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The problem you’ve got is that the two lists that you’re looking at are ones with concrete release dates, and we’re currently in the period of the year where the release dates are the hardest to come by. Basically everyone’s either just started their fiscal Q1 and so have a completely clear slate, or like Microsoft have just started their Fiscal Q4 which means all they’ve got left on the slate are the delayed stragglers.
More like grabbing a bargain; When Embracer bought Saber it cost them more than $500 million. They sold it to Beacon (who are basically just a bunch of investors and one of the Saber founders) for just under $250 million, and are now stacking up extras from the Embracer spending spree while they still can.
On a similar note, who do we reckon is buying Gearbox? My money is on Take 2, because who would be stupid enough to buy Gearbox (Embracer aside) when the Borderlands publishing rights are permanently in 2K’s hands?
It’s Rocksteady, so it’ll be higher than 40s. Heck, it’s almost impossible to get a score lower than 40 on metacritic…
Mid 60s I’m guessing, perhaps as high as 69 if reviewers are feeling generous. The kind of score which would be absolutely fine if it were a cheap and cheerful B-game made by a scrappy team of underfunded devs, but which is an absolute embarrassment when applied to a multi million dollar tentpole. The kind of score that implies ‘meh’.
The game released on the 19th September, Nominated games had to be released before the 29th September. Golden Joysticks voting was from the 3rd to the 20th October, and the premium DLC that made everyone angry was confirmed on the 24th and then released on the 27th. The timing could absolutely not have fallen more perfectly for MK1.
I mean, if we’re gonna namedrop completely unique indie darling difficult puzzles, then Return of the Obra Dinn also deserves a mention.
But wootz! Don’t you see! Fortnite was making inroads into the metaverse, and we all know that whoever cracks the metaverse concept is going to reap infinite profits right? Because that’s certainly not a weird dystopian sci-fi pipe dream or anything! It was going to be all smooth sailing straight into forever profits!
It went to Songtradr, who are mostly a music licencing company. So I’m guessing that at least initially things are going to stay the same but that musicians are going to get nagged into letting Songtradr put their stuff up on their big licencing store. And then enshittification, because that’s how absolutely everything is going.
It’s not entirely against their own self-interest. More accessible engines on the market means more beginner devs who may graduate to Epic in a few years, and more products to sell on the EGS. Also more devs potentially means more asset store customers.
Regardless, it’s certainly more helpful to the industry than Unity at the moment.
If I remember correctly, it was originally intended to be an episodic game, but plans changed late in development. As a result, the first half of the game is a really good bit of moody character-driven slow burn storytelling, and then suddenly it’s like the entire corkboard full of plot ideas gets vomited out at once.
Until reasonably recently, Embracer was known as Nordic Games. Their plan was simple and quite effective; buy old game IP, release remasters, make reasonably-budgeted sequels aimed at niches of the industry being missed by the increasingly laser-focussed AAA publishers.
It worked for a good few years, and they became a Katamari of game development studios. An increasingly unwieldy Katamari. And like any good Katamari they started picking up bigger and bigger things. Suddenly instead of spending a couple of thousand on a struggling legacy developer, they were paying upwards of a billion at a time, swallowing up things like Gearbox, Asmodee, Dark Horse Comics, Middle Earth Enterprises, Square Enix Europe. They lost focus and just kept buying things, including things they couldn’t afford to buy. Eventually, a planned deal with the Saudis fell through, and that Katamari just slammed directly into a wall.
Part of me wants to argue that the games industry has a long-standing history of under-compensating workers, which makes being within the top 25% not particularly impressive, but instead I’m just going to admit that you caught me ragging on EA with an easy jab.
They did lay off a shed load of workers earlier this year mere days after announcing record profits though. Still, they’re not quite the miserable black hole that they were in the ‘EA Widows’ era when they were forcing unpaid overtime on a straight up illegal level.
The Elden Ring expansion straight up has a release date: June 21st 2024.