Jank Mail: It's happening again

This week on Jank, Graham found that The Witch’s Bakery offered nothing new and yet everything he needed, and that Blood Dungeon was a welcome addition to his sixteen-year history of Messhof games. Brendy crashed a Google plane into Google’s HQ and he’d do it again, you hear? He also brought back Living in Sim with a look at The Data Center, which is as soothing a distraction as you’d expect but does not reckon with the AI usage it both enacts and implies. I played Bad Magpie and found that it advances the bad-bird canon.

This week not on Jank the big news is, once again, Xbox fucked it. Widely-reported and conspicuously not officially-commented-upon stories reported that Double Fine, Compulsion Games and Ninja Theory are all on the chopping block, as part of a widespread bloodletting which was foreshadowed by the announcement of the Great Reset and the departure of the boss of Xbox Game Studios, who presumably peaced out rather than spend months reciting bullet points in severance meetings. This comes a mere week after a lavish fan hoedown which included a reveal of Ninja Theory’s new game, which allegedly included a PS5 release in order to make the studio more valuable. The flailing will continue until the bottom line improves.

The other corporate rake-stepping event of the week was Epic’s State of Unreal, at which they announced that UE6 is about killing Blueprints, integrating generative AI and crossing over with Fortnite as part of a global vision of defeating Roblox by becoming a different, better Roblox. This went down about as well as you’d expect with the indies: the Vampire Survivors people are “reviewing” the terms of their Fortnite deal and that’ll probably involve them reading the small print and realising that they can’t back out of it, but it’s a useful indication of the vibes overall.

Looking on the bright side, being able to output character models as Fortnite cosmetics is another tiny source of revenue that might help studios make payroll for another week before admitting defeat and shutting down, or selling to another company that will then shut them down, and in any case it’ll take years to arrive and people can use the old engines indefinitely, as Joe Wintergreen points out. From a pitiless business perspective it’s a pretty sensible approach for Epic and anybody trying to run a games studio as a business, but it’s also part of the inexorable flattening of everything into standardised formats to serve the interests of capital. There remains the option to simply not do that, as Mike Cook demonstrated with his manifesto game NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY YOUR GAME which attracted a lot of questions already answered by the manifesto game. 

In more straightforwardly good news, Epic is going to revolutionise the Epic Game Store with things like “patch notes” and “player profiles” (and this week’s free games include Citizen Sleeper, so get on that). Horses sold enough to pay back investors but not enough to make another game, yet. The GTA 6 box looks exactly like every other GTA box, in case you were worried. Several gaming CEOs appear in a leaked list of people associated with a sinister secret society for millionaires, so chalk up another win for games as part of culture. 

EA is having another go at in-game advertising because time is a flat circle and advertising is the last recurring revenue stream of the damned, although in fairness it’s mostly sports games these days and gratuitous marketing is essential for that simulation. Tim Langdell is still doing it. Steam Controller delivery dates now extend into 2027, forcing Valve to roll out a new despair-metering order status page that will doubtless prove handy for the Steam Machine. Garfield has joined the September battle royale. 

We close as always with some choice cuts from the comments. Faldrath says what we're all thinking after reading Graham's post about The Witch's Bakery:

BlackTieOnly got the validation they were seeking on Blood Dungeon:

jonespaulr is just one of the reasons why you should always read the comments on Graham's suggestions of what you could play this weekend:

That's all for this week. Go and play some PC games.