Jank Mail: Necrosis Week

It’s been a quiet seven days on Jank, befitting the summer months. In a token sop to world events Graham extolled the virtues of watching the World Cup in first-person care of the BBC’s interactive replays, enabling you to experience first-hand whatever it is that people are mad at Ronaldo for. Brendy chatted with some devs to understand his love of the command line, with reference to both Duskers 2.0 and foundational PC fandom text Hackers (1995). 

The newly-integrated Total Playtime considered the dark art of game reviews, and we didn’t even get round to scoring or being extremely mean about Starfield but we did reveal Nate’s games journalism origin story so that’s your subscription value right there. And What You Could Play has once again provided three recommendations from Graham and many more from our excellent commenters.

Beyond these fetching yellow walls it has been Necrosis Week at Xbox, the die-off starting with extremities like IO’s fantasy game and then racing up towards more significant limbs like Arkane and Undead Labs, which are marked for as-yet-uncertain surgery on Monday. The company cheerily asserts that it’s not cutting the total amount it spends on games, but that money is getting put into established franchises like Gears of War and Halo because reheating 20-year-old dudebro brands is something that always works out great. There was a brief panic about Obsidian but apparently they’re fine and so is Kojima’s game, because Kojima is always fine, despite the near certainty that his game will cost more than any of the others due to a cast of carefully motion-captured A24 talent. 

Not to be outdone, Sony landed a one-two punch of breezily announcing that purchased digital content is no longer available and also that it’s not going to release things on discs any more, a pairing that did not go unnoticed. This is not a PC gaming problem, yet, but it does make me wonder anew what happens to your Steam library when Gabe Newell dies, if that’s even a thing that can happen or anybody would ever find out about. Place your bets on either “Willie Wonka-style inheritance caper” or “decades of increasingly gnomic statements later discovered to have been inferred by soothsayer/AI tool post-mortem”.

Somebody made a Companion Cube case for the Steam Machine, surprising James on RPS with how well-made it was and Valve with how unlicensed it was, so now it’s some extremely collectable landfill. The Blood Bowl games have a new owner but the same developer. The batshit tale of Subnautica 2’s publisher vs the people making Subnautica 2 has been comprehensively resolved in favour of the latter, gifting the CEO perhaps the most meticulously legally-wrangled you-can’t-fire-me-because–I-quit flounce in the history of the form. 

The process of making Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was a seven-year death march that broke its developers and didn’t even produce a good or successful game, a lesson which will almost certainly go unlearned. Meccha Chameleon was made in two months and has earned over $50,000,000 and there probably isn’t a lesson to learn but it won’t stop people trying. 

The attempt to launch an MMO with no experience, a $65k Kickstarter and backing from credulous techbros ended predictably. Any bugs in Clair Obscur are on purpose actually. A new hero rises, and his name is Marathon Steve. Warren Spector’s studio is basically done for and games media isn't looking much better, please support Jank so the artform may endure. 

What news from the comments section? RickyParaphernalia has a good idea for a football game based on the BBC replay tool:

Grant Cecil shares our concerns about forgetting the Amiga in the Lie-In:

Sin Vega, as ever, is more concise in her judgement of the same topic:

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