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🎮 Microsoft announces Project xCloud, a game streaming service

Just like they promised, Microsoft has announced a service to stream console games. xCloud, according to The Verge's recap, streams Xbox games to consoles, PCs, phones and tablets.

According to their marketing video, which I would highly recommend watching, Microsoft broke down Xbox Ones and stored their guts in servers. These servers will stream the game to basically anything with a screen.

The most interesting part of the video was their positioning. Microsoft said they understood hardcore gamers want the full experience, but more casual players might like streaming better. They see this as a way to sell console gaming to people who don't own consoles. They're trying to segment the market.

As we've seen with Fortnite, people will play a console game on mobile, touch controls and all, if it's good enough.

Watching this video gave me pause about the future of this service on mobile, however. One woman in the video talked about how much she loves streaming games to her Android phone. This makes sense because Microsoft is trying to colonize Android.

However, it also makes me wonder how this service will work on iPhones. Apple famously kicked Steam Link off the App Store for allowing users to purchase games from Steam on an iOS device. This is a no-no since Apple mandates you give them a 30% cut of any in-app purchases.

My guess is Microsoft will get this service onto iOS and pay Apple's 30% tax when people sign up for a subscription on their iPhone. Netflix pays the same tax and they hate it too.

I also wonder how well this service will work over data. In the video, Microsoft says game streaming will "push the limits of 5G," which does not even exist yet! I get why they're doing it—better to design for 2020, when this actually launches—but man, that's a high ask.

Connectivity in general will be an issue with xCloud. In its announcement post, Microsoft says the service will run off the Azure server network. This is their secret advantage to streaming games and why they think they've solved latency issues.

But. Now we have an issue of where Azure covers. Look at this helpful map they published with their blog post:

Microsoft's response to this will likely be that people who don't live in an Azure coverage area can just buy an Xbox. That still sucks, though, especially if you want to stream games to your phone.

My last thought is their intro video is notable for what it doesn't show: new consoles. Presumably the next generation of Xboxes will be designed with streaming in mind. I'm curious to see where how this goes.

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The smallest hint Rocksteady’s Superman game might be happening

Kotaku reporter and person with good sources Jason Schreier dropped a tiny, tiny hint Rocksteady may be working on the Superman game they teased in Arkham Knight.

Observers early this morning theorized that this [leaked Harry Potter] game might be made by Arkham developer Rocksteady Studios, but we don’t believe that’s the case. (From what I’ve heard, Rocksteady is still sticking to superheroes.)

Is it a stretch? Yes. But it's possible.

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Red Dead Redemption II requires 105 GB of storage

Kyle Evans of Rockstar Intel got a lot of great info off the back of the Red Dead II PS4 bundle, including a storage requirement of 105 gigabytes.

I was shocked at this number, but further research says it's the new normal. Developers cite uncompressed textures and audio files as being storage hogs, and a game of Red Dead's size is bound to have a lot of both.

It just feels crazy that my 500 GB PS4 only has space for a few big-budget games.

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Don't Let Telltale Milk Your Fandom Until They Pay The Workers They Screwed

Patrick Klepek stepped up with a damn good take about people celebrating the news that The Walking Dead's final season may still finish:

Here’s the problem: Telltale’s statement says nothing about how it intends to support the hundreds of workers it just laid off, and it shouldn’t matter what happens to this season of The Walking Dead until they fix that. I want to see the end of Clementine’s story, too—I’ve even written about what a great job the development team did in setting up this season for narrative success. But fandom shouldn’t blind us to the reality of the situation, in which a major company just screwed over its employees.

I get that fans want to see the story finish, especially so close to the end. I get it. But Telltale management behaved in an unacceptable way, and I don't know if we should give them money.

Former Telltale dev Emily Grace Buck tweeted:

The Walking Dead: The Final Season Ep 2 is still meant to drop on Tues

I’m in a weird place as Lead Ep Designer because I want you to play it! The team did awesome work, pushed boundaries, & I want you to see it! Send us off on a high note! But I’m not gonna tell you to buy it

I look at unhappy fans who want the series to finish more than anything and think, you are not the most wronged party in this whole mess. Telltale developers lost their job, their healthcare and their insurance. They deserve aid first because the injustice done to them was so much worse.

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Why Telltale mattered

Richard Cobbett wrote a nice eulogy for Telltale at PC Gamer:

More than anything else, Telltale proved that adventures weren’t simply alive and well, but that they could reach a mainstream and hardcore audience on any platform.

Telltale deserves all the credit in the world for making a new generation love adventure games. I despise old-style point-and-clicks, but their story-centric take on adventure games hooked me and millions of others.

Their formula didn't just inspire players either. Without Telltale, who knows if we would have gotten gems like Life is Strange and Until Dawn?

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🎮 Unionize everyone

Telltale Games, the developer behind famous franchises like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, shut down over the weekend. My heart goes out to the approximately 250 employees who lost their job.

The whole situation is a giant trainwreck. Former Telltale narrative designer Emily Grace Buck tweeted:

To clarify some questions people have been asking (and keep in mind I am NOT a company rep) - Around 250 people are jobless, not 225 - We did not get any kind of severance - Our healthcare only lasts for one more week - Many former employees were contract & can't get unemployment

There are people who started at Telltale as recently as a week ago.

Some of those people have children.

At least one of them relocated cross country

A lot of the Telltale devs have families & children. And now they don't have a paycheck. Not even a severance paycheck.

Due to the insanely high cost of living in the Bay Area relative to payscale, many of my (unbelievably skilled and talented!!!) colleagues were living paycheck to paycheck and do not know what they are going to do to make ends meet this month

Even before its shutdown, this was not a healthy company that treated its workers fairly. Three months ago, The Verge published a piece saying Telltale had "a culture that promoted constant overwork, toxic management, and creative stagnation."

Brandon Cebenka, a former Telltale character artist tweeted (emphasis mine):

Re: I got laid off at Telltale None of my sleepless nights or long hours on weekends trying to ship a game on time got me severance today. Don’t work overtime unless you’re paid for it, y’all. Protect your health. Companies don’t care about you.

The game industry has been chewing up developers and freeloading off unpaid overtime for years. There is one way to stop it: unionize.

Forget what you think you know about unions or the idea that they're somehow just for steelworkers. Unions are for everyone.

This is about power. Telltale screwed its employees because it could. Unions shift the balance of power so workers have a fighting chance. Mattias Lehman has a good unions 101 explainer:

Unions will not save the workers laid off by Telltale or any other company. But what collective organizations can do is exert power within a company to ensure that workers have more ability to speak up and push to change their conditions.

Companies don't care about you. You need the negotiating power of a union to make them care.

Unionize everyone.

Further reading

Game Workers Unite statement on Telltale: "The system for creating games is broken"

Jason Schreier (Kotaku is part of the GMG union): "Unionization can't prevent a game studio from shutting down, but it can let workers fight for paid overtime, severance, and most importantly, a seat at the table."

Waypoint: After Destroying Lives For Decades, Gaming Is Finally Talking Unionization

Kotaku: It’s Time For Game Developers To Unionize

Paste's Holly Green: "fuck, it sucks that Telltale folks are scramblin' for jobs and even worse when studios and publishers I know are treating folks just as bad are all 'We're hiring! Apply here!'"

The Verge's expose of Telltale: Toxic management cost an award-winning game studio its best developers

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PS Vita production to end in 2019 in Japan

Sal Romano, writing for Gematsu:

PS Vita will be manufactured until 2019 in Japan and there are currently no plans for a successor, Sony Interactive Entertainment senior vice president Hiroyuki Oda told Famitsu at Tokyo Game Show 2018.

The Vita is a nice little system that never got the chance it deserved. Damn shame.

Also, when are we getting a port of Persona 4 Golden?! A game that good should not be trapped on a dead system. I would kill for a Switch port.

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PlayStation Classic announced

From the PlayStation blog:

Today, we are excited to announce that we are bringing back the original PlayStation experience in a new miniaturized version – PlayStation Classic! The console will come pre-loaded with 20 classic titles, including fan-favorites such as Final Fantasy VII, Jumping Flash, Ridge Racer Type 4, Tekken 3, and Wild Arms.

It will run you $100, so maybe wait to see the full list of games before preordering.

I will not be getting one of these. I began gaming with the GameCube, so I have no nostalgia for this era of gaming.

To my mind, PS1/N64-era games are the hardest to go back to. The industry had to start from scratch in a lot of ways during the transition to 3D. Games from that era often had bad cameras or awful controls simply because developers didn't know any better. Plus, I think 2D art ages better than 3D.

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Lawbreakers servers have shut down for good

A former Boss Key dev tweeted:

#lawbreakers servers are officially closed for good. Hardest development, and best game I ever shipped. If you played it, thank you.

An ignominious end: ignored by everyone but those stopping to celebrate another CliffyB failure and the game's minuscule population of fans.

The late Totalbiscuit was a huge stan for LawBreakers. He never wavered in his opinion that this game was a secret gem that never successfully explained its mechanics or made its case to the public.

I never felt inclined to try it because of its off-putting hyper-aggro "Bro-verwatch" marketing and hideous character design.

Rest in peace, LawBreakers.

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15 European gambling regulators unite to tackle loot box threat

Emma Kent, reporting for Eurogamer on mostly European regulators teaming up to tackle "the blurring of lines between gaming and gambling":

The key focus for the parties involved appears to be "tackling unlicensed third-party websites offering illegal gambling linked to popular video games". If you're wondering what this is, think back to skin betting site CS:GO Lounge, which allowed users to bet real money on a pot of their CS:GO items until Valve cracked down on the site in 2016. Many of these still exist, and regulators want both the video games industry and technology platforms "to play their part in helping crack down on these websites".

But the investigation won't stop there. The regulators stated games providers must "ensure that features within games, such as loot boxes, do not constitute gambling under national laws".

Good luck to them. The status quo is such a shitshow that any change is likely to be good. On one hand, you have no-name scumbags pushing gambling to kids under false pretenses. On the other, you have some of the biggest companies in the world subjecting millions of players to basically the same thing.

Regulate away, governments. Regulate away.

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Riot Games Says It Wants To Clean Up Its Mess, But The People Who Made It Are Still There

Cecilia D'Anastosio followed up on her dynamite report exposing a toxic culture of sexism at League of Legends developer Riot Games. One month later, it is unclear if Riot will make real change.

According to sources currently and formerly employed by Riot, who are anonymous due to their fear of retribution, employees up to and including those at the highest level of the company have been the subject of official complaints or implicated in allegations of harassment or misbehavior. Whether or not these men are held accountable should, to some current Riot employees, be the measure of whether Riot is serious about cultural change.

It must be hell inside Riot. D'Anastosio's reporting makes it clear that entire company, from the bottom to the top, is complicit in a toxic, terrible culture. For that culture to try to reform itself is an incredible challenge. For everyone's sake, I hope they succeed.

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Another good take on Spider-Man’s relationship with the cops

Heather Alexandra, writing for Kotaku:

Police are an unimpeachable group in Spider-Man. They show no real flaws and make no mistakes. They don’t feel like an integrated part of the the community; they pepper cutscenes and sometimes walk the streets but mostly show up as an allied faction in procedurally generated crime events. Even if Spider-Man’s New York is largely a fiction, it points towards a real place. New York is many things, but it is also the city of Eric Garner, stop-and-frisk, and Palantir.

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NBA 2K19 Is A Nightmarish Vision Of Our Microtransaction-Stuffed Future

Luke Plunkett, reporting for Kotaku:

NBA 2K19 is constantly begging you to spend VC. You’re asked to spend VC on Gatorade for performance boosts, on vehicles to make progression around the plodding Neighbourhood mode quicker, on shoes, on clothes. It’s relentless, in your face the moment you turn the game on, and doesn’t leave you until the second you quit (quite literally, since GET VC is right there underneath QUIT).

Putting the buy more VC button literally under the quit option is so gross.

It just gives up the charade that these microtransactions are "optional." NBA 2K19, and to lesser degrees all games with microtransactions, are designed to frustrate you to the point of quitting, just to push their in-game currency.

The microtransactions are never optional.

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They Turned Spider-Man Into A Damn Cop And It Sucks

Tom Ley, writing for The Concourse:

It’s dumb to expect video games to be responsible reflections of real life, but it is also impossible, for me at least, to not feel some ickiness about the game forcing me into cahoots with even a fictionalized version of the NYPD, an organization that routinely oppresses some of the most vulnerable residents of the city I live in.

During my playtime, Spidey said, "Whoah! A drug deal!" My first thought was, does Spider-Man support the drug war?

I know this is a heightened universe with superpowers and capital-c Crime, which is different from real-life crime, but it still feels weird.

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Spider-Man has different dialogue audio for Peter moving and standing still

File this under: Absolutely insane craftsmanship and attention to detail.

Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku first noticed this:

As [Spider-Man] flings himself about, he frequently gets calls from friends on his radio, and he responds differently depending on whether or not he’s exerting himself.

Listen for yourself.

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'Shadow of the Tomb Raider' Tries, but Fails, to Tackle Its Own Colonialism

Dia Lacina, reviewing Shadow of the Tomb Raider for Waypoint:

The game’s narrative gestures at wanting players to learn a lesson about colonialism, but even when it manages to make some small point, it's undercut by the very mechanics that make up 90% of the game.

Between this game and Shadow of War, I'm sick of faux-deep games that go, "Sure, you're having fun, but what if this is all bad?!" Don't do that, game, when you are the one providing that fun! That's not deep. That's a surface-level attempt to grapple with your mechanics' morality without actually making substantive change.

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Let Me Tell You About My Time With 'The Quiet Man'

Patrick Klepek recounted his experience in Waypoint playing The Quiet Man, an inexplicable live-action/fighting game hybrid:

The Quiet Man shouldn’t exist. We live in an age when so many games, especially ones funded by big publishers, are slam dunks. They know what they’re building, we know what we’re buying. Rinse, repeat. The Quiet Man is inexplicably weird for all sorts of reasons, the kind of thing where it should have been clear long ago it wasn’t going to work, an idea that didn’t translate from paper, and yet it continued apace, and soon, it’s going to be released.

His (funny) experience with the game's PAX demo needs to be read to be believed. What a weird thing to exist.

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