This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: The Pursuit of Optimal Play
- An Impromptu Xbox 360 Retrospective (It Was The Best of Times; It Was The Worst of Times)
- The Embracer Divestment Continues (Cryptic Games and Arc Games Are Buying Themselves, Basically)
- Nintendo Buys Bandai Namco Singapore (This is the Good Kind of Acquisition)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
The Pursuit of Optimal Play
So, this week’s preamble is inspired by a conversation I had with Natalie.TF friend Missy Scrumptious about Pokémon Legends: Z-A and how different our approaches to the game were. How we had ultimately different goals while, extensively, trying to achieve the same thing. Complete the game.
There is a lot of ink to be spilled over the nature of video games, what it means to beat them, clear them, and how structured play is or is not meant to be engaged with. To some, just messing around in a game, interacting with its simulated world, is sufficient enough to be a full play experience. But that is not how I go through games, nor is it how I assume the typical, ideal, and responsible player will go through a game. Ideally, in my mind, a player should be inclined to do just about every reasonable task that the game presents them with, and will strive to achieve them. Effectively, they will pursue it with the same diligence that is expected of a student pursuing an assignment or worker trying to both maintain their job and get in good graces with their taskmasters.
So, what does that mean in a game like PLZA? Well, it is a game full of tasks, objectives, and goals that the player is encouraged to pursue. Completing the main story, completing the postgame story, completing the Pokédex, completing all 100+ side quests, and completing a variety of research tasks for a hierarchy of rewards. Which is in addition to more implicit goals such as reaching a level cap, optimizing the stat spread of Pokémon, and generally accruing power. But for me, it also goes deeper. Pokémon games can be powered through in a weekend— or day if you’re a chic no-lifer— but they are more than that. They are meant to function as miniature semi-online platforms with robust postgame faffing around, creating the veneer of limitless content through repeatable challenges. This, accordingly, imposes a new set of standards upon the player that I think are obvious, but might not be to other people.
For example, as the player engages in these postgame activities, they will inevitably reach level 100 with their team. A feat that some shrug off before going into more EXP rewarding battles with their roster, but I find this approach to be… wasteful, as that EXP could, if not should, go to Pokémon who are below the level cap. And if the player does not have any specific Pokémon in mind, then they should pick one with some level of versatility, or otherwise aesthetic appeal.
Another example is money. The Pokémon series has a strange relationship to money, as you could rarely use it to get everything you want, unlike in real life. In PLZA, money is something the player will naturally accrue oodles of via the postgame tournament, the Infinite Z-A Royale, which they are expected to partake in dozens of times. There is a lot that players can spend money on. Poké Balls for catching more Pokémon, healing items for healing between battles, extra held items, Mega Stones, mints, berries, and also a deluge of outfits for trainer customization. (I would argue that all of these things should be purchasable from a single menu, and in bulk, but what do I know?)
So, what is the player to do when they accrue thousands of dollars with each run of the Infinite Z-A Royale? Why, buy up an excess of goodies, just to have them. Does one every need five of every mint, all Mega Stones, two of each held item, and enough potions to fund an army? No, but if they are given money, they are expected to use it to stockpile and horde things for a rainy day that, most likely, will never come. See The Megalixir Problem. And for clothes… I would argue that the game actively wants the player to buy all of them. The act of finding outfits in the world is so cumbersome and fragmented that it’s hard to visualize an outfit outside of the player’s wardrobe.
Or to phrase this all in a more succinct package, I think that it is logical for the player to set goals, however arbitrary, while playing a game, and one of the easiest arbitrary goals to manage is that of inventory, that of resources. I view this approach of setting goals, of wanting to quantify player progress, as a good and natural part of the process of playing a game for most people. And I think that players who don’t do this, who don’t try to achieve wider of loftier goals, are… not playing the game wrong. But to me, it betrays a cultural understanding of how play should be conducted. Kind of like watching someone dribble a soccer ball before hitting it with a cricket bat. It’s not a wrong use of the materials, but ain’t nobody gonna call it right or proper.
This expectation of how games should be played is something that I have been crystallizing as I have grown older, more frustrated with the world at large, and isolated from the juicy apex of culture— the youths. For example, I would openly say there are only two ways one should ideally engage with a Metroidvania. A 100% playthrough or an any percent speedrun. A leisurely 70% run through that is 20% longer than the average How Long to Beat metric for a casual playthrough is, embracing rudeness, a shit low-effort attempt at playthrough. If one likes a game, they should play it thoroughly, play it well, play it fast, or play it with artificial restrictions to create a more engaging play experience. If they don’t like a game… they should just not be playing it. There are too many things to love in this world to spend time so suboptimally. …Actually, maybe I should add a ‘play for content’ category here…
This all being said, the pursuit of optimal play is something that I routinely struggle to understand with certain games. Even games I like. Because what makes sense to me does not always match what the designers intended, or what their design is built around. Going back to PLZA, Missy informed me that I was playing the Infinite Z-A Royale suboptimally. I was approaching these recurring events as a completionist, focusing on stealth, the bonus cards found on the floor, and collecting spare change littered about. When the actual optimal way to play is to run into battles, as time does not move in battles, and do so over and over again, fast traveling between different areas when battles run dry. This cycle of battlemaxxing was to be repeated recklessly, with little time spent grabbing cards or tokens, in order to optimize a player’s monetary rewards.
I did not independently recognize this as optimal play because, well, it’s outright ignoring mechanics in some regards and going against the implicit instructions of the tutorial. And I view that as either a failing of me, as a player, or of the game itself. Which one? Hell if I know. Because for as much as I strive to play games logically, optimally, or in a way to maximize both progression and enjoyment, achieving this requires learning the language of the game and getting along with it.
Does a game want the player to approach combat aggressively or defensively? How much exploration is required? Does the placement of certain objects or interactables imply that the player must modify their approach within this environment? Are they supposed to actually use the weapons if they are just gonna blow up in their hands? What is the most effective means to accrue power and does doing so feel like an exploit or a meaningful experience to enhance the enjoyment factor by minimizing friction and frustration? Or should the player just tolerate the gameplay, because they are there for the characters and exploration above all else?
There is not always a single correct way to get the most out of a game. I can fully understand why someone might not understand what a game wants from them, because I have been there many times before. …But what I cannot stand, what drives me nuts, is when people look at these stated goals and tasks and say ‘nay, I don’t give a shit about that.’ To me, it’s the equivalent to someone taking a class with the intention of bombing it just to maintain their status as a full-time student. Or someone choosing to not do their homework because they don’t see it as important. They don’t consider it a responsibility or job worth doing. What I CANNOT stand, nor tolerate, is when someone just chooses not to pursue things that are clearly being assigned to them, because they don’t care.
To me, this is just a form of laziness, of choosing not to engage with something on the level that is clearly desired or expected. I can understand if someone just lacks motivation or the attention required to engage with something. But there are some forms of unoptimized play that just infuriate me. Like people who avoid all side quests in a game. Or people who decry game stories, as a collective medium, as being bad, blasé, or bereft of quality, while simultaneously skipping through any cutscene they see, and refusing to read more than five lines of text. It’s like watching someone eat the cheese, sauce, and toppings off of their pizza and leaving all the bread behind. I can get leaving behind the crust, because some people have weird mouthfeel issues when it comes to crunchy things. But if one wants such a curated or limited experience, then… why are you here? Your needs would be better served by something else.
Akumako: “Are you prepping on going on some tirade against people who don’t like catching Pokémon in Pokémon games?”
No, but that does piss me off because… literally what are you actually here for? If you don’t like noodles, why the HELL are you making mac and cheese?
Akumako: “You’re in the weeds again. Wasn’t this supposed to be a follow-up to a private discussion with Bimbo Audino.”
Nah, Bimbo Audino’s some pervert TF artist who sometimes does TSF. This was a conversation with Missy Scrumptious, the fat Audino.
Akumako: “…This lore gets dumber every week!”
An Impromptu Xbox 360 Retrospective
(It Was The Best of Times; It Was The Worst of Times)
This past month has been the 20th anniversary of the Xbox 360. An event that has caused many to reassess the passage of time, what it means to be retro, and reflect back on a console that stuck with them as their go-to entertainment device for a significant part of their life.
However, with all this recollecting, I am more struck by how… twisted the perception of the Xbox 360 tends to be, as it was one of the few consoles in living memory to undergo a shift, if not overhaul, in its identity. Quite simply, what the Xbox 360 was in 2005 was not what the system was when it was sunset in 2013. And a lot of iconic memetic cultural memories of the Xbox 360 are relegated to the first half of its lifecycle. But before explaining this divide, I need to embellish in some history repacking.
In 2005, the Xbox 360 was the most powerful console on the market, a true next generation games machine, and the first significant power boost in over 5 years. Its games were flashy, pretty, and the console was designed around TVs that had yet to be priced down to affordable prices for the average customer. (And even then it would take them a few years before they got actually good.) It was only $300, which is like $500 in today’s dollars, and was home to an impressive, if not iconic, line up of titles. I don’t just mean the launch titles. Those get too much attention and I find the fixation on them to be passé. If you look at everything that came out from launch leading up to the banger holiday 2007 release period, and were playing every major release, you were enjoying some of the most premium and quality gaming experiences of that era.
Yes, yes, the titles of this era almost universally wore some scuff marks from the transition to HD. But they were capable of image quality and resolutions that the PS2 could… theoretically capture, and effects that just could not be done without half a gig or RAM or whatever. They were capable of a level of variety that just was not widely seen on other consoles due to the introduction of Xbox Live Arcade titles. A new type of marketplace that allowed developers to experiment with smaller titles with no physical production costs, and gave way to a truly diverse library. One that was only enhanced by Xbox Live Community Games, formerly Xbox Live Indie Games.
However, it was not just the titles, it was the presentation of the console itself. Consoles leading up to this point had their own menus and interfaces for memory management. Start up screens had already etched themselves into the gamer zeitgeist, and the original Xbox was positioned, to some extent, as a multimedia device. But it was only with the Xbox 360 and its iconic blades interface, with its integrated online store, online play, and online features, where consoles gained a true UX identity. This was paired with an exaggerated mid-2000s advertising campaign that gave the Xbox 360 a powerful identity that made it seem more than just a device to play DVDs and video games. It was an entertainment center created back when striking designs, bold textures, and bright colors were in.
…Then there was the Red Ring of Death, one of the worst hardware defects in modern memory. This defect forced Microsoft to process, repair, and ship out Xbox 360s to millions of people, an endeavor that cost the company billions of dollars, and threatened to take people’s beloved consoles from them due to design oversights. Microsoft tried to make the most of this situation, but it’s a small miracle that this did not destroy whatever momentum that they had. Instead, that momentum was destroyed by something more deeply related to its brand and library.
You see, the Xbox 360 did not maintain this same identity throughout its life. And this early era of the system, 2005 to 2008, almost feels like its own distinct console. There was not one single clear dividing point, but everything began to change when they released the New Xbox Experience in November 2008. A UX overhaul that ditched the slick blades interface for… a bunch of boxes and columns that you had to scroll through, paired with Mii-like avatars that lacked the same charm and largely existed as a way to sell digital outfits. It was different, it was seen as worse, robbing the system of its identity, and marked a change behind the scenes at Microsoft.
As they entered 2009, Microsoft was making some significant changes with their first-party titles. They were not funding as many exclusive games, a bit too full of themselves and their successful four years on the market. Instead, they were putting resources into another pillar, a peripheral that would define the latter years of the system. Xbox Kinect.
I have said before that the seventh generation of games consoles was the best and the worst of times. It had some truly incredible games, saw the rise of online gaming, the resurgence of PC gaming via Steam, and the only good era for mobile gaming. But nearly every hardware focused innovation was a dead-end innovation. Something that might have lasted two generations, but was written off and left to decay in the dustbin of gaming history. Motion controls, dual screen gaming, peripheral-driven gaming à la Rock Band. But the biggest dead end, in my book, was Microsoft’s souped up EyeToy, The Kinect. A voice controlled camera capable of scanning the human body in an attempt to make games more… accessible? Well, it worked as a novelty to lure in the casual audience who was hooked into gaming with the Wii, yet lost interest after enjoying the system for a year or two.
I am using the word novelty here not out of disdain for the technology, but because of how Kinect was received and treated. Not as something to genuinely enhance any game in a strict mechanical sense. But as something different, something that you just needed to try. This led the Xbox 360 to have a huge boon in sales during the 2010 holiday season, with Kinect bundles flying off the shelves and developers being urged to not develop Xbox 360 games, but Kinect games.
This resulted in the catalog of exclusive controller-based titles to diminish during the latter half of the 360s life. Most major releases were iterative franchise fare like Gears of War 3 (2011) or Halo 4 (2012) and multiplatform releases that performed best on Xbox 360, as the PS3 was never easy to develop for. The system was still around, still being bought, and games were selling for it, but there were increasingly few games to look forward to on Xbox. Meanwhile, the PS3 had a hefty run of great exclusives late into its life, with The Last of Us being the big one. (Which sucks, as that game ultimately harmed gaming more than it helped it. But that’s a topic for another day!)
I think something that is often ignored or implied when people highlight the failure that was the Xbox One reveal. How the cultural landscape around Microsoft and Xbox was beginning to shift. The Xbox 360 had a great run from 2005 to 2008, where it felt like the force that was defining console gaming. Gaming in its best, most concentrated, and purest form. A game system full of games for Gamers. A continuation of the heights of the PS1 and PS2 generations, launched while Sony was falling from the heights of hubris with the PlayStation 3’s… PlayStation 3-ness. (Confusing architecture, limited backwards compatibility, evil pricing, immense ‘who is this for’ isms with certain features, etc.)
However, with the release of the Kinect, it felt as if Microsoft was abandoning their base. Not shooter fans of people who only bought the system for Halo, Gears, and CoD. But the forum lurkers, bloggers, content creators, tastemakers and arbiters of ‘online core gaming culture.’ Xbox was pivoting their focus away from them and to the family audience, giving them little but franchise fare and third-party titles to keep them engaged. This was not always easy to see at the time— I would know, I was there. However, looking back, there was a severe lack of content for an Xbox 360 player to find that was exclusive to the 360, and not Kinect. Maybe some smaller niche or downloadable games, but those were dwarfed by the number of PS3 titles that were ONLY for the PS3.
Fans were hungry, they wanted assurance that Xbox really was just prepping for another strong generational launch. Sony got in early with their February 2013 PlayStation 4 reveal. Microsoft waited three long months before revealing the Xbox One. And what they revealed was not a game system for gamers, it was an entertainment suite for the living room television. Something as capable of playing dancing games and changing the channel via voice command as it was playing Xbox games. …Like Call of Duty. And Madden. And NONE of the games players had bought over the years.
It was a bad time— I have ancient records of my dismay over the reveal. It frustrates me that the likes of Don Mattrick effectively tore down what Microsoft had built up over this generation. And it annoys me that this era of the early Xbox 360 had to fizzle out like it did, rather than continuing. Because I think it was a genuinely great time for gaming. Sure, there were plenty of duds there, but there was genuine hope and optimism, oodles of innovation with what could be done with online and the extra horsepower of the 360. All Microsoft had to do was keep funding projects and let skilled people make great games. Instead, the management fostered over the past decade faded away. They had it, they lost it, and as we can see today, they’ll never get it back again.
It annoys me because the potential was there. The promise was there, and I was lulled into thinking that Xbox truly was the future of gaming. I did not start really following gaming news until I was 12, in winter 2006. I did not become REALLY into gaming news until I was 13 in 2008. (Right at the same time I started getting into TSF, funnily enough.) And after Microsoft’s E3 2008 conference, I was determined to get an Xbox 360 for my joint Birthday and Christmas present in 2008. Mostly because of Final Fantasy XIII, Fable II, Prince of Persia (which I thought was the best looking game yet) …And because Nintendo’s E3 2008 conference was, well, a thing of infamy. I was getting on in the years, growing past Nintendo, and wanted to experience Big Boy Gaming!
I loved my Xbox 360. It was home to so many formative gaming experiences. I truly have a reverence for its library, and the games of that era… but looking back, I really wish I had jumped in earlier, that I experienced this particular era so many are nostalgic for, and that it continued. Not that Xbox won, but that they were a valid competitor to Sony as they were fixing their shit following the PlayStation 3’s launch. Instead, they spent the past 15 years flopping around, struggling to match the output of their main competitor, absorbing so many studios, while destroying so much.
…That being said, I do think that it is worth interrogating what exactly the Xbox 360 brought to the table with its initial lineup, as it was… significantly different.
If one looks at the early slate of the Xbox 360, they will notice a distinct lack of Japanese games. Yes, there were some Capcom bangers like Lost Planet, Dead Rising, and Devil May Cry 4. RPGs like Blue Dragon, Tales of Vesperia, and Lost Odyssey painted an optimistic future for where RPGs could go. And there was a deluge of visual novels and arcade ports like The IdolM@ster in Japan. But unlike the PlayStation 2— home to the greatest games of every nation— and the Japanese GameCube, the Xbox 360 felt America, it felt Western, it helped mark a pivot in the games industry where The West had developed enough to become the dominant force in Anglosphere/global gaming. Commercially, creatively, and quantitatively.
This might be hard for some people to understand if they were not there, but throughout much of the 80s and 90s, most of the best console games came from Japan. Western game developers were slower to grasp these Japanese machines, follow their innovations, and the biggest games came out in Japan first. There was a very real sense that Japan was the dominant cultural force in video games. The PC scene was far more western dominated— Japanese PCs were different hardware altogether before Windows 95 unified the world— but consoles were cheaper, more accessible, and… no shade, but they just had better games. Quantify it however you like, you know I’m right.
This started to shift in the PS1 era, as Sony was trying to make a truly global games platform, partnering with or acquiring studios from America and Europe. But they were still playing catch up, and the top five best-selling PS1 games were all Japanese. With the PS2 era, things were a lot more cutthroat. Sports games exploded in popularity and fidelity. Shooters were becoming the big hotness. Grand Theft Auto defined what gaming was around the world. And the American kids who grew up with an NES were entering their 20s, pursuing careers in games. The market forces were shifting, games were becoming increasingly focused around a Western audience as budgets raised. And while there were still TOO MANY Japanese exclusive games, it felt like an equilibrium was maintained.
…Then that all changed with the Xbox 360 era. Console sales were declining in Japan. 3D capable handhelds and feature phones were attracting players and developers with lower cost portable experiences that could be played while on transit or in public. And while American developers were salivating over this hot new tech, Japanese developers were stumped. They lacked the tools and team composition needed to tackle HD game development, leaving the door open for western developers using licensed engines to thrive. …Oh, and the PS3 was the PS3. Hard-ass-balls to make games for. Japanese games were still being made, of course, but the transition made the shift from PS1 to PS2 look buttery smooth by comparison.
For as much as the early Xbox 360 owned, it definitely suffered from a lack of Japanese support, a lack of Japanese creativity, and… just too many games about shooting men with guns. I think this lack of support, this lack of variety and representation, led to a lot of the anti-Japanese sentiment, xenophobia, and general shitty trends that were common throughout this generation. There was a sense that America had finally won the video game race, and this emboldened shitty people, the kind that would be scared off by non-American art, that gaming, that Xbox, was a safe haven for them. That it was a place for the White American Suburbanite Male that would eventually be lured into extremist ideologies and Modern American Naziism through mediums like GamerGate, and its successor movement MAGA.
…And the lack of diversity amongst a lot of early Xbox 360 games definitely led to a dearth of online-focused brown-gray shooters. Publishers looked at what was selling, saw the online fueled Call of Duty and Tom Clancy topping the sales charts in 2007, so is there any surprise that they only wanted to greenlight online-focused brown-gray shooters?
I’m not trying to say that the early Xbox 360 era ruined gaming or anything dumb like that. But I do think it is important to be critical when analyzing history, when looking back at something as frivolous as gaming history, and recognize how things connect. How the past feeds into itself through the future. Rather than just look back at the past and wish that you could be 12 again, but do things better, smarter, and with a lot more quality cumming.
Akumako: “Natalie, for fuck’s sake, people do not want to become 12-years-old again and use modern gooning techniques to inifinite-masturbate for the rest of their lives! I don’t know where you got that idea, but it’s twisted, wrong, really stupid, and when you say shit like that, it undermines whatever point you are trying to make.”
…Oatmeal!
Akumako: “Fuck’s sake. WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?”
Also, I just wanted to add something that I could not fit elsewhere. Ahem.
Akumako: “What? No, the segment is over! Listen to—”
Something else that I find vital to discuss when talking about gaming around 2008 is how The Great Recession affected gaming… or rather how it didn’t. This is a bit hard to understand through a 2025, deep into an ongoing cost of living crisis. It’s easy to bemoan how expensive games are now, but that’s not something that was hugely a concern back in 2008. People were losing their jobs, homes were being foreclosed, and shit was bad for a lot of people for a lot of reasons. However, there was still a lot of optimism towards technology.
$300 game consoles, games that could be afforded with a day’s earnings, used game deals that let people snag three games for $40, these things kept gaming accessible to a lot of middle class households. Food was cheap, Dollar Menus were a thing, rent was not crazy like it is now, mortgage rates were low and dropping. The era of free money was starting up in response to the recession, and while jobs were lost, not nearly as many people were living paycheck to paycheck. People, somehow, had a couple hundred bucks to spend on frivolous things, and fewer compulsive distractions. They might not be able to buy a home, or new car, or afford a vacation this year, but a new Xbox 360 for them and their little tykes? Yeah, that was reasonable.
But nowadays? Food costs like twice as much, tech products are subscriptions you pay for perpetually, and positions paying $8/hr back then are probably only making $12/hr now. The price ceiling for products and services has been blown off, nothing is enough for modern tech companies, and permanent price drops for consoles— shit, even games— just aren’t happening. Hell, even RAM is over twice as expensive as it was two months ago, because AI data centers REALLY need it.
Akumako: “Are you saying that shit sucks now, and we had it better during The Great Recession?”
…The latter. And I think that is worth thinking about. Because if you aren’t, then life has not radicalized you left enough!
Akumako: “Says some bitch from the top 20%…”
Even though I’m making six figures, I’m still working class, and still on the side of the working class.
The Embracer Divestment Continues
(Cryptic Games and Arc Games Are Buying Themselves, Basically)
This is a smaller acquisition/divestment story that I’m just throwing in to make this Rundown a bit fuller, and as due diligence in documenting what’s going on with Embracer. For those who forget, Embracer was a profoundly aggressive company that aimed to acquire and consolidate much of the American and European AA games industry, even branching into established AAA studios. They moved fast, expanded too much, and did not take the necessary precautions as Saudi Arabia lured them into a $2 billion deal, only to bail at the last minute.
This lack of funding, combined with market shifts in the games industry throughout 2023, ultimately hurt Embracer, and anyone working for them. Studios were shut down, thousands of people were laid off, dozens of projects were canceled, and the company has spent the past few years recognizing. Selling off studios, partitioning studios into new buckets, and planning to spin off everything into a new cluster of companies. They consolidated, and are now breaking themselves apart, selling whatever at a fraction of the price they initially paid.
The latest subject of this fire sale approach are a pair of fairly obscure subsidiaries. The first being Cryptic Studios, a company that has survived more acquisitions than any company realistically should. Especially for a studio in the Bay Area. They are an accomplished MMO developer responsible for City of Heroes, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and Neverwinter. All aging titles mostly kept alive through niche communities and likely minimal staff needed to keep the games operational while providing players with things to do. It’s not a glamorous business— I’m still surprised the likes of Daybreak Game Company are around, still making annual EverQuest expansions. But a business that is just barely successful enough to keep the lights on. It seems like something you’d maybe want in a larger portfolio, but the online gaming scene is so crowded I don’t see many new players flocking to decade-old MMOs, long past their prime.
The second entity is Arc Games. A game publisher originally created as a western division for the Chinese online game giant Perfect World, dubbed Perfect World Entertainment. In 2022, they were bought by Embracer, dba Gearbox, renamed to Gearbox Publishing San Francisco, before being renamed Arc Games in April 2024. While some IP rights duties will be retained by Embracer, such as the Remnant series and some new online multiplayer thing called Fellowship, Arc will remain a co-publisher on certain titles.
The new owner of both entities is a newly formed entity by the name of Project Golden Arc, who was predictably created by Arc Studios management. Meaning they are now an independent operation, a sort of developer/publisher combo that specializes in older online games. All for the relatively modest price of $30 million.
Now, I bring this up because I feel a compulsion to look into deals like this so I understand the players, and because it highlights an easy to ignore subset of the games industry. …Unless you’re someone like Cassie, who regularly plays older MMOs. There’s also something to be said about how the concept of an MMO has drastically morphed and mutated over the decade, shifting and spreading elements across all number of online titles. All while emphasizing the storefront and undermining the more ‘immersive’ or in-game communal elements of these titles. But I’m not an MMO-er, so I’ll just keep my trap shut and wrap this baby up, as it’s Thanksgiving week, few companies are announcing things, much of the American games industry is taking time off, and people are grinding through the October/November hotness before they need to make their arbitrary GOTY lists by early December.
Nintendo Buys Bandai Namco Singapore
(This is the Good Kind of Acquisition)
GOLDARN IT! Nintendo! You don’t announce acquisitions on Thanksgiving! The hell’s wrong with you?
Ugh, okay, time for a little history lesson.
Sometime in the early 2010s, Bandai Namco opened up a Singapore-based studio, Bandai Namco Studios Singapore Pte. Ltd. Why? Because Singapore is a major tech and business hub due to its fairly open borders to skilled workers, its very pro-business government, and its status as a heavily guarded police state. It is a country full of talented people from all over the world, operating with little barrier, and benefitting from a lowest cost of living compared to many other major international hubs like New York and London. (It’s hella expensive next to Beijing though.)
Once established, Bandai Namco Singapore cut their teeth as a support studio but then, in 2017 and 2018, word circulated that this new studio that nobody had really heard of was working on the recently announced Metroid Prime 4 and the unannounced Ridge Racer 8. …Then in January 2019, Bandai Namco Singapore was taken off of Metroid Prime 4, with the project shifting over to Retro Studios. As for Ridge Racer 8, that was never announced and was quietly canceled.
Following this event, people assumed that Bandai Namco Singapore was incompetent or incapable of delivering games that stacked up to the Nintendo standard. The studio admittedly worked on the Bandai Namco developed New Pokémon Snap (2021), mostly providing concept and character art, and was thanked in the credits of Splatoon 3 (2022). However, it’s very difficult to tell when work would have been done on these games. Sometimes art can be produced five or six years in advance, as part of preproduction. And since cutting their teeth as a support studio, Bandai Namco Singapore was given the privilege of fostering their talent by producing Hirogami. A much ignored papercraft action platformer… that received middling reviews. Eh, sometimes you gotta make mid before you can aim for peak, as the youths like to say.
This narrative was easy enough to process… but then Nintendo announced that they were acquiring Bandai Namco Singapore, and they make their reason very clear. “It has contributed to the development of Nintendo titles, including the Splatoon series, and has an ongoing business relationship with Nintendo.” Effective April 1, 2026, Nintendo will acquire 80% of all shares in Bandai Namco Singapore, and the studio will be rebranded as Nintendo Studios Singapore.
So… this is a bit strange, but also not… really?
It’s important to note that Bandai Namco and Nintendo have formed a strong relationship over the decades. Namco was among the first third parties release games on the Famicom. While they had a bit of a falling out in the N64 era, they formed a pretty solid partnership during the GameCube era. And they eventually became such a trusted studio that they were given the rights to develop the Smash Bros. series, well, so long as their boy Sakurai was helming the project.
Now, buying a studio owned by a partner can be a serious business faux pas depending on the context, but this is likely not some hostile takeover of a subsidiary that, for the record, Bandai Namco is under zero obligation to sell. More likely, the Bandai Namco Singapore has shifted primarily to being a support studio for Nintendo projects. And if you have a subsidiary that is wholly dependent on a single client, it makes sense to just sell the subsidiary. Net the cash, remove the managerial overhead, and get in good graces with one of the biggest names in gaming.
Plus, Nintendo only wants to acquire long-term development partners. They lucked out with Monolith, who co-developed some of their biggest titles, and Retro has probably been a net loss aside from Donkey Kong Country Returns. You don’t rake in the cash by not releasing a new game in over a decade. But I do like seeing them expand, as it means more high quality Nintendo games, more opportunities for game devs, and generally more things for Nintendorks to geek out over.
Progress Report 2025-11-30
So, I have been a bad girl, a lazy girl, because I’ve been playing too much Yu-Gi-Oh: Legacy of the Duelist. Why? Because after watching 100 episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh GX with Cassie, I could not help myself and really wanted to play a Yu-Gi-Oh game. I wanted to play something that captured a specific feeling, and for reasons I’ll get into next Rundown, I settled on this game as being the best at offering what I wanted. A digital card game that feels efficient, intuitive, and gives me the ability to play around with a lot of unique cards and opponents. Because while I can respect deckbuilders, there is something to be said for a game that is just a series of challenges where you are given the tools and need to figure out a solution, rather than one built around accumulation.
I should probably say more, but I want to save this topic for next week, so… I’m out!
2025-11-23: Wrote 4,000 words for Efu Efu Efu 4. Wrote 3,000 words for the Xbox 360 retrospective bit.
2025-11-24: Weird schedule for today, with dentist and errands in the morning and work in the afternoon. I got sidetracked with some art project planning, but managed to get in 2,000 words for Efu Efu Efu 4. This current stretch is good, but BOY do I need to end this afterwards.
2025-11-25: Wrote 4,000 words for Efu Efu Efu 4. Why so few? Well, my morning was full of talking to friends. Afternoon was full of Yu-Gi-Oh GX and chatting with the Cassie, and my evening was full of doing things with my mother. And after finishing a 5,000 word chapter in this oversized beast of a project, I was not in the mood to start the next branch, sorry~!
2025-11-26: Edited the Rundown, added the 600 words Embracer bit. Wrote 6,000 words to finish off Efu Efu Efu 4. This dumb one-off idea is currently at 27,000 words and I still gotta write the Foreword!
2025-11-27: Wrote 700 words for the Nintendo Singapore bit. Made a header for Efu Efu Efu 4. Edited 13,000 words. Went on a 3.5 hour Thanksgiving food voyage. Will finish up Efu Efu Efu 4 sometime tomorrow.
2025-11-28: Finished up Efu Efu Efu 4, got some edits from Missy after I sent her a preview copy, and incorporated the edits to a new master file.
2025-11-29: Wrote 3,900 word preamble for next week’s Rundown (it’s about Yu-Gi-Oh). Did some research for the Trans Venus showcase, mostly just Googling and obscure database jumping. You find WEIRD shit when you do that. Like finding out that the Trans Venus dude is an Eisner award winning artist. Wrote 750 word intro for the showcase. Wrote 1,000 word piracy bit for next week’s Rundown.