Destructoid Checkpoint: The Ups and Downs

Some weeks, the news is bad, and it’s a conscious effort to find the aspects of this thing we all love that keep us invested. For me, it will always be the storytelling, and how gaming rises above movies, music, and television to invite the audience in, and gives us permission to have a jolly good poke around.

There really is just nothing quite like gaming, and while the art form and industry have ups and downs, the ups can often be spectacular. Is it worth the downs? That we all need to answer for ourselves.

A blue note for Bluepoint

In news I did not expect to be writing, Sony is shutting down Bluepoint Games. The studio has specialized in turning old Sony titles into modern platform gold and has turned their hand to titles like Uncharted, Shadow of the Colossus, and Demon’s Souls. 

Formed in 2006, the studio was picked up by Sony in 2021 after the aforementioned Demon’s Souls remake was met with huge acclaim. Bluepoint was then put to work helping with God of War Ragnarok, and what should have been a huge sign of trust was apparently ill tidings. After Ragnarok shipped, Bluepoint was tasked with creating a live-service God of War game that would later be cancelled when Sony realized that Jim Ryan’s company direction was actually lunacy, and you can’t turn every property you own into live-service trash. 

Since then, it seems Bluepoint Games has been trying to figure out what its future looked like, and Sony didn’t think it looked like anything. It’s very sad news when you consider just how good the team was at jazzing up old titles, and how rich Sony’s library of older games is. It’s a little difficult to comprehend that nobody could find a suitable project for the team to work on. 

The West(ern Digital) has fallen

Never let it be said that I missed an opportunity to talk about how absolutely garbage-water I think AI is, and how the impact of this charlatanous chicanery is going to haunt us for years to come. 

After watching the gluttonous tendrils of the tech bros drive the prices of GPUs and RAM through the roof, now it’s time for HDD capacity to feel the crunch: Western Digital announced that major deals with cloud computing companies have hoovered up the last of its stock, pretty much through to 2028.

Now, Western Digital were not exactly a huge move in the consumer market, with just 5% of the HDDs in real people’s computers coming from them, but it does let you know that this tide of want and need is likely to roll across the rest of the manufacturers as AI companies continue to gobble up every pit of technology and hardware that they can get. 

The AI industry is firmly in a compute arms race, and while none of them are making money, or have any plans for products that people might want enough to pay for in order for them to start making money, they plan on spending as much of it as they can on data centers that will be left idle, odd tombs of lost knowledge when the world finally ends. 

In all seriousness, it's a solid indicator that this buy-up isn't gonna stop any time soon, and everything that makes up your computer is going to feel the pinch, along with just about every other consumer product that needs chips, RAM, or rare earth minerals. 

Peeping Pokémon Pokopia

I want to talk about something good and cute this week, so I have chosen Pokémon Pokopia. I find myself needlessly excited for this game, for all kinds of reasons that are kind of hard to explain. I love the creature designs of Pokémon, and I like all manner of aspects of the games, mainly the older ones. 

Newer titles can lose me a little, but it’s impossible not to love the sheer mix of goofy genius that is the average ‘mon. Pokémon Pokopia will allow me to engage with this design language via a nice, cozy game. I’m as happy swinging an axe or shooting a monster or fat-rolling to dodge a boss as the next gamer, but sometimes my brain needs a break from that kind of shenanigans, and this looks perfect.

Instead of making these little goobers fight, I’ll build them a house and make them crumpets. You actually play as a Ditto who take human form, for crying out loud. I get the feeling that much of the world is becoming afraid to appear goofy, but we can be blessed because we will always have gaming, and with luck, it will always allow us to just get a little silly, and sometimes we really need that, I reckon.

A Major Shakeup at Xbox

So this news dropped very late in the writing process, but huge changes have been announced at Xbox. Phil Spencer is retiring, Sarah Bond is leaving, Matt Booty is being promoted to Chief Content Officer, and Asha Sharma, the current President of Microsoft’s CoreAI, is becoming the new CEO of Miscrosoft Gaming. 

Many people, myself included, somewhat assumed that Spencer's mantle would pass to Bond after he hung up his gloves, but it seems like that just wasn’t going to happen. From the outside looking in, Bond’s departure seems to be a little odd. There is a lot of knowledge walking out the door, but it seems Microsoft may not have been willing to bet the house on her leadership. 

It’s honestly impossible to predict what this all means for the future of Xbox, but the simple reality is that the company has seriously misstepped for the last two generations, and that enormous investment in publishers over the last few years has yet to really pay dividends. 

About the only clue we really have is that Asha seems to have a lot of experience scaling new initiatives, so we can likely expect more big shake-ups at Xbox, and potentially a new approach to the market.

I’ll probably have a lot more thoughts on this next week. 

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Scott Duwe is feeling things about Marathon, but wonders if the world that Bungie is creating might be more suited to a different type of game. – “That being said, it’s an extraction shooter. This means it’s PvPvE and fully multiplayer at all times, similarly to a game like ARC Raiders or Escape From Tarkov. And while I’m aware that this isn’t a hot take, I can’t shake the feeling that this exhilarating sci-fi world would be better suited to almost any other genre.”

Andrej Barovic is hoping for some depth in Elder Scrolls 6 – “As time progressed, Bethesda increasingly embraced a shallower, more approachable, and less complex RPG style that favors quantity over quality and believes that so long as players have things to “do” in a game, that should be enough. Because of that, we got Skyrim, which ditched stats and any kind of build complexity in favor of a streamlined set of categories aimed at removing a proper class system.”

With GTA 6 on the horizon, Tiago Manuel looks at some of the games that came for the king and missed. – “Ever since the GTA series became the biggest game franchise in the world with GTA 3, many have tried to one-up it. No game has succeeded, but many of its challengers have remarkable development stories, so let’s remember the fallen.”

And that’s it for this week.