Jank Mail: Phil out, VR and sequels

Welcome to Jank Mail, our rundown of the week in PC gaming and Jank in particular. I like to start with the latter because we are of course the true arbiters of what matters, but today I have no choice but to start with IGN’s reveal that Big Phil is out at Xbox, along with his presumed successor Sarah Bond, prompting a lot of late-night discourse and Microsoft rushing out the PR plan that was supposed to kick in next week. 

I’m a bit down about it: Xbox has been a state of perpetual struggle in the last decade and lots of people have well-developed reasons to hate Spencer's guts, but in my encounters he was always a nice guy who consumed and cared about the products his business made. This made him a very rare breed in the executive class, who routinely regard both their output and their audience as budget line items. His replacement is a jar-grown exec who previously headed Microsoft’s AI output so the discourse outlook isn’t wonderful, although she said games are art in her intro message so at least that’s one argument we can stop having.

What else happened? Layoffs, obviously: Jake Solomon’s new studio is closing before it ships a game, but you can look at the game they didn’t get additional funding for. Sony shut down Bluepoint, the latest in the long acknowledgement that live service games are hard and expensive and it’s easier to simply not, although this revelation apparently comes too late to put the team back on remasters which are seemingly the only safe money in AAA right now. 

Elsewhere in extremely expensive mistakes, Meta’s VR metaverse is ditching VR because even $73 billion in funding couldn’t make it a fun place to be, even with legs. This is actually good news for VR games because they don’t have to fight with Worlds content in the Quest Store any more, although Meta also promised it will be “supporting the third-party developer community” and that historically has not gone well.

The Bioshock movie totally exists and they want it to align with the release of the new Bioshock which also totally exists. The next Elder Scrolls? Totally exists too, and does so with an old-timey Bethesda flavour. The Ubisoft CEO promised more Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games, just in case anybody was worried about the division they created to make Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games. The creator of Blue Prince discovered work-life balance and Mewgenics sold a million copies. 

Peter Molyneux displayed his characteristic PR mastery by promising his “last” game will contain “horrendous mistakes”. Great to have you back, Peter. AI is ruining literally everything, so let us RETVRN to Unreal Tournament 2004. Here’s the Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines sequel we could have had and the Slay The Spire sequel we’re definitely getting. We’re also getting a Layers of Fear sequel, but that was communicated through a spooky poetry reading which makes its qualities hard to judge.

Chez Jank, Brendy revealed the best alcoholic in videogames and set out to destroy Eve Online’s chatbot, Graham took on additional side jobs in Fantasy Life i,  and we had our first ever freelance contribution thanks to the generous support of our backers, in which Alice Bell made pancakes for Bigfoot. She also developed some conspiracy theories on Total Playtime, and joined Brendy, Nate and myself in detailing the interminable stenography of the Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood novel. Brendy permitted himself to get excited about a press release because it’s about an expansion for Opus Magnum. 

That was the week. See you next Saturday for another one.