Destructoid Checkpoint: Ubisoft was on to something

It’s always funny to watch the gaming industry casually rolling along, throwing art into a money machine, and watching all the blood and boney bits come flying out. Sometimes the mess offers up some interesting tales, such as one of this week's stories. It’s easy to spot a hole in the market, but can you fill it? That’s the question.

Potential Penny Pinching at Xbox

After lots of shuffling around at the top of Microsoft, we are already seeing the first signs of the things that might be a priority for the Xbox makers in the future. According to The Verge, new CEO Asha Sharma, an appointment that initially caused consternation among people who legitimately seem to think that having a good gamerscore would make you a good CEO, has identified the price of Game Pass as an issue. 

Reportedly, the service is considered by Sharma to be “too expensive” for gamers, words that are likely to see a massive overcorrection in attitude from players who are feeling the pinch in their pockets and constantly hope that benevolent corporations will save them from…well…those very same corporations. 

Microsoft has made some pretty serious mistakes of late, and Game Pass is certainly one of them. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a superb offering, and fantastic value for gamers like me who can afford the subscription each month and benefit from it across both our PCs and Xbox consoles. What it didn’t do was what Microsoft hoped, which was to disrupt the market. 

The entire point of trying to be the “Netflix of gaming” is that other companies would be forced into a similar model, offering subscription services or even having to put their games on your platform to stay relevant, as your market disruption showed everyone that there could be a “better way.” The problem for Xbox is that neither Sony nor Nintendo blinked, and Game Pass really showed how dangerous a prospect it is by also being home to all the first-party games that Microsoft spent billions to get its hands on.  

It seems somewhat unlikely that the solution will be something that gamers actually want. When a company decides something is “too expensive,” they don’t really think about lowering the price of it; instead, they seek to add value. The bottom dollar cost is the same for the users, but the expectation is that the improved value will cause them to reduce spending somewhere else to maintain the service. Value-add, new tiers for first-party games, and even advertising-supported tiers are all currently being considered. Will they be solutions that players line up for? That remains to be seen.

Animated Bloodborne

After just talking about Alex Garland’s Elden Ring last week, this week brings the news that Sony is moving ahead with an animated Bloodborne movie that is set to be R-rated and involves popular YouTuber and noted Bloodborne addict Jacksepticeye. 

Not much is known right now, but I am very much behind the idea of making this an animated effort. Animation has a certain quality and malleability to it, and you can do very fun things with perspective and scale that emphasize the power and emotion of moments that would look utterly goofy in a live-action movie. 

The R rating is welcome, as I have no idea how you produce a Bloodborne movie with the required gore volume without it, and I’m not fretting about the involvement of Jacksepticeye either. He’s a big fan of the game, and someone seems to feel he has what it takes to help get it made. The movie will be good or bad, but likely worth seeing either way if only for the hilarious fallout of Bloodborne fans being constantly baited by clout-chasers about a remake that was never going to happen, then being let down by a movie when it finally arrived. 

I don’t need extra eyes inside my skull to have the insight required to see how funny that would be. 

Ubisoft was right all along

Ubisoft often catches flak for its games, but sometimes it has a solid vision and understands a potential niche. The company spent years and a lot of money developing a pirate game. The decade-long development cycle reportedly cost $200 million, which is a lot of cash, but resulted in Skull and Bones, a game I am not ashamed to say I had to Google the title of just now, as I had forgotten it. 

Skull and Bones sank without a trace, peaking just north of 2500 players on Steam, failing to entice an audience, and making us all believe that Ubisoft was crazy. But we were all of us deceived, and Ubisoft was right; they just made a really, really bad game. 

It looked like the piracy (not that type) market had been cornered by Rare with Sea of Thieves, but a new game has arrived, and it is tearing up the Steam charts. Windrose, from developer Kraken Express, launched on the 14th of April and has a peak of 113,930 players on Steam, with 108,584 playing right now, as I type. It will likely hit a new peak this weekend. 

The PvE pirate game does everything you want and has already enraptured a passionate fanbase, despite being in early access. The survival nature of the game offers a real challenge to players, while fantasy monsters and fun building options give depth. It can also be played solo or with friends. I will talk about this game more over the coming weeks, but for now, I am deeply entrenched in my adventures on the seven seas, and it’s great to see the gaming community embrace yet another fun title that feels like it has dropped out of nowhere. 

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Andrej Barovic has bucked the trend and found something to like in Battlefield 6, a game that seems to be burning up most of the goodwill it had at launch. - “Battlefield 6 is one of those gaming stories that prove certain companies never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Despite being one of the best-selling games of the last year, it has been bleeding players like there’s no tomorrow, leading to massive layoffs at Battlefield Studios amid a total lack of understanding of what fans actually want to see.”

Tiago Manuel breaks down some of the strangest endings in video games, for anyone curious. - “Being enjoyable throughout no longer suffices. Great games require a memorable ending. They often stick in the mind for the wrong reasons. Some games end on a straight-up bizarre note, so let’s have a laugh and reminisce, now that you’re hopefully no longer mad at them.”

Luci Kelemen spent some time with Distance, a fun little racer that I myself enjoyed quite a bit a few years ago. It’s an odd little thing, as Luci explains. - “It takes a bit of time to suss out the complicated controls and the platforming challenges offered by Distance, but once you do, and hop and skip around at high speed in this uniquely clean, colorful and metallic environment, it is still an incredible experience today. Comms system announcements and loading screen snippets give you almost FromSoft-like lore drips, setting you up for the distortions and surprises to come.”

And that’s it for this week.