The Last of Usinspired no shortage of takes when it first released back in 2013. The HBO TV adaptation has been no different. Like a massive EpiPen of stimulus for the take economy in middle of winter, it has elicited both over-the-top praise, scornful dismissals, and everything in-between. But what is potentially the worst take of all wasn’t born until today.
“Hi FTC — did you catch last night’s episode of The Last of Us?” tweeted Activision Blizzard’s Executive Vice President of Corporates Affairs and Chief Communications Officer, Lulu Cheng Meservey. “It was incredible.” What followed from the Call of Duty publisher’s recently hired serial poster was a cringey thread about how The Last of Us TV show proves Microsoft should be allowed to acquire the company for $69 billion.
For those who might be living under a rock and don’t know: The Last of Us is a harrowing tale about love, loss, and redemption in a world brought to its knees by pandemic. This week’s especially intimate and emotional episode moved many to tears. It moved Meservey to post about how the largest acquisition in the history of tech raises no red flags.
Microsoft and Activision Blizzard have been on the offensive ever since the Federal Trade Commission launched an anti-trust lawsuit against them, seemingly with the intent to wriggle loose a few more concessions before eventually letting the deal go through. It is a multi-faceted, omni-directional campaign that has Microsoft repeatedly talking about how much it sucks compared to Sony, both in terms of making games and now in terms of making TV shows. That was certainly the sentiment Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer conveyed last week when asked to compareThe Last of Us TV show to the Halo TV show.
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“Sony’s talent and IP across gaming, TV, movies, and music are formidable and truly impressive,” Meservey tweeted today. “It’s no wonder they also continue to dominate as the market leader for consoles. In gaming, Sony is ‘the first of us’ – and they will be just fine without the FTC’s protection.”
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot faced tough questions from some exhausted and fed-up staff about recent missteps and future plans in a company-wide Q&A session on Wednesday. The meeting comes just a week after the Assassin’s Creed publisher announced new cancellations, delays, and cost-cutting measures, and told employees “the ball is in your court” to help get the $3 billion company back on track.
“The ball is now in our court—for years it has been in your court so why did you mishandle the ball so badly so we, the workers, have to fix it for you?” read one upvoted question on a list submitted in advance through corporate communication channels and viewed by Kotaku. It was a reference to a now infamous email Guillemot sent to staff last week that appeared to shift blame for the publisher’s recent mistakes and hold lower-level employees accountable for fixing the situation.
Guillemot opened the meeting by apologizing. “I heard your feedback and I’m sorry this was perceived that way,” Guillemot said, according to sources present who were not authorized to speak to press. “When saying ‘the ball is in your court’ to deliver our lineup on time and at the expected level of quality, I wanted to convey the idea that more than ever I need your talent and energy to make it happen. This is a collective journey that starts of course with myself and with the leadership team to create the conditions for all of us to succeed together.”
While that clarification resonated with some developers, others who spoke with Kotaku still feel management is out of touch and found little in the meeting to reassure them. The hour-long affair was filled with industry buzzwords and business jargon and light on specifics. Chief financial officer Frederick Duguet said they needed to reduce costs and increase productivity. Chief people officer Anika Grant rejected a recent proposal for four-day work weeks and said requested raises to keep up with inflation were off the table amid the current financial struggles. None of the executives directly addressed the recent call for a strike over working conditions at the company’s Paris studio.
Guillemot remained vague about the potential for layoffs as well. “It’s not about doing more with less, but finding ways to do things differently across the company,” Guillemot said at one point.
The meeting comes after a particularly poor 2022 for the global publisher which included no marquee blockbuster as several projects were delayed, trapped in development hell, or shipped and failed to find an audience. “It appears that management is out of touch with games saying that we need to adapt to an evolving industry,”?” read one of the questions for the meeting that received hundreds of upvotes. “Why are we chasing trends instead of setting them?”
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Those trends could include the company’s 2021 misadventure with NFTs or its partnership with the now-defunct Google Stadia streaming service. It could also describe the publisher’s recent race to ship multiple free-to-play spin-offs of existing franchises and a crowded slate of battle royale and hero-based shooters. Some of these, like Hyper Scape and Roller Champions, have already launched and struggled to find audiences. Others like The Division Heartland were announced a while ago and have yet to actually come out.
Ghost Recon: Frontlineis another example. Revealed in 2021, it looked like a rip-off of Call of Duty Warzone but with some new gameplay twists. Internal testing reportedly revealed that it did indeed play like a Call of Duty Warzone rip-off and Ubisoft decided to can it last summer along with three other projects, leaving Ghost Recon fans scratching their heads and developers disillusioned.
In today’s meeting, Guillemot spoke of doubling down on Ubisoft’s core franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, andits Tom Clancy games, including Rainbow Six Siege, whose potential the CEO compared to Riot Games’ Valorant. Some see it as a retreat not just from chasing trends but from experimentation as well. “We need to acknowledge that the trends are for mega brands,” said Marie-Sophie de Waubert, senior vice president of studio operations, when asked about why the company didn’t pursue more varied, smaller games like Anno 1800.
One big criticism of Ubisoft in recent years has been the lack of variation between sequels and an over-reliance on an open-world blueprint that bleeds over from franchise to franchise. When pressed about the lack of inventiveness, Guillemot pointed to Far Cry 6 as a “good quality” game that was still considered “not innovative enough.” It remains unclear how Ubisoft will juggle the budget demands and production complexity of its big blockbusters with creative risks going forward.
Kotaku understands that developers onsome of the recently canceled projects will pivot to helping ship games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, a smaller and more traditional entry in the stealth action series. Originally planned as an Assassin’s Creed Valhalla expansion, Mirage grew into a full-fledged game in part out of the need to plug holes in Ubisoft’s release calendar. Instead it slipped into the fiscal year starting in April 2023, along with Skull and Bones and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Guillemot recently called that lineup and what comes beyond it the best in the company’s history, though if its recent past is any indication, it’s unlikely to go exactly as planned.
Ubisoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Remember those early days of Humble Bundles? When every newly-announced deal felt so essential, and literally millions of dollars would be raised for charity each time? It still happens occasionally, like last year’s Stand With Ukraine bundle that raised an incredible $20 million for charities working in the country, but over the decade the thrill has certainly worn off. But seeing one of my favorite developer/publishers, Wadjet Eye Games, having a deal on the site, reminded me of those times.
Wadjet Eye, the New York-based indie publisher and developer that’s mostly made of Dave Gilbert, is responsible for many of the best adventure games in the last sixteen years. From its self-developed projects like the incredible Unavowed and The Blackwell series, to those it’s published like Gemini Rue and Shardlight, the name has generally been a byword for super adventures presented with a ‘90s vibe. As it happens, all of those mentioned games, along with nine more, are included in the bundle, all for $10.
That’s a crazy ol’ bargain, and if you’ve wandered away from point-and-click adventures in recent years, it’s an excellent way back in. You wouldn’t believe what good stuff there is to find being made in the Adventure Game Studio engine, and Wadjet Eye’s are generally the best of them. The other games featured are Strangeland, Primordia, Technobabylon, Resonance, all six Blackwell games, and Gilbert’s first game, The Shivah. The chosen charity is JDRF, which raises money for type-1 diabetes research.
It’s interesting, and sad, to note how much of Humble’s sheen has come off, given that despite being live for five days, this bundle has sold just shy of 9,000 copies, with $11,800 raised for JDRF at the time of writing. It’s obviously still great to see that money going somewhere good, but it’s a trickle compared to the company’s previous waterfalls.
Of course, in the years since Humble’s heyday as a bundle seller (the company is owned by IGN now, and is a very successful indie publisher), a fair amount of good faith was lost. A very misguided decision to limit the amount of your chosen payment that could go to charity was announced, backtracked on, then re-instituted anyway.
Thankfully, right now, you can redirect your money where you see fit, albeit with an obligatory 15% going to Humble. (Meanwhile, there’s no minimum amount for developers or good cause—astonishingly you can adjust the sliders to give every penny to Humble, with none going to the people who made the games!) Also, the real selling points of genuine “pay what you want” disappeared a long while back, with minimum costs now often totalling enough that some deals don’t feel like bargains.
Good Old Games, or GOG, the digital-rights-management-free PC gaming marketplace and platform from CD Projekt, has officially ended a service that already didn’t feel terribly long for this world. What once seemed like a promising way to slowly import portions of your Steam library to GOG, where they could exist in an infinitely archivable format, has now finally evaporated.
GOG launched in 2008 as an alternative to other digital gaming storefronts on PC, focusing on making older, hard-to-find games purchasable. The cherry on top? All of these games would be available without any digital rights management software to restrict what you do with your .exe copies. Unlike Steam, GOG games are much easier to back up and re-install on multiple computers, all without ever needing to get tangled up in any sort of online account authorization. In 2012, the service expanded from older PC-gaming gems to modern titles, keeping the DRM-free policy in place.
In 2016, GOG announced “Connect,” a service that let you connect your Steam library to redeem select titles you already owned as DRM-free copies on GOG, with said games only eligible for redemption in a limited window of time. Those who’ve checked GOG.com/Connect in recent years, however, have found nothing but digital tumbleweeds. And now, in January of 2023, said link and service now just directs to GOG’s homepage, officially signaling the end of this once very promising program.
GOG.com/Connect always had an air of “this is too good to be true.” A service that gives you an extra copy of a game you already own, with no restrictions as to how you can backup, install, re-install, sell, or share it? How even?
But while the service was active, it wasn’t just a great way to migrate to a new platform, but rather a handy way to archive your Steam library. Though Steam is a pretty accessible and reliable platform that often gives you access to games you’ve purchased but have since been pulled off the storefront (2007’s Prey is one such example), DRM is still widely used on the Valve storefront and trying to use the service without a reliable internet connection can easily render a game unplayable, as many a traveling Steam Deck user has discovered. GOG Connect was once a promising solution to this issue. But, the idea of being able to some day move a substantial amount of your library into something archivable, without spending a dime, was just too good to be true.
Like many, I used this service a fair bit when it launched. I’d keep the link bookmarked to visit once a week. But as available games began to dry up, it drifted from memory. I still play the game of “should I get this on Steam or GOG?” every time something I want comes up on both services. The promise of GOG Connect once made that question irrelevant.
Today, Microsoft filed a revised response to the United States Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit intended to stop the tech giant from buying up Call of Duty publisher Activision. The initial filing contained multiple arguments claiming the FTC itself and its court system were unconstitutional. But now Microsoft has yanked that language out of the doc and claimed it was all a mistake. Y’know, just your average oopsie of calling a large government agency unconstitutional.
Last year, Microsoft announced its plans to consume Call of Duty and World of Warcraft publisher Activision Blizzard for a whopping $69 billion. Since then, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard have faced pushback and legal roadblocks around the world as various government agencies and regulatory committees investigate if the massive deal would give Microsoft an unfair advantage against its competitors. As you would expect, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard have fought back and spent 2022, filing responses, docs, and court paperwork in an effort to make its deal happen.
In a press release put out by the FTC last month, the agency announced a lawsuit against the merger and reasoned that Microsoft would be able to stifle its competitors by making games Xbox exclusives and manipulating prices, should the deal go through. Microsoft fought back via a response that contained a lot of arguments, including the assertion that the FTC itself was actually unconstitutional.
However, as reported by Axios, today Microsoft refiled its response to the lawsuit and has omitted the section arguing that the FTC’s lawsuit was “invalid because the structure of the Commission as an independent agency that wields significant executive power” violates Article II of the US Constitution. In that same section of the original filing, Microsoft also argued that the lawsuit and legal proceedings being carried out by the FTC were “invalid” because the FTC’s official complaint violated Article III of the U.S. Constitution. Oh, and Microsoft’s legal team also claimed that the FTC’s “procedures” violated the company’s “right to Equal Protection under the Fifth Amendment.”
Read More:Gamers Are Suing Microsoft To Thwart Its Merger With Activision
Now all of that is gone and Microsoft tells Axiosthat it probably shouldn’t have been in that initial doc in the first place.
“The FTC has an important mission to protect competition and consumers, and we quickly updated our response to omit language suggesting otherwise based on the constitution,” Microsoft public affairs spokesperson David Cuddy told Axios. “We initially put all potential arguments on the table internally and should have dropped these defenses before we filed.”
Microsoft says it appreciates all the “feedback” it received about its arguments claiming the FTC itself was unconstitutional and are “engaging directly with those who expressed concerns” to make the company’s position on the matter “clear.” In other words, the FTC probably didn’t take too kindly to be called unconstitutional and you probably shouldn’t anger the people suing you and trying to stop your whole big merger from happening.
Axios reports that Activision is also dropping similar allegations it had included in its own, separate response to the same FTC lawsuit.
Last month, the legendary co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog was arrested for allegedly purchasing shares in a development studio before its involvement in a Dragon Quest game was announced. A month later, he was arrested a second time for reportedly buying stock in a company that was set to work on a Final Fantasy spinoff. Yesterday, Tokyo prosecutors formally charged Yuji Naka for inside trading roughly $1,080,000 in Final Fantasy stock.
According to NHK, the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office determined that Naka had been making a profit on insider trading (Thanks, VGC). For the uninitiated, insider trading is when someone with non-public knowledge of a company is able to use that information to trade stock at an advantage. Doing so is illegal in Japan. So Naka ran afoul of the law when he purchased shares in ATeam before the studio had announced that it would be developing the mobile game Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier, a battle royale that was exclusively released for mobile devices. Though the game was announced in 2021, Naka was arrested on December 7 of this year.
This was a month after he had been arrested the first time for buying shares in Aiming, the studio that created Dragon Quest Tact. In both of these incidents, he was arrested alongside Square Enix employee Taisuke Sasaki. Sasaki was indicted for trading roughly $782,000 in stock.
If the two made a profit off the ATeam stock, it was presumably before The First Soldier was canceled less than a year after its launch. Square Enix had clearly been hoping to capitalize on the popularity of Fortnite and other battle royales. Instead, First Soldier suffered severe performance issues and was exclusively available on mobile.
Naka had joined Square Enix in 2018 to direct Balan Wonderworld, a strange action-platformer that was near-universally panned as a flop. The game was unfocused and confusing to many reviewers, and Kotaku included it on a list of the year’s biggest gaming disappointments. The director departed Square Enix in June 2021. Maybe Naka would have been better off if he had been focused on directing a good game instead of manipulating the stock market.
Developers at the Boston-based gaming studio Proletariat announced plans to unionize on Tuesday. If successful, roughly 60 employees there who worked on World of Warcraft’s new Dragonflight expansion would join the growing ranks of organized labor across parent company Activision Blizzard and beyond.
The group, called the Proletariat Workers Alliance, is unionizing with the Communications Workers of America and says it has a supermajority of support among qualifying staff at the studio. While it has filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board, it’s also calling on Activision Blizzard to voluntarily recognize the union in a break with the Call of Duty publishers’ attempts to stall and sabotage similar efforts at its other studios.
“Everyone in the video game industry knows Activision Blizzard’s reputation for creating a hostile work environment, so earlier this year, when we heard that Blizzard was planning to acquire Proletariat, we started to discuss how we could protect the great culture we have created here,” Dustin Yost, a software engineer at the studio, said in a press release. “By forming a union and negotiating a contract, we can make sure that we are able to continue doing our best work and create innovative experiences at the frontier of game development.”
The Proletariat Workers Alliance would be unique among gaming unions for representing all non-management staff at the studio, rather than just quality assurance staff as is the case at Raven Software, Blizzard Albany, and unionization efforts currently underway at Microsoft’s Bethesda studios. The Proletariat developers list flexible PTO, optional remote work, no mandatory overtime, and policies fostering diversity, equality and inclusion among the demands they plan to negotiate at the bargaining table if the union drive is successful.
Activision Blizzard didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it would voluntarily recognize the union or try to fight it as it has previous efforts within the company. The publisher recently tried to block Blizzard Albany’s union on the grounds that allowing only QA to unionize would hurt the development of games like Diablo IV. Ultimately, the NLRB didn’t buy it, but in Proletariat’s case those concerns would be moot anyway since a studio-wide vote is exactly what the workers are asking for.
Proletariat was founded in 2012 by former Zynga, Insomniac Games, and Harmonix developers, funded by venture capital and investments from companies like Take-Two. It’s best-known release prior to joining Blizzard was Spellbreak, a free-to-play magic shooter that came out in 2020. The game was eventually shut down this past June, however, and Proletariat was acquired to work on World of Warcraft the following month.
“At Proletariat, we have always emphasized looking out for each other as people, and we’re committed to preserving what is best about our studio,” James Van Nuland, an associate game producer at Proletariat, said today. “We are in this together.”
The 2022 Game Awards ended with a random kid sneaking up on stage and muttering nonsense about “reformed Rabbi Bill Clinton.” The 2022 Game Awards is now, understandably, trying to pretend that never happened, blurring the kid out of a picture celebrating Elden Ring developer FromSoftware’s second Game of the Year win.
“FromSoftware is the first studio to win 2 Game of the Year awards at The Game Awards,” the event’s social media account tweeted on Wednesday. The studio won in 2019 for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and again earlier this month for Elden Ring. “Congratulations FromSoftware,” it concludes. Attached was a picture of director and studio president, Hidetaka Miyazaki, holding the award alongside a member of the team who was translating his acceptance speech that night.
But it didn’t take an eagle-eyed observer to notice that the Bill Clinton prankster from that night, who had been standing behind both men, was sloppily Photoshopped out of the image. “LOSING MY MIND THAT THEY BLURRED THE KID LMFAOO,” quote-tweeted Twitch streamer GamesCage. “Hahaha you gotta use ‘content aware fill’ tool in photoshop to remove background assets next time,” added FromSoftware dataminer, Lance McDonald.
The kid who crashed the Game Awards that night was later revealed to be Matan Even, a high schooler with a penchant for clout-chasing IRL stunts, who later gained notoriety on the internet. He previously trolled an NBA fan cam with a freedom for Hong Kong t-shirt, and interrupted a BlizzCon panel with a similar message. He’s appeared twice on InfoWars to discuss Chinese censorship, but his social media presence shows no allegiance to one particular political ideology, and he has since distanced himself from InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, whom he had previously called his “favorite person” on the right-wing conspiracy network.
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Even’s stunt at The Game Awards was seemingly devoid of any larger substance or meaning, but it did momentarily steal the spotlight away from the rest of the ceremony. Host Geoff Keighley laughed it off as security escorted the minor off stage, and though he later tweeted that Even had been arrested, LAPD claim he was only escorted to a local police station before being released without any charges.
The blurred tweet would seem to indicate that Keighley’s Game Awards still feels besmirched on some level by the interloper that night. Apparently not besmirched enough to get someone with more Photoshop experience to fix the image, however. It took Kotaku’s own Zack Zwiezen less than fifteen minutes to properly edit the kid out of the image. Or as one person pointed out, The Game Awards could have simply used one of the many other stills in which the kid is out of view.
The Game Awards did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 gives Americans the right to sue companies over anticompetitive behavior, a fact which 10 self-described gamers are using to take Microsoft to court, aiming to halt the company’s acquisition of Activision.
As reported by Bloomberg Law, the complaint, filed today and obtained by Kotaku, states that the plaintiffs, or “video gamers” as they’re described, are concerned that “the [Microsoft and Activision] merger may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly;” this merger, the complaint states, would specifically be in violation of Section 7 of the Clayton Act, which states that acquisitions that diminish competition are prohibited under U.S. antitrust law. The complaint not only cites the scale and scope of the Activision and Microsoft merger as problematic, but also that this latest proposed union follows numerous other Microsoft acquisitions ranging from its 2014 purchase of Mojang all the way up to its acquisition of Rare in 2022.
Thoroughly laying out console, PC, and AAA gaming, as well as subscription services as “Relevant Product Markets,” the suit calls attention to just how many large franchises will fall under Microsoft’s corporate umbrella should the merger go through. Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Doom, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Halo, and The Elder Scrolls are just some of the cited examples. It maintains that currently Microsoft and Activision compete directly through these titles and services like Battle.net, the Microsoft Store, and Game Pass. The merger would shatter that competitive dynamic.
Should the merger go through, the suit claims, Microsoft would hold “outsized market power and the ability to foreclose key inputs to rivals and further harm competition.” The suit mentions competition both whereas it concerns sales to consumers, as well as the competition in the industry to “hire and retain talent within specialized video game labor,” which would be “lessened” under the merger.
Kotaku has reached out to Microsoft for comment.
The proposed MIcrosoft / Activision merger has been a lightning rod for controversy ever since its initial announcement. Perhaps most worrying for Microsoft is the recently filed lawsuit from the FTC. The feds allege that, should this merger go through, it would pose serious harm to competition in the video game industry, citing past behavior of Microsoft to prioritize Xbox and Windows PCs as platforms for its games. Microsoft has disagreed, stating that the Activision acquisition would “bring Call of Duty to more gamers and more platforms than ever before.”
Speaking of Call of Duty, in response to criticisms of its intended merger with Activision, Microsoft has pledged to continue to deliver Call of Duty to other platformsfor at least 10 years. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has categorized Sony’s criticisms of the acquisition as an attempt to “protect its dominant position on console” and that it seeks to grow by “making Xbox smaller.”
Crisis Core – Final Fantasy VII – Reunion was released today and is a solid remastering/remake of a beloved PSP title. But at least one painting in the new game contains a li’l something extra: a Getty Images watermark, implying that the in-game painting was created using an image preview taken directly from that service’s website.
In our review posted earlier today, we noted that the new remake is a faithful adaptation of the original PSP game, complete with flaws that come about from being overly dedicated to being a perfect prequel. And like the original, while the first half or so of the game is solid, the ending makes for a “disappointing conclusion.” It’s a damn good-looking remake nonetheless. However, we’ve noticed that the new visuals come with a new mistake, in the form of a watermark left on at least three instances of an in-game painting.
During chapter eight of the game, you’ll enter a Shinra mansion. In this very nice-looking and opulent home you’ll find many fancy paintings hanging on the walls. Look closely and you’ll discover these are real paintings. Look a little closer and you’ll clearly see where Square Enix grabbed the art from.
Yup, that’s a big old Getty Images watermark right in the middle of it. I was able to track down the exact painting that Square Enix grabbed using our own Getty account. It’s a piece by artist John Crowther depicting Ludgate Circus in London in 1881.
Kotaku has reached out to Square Enix but didn’t hear back before publication.
Read More:Crisis Core – Final Fantasy VII – Reunion: The Kotaku Review
It appears that whoever grabbed this image from Getty—and possibly didn’t pay to license it, as the watermark is still there—stretched it out and cropped most of its top to make it fit in the frame. And this isn’t a one-off error. The resulting painting appears at least three times in this area of the game complete with the Getty watermark. Whoops!
The watermarked painting appears in at least three different places.Screenshot: Square Enix / Kotaku
This isn’t the first time a big Square Enix RPG has shipped with a mistaken watermark included.Kingdom Hearts III also included a watermark during one cutscene. However, that was a “blink and you’ll miss it moment” and not an easy-to-find painting that appears multiple times and can be seen clearly by anyone paying attention. If you want to see this mistake yourself, I’d go to the mansion sooner than later, as I imagine Square Enix will be patching it out shortly.