

If it does complete the acquisition, there’s a lot more work ahead for Microsoft, not only to complete the deal, but to make it a success.

The merger with Activision Blizzard would give Microsoft several of the most popular gaming franchises in the world, but the Redmond company would also be responsible for one of the most neglected, toxic offices in the modern industry.

In a real-estate metaphor, Activision Blizzard is a nice-looking house in a good neighborhood, but once you get inside, it’s visibly falling apart.

While the company is still in excellent financial shape, particularly after the successful June launch of the dungeon crawler Diablo IV, Activision Blizzard has come under repeated, consistent fire for the last several years for multiple internal issues.

The company has faced a number of lawsuits amid reports of a “pervasive ‘frat boy’ workplace culture” where female employees were subjected to “constant sexual harassment.”

Activision paid a $35 million settlement to the Security Exchange Commission in February to settle a probe into workplace misconduct issues, in a deal that did not require Activision to admit to wrongdoing.

In May the company released its first transparency report that said it received 114 reports of harassment, discrimination, or retaliation by employees last year.

“Even one instance of harassment, discrimination, or retaliation is one too many,” the report noted.

The problems have allegedly resulted in a gradual “brain drain” at Blizzard in particular. Much of what got Blizzard to its position in the industry was its institutional knowledge; many of the developers who built series like Warcraft and Diablo were lifers at the company, and many of Blizzard’s founders had stuck around. That changed in the mid-2010s, as many of those longtime employees left the company.

In addition to the lawsuits, the ongoing cultural issues led Activision Blizzard employees to organize as the ABK Workers Alliance, in an attempt to force change at the company from the bottom up.

Separately, a series of controversial layoffs at Activision Blizzard subsidiary Raven Software led its quality-assurance department to vote to unionize in May 2022. That subsequently led to a second QA union forming at Blizzard Albany in New York.

This effectively conveyed that, for all Activision Blizzard’s money and prominence, it was and is in need of a serious, top-down reorganization.

As a first step, Microsoft signed a labor neutrality agreement with the Communications Workers of America in June 2022 to indicate it wouldn’t stand in the way of organization efforts at Activision Blizzard subsidiaries. This puts it in stark contrast with Activision Blizzard’s existing leadership, which took actively illegal steps to fight unionization drives under its roof.

What’s next

Microsoft still faces a separate regulatory challenge across the pond from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which said in April that Microsoft’s proposed remedies weren’t enough to overcome cloud gaming antitrust concerns in the developing market for cloud gaming.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said on Tuesday that the company still disagrees with the CMA’s position on the case but is now “considering how the transaction might be modified” to address the UK regulator’s concerns. Microsoft, Activision, and the CMA have asked the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal for a stay in their litigation while they negotiate.

There is also an ongoing FTC lawsuit against Microsoft, which seeks to block its acquisition of Activision Blizzard due to concerns over monopolization.

However, that suit from the FTC raises the same objections as it did in the June hearings in San Francisco, which were dismissed in Tuesday’s ruling. It seems likely that the FTC may simply abandon the case instead of attempt to re-litigate a losing argument in a lower court.

Microsoft has made a large number of concessions to its competition in order to get the Activision Blizzard acquisition past regulators. This includes a requirement by the European Union to automatically license Activision Blizzard’s games to competing cloud gaming services.

Much like what’s happened with Minecraft, this means Microsoft has effectively stuck itself into a role of a cross-platform publisher, rather than as the owner of a platform in its own right. This is entirely in keeping with the company’s stated intentions, including what executives like CEO Satya Nadella testified during the June hearings, but is also against the typical operating procedure in the modern games industry. That strategy arguably came at the expense of the Xbox One, which got handily trounced in the marketplace by Sony’s PlayStation 4.

In addition, Microsoft disclosed in October during an investigation by the CMA that part of the driver behind the acquisition was that it plans to enter the mobile marketplace with its own standalone app store, using “well-known and popular content” like Candy Crush to draw in consumers.

With the mobile market making up just over half of the modern games industry, it was only a matter of time before Microsoft tried to establish a firmer beachhead there. This could heat things up dramatically for what’s already a competitive, occasionally controversial field, particularly if Microsoft opts to hone in on vulnerable points in the modern mobile market like its notoriously inconsistent curation.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with information about Activision Blizzard’s transparency report and other changes.

The next big Marvel Comics video game is being made in Seattle.

Electronic Arts (EA) revealed Monday that it’s opened a new Seattle-based studio called Cliffhanger Games. Cliffhanger’s first project is an original single-player game starring Marvel superhero the Black Panther.

The new studio is led by Kevin Stephens, who previously spent almost 20 years at Monolith Productions in Kirkland, Wash., and exited the company in 2021 as its studio head. He’s been working full-time at Cliffhanger since May 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Monolith is the company behind the F.E.A.R. and Condemned series, but is most famous for the Lord of the Rings-based Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War.

“We’re dedicated to delivering fans a definitive and authentic Black Panther experience, giving them more agency and control over their narrative than they have experienced in a story-driven video game,” Stephens wrote in a press release.

Cliffhanger is described by EA as an AAA studio, which is an informal industry term that typically means it’s intended to work on big games with a big team (100+ developers) and a big budget. It’s suggestive that EA’s Black Panther will be a massive, open-world experience.

Electronic Arts, founded in 1982, might be best known by its initials. It’s currently the second largest third-party developer in the modern video game industry, behind Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard, with multiple successful franchises that include The Sims, Star Wars, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Titanfall, and the annually-updated Madden and FIFA sports simulators.

Electronic Arts has at least two other studios in the Seattle area, including casual-gaming giant PopCap (Plants vs. Zombies) and Ridgeline Games, the previously-unnamed developer headed by Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto. Cliffhanger is apparently the mystery studio that EA began to set up back in 2021, with Stephens and former Monolith president Samantha Ryan.

The character of the Black Panther first appeared in 1966’s Fantastic Four #52, and was created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. T’Challa is the ruler of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, which has used its local deposits of the metal Vibranium to build a high-tech, secretive society.

EA hasn’t discussed further details about the version of the Black Panther it might feature in its game. In the comics, T’Challa is currently a member of the Avengers and has been deposed as the king of Wakanda.

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, due to the passing of T’Challa’s actor Chadwick Boseman in 2020, the role of T’Challa was retired and the mantle of the Black Panther passed to T’Challa’s sister Shuri (Letitia Wright).

If EA’s Black Panther follows a similar model to other recent big-budget Marvel games, such as Insomniac’s Spider-Man, then it’s probably safe to assume that it’ll be set in its own continuity that draws in equal parts from the comics and film.

From the start, Microsoft’s hearing against the US Federal Trade Commission was going to be interesting to anyone who follows the business end of the video games industry.

As previously discussed, most of the major players in modern gaming maintain a firm hold on their internal data, so the discovery process in any games-related legislation often provides a few big stories from behind the scenes. FTC v. Microsoft was no exception to that rule.

The five-day hearing was punctuated by surprising revelations and the occasional accidental leak, all against the backdrop of Sony’s attempts to keep Microsoft in third place in the ongoing ninth-generation console war.

The FTC is seeking a preliminary injunction that could threaten the future of Microsoft’s attempted $69 billion acquisition of video game developer Activision Blizzard.

The agency filed for that injunction on June 12 alongside a restraining order, which would, if successful, prevent Microsoft from closing the acquisition for long enough that it would run into the original agreement’s final termination deadline. That would force Microsoft to pay Activision Blizzard a $3 billion penalty, as well as potentially halting the acquisition.

The hearing, which ran from June 22 to 29 in San Francisco, saw testimony from multiple Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, Xbox head Phil Spencer, and corporate vice president Sarah Bond, as well as video deposition from Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment.

The first day of the hearing set much of the tone for what was to follow.

The FTC’s case was built around the potential anti-competitive impact of the acquisition, where Microsoft would end up with exclusive control over several of the largest video game franchises in the modern business, most notably the Call of Duty series. That comes with the risk that Microsoft could leverage that control to hurt its competitors, such as Sony.

Conversely, Microsoft’s defense hinged on demonstrating that, both in theory and in practice, it doesn’t believe in console exclusivity. On the stand, Nadella testified that he was against the idea, saying he “would love to get rid of the entire exclusives on consoles.”

“But that’s not for me to define,” Nadella continued, “especially as a low-share player in the console market. The dominant player there has defined market competition using exclusives, so that’s the world we live in. I have no love for that world.”

Traditionally, exclusive games for a platform have been one of the biggest factors in competition between gaming consoles. Going as far back as the 16-bit era, you bought a Super Nintendo if you wanted to play Mario games and a Sega Genesis if you wanted to play Sonic the Hedgehog.

In the last couple of console generations, Sony has successfully pursued that strategy with a lineup of first-party video games that are exclusive to the PlayStation platform, although it’s recently relaxed that policy by releasing some of its recent hits, such as Horizon: Zero Dawn, on PC via Steam.

Meanwhile, Microsoft leaned heavily on its own system exclusives for the first two generations of Xbox hardware — it stopped doing so early in the Xbox One’s life cycle, largely to its overall detriment. Even games made by the first-party Xbox Game Studios network are always released simultaneously on Xbox and PC, and Microsoft is currently publishing Minecraft on two competitors’ platforms, the PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. When I reviewed Halo Infinite for GeekWire in late 2021, a game that was explicitly meant as an Xbox system-seller, it was on PC via Valve Software’s Steam client, with a code that was given to me by Microsoft’s media team.

Much of the FTC’s argument against Microsoft hinged on the forthcoming space-opera RPG Starfield, which was originally intended as a console exclusive for the PlayStation 5.

After its acquisition of Zenimax Media in 2020, Microsoft proceeded to make Starfield a console exclusive for the Xbox Series X|S. That move was subsequently brought up as a factor in the UK’s decision to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

According to Spencer, the Xbox chief, however, Starfield’s initial exclusivity to the PlayStation platform is part of what spurred Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax in the first place.

“When we acquired ZeniMax, one of the impetus for that is that Sony had done a deal for Deathloop and Ghostwire [two 2020 games from ZeniMax’s studio network]… to pay Bethesda to not ship those games on Xbox,” Spencer testified, as per a transcript from the Verge.

“So the discussion about Starfield, when we heard that Starfield was potentially also going to end up skipping Xbox — we can’t be in a position as a third-place console where we fall further behind on our content ownership. So we’ve had to secure content to remain viable in the business.”

That recasts much of the industry conversation around Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Sony, as the maker of the PlayStation and Microsoft’s main rival in the console market, has frequently objected to the acquisition on the basis that Microsoft could proceed to use Activision Blizzard’s franchises as leverage to harm the PlayStation.

Call of Duty is the primary driver of that accusation, and it’s not entirely without merit. Even beyond Call of Duty’s massive sales numbers, Sony revealed during the hearing that approximately 1 million PlayStation owners only play Call of Duty games, with another 6 million players who put over 70% of their gaming time into the franchise.

(This was an accidental reveal, as some of the documents Sony submitted as evidence in the hearing were inexpertly redacted. Someone marked out important details on those documents by scribbling over them with a black marker, which wasn’t enough to erase those details once the documents had been scanned for the court record.)

With that in mind, Call of Duty by itself is a major sales driver for game consoles. The FTC called Harvard’s Robin Lee as an expert, who testified that if Microsoft were to make the next Call of Duty an Xbox exclusive, it could mean a 5.5% boost in console market share at the PlayStation’s expense.

Even though Microsoft’s testimony and track record say it wouldn’t leverage Call of Duty like that (Nadella testified that doing so “makes no economic sense and no strategic sense”), giving it the ability to do so is a significant threat to Sony’s overall bottom line.

The FTC argued that that makes Call of Duty a “unicorn,” in the judge’s terminology: it’s a success story that can’t be easily replicated or replaced, given its 20-year history and prominence in the hobby. Microsoft’s expert, Dr. Elizabeth Bailey, countered that Lee’s model of the market is too narrow, and that Call of Duty is not a uniquely important property. It’s not the only multiplayer first-person shooter in the world; it’s simply the single most popular and visible example of the genre, with numerous competitors like Battlefield, Halo, Overwatch, or Counter-Strike.

From near the start of Microsoft’s run on this acquisition, Sony has been its loudest critic and strongest opposition.

While the FTC’s objection to the deal can easily be traced back to Chairwoman Lina Khan’s anti-monopolistic stance, it’s still ended up as effectively defending Sony, the leader in the international console market and a Japanese corporation, against an American company that barely counts as its competition.

With the reveal that Microsoft bought ZeniMax Media, and thus Bethesda Softworks, specifically to keep Sony from making Starfield a platform exclusive, it recasts Sony’s objection to the acquisition as, to paraphrase, a worry that Microsoft would do to it what it’s been doing to Microsoft for years.

Other interesting data points from the hearing included:

• Ryan, in pre-recorded testimony, claimed that publishers have told him that the Xbox Game Pass is “value destructive,” which makes it “unanimously” unpopular. This follows up on an admission from Microsoft, in documents submitted to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, that Game Pass “cannibalizes” sales for games on the service; however, it contradicts claims that Xbox made in 2021 that the Game Pass functions as a try-before-you-buy “discovery engine.”
• Microsoft had previously considered acquiring a number of other companies to strengthen its position in the video game market, including Sega (Sonic the Hedgehog, Yakuza), Bungie (Destiny 2), Thunderful (Steamworld Build, Planet of Lana), Niantic Labs (Pokemon Go), IO Interactive (Hitman), and Supergiant Games (Hades, Transistor).

• Documents unsealed during the hearing indicated that Microsoft plans to bring its next edition of Xbox hardware to market around 2028.
• That also connotes that there will even be a new generation of physical Xbox hardware, which flies in the face of industry predictions that the next frontier for gaming is the cloud.
• That doesn’t seem to match reality, however, as Microsoft’s Bond testified on June 23 that Xbox Cloud Gaming currently runs at a loss. Xbox Cloud Gaming, as per Bond, is primarily used by console users to play a game while waiting for it to download locally, rather than to play games via a phone or tablet linked to Microsoft’s cloud servers.
• Sony’s inexpert redaction also ended up revealing the budgets for two of its recent first-party video game projects. This year’s Horizon: Forbidden West was made in five years for $212 million, with a team of 300 employees, while it cost $220 million for 200 employees to make 2020’s The Last of Us Part II over 70 months time.
• This provides a rare unfiltered look into the costs and timeline of what’s often called “AAA” games, such as the projects currently under development at Amazon and Wizards of the Coast. If a company says they’re trying to make a AAA game, that signifies a team of dozens if not hundreds; a budget in the eight- to nine-digit range; and a development timeline that could easily run for five years or longer.

Both sides presented their closing statements on Thursday. U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley’s decision is forthcoming.

The PC version of the highly anticipated game Baldur’s Gate III will exit Steam Early Access on Aug. 3, almost a full month ahead of schedule.

BG3, an adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons to a computer-game format and a sequel to the popular 2000 PC game Baldur’s Gate II, has been available in Early Access since October 2020.

It marks the first collaboration between Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast, D&D’s longtime publisher, and Larian Studios, a game developer headquartered in Belgium with satellite studios in Canada, England, Ireland, Spain, Russia, and Malaysia. Before this, Larian was arguably best known for its Divinity series of computer RPGs.

Previously, BG3 was scheduled for release on PC, Mac, and PlayStation 5 on Aug. 31. The decision to move up the PC version date was announced via BG3’s Steam community pages.

“This means the PC version of Baldur’s Gate 3 will be released at a time where you’ll have more time to play it,” Larian Studios said.

This can be interpreted as Larian Studios avoiding as much conflict as possible with Bethesda Softworks’ space-opera RPG Starfield, which releases on PC and Xbox Series X|S on Sept. 6.

The PS5 port of BG3 is now scheduled for Sept. 6, with the Mac edition following at an unspecified later date. Larian has explained the delay as the studio needing slightly more time to achieve its target framerate of 60 FPS on the PS5 platform, as opposed to needing to downscale its performance to hit its original release date.

Customers who bought one of the BG3 collector’s editions, which feature multiple physical goods like artbooks and a pack of stickers, can still expect to receive their CEs around the original planned release date.

BG3 is set over 120 years after the events of the previous game in the series, and takes place in and around the city of the same name in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for D&D. As an adventurer who escapes from a group of mind flayers, you’re out to both cure yourself of a parasite the flayers placed in you and deal with their invasion of the Realms.

You can pick from a wide assortment of classes and races for your player character in BG3, which encompasses many of the classic D&D and Forgotten Realms choices. As of the Thursday announcement, this also includes the ability to play as dragonborn, half-orcs, or duergar, and pick a new class — the monk.

Larian wrote in its announcement that nearly 2 million people picked up BG3 while it was in Early Access on Steam, and that its development team has expanded to 400 people. The final version of the game has a script that’s roughly 2 million words long, which is slightly more than the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series to date.

BG3 is considered a major part of Wizards of the Coast’s release schedule for the year, and is the largest video game yet released under Wizards’ current video game initiatives. Wizards CEO Cynthia Williams previously told GeekWire that video games are “a critical way to give fans a different way to enjoy a brand and game that they love.”

Microsoft plans to bring the next generation of Xbox video game consoles to market in 2028, according to documents unsealed in Microsoft’s ongoing court battle with the FTC.

Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s head of Xbox, took the stand Friday in San Francisco for the second day of a hearing that could determine the fate of Microsoft’s proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the game giant behind blockbuster franchises including Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft.

The US Federal Trade Commission is seeking an injunction that would prevent Microsoft from meeting the final deadline on its acquisition agreements with Activision, which would entitle Activision to a $3 billion penalty payment and potentially sink the acquisition as a whole.

Friday’s testimony at the hearing was primarily dedicated to a back-and-forth between the FTC’s lawyers and Spencer. In a June 22 filing, Microsoft said outright that Xbox has “lost the console wars,” coming in a consistent third place behind both Sony and Nintendo.

Asked for further comment on that, Spencer called those wars “a social construct with the community,” a phrase that went viral on social media for a few hours.

One of the bigger pieces of news from the case didn’t come from the testimony, however. Gaming website IGN reported that some of the court’s documents reveal Microsoft’s current plans for the Xbox, which includes the expectation that the next generation of gaming consoles will hit the market around 2028.

On the stand, Spencer also testified in response to an FTC lawyer’s questioning that the next entry in Bethesda Softworks’ best-selling Elder Scrolls series (Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, etc.) is at least five years away, and that he wasn’t sure what Microsoft platforms it would appear on.

That, in turn, has started rumors that a theoretical 10th-generation Xbox might launch with a new Elder Scrolls game as a console exclusive.

This marked what’s become a fairly typical exchange in the hearing. The FTC’s argument during the hearing has hinged largely on the aftermath of Microsoft’s 2021 acquisition of Bethesda Softworks and the subsequent decision to release its highly-anticipated game Starfield as a console exclusive for Xbox.

Before Microsoft acquired Bethesda, two of Bethesda’s highest-profile games, Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo, were initially console exclusives for the PlayStation. Spencer testified that pre-acquisition, Starfield was going in a similar direction, where it would’ve appeared on Xbox months or years after PlayStation if it had been ported to the system at all.

It’s all part of what appears to be Microsoft’s overall defensive strategy in this week’s hearing. Sony commands a substantial lead in the console market; Microsoft has cited figures that show it has 30% of the overall console market vs. PlayStation’s 70%, although those figures conspicuously omit Nintendo from the picture.

As such, Microsoft appears to be arguing, its acquisitions for Xbox are all a matter of basic survival in an intensely competitive market.

Spencer also discussed the fact that Activision, through its subsidiary company King, is the single largest mobile gaming developer in the world, primarily off the strength of franchises like Candy Crush.

On the stand, Spencer called mobile gaming a “gap in our portfolio,” which the Activision Blizzard acquisition would address, along the way to Microsoft launching its own competitive mobile app store.

One of the teams at Bellevue, Wash.-based game studio collective ProbablyMonsters has officially halted development on what was to be its debut project.

Cauldron, headed by former Bungie art director Dave Matthews, had yet to publicly reveal what it was working on.

“Building new teams, original games, and innovative worlds from scratch is an amazing opportunity and one of the biggest challenges in entertainment,” said Harold Ryan, ProbablyMonsters CEO, in a statement to GeekWire.

Ryan continued, “As we strive to sustainably iterate, grow, and learn, not every project will make it to market for a variety of reasons. We have made the difficult decision to stop development on an unannounced project.”

ProbablyMonsters, founded in 2016 by Ryan, former CEO at Bellevue, Wash.-based Bungie, is a studio collective that bills itself as “building a family of sustainable game studios through a people-first culture.”

ProbablyMonsters is currently in the process of “evaluating individual options” for employees affected by Cauldron’s canceled game. This is being done with the stated goal of reassigning as many employees as possible to other teams at ProbablyMonsters.

Cauldron will remain open as a studio within ProbablyMonsters. “We will continue to explore different opportunities for storytelling with Cauldron,” Ryan said.

News of Cauldron’s project’s cancellation began to spread 6 days ago via a LinkedIn post by one of the affected employees, which was quickly picked up and reposted in the subreddit /r/GamingLeaksAndRumours.

The first public announcement of the project’s cancellation was made by Ryan via LinkedIn on June 22, saying that “for this game, the competitive landscape is too uncertain.”

Cauldron is one of two studios currently within ProbablyMonsters’ network, alongside Battle Barge, which is headed up by John Dunbar, Patrick Blank, Marsh Lefler, and Allen Fong.

ProbablyMonsters’ third studio, Firewalk, was acquired by Sony in April for an undisclosed sum, and subsequently revealed its debut project, Concord, at Sony’s PlayStation Showcase on May 24.

Today marked the first of a five-day court session that pits Microsoft against the US Federal Trade Commission, in the latest in a series of legal maneuverings over Microsoft’s proposed $69 billion acquisition of video game developer Activision Blizzard.

While several major territories, such as Japan and the EU, have greenlit the acquisition, regulators in both the US and UK have sought to stop it, citing concerns over monopolization, and the potential for Microsoft to achieve a dominant position in the nascent market for cloud gaming.

The court showdown between Microsoft and the FTC is in response to a complaint filed by the FTC on June 12, which seeks a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that would prevent Microsoft from closing the Activision Blizzard deal before July 18.

If the FTC is granted its injunction, Microsoft could end up owing Activision Blizzard a $3 billion termination fee as per the terms of the original merger proposal, as it wouldn’t have successfully completed the acquisition by its final deadline. This would force Microsoft to rework the terms of the original deal, which could involve ending its attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard.

Microsoft will attempt to defend against the injunction in San Francisco over the course of five days in court, on June 22, 23, 27, 28, and 29. The case will include testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Xbox head Phil Spencer; head of Xbox Studios Matt Booty; Bethesda Softworks’ Pete Hines; Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick; Xbox VP Sarah Bond; and one of the acquisition’s most vocal critics, Sony PlayStation head Jim Ryan.

At time of writing, much of the FTC’s case for the injunction, like that of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, revolves around Microsoft’s previous acquisition of Bethesda Softworks, and the subsequent decision to make upcoming Bethesda games like Redfall and Starfield console exclusives on Xbox.

If Microsoft’s done that once with a game as highly anticipated as Starfield, the FTC argues, there’s nothing to prevent it from doing it again with hit Activision Blizzard franchises like Call of Duty or Overwatch. That would provide Microsoft with a significant competitive advantage in the field, bordering on a monopoly, particularly in the case of the perennially best-selling Call of Duty franchise.

The Activision Blizzard acquisition would also provide Microsoft with a massive edge in the cloud-gaming market, the FTC argues, as its control of so many of the video game world’s most popular franchises would provide it with a nearly unbeatable advantage over smaller or less established competitors.

Microsoft’s counter-argument has been to offer a number of binding 10-year agreements that legally require it to bring the Call of Duty series to rival platforms, such as the PlayStation or Nintendo Switch.

Even beyond its implications for the future of the Activision Blizzard deal, and hence the future of the Xbox, Microsoft’s day in court is likely to involve some inadvertent bombshells.

The American video game industry is notorious for its secrecy, where many companies maintain firm control over their internal data. As a result, public court cases in the games industry that involve any degree of testimony or discovery tend to come hand-in-hand with some interesting reveals, such as when 2021’s Apple vs. Epic ended up disclosing some of Microsoft’s internal sales data about Xbox hardware.

At time of writing, the big disclosure on day one of the hearing has been from Sony’s Ryan, who’s built a reputation over the last year-and-a-half as the primary opponent of the Activision Blizzard acquisition.

A newly-unsealed email contradicts Ryan’s public stance, however, with Ryan saying in private that he’s “pretty sure we will continue to see Call of Duty on PlayStation for years to come.”

Update, 1:30 PM PST: “Today showed Sony has known all along we’ll stand by our promise to keep games on its platform and made clear its work to lobby against the deal is only to protect its dominant position in the market,” a Microsoft spokesperson tells GeekWire.

In its latest Nintendo Direct virtual presentation on Wednesday morning, Nintendo announced a number of upcoming video games, including the surprise debut of a new entry in the long-running Super Mario Bros. series.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is planned for release Oct. 20 as an exclusive for the Nintendo Switch. It returns the series to its roots as a 2-dimensional, side-scrolling platform game.

Like several past Mario releases, such as 2019’s Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, SMB Wonder offers a co-op mode where up to 4 players can play through each level together as Mario, Luigi, Peach, Toad, and/or Daisy.

Nintendo didn’t reveal much else about what Wonder brings to the table, aside from a brief glimpse at some new levels and abilities. This includes a strange power-up that turns Mario into an elephant-person.

The announcement of Wonder was the closer for a 45-minute virtual presentation hosted by Nintendo President Shinya Takahashi and Senior Executive Officer Yoshiaki Koizumi, in which they shared highlights of Nintendo’s release schedule for the rest of the year, including:

• Pikmin 4 is scheduled for release on July 21, which marks the return of the series after a decade. As a tiny explorer who crash-lands on an Earth-like planet, you’re asked to use creatures called Pikmin as your allies and companions as you explore for the raw materials you need to fix your ship. New features in P4 include night expeditions and a new buddy, Oatchi, a doglike alien who serves as a protector, pack animal, and occasional makeshift boat.
• A new WarioWare game, Move It!, is coming on Nov. 3. The WarioWare series is a collection of very short “micro-games” made to be played in short, intense sessions. With Move It!, Nintendo has added support for the gyroscopes built into the Switch’s JoyCon controllers, which allows micro-games to involve full-body movement like dancing.
• Events at the official Nintendo Live show in Seattle on Sept. 1 will include tournaments for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Splatoon 2.
• The popular stealth-action series Metal Gear Solid is coming to switch with Master Collection Vol. 1 (Oct. 24), which compiles the first three MGS games with the original NES Metal Gear and its sequel.
• The rare Super Nintendo game Super Mario RPG, a collaboration between Nintendo and Final Fantasy developer Square Enix, is receiving a graphics overhaul and a re-release on Switch on Nov. 17.
• Vancouver, B.C.-based Phoenix Labs (Dauntless) is releasing its fantasy-themed “life sim” Fae Farm as a console exclusive for the Switch on Sept. 8. As a newcomer to a mysterious island, you can cooperate with up to three other players to build a homestead, start a farm, and solve the island’s mysteries.

Nintendo, which has maintained an American headquarters in Redmond, Wash., since 1982, recently released The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the long-awaited follow-up to 2018’s award-winning Breath of the Wild. Tears sold over 10 million copies in the three days after its May 17 launch, according to Nintendo, which makes it the fastest-selling title in its franchise to date.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint in court Monday to block Microsoft’s acquisition of video game developer Activision Blizzard.

The FTC seeks a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction, citing section 13(b) of the FTC Act. This would prevent Microsoft from closing its Activision Blizzard deal before its current termination deadline on July 18.

Microsoft moved to acquire Activision Blizzard, the third-party video game developer behind Call of Duty, Diablo, and Candy Crush, in January 2022 for $68.7 billion. If successful, it would be the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history, overtaking its 2017 purchase of LinkedIn, and would propel Microsoft to become the second largest video game company in the world.

Microsoft has defended the acquisition on the basis that, due to its ongoing efforts in cloud-based and streaming services for video games, it would enable Activision Blizzard to expand its audience to over 150 million more players via methods such as Xbox Cloud Gaming.

“We welcome the opportunity to present our case in federal court,” said Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, in a statement to GeekWire. “We believe accelerating the legal progress in the U.S. will ultimately bring more choice and competition to the market.”

Previously, on April 26, regulators at the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority issued a final decision to block Microsoft’s deal, citing the risk that the acquisition would place Microsoft in an early, dominant position in the still-developing cloud gaming market. A hearing for Microsoft’s appeal of that decision is scheduled for July 24.

The FTC had previously filed suit in December to stop the acquisition, citing the risk that Microsoft would use Activision’s content in order to suppress its competitors such as Sony. Microsoft has subsequently made numerous concessions toward that end, such as a 10-year guarantee that Activision’s Call of Duty games will continue to be available on Sony’s PlayStation.

Subsequently, reports appeared in the international press that Microsoft was in search of ways to close the deal regardless, which could potentially include the decision, occasionally nicknamed “Mexit,” to simply not offer Activision Blizzard products in the UK.

Those reports are cited in the FTC’s complaint as a motivator, alongside a separate emergency motion that would request a court order to block the official consummation of the Activision Blizzard acquisition. That order would only last until after the court has the chance to rule on the June 12 complaint.

The injunction is, in short, an attempt to stop Microsoft from doing any crazy end runs around its current legislative blockades in the U.S. and UK, such as withdrawing Activision’s software library from the market in either territory.

Microsoft aired its pre-recorded Xbox Showcase June 11 to reveal what’s coming next for the Xbox video game platform.

It included a deep dive into the systems and design of the upcoming Starfield, an exclusive space-opera RPG from Bethesda Softworks; world premieres of new games from first-party Xbox studios like Compulsion Games and inXile; and new trailers for long-awaited Xbox games like Fable, Unavowed, and Hellblade II.

This year’s Xbox Showcase has been anticipated for weeks, with some analysts going so far as to consider it a make-or-break point for Microsoft’s Xbox business.

The news out of Xbox in 2023 is largely mixed so far. The platform has suffered from dead-on-arrival projects like Arkane Studios’ Redfall; offered critically successful but reportedly underselling releases such as Tango Gameworks’ Hi-Fi Rush; had to deal with organizational issues at 343 Industries, which makes Xbox’s flagship franchise Halo; and seen a slight overall slump in Microsoft’s gaming revenue.

This comes as Sony reports its best year yet for the PlayStation 5, with a sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man coming this holiday season. Nintendo reversed much of its own 2023 slump with extraordinary sales for its May 12 Switch exclusive, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

While Xbox isn’t doing that poorly per the numbers, its competition has fielded several big wins at a time when most of the news for Xbox has been mixed-to-negative. It’s left Xbox looking like the odd company out, and analysts have argued it’s in need of an overall course correction.

If Microsoft agrees with that perspective, it wasn’t in evidence at the 2023 Xbox Showcase. While it did establish a few release dates and had a couple of big reveals, the Showcase further established that the rest of 2023 for Xbox rests on two big releases, Starfield and Forza Motorsport, as well as continuing to add big third-party releases as day-one launches on the Xbox Game Pass subscription service.

The bulk of the Showcase, over 45 minutes, was dedicated to Starfield, which releases on Sept. 6, and which is largely considered the hail mary for Xbox’s fiscal year.

The Showcase presentation included a series of extended looks at Starfield’s systems, including combat, exploration, world-building, character creation, its freeform approach, and the ability for the player to extensively customize and crew their own personal starship.

While Bethesda had previously disclosed that Starfield will feature over a thousand worlds that you’re free to explore at your own pace, the Showcase was the first time that its designers discussed the process thereof. Worlds in Starfield are procedurally generated, but are then populated with a variety of handcrafted encounters. No two players will see the same version of Starfield’s galaxy.

Starfield director Todd Howard also revealed that Starfield’s collector’s edition will come with a working smart watch that’s designed to match the official Constellation-brand watch that your character’s given in Starfield. That watch comes in a special hard case like the NASA-derived secure cases that are found in-game, along with an iron-on patch, a steelbook, and a digital download token.

To go along with the game, Xbox will issue an officially-branded Starfield Xbox Series X|S controller and a Starfield-branded wired headset. This marks the first time Xbox has issued a special-edition headset for a game.

The news from Forza Motorsport, the latest entry in Xbox’s long-running series of ultra-realistic racing games, was significantly less intense. Motorsport, now officially scheduled for release on Oct. 10, has officially partnered with General Motors, so players of the game will be able to collect, customize, and drive the 2023 Cadillac Racing V-Series.R and 2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray.

In a surprise announcement, Microsoft will issue a brand new version of its award-winning Flight Simulator next year. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, made in partnership with the French studio Asobo, will feature additional activities such as search and rescue flights, aerial firefighting, hot air ballooning, experimental planes, and running a VIP charter service. No release date was offered.

Xbox’s Phil Spencer briefly took the stage at the end of the Xbox Showcase to announce that “we have heard your feedback.” Microsoft plans to increase the available supply of Xbox Series X units in stores, and will release a new edition of the all-digital Xbox Series S.

This new Series S features a 1-terabyte solid-state drive, up from the 512 GB drive in the current model, and comes in a new color, Carbon Black. It will ship for $349.99 on Sept. 1.

Spencer also raised a few eyebrows by wearing a T-shirt that featured the box art for the 1995 PC game Hexen: Beyond Heretic, created by Raven Software.

In a fully-calculated media event like this one, it’s difficult to imagine that Spencer just rolled out of bed and grabbed that shirt, particularly as Activision Blizzard currently owns Raven Software. It’s entirely possible this was a subtle hint about what’s first on Spencer’s agenda if and when Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard goes through.

In other first-party news for Xbox Game Studios:

• Playground Games’ reboot of the Fable series is officially scheduled for release in 2024, with a new CGI trailer that stars British comedian Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowd) as an antagonistic, hero-hating giant.
• Obsidian Entertainment’s first-person fantasy RPG Avowed received a new trailer of its own, which hinted at the lore of the series and established that it’s coming next year.
• Ninja Theory revealed more in-game footage from its forthcoming Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, scheduled for 2024. The original Hellblade was an award-winning 2017 release that used both action and exploration gameplay as metaphors for a struggle with mental illness. Its sequel is planned to continue that story.
• Montreal-based Compulsion Games (We Happy Few) was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 and has been relatively quiet ever since. It broke that silence at the Showcase with a CGI trailer for South of Midnight, a third-person action-adventure game co-written by Zaire Lanier (Subnautica: Below Zero) and set in the supernatural folklore of the American South.
• InXile (Wasteland) revealed its next project at the Showcase. Clockwork Revolution is a first-person steampunk game from the creators of the classic 2001 PC game Arcanum. The city of Avalon has been built into a paradise by its ruler, who’s used a time-travel device to reinforce her power. Your goal is to use the same methods against her, by changing the past to depose a tyrant in the present.
• Xbox Studios will publish Stoic Studio’s TowerBorne, a new cooperative action-RPG, which was made as a lighthearted adventure to contrast with Stoic’s previous project The Banner Saga.
• As a tie-in with the theatrical release of Dune: Part Two in November, players of the current Microsoft Flight Simulator will be able to acquire and fly their own bug-inspired “thopters.”
• Rare’s Sea of Thieves will receive a free update on July 20 that crosses over with the recently-revived adventure series Monkey Island, allowing players to team up for an adventure with Guybrush Threepwood.

To summarize: Xbox’s first-party plans for the rest of this year all rest firmly on Starfield, and to a lesser extent, Forza.

However, 2024 will see Fable, Avowed, Hellblade II, South of Midnight, and a new Microsoft Flight Simulator. If there’s a quiet subtext to this year’s Xbox Showcase, it’s “wait until next year.”

Other reveals at the 2023 Xbox Showcase included:

• Ubisoft revealed a new game in the Star Wars universe, Outlaws, for 2024. As a smuggler in the period of the original trilogy, you’re asked to dodge both the Empire and your debts in pursuit of one last heist.
• Keanu Reeves returned to a Microsoft stage to officially reveal the first major expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, called Phantom Liberty. Co-starring Idris Elba (The Wire), PL sends players into the slums of Dogtown on an urgent mission to rescue the President of the New United States. It’s planned for release on Sept. 26. CP2077 is based on the tabletop roleplaying game of the same name by Kirkland, Wash.-based R. Talsorian Games.
• The team behind the popular Persona series of Japanese RPGs announced its first trip into a fantasy setting with Metaphor: ReFantazio, a 2024 game where a random traveler gets pulled into a quest to save a kingdom.
• Speaking of Persona, a full remake of 2006’s Persona 3 will land on Xbox in 2024, and a brand-new strategy-based spinoff, Persona 5 Tactica, is coming out on Nov. 17.
• The Chinese Room, creators of Dear Esther, revealed a new game, Still Wakes the Deep, a narrative horror game set on a sinking oil rig in 1975. Players must survive inclement weather, the rig’s crumbling structure, and an unknown entity that seems to have crawled aboard.
• The next destination for Bethesda’s Fallout 76 is post-apocalyptic Atlantic City, as efforts to reclaim the post-nuclear war northeastern US advance as far as New Jersey.
• Players of Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 will receive five free playable characters in Aug. with a subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

Xbox Game Pass releases for the rest of 2023 include Payday 3 (Sept. 21) and Cities: Skylines II (10/24), in addition to Starfield and Forza Motorsport.

In Ironwood Studios’ debut video game Pacific Drive, an unknown phenomena has transformed a big part of the Pacific Northwest into what’s now known as the Olympic Exclusion Zone.

Players are asked to navigate the Zone’s dangers, which include lethal monsters and unpredictable storms, from behind the wheel of an extensively customized station wagon. While your character can get out of your car and even take damage, your survival primarily depends on how well you take care of your car.

Ironwood has variously described Pacific Drive‘s genre as “driving survival” or, more cleverly, a “road-lite.” Each trip through the Exclusion Zone is randomized, so no two players will have the same experience, but you’ll learn and gain something from each failed run.

Pacific Drive was first revealed in 2022 at one of Sony’s State of Play livestreams. It’s the debut project from Ironwood, founded in 2019 and headquartered in Seattle.

Ironwood’s 19-person staff includes studio head Alexander Dracott, formerly of Oculus and Sucker Punch; production director Alyssa Askew, previously with Big Fish and the manager of gaming events for Seattle’s annual GeekGirlCon show; and narrative designer Karrie Shao, a former writer on Riot Games’ League of Legends.

The team at Ironwood includes developers who’ve worked on a number of recently famous games, which ranges from Pacific Northwest projects like Cozy Grove, Halo Infinite, and Infamous: Second Son, to international productions such as BioShock Infinite, Mafia III, and Mortal Kombat 11. For a relatively new indie developer working on its first game, Ironwood has a lot of experience under its hood.

As part of the run-up to Pacific Drive’s launch later this year, Ironwood debuted a behind-the-scenes developer diary, “Tales From the Road,” on Saturday morning as part of GamesRadar’s Summer Games Fest.

“Initially, [Pacific Drive] was very much a personal thing,” Dracott says in the diary. “I grew up driving station wagons around the Pacific Northwest.”

“As an adult, I decided to start doing that again… I would go to abandoned industrial sites, taking the car up up these tiny little dirt trails, and there was this vibe, of being out there in the woods with this old car, a surreal experience. That became the initial seed of the game.”

As part of that, Pacific Drive has been built to cause the player to develop a “sense of companionship with their car,” in Dracott’s terms. The Zone is made to be a lonely place, without any other humans around, so your car is both your vehicle and your only partner.

In between runs, you can venture on foot into the abandoned landscape of the Exclusion Zone, to search for resources and materials that you can use to fix your trusty car. In garages, you can craft and install parts and upgrades, in order to get increasingly further into the Zone and figure out what’s happened to the Pacific Northwest.

Pacific Drive is planned for release later in 2023, on the PlayStation 5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.