Jank Mail: launches, losses and Morrowind

Welcome to Jank Mail, our weekly newsletter, summarising the last week in PC gaming and our own contributions to it. Henceforth it will arrive on Saturday, but I was running late this weekend. The thing about being called Jank is that any such haphazardness can be attributed to brand marketing, so it’s on purpose actually. 

The most significant event in PC gaming last week was, of course, the launch of Jank: a new reader-funded website about PC games which strives to publish things that other outlets are too commercially sensible not to. Graham wrote our introductory manifesto, and Brendy explained and then embodied it by making three game developers climb a mountain, asking some others about working at Telltale, and explaining why AI can’t do game criticism. 

We all nominated our best games of the decade so far, and debuted our regular guides to what you should play and read this weekend. We recommended Sektori and reviewed Sword of the Sea and Big Hops, and debuted our partnership with the Total Playtime podcast by making Graham read the Death Stranding novelisation, which captured the most wearing parts of the game and none of the highlights but at least could be finished in less time.

What else happened? Kotaku is hiring, which also counts as good news in games media. Paradox confirmed that it lost a lot of money on Bloodlines 2 but it’s still going to release the expansions anyway. Deadlock added a new type of guy and people got very excited about it.

New free-to-play hero shooter Highguard came out and immediately got monstered on Steam, reaping a burgeoning crop of bad vibes that sprouted following its hastily-assembled Game Awards debut. The studio head conceded that rushing out a trailer with no gameplay was “maybe a little risky in hindsight” although the Discourse seems to have concluded that it’s all Geoff Keighley’s fault. The devs rushed out an experimental 5v5 mode for the weekend in response to complaints that the maps are too big for 3v3, which is commendably speedy reaction to feedback. Other complaints included “having an underwhelming trailer” and “multiplayer issues on launch day”, which is fair enough because those have never been done by any other videogame.

Larian boss Swen Vincke became the Twitter Main Character by musing on a Metacritic for game criticism, a proposal that received extensive non-game criticism. Edwin at RPS summarised the thread and the chief complaints about it, I suggested some helpful review criteria and friend of Jank Nathan Brown hoped that it was not a sign of Vincke succumbing to Twitter brain worms. 

GDC’s annual survey revealed that over half of game developers believe that generative AI is harmful for the industry, although you will be unsurprised to hear that execs remain big fans. This came as the latest drop of Epstein files demonstrated a broad swathe of C-suite illiteracy that suggests why they want robots to write for them. Google swiftly proved the haters right and made everything worse, as it so often does, by promptly releasing an AI tool that creates games, tanking the share price of a number of game publishers due to the established phenomenon of stock markets being stupid. 

Elsewhere in finance news Meta announced that it lost $86 billion on virtual reality and is going to focus on glasses instead, adding VR to the list of things that only Gabe Newell can save along with affordable gaming PCs and, for some reason, megayachts. 

Beyond Good And Evil 2 still exists, says a member of the development team, although whether it exists in any form beyond white boxes and if said team has to include pets to count as a collective remains unclear. Ubisoft didn’t announce any new layoffs this week, enabling us to reset the counter to 0 for the first time this year. It probably won’t last. Bethesda veteran Bruce Nesmith proclaimed that a Morrowind remake is highly unlikely and would be no fun anyway, which is probably true but caused predictable outrage in skull-harvesting circles. The news was broken on an otherwise unrelated blog for a content marketing agency which I’m not going to link to in order to deny them the SEO boost it was obviously created for.

And that was Jank’s first week in the world. We’ll do this again on Saturday, with a regular timetable to share our imperious view on the PC gaming landscape. Feel free to suggest anything we missed in the comments.