Belghast

I tell you friends… we continue to live in interesting times. It is not as though the chip shortage and the global pandemic were enough… it is apparently acquisition season which is bringing on some odd happenings. Yesterday three events took place that might have each inspired a blog post, but instead of dragging this out forever I am going to talk about all three this morning. As always I have already used my Twitter account as the social relief valve that it is, and hopefully you my blog readers will get a more measured response.

Sony Acquires Bungie… sorta?

News broke yesterday that Bungie would be joining Sony Interactive Entertainment in a deal worth 3.6 billion dollars. My initial take was that it seemed like an awful lot of money for a single game studio, given that most of the recent acquisitions have been far more about a grab for intellectual property rather than acquiring specific actively supported games. Bethesda/Zenimax for example had a pretty robust back catalog and some extremely high performing and beloved franchises under its belt… and that was 7.5 billion. Disney acquired the entire Star Wars franchise for what seems like a bargain basement price of 4.05 billion. Maybe the recent acquisition fever has inflated the price tag associated with studios… but this just seems like a lot for Destiny 2.

Bungie is a really weird freaking company. Lets take a moment to trace their recent history:

• Starts life as a Macintosh exclusive developer
• Gets snatched up by Microsoft who gains Halo franchise
• Fights for freedom losing Halo in the process but becomes independent again
• Enters into a 10 year exclusive publishing deal with Activision/Blizzard.
• Fights again for freedom and becomes independent again.
• Gets acquired by Sony but still maintains autonomy?

Specifically with that last point, it sounds like in this deal Bungie is going to retain a lot of autonomy and if you are a Destiny 2 player… nothing much is going to change. Under Activision the PlayStation used to have exclusive content in Destiny, and it seems like we are not returning to that just yet. What I think is likely however is that the new IP that Bungie has talked about in veiled statements is probably going to be a PlayStation exclusive, similar to Starfield becoming a Microsoft exclusive even though all of the existing published content did not during the Bethesda acquisition.

Sony has come out and said that this deal was not a reaction to the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard and that is likely entirely true. Deals take awhile to bake and reportedly this has been in the works for half a year or so. However I do absolutely think this is a panic purchase on the part of Sony because regardless of this most recent ground breaking acquisition… we are in a climate where studios are being taken off the market left and right. It is not only Microsoft, but also Embracer Group, Tencent, and NetEase that are locking down studios, and Sony has to feel this pressure to make some of their own acquisitions. Which then leads to the weirdly high price tag and unusual autonomy that seems to come with this deal. Again this is me talking out of my ass here, but like everything on this blog it is effectively my editorial statement on things.

Warcraft Pokes Holes in Faction Wall

So I realize that every single article reporting on this is using a version of this image… but quite honestly it fits the mood. I would say this is surprise news, but honestly it has been rumored for awhile. Yesterday it was officially announced that Blizzard would be poking some holes in that faction wall to allow for limited cross faction grouping. Essentially if you have a friend on the other side of the chasm that is a RealID or BattleTag friend, you can invite them to a group and run structured content with them like Mythics or Raids. Random activities will for the time being stay faction specific, and the factions will remain hostile to one another in the open world. This is designed to be an opt-in system.

Originally tweeted by Anna Bell (@liopleurodonic) on January 31, 2022.

So my first reaction aligns closely with this gif that Anna tweeted out yesterday. It really is about fucking time they made this move. My stance has long been that anything that gets in the way of you playing with your friends is awful. Faction walls are awful. It ends up with a scenario where some people have to make a sacrifice in order to do the thing that allows them to play with the majority of their friends. Grace made the sacrifice once of playing Alliance so that they could raid with my guild in Legion. Then later I made the leap to Horde because I no longer really had much in the way of ties to raiding and that was their preferred faction and I had another friend group on that faction. None of that should have needed to happen and we SHOULD have been able to play together regardless of our personal cosmetic choices… because really that is all a faction is… a cosmetic choice.

My second reaction is that Blizzard did not go anywhere near far enough with this move and I hope over time they continue to loosen the restrictions. Guilds are going to remain single faction, and really… that is a shame. I would have liked to have seen that barrier to drop as well as the one preventing players from communicating in the open world. Probably my favorite take is this one:

I find this so fascinating as both a business decision and also an ideological one – WoW’s game design was built around this idea of conflict and hostility between players and it never yielded a positive outcome

AppleCiderWitch

It is absolutely true. This weirdly antagonistic stance of always pitting player against player and creating artificial zero sum scenarios… has only seemingly fostered the toxicity of the community. Final Fantasy on the other hand goes out of its way to foster cooperation between its players, and it shows allowing the community to weather even the weirdest of times. I hope we see more just universally positive changes for the community as a whole, because you cannot turn this ship around with business as usual. For me however, I am still holding Blizzard at arms length and still hopeful there are more groundbreaking changes to come.

New York Times buys Wordle

Viral sensations come from seemingly nowhere and often disappear in the same manner. How many of you are still playing Flappy Bird for example, of hell even the more highly produced Angry Birds? Over the last few months a weird social experiment has been taking place on twitter and I officially joined the cult. For those who might not still be initiated into this madness of Wordle, each day you have to guess a five letter word and you have six tries at it. Grey squares indicate that the letter is not used in the word, yellow squares that the letter is used but in the incorrect place, and green that the letter is in the correct position. Each day millions of players post their results to social media, and as a result the viral meme continues to grow.

My wife and I play and I have been participating for roughly a month. These statistics are incomplete because it keeps track of things in a cookie, which limits the tracking to a specific computer and even a specific browser. I’ve yet to fail at getting the word, and many of us have developed a series of strategies like starting with a specific vowel heavy word each day and then moving from there. Anyways… yesterday New York Times purchased Wordle from its creator for what is termed as “low seven figures”. Josh released a statement on twitter that it was stipulated in the purchase that the game would remain free to play, which is good. However the specific verbiage of NYT is a little different… that it would “initially remain free to new and existing players”.

Now to be fair to Kodra who has reminded me of this on multiple occasions… the New York Times Sudoku remains completely free and without AdBlocker barrier. However the site as a whole is an awful experience without a subscription, and since this purchase was designed to drive additional digital subscriptions… I do wonder how long Wordle will remain free. Viral hits like this are a combination of so many different elements that lead to a general feeling of good will in the player base, and any amount of friction can sour that experience. NYT is going to have to be very careful about that line and how much they push against it, because as quickly as this entered the zeitgeist it can exit it even quicker.

Please note I do not begrudge the sale of Wordle one little bit. I mean shit… if someone offered me “low seven figures” for Aggronaut, I would sell it in a heartbeat. I’ve never done anything to monetize this site, but that sort of payment is life changing and there is no way I could turn that down. I can always go out and build another site, just like Josh can always work on a new game. I am happy he got a payday over what has ended up being a deceptively brilliant game. As interesting as I find it though, the moment I have to navigate a nag barrier or come up against a paywall… I am out.

Over the last week there has been a bit of a meme floating around twitter, where folks are supposed to post an image from any movie that they have seen seven times or more. I love these sorts of things as a thought experiment, but I hate the way that they clog up twitter. In the past I have used these to spring off and start a blog post, so that the entire madness can be contained within my private domicile. The thing is this actually became a bit tougher of an experiment than I would have thought. I went into this thinking surely there are not that many movies that I have seen seven times or more. However I am in fact old… and also grew up without cable television… which the more I thought about it increased the number of films on this list. In a few cases I am going to be lumping multiple films together because mentally I think of them as a set.

You are going to see a bit of a trend. There are a lot of 80s and early 90s movies that I watched a lot… in part because I did not have cable television until college and was limited to only a handful of over the air channels. Combine with that the fact that I was an only child and spent an awful lot of time alone as a kid… by choice mind you. There were many times I had the television on in the background as signs of life, and in many cases this was actually some movie playing in the background since we only had a handful of over the air channels.

Star Wars Original Trilogy

• Star Wars – 1977
• The Empire Strikes Back – 1980
• Return of the Jedi – 1983

This is easily my first obsession when it comes to movies or characters in general. I saw this film when I was two years old at the local drive inn theater. Reportedly I came away talking about almost nothing but “Darfa Bater” and was completely obsessed with him. For those not of at least my age, one of the quirks of VHS movies is that when they first became available they were ungodly expensive… on the order of magnitude of $100-200 for a single movie. Then something changed around 1989 if I remember correctly and you could start to get movies somewhere near the $30 price point. I remember one Christmas the only thing I asked for was a copy of the Star Wars trilogy, and while these are not my actual VHS tapes they were this set from CBS Fox Video. I likely damned near wore them out, with Empire Strikes back easily being my most watched in the series.

Indiana Jones Trilogy

• Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark – 1981
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – 1984
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – 1989

Shocking to no one that grew up in the 80s… I was also super into Indiana Jones. I love the first and third film… and tolerate the second film. Mostly the whole bug room thing made me super squeamish because that was my personal fear, not snakes or rats. I did wonder if I had actually watched Temple of Doom seven times, but figure over the many years of catching it on cable and leaving the channel tuned there… I have to have watched it. It was also the one I had a shitty VHS copy of the first, which absolutely bumped up its view count.

Blade Runner

• Blade Runner – 1982

Blade Runner is one of those formative science fiction epics for me. There are scenes in this movie that I am still obsessed with as an adult, and have yet to see anything to really fully replace the visuals. I enjoyed the second Blade Runner, but there is nothing that will truly ever replace the original. I am probably always going to be more than happy to sit down and watch this one. I wore the shitty HBO recorded copy that I had ragged.

Dune

• Dune – 1984

I remember when I first encountered Dune like it was yesterday. It was shortly after the birth of my cousin Christopher, and we were spending a lot of time up in Oklahoma City while my mom helped out. The highlight of these trips was unfettered access to cable television, which meant I consumed copious amounts of HBO and MTV. So this would have been after HBO started showing Dune and I am pretty sure in that one weekend I watched it start to finish at least three times. My uncle happened to notice my obsession with it and gave me my very first copy of the Dune paperback, and I was enthralled by the glossary in the back of terms… starting what has become a lifelong connection to this universe.

Ghostbusters

• Ghostbusters – 1984

My uncle was always an early adopter of technology. As a result they had a VHS camcorder long before anyone else I know had one. The original one that they had was in two parts, a small VCR and a small camera that together made a complete package. My cousins were so obsessed with Ghostbusters that they went enough times to the theater to see it, that on one of these viewings my uncle snuck in the recording and taped a copy. This poor recording was the first time I saw the movie and made up for a ton of subsequent watchings once I got a copy of it in my grubby little hands

The Last Starfighter

• The Last Starfighter – 1984

I feel like this movie will forever be thought of as something trying to ride the coattails of Star Wars hype. However for me personally it was so much more because it combined my love of space epics and video games into a single package. I still think the Gunstar is one of the coolest ship designs ever, and if I ever get a 3D printer I figure I will make myself one. For years we have heard about a potential sequel but nothing seems to ever come of it. As a kid I would have loved the Galoob line of toys that never materialized either. It does not hurt either that I had a shitty VHS recording of this from HBO that was on regular replay.

My Science Project

• My Science Project – 1985

My Science Project is arguably not a good film, and I know this. However I still have a deep connection with it, in part because there was a time when this was one of the few movies I had access to. Something you have to understand is that in the early days of the VCR, there was a buy in to be able to rent movies. I remember Aardvark video charged a hundred dollar membership fee, in order to get access to rent films and even then the rental fees were around ten dollars each. Suffice to say we did not rent a whole lot of movies until that changed. One of my Dad’s friends from work used to take blank VHS tapes and fill them up with 3 movies per recorded from HBO and then send them home to me. This often meant I got a rather random assortment of movies, and on one of these early offerings was My Science Project. This film does not hold up at all, but I still love it.

A View to a Kill

• A View to a Kill – 1985

A View to a Kill is not a great James Bond film. I grew up mostly only knowing Roger Moore as my Bond, and as a result I have a kinship with movies like Moonraker. A View to a Kill was also on one of these movie mixtapes, and as a result it got way more views from me than it really deserved. I still love the soundtrack though and it will probably be my favorite bond “theme”.

The Goonies

• The Goonies – 1985

Once movie rentals became cheaper, it saw us getting a movie pretty much every weekend. When cousins were in town, it often saw us renting multiples. Goonies was always one of the movies that was in pretty regular rotation. I loved it as a kid and I still love it as an adult. It is just a fun adventure film with cartoony bad guys and entertaining characters. It does not hurt that many of us were obsessed with trying to beat the extremely obtuse Goonies II Nintendo Game.

Aliens

• Aliens – 1986

Around 1990 a local video store went out of business and sold off all of their movies. Among these I picked up a number of gems like Alien, Aliens, and Predator. The one I watched the most often however was Aliens. As a kid I thought Alien was kinda boring to be honest, moved too slowly. Aliens on the other hand was this big science fiction adventure horror film and I loved it. I loved everything about the weapons that they were using and thought Sigourney Weaver was a badass.

Highlander

• Highlander – 1986

While this came out in 1986, I did not discover it until the 90s… when HBO was playing it constantly. It became a favorite of me and my friends and if it happened to be on while we were together… it was a high likelihood that we were going to watch it. Once again it is a series that I was largely enthralled by the mythology of it. There was rumored to be a cut of Highlander II that was actually watchable, and I remember so much discussion about maybe trying to get our hands on a copy of it. To the best of my knowledge… there is not a version of the second movie that makes any sense.

The Lost Boys

• The Lost Boys – 1987

I am not entirely certain what it is about this film that made me so obsessed with it, but it was a thing. Maybe I had a crush on Star, or maybe I just thought that the vampires looked badass. Whatever the case I was enthralled with the mythology of these films to the point of trying to track down the comic books that were referenced in it (that did not exist of course). This obsession lead me down a path of discovering a lot of horror comics in the process and warped my little mind. The soundtrack is also great, and I can still sit down happily to watch this at any time. I did not hurt that I bought a copy in that video store sale as well, and had easy access.

G.I. Joe The Movie

• G.I. Joe the Movie – 1987

I am not sure I fully understand why this grabbed my imagination so much. Sure I loved the GI Joe cartoon, but this movie was so much more. There was an actual mythology that they were introducing to Cobra, and I was completely hooked. Looking back now… it is cheesy as shit, but the heart wants what the heart wants.

Hellraiser Trilogy

• Hellraiser – 1987
• Hellbound: Hellraiser II – 1988
• Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth – 1992

I am slotting this in here because of when the original Hellraiser was released since I am keeping a psuedo chronology here, but in truth it was not until high school that this obsession began. I love Pinhead and the whole lore of the cenobytes… even though most of it was just sort of made up on the spot for the films and had very little connection back to the Hellbound Heart story. There was a period around 92/93 that I dissected these films bit by bit. By then we were a family that owned two VCRs and dubbing off a copy was a thing.

Akira

• Akira – 1988

In truth my first exposure to Anime was Macross as part of the Robotech cartoon. However Akira began my real explorations of what I liked and did not like in Anime. I got my first copy of Akira like everyone else did at the time… Suncoast Video. I am absolutely certain that I have watched this at least seven times, because I spent a lot of time trying to digest everything that was going on in the shots.

Streets on Fire

• Santa Cruz Skateboards – Streets on Fire – 1989

I’ve talked about this video before in a few other posts, but growing up in the middle of the country with no ready access to concrete… I spent a lot of time watching the bad copies of skate videos I had access to. I am not even sure HOW I got my hands on this… but I know my copy made off another copy. When you had no real access to new material, there ended up being this underground network of folks dubbing off copies for everyone else. This thing has such an amazing soundtrack and it was doing something different from most Skate videos… actually trying to tell a bit of a story. Hamfisted as it might be there was a narrative through-path connecting the skate clips.

Nightbreed

• The Nightbreed – 1990

I love Clive Barker and this is my favorite movie that he has been involved with. Nightbreed is such a great tale about how maybe Monsters are actually the good guys. I was obsessed with the lore of the Breed and of Midian and immediately went out and bought Cabal the novel it was based on reading it cover to cover. It is just so freaking good folks.

The Crow

• The Crow – 1994

What can I say. I love dark antiheroes and was absolutely going through my Vampire the Masquerade phase when this movie came out. The hype around it surrounding the death of Brandon Lee made this essentially required viewing for anyone. Again I think I was more engaged with the mythology of it than anything else. I had not read any of the Crow comics prior to this, but absolutely did afterwards. The soundtrack is still phenomenal which only helps cement this as a great viewing for me.

Shawshank Redemption

• Shawshank Redemption – 1994

I have to say at face value… this would not have been a movie I was into as a senior in high school aka when it actually was released. This is a film that I did not discover until an adult, with cable television… and the USA network playing it pretty much every single day. All of that said it has probably become my single favorite movie. This might be the closest I have seen to the perfect film, and I have this habit of stopping to watch it any time I notice it is playing on television. I cannot say with any certainty how many times I have watched this film but it is absolutely over twenty.

Clerks and Mallrats

• Clerks – 1994
• Mallrats – 1995

There was a period of time when I was super into Kevin Smith movies, and I have subjected my poor wife to these more times than I can count. While I have also watched a lot of Chasing Amy I don’t think I have probably watched it seven times. I know for certain due to multiple rentals before purchasing my own copy of both that I have seen Clerks and Mallrats way more than seven times. These movies fairly adequately encapsulate my high school and college sense of humor. Clerks has a special place in my heart but I think I like Mallrats way more, and like Chasing Amy even more in spite not watching it as many times. I think it is probably the quote-ability of the one-liners. Something that was super popular on IRC was playing sound clips… and I had a directory loaded full of quotes from these movies.

Hackers

• Hackers – 1995

This movie is so dumb and I love it so much. Like I am still uncertain if this movie intended to take itself seriously, or if it was always meant to be this slapstick send up of what Hollywood thinks hacking is. I tend to align to the later because there is a self awareness in this movie that you only really see upon repeated watchings. I think the studio thought this was a serious movie, and the writers absolutely went in another direction creating this cartoonish abomination that no one can really take seriously. It has a lot going for it… entertaining protagonists, phenomenal music, and great villains. This movie also began my love affair with Matthew Lillard.

Scream

• Scream – 1996

Scream and Hackers have so much more in common than just the fact that Matthew Lillard is great in both of them. Scream is this self aware send up of the entire Horror movie genre, while also being one of the better slasher flicks to have ever been created. It is simultaneously not taking itself seriously, while delivering this deeply nuanced serious entry into the genre. I have watched the original so many times because it is so freaking good. I am pretty sure we went and watched it multiple times in the theater even.

The Matrix

• The Matrix – 1999

The Matrix fills this niche for me of not only being this mind-blowing movie… but also being the perfect DVD to showcase what that technology could do and why it was so much better than VHS. This is literally the first movie that I bought for my DVD player, and as a result got a lot of repeated viewing because DVDs were expensive. I’ve continued to watch it every so often throughout the years just because it is a great film. I am happy to see that the franchise is being revisited and I liked the most recent version almost as much as I liked the original.

What Changed?

So one of the interesting things about this thought experiment is that I realized I just don’t engage with media in quite the same way that I used to. Some key reference points… I graduated high school in 1994 and graduated college in 1998. We bought our home in 1999 and have been living in one place ever since. I just don’t watch movies in quite the same way as I once did. Weekends used to be marked by a trip to the video store to rent fresh fodder because the lack of access to cable television meant there was almost nothing worth watching. However I can’t say that I have rented a movie in any form since the advent of Netflix. There were a lot of times you rented the same film more than once because in a small town you had a very limited repertoire of what was available.

There are plenty of films that I have watched more than once however. There is probably even a large list of films that I have watched three to five times. However there is something significant about that seven times because that really is a lot of repeated viewings. I thought I would honestly have a smaller list of movies, but over the weekend and this morning I have been jotting down films that I know I have watched that many times. A lot of this meant crawling mentally through the movies that I had recordings of and had ready access to. The list wound up much larger than I thought it would be, but I have to say this list of films does a pretty good job of explaining the formative stuff that calibrated my tastes.

Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to spin off of a topic that started on the Blaugust Discord. Side note and a bit of a plug… every single day there are discussions like this happening there. Ultimately a conversation thread spun up in the Post Discussion channel about what actually denotes the title “Indie Game” and to a lesser extent what makes something a “AAA Game”. These two terms are often times bandied about as opposite ends of some sliding spectrum. What I present to you today is that we often use terms with concrete certainty like “hardcore” or “casual” without them really having any concrete meaning associated with them. I feel the same is entirely true for what we think of as “Indie Games”.

I first heard the term “indie” as referred to record labels or bands. I remember listening to a lot of great albums on Sub Pop or SST. Collectively it was agreed that this term meant any band or label that did not get big label support and as a result was not getting much in the way of airplay on the radio. This sort of music was largely relegated to college radio stations or other smaller independently owned stations that had programming other than “Top 40”. I still remember the weird feeling when Red Hot Chili Peppers crossed over from being a very underground phenomena to being on a major label and that you could find cassette singles in Walmart or hear them on the local rock radio station. However just as the fact that radio has no real relevance anymore, I would suggest that “Indie” doesn’t mean a whole lot in gaming terms either.

To illustrate this point, let’s have a thought experiment. I present to you four games that all have had fairly wide success. Which of these are independent games? How do you even quantify what independent means? I see lots of twitter accounts for example heralding that they only play Indie games to give Indie developers airtime… but what does that even mean really? Does “Indie” denote a design ethic or an art style, or does it simply mean an independently held studio not owned by a large publisher or first party platform? Let’s break down each of these four games and present the information we know about each of them.

• Hades – Developed by Supergiant Games which is a studio of around 20 people. Supergiant originally had a publishing contract with Warner Bro.s Interactive Software, but more recently they entered into an exclusive publishing deal with Take-Two Interactive that relates specifically to physical game editions.
• Valheim – Developed by Iron Gate Studio which at the time of creating the game had around 5 employees. This was published through Coffee Stain Publishing, which was acquired by Embracer Group in 2018.
• Death Stranding – Developed by Kojima Productions LLC which is an independently held studio reformed out of the ashes of a similarly named studio once owned by Konami. It has around 80 employees and the development of Death Stranding was in part funded through a timed exclusive deal with Sony Interactive Entertainment. Additionally there is a publishing deal with 505 Games to handle the PC release only.
• Cuphead – Developed by Studio MDHR with a staff of around 20 people. This was funded in part due to an exclusivity deal with Microsoft that lasted a little over a year.

So again I ask you, which of these games is an “Indie”? The truth is I really do not know. Before this thought experiment I would have said Death Stranding was not but Valheim was… however in truth the data could flip in the opposite direction given that Embracer Group is now one of the largest publishers. My original definition of what made an Indie studio would fall along these lines:

An Independent Games studio is any studio not owned exclusively by a first party platform or is not the exclusive subsidiary of one of the major games publishers.

So under that language if you were not owned by one of the platforms of publishers that held big ticket E3 shows… you were an Indie. By that specific verbiage every game in the above list would qualify as “Indie”. However I feel like that might be disingenuous as often times there is another criteria that folks bring into the mix. That of course is budget and the truth is I could not find any reasonable numbers surrounding the budget of any of the titles above. My gut reaction would be that Death Stranding had the highest production budget and Valheim the lowest… with the others taking the middle ground and probably Hades having a higher budget than Cuphead.

I still say that right now, with the way that games work and publishing in general happens between the assorted platforms… that none of these titles have any real meaning. I would say the same is true with AAA games… which is a term I found out yesterday apparently comes from the ratings of financial bonds. We are going through a really weird phase, especially with Microsoft acquiring what used to be large publishers to turn them into semi-exclusive vassal states. I think in the coming years the differentiators between all of these terms will become more meaningless. While we as human beings love to classify things into silos, I submit that the only meaningful designation right now is “games I enjoyed” and “games I did not enjoy”.

I know I am riding on the fumes of a discussion that has already died down on the Blaugust Discord, but if you have any more thoughts to add to the mix I would love to see them below.