Destructoid Checkpoint: As brightside as it gets

Another week, another bundle of headlines to sift through. I might as well say that I am specifically ignoring EA layoffs, as they make me sad, and stories about old Blizzard layoffs, as they made me angry. We’ll likely be forced to have a big layoff-focused special at some point, so just prepare yourself for that one, I guess.

Instead, I’d rather focus on some nice things, and also make fun of Epic Games, who firmly deserve a bit of pointing and laughing from time to time, if only because of Tim Sweeney’s haircut. 

Slay the spire, too

It is with a big fat grin that I get to say that Slay the Spire 2 has been a tremendous success for developer, Mega Crit. The original is highly regarded among people in the know, but it might shock you to learn that it never did the headline-grabbing “Huge Player Count” thing that so many folks seem to think games live or die by. 

If you go and check the stats on SteamDB, you will find the perfect user graph for any game, which grows consistently over time. There are a couple of huge spikes, but what Slay the Spire really did was just be a really good game that people were very happy to recommend to others, and a lot of folks stayed playing it for a very long time. 

What is funny is that Slay the Spire 2 did have a huge playercount surge, with an incredible 574,638-person peak, and just north of 400K people playing it as I type this. This is yet another indicator of a big swing in gamer behaviour., I think the Golden Age of Indie Games is reaching a new peak, and this makes me very happy. 

Because this keeps happening. Titles like Slay the Spire, Mewgenics, and Silksong keep attracting bigger audiences than ever. But why? I’d theorize that AAA companies have burned a lot of goodwill over the last five years. On the other hand, developers like Mega Crit, Team Cherry, and Edmund McMillen are now cashing in on the fact that they have produced games that people already love, and even larger audiences are trusting them to respect their dollars.

Remember, people want to buy into a vision, and too many years of design-by-committee AAA titles, with launches bolstered by paid-to-play influencers, is taking its toll on people. Ultimately, those who do purchase the AAA titles will always be the biggest sector of the audience, but the ones that get churned away still love gaming and still want to engage with its artistry. Thankfully, there will always be wonderful games to experience, and it looks like the future of the indie market is only getting brighter each year.

Pokémon Pokopia

It’s hard to have a pun in the head when the name of the game is already a play on words, but that aside, Nintendo seems to have scored another massive hit. In just four days, they moved 2.2 million copies, with a million of those in Japan alone. 

The home market is always tremendously important to Nintendo, and they rarely, if ever, lose sight of the fact that they are exporting games from there to the rest of the world, which is where a large part of the charm comes from. 

Having played a lot of Pokopia, I can honestly say it's a very interesting project. While it is tempting to write it off as Animal Crossing: New Horizons with Pokémon, that is doing it a disservice. The reframing of the Pokémon from creatures who battle to ones who call me bud and pal has really done a number on me, frankly. 

The game has very neatly and comfortably slotted into my day as something I just put some time into and then go and do other things, something New Horizons failed to do for me. A part of this is the general ridiculousness of Pokopia, and the inherent tragedy of these little monsters who often define themselves by the presence of humans learning what to do now that all the humans are gone. 

It exists in a fun and interesting place where you can, if you wish, sit and ponder whether the game is an examination of how mankind not only impacts our environment but also makes other animals dependent on us for their own survival. We didn’t just develop a level of intellect that leaves us horrified at the world (this is where I recommend that you read The Last Messiah by Peter Wessel Zapffe), but we tend to inflict the horror of understanding on others who remain blissfully ignorant of the size of the cosmos. The Pokémon in the ironically named Pokopia are so out of touch with their own origins that all they can do is ape human behavior and mimic our environmental negligence to survive. 

Or, if you like, it’s just a funny game about building huts and houses for magnets and birds. Who can say, really?

V-Buck you, too

Epic Games, owners of what used to be an infinite money printing machine called Fortnite, have found themselves with apparently no choice but to increase the price of V-Bucks. What you used to pay to get 1000 V-Bucks will now only get you 800, with further value drops the higher up the bundles you go.

This is due to the rising cost of keeping the game running, according to the team, but for consumers, it’s really just one more squeeze in a long line of squeezing. I suspect it won’t be long before many companies learn that the only blood you get by squeezing a stone is your own. 

One of the biggest problems that Epic is likely facing with Fortnite is that they appear to be massively cutting into its own profit margin by becoming hugely reliant on crossovers and licensing deals to generate shop interest. The original Fortnite sold skins for characters that were 100% own by Epic, but those Star Wars, Marvel, and K-Pop Demon Hunter deals don’t come cheap, and Epic is likely losing a substantial percentage of the sales value on those deals. 

The argument is that they sell more skins because of said deals, but how true this continues to be at this point is actually pretty nebulous. I have been informed by young nephews and nieces that Fortnite is now cringe.

While ultimately Epic has the data that seems to imply this price rise is a good idea, you really have to wonder how close the margins are, and if this is designed to simply maintain the profit margins or actually “pay the bills.”

I guess not even The Seven can escape the impact of tankers sinking in the Strait of Hormuz.    

What’s happening, Destructoid

Andrej Barovic is eager to see Capcom learn from the past when it comes to Resident Evil’s future. - “Now that I’ve completed Resident Evil Requiem, I put myself through the usual ordeal of reviewing every piece of Resident Evil lore, contradictory though it often is. In this renewed interest in Capcom’s long-standing franchise, I began to wonder who a potential Resident Evil 10 should feature in the main role and came to realize that it’s actually a rather difficult problem to solve.”

Kyle Ferreira has been digging through the recent past for fun stuff to play, and has one game that never stops being fun. “I’m sure most gamers have that one title that just sticks with them throughout the years. Most of us probably have several. You know the type: we stop playing them, even forget about them for a while, but then one day, there it is. You pick it up to have a quick go, and boom, fifty hours later, you’re as hooked as day one and can’t get enough. As someone who plays a lot of games (obviously), I have plenty of these games in my library, but few are more fascinating than Dave the Diver.

Tiago Manuel makes the case that even Fortnite would struggle to get off the ground in the modern gamescape. - “Highguard’s premature death made me think of Fortnite and how different things were back in the day. Fortnite is ubiquitous nowadays, and, having been released a decade ago, many of the people playing it aren’t aware of its early history because they weren’t even born when it came out. Still, it wasn’t the immediate smash hit that most seemingly know it as.”

And that’s it for this week.