Jank Mail: Next Fest, Xbox next, Saints No

The week, and February, is over. What did we learn? We played a bunch of Next Fest demos and so did everybody else until Marathon came out. Brendy commends Airframe Ultra and partially understands Spacefleet: Heat Death, and I revealed that Beyond Words sure is what it looks like. Sin Vega took a late trip to Beatdown City and Brendy continued to develop our #brand by asking some developers to share their best jank. 

Out in the wider games industry, the end of Phil Spencer’s reign at Xbox remained a topic of spirited discussion. The takes spanned the usual games community spectrum from “farewell to our saviour” to “good riddance, loser”, alongside a suspiciously comprehensive savaging of Sarah Bond. The most obsequious take was rewarded with an interview with new broom Asha Sharma, in which she reaffirmed a commitment to Xbox without saying what that actually means. 

Sharma is at least being commendably transparent about not having Spencer’s gaming chops, which by all accounts would be very difficult without blocking out three days a week for Achievement farming, and says she needs to “learn about the ‘why’” of previous decisions, which is the sort of thing executives say before trashing everything their predecessor did. We’ll see how that pans out, but overall there is some cause for optimism about what lies ahead.

Over in the other PC-ish console house, we found that Bluepoint did indeed perish as a consequence of Sony’s doomed live-service push, and also pitched the Bloodborne remake but Miyazaki wasn’t into it. This is veering into console chat, so let’s bring it back to PC gaming with credible claims that Sony is going to back off PC ports of first-party games, meaning that we’ll only be able to experience God of War via the unsettling cosplay of the Amazon show.  

Clint Hocking left Ubisoft again, which by our count means he’s only shipped two games in the last eighteen years of working in AAA. Can’t feel good. Embracer doesn’t seem up for bringing back Saints Row which also does not feel good, and Amazon doesn’t seem to be feeling good about games in general because it shut down King of Meat and ditched Maverick’s new racing game in the same week. 

Games media industry news: the games media industry is in bad shape, which is not news in itself but we have some new data in the form of Videogamer getting busted for replacing all their journalists with AI] and layoffs at Eurogamer and Outside Xbox. This is why you should support independent media like this new site about Pokémon Go. 

Discord delayed its age rating rollout because everybody got mad about it and started downloading TeamSpeak. It is time to return to IRC. Splash Damage bought scum, Valve got sued over lootboxes, and Krafton revealed that the reason its new game casts you as a giant hench chicken is because that’s what everybody picked during the job interviews, Who are we to judge? Jank, that’s who, and we’ll return to judge the news again next week.