The serious business of making games

Game Pass has a lot of games, many of which I wouldn’t necessarily call “console style”. If they can get current sports games on there, more stuff like MSFS, I think they could grab more folks that way, too.

And once they get more premiere console games, they could eat into other platforms as the second choice platform, hardware or not.

Note also that I have limited sympathy if their target is something like 30 million subscribers up from 10 million a year and a half ago. My completely random guess is that they’re safely in the “cry me a river”/world’s tiniest violin territory with something like 28 million subs.

This (rather older) article reports these numbers:

  • April 2020 – 10 million
  • September 2020 – 15 million
  • January 2021 – 18 million (remains the last confirmed article)
  • April 2021 (reportedly) – 23 million

I think executive bonuses were affected by them missing.

They’ll do better once they get a more steady stream of big games day one. Right now IMO it’s been far more old games (which you probably already played or bought during a sale) or games that if not on Game Pass would fall into that “wait for a Steam sale” category. There’s also the fact that 3rd party stuff leaves the service over time and I think a lot of PC gamers have become sort of digital hoarders.

This number is incorrect. We know subs only grew by 37% year over year from June 2020 which was between 10 and 15m. That makes 20.55m the literal cap by June 2021, and since it’s unlikely there was no growth between April and September last year it’s probably decently less than that. In fact, based on the 18m number from January, new signups must have basically slowed to a crawl in the first half of 2021.

A look at Tomb Raider: Ascension, a survival horror game that was squashed in development.

Wow, I was just reading about that studio last week in Jason Scheirer’s book “Press Reset”, and that was one of the studios written about that formed in the aftermath of Irrational Studios dissolving after releasing Bioshock Infinite.

$1 billion valuation.

I have no idea what that is, but I think I hate it.

My reaction as well, heh.

“We believe Faze Clan is becoming the voice of youth culture, a brand that sits at the nexus of content, gaming, entertainment and lifestyle in the digital-native world,” Faze CEO Lee Trink said.

Ka-Pow muthaluvvas!

image

Booyah! Bruh! Company valuation hyyyyyyyyyype! Sick, bruh!

I do know what that is! Thanks to the whole “being involved with a crypto pump&dump scheme”.

Also, the fact that they become listed through a merger? If it’s a reverse merger they don’t have to do an IPO, which means they can skip a bunch of disclosure stuff.

If I had a red flag, I would be waving it.

I mean this is really that there’s so much paper money floating around now anything that looks hype can get in on it.

Good for these dudes (I guess?) for doing nothing but being cool and riding the dragon to wealth.

The catch will be whether they’re smart enough to land and get off the dragon before it craters into the earth.

That logo makes me think of this.

And in my book that is a very bad thing!

I mean even if they end up with zero but had 5 years of being part owners of a billion dollar lifestyle company, they’re still coming out ahead.

Yeah, it has a certain runic menace to it, for sure.

It’s a SPAC, so yeah, basically a reverse merger.