Not surprising, Journey to the West is really popular, and even western societies like Ancient Chinese mythos stories. Wukong and Nezha are probably the 2 most popular, if I had to guess. On top of this not surprising a Chinese publisher making a game about a Chinese mythos is doing well in China, when almost no one is competing in that regard so the market is hype for representation and seeing “their” story made into a playable game.
Oh man NFTs and eSports? Yawning Boat Monkeys or whatever lost billions and the guy who hyped crypto is going to prison for rugpulling on a massive scale.
Who the fuck at this point thinks anyone is interested in them?? eSports has been tried to be forced and anything made specifically for eSports sucks hot dog shit and fails. The only eSports that take off are games with homegrown audiences who enjoy the gameplay (like leave became eSports, it wasn’t created to BE an esport.)
This isnt a shock though, the IOC is openly corrupt and bribable. A brief glimpse at the 2016 Apocalympics in Rio shows they don’t give two fucks about the games, as long as their greasy hands get cash in them. Which totally tracks when NFTs are just a way to exchange fake dollars and hide money in something that has perceived value - just like real art.
It’s not a game for everyone, but it is a lot of fun (if you enjoy building a tank). Part of why I really like it is there’s no real pve tank games right now and this is the closest offering. I’d fuckin kill for Warthunder-but-open-world. Or even mission based. This scratches part of that itch.
This has been disproven and was called out at the time of the increase. Games cost less to develop now than ever. Microtransactions and recurrent subscription transaction1s like battlepasses mean a shit game gets to live longer than it would deserve. People have careers in the field and languages common to the industry - this isn’t a “new and groundbreaking” industry - its one of the largest on the planet.
Studios are absolutely not passing any of that $10 to lower level staff. It was to see if the market would bear it, and no other reason - and corporate defenders came out of the woodwork to pretend BILLION dollar corporations need more money. If videogames were too expensive to make, they’d not be spending so much, now would they?
And it’s not even new. The audacity to charge $70 for a makeup artist to touch hp a ps3 game. It baffles me that bloodborne is a title Sony refuses to allow a port of, even as they let first party in-house developments and ps exclusive since ps2 era - Ratchet and Clank and God of War go to pc.
Just a shout out to Stephanie Sterling for covering Koticks fuckery since the beginning (on youtube) And Jason Schrier for publishing it (kotaku, now bloomberg, and freelance), even as it has fallen on deaf ears for the better part of a decade. Activision Blizzard has been rife with frat boy culture that kotick promotes would have been a bloody nose on the new face Microsoft wants to put on the company.
“Gaming journalism” did its best to not mention it every time something with kotick came up. Blizzard would release shit about games as a smokescreen. A scandal where Kotick groped a guy in front of an elevator? NEW OVERWATCH 2 DETAILS ANNOUNCED!
It may not be the work he wanted, but it was a positive direction. I know nothing about his other works, but new-kratos is a much expanded character and successful continuation on the original work. Not a hamfisted cash-in like so many sequelizations do.