In this week’s newsletter: Other than God of War star Christopher Judge’s heartfelt acceptance speech, the Game Awards felt symptomatic of something wrong with the industry
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Believe it or not, this issue marks a year of Pushing Buttons. However long you’ve been a subscriber, I wanted to say thank you so much for reading. Whether I’ve been chewing over the week’s gaming news, philosophising over what games can offer us in times of crisis or just writing (again) about how brilliantly creepy Zelda: Majora’s Mask is, putting this newsletter together has consistently been a highlight of my working week. I try to bring you a balance of analysis, opinion, reminiscence, recommendations and good old-fashioned journalistic storytelling, but if you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see more of in this newsletter, hit reply and tell me. And if there are any guest writers you’d like to see in your inbox in 2023, let me know who they are and I’ll try to make it happen.
When the first issue went out, the world was still emerging tentatively from Covid-19 lockdowns, when video games had been a vital social lifeline for millions. The effects of the pandemic continue to be felt in the games world; 2022 was full of games that were delayed as studios scrambled to adapt to remote working, and I played more than one big-budget game this year that bore the unmistakeable signs of a rush to the finish. The industry also made less money this year, after unsustainably rapid pandemic-fuelled growth in 2020. In other ways, though, it’s been a slow return to business as usual, as the industry hype machine stirred back to life.
The huge news of the week is that the $70bn business deal known as Acquisition Blizzard (that is, Microsoft’s purchase of Activision, which has been rolling on all year) is being blocked by the US Federal Trade Commission. The trade body cited concerns that it would thwart competition, and evidently Xbox’s offer to guarantee Call of Duty on PlayStation (and Nintendo, where the series doesn’t generally appear anyway) did not allay those fears. This news broke right before the Game Awards, interestingly, and Xbox boss, Phil Spencer, did not look happy about it.
Two big 2023 games have just been confirmed for June: Street Fighter 6 and Diablo 4. That’s also the month of E3’s return under new management, so it’s going to be busy.
Our own Steve Rose wrote about Facebook’s giant bet on the metaverse, and how that’s currently working out. (Clue: not well, so far.) Every time I read one of these things I think, why on earth are all these companies spending billions to essentially create PlayStation Home? The ads that Meta has been broadcasting lately – all about how urban planners will use the metaverse to design the future, etc – look like what I saw when I played Minecraft with Microsoft’s abandoned Hololens AR headset in 2015.
Idris Elba stars in the new Cyberpunk 2077 expansion. It really is time for me to play this game properly, isn’t it? It barely ran on my PS4 when I first bought it in 2020, but as we all know, CD Projekt Red has been working doggedly to turn its game’s fortunes around and – alongside a very successful Netflix series – that hard work has seen Cyberpunk 2077 become an unexpected resurgent success.
The evidently rather bitter writer/director of Days Gone, Sony’s rather drab 2019 open world biker zombie game, has recently claimed that the game didn’t succeed because “woke reviewers … couldn’t handle a gruff white biker looking at his date’s ass”. (The studio behind Days Gone has distanced itself from its former employee’s comments.) Even leaving the game’s quality out of the picture, I think the middling reviews and sales were more likely because it came out at a time when people were really starting to suffer from open-world fatigue – and also in the same year as Red Dead Redemption 2, probably the greatest game in that genre. But what do I know, I’m just a woke reviewer. Continue reading...
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