This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Natalie Rambles About Palworld – Week 1
• No One Can Stop The Pokémadness (Palworld is a Global Sensation and Home to Massive Controversy)
• TSF Showcase 2024-04 Oto x Maho by Shirase Shuu and Suemitsu Dicca
• Microsoft’s Big Cuts! (Microsoft Layoffs, Cancellation, and War on Physical Games)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Natalie Rambles About Palworld – Week 1

So, this past week I’ve been doing something that I have not done in a long, long while. Playing the latest, hottest, and most successful video game right during its release window. And that game is Palworld. I remember being highly interested in this game after its provocative 2021 reveal trailer, where it was colloquially branded as Pokémon with guns, and was briefly used to put GameFreak down. 

It came out, and rather than hearing if it was good or not, I heard about the sales, and decided to buy two copies. One for me and one for my buddy, and Ark: Survival Evolved veteran, Cassie. I played the game to get my bearings, joined up with Cassie to play co-op using a dedicated server, and proceeded to venture across the world for 10+ hours without ever finishing the supposedly 5 hour tutorial. Because I play games like an accountant.

Overall, I like Palworld. I think it is a well constructed open world game whose core elements of monster catching, crafting, and automation all create an engaging feedback loop that can keep players hooked for hours upon hours. I think the world itself is full of interesting geography and locales to explore, featuring just enough uniqueness with the shape of the world and the creatures you find to not feel generative. For an early access game, it functions well and looks quite good, with a clean user interface, barring a slight overabundance of text and PC oriented menus. And while some might find the disparate visual elements of this game to be a negative, I think it is an enticing aesthetic. Though, my aesthetic tastes are of a debatable quality. And, most importantly, I think it works well as a co-operative multiplayer game, which is kind of the central appeal. Like I said before, people really like playing games with their friends!

That being said… Palworld is also an early access game, it is unrefined in many ways, and there are a lot of nebulous things that I think ought to be corrected to make for a better experience.

While the game is centered around catching monsters, or pals, and battling them against each other, the game makes snagging them strangely difficult. They have a lower capture rate than you would see from Pokémon and if you want good odds of catching a critter, even a level 10 one, you need to get them to very low health. 

This is a problem, as if they faint, they cannot be caught, and if you are using enslaved pals to battle wild pals, they will just fight until their opponent is dead. Meaning that many of my encounters involved sending out a pal to weaken the foe, and then getting them to super low health by poking them with a stick. Or just widdling them down with my crossbow. It’s not awful… but the game encourages players to catch like 1,000 pals in total (catch 111 pals 10 times) so that will get old after the first few hundred times.

The game’s progression economy is reliant on getting access to various materials— wood, stone, food, ore, coal, et cetera— yet the game only automates some of them. No matter where their base is, players can get an unlimited quantity of wood, stone, and food by building certain facilities. However, they cannot do the same for ore and coal. If the player wants these highly valuable materials, they will need to position their base in an environment that is naturally plentiful of these materials, and have pals farm them whenever they respawn. Which just feels arbitrary. A patch of infinitely generating ore makes as much sense as an infinite lumber patch.

The item management system in general is kind of strange to me. Players are supposed to store resources at their base in various chests and compartments, yet the chests cannot hold as many unique items as a player, and the starting chests can only store a measly few. Limiting inventory like this only makes it harder to remember which chest contains what, and makes the act of interfacing with the game more combative. I just want one big central chest where everything in my base is stored, rather than 4 different chests for different types of materials. One of them is streamlined, the other is just wasting my damn time.

While traveling, I regularly had issues where I became overly encumbered with items I picked up, forcing me to travel back to base to deposit my resources. This kinda blows, and I wish the game took inspiration from the likes of Torchlight and let me send one of my pals back to base to deposit my resources. Or… maybe just have me use one of the teleporting pal balls on the crap I’m carrying to teleport it to the base.

Also, the entire game’s introduction is just… weird. Players start on the top of a mountain. Not a plateau or anything, just a mountain that slowly descends while being prompted to do various tasks. Like building a base. Except the terrain here is not suited for a base, not being very flat or expansive, and the player does not know enough starting out to know what a good base is. …Which is a problem, as this isn’t like Minecraft where you can just move a base easily. It’s like moving IRL.

Bases are also more like compounds than anything else, and not really meant to be aesthetically appealing. Their area is limited and there are so many facilities that aesthetics like roofs of fancy furnishings seem like a waste. Why build a home… when that just takes up space for your pals (workers (slaves)) to be productive? Honestly, I would rather see the game feature bespoke base areas with better geography and larger spaces… Shame it’s too late for that now! Ah well. Maybe Cassie will let me make the third base my way…

Palworld is capable of some truly enticing moments, yet it suffers from the fate of being a game not yet exposed to widespread criticism, meaning it has some pretty significant issues. Still, I want to love it. The game manages to scratch the same general itch that Legends Arceus did two years ago with its core scavenging, capturing, and exploration gameplay loop. Now, Palworld is not as good as PLA. It has too much bullshit inherited from survival games and focuses on a loose, indirect progression system that… I just find to be worse from a design and gameplay level. However, with a year or two of updates and refinement, I think Palworld could get pretty close to PLA’s level.

…Also, since I host my own dedicated server, I could just set certain variables, like build time, or collection quantity, to more beneficial numbers. Sure, it might make the game easier, but I don’t really mind. If I wanted to do something hard, I’d want to walk away with something of some value. Like a full stomach, a book, a certificate of my practical skills, or cold hard cash.

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No One Can Stop The Pokémadness
(Palworld is a Global Sensation and Home to Massive Controversy)

I was originally going to start with this, but I wanted to talk about Palworld as a game beforehand. If only to make whatever bias I have simple and clean before diving into the biggest story of this past week. The inescapable kerfuffle of people yelling about Palworld. Now, why were they yelling? Well, that comes down to two factors. The immense success of Palworld and its exhausting controversy.

Palworld sold 1 million units, just on Steam, in its first eight hours. By the time I’m writing this piece, Palworld has sold 8 million units within 6 days. It has become the second most concurrently played game on Steam, beating out Counter-Strike, Dota 2, and everything except for PUBG, which snagged 3.5 million people, at once, 6 years ago. Damn. I almost forgot how big that game was before Fornite at its lunch. Also, all these are just Steam figures. The game came out on Xbox One and Xbox Series at the same time, and is available via Game Pass. So… it might have hit 10 million players in a week. Which is impressive regardless of the game, and for what is ultimately an independent self-published game by what is, as far as I could tell, a AA studio is… beyond impressive.

Palworld is big. Palworld is a sensation. Palworld is mainstream. And if you are into gaming, you at least heard about Palworld. However, that also meant a lot of eyes were on the game. People started looking at the monster designs more closely, did basic research into the developer, Pocket Pair, and before too long, a two-pronged controversy was underway.

The minor of these two points highlights how Pocket Pair previously released a game that made use of an image generator known as AI: Art Imposter. And how its CEO has proclaimed interest in AI as a game creation tool at several points in the past. This has led some to suspect that AI was used in the creation of Palworld. However, it is difficult to prove that certain things used AI due to how multipurpose and competent it can be depending on the task. Still, there is enough stigma against AI for some to shun the game for even having a perceived proximity to it. Seriously, AI image generation is going to be a shaky issue this year, and seeing how flippantly accusations went around during this discourse makes me think AI discourse is… just doomed to be fruitless.

However, the real iceberg of this controversy is how the design of certain pals in Palworld are quite similar to Pokémon. Starting with the general smooth and colorful way the animal creatures are depicted, to more granular elements such as similar ears, eyes, and body types. No matter what you think… there is a certain stylistic similarity. 

These similarities have led to numerous accusations about the game’s assets and designs. There has been a lot of loaded language thrown about this, ranging from ‘rip-offs,’ ‘creatively bankrupt,’ ‘plagiarism,’ ‘stolen,’ and so forth. Largely anonymous entities on the prevailing social media platform, X (The Genocider’s Gooch), have been tossing around loaded language and comparisons between various pals and Pokémon. And based on the information available now, people have been prompted to provide a gooey and unrefined hot take on this matter.

This is the real heart of the controversy to me, and I think it is an interesting topic in theory. How do you prove if something digital is stolen? Should the average person actually care if a small studio is creating something similar to a key product of a multi-billion dollar company? Where should one go from viewing art and designs as the work of an artist to being a product sold by a corporation? What exactly is the Japanese law surrounding similarities like this? Specifically Japanese law, as Pocket Pair is a Japanese company, just like Nintendo, and if a lawsuit were to happen… it should be in Japan.

Unfortunately, discourse involving thousands of people… cannot be productive. I really want to believe that they can— I’m a socialist/leftist after all— but this whole kerfuffle has just been a terrible display of communication between people as they failed to engage with each other’s perspective. It has demonstrated how much some people have been trained to trust their first impressions and conform to the vibes of the situation. How people latch onto terms that have fluid definitions, yet act as if they are terms that are universally understood as an objective measure. And how… a lot of people just straight up follow the bastard-headed ‘guilty until proven innocent’ ideology.

This is all exasperated by how people profit in the modern internet. When a controversy is brewing, it is within the interest of online creators to write articles about it, produce videos, and follow the latest hotness. All because… it is one of the best ways to make money on the internet. Just as an example, I was thrown a video by the folks behind Video Game Story Time. Their coverage over the legal situation was a 12 minute video featuring a handful of illustrations, some B-roll, a few website screen grabs, and a few illustrations from an illustration-driven channel. It was not a very high production video, I’m guessing it would take two days to prepare, and it managed to get over 7000,000 views in a week, making it their fifth highest viewed video of all time. You know what I call that? I call that a good hustle and a good business decision!

As for my thoughts on the actual situation, I am just as uninformed as anyone else, so take my mild takes with a spoonful of vegemite. I do not think the developers at Pocket Pair are stupid enough to do something illegal, especially after their game had so many eyes on it after its reveal in 2021. I do think they deliberately made something with visual similarities to Pokémon to garner attention and accumulate higher sales. Just like Robopon! However, I do not think they stole or directly modified any models, and I do not trust any anonymous self-proclaimed 3D modelers or artists who are making bold claims. Just because someone says they are an expert on something doesn’t mean you can trust ’em. It certainly won’t be the first time an alleged expert lied about something…

Regardless of one’s thoughts on the game, Palworld has already won. It is already an unprecedented success across the world. Yet, the game could be in potential trouble in the future…

The Pokémon Company is currently investigating Palworld, and looking into any sort of infringement that might be going on with the game. TPC might find something, or they might not. This has the potential to result in a court case. TPC could settle out of court with Pocket Pair to avoid a publicized legal battle. Or Pocket Pair could reach a compromise with TPC to modify the designs of certain pals to be less like Pokémon. The game is in early access after all, in a public beta, so it would not be too strange for some designs to be changed.

Anything can happen at this point. I don’t know what. Nobody does. Sadly, some people want immediate action because their brains have been ruined by instant gratification worse than mine has. And that’s plum scary, buddy! 

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TSF Showcase 2024-04
Oto x Maho by Shirase Shuu and Suemitsu Dicca

Edit 1/28/2024: I changed the segment where I guessed what the title of this comic meant based on feedback from Cassie.

You know what there’s a shortage of? Magical girl TSF stories! And I don’t think I need to really explain why. Magical girls stand up to injustice, look pretty, and are able to defeat any threat with the power of love and bonds! That graphs so well onto a typical trans narrative that you don’t even need to try! And you don’t even need to go the standard ‘teen boy becomes a magical girl’ route. You can futz around in the margins, like with Mahou Shoujo La Valliere by Kouji, which… I really want to do a showcase on. Unfortunately, 5 of the 11 chapters are still untranslated, and Kouji sorta abandoned that series. I’d think about funding a translation myself, but I’ve got a mortgage to pay.

Recognizing this deficiency, Natalie.TF contributor Cassandra Wright recommended that I check out Oto x Maho. A four volume magical girl TSF manga that ran from 2008 to 2012 and was based on a 16 volume light novel series that ran from 2007 to 2015. Well, at least based on what release dates I could find. That’s one of the problems with digging for relics from a decade ago. Another is that you could spend several hours reading through a series, hoping it does something interesting, when the only interesting thing about it is how many things it lacks.

…Yeah, it’s going to be another one of those showcases. Sorry about that. I don’t always showcase things that are good, because that would be booooring!

Oto x Maho, which I think means sound x magic, but according to Cassie, it probably means otonoko x magical girl, but abbreviated to be more open to interpretation. Anyway, the comic follows Kanata Shirahime, a 13-year-old boy who is the son of a magical girl and, one night over dinner, is told that he too must become a magical girl. His mother, Konata, then proceeds to explain his duty in what has to be the worst way possible. Transforming into a magical girl, revealing that their family cat, Moeru, is actually her mascot companion, and throwing Kanata at one of the series’ mandatory monsters. Who are called Noise, because the writer was a big fan of The World Ends With You wanted a musical motif, going so far as to call the magical girls ‘Tuners’ and… not much else.

Before Kanata can get a grip on what the hell is going on, Konata adds one final reveal. That she is going to be touring the world for three months and Kanata— a 13-year-old— will need to fend for himself. Well, with the help of magical cat Moeru, of course.

From here, the story shifts into several layers of set-up. Character introductions, establishing a status quo, including a monster of the chapter, and showing Kanata cut his teeth on the whole mahou shoujo thing. It prioritizes comedy above all else, giving the story a light and silly tone that makes it easy enough to get along with and offer the story a benefit of the doubt. Chapters feel different, things are progressing, and stakes slowly rise higher as sprinkles of darker ideas are thrown in. Like with the mini story arc spanning chapters 5 to 7, where Kanata is plagued by insects who fill him with doubt and hatred over himself and his body. This causes him to lose his ability to transform, and sees him gain the strength to fight on with the reassurances from his friends, all before fighting a shadowy doppelganger. Nothing too unique, yet it’s nothing to sneeze at either.

However, that arc is about a third of the way through this manga and at that point, whatever it is about is not very clear… and it’s never particularly clear. Why is that? Allow me to pause as I break down the elements this series is working with, starting of course with Kanata.

As a character, Kanata is a generally kind young man with a scattering of insecurities related to his body, namely how feminine he looks. This is a familiar enough concept for TSF protagonists… except Kanata is not just some looking dude with longer hair that just naturally looks good even with boy levels of maintenance. Kanata’s hair goes down past their butt, they have a distinctly feminine physique, and they somehow look more girly when wearing boy clothes. There are reasons why Kanata looks this way, but I need to question why the writer went in this direction. Kanata looks like a girl no matter what their sex is. I’d say that Kanata is the most girly looking ‘supposedly male’ TSF protagonist I’ve ever seen, except it still has nothing on the indisputable masterpiece that is Raiden Shogun is My Wife. At least Kanata’s not padding their masculine bra…

Despite all of this, Kanata does not like it when people view him sexually, like a girl, and wants to affirm his masculinity. He is distinctly not trans, and the story never truly entertains the idea that he might prefer to stay as a girl. He is a boy, that’s it, and I think the story really pissed away an interesting concept here. Especially after learning that… Kanata grew up being sorta gender fluid. At the very least, Konata presented him as male or female throughout different years of his youth. A bit like Shion Wakanae from Family Compo.

Also, Kanata’s magical girl form is just Hatsune Miku. Kanata, or Kana-tan, has twintails, elaborate hair clips, wears a loose dress shirt with a tie, a pleated skirt, black shoes, white stockings, and modesty shorts, or rather splats. From the skirt up, they look just like Miku. And when they get a last minute redesign, they get Miku’s disconnected sleeves too!

Kanata, as a character, has a lot of potential to be an interesting queer character thrust into the position of a magical girl, and given the ability to live as both male and female. The story acknowledges this potential… yet does not make use of it. …Actually, no, it’s worse than that. Oto x Maho identifies potential, establishes interesting ideas, and seals it off before it can start exploring it with even a modicum of depth. I want to say that this is just isolated to Kanata, but… it’s not. It’s kind of everything.

Moeru takes the role of being Kanata’s perverted sensei figure, and while the story establishes him as a fighter of some capacity… he’s pretty much just a gag and exposition character. When some bickering is in order, Moeru claws in. When someone needs to explain something, Moeru can act as the bottomless barrel of exposition. He does not need to be much more, yet he is firmly nothing special. Also, he’s a perverted old man who gets his jollies from watching Kanata, a family member, transform into a girl. …Moving on.

Ruma Hina, d.b.a. Grace Chapel, is presented as Kanata’s magical girl partner, and the second member of a would-be team. She is a lot more of a fiery sort than Kanata, more experienced, less emotionally mature, and does that thing where she ends most sentences with a verbal tic, “desu no.” She is also an orphan who was abandoned by her parents, lives in the woods, and kills Noise to make enough money to feed and clothe herself. …Yeah, this comic has a homeless child! I bet you didn’t expect that!

Sadly, despite having so much trauma that one could get into, and having a backstory rife for exploration… The story does not do much with it. Yes, it establishes she has anxieties and doubts that are fed on by the Noise. However… the story is just not interested in exploring her background in detail. They just gesture toward her going through trauma without saying much of anything. I would say you have to address or explore her trauma and backstory more but, apparently, you just don’t need to! You can just have them spit some shit about how they can protect themselves when… no, child, you cannot. You might think you can, but that’s only because you haven’t been park-raped yet.

Jou Asuno is pushed as a significant character, yet he mostly exists to sexually harass Kanata, even though everybody harasses Kanata. He’s the resident dude and male friend, though considering how he loves Kanata to the point of making crossdressing figurines of him, maybe friend is the wrong word. He appeals to a particular breed of humor from a particular moment in time and little else.

Yori Ikuse is an odd inclusion, as she mostly exists as a supporting character for Ruma. She’s a 24-year-old woman who treats Ruma as a little sister, helps her out from time to time and… is also a magical girl. I’m not sure how or why that is possible, and aside from insecurities about being an (almost) Christmas cake, she really does not have much to add. She shows up for 9 pages, gets bodied by Noise, encourages Ruma, helps Ruma from a mental health crisis, attends a mini chapter, and is a secondary player in the final battle. I think she’s cute in an overbearing big sis sort of way, but the story would probably be better without her.

Lastly, we have Class President who… I don’t think was ever actually given a name. She is introduced as a love interest for Kanata, this platonic ideal of a caring and considerate class president. She gets a few chapters dedicated to her and, after a conflict leading into the 75% mark, she is revealed to be… the mastermind!

…But mastermind of what? What is this series really about? What is the message? The goal? Good question! …That was my answer.

Oto x Maho sort of… lacks any thematic cohesiveness that I could intuit, and I like to think I’m pretty good at this. It gestures toward familiar ideas. The power of bonds, the importance of accepting and loving oneself, the power of determination and persistence, and the importance of maintaining harmony in a world full of destructive noise. Yet… it does not really say anything. And the final arc of this story exemplifies that well. 

It has a good premise. A friend of the protagonist reveals that the bonds they shared were mere lies and manipulation while promising to begin an apocalyptic event, dubbed The Night. The traitor is seen conversing with an unseen ruler, is allied with a shadowy and imposing figure, and the familiar setting of the series is locked in a perpetual midnight with a blackened sky. The traitor talks about creating a new world by doing away with this one, revealing their own hidden power, and challenging the protagonist to a fight. The fight is slowly shattered into a heart-to-heart, and a new truth is then revealed along with the ultimate evil. Who, in this case, is called Fearness. Yes, you read that right. The big bad, the ultimate evil, is straight up called FEARNESS. FEARNESS!!! 

The problem is that it is more complicated than it needs to be, poorly connects to what happened in earlier chapters, and has one entirely pointless character. So pointless I’m not even going to mention their name. It has bombast and energy behind it, some palpable passion from the writer and artist. A lot of the imagery is cool, and there is a considerable tension… but for what? It all feels too derivative to mean much, and the ending… just kind of sucks. Because it lies. It tells the audience that something major happened, that two losses were experienced, and then undoes it a few pages later. …Also, the less said about the genital weirdness, the better.

Oto x Maho is the ‘off-brand kinder egg with no toy inside of it’ of TSF comics. It looks appetizing, and can be enjoyed if you just savor it, lathering your tongue in a sufficiently pleasant sweetness. Yet, when you try to take a bite out of it, you realize it was full of air! Of nothing!

…Okay, that might be harsh, though after reading through this comic, I certainly felt like I had gotten precious little from it. It lacks a clear thing it is trying to do and ends with a wet fart where nothing was accomplished… despite the heroes all saving the world. It has so much potential lying around that it’s frankly baffling how it turned out like this… though, I do have a theory. Maybe this is just a highly limited adaptation. Manga takes far more time to make than a light novel, and while the adaptation ratio is variable, you can’t fit 16 light novels into 4 volumes of manga without leaving behind 25% to 50% of the story.

That is not meant to say that I think the artist on this book, Suemitsu Dicca, did a bad job. While the first few chapters are a bit iffy with some of the paneling, presentation, and general way that information is displayed, it gets better as it goes on. The characters look better and have more eye-catching expressions, which do a lot to add to those with thin personalities. Suemitsu clearly grows more comfortable with the action scenes demanded of this series the more they draw. And panels are displayed in a more clean, readable, manner. Due in large part to their art, I would say the comic can be pretty enjoyable if one is just focusing on the moment-to-moment beats. It’s also gosh darn adorable, especially with the full color chapter introduction pages. They’re a good artist, and they did a good job bringing the story to life in a sufficiently lively manner. …It’s just that the story itself, through whoever/whatever’s fault, was not very good.

The most frustrating conclusion to have when engaging with a work is one of sheer befuddlement as to what the intent and vision behind the project were. Sure, I might be able to make general, vague, or sweeping conclusions based on obvious factors. But sometimes, I just find a work where I am left bewildered as to what the goal was, and not in a ‘well, that was one extra chunky nutty bonkers bar’ sort of way. In the boring sort of way!

Oto x Maho is one such work, and while I really bloody wanted to find something to praise about it… I was at a loss. It does not offer much to TSF fans, as the series has no interest in exploring the differences between the protagonist’s original and new form. For magical girl fans, there is nothing particularly unique here, as everything feels like something that has been done in a bigger and better story. And none of it is cohesive enough to feel like the writer truly had a story they wanted to tell. As such, I would not recommend this series, and… it isn’t even a good example of what not to do. 

Sorry about this one folks. I invested too much time into this one to not talk about it. But rest assured, next week I am going back to a certified Natalie.TF banger from one of the kings of TSF comics to debut a Chari Shal translation of a 1981 TSF comic! Stay tuned and stay crispy!

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Microsoft’s Big Cuts!
(Microsoft Layoffs, Cancellation, and War on Physical Games)

Well, Microsoft certainly had a week. Right after securing Activision Blizzard under their blackened folds, they launched a wave of layoffs, unemploying 1,900 people of their approximately 22,000 person workforce. This is deeply unfortunate, as this ruins the lives of thousands of people, though I cannot say that I am surprised by this at all. Layoffs have been endemic to the industry for the past year and act as a crass response to the growth gaming experienced during the pandemic and the anticipated decline from a looming recession. Most companies doing these layoffs do not need to perform them, yet it makes them look good to investors. The owners of the company. The people who executives must prioritize. 

It is a cruel system that is part of the unfortunate reality of publicly traded companies… and private equity firms. People are viewed as an expense, as a drain on cash and a reduction of profit, when really they are the greatest asset of a company. Sadly, GAAP and IFRS do not do that, meaning companies lack the financial incentive to practice professionally ethical activities— not taking people’s jobs away from them to make financials look good. It sucks, and that’s why we should abolish the current capitalistic system and replace it with something that values humans more.

As a result of this cancelation however, a game developed by Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard’s Irvine office was canceled after six years of development. Per a report by Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, this project, going by the codename Odyssey, initially began conceptual work in 2017 as a survival game inspired by Minecraft and Rust. Activision Blizzard announced this title as Unannounced Survival Game in January 2022. Not because they had anything to show, but because you gotta announce a project before hiring for it. Well, unless you already have a team capable of performing the project… like game developers used to back in the day.

As for why it was canceled, much of it can probably be traced to its choice of engine. The game was prototyped in the versatile Unreal Engine 4, yet executives decided to pivot away from it because the engine did not support 100 consecutive players. So they used some shitty internal mobile engine called Synapse. Because that’s what you want to use for an ambitious open world game. A fucking mobile game engine. The team kept making things in Unreal despite this, and while the technology was a pain to deal with, the game was making progress. The developers hoped they could switch the project over to Unreal under Microsoft’s ownership, so progress would go even smoother. …But then the game was canceled because the engine— that they were forced to use— wasn’t good enough.

In all fairness, when you switch engines, you need to basically remake the game from scratch. That takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of hard work. Engine switches have resulted in the deaths and failures of so many games it’s kind of surprising a switch like this ever works. Combined with the risk of a new IP and the fact that the online survival game genre is looking to become oversaturated in the upcoming few years, I honestly can’t blame them for this decision. It sucks for the developers. They not only spent years of their life working on something that is getting shoved in a vault, never to be finished, but are now out of a job. All of this is terrible, but it’s due to a larger systemic issue, and the people who dealt these ultimatums are… ultimately people just trying to make due in the system. Hate the game, not the player, because the game of capitalism is fookin’ gobshite!

Oh, and Microsoft is also looking to further their capitalistic goals by… getting rid of discs! 

This was prefaced by a rumor that Walmart is planning on removing Xbox games from their stores. A move that seemed in line with big box retailers choosing to no longer sell physical media, such as Best Buy, who removed DVDs and Blu-Rays from their stores. However, that is a retailer issue, not a manufacturer issue. The latter of which is way, way worse, as you cannot sell something if it isn’t being produced.

A report by VGC compiles most of the key components of this story, saving me from digging up for little bits to form a written conspiracy board. They highlighted a Windows Central writer who claimed Microsoft has “shut down” their retail games department. They roped in how the big FTC leak from last year indicated that Microsoft planned on releasing an “adorably all digital” Xbox Series X. How Microsoft’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II will be eschewing a physical release entirely. And how, per Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners, some AAA Xbox games see 80+% digital sales.

Throw all of these stories together and… yeah. I think you have a convincing case that Microsoft is just planning on doing away with physical discs, and my anecdotal evidence falls into that take. When I sold my game collection, they said they did not want any Xbox One games, because there is not enough of a market for Xbox One games. And I can’t imagine that Xbox Series game discs are flying off the shelves, because a lot of people who wanted an Xbox Series just got the Xbox Series S. The one with no disc drive!

From a consumer rights perspective, this is just dreadful news. Game companies have been trying to get people comfortable with an account-driven future for over a decade at this point. The Xbox One reveal was a huge mask off moment for the industry at large. 

This is not a matter of physical media being better than digital. Because physical media is just a file or bunch of files burned onto a disc or card. This is a matter of control, of being able to sell your media and buy it directly from other people and play it decades after the fact. Of being able to buy media, period. 

For all the luster about how everything can be bought digitally, or accessed via official sources, that is not true, and cannot be true. Things get delisted from digital storefronts and services all the time, and there is no good way to stop that from happening. And if a games console is all digital, that means it is a console that will, after a certain point, be unable to play new games, or any games, and digital libraries could just be destroyed.

Thankfully, we have emulation, hacking, and piracy to help curb these failings, to help make things that are no longer being sold widely available. However, that solution will not always work, and might not work in the future. There needs to be a solution to preserve the art that people have created, to prevent companies from creating these walled gardens that force people to go to one store to buy their products. Because otherwise… then it’s over. 

Microsoft is ultimately a creature of capitalism, and its purpose is not to better lives, but to maintain its monetary worth, appease investors, and pay them a dividend that justifies their investment. That’s why they strip highly skilled workers of employment. That’s why they cancel promising artistic ventures when the projected rate of return and risk assessments do not meet the specified metrics. And that’s why they are, almost certainly at this point, joining in on the widespread burgeoning war on ownership.

What can be done about this? Well, either frame your political enemies for terr—

Akumako: “ONE MORE WORD AND I’LL SHOVE THIS FUCKING MONKEY WRENCH RIGHT UP YOUR NOSE!!!”

…Actually, just join a local socialist organization, call your representatives, or do whatever you want to try to change the future. They might have the power, but power can be stolen. It can be denied. And no matter how imposing the systems that dictate the world may seem, they can always be demolished. You can start with reform, you can start by just focusing on battles, but this… this is gonna be a 50 year war in the making! …Assuming the world doesn’t get sliced up by a big sword by then!

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Progress Report 2024-01-28

If my computer ever got raided, I would have a LOT to answer for… Not because I have naked pictures of actual children made of flesh and blood. God no. The only photographed nudes on my PC are my old dick pics.

2024-01-21: Wrote 1,000 words of Rundown RE: Palworld. Wrote about 3,000 words for VD 2.0 CH 6-22. I also watched some anime with Cassie, for a review, and played two hours of Palworld, meaning I could no longer refund it! Again, writing this story is getting harder, as I am just feeling more fatigue

2024-01-22: Today was my TSF Showcase day, so I wrote about 2,400 words and read four volumes of manga, while pulling some images.

2024-01-23: I played a bunch of Palworld with Cassie today and wrote 2,500 words for VD 2.0 CH 6-22 before trying to come up with general ideas for the Posse Logs segment.

2024-01-24: Frick. I spent too much time futzing around with a spreadsheet for fun and lost some of my changes because I didn’t save it in OneDrive for the auto-save. I spent two hours on Palworld, when I just wanted it to be one but… open world games be like that, dude. Between that and work, I only got through 1,600 words for VD 2.0 CH 6-22 before I ran out of juice.

2024-01-25: Wrote/Rewrote my Palworld sections, totaling 2,300 words. Wrote 1,800 words for VD 2.0 CH 6-22. Next time, I finally get to write the museum chapter!

2024-01-26: Wrote 1,380 words for the Microsoft segment, proofed the Rundown, and got everything ret-2-go. The ret-2-go part actually takes me, like, 20/30 minutes due to how WordPress does not understand GoogleDocs formatting, so I need to manually center the headers, widen the separators, and manually choose the images from my WordPress library. I used to be able to just copy the link and have the software read it but noooo! Now I need to add the image, center it, and apply the link! …And I only got around to writing 900 words for VD 2.0 CH 6-22. It was late and I was tired.

2024-01-27: So… Cassie and I wound up playing 6 hours of Palworld together and that kinda spent all the time I had lined up for writing today. Between chores and work, I was not able to write until 23:15, and at that point, I was too drained to really resume writing anything. Who starts something after 23:00 and has it go well? People with bad sleep schedules, that’s who! …Also, Cassie stayed up until, like, 4:00 her time playing with me. She is a true MMOer…

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Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp
Acts 1, 2, and 3 Progress Report:

…Yeah, I am definitely not going to get to Act 3 in time. I just lack the drive and passion after writing so much for one story. I’ll do an announcement next week.

Current Word Count: 277,499

Estimated Word Count: ~500,000

Total Chapters: 48

Chapters Outlined: 42

Chapters Drafted: 26

Chapters Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 122