Jank Mail: X-termination

We are approaching the end of Wall Week, our celebration of carefully created barriers to mark the erection of our own. Graham mused on how a youth spent making Half-Life maps taught him the sheer miraculousness of any game being released. Due to a communication error, Brendy reviewed Wall-E. I mused on the PS360’s waist-high era, we published the definitive list of the best walls in games, and Jeremy Peel considered how Dunwall’s walls set you free.

Outside the well, we maintained our free-to-read regulars: our roundup of the best game writing, highlighting the new games you can play this week, the fortnightly Total Playtime podcast – which this week managed to discuss an actual papal schism rather than our ongoing fictional one – and of course this newsletter. 

Outside Jank entirely, Necrosis Week was followed by Bloodbath Week, as Xbox stormed out of the blocks by ditching five studios and laying off 1,600 people as an opener, with a further 1,600 to leave over the rest of the year, which is having exactly the impact on morale you might expect. 

The “good” news is that Double Fine and Compulsion Games are both returning to their original ownership along with the games they made and some funding towards their next one. That is sincerely not a bad deal, particularly for Tim Schafer, who has basically been paid unspecified millions to continue being Tim Schafer and continue to make Double Fine-ass games. This is philanthropy, albeit incompetently delivered, and it’s good that Compulsion also get to keep on their path although that’s cold comfort to all the staff that got laid off already. 

Things are more uncertain for Ninja Theory and Undead Labs, which have been sold, but they also get sent on their way with some funding so that’s something, and Arkane who are subject to French employment law and thus now embark on an extremely protracted negotiation. This will end in… something, and you’d put a few quid on Ubisoft but my bet is Atari because they have a French office and literally some money which is more than anybody else has.

The studios who weren’t sold simply had to experience brutal staff cuts along with the rest of the business. Total counts are uncertain but it’s looking like we lost half of id, a quarter of Obsidian, most of the Elder Scrolls Online dev team and more people than I can list across everything from user research and network support to the 27-year veteran who redesigned the Khajit in Skyrim. Those who survived are pointing out this will make games harder to finish, and they are being told to work smarter not harder, which is the sort of searing insight that gets you seconded to a national task force on jobs and productivity. 

Notable within the downfall was Bethesda’s proclamation that it’s basically going to stop doing new things in favour of exploiting existing things, so well done to whoever used the monkey’s paw to wish for another Obsidian Fallout game, and commiserations chiefly to those laid off but also to anybody who wanted more Avowed, Pentiment, Perfect Dark, or anything being pitched on the basis of creativity rather a five-year P&L with consistent recurring revenue. A week of absolutely poisonous commentary eventually yielded an unnamed announcement that id is still capable of making games, which speaks to the level of “good news” we’re working with here, and it will continue for months to come as the employment statutes of various non-American countries grind onwards to inevitability. 

Don’t let Xbox hog the layoff limelight, though: Ubisoft fired a bunch of Black Flag developers the day their game shipped, the Destiny 2 dev team issued players a commemorative badge to mark the occasion of them all being laid off, and IO shut down a studio after Xbox killed their publishing deal (although the game is still happening). It’s not looking great out in indie-land either.

Over in games media, there is a new old-school independent multiformat games website but obviously there were also layoffs as part of the ongoing collapse, please subscribe to Jank because that is the only way this whole thing works. 

What else? Mike Bithell’s new game is Britpop Dracula. Deathmatch Pokémon left Early Access and they didn’t change the price, which is nice. Embark has changed Ark Raiders matchmaking so you are no longer judged by the behaviour of your psychotic friends. Robert Yang switched his games to a free-to-play Gay As Service model although that is too gay for Steam. There was some huge drama about a hot werewolf in Love and Deepspace, which I didn’t understand, but there’s a comprehensive summary on TWIG which once again confirms that “Fandom” is becoming a 21st century version of “The Aristocrats”.

Let's see how the community got on. Hypatia has their will prepared after listening to this week’s Total Playtime. 

Ben King had one of several strong submissions on the best walls in PC games.

Caoimhe understood the mission.

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