Tag: email_newsletter

“The kind of games and studios that are being “rationalised” out of existence here are exactly the kind that we need in 2024: smaller, creatively interesting games that offer alternatives to the increasingly homogeneous gaming behemoths that have been hoovering up money for more than 10 years. Roll7’s releases are exactly the kinds of games that should form part of an artistically as well as monetarily valuable portfolio for a publisher such as Take-Two.

Grand Theft Auto prints money, and the publisher’s executives take home tens of millions every year. Is it actually true now that such a publisher can’t support smaller games, too – even if they win awards and turn a profit? What is the point of having an “indie” publishing label if you’re simply going to buy good studios and shut them down after barely two years?”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/may/08/pushing-buttons-roll7-studio-take-two

“Having what Elliott calls a “sticky” demo is helpful — a slice of the game that grips players and doesn’t let go. Balatro, which transforms poker hands into an addictive “roguelike” that fans can’t stop playing, is a good example of this phenomenon. The game is difficult to explain but nearly impossible to put down once you’ve tried it.

Elliott said his teams often reach out to small streamers and YouTubers — people who might not have millions of viewers but do have loyal, dedicated audiences that can add up in the aggregate. “If you get enough of those people talking about the game early enough, it does build resonance,” he said.

Elliott, who worked at big game companies such as Acclaim and Electronic Arts before becoming an entrepreneur, said he started Playstack in 2016 “to do everything I’d ever done again, but learn from the mistakes.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-19/how-small-video-game-publisher-playstack-creates-hits-like-balatro

“It’s almost as if an entire generation suddenly realized that France actually has a large city directly on the seaside, a place with pristine rocky coves and restaurants on the water serving grilled fish. The result has been a 5 percent increase in real estate prices, with the popular 13th Arrondissement seeing a 15 percent boost. Many of the newcomers are modern nomads: people with jobs in Paris who work from home in Marseille and can board a TGV to be in the capital in three hours”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/the-marseille-experiment-macron-attempts-to-save-a-city-overtaken-by-drug-violence-a-bade2006-b7d7-433c-abf1-f053d56680aa

“IM activists also work in the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament in Berlin. Mario Müller, a tattooed offender who has been convicted of attacks on a plainclothes police officer and on a left-wing activist, has roots in the neo-Nazi scene and he helped establish the first Identitarian housing project in Halle. Today, he works for AfD parliamentarian Jan Wenzel Schmidt. Members of parliament from other parties find it concerning that right-wing extremists have access to the protected Bundestag buildings”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/right-wing-extremism-german-identitarians-are-trying-to-make-a-comeback-a-1fa09809-4097-4ab7-b397-7c29f3f9a33d

“You might think: who cares? What’s 5m PS2s between friends? And it’s true that I find this lack of transparency particularly annoying because I am a journalist, and I like to have answers. But the absence of reported sales figures allows companies to spin narratives that don’t line up with reality, to please the markets and their shareholders. They can claim success on whichever metric best backs up that story”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/apr/03/pushing-buttons-video-game-console-sales

“Some players have reacted with dismay to this game’s inflexibility, but I respect Dragon’s Dogma 2’s willingness to ruin your day from time to time. It doesn’t bend to your will; you have to work around its rules – even when, at the beginning, you don’t necessarily know what they are. At first you might be frustrated that, for instance, characters often tell you about intriguing legends and rumours, but the game never marks these things down on your map to tell you where you might find them. Then, as the hours go by, you might find yourself caught out in the wilds at night without a camping kit, and seek shelter in a cavern that turns out to lead to a crumbling mountain shrine, where you find an actual sphinx. You realise that if someone had marked its location on your map, you’d never have felt so awed when you first spied its glowing eyes in the dark”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/mar/27/pushing-buttons-dragons-dogma-2

“In its better moments, the House of Lords is a kind of council of elders, where the polished word and cogent argument have a home in a place where politics is more than an exercise of slavish obedience in the interest of climbing the career political ladder. It is a bulwark against populism, which is also flourishing in Britain – as seen in recent days with the government essentially suspending the right to asylum.

In its worse moments, the House of Lords is derelict ruin occupied by upstarts, party donors and lobbyists for whom nothing is further from their minds than true democratic rule. And in the already divided kingdom, the worse moments of late have heavily outweighed the better ones”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/haunted-house-on-the-thames-behind-the-scenes-in-the-house-of-lords-a-a85dc866-8843-414a-91b7-850487e41891

“Senior civil servants are “who you dream of, if you’re a vendor”; they may be exceptionally bright people with Oxbridge firsts who have completed their training at the Major Projects Leadership Academy, but in practice they have never worked in the industry with which they are negotiating. More fundamentally, civil servants do not understand that the other side is designing its bid to arrive at what project managers call the OFM (Oh, F**k Moment), when a new set of costs suddenly appears. The engineers have found that they’ll have to drill through granite to build the tunnel, or the data scientists have found errors in the old system. “As long as you can find things which weren’t covered in the original contract,” they told me, “you’ve opened the door to expanding the scope and demanding more money.”

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2024/01/the-rotten-state

“Since 2010, councils have had 60 per cent of their spending power cut by central government, which aggressively reduced funding in a bid to reduce Britain’s budget deficit after the 2008 financial crash. (In 2009-10, the deficit reached 10 per cent of GDP, and the national debt was at 67 per cent by May 2010.) Government ministers encouraged councils to be more entrepreneurial and raise their own funds through commercial investment, and in 2015 abolished the Audit Commission, which had kept a check on their finances. Council officers became prime targets for dubious investment propositions”

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2024/03/bust-britain