#brendan sinclair

Brendan Sinclair, writing for GamesIndustry.biz on the Guild Wars 2 controversy:

In the long run, holding Price and Fries up as sacrifices to quell the outrage discourages developers from having opinions, social media accounts, or interactions of any kind with fans.

I’ve seen this reaction on Twitter from at least two game developers [1]. I am not a dev, so grain of salt, but they seem to see this situation and worry about tweeting something that could go viral on Reddit too.

This state of affairs is a damn shame because hiding the labor behind games hurts developers.

🎮 funtime-error

Wesley Yin-Poole, writing for Eurogamer on EA's dubious claims of "no more loot boxes":

FIFA is the great exception to EA's new anti-loot box marketing push, and this fact has largely flown under the radar. Why? FIFA's audience is more mainstream than those of a lot of EA's other games - perhaps all of them. Mainstream gamers tend not to take to Reddit and Twitter and all the rest of it to complain about video games. They tend to accept the way video games work and just get on with it. If something feels icky then, well, they'll probably stop playing and be done with it. No online petition, no #campaignforjustice, no pointless boycott.

But there are those of us who do play FIFA and know it's exploitative, know it could be better, and now know there's one rule for Battlefield and another for the football game we love. Wouldn't it be nice if EA's loot box promise and pay-to-win rejection encompassed FIFA, too?

Brendan Sinclair of GamesIndustry.biz asked EA CEO Patrick Söderlund about this discrepancy:

Söderlund summarized the core pillars of EA's approach as ensuring players get value for their money, that they can't pay to win, and that they have the freedom to choose whether they want to engage with it. When we point out that FIFA Ultimate Team quite explicitly works on a pay-to-win basis, he referred back to the first pillar.

Even now, even while apologizing, EA executives are still not giving us the real reasons behind their decisions. Ultimate Team has pay-to-win loot boxes because they can get away with it, and Battlefield doesn't because they can't.

Just last year, EA executives were celebrating Ultimate Team's $800 million annual revenue and planning to add "a similar mechanic" to other franchises. There were no concerns about pay-to-win or player friendliness then!

None of this should be a surprise. EA is a massive international for-profit corporation. Their business is making money, not making us happy. I just wish they'd stop pretending otherwise.

Brendan Sinclair, writing for GamesIndustry.biz:

Large publishers are increasingly signing on for games willing to be seen as exploring questions of sexuality, identity, and other weighty topics. [Life is Strange: Before the Storm narrative director Zak] Garriss isn’t sure exactly what happened to cause that, but he’s grateful for the change regardless.

“Part of the answer probably lives outside of the industry,” he said. “The evolution of television narrative has done a lot to explode our understanding of the limitations of storytelling in general. I look at TV 20 years ago versus TV now, and I see a savviness, and a willingness, and a courage to tell more complex stories, more non-traditional stories. And we’ve seen success with that. We’ve seen audiences resonate with a bigger variety of narrative and I think that’s sparked and inspired more imagination in the industry, top to bottom, from indie all the way up to the biggest publishers in the world.”

TV isn’t responsible for opening the floodgates on what stories can be told in popular media. TV reflects the changes, but I don’t think it drives them. The real culprits are:

Shifting social and cultural norms, especially around who is seen as deserving a voice

The internet, which allows anyone to bypass gatekeepers and deliver media to historically underserved groups

Regardless, I am grateful we have the diversity of games and media we have.