New Game Plus August 19 - 25
Game Informer Layoffs
Just a few short weeks ago the realignment process of GameStop resulted in around 60 district and field leaders being terminated. GameStop is in a tough spot trying to figure out how to stay relevant in a video game age that is moving towards subscription based games, free to play and all digital. They have tried other avenues in the past including board games, cell phones and other things but nothing seems to be making the progress they are looking for. The stock has been in decline since 2013 with highs of around 58 per share to the most recent plunge which happened around January of this year where we saw the stock fall from 16 per share to around 3.50. In a little over half a year the stock has dropped 80 percent. However the good news here is that the company is not going in the sunset lightly by adding new members to the corporate team to try to turn the fate of the company around. In fact, even at near rock bottom price that the stock is currently trading at some big investors think this company is poised for better things. Barrons reports that Michael Burry seems to believe that despite all the troubles the company has a “very good balance sheet” and has “cash flow to justify a much higher share price”
There was an article on Kotaku this week from Jason Schrier in which he received comment from Game Stop. In the article a GameStop representative was reached for comment and said “as part of the previously announced GameStop reboot initiative to transform our business for the future and improve our financial performance, we can confirm a workforce reduction was implemented impacting more than 120 corporate staff positions, representing approximately 14% of the total associate base at our company headquarters as well as at some other offices. While these changes are difficult, they were necessary to reduce costs and better align the organization with our efforts to optimize the business to meet our future objectives and success factors. We recognize that this is a difficult day for our company and particularly for those associates impacted. We appreciate their dedication and service to GameStop and are committed to supporting them during this time of transition” Based on the numbers given from the corporate comment it seems that GameStop is comprised of about only around 1000 people with the majority of the company just being retail employee at the brick and mortar stores
Losing your job when you aren’t expecting it is one of the worst things that can happen to you as your whole life gets thrown upside down. You have to quickly figure out what the next step is in your life and how are you going to support yourself and the ones you love in your life. Even worse, many times people just have to take whatever job they can find to make ends meet and eventually stay in that field, leaving behind many dreams. The industry of video games at large is a very tough place to survive, between companies restructuring constantly, the industry always evolving and corporate consistency demanding crunch. Many of those people involved have great personality and skill for what they do so they hopefully will land on their feet in the gaming world soon.
One of my favorite podcasts and websites is Game Informer who is a subsidiary of Game Stop and a big question I had always wondered was if Game Stop ceased to exist what would happen to Game Informer. In what is easily one of the bigger stories of the week Game Stop continued its restructuring by laying off around 100 more employees with 7 of those people being from Game Informer. It might not sound like a lot and you might think that a magazine, both digital and print, a website and a podcast would take a lot of people but apparently Game Informer was only about 15-20 people. Ultimately, the restructuring has eliminated half of the Game Informer staff. A big question becomes is that the final plan from head office or is there more to come shortly. After all it was just two weeks ago that the first round of firings happened with about 60 people. You have to imagine that corporate is still looking long at hard at every single person in the organization and trying to figure out who is essential to the company at the moment.
I personal think that GameStop isn’t dead in the water just yet considering the new consoles are just on the horizon and that has bought the company a little more time to reboot and adapt to the industry changes. its also interesting to note that 14% of the company corporate was laid of which is a change of pace from when corporate is always the ones who are safe.
Sony Acquires Insomniac Games
Easily the biggest story of the week didn’t actually come from anything related to Gamescom. Instead, on Monday, out of nowhere Sony announced they had acquired Insomniac Games. Insomniac is famous for many games but their fame as of late is thank to the excellent game that is Marvels SpiderMan. The studio has also made some other great games over their 25 years in the business that would include Spyro, Ratchet and Clank, Resistance and the Microsoft exclusive Sunset Overdrive. This drives one of the initial questions that people had and that was would Sunset Overdrive be making its way to Sony and what that means for the future of that series. Insomniac has mentioned on their social media that they own the IP to the franchise but the first game in the series is an Xbox Exclusive. Which means if they hold the fate of that game in their hands, although I feel that making another entry in that series would be risky. It was a very fun and polished game but it didn’t sell overly well, which begs that the question was it because it was an Xbox exclusive or was it because that the majority of people just didnt connect with that game and universe.
No details of the deal were made but it seems very clear that Microsoft was onto something when a few years ago they started to buy studios, understanding that the next generation of consoles will most likely be won by who has the better content. There could be two arguments made for why Microsoft and the Xbox One didnt win the console race this time against the PS4. The first argument would be that the messaging from the announcement was bungled as they talked about how it would be the centre of the living room, including TV functionality and they also weren’t clear on how used games would work on the systems. Initially they were against having used games work on their system and planned to incorporate DRM to protect used games from working, but they clearly changed their tune once they heard and felt the backlash. The second reason that they lost this console generation in terms of systems sold was due to their lack of first party exclusives. There was little reason to decide to turn on your Xbox. If you are a racing fan then the Forza and Forza horizon series delivered you could find gems on the system such as Ori and The Blind Forest and Insomniacs Sunset Overdrive but it would be hard to classify those as system sellers. Halo 5 came out in 2015 but didnt exactly hit the mark as the story left a lot to be desired and it had an uphill battle after the disastrous launch that was 2014’s Master Chief Collection. Gears of War 4 came and went with little fanfare due to lack of excitement the franchise still had after 4 games. It was with a new studio who were also in the process of giving the franchise a soft reboot with new main characters so it had to lay the ground work. It will be interesting to see the reaction that Gears 5 gets in a few weeks as it seems to be either flying under the radar or not generating much interest. I am currently unsure which of the two options it is right now.
If you look at the exclusives that Sony brought to the Playstation this generation the list almost looks like a greatest hits collection. Just off the top of my head you have BloodBorne, Horizon Zero Dawn, Until Dawn, Uncharted 4, Uncharted Lost Legacy, God of War and of course Insomniacs Spiderman. This doesnt even take into account the games that are still due to be released before the PS5 launch including Death Stranding and Last of Us 2. On top of all of these first party games, Playstation is still home to all the famous third party games as well.
Which brings us right back to Sony and their addition to their first party studios. Its interesting to me why this acquisition took so long because over the whole existence of the studio and the games they are known for have all been Playstation exclusive. They have made about 10 other games over the years for multiple platforms, mobile devices or VR but for the most part when it came to a true console game they were Sony exclusive. One thing to note from the Sony press release was that Spiderman has sold through over 13.2 million copies which makes it one of the best selling games on the PS4 trailing only Uncharted 4 which had the benefit of being the fourth mainline entry in an existing and established universe. I guess Spiderman kinda has an existing and establish universe but there have been some bad superhero games and even worse Spiderman games. Overall, in my opinion it was a great time for Ted Price, CEO and Founder, to strike a deal with Sony. Over the companies 25 years in existence there has never been a time where their value could have been higher. They had made great games before but nothing that has reached the level that SpiderMan did.
It will be interesting to see if the acquisition from Sony gives the company more funding to add more members to the workforce in hopes that they will be able to deliver more games for Playstation on a higher frequency. The team seems to be large enough and looking at their list of games released they dabbled in mobile games and magic leap with my assumption that this was to help fund the studio for the bigger projects and to help keep the studio open. Sometimes you have to take jobs that you don’t like to pay the bills so with security will they be able to put their focus into AAA games for the PS5. They also dabbled into VR for the Oculus and you wonder if there is a plan for a PSVR2, is Insomniac Games already working on a killer app.
Nintendo Indie World
On Monday morning, right before events for Gamescom started to get underway, Nintendo released a 20 minute Direct featuring news of their upcoming Indie games. They showed off 29 indie games that are coming to the Switch in the near future with some of them already being released at the time of the showcase. Some of the lower highlights included the rumoured Super Hot, Hotline Miami Collection and Risk of Rain 2 in terms of what we weren’t already expecting. In terms of highlights, The Touryst, a game due out this November looks like a Zelda Minecraft hybrid and has a lot of potential in my eyes. This game is developed by Shin en Multimedia who are the same team behind their last game Fast Rmx, the Fzero like racer that was released 2 years ago with the launch of the Switch. They made a very good FZERO type game so it will be interesting to see what their take is on making something that pays homage to The Legend of Zelda.
The biggest reveal came at the end of the showcase and it was one of my E3 predictions and probably many others was the Ori and the Blind Forest would be making its way to the Nintendo platform. This seemed like a sure thing to be announced at E3 this summer after the Cuphead made its way from Xbox to Nintendo. Ori is a near perfect fit for the house that built Metroid. Ori and the Blind Forest is easily one of the best Metroidvanias to come out in recent memory. The visuals are stunning, the controls are super tight, the progression throughout the game is next to perfect you are never playing too long without learning your next skill. After that its not long before you are chaining all your skills during incredible set pieces. Not only is this great for Nintendo fans who never got a chance to enjoy this game during its time on the Xbox but I am excited for what this means for the potential of other games coming to the Nintendo Switch. Its clear that a good partnership is being established with Microsoft and Nintendo with the second Xbox exclusive coming to the Switch in 2019. I have eagerly been waiting on Ori and The Will of The Wisps since it was first announced a few years ago. It looks like it is on target to make a release early next year and as of now the game is penciled in to be out on February 11, 2020. The big question here is will that game be release day and date on both the Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
Its also tough to know what to expect from a Nintendo port. To this day we have had some amazing Switch Ports including the Xbox published Cuphead, Doom, Rocket League, and Skyrim are all pretty decent examples of how to port a game to a system with less power. One of the most glowing examples was how well Diablo 3 runs on the system in either handheld or docked. It looks amazing no matter how much is happening on screen at once and if you have played Diablo 3 you know how hectic things can get at times. On the flip side of this argument we have also seen some really bad Switch ports of games including ones that shouldn’t be having trouble on the system at all. An example of this is BloodStained and how the frame rate gets very choppy and at points will even drop down to single digits. Another game that struggled on the Nintendo Switch was Mortal Kombat 11. It was released day and date on the system and I was very closed to purchasing the Nintendo version but due to their lack of showing off or talking about it pre launch, I figured something must have been off. On launch, I purchased the PS4 version, thankfully, because the Nintendo Switch port not only looked a lot worse but it also had game crashing bugs in it as well. They might have been patched out by now but for at least the first month, I kept hearing from people who had it on the Switch that the game crashing bugs were still present. This brings us back to why I am cautiously optimistic about Ori on the Switch. I would love the ability to take that game with me wherever I go because sometimes it can get its hooks deep in you but not if you have to sacrifice any quality from that game as every piece of that game combines to make a masterpiece. The definitive edition comes out at the end of September, so if you haven’t played it yet, I strongly urge you to purchase it but I would wait a couple days after launch to see what people are saying about the controls, visuals and frame rates.
Modern Warfare Alpha
On a quicker note this weekend there was an alpha for the latest Call of Duty that featured the mode gunfight that we talked about a few weeks ago. This is a 2v2 close quarters mode, and the beta was exclusively available on PS4. My impressions of the alpha was overall great but there are still some things that I hope can be sorted out before launch. Considering this was an Alpha test, the game ran real smooth. This was my first time getting hands on with the game and the gun feel and the time to kill has really set this game apart from other call of duty titles. There is still a slide but its not quite the power slide that you are used to and you become very slow when you use it so its only ideal to slide into cover. I did come across some high level players and there was a lot of jumping going around. This mode specifically is designed for either two friends playing at the same time or at the very least two people using a mic and communicating like humans. I probably played around 30 games and I only had two games where the people were using their mics like actual decent human beings trying to have fun playing a game. The other times were either no mic or you can imagine what a typical call of duty player would be saying. Those two or three games where I played with a decent human being who wanted to communicate was a blast and really set this mode apart. It changed it from just another shooter to a very tactical experience. Another small issue is that this game was first team to 6 points wins and often when your team goes down 0-1 or 0-2 someone would quit, which is fine if they want to quit after that and dont want to try to turn it around but it would be nice if there was some kind of autofill so you could at least enjoy the rest of the match, rather than be rushed 2v1 for the rest of the game. Taking what mechanics and personality is already in the Alpha, there is higher hopes for the fully finished product when it launches in a few months. I am also looking forward to the larger beta in a few weeks that will feature more modes.