More than a newsletter 📩 February 1st 2020

Big studios can't hide crunch anymore, so they just admit to it

Here's the abbreviated history of the perception of crunch in video game development: Crunch was happening and people didn't really know about it and no one who experienced it talked about it. Fast forward, crunch culture is whispered between trusted colleagues and friends, but any employee is too nervous to talk about it in fear of being fired. Only a few years ago, crunch began to creep into the limelight because of anonymous complaints. Gaming journalists then began to do deep dives into crunch culture and expose huge companies like Rockstar and CD Projekt Red for the awful crunch that they put their employees through.

Within the past couple of months, developers have realized that it doesn't matter if they try to cover it up, people will find out about crunch. So, they've decided to go with transparency. They acknowledge the oncoming crunch or they address the crunch that already happened, saying that it sucks, but was necessary. This article does a great job of highlight developers like CD Pojekt Red and id Software for being so upfront with their development cycle and brings up the question: "does transparency justify the crunch?"

From a positive perspective, maybe crunch is slowly getting better. A survey from the Internal Game Developers Association's Developer Satisfaction Survey shows that employees say that their jobs have less crunch as well as other improvements over the past few years. We're in a big development time for games right now, so it's understandable why we're seeing so many articles about work conditions. It's easy to see this influx and think that the industry is getting worse, when in reality, it could be getting better. Hopefully, next year's survey will show an even better improvement!

Image credit: Cyberpunk 2077

Let's talk about 💰💰💰

This week, we got some "fun" reports about sales! That might not sound fun, but it is really interesting to look at how the PS4 sales have done, how the Switch is killing it, and how EA's past year has been.

EA's annual conference call (which everyone that's in the industry listens to, I guess?) shows Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order sold incredibly well, Madden 20 was the most successful in the franchise, and more.

The Nintendo Switch sales are crazy good

PS4 Games sales blow past 1 billion!

It's really exciting to see the sales reports of current-gen before next-gen drops at the end of this year. Do you think that the PS5 will outsell the PS4 in its life cycle?

Image credit: Pepi Stojanovski

Load Save is more than a newsletter

If you didn't know, 2020 is the year of Load Save. This week, Load Save is becoming more than just a newsletter.

What do Load Save and St. Jude have to do with each other? Keep reading to find out!

Is it still a newsletter?

Don't worry! The newsletter will still send out just like normal. Let's talk about what went on this week in gaming!

Is the Industry getting better? A recent survey might hint towards a brighter future

Stadia still sucks, and Google isn't interested sorry

Streaming is becoming a more stable job, but at what cost?

If you want to say hey, you can follow Load Save on Twitter or Facebook!

As always, enjoy the read!

Development

Can Half-Life: Alyx pull VR out of its niche?

The fact that Valve's VR system, the Valve Index (the worst named product I've seen in a while), is ~$1,000, is insane to me. What's even crazier is that it's selling so well that there have been shortages of it in certain areas. What's convincing enough to throw that kind of cash? Half-Life: Alyx.

It's really a genius idea for Valve, if it works. The best way to sell such a highly priced product is to connect it to a super popular game franchise. Imagine if instead of Half-Life, Valve announced a VR Portal game. There would be some hype, but I doubt it would be as big as it is for Alyx. So now that Valve has made a lot of money from the Index, the next step is to make a lot from Alyx! The game looks pretty good and it looks like it'll meet it's release window, so will its success pave the way for the future of VR? That's the topic of this article.

Let me know what you think about it!

Image credit: Valve

Google responds to complaints of slow Stadia announcements

Stadia is a dumpster fire that will never go out.

To no one's surprise, Google Stadis has yet to provide much value to their customers. They haven't met many of their "New Year Goals" and their response to upset fans has been lackluster, to say the least. Instead of apologizing for the lack of games and features, they continue to say "it's coming" and deflecting responsibility. Stadia customers have expressed their frustration with the lack of announcements of games coming to the platform. Stadia responds with no apologies, instead they say it's more of the developers fault. Apparently, the Stadia team is just waiting for the game devs to announce that their game is coming to Stadia.

Imagine the perspective of one of the game devs who's game is supposed to come to Stadia. You haven't announced it yet and you're afraid to do so. Why? Because a lot of the response will be about the failure of Stadia thus-far. It's bad press for any game that's moving to the platform, so I can only imagine that these devs are sitting with their breath held hoping that Stadia can fix this. Sadly, it looks like Google is just waiting for each individual developer to announce and dig their own grave.

It's a sucky situation all around: the customers were screwed and the game devs that agreed to put their game on this platform are screwed. Do you think Stadia can recover or is it another doomed Google project?

Image credit: Google

Reviews

Temtem is even better than Pokémon

If you're like me, you've seen a lot of people talking about Temtem, the MMO that's heavily influenced by Pokemon, but you've never read anything more than a headline about it. I finally took a minute to read about this game that has seemingly taken the internet by storm, and I'm glad I did. PC Gamer looks at the similarities between Temtem and Pokemon and highlights where they differ and where Temtem improves.

If you've ever wanted a Pokemon MMO, something a little more challenging, or a switch up on the age-old fighting system, Temtem is probably the game for you. I'm tempted to try this one out myself after this article!

Image credit: Temtem Twitter

Community

Bethesda creates clones to give your stuff back in Fallout 76

In standard Fallout fashion, Bethesda is solving an easy problem in a really weird way. I'll give you a minute to read this article...

That's right. The Fallout 76 Dev Team is creating clones of your character to help you get your inventory back that might have been stolen during a hack. So let's break this down so we can talk about all of the stuff that is crazy about this situation.

First: Fallout 76 had a "easy to use" hack that allowed people to steal other players' inventories quite easily. Remember in Fallout: New Vegas when you could pickpocket NPCs and sometimes take the gun out of their hand without them noticing? Just like that, but with actual players.

Second: In order to return these items to players, the dev team had to create clones of the players' past selves and meet them in game to trade everything they lost. This tells us that the dev team doesn't have a way to just give items to players, which makes sense seeing as how badly this game has been run since its release. But, it is nice to see the dev team go to such links to return the items and give out Atom points (in-game currency). But man, I would love to see a video of this exchange.

I know I've complained a lot about this broken game, but it's provided more goofs and laughs than any other game in recent memory. It's because this stuff is real, in a sense. It's not scripted. No developer said, "hey, wouldn't it be funny if we did this?" It's just things that have happened to a game that is under-baked and has a support team that is just trying to make people happy.

So, I guess I should say thanks to Fallout 76? Not to Bethesda, but to the day-to-day support and dev team that make these funny articles a reality. I can't wait for the goofs that the Wastelanders Expansion brings.

Image credit: Bethesda

Long Read

Top streamers are leaving Twitch amidst big money and shady deals

This article really stood out to me since I've recently started streaming. If you're interested in streaming, are a streamer, or you just like the business side of things, this is a great article to read.

It discusses the change of the profession of streaming. Streamers who have been grinding their entire streaming careers to make it big are starting to sign these huge exclusivity deals so that they can make streaming a more reliable source of income. To me, that's welcome news. I've mentioned before that the stories of streamers being afraid to take a few days off is so saddening to me. This way, these people have more of a choice on how to spend their time.

Sadly, the presence of high-dollar deals brings about the threat of shady agencies and agents who are taking huge percentages off the top without the streamer even knowing. This will always be present in mega-popular industries like streaming, but it's sad to see young streamers being taken advantage of because they don't know much about the business side of things.

I'll leave it at that. This is a long, long read, but it's absolutely worth it. Let me know what stood out to you and what you think about the future of streaming.

Image credit: Twitch Twitter

Before You Go

St. Jude? Load Save?

I'm really excited to announce that Load Save is expanding onto Twitch!

The goal of this stream will be to raise money for St. Jude (and have some fun while doing it). Any money you donate, whether it be Bits or Subs (Amazon Subs too!), will be donated straight to St. Jude.

A few of my close friends and I plan to stream every Thursday night. We all share the passion of supporting St. Jude, so each of our channels will donate any money we make to the charity. Outside of Thursday nights, some people will solo stream throughout the week. We'll all be hosting each other, so you'll always have a way to watch. Make sure to follow to know when we'll be streaming!

Check out the link to learn more! I'm so excited to see Load Save grow and be able to use it as a platform to help the world. If you have any questions, feel free to ask on any of the LS socials or email me at seth@simplefocus.com!

Thanks for reading and letting me do something as awesome as build this brand. I'll see you next time!