The serious business of making games

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.

Imane “Pokimane” Anys, one of Twitch’s most successful streamers, announced on Wednesday that she’s the co-founder and chief creative officer of RTS, a “talent management and brand consulting firm” for gaming creators. Buried in the announcement is the weirder, more interesting detail that RTS is the very same company that purchased the beloved fighting game tournament EVO with Sony earlier this year.

Ubisoft sees money on the table!

Ubisoft’s future blockchain ambitions were mentioned both in its earnings release and a few times during the call. As noted in its press release, Ubisoft is funding blockchain gaming company Animoca Brands, which advertises itself on its website as “the global leader in branded blockchain gaming.”

Animoca’s current projects include Revv Motorsport, Revv Racing, and upcoming game Formula E: High Voltage, all of which use the same token called “REVV” to enable players to “own” digital assets and collect NFT in-game items. It also has a game called The Sandbox, a virtual world full of NFTs called “Sand.”

In addition to its funding of Animoca, Ubisoft is a founding member of the Blockchain Game Alliance and has been exploring the technology generally since its early development.

“[Blockchain] will enable more play-to-earn that will enable more players to actually earn content, own content, and we think it’s going to grow the industry quite a lot,” Duguet said. “We’ve been working with lots of small companies going on blockchain and we’re starting to have a good know-how on how it can impact the industry, and we want to be one of the key players here.”

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“This is your company, your brand (and our money)”

The last bit was silent.

Rage. White-hot rage.

I knew from the headline that I’ll probably have never heard of the most popular game in the world before.

And I was right.

Me neither.

100 million simultaneous players is a staggeringly huge number.

Daily users, not concurrent. Still a staggering huge number of course.

Thanks for the article. Interesting tidbit:

I absolutely loved The Three-Body Problem so I was interested to see that he’d be writing for a video game. But I am super disappointed to hear that he’s pro-genocide.

The Chinese government is also taking a heavier hand in video games content since this year, seeing them as an important art in the propagandists tool kit, so there’s that to keep in mind too…

It’s a truly massive game. The scale of games in China (and SEA) makes what happens in the West look miniscule.