Passing of Humanities torch

We've spoken a bit about Helldivers 2 because it is the property on everyone's mind for a bunch of very good reasons. It's a glowing reminder that big companies can facilitate small teams to punch out pure gold in the exact right circumstances, and even the absolute pits of the industry itself holds some small nugget of potential that can be nurtured appropriately. Who'd have thought I'd ever consider anything stronger than disdain for Live Service games? Certainly not myself! And whilst Suicide Squad is busy drippling out the remainder of it's content to increasingly lacklustre results, Helldivers is busy sizing up it's theoretical unending war of content. Hell, it all makes me wonder if there's someone out there crazy enough to make a pure survival game which I don't find to be utter pants. Wait... I guess that was already made and it was Minecraft, wasn't it. Shucks- I wanted something to look forward too...

But with Helldivers 2 perched where it is, at the height of their pride and ambition, the danger for them falling off is all the greater. I mean sure, the game has already waxed from being at the eminence of gaming pop culture, but that's natural solidification of 'next big thing' players versus entrenched and enfranchised players. Same thing happened with Palworld and I'm sure we'll see a spike in those game numbers with the coming of their first major content update in the next few weeks. I'm talking about the big blunders that flew across the world like a swift wind. I'm talking about the Sony account debacle that sparked a mass dislike campaign across Steam and cost a community manager their job when they told the audience in too-plain-English how to assert dominance over the big faceless megacorpo. How do you prepare for the stumbles, not just the recovery method, but sheer avoidance from the get-go?

That is surely the great dragon that Arrowhead Games are shaping up to face in the coming years as they buckle down their studio to aim for becoming an evergreen studio with the respect and aplomb of former Blizzard. As essential to Sony as Naughty Dog, but with a focus on Co-op friendly games of a higher class that bring back that much ignored sub-genre of gaming. Their ambition is lofty but I'm glad someone is trying to fill that gaping maw left in the industry after Blizzard lost literally everything that made it a place worthy of respect and devolved into whatever it is you'd call the company now. A mistake? I'm happy with 'A Mistake'. But in that pursuit we've already felt some shockwaves of the changes coming which signal some sort of change in the status quo- even if what that change might be can only be predicted by soothsayers.

Founder of Arrowhead, Johan Pilestedt has stepped down as the CEO of Arrowhead in order to focus more closely on his roles as Chief Creative Officer and Chairman, and needless to say this has sent something of a cold chill across the spines of those investing themselves in Helldivers' continued success. On the hand that Johan is probably favouring, the man appears to be more of a creative than a business man, thus giving ground to people better suited for those roles expediates the running of Arrowhead. On the otherhand- Johan seemed to be one of the few games company CEOs who really had a good head on his shoulders. He believed in the right aspects of the hobby and genuinely seemed to push the company that direction. People born to naturally navigate CEO roles are best suited typically because they don't value the same things that actual humans do. They are clinical, statistical and they tend to ruin creative ventures. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. Inevitably. I can't say whether or not Arrowhead is making the right move.

The history of the games industry is full to the brim of examples presenting player-first studios that lost that special spark chasing something else- typically the corporate mandate. Bethesda, for one, were beloved heroes of their player base after turning out several 'Game of the Year' contending games which ruled both the Fantasy and Sci-fi genre of open world games. Bethesda were the kings of the open world and if you partake in mods one might argue that they still do. However it would be straight ignorant to just brush past the very plain fact that Bethesda don't appear to be where they were in terms of fan respect. Fallout 4 made some very odd choices, particularly with the pricing of genuinely non-functional DLC. Fallout 76 was a strange diatribe off in a direction that Bethesda had no experience in as a company which resulted in an immensely predictable disaster. And Starfield kind of feels like it wasn't made with any of the series fans in mind. Is this the future that awaits going the more corporate friendly route?

Because at the end of the day we're talking about companies that have to abide by a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to increase value, but how that is translated really depends on the mind interpreting the concept of value. A creative mind might deduce that value relates to the goodwill of the brand and the quality of their output, and thus would justify prioritising decisions that raise the prestige of the art championing that knock-on. A analytical and corporate mind might see a much more direct route to value being upping the avenues for which the company can extract funds from the player, decreasing the prestige of the brand, but scoring quicker revenue bumps for show and tell. Arguably both achieve the goals they set out to, but one certainly scuppers the future of the artform and industry much more tangibly than the other.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this is, rather coincidentally enough consider the quoted intent of Arrowhead, Blizzard. Once upon a time that company stood for the very heart of championing the player and what they want out of their games, which fostered the kind of brand loyalty that most other companies would just kill for in the modern age. But somewhere along the way the talent that mattered started to peel off on their own ventures, and the corporate culture began to shift and pervert in a direction that quickly became cynical and out-of-touch. Just comparing the amount of penny-pinching avenues in the Diablo Immortal Mobile scam compared to Diablo 3 is enough to show where modern mandates place the priority for the company- and it's result ended up coring the entire company.

But there's plenty of examples why the move that Arrowhead is doing is exactly what the company needs in order to go that extra level- until we see what comes of this shift in leadership it's impossible to say for certain what direction this will lean them. On one hand I'd like to think that the team know what they're doing, who they're putting in charge and that there's a certain level of trust implicit there. On the otherhand, I've seen plenty bigger companies that very much should have known what they were doing fall the way of the easy payday. You can't ever convince me it wasn't a cognizant decision to ship Cyberpunk 2077 before it was done, it was a gamble made and ultimately lost that the backlash would be outweighed by the profits. I pray Arrowhead never find themselves plopped in front of a similar switch as a direct result of this decision.

Sony and the self-immolation of their ports

 

Sony are a peculiar case of a game company. Sitting at the top of the adult console market, chest to chest with Nintendo, you'd have thought they would have a strong grasp on what it takes to succeed. But as Microsoft starts shooting itself in the cranium, I think we're becoming more and more privy to the fact that Playstation has only be getting a foot up because Xbox so regularly falls on its' face providing a step from which to move up from. If the Microsoft Xbox brand were competent, controlled by people who knew what they were doing, extracting the right games out of the right studios and making a name for themselves, Sony would be the donkey of the free right now for how utterly moronically anti-consumer they always insist on being. Of course, in such a reality Xbox would have no reason to play nice with consumers either so they would be just as big of monsters. There really is no winning when you play with corporations, is there?

And we can see this clearly in Sony's bizarre first party direction, which to this day hasn't changed from the Live Service mandate of yester year. Despite their successes in buying single player developing studios that have secured award after award for the company, even going on to secure and award winning show from one of their first party produced properties- Sony wants to chase after the biggest no-where prize in gaming: Live Services. What is the point? As this point it's a more likely best to take your money to the high-rollers table and bet on a hand of Blackjack, the odds are actually better to make a profit doing that then investing in a Live Service- given their horrific failure rate. Helldivers 2 may have skewered perceptions for Sony a little bit, but if they really invest in this direction as much as they're threatening to, in 5 years time habitual Poker Players will be more in the black than they are!

But that's the old news, how about that Helldivers 2 situation, eh? Remember when that all transpired and Sony tried to wiggle their account requirements upon a game that provably functioned just fine without them- twisting PC players into creating PSN accounts just to play the game they bought. Of course, the team themselves cared very little about the comfort of their playerbase before discovering that due to various countries not having PSN countries, some of their players would be actually unable to keep playing the game. Funny how it changes the conversation when "I'm actually not comfortable doing this" turns to "I actually can't keep invested in your ecosystem if this continues." But my surliness regarding Arrowhead and their backpedalling aside, why was such a system even a Playstation mandate to begin with?

Rumours abound but the most likely idea I've heard brought up is the ol' hotshot exec wants to show how much of an impact he's had excuse. It's the classic. Change the brand logo to something objectively less clear and worse to prove you've effected something worth sticking in the CV. This was just a case of a guy wanting to talk about the big new sign up numbers that PSN has received, even it was at literally gun point in order to play the hit new game. The requirement was suspended upon the rocky launch, but when the game blew up that drove the heat under the execs collar for that sweet praise from his sugar daddy bosses. That seems to play out perfectly in my mind explaining all of this to an unfortunate T. But whatever the truth of the matter, whether it was Sony pushing this or Arrowhead, the results were perplexingly bad for Sony.

Ignore the PR hit for a moment, if you can. Logistically the shrinking of your current most popular user base is an active assassination of the PC port to an unreasonable degree. A desecration of basic profit making principals in an age of the games industry ruled by the almighty dollar bill. Steam ended up pulling the game entirely from storefronts outside of the purview of the PSN, cutting off entire countries worth of customers for absolutely no real gain. There's so lip service about making moderation a little easier on the team's side because they can just ban a PSN account rather than work to ban IPs- but is that alone worth cutting off thousands of customers? Who then will be granted refunds by a surprisingly understanding Steam?

Of course the story has that happy ending where the big bad Sony were told off by a user base who review bombed the game, got the decision overturned and now have a shiny new cape to show off the great meta-war: but those regions are still blocked from buying the game for whatever reason. It seems some degree of the damage has been done, and nothing of consequence was gained. Whatsmore, absolutely nothing was learnt either, because Sony are doing the exact same crap again for the port of Ghost of Tsushima, and one has to wonder whether or not there's one sycophant in charge of PC ports that no one at Sony is keeping a close enough eye on, because financially, this makes no sense!

Now Ghost is a single player game primarily, meaning the decision to not sign into a PSN account isn't going to invalidate the entire game suddenly. But the game did get a post-launch online mode which, according to folk from the time, is supposed to be pretty fantastic. Oh, but what's that? Ghost of Tsushima has also been blocked from purchase in all regions that don't have PSN coverage. Which... actually makes no sense whatsoever! The game doesn't need online connectivity whatsoever, there is no reason to take a torch to everything like this! Is this just the cost of working with Playstation? Having them kneecap your product out of misguided caution over a non-existent backlash because they're too stupid to employ any amount of critical consideration to the situation?

Sony have always had a strange and icky relationship with porting their first party games, almost as though they're terrified of people realising that the only value the PS ecosystem holds is it's exclusive games and without that they're just an average console developer who made a few lucky studio investments back in the day. But it's only recently they've demonstrated an unhinged level of frank disconnection with the reality around them to an absolutely dangerous degree. And for those that sold their studio to the Sony machine, they can just sit back in perplexed horror as their hard work is stamped upon for absolutely no good reason as Sony flails around striking out at phantoms. Is this what it means to experience cognitive company decline?

Has Helldivers gone too far?

 

A wise philosopher once said "They found you amusing for a while, the people of this industry. But the one thing they love more than a hero, is to see a hero fall, fail, die trying. In spite of everything you've done for them, eventually they will hate you." Whilst another coined the slightly more pithier quote "You either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Both poignant and iconic glimpses into the world of public regard and the constant popularity contest. The heights it soars you to and the cliffs it tries to push you off of. And today it would see it is the Internet's darlings turn to be put up to sacrifice. Just as Baldur's Gate 3 was bullied for a week because of one glitch that destroyed items which was up for a bit, Helldivers is hitting it's wall when it comes to the most frustrating aspect of any online-primary game: convenience and access.

If there's one thing you never want to stick in a post if you want it to be received in any way well and not as some sort of punishment- it is the phrase "The grace period is up." And yet that is how Helldivers chose to introduce the now mandatory requirement that everyone who plays their game has to log on to an active Sony account in order to play. And by everyone- I mean the extensive PC player base. People who might not even own Sony accounts, are now going to be forced to make one in order to play this popular online game that everyone has been raving about. Now this was always a requirement listed on the Steam page, but thanks to the plethora of launch issues that brought the Helldivers team into a bitter struggle with server infrastructure in order to handle the vast hoards of players rushing to their game- that extra requirement was suspended until further notice. Well, welcome to 'further notice' everybody!

Essentially this means another layer of periphery between players and the games they pay for, which we already know that PC players deeply dislike thanks to the ever popular hatred of all game launchers and even more so for alternative store websites that try to secure their dominance with exclusivity deals. (I swear if FF7 Rebirth goes first to Epic again I'm going to spit!) Not to mention this periphery is the Sony ecosystem which has a frightening reputation for being leakier than the Titanic submersible. (Too soon?) So hope you're happy with your details being smeared across the dark net a couple months after creating your account because that's the pipeline of those sign up forms! No one likes password management and no one likes another check and balance which, as proven by the several months we've gone without, genuinely isn't necessary for the game to run.

Now it should be noted that there is a coherent reason for all this. The original way that Helldivers was designed to run it's service was by the monitoring of PlayStation accounts which would allow the team to swiftly deliver ban actions against problematic players without going through the hoops of IP banning they are saddled with otherwise. So for the team it's a convenience feature. I'm just as pessimistic as your most staunch anti-corpo out there, but I have to put my foot down and insist there is no evidence this is some ploy from Sony to force new products down players throats. There's not even a way for Sony to push deals in your face except for maybe direct emails? If anyone reads those!

But here's the thing. For me this is just a frank inconvenience. I'm being asked to make a new account, share my email and details, to a place that I don't want to. It's a pain in the neck that I don't want to deal with. But I have that option. But for some out there, the situation is not so clean. For some, the option to sit down and make a PlayStation account actually is not there at all- because Steam has a wider reach than the Playstation infrastructure does. There are players who actually will be locked out of playing Helldivers thanks to this decision, and those are the hardline and unavoidable concessions that such a policy is forcing on it's own consumer base for the small victory of being able to ban some people a bit more efficiently. Does that sound equitable?

Helldivers community managers took the typical 'hostile community manager' approach to all this when it blew up- mocking people's outrage over this small imposition and encouraging the aggrieved to up and leave like they were proposing to. You know, typical 'I've been hired to crisis manage by shouting louder than everyone else' conduct. (I seriously do not know what Community Managers do besides stoke fires.) But that somewhat turned when people voiced the much more real blocking off of players that this shift was doing. That was when the community started encouraging... people to continue downvoting the game on Steam and getting riled up? (Uhh... yeah, sometimes you have to wonder why these people are employed.)

In actuality there is method to this madness. Because the Helldivers team seem, curiously, to actually be on the player's side here- but it would seem the decision is out of their hands. As the Manager explained, Sony don't care about Discord outrage, but dropping metrics on Steam reviews are unavoidable and provide tangible evidence of community distaste that can be used as ammunition in negotiations. Maybe if people keep annoyed for long enough, Sony will be forced to see the strain their odd mandates are causing for this game, their most popular in a while, and lean off of the unnecessary ruling. Then we can all get back to the harmless community of genocidal democracy-freaks that this game was built to facilitate and foster!

And all this goes to show the frank discontent in the relationship between developers, publishers and consumers in what is ostensibly a 'service community'. When the right limb doesn't even know how what it does effects the left limb, you get situations of unintentional self sabotage where entire forest fires need to be lit and allowed to ravage the country side before solutions can be even so much as considered! You might fall for the lie that these are intelligent decisions made by the well researched and discerning, who know the breadth of their rulings before they play out- but needs merely pay attention to the floundering common in the highest echelon of the industry to know how untrue that is. These people live on a different stratosphere to those they siphoning a living off of. But hey, at least there's hope for Helldivers 2 if only their loyal fans scream loud enough.

Immersive marketing

Though I haven't had the pleasure of actually playing the thing myself it's been great to hear all the rhetoric drummed up around 'Helldivers 2', particularly when it comes to the ways that it subverts what people expect from a game of it's ilk. A decent little follow-up to a stylish twin-stick turned into a surprise megahit beloved across the internet, and the devs- after some healthy crumbling under the weight of sudden success- have really risen to the task. Keeping the game feeling healthy and the players on their toes, but most interestingly from an outsider is the way in which the team are embarking on a very particular community strategy I rarely see employed by really anyone else these days- the good old Immersive Marketing.

Don't get me wrong, we've all lived through the age of community managers who treat their jobs like a larping session, which is... fun? I remember the awkward smile I got when I saw the first urgent Tweet on a recent Destiny debacle not that long after launch, and saw them refer to the audience as 'Guardians' and end every message with 'Pardon our dust.' (Still don't get what that second part was about, truth be told.) But what I'm talking about is a bit more, involved than that- whilst being a bit more laid back. I'm talking about the times when the developer bring the audience into the fiction of the world outside the confines of the magic box in a way that feels natural and additive to the experience. And of course I'm talking about the funny dialogue players have shared with the Helldivers developers.

When the Helldivers game started slowly introducing new enemy types into the mission roster, it was without fanfare and entirely to the surprise of fans. As such, a really organic movement of shared Twitter posts and screenshots detailing the new flying bugs began popping up online- mimicking the threadbare way such news would spread in a propaganda controlled militarist fascistic faux utopia like the one depicted on Super Earth in Helldivers 2. And true to his role, the game director took to his account to frankly denounce the rumours of the new flying bugs with the pithy quote "Everyone knows bugs can't fly." Until someone directly tweeted a picture to him which broke the play of ignorance in a smart back and forth.

In a much different way Elite Dangerous had a play at this kind of guerrilla marketing with the way that they introduced Thargoids back into the series lore. As Elite Dangerous kind of plays like an online ecosystem somewhat like a Live Service, only a lot more natural and less predatory. You might think of it more like an MMO of a type- players just go about living their space lives, hunting pirates or running trade routes across the stars for pocket change. This kind of easy living is helped by the fact that the universe of the game really happens around players. Events that shift the lines of the various world factions spread on ingame news sites, but outside of that we are just the people inhabiting the stars- the machinations of the politically inclined hold little affect on our day to day. Or at least, they did until the Thargoids returned.

What little there was in the way of lead-up was portrayed entirely within in-universe snippets of stories and bizarreries. Things going missing, signals heading nowhere- nothing significant enough to be even called preludes to an impending event. No one was actively looking to try and trigger anything hidden within the code. Which is what made it such a special moment when a player, seemingly by accident, stumbled upon an encounter with a fully modelled alien Thargoid ship which appeared, scanned the onlooker and then fled, kicking off a wave of speculation across the community regarding what this could mean and what it portended. Of course, that could eventually become the Thargoid war and there on.

The excitement of that event alone sparked a gold rush of interest surrounding the game and the natural way it was discovered reinvigorated a sense of exploration in a people who suddenly remembered 'oh yeah, this game has an entire Universe- I wonder what else there is hidden away in the stars!' (See, that's what space games like Elite have that space games like Starfield need- wonder.) Now you can argue whether or not the team lived up to that excitement with the following events and how they affected the game world, the new weapon types and the new Thargoid ship combat metas- but that important thing is they got eyes on them. Even if it was a dud- that is an example anyone else can look at, emulate and get right with their own iteration. Out of the box immersive marketing- it works!

There is a time and place for stuff like this, of course. When a game is in dire need of repairs and the community is waiting around with the hands on their ass wondering when it's safe to log into a game- no one wants to play games figuring out an RNG to know what fixes and updates are coming. You really have to be able to read the mood of your players to know when you are comfortable enough to play a few games with them. If Starfield's team came around tomorrow to slyly tease about upcoming content, that might drum up a bit of hype around those that are waiting- but if they did that nearer to release, in the height of the discourse around the design problems of the game- it would have caused an uproar. It's all about reading the room and timing- just like comedy.

I'm all for thinking outside the box and using one's creativity to achieve what others cannot. No one likes a corporate account that acts just like everyone else on social media only with a decade old meme vault to lug around. Being original, finding ways to connect directly with your audience and simply shirking the artificial nature of communication helps distinguish immersive marketing from bland 'hello fellow kids' style social media work. With enough effort we could really see a wide spread evolution of the way that people communicate with their customers, and from that will spawn much more natural growing audiences. Perhaps that is the future of marketing that the indie market can hope to grow from, who can say?

The little Live Service that could

I'm not gonna pull any punches here- I think Live Services are trash and should burn down to nothing alongside with all the failures they've already endured this year. In fact, all my homies hate on Live Services! (>This message is sponsored by the single player gang<) But what if I told you that just like an anime season finale where everybody is at their last post and the antagonist is floating above the scene with a total victory in the grasp of his hands- someone, somewhere, has figured out a way to actually do a Live Service in a way that not only isn't total trash, but is actually starting to take off to a worryingly wide audience. Yes, all of us Live Service haters out there are going to have to start eating our hats pretty darn soon because of all games it was Helldivers 2 that flew down out of the drop ship in order to rain on our parade.

Now I'll be honest- I had no clue what Helldivers even was before that sequel was announced to moderate applause during the PlayStation conference last year. Apparently the first entry was a decently entertaining top-down shooter with pretty heavy Starship Troopers vibes emanating off of it. Helldivers 2 looked to lean even further on those laurels to the point where I actually assumed the trailer was meant to be for a new third person Starship Troopers game before the franchise title flared up on screen. (Although in my defence, I was disadvantaged by my ignorance.) But even those in the know couldn't have had any inkling of a clue what exact impact this game was going to have when it landed, for it's moderate price point, just a few days ago.

We live in an age of 'flash in the pan' hits; wherein one week all anybody can talk about is a Pokemon reimagining and the next week we have ourselves an unapologetically Verhoeven-coded military bug shooter championing co-op missions of bug hunting for the service of Super Earth. Helldivers has been the kind of hit that developers can't even bring themselves to dream of, to the point where servers are literally melting because the team had no idea their player numbers could go this high. Originally it's said that the developers were playing to actually hop onto online games and mess with their player base, whom they expected to be cosy and intimate, but now such a proposition seems laughable with the thousands of concurrent sessions they have being started every few minutes or so. Truly, this month is the month of Helldivers 2. And it's a Live Service?

That's right- despite having an actually sensible buy in price point and a satisfying amount of content off the bat- Helldivers 2 is committing itself to all the carnal sins of modern gaming. It's laying out a continuous development plan, (although I hear that constraints of those plans have stretched significantly given the runaway success of the title.) there are microtransactions, battlepasses and gameplay effecting cosmetics. And yet none of that is being looked down upon. In fact, Helldivers 2 is being celebrated as the one game in the entire industry that does the absolute impossible and gets it right- and I am both impressed and lightly horrified to see how that's the case. Helldivers 2 is about to turn the whole table back around on the 'Live Service' debate.

The defining characteristics of every Live Service in the past few years has been an unfinished game shoved out the door with a promise to make it feel somewhat complete over the next year or so of adding new content. Oh, here's a new map and a bunch of new mission types and enemy variants and weapons. "But of course, that means we need to take out the beginning quests from the game because... well... screw you- that's why." That game will then promote unending quests for players to get lost in, disregarding the fact that all those recurring missions are trash focused around the same three objectives. (Defend the point, kill the bullet sponge, escort the vulnerable thing) Helldivers 2, on the otherhand, hyper fixates on it's design. 

Helldivers 2 was designed with the very soul of recurrent play in mind- with the loop of dropping into various hotspots in order to smite the enemies of mankind slipping nicely into the fiction of the world they establish. As does the 'War Bonds' which forms the currency of the in-game Microtransaction store and the provisions of the Battlepass. And just like every game with a Live Service component that isn't quite as hated as others': you can earn currency without spending a dime and buy the pass at your own pace. Also, the Battlepass doesn't expire which forgoes the lamentable 'fomo' aspect that many of the laziest Live Services cling to like it's the only idea of value their company has ever produced. To many, Helldivers is a breath of fresh air.

And to me it's like that first whiff of gas in the canary mine, because I've paid more than enough attention to this industry to know exactly what comes next. Helldivers 2 has every right to be a success, sliding into the goal right as everyone had settled into the very safe assumption that Live Services are dead. Right after Kill the Justice League began it's slow agonising journey to an early death and Pirate ship game (Genuinely can't remember the name, again) face planted on that journey to such an extent I don't even expect it to last the year at this rate. Helldivers is going to be used as the fuel underneath every executive fire for a Live Service future that had just been doused with cold reality- and we're going to be in this exact same position four years from now.

I know what supporters are going to say. "But Helldivers does it right! Surely this game will serve as an example blueprint for these companies!" To which all I can do is sadly chuckle at what naive fools you are. Do you think Helldivers 2 is an easy sort of game to make? No! It takes passion, talent and insight- all the qualities that are whittled down with prejudice by the corporate driven Live Service surge. This game will be used as vindication to keep the Live Service dream alive, and the copycats riding this game's tail will miss the point entirely, crash and burn totally, and further ruin the prospects of the AAA angle of the gaming industry. So thanks Helldivers for proving it can be done, and thanks for nothing for the consequences of that.