This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: How Are ‘Real’ Video Games Profitable? Mk2
• Natalie Rambles About Roblox For Way Too Long (All Because of a Potential Nothingburger)
• Looks Like Ubisoft is Crumbling… (They Just Keep Letting Us Down, Letting Us Down…)
• PlayStation 5 Pro Announced ($700 And They Don’t Even Give You A Disc Drive…)
• THE GREAT UNITY TURNAROUND! (Unity Axes Runtime Fees After Destroying Their Brand)
• So Long, I Guess, Annapurna Interactive (The Entire Annapurna Interactive Staff Resigned)
• Drats! Generative AI Found Natalie.TF! (I Got 3,339 Page Views In A Day)

---

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
How Are ‘Real’ Video Games Profitable? Mk2

In assembling this week’s topics, there was one recurring theme to everything. Not a particularly unique theme, but one that regularly fascinates me in terms of the world of gaming. Money. Meaning that I think it is time to revisit the age-old question of “How Are ‘Real’ Video Games Profitable?” that I asked 50 weeks back.

As a tax accountant, the topic of money is one that consumes my daily life, and I like to think I understand it pretty decently. While I understand money on an individual or small business level, things get murky when expanding into a major company or industry. Which is my way of saying I am mystified at how major video games make the money they do or rake in the profits they do.

Now, I naturally understand the fundamentals. Companies sell products, monetize them, and make money from these transactions, while incurring substantial costs of revenue in the form of industry standard 30% fees or the significant costs of physical games. Expenses are tied between the mundane shit that every company needs to pay for— rent, utilities, computers, equipment, software subscriptions, contract labor, consulting, legal fees, accounting, etc. And due to the fact that games take way too long to make— we need more PS2-ass games made in PS2-ass timescales. And video games need allocated funding, which can take the form of liabilities, equity, or more likely regular payments from the publishers that cover development costs with an extra markup above cost.

I understand the mechanics of the equation, but I do not understand how the products can be profitable unless the sales are immense. Part of my lack of understanding is due to how secretive the games industry is when it comes to accounting. Box office numbers for films and budgets are common knowledge, yet nobody is really sure about how much games cost— when I know they have the financials to show it!

As such, any financial analysis will involve a lot of guesstimating, which I always hate doing when dealing with barely any tangible information. Furthermore, even when a company is public, they never show people the FULL details to indicate how the day-to-day business works. I don’t know how many people have seen a balance sheet for a small corp or partnership, but the full details typically have descriptive names and are fully transparent. Subcategories clearly lay out how things are being funded and give both decision makers, and accountants, clear ideas of where money is going and areas to investigate to minimize costs.

However, the consolidated financial statements of public companies do not do this. Instead of dividing revenue by product, which is such an obviously useful categorization, they just say… total revenue. This lack of detail and transparency makes it really hard for me to grasp the full ramifications of what is going on at a company. Part of this is deliberate, as investors do not care about the precise details of a company, and companies like to hide as much information as possible from the government and regulators. Trying to gauge the true nuts and bolts financials of a big company with publicly traded financials is tricky when one has all the information, and basically impossible when you don’t.

As such, I think the only way to really understand the art of making money in games is to look at smaller independent studios. …Who have zero reason to disclose their financials, meaning I need to break them down using guesswork and assumptions. Still, I feel the need to understand how games make or don’t make money on some level… and this past week I stumbled upon an example! Not sure if it is a good example, but we’ll get there. 

1000xRESIST is an adventure game with a striking art style and engrossing story by Vancouver-based developers Sunset Visitor. It was critically lauded, has an overwhelming positive rating on Steam, and was released on various PC storefronts in addition to Switch on May 9, 2024 for $20. I have it on my list of hundreds of games to maybe possibly check out. This past week, after four months on the market, Sunset Visitor announced the game had sold over 25,000 units. 

…When I saw that figure, I assumed that this meant the game bombed. Instead, the developers said that the game did well enough for them to keep the lights on, fund a Japanese localization, move to a bigger office, and begin work on their next game. That’s great news! …But how the hell does that even work? This requires some investigating and accounting! 

Step One: Revenue

So, how much money did 1000xRESIST make? Well, the simple-minded approach is to take the base price, $20, and multiply it by the units sold, 25,000, which gives us $500,000 USD. Except this is already contentious.

The thing about game prices is that every game actually has multiple prices due to regional pricing. USD may be the de facto currency in the English-speaking internet world, but modern storefronts all support regional pricing, and most regional pricing offers games at a discount. This includes 1000xRESIST, whose regional price details can be seen here. UK and European customers need to pay a bit more, while Latin/South American and Asian customers pay less. A pretty standard spread. As such, I always feel as if some adjustment needs to be done when determining the raw revenue of a game. The exact adjustment depends on the game, its audience, and its regional pricing. And here… I’m just going to deduct 5%, as I feel that people abusing regional pricing always results in a slight decrease.

That’s $25,000 gone to the wind~! Only $475,000 left!

Secondly, we need to address discounts, but this is fairly simple for a game with as short a shelf-life as 1000xRESIST. Per price charting site IsThereAnyDeal, the game has been on several 10% sales during its first four months, and went for a 20% discount on GOG in late August. It also had a 10% off launch sale for the first two weeks of its release, before undergoing the same discount during the Steam Summer Sale the following month. As such, I feel an adjustment is definitely in order, but to take a full 10% without exact data would be a bit bullish, so I will say it saw an 8% reduction in revenue due to these sales.

$38,000 is a lot of money, but it was lost to discounts! Only $437,000 is left!

Next is the obligatory 30% platform fee. All Switch, Steam, and GOG sales would be subject to this same fee. The title is also available via the Humble Store, which I believe is still charging a 15% fee and a 10% charity charge. Humble Store is not the go-to store for most people, as Steam is easier and GOG is for anti-DRM purists. (Though, I think Humble still gives store purchases both DRM-free copies and Steam keys for applicable games. At least they did 5 years ago.) I’m just going to consider this to be a 30% fee, as that’s probably the most likely.

That’s a resounding $131,100 off the table, bringing the gross revenue down to only $305,900.

Step Two: Funding

The terms around indie devs and indie publishers tend to be things discussed openly in private game dev circles, yet typically do not escape from there. It is possible that Fellow Traveller takes a cut from every sale in addition to platform fees, but I would need to see the contract to understand that. Sometimes publishers take all money until the game recoups the investment they put into the game. Sometimes they take a 30/70 split on top of the 30% platform fees, leaving developers with only 21% of proceeds. Other times they take a small percentage, like 10% to 20% of total proceeds. At least that’s what I’ve gathered from tidbits like this that I’ve happened across over the years.

In doing some light web searching, I found an interview where the developers of 1000xRESIST started the project during the COVID-19 pandemic. It then went through iterations, prototyping, before securing a publisher and funding, leading to a development reboot on June 1, 2021. Fellow Traveller does offer funding options, and doing some more searching, I found a site called Treasure Hunter Fan Club… which was last updated in 2017. Meaning everything on here could be outdated or wrong. Regardless, this website details a three-phase funding repayment plan for developers.

Phase One: The developer pays back their funding. More specifically, 70% of gross product revenue goes to the THFC funding, 5% goes to the financier royalty— whatever that means— and 25% goes to Fellow Traveller. This continues until the funding has been repaid. Or, in more practical terms, the game has made back 100%/70% of its funding, which rounds to 143%. This is, naturally, FAR harder than getting back 100% of the initial funding.

Phase Two: Once the initial funding has been fully repaid, a new breakdown is adopted. 55% goes to the developer, the first dollars they actually made off the game. 25% to Fellow Traveller, 5% to the financier royalty, and 20% to THFC. This continues until THFC has made back double their investment in the project, which means the game needs to make… 100%/20% plus 100%/70%… 643% of its initial budget back. Basically, no games do this aside from mega hits. 

Phase Three: After the game has made back 643% of its initial funding, 25% goes to Fellow Traveller, 5% to the financier royalty, and the devs finally get a sweet 70% of their gross proceeds. Which sounds like a lot, but per the aforementioned 30% fee, this only translates to 49%. Meaning, even in the BEST case scenario, developers are seeing less than half of each sale.

Assuming that these terms applied to Sunset Visitor, assuming that they did not receive any external funding, and assuming that the gross revenue from 1000xRESIST was $305,900, we can do some math again. 

Per the statement released by Sunset Visitors, it seems that the game has become profitable, meaning the first phase of funding repayment must have been cleared. Meaning the game’s budget must have been less than 70% of its gross revenue. That would be $214,130, or $215,000, just to make the number easier to digest.

…Yeah, there is no way you can make a game over the span of three years with a budget like that, unless you are a solo dev. And this game was not made by a solo dev. Per the MobyGames credits listing, it was made by a small team, about 40 people, not counting voice actors, publishing staff, and playtesters. Just going off of the credits, it seems like the core day-to-day development was led by Remy Siu, Kodai Yanagawa, N. Tan, and Colin J. MacDougall. With narrative designers Pinki Li and Conor Wylie and composers Line Katcho and Drew Redman possibly not working on the project for its entire development. Once the story is done and the game is in QA, the story folks typically move on to new projects, and composers could write the music for a game in a few months depending on the scope. 

Okay, okay, so… there is absolutely no way in hell that this project could make up its budget if it abided by these funding terms, with this little revenue. Does that mean there was outside funding? …Yes, and a lot of it!

Step Three: Canadian Arts Money

Going by the game’s credits, 1000xRESIST received funding from various Canadian arts funds. A great feature of functional governments that, sadly, has never really taken off in the United states, a nation that has never produced a single art in its 248 year history. Checking the official websites of these organizations, I was able to find how much some of these organizations committed to the project. Also, I am assuming that all of these funds were in CAD.

• Canada Media Fund committed $486,376.00 CAD to the project in fiscal year 2021.
• Creative BC committed $50,000 CAD to the project.
• The British Columbia Arts Council committed $184,575.00 CAD to Remy Siu (Remus Siu), the founder of Sunset Visitor and the game’s creative director, across 2017 to 2020. …Which does not seem to be related to this game, but I’m going to count them anyway.
• UBCP/ACTRA committed some scholarship to the game, which, based on their website, caps out at $10,000 CAD per person per lifetime. It is possible that multiple of these were taken for the project, but I have no good way to tell. I’m just calling this $10,000 CAD.

It is possible there were other funding sources beyond these, I just gathered them from the aforementioned credits list. But this alone accounts for $730,951 CAD. …Which was distributed over several years, some of which saw wild inflation, and this is all CAD. As of writing, this is worth $538,150 USD, so that is the number I will use, even though it is likely an overstatement due to the Arts Council commitments, as only $59,600 CAD of those funds were received in fiscal year 2020. …Screw it, let’s call this $500,000.

They got approximately, possibly, $500,000 USD from arts funds. Good on them! But assuming that they got this, and they got $215,000 from THFC, that brings the total budget to $715,000. …Is that enough to make a game of this scale?

Step Four: What’s the Budget?

Now, this is the part that always gets to me when trying to determine a game’s budget, as there is so much guesswork involved without a proper accounting. However, I can make some broad guesses. Assuming that the game was in development for three years, the assumed core full-time developers, Remy Siu, Kodai Yanagawa, N. Tan, and Colin J. MacDougall must have all received a full-time living wage. Which is hard to gauge, as the cost of living went way up over the past few years, but I’ll throw around some pretend numbers.

They are based in Vancouver and likely all rent apartments, so the living wage would definitely be over $3,000. Though that would be affected by their living situation, roommates, living with parents, etc., and I think doing game dev for anything under $50,000 USD is utter bullshit. …So I am going to use $40,000 a year as the most cynical estimate I can stomach. For four people, across three years, that is $480,000. 

…Well, that already blew past the arts grants and into the back-asswardly assumed THFC funds. $235,000 would remain as the pay for the mocap, voice actors, consultants, sound design, two composers, and two narrative directors. This is all WAY harder to judge, as you now need to guess how long these engagements were for and what the rates were. But I would say that the music should cost at least $50,000 for an 85 track soundtrack. And for an adventure game, a good narrative should be at least $40,000 for each designer. 

That leaves only $105,000 for everything else, and… I can kind of believe that. Independent voice acting pays like butts and is most often done as a passion. Mocap work can be done for increasingly cheap these days and Sunset Visitor has their own mocap room. Consultants can cost anything from a few hundred bucks to tens of thousands depending on one’s needs, and sound design… was largely done by one dude who previously worked on Godfall (2020). Huh.

This is ultimately a deeply flawed analysis due to a lack of information I had ready access to, or general awareness of. But the point of this exercise was to show just how incredibly hard it is to make money with an indie game. I used $40,000 as a figure as a more reasonable salary of $60,000 for a professional lead would tear through this game’s budget in a snap. Same with my treatment of core and non-core dev teams, as they seem to employ the narrative designers full time. I am ignoring all sorts of equipment, supplies, travel, company meals, incidental expenses, or their office rent. I straight up ignored the costs of pre-production and the circa 2023 Unity licenses. And even then, I was only able to barely rationalize a breakeven situation.

The idea that this game succeeded only makes sense if almost all of its funding was provided by government grants… and that might have been the case. I do not have access to their books, so I cannot see where all their money is coming from, and what I hoped to be a simple and easy investigation has grown into something that devoured an evening.

1000xRESIST is a title that received ample funding from government programs, something that very few creators actually can due to the immense levels of competition and limited resources. It has polish, it has a striking look, and it has a slim dev team of skilled and passionate people with experience under their belts. It found its niche, got a great reception from those who played it, and some even called it their favorite game this year. It has a LOT going for it… so how the hell is it only doing Concord numbers, and how is that enough to keep the developer going? How are they considering this a huge success?

I… I don’t know. I don’t know how video games make money and… I don’t think I ever will.

---

Natalie Rambles About Roblox For Way Too Long
(All Because of a Potential Nothingburger)

I know basically nothing about Roblox. I first heard about it in 2016/2017 when Anthony Gallegos talked about using it as a tool to teach kids to make games on The Comedy Button. I have seen both of the People Make Games investigations into Roblox, and thought it looked to be a deeply corrupt platform profiting from child labor. I have seen a few more comedic videos from Dunkey, this one Yakkcomm video, and know that it is obscenely huge, but that game’s something well beyond my purview. Even though I really should pay attention to it, as Roblox is one of the highest grossing games of all time. 

Seriously, in 2023 the Roblox Corporation made 2.8 billion dollars in revenue. And while I cannot be sure if that comes solely from Roblox transactions or other monetization, it probably accounts for the overwhelming majority of their revenue. Meaning that the game is bigger than juggernauts like Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile, which made $1.48 and $1.11 billion respectively. (The source I linked also reports the revenue of Roblox, but that is only the mobile version.)

I would feel bad for having such blind spots, but the reason why I have these blind spots can be attributed to… me just not having the tools needed to understand these things during their initial rise. Growing up, I was an eMac kid and didn’t start using Windows until 2013, when I was 18. I completely missed the initial rush of Roblox, as my fake computer could barely run the 2009 alpha of Minecraft in creative mode. As for mobile gaming, I was a cheap-ass who was trying to save money for surgery, so I didn’t even get a real phone until August 2019, because I had to for work. But I should be more in-tune with games like Roblox now, considering how big it is. Unfortunately, Roblox kind of splintered off and was never seen as part of ‘gaming’ as defined by the console and PC enthusiasts who, whether intentionally or not, partitioned gaming into several distinct categories. But they can largely be defined as console/PC games and mobile/casual service games.

In fact, I already went on a tangent about this in the initial draft, so… it’s story time kids!

Back in the late 2000s, there were PC game fans and console game fans, separated by both genre and hardware. Yet they often cluttered together as both communities respected each other enough to coexist and co-mingle. I mean, if you were talking about video games on a computer, you had a computer. However, these communities were always less receptive to ‘casual games’. Whether they be flash games, browser-based experiences, Wii games, or small titles that did not fit within the communal idea of what games should be. 

When mobile games became a thing in the early 2000s, there was some desire to treat them seriously, but that quickly faded away due to numerous factors. The technical limitations of hardware like the N-Gage, which could do a lot, but never do something well. The cumbersome controls of many early phone games— if you never tried playing Snake on a squishy number pad, you know the pain. And the fact that most of the games of this era, for these systems, were kinda shit. Well, at least in America. Japan had some great-ass phone games, but they’re at death’s door because preservation in Japan is pretty fringe.

Once the mobile market entered the iPhone era however, things began changing rapidly. There was an age of successful and well-designed arcade-style hit games of the titles, like Cut the Rope (2010) and Fruit Ninja (2010). Graphical showcases like Infinity Blade (2010) that left players wondering what the future of mobile gaming could be. And things generally looked pretty bright. Well, for those who could afford a smartphone at least. 

Remember, this was during The Great Recession. However, around 2012 or so, when Clash of Clans (2012) and Candy Crush (2012) came out, things began to change. The smartphone market was opening wide, becoming more accessible, and more developers were looking at mobile. However, the monetization and design model was beginning to shift. 

Game publishers discovered the golden formula of monetization. To have an entry price of nothing, rewards that kept players coming back every day, and give players constant opportunities to spend using their saved credit card. To shift from developing packaged games… to developing live services. Games designed to consume all of a player’s time, lock them in a game loop, and help erode their resistance until they started paying for feature or progression aids.

This was around the time that major gaming sites stopped really reporting on mobile games as much, and when animosity toward mobile games was at its height. It had already heated up in the preceding years with countless companies making desperate pivots to mobile or declaring that consoles were dead. The console and PC enthusiasts began to other mobile gaming, and it became seen as something different from ‘real gaming.’ Even though mobile would overtake ‘real gaming’ in terms of revenue by… 2018.

A divide formed, and as mobile-driven live services were on the rise, console game enjoyers were doing their best to distance themselves from mobile game fans. …Even as they bought $100 in loot boxes in Overwatch (2016) and EAST AR Wars Battlefront II (2017). This divide continued… even as console and PC game-likers continued to engage in live services on consoles. To them, they were different! You used a controller ‘n’ shit! This only got more hypocritical when games like Fortnite and Genshin Impact began the modern trend of what I call ‘true-cross-platform live services.’ Games that are on every platform and feature a design that caters to all of them. For console or PC players, they are just regular-ass games. For mobile players… they are regular-ass games by virtue of their ubiquity and popularity. 

It’s an approach that has led some developers to assume that they could merely develop single-player single-purchase titles for all platforms, but after a decade of training, mobile players are not inclined to pay for a game. Only for things within a game. As seen by the recent sales failures of Capcom’s latest releases for the iPhone 15 Pro. …But I’m drifting so far away from the topic at hand that I’ve almost forgotten what it was. 

Editing Natalie Here! This tangent really has nothing to do with anything, but I was happy with how it turned out, so I’m keeping it in! If you don’t like it… block Natalie.TF on your router, because you’re a totally uncool joker!

The point is that Roblox is a blind spot for me, just like with a lot of alleged gaming enthusiasts. However, I know to recognize it as something of great importance by virtue of its size— according to my arithmetic, in 2023, Roblox accounted for over 1.5% of all revenue in the world of gaming. So I naturally perked my head out of my shell when I heard that Roblox was planning on opening up a traditional games store. As in, a marketplace for Roblox creators to sell games for real American Fiat, rather than the Robux company scrip they use to skirt around international and labor gambling laws. (No, I’m not kidding, Roblox is an even worse cosmetic market than CSGO, as it is marketed toward children. It’s embarrassing that the SEC missed this. We really need SOX 2.0.)

Now, this would be a kind of nothing story, but the kicker is that this is actually WAY better than the absolute injustice that devs normally have to deal with. Roblox developers can change Robux for their games or include microtransactions, but they must abide by an abhorrent 75% platform fee. It is so bad that I cannot imagine how anybody can make a functional business in Roblox without abuse. But under this new fiat storefront, creators will only be charged 25% to 50% fees, depending on the price tag of the transaction. A 50% fee on $10 purchases, 40% on $30 purchases, and a 25% fee on $50 purchases.

This… could be a big change for the independent game market, as Roblox players tend to mostly stay within the realm of Roblox. It’s how they maintain 68.4 million daily active users. Serving higher quality experiences to them could be very lucrative for the right team, especially if they have experienced professionals on staff. …Or this entire idea could be ill-conceived from the start.

You see, the majority of Roblox players are very young, lack a credit card, and if they spend any money in the game, it’s because an adult bought them Robux. Kids spend these Robux like… kids. Either they hoard them up for big ticket items they want, they spend them on silly cosmetics, or try their hand at trading cosmetics and market manipulation. (The economy would be fucking sick if kids were allowed to day trade, I swear to Erinlingo Hucklebee.)

Point is, the kids only have Robux, not fiat, and they cannot get fiat unless they have a debit card or credit card. I know I had a bank account since I was 13 or so, got a credit card when I was 18, and while I tried looking up some stats on what kids these days are using… I’m not sure if I believe these figures. How can 17% of kids ages 8 to 14 have a credit card? I can believe that about 16% of all teenagers had a bank account and debit card circa 2019. But these are from pretty random-ass publications, and I wouldn’t really trust their data. (Note to self, in my next life, launch a website called Natalibel that just publishes libel.)

Point is, I doubt that children will be able to purchase these premium fiat-only experiences… which begs the question of why Roblox Corporation is launching this initiative. If it is done right, it could represent the creation of a truly massive integrated storefront. But this seems like it would only work if they launched ‘Roblox cash cards’ in addition to Robux. …Which would completely solve this problem. 

This storefront idea could represent a pretty big boost to Roblox as a platform and help them better retain players and developers. …Or it could be a big old nothingburger that will shut down a year after its projected 2025 release. I don’t know which! But I thought this was an interesting experiment regardless, and I WILL devote segments to dumber topics going forward. That’s a gamble with a 100% success rate! No gacha!

---

Looks Like Ubisoft is Crumbling…
(They Just Keep Letting Us Down, Letting Us Down…)

Ubisoft-Tencent— gosh, am I really going to do that to any company with even a paltry 10% ownership from Tencent? I guess so! And by that metric, I should probably prefix “Saudi Arabia’s” to SNK and Nexon. Or does the S in SNK now stand for Saudi? Saudi Nihon Kikaku sounds like some shit you’d read in a crappy über-racist spy novel published in 1983 (meaning I love it, ironically). So I’m going to try to remember to use that going forward. (If you couldn’t tell, I hate investment conglomerates.)

…Anyway, the story here is that Ubisoft has been having a rough past year.

Skull and Bones (2024) was a ripe load of rotting bollocks that seemingly sold considerably less than a million units in its first week, which is not good for a game that took a decade and over $200 million to produce.

XDefiant (2024) was meant to be their next big live service shooter, and while it did decently at first, it fell off like a wet turd and is at risk of getting shut down. They are giving people $9 in fun bucks in hopes they’ll pitch in a dollar to get a $10 goodie and go from player to payer.

Star Wars Outlaws (2024) failed to meet its critical expectations, being largely considered good, not great, and narrowly avoiding Metacritic’s mid range, which led JP Morgan to slash their sales forecast by 2 million. …Wait, the scum-barons at JP Morgan track game sales? Are these predictions public? Because while I would not trust these market manipulating fuck-sticks to read the market, I would find that interesting.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (2024) was celebrated for just being good-ass games, but the title only made an estimated $15 million in its first two weeks. Which is not a lot for a game that started development in 2019 and had a core staff of 94 and hundreds of other roles. 

And while Assassin’s Creed: Mirage (2023) managed to sell 5 million units on a slimmer budget, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (2023) only saw 1.9 million players after eight weeks. Which, as a millionaire I used to work for would say, is not sexy!

The underwhelming performance of these titles, and many others released over the past few years, have soured Ubisoft’s shareholders. The share price is at a ten-year-low, having fallen well under $3 after being over $20 in February 2021. And one Swedish hedge fund was so upset with their performance that they wrote an open letter calling the company to go private and remove its CEO, Yves Guillemot. A man who oversaw widespread systematic abuse at the company and who should have 95% of his assets seized by the world governments.

I find this story interesting as Ubisoft… is a peculiar figure in the modern climate of the games industry, as they never really found success in live services. At least, not the sort of success that allows them to bankroll the rest of their company. They tried with Rainbow Six: Siege (2015), For Honor (2017), Hyper Scape (2020), and Roller Champions (2021). But they have never found their big money maker. No NBA 2K, no Football Club, no John Madden’s American Football, no Call of Duty: Sponsored by the US Army, and no GTA. 

Ubisoft got really good at creating girthy and heavily monetized open world titles, but as the market shifted to more online offerings, they found themselves with rising dev costs and a reduced playerbase. I can easily see why someone would eschew the latest Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed for any of the open world live services on the market. Games that offer way more content for free, and probably better experiences for a comparable price tag to their $100 complete game editions. The cracks started appearing with Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint (2019), and it just got worse as more and more titles underperformed.

Now, I know it is WILD for me to say that a company should have focused more on live services over single-player games. However, when a company is as enormous as Ubisoft, they need to be everywhere and leverage their IP as much as they can. They need to calculate how these big projects are released, how they are presented, and how to get the most eyes on them. Instead, they have been canceling projects like their The Division live service and that Ghost Recon battle royale. I’m not going to say that I could do much better at managing 19,000 people, but I do know that something needs to change. …And I think that they should start by booting Guillemot. Yes, I know he was the founder, that his family owns 14%, but after nearly 40 years, he’s made too many damn mistakes.

---

PlayStation 5 Pro Announced
($700 And They Don’t Even Give You A Disc Drive…)

It has been 11 years since the release of the PlayStation 4, and while sales have slowed down to a crawl, it’s still a relevant console. If someone only has a PS4, there is still a large number of modern titles that they can still enjoy. This is rather unprecedented in the console sector, as while there have been claims of consoles with a decade-long lifespan in the past, that hasn’t been a thing since the Famicom (1983 to 1994). (The PS2 was dead before 2010.) There are many reasons for this. Similar architecture between past and current gen makes developing a PS4 version relatively simple. 

The current economic climate and initial stock issues with the PS5 have prevented many customers from upgrading, so the PS4 maintains a high number of DAU, WAU, and MAU. Aside from show-stopping AAA titles, most games simply do not need the upgraded specs of the PS5 and could run just fine on PS4 level hardware. The Switch is weaker than the PS4, so… why not also throw everything that runs on Switch onto the PS4? And game publishers know that the more systems you launch on, the more money you can make.

Because of this situation, there has been something of a dearth of games that truly feel like ‘next gen’ experiences. In part because so few games were fully designed for and around this new hardware. Sony was supporting the PS4 with first-party titles as of last year, and there are precious few PS5 (console) exclusives:

• Astro’s Playroom (2020)
• Demon’s Souls (2020)
• Destruction AllStars (2021)
• Returnal (2021)ᴬ
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2021)ᴬ
• Final Fantasy XVI (2023)ᴬ
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023)ᴮ
• Quantum Error (2023) (This game may or may not actually exist)
• Silent Hill: The Short Message (2024)
• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024)ᴮ
• Helldivers II (2024)ᴬ
• Rise of the Ronin (2024)
• Stellar Blade (2024)ᴮ
• Concord (2024)ᴬ (RIP)
• Astro Bot (2024)

ᴬ – Game was also ported to PC

ᴮ – Game will be ported to PC at a later date

While this past year has seen a considerable boom to their library, at four years in, it still feels as if developers have just started to use the console’s new capabilities. Admittedly, you could say the same thing about the PS4 during the first 3 years of its life. The system was loads more powerful than what came before, and the PS4 did not get a killer app until Bloodborne (2015). However, technical problems were still present in numerous games of that era. 2014 was a clusterfuck of glitchy releases and suboptimal performance, so there was a desire for greater power. In 2024 though? Eh… nicht so sehr.

Despite this, Sony has gone and announced the PlayStation 5 Pro as their next revision of the PS5 after launching the slim model last year. What exactly does this new device offer and how does it make games better? …Well, you know how a lot of PS5 games let players choose between a fidelity and performance mode? Higher resolution at 30 fps or lower resolution at 60 fps? Well, the PS5 Pro basically lets players have the best of both worlds in addition to having better ray tracing. 

…The good news is that the PlayStation 5 Pro available on November 7, 2024.

The bad news is that the PlayStation 5 Pro costs $700. …Just like the 3DO!

Like everybody else, I need to talk about the price situation here. For those blessed by stable American prices, the PlayStation 5 digital edition debuted at $400 in 2020, then had a soft price increase to $450 with the slim model in 2023. Meaning that the PS5 Pro costs $250 more. …And that is the part I take umbrage with! If one were to wait until Black Friday season, when this system is launching, there are so many things that one could get instead. An Xbox Series S for $250, some Switch bundle for $250, or buy a stack of new games to play for any system. 

For an extra $250, this is a very minor upgrade. I think the differences between performance and graphics in the games shown in PlayStation’s official reveal of the PS5 Pro did precious little to sell the power of the new hardware. It looks better when zoomed in, sure, but the differences are so scarce that it’s hard to see this as a worthwhile upgrade. We are reaching the point where graphical advances are barely perceptible, and I think it really shows with this. Especially if you have an outdated display like me. 

---

As an aside, I currently use two ASUS VS239H-Ps as my monitors. They’re just basic 23-inch, 1080p, 60 Hz, IPS displays, but have good coloring. I have been using this as my main display for nine years. I love it, but I would also be happy to upgrade to two 23-inch, 1600p, 16:10, HDR, 120fps monitors, but they are stupid expensive. I bought my old monitors for like $100/$120, and comparable monitors are still going for as much, so I’m less inclined to spend twice or thrice that on a new monitor while my old ones still work. …Shit, I should have asked around when I was at MicroCenter with Cassie. The nice folks there could have helped me.

Akumako: “Do they even make monitors with those specs? Who the fuck even uses a 16:10 monitor these days? Aren’t people busy creaming all over their ultra-wides?”

Silly foxes, like Cassie, are into ultra-wides, but not me! So much modern UI is based on scrolling and vertical screen space is at a premium. A standard browser window tab, URL, and Windows taskbar uses a lot of space, but if one was using a 16:10 monitor, they would basically gain all the space used by the browser UI. I used a 16:10 monitor for a few years, but it was a 1680 by 1050 display, and a 1080p display felt bigger, because it was. However, I regularly find myself strapped for vertical space during my daily computing, so I keep thinking that would be a better approach. …Except I need to do a lot of screen sharing, and people might think it looks weird or wrong compared to a 16:9 display. 

Akumako: “I think most people are dumb and wouldn’t even notice.”

You’re probably right.

Akumako: “Now get back to talkin’ bout PlayStation, ya fuck!”

---

I think the PlayStation 5 Pro is a very underwhelming piece of hardware, I do not see it doing particularly well, and I think it is simply unnecessary with where games are at right now. Power is not the problem. Games do not need to keep pushing greater technical, fidelity, or performance heights. Publishers need to chill the hell out with their pursuits of better graphics. Hardware like this just does not help anyone or anything, and supporting it will just consume more development time, resources, and energy, all so a few can see games look marginally better. 

…Despite this, I just know that this will sell millions. I thought the PlayStation Portal was an absolute waste of technology, but it has done rather well. Probably better than the PSVR2.

---

THE GREAT UNITY TURNAROUND!
(Unity Axes Runtime Fees After Destroying Their Brand)

On September 12, 2023, Unity Technologies shot itself right in the dick. The game engine developer made the bold decision to change its monetization strategy by introducing a runtime fee, where publishers would need to pay every time a Unity game is installed on a new device. This was a stupid decision that made absolutely no sense, as Unity does not need to do anything when their software is installed on a new device. And it was just a downright terrible look for the company, as they were introducing a new type of fee that disproportionately hurt smaller developers. They tried to revise things later, but it didn’t work. Trust was already broken.

I covered this story in my September 17, 2023 and September 24, 2023 Rundowns, and even did some mock math to determine a scenario of how these Runtime fees would be applied. They ranged from frustrating to just straight up egregious. I won’t go over the details, but after witnessing this trash fire for about two weeks, I ended my discussion of the topic with the following line:

“So, Unity, I’m sorry, but you just lost. It’s done. It’s over. You had it. You lost it. And you’ll never get it back again.”

Natalie Neumann, Rundown (9/24/2023) Ai’s Time Warp and Premise Predicament

I still completely agree with this sentiment and believe that developers should focus on using engines like Tencent’s Unreal Engine and the open source Gadot.

On September 12, 2024, Unity Technologies canceled its runtime fee… and increased the prices for their software yet again. Unity Pro— needed for any developer making over $200,000 a year in revenue or funding, now costs $2,200 a year per seat. They used to have a plan only costing about $400 a year, Unity Plus, but that was removed as part of the Runtime fee fiasco. 

On a sheer price level… Unity seems like such a shitty deal that no developer should go for it. I don’t care what features they have, this is utter bullshit next to Unreal’s 5% royalty on sales after the first million dollars. And compared to Godot, which is limited but free and open source? No. Unity just is not worth this much money, and I would urge developers to stay away from it, starve them out, and make them desperate for customers. And even then… I will not trust the company until its leadership has undergone a 90% turnover, or it’s dead.

Unity has violated the trust of game developers, and I do not believe that they should be treated with anything but scorn and disdain. They took advantage of them, tried to steal from them, and while I understand they need to make money, they could also… just get better at business. 

Even after laying off 25% of their staff earlier this year, I still do not know why Unity needs approximately 5,000 people working for them, when they only have one major product, the Unity engine. (I’m saying they over-hired, not agreeing with the layoffs. Fuck layoffs.) Sure, they have a grab bag of subsidiaries, but I do not think any of them are that major. Epic has about 4,000, but hundreds of those are developing Fortnite (2017), and hundreds are spread between major subsidiaries like ArtStation, Harmonix, Psyonix, and Sketchfab. 

But even if they managed their headcount better… these dumbasses think it’s okay to hire a new CEO with a base salary of $850,000— a lot, but not disgusting. A $2 million bonus— okay, that’s a bit— and a million shares of restricted stock. …WHAT? Unity was worth about $25 per share back then, so that is basically a $25 million bonus. …$25 million is enough to keep a family financially secure for at least 4 generations, and they’re just casually throwing that at one dude because he did a good job at the Take-Two Zynga mines. 

Why do that? Why… let me just pull up their financials… why spend $834,625,000 on selling and marketing? Everybody knows who you assholes are! And how can your selling expenses be that high? This is software, you don’t have door-to-door Unity salesmen! Why spend almost a fifth of your revenue on “other general and administrative expenses”? Why is the cost of revenue over a third of the revenue? A billion in research and development? Yeah, I get that. You need R&D to develop a game engine, maintain it, and it should be the biggest expense. Makes all the sense in the world. But… why does it cost that much? How much more can you improve Unity at this point and add new features?

Unity Technologies is beyond redemption, should not be forgiven, and I want to see the company fall apart. The loss of the Unity engine would be a catastrophic loss for gaming as a whole… but somebody would purchase and keep the engine going if the owners were to fall. And I can almost guarantee they’d do a better job managing it than the current batch of executive shitheads.

---

So Long, I Guess, Annapurna Interactive
(The Entire Annapurna Interactive Staff Resigned)

…So, this just came straight out of nowhere while I was editing this piece. Per a Bloomberg report, the staff at Annapurna Interactive, a renowned indie game publisher, has all resigned. There were discussions about spinning off the company as something separate from Annapurna Pictures. The owner, Megan Ellison, was not interested in this, and the staff… just walked out. They quit, leaving the publisher. This entity responsible for hundreds, maybe thousands, of people getting paid is now being run by a skeleton crew. The developers who signed a contract with them are rightfully worried, as if they don’t get paid, they’ll need to shut down their studios.

…So, how did this happen? Well, the article did not go into detail or speculating what caused this beyond a desire for the company to become independent. But it sounds like there were some intense tensions between the staff of Annapurna Interactive and their owner. This is an extreme reaction that could spell the end for this publisher depending on how things play out, and this will be a good story to keep tabs on going forward. Maybe it has something to do with a mandated change to also publish AAA games, but that seems like a helluva stretch. 

Also, AAA games are not bad in and of themselves. The problem is almost always with the publisher, and a supportive low pressure publisher who lets dev teams set their own deadlines might be a good thing. It is just that bad publishing policies have come to be part of the definition of AAA games in the eyes of many.

I hope that whatever the dispute is over that it is remedied as swiftly as possible. Either the resigned staff are brought back or management brings in a bunch of games publishing staff who were axed by the countless layoffs this past year. But no matter what happens, this is not a good sign for the publisher. Which is a problem, because while they distributed some renowned titles, they don’t have a spotless record. 

As I mentioned last year, Annapurna Interactive has had a history with permitting and allowing abuse to happen between its partner studios. They operate, or operated, under the auteur theory that only dickheads make great art, and you cannot make great art without some suffering. Which is, you know, wrong. 

…And that’s all I have to say. Onto the showstopper!

---

Drats! Generative AI Found Natalie.TF!
(I Got 3,339 Page Views In A Day)

This past week, Natalie.TF had its best day ever! Normally I see over 800 views from over 330 people. The traffic is quite consistent and I try to share what statistics I can with readers, like you Cassie, during my year-end Rambles. However, on September 12, 2024, I saw 3,339 views from 376 visitors. With many of those views coming from years-old reviews, random posts that have gotten less than 50 lifetime views, and image files that I uploaded 10 to 8 years ago. I check my stats semi-regularly, and this is very abnormal. I would ask if I just had one odd viewer who went on a random tear across my website… but I’m 90% sure that this was the result of an AI scraping Natalie.TF for articles and images.

Now, this might not be AI. This might be some web scraper that’s pulling data from my site, and just doing it in a very slow manner. But I doubt that would be interpreted as page views. I know I didn’t incur any additional page views when using Filezilla to back up Natalie.TF last year, when I was feeling paranoid about the future of the internet.

Conceptually, I don’t really care if an AI scrapes my writing, processes it, and uses it to regurgitate information to people. My writing is free, unmonetized aside from some Amazon listings I would distribute for free if I could, and if it can be used to create something that could help people. However, I do take a problem with the monetization of AI, how people are selling things regurgitated by a machine, and how writers, artists, and creatives in general are being treated as fuel for a rapidly growing industry. An industry that could be used for collective good, but capitalism said FUCK THAT!

Also, I have grown very disillusioned with AI, as it simply has not been able to do the things I was initially sold on it doing. I would love to have a digital assistant do organizational shit for me after I speak into the microphone and just have it do it. Organizing my files, cleaning up my email, helping me clean up spreadsheets based on the examples I show it over the span of several months. 

But in my experience, all AI can do is make decent-ish images and sound, if you do not care about continuity, and provide text aid of varying degrees of help. AI lies, searches the internet in a way different from the shit-ified Google, and writes decent starts of stories before cowarding out or landing on some cliche ending. Because this thing doesn’t know anything but cliches! C’mon, you used to be able to get pretty dark with it, ChatGPT! It was like nabbing cool ideas from 4chan before every TSF thread started shitting on trans people! (In fact, here’s a folder I dumped stuff into. I haven’t looked at this shit in YEARS.)

---

Progress Report 2024-09-15

Cassie wanted me to make something of her lying in my bed, so… here you go, ya floof!

But really, I love Cassie. She is my best friend of all time, I’m glad I got to spend that vacation with her, and I enjoy the fact I get to talk to her every day. She’s adorable, fascinating, and deeply eccentric in a way similar yet different from me. We gel together, and I’m glad that she reached out to me.

Genuinely, Natalie.TF is how I have made every social connection I currently have, and every one I have forged after high school middle school. So if you wanna be my friend… email me or add me on Discord. You can find my email on my About Page and you can find me on the Press-Switch, Student Transfer, and Dream Team Studio servers. Now, do I need new friends at the moment? Not really. Because tax season is in full swing, and I’ve got a novel to finish by Election Day.

…I wonder if anybody will recognized that I used an element from the Chinese logo of Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 (2011)? I WISH I knew how to make logos like that…

2024-09-08: Watched The Matrix and the first two episodes of Zombieland Saga with Cassie and the dog friend. I forgot loads of parts of The Matrix, as I had not seen it in 15+ years, but it is still a very good movie. Zombieland Saga is amazing from the first two episodes, having such energy and personality that I immediately fell in love with it. I really wanted to go all out with writing today, but I lost a good 90 minutes to text chats with readers and commenters. So I only passed 5,000 words into PS 1988 Ch 09 before realizing it was 1:30 and I should get ready for bed. Yes, this chapter is long as hell, because I just had to have those extra Japan scenes for fun flavor and feature two exposition dumps. 

2024-09-09: Another work-filled day. Work ended at around 19:00, and I spent the evening working on the 2,400 words for the Roblox and Ubisoft segments. I did have some potential time to work on PS 1988… but I was also almost through a Pokérogue run, so… 

2024-09-10: Wrote the 1,100 word PS5 Pro bit. Wrote 2,300 words for PS 1988, wrapping up Ch 09. FINALLY! Should have started reviewing the outline for the next chapter, but it was 00:40, and I was too fried for that.

2024-09-11: Wrote 2,800 words for the preamble— I really need to fucking stop. Holy shit do I need to STOP going on these tangents! Wrote 600 words for PS 1988, starting Ch 10.

2024-09-12: Wrote 1,700 words for this Rundown, edited it, made the header images. Wrote 1,900 words for PS 1988.

2024-09-13: Another big PS 1988 day! Unfortunately, I had to spend a good two hours re-researching Supreme Court justices circa 1988 to figure out which ones a character should kill. Yep! It’s one of THOSE stories! Finished CH 10 by adding 4,500 words. Meaning I only have… 5 left. Fuck… Also, definitely not hitting that 88k word count. And I cannot stretch it out to 114k either, so that reference is out the window, where it probably should be. (As a reminder, this is a pro-socialist, anti-racist, basically anti-White novel.)

2024-09-14: Busy chore morning followed by work. I was a bit fatigued afterwards, so I had a late start working on PS 1988. Wrote 3,100 words for CH 11, and got close to the part where I can reincorporate older writings. I basically wrote 3,000 words of dialogue during the outlining phase and dating back to, like, 2023. But it was like 1:00 in the morning, and I was not in the mindset to figure out how to bridge talk about toxic nostalgia to talk about the fallacy of how ‘Black people have had a century to catch up to White folks’ and how the 13th amendment basically exists to keep slavery going. Even to the modern day! WHOA!

---

Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Vice X Weiss Vice
Progress Report:

Current Word Count: 77,130

Estimated Word Count: 100,000

Words Edited: 0

Total Chapters: 16

Chapters Outlined: 16

Chapters Drafted: 11

Chapters Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 51