10 The Wildest Video Game News Stories of 2022 | Winter Spectacular 2022
As someone who covers video game news for a living, I like to think I’ve been consistently well-informed about the constant comings and goings of the industry. Well-informed enough to say that 2022 has been an absolute rollercoaster of a year for the industry.
Admittedly, it feels like every year has been a collective fever dream in general, with 2022 simply being yet another. And while video games remain a source of comforting escapism, the industry itself routinely fails to just be normal.
Over the past 12 months as a reporter, I’ve had a front-row seat to some truly mind-boggling stories and developments, many of which have gone beyond the bounds of our insular industry and broken into mainstream news. So, to cap out 2022 and ensure you don’t forget how ridiculous the industry can be, I’ve compiled what I believe are the wildest gaming news stories of the year for us all to laugh and/or cringe at.
1. Wordle Explodes In Popularity And Gets Bought Out
Did anyone else forget that Wordle came out only last year or is it just me? While the word game craze kicked off towards the end of 2021, its popularity continued to spread well into 2022 and beyond. To the point where I was regularly having to come up with new Wordle stories at least twice a week.
There are only so many times you can report on another Wordle clone or people getting irate over a particular spelling before all the stories start to blend together, but this was the reality for many writers. Wordle was the SEO king and as long as enough people were typing it into Google, websites needed coverage. Something the myriad of fan-made clones, some of which became massively popular in their own right, provided.
Honestly, this feels like it happened 10 years ago…
For such a simple concept, Wordle’s achievements are impressive, going from a fun side-project for Josh Wardle’s wife to have something to play to enough of a global phenomenon that The New York Times bought it for a seven-figure sum. Even now the fad hasn’t died; you can still find people sharing their answers on Twitter and Facebook.
You could argue that Wordle is proof that you don’t need to dump billions into hyperrealistic graphics and high-profile actors to make your game successful, though I doubt anyone else in the industry will take that lesson to heart.
2. Babylon’s Fall Launches To No Fanfare – Will Die In Less Than A Year
Considering the success the two companies had with Nier: Automata, another collaboration between Square Enix and PlatinumGames should’ve been a slam dunk. Instead, Babylon’s Fall is easily a contender for the most embarrassing launch of the year and while many predicted its demise before it even released, I don’t think anyone was prepared for precisely how badly it would perform.
It’s easy to forget and say “were we too hard on Babylon Fall” but when you go back and look at it… Yeah, this game was terrible.
There was just so little enthusiasm surrounding Babylon’s Fall. It being yet another live service in an already oversaturated market didn’t help, but even having Platinum’s stylish combat wasn’t enough to generate excitement. Pre-release material highlighted a rather dour, uninteresting world; one lacking the kind of madcap and unbridled energy of something like Bayonetta or The Wonderful 101. This is all without mentioning a somewhat smeary, painterly artstyle that was so maligned that it had to be toned down before release
Its critical failure was hardly a surprise, but that would hardly matter if it could carve out a niche and resonate with enough customers to create a living community. If it could at least keep people playing, then it could survive low review scores, but it didn’t manage that either. It wasn’t even bad enough to be a morbid curiosity, barely attracting over 600 players on Steam at launch.
Editor’s note: I would describe Dash less as a collaborator and more of a antagonist foil…
Attempts to drum up interest with a Nier crossover also failed. Things got so bad that, for a period, literally one person was playing it – startmenu collaborator Dashiell Wood, a self-admitted lover of what he calls flawed but charming games.
Square Enix, as if deep in denial, insisted for weeks that it still had long-term plans for Babylon’s Fall. However, it’s since had to admit that there’s no point spending money to keep servers up for a game that has a player base in the double digits.
In September, the publisher announced that Babylon’s Fall will shut down in February 2023, less than a year after its release. Thus dooming it to forever be referred to as Babylon’s Fail by millions of punters that need a catchy strapline when writing about it.
3. Balan Wonderworld Creator Arrested Twice For Insider Trading
Balan Wonderworld was sort of the Babylon’s Fall of 2021, in that it was a Square Enix title that was widely and notoriously mocked upon its release, developed by industry legends, and Dashiell Wood is the only person in the world who actually likes it.
Art.
This year, the game’s director and one of the original minds behind Sonic The Hedgehog, Yuji Naka, blamed Square Enix for its poor quality, claiming that he was booted off the project for pointing out its problems, and even filed a lawsuit over it. At the time of writing, it’s unclear how the lawsuit is progressing, but that was just the preamble to this nonsense.
Many months later, news broke of three people being arrested for alleged insider trading while working at Square Enix. Basically, they used their knowledge of the existence of a Dragon Quest mobile game to buy stocks in the development studio before the game was announced so they could sell them post-announcement and make a profit. Two of them were identified as former Square Enix employees… including Yuji Naka. Because the world has a bizarre sense of humour and loves irony, it also came out that while two of the people made large investments of ¥47 million ($336,300), Naka only bought ¥2.8 million ($20,000) worth of stock.
Not to kick a dude while he’s down but, boy, did Yuji Naka probably not realise this would become the photo of record of him during his criminal trial.
It doesn’t even stop there because, as I was writing this up, it was reported that Naka was arrested a second time for the exact same crime regarding a Final Fantasy mobile game. However, this time he invested a much larger sum of ¥144.7 million ($1,000,00).
As of yesterday (the 27th of December) the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office's Special Investigation Department have formally indicted Naka and one of the other men, meaning that this case will likely go to trial. Regardless, it’s still wild to know that Naka may become more famous for his criminal activity, rather than helping make Sonic the Hedgehog (though some will argue the latter is a far more heinous crime).
4. The Invasion of Ukraine And The Industry’s Response
Not to bring the mood down, but it’s impossible to discuss the wildest video game news stories without mentioning the war in Ukraine. It’s an utter tragedy and one that will hopefully be resolved sooner rather than later (remember when people figured it’d be over in like a month and that was in February?).
While many did predict the invasion based on what was going on at the time, I think most of us were unprepared for just how wide the ramifications of this invasion would be. Especially regarding the games industry. Usually, big-name companies like to avoid taking a stance on political issues out of fear of seeming biased and driving away potential customers (aka being massive cowards), but this was something not even the games industry could ignore.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 is one of the games delayed indefinitely.
Nearly every publisher and developer made it perfectly clear they didn’t abide by Russia’s (more specifically Putin’s) actions. Many of them raised and donated money for Ukrainian charities, EA expelled Russian teams from its sports titles, and the likes of Sony and Nintendo pulled their games out of Russia, effectively telling the country they didn’t want its money. Meanwhile, Ukrainian studios soldiered on with development as an act of resistance, with some devs even signing up to risk their lives fighting back.
It's debatable how much of this was motivated by genuine morals rather than good PR, but this doesn’t change how monumental of a movement this was. Of course, this was but one part of wider action made to cripple Russia. Some of us, including Putin, probably expected most of the world to turn a blind eye to this just as it’s done to so many other global atrocities. So, to see the industry instead take a greater stand than anyone could’ve realised is at least a nice reminder of how indomitable the human spirit can be.
5. Hideo Kojima Is Mistakenly Accused Of Assassinating Shinzo Abe By A Dumb Racist
Okay, back to something a bit more light-hearted. Although that may be the wrong choice of words considering it involves a person being murdered. On the flip side, said person was former prime minister Shinzo Abe, a conservative nationalist who denied Japanese war crimes and had ties to the Unification Church, which was essentially a cult. Murder is never a good thing, but I think what best sums up the kind of person Abe was is that following his assassination, most of Japan went “You know, he kind of deserved it.”
The phrase “gong show” doesn’t get thrown around enough…
The fact this happened while the UK was having its own prime ministerial crisis (one that didn’t involve any assassinations, unfortunately) was wild enough, but the reason I’m bringing it up is that a photo of Abe’s assassin quickly made the rounds on social media. Except it was of someone else. On its own, that’d be pretty scummy since it risked putting an innocent stranger in danger should Abe’s supporters tracked them down. But this wasn’t some random man; it was famed auteur and video game director Hideo Kojima.
Among those who mistakenly pinned the blame on Kojima were a Greek news outlet, an Iranian news website, and right-wing French politician Damien Rieu, who tweeted out a photo of Kojima posing next to a poster of Che Guevara and writing “The extreme-left kills.” If he was lucky, everyone would’ve just made fun of him for using a photo of a very famous figure in the games industry but, unfortunately for Rieu, other bigots picked it up and spread it around.
GONG SHOW!
Unsurprisingly, Kojima didn’t appreciate having thousands of people accuse him of murdering a politician and his studio, Kojima Productions, issued a statement that it was considering legal action.
At the time of writing, we don’t know whether the studio did pursue a lawsuit against Rieu, who did delete his tweet and apologised for his mistake, or if the studio went after the other aforementioned outlets.
6. Hacker Steals And Leaks Footage Of Grand Theft Auto 6
Video game leaks are nothing new, but has there ever been a leak on a scale as the Grand Theft Auto 6 one? I struggle to think of anything that comes close. If you’re wondering what makes this so significant, the reasons are twofold.
I was going to put a leaked GTA 6 screenshot here, but I like running a website that isn’t going to be sued into oblivion.
First, GTA 6 is one of the most prolific upcoming releases at the moment. The game has been rumoured and ‘leaked’ countless times beforehand, and the GTA fanbase has fervently demanded it for years. GTA 5 was almost 10 years ago, which is an obscene amount of time between sequels. All fans had in the interim were more GTA 5 re-releases, continued GTA Online updates, and the GTA: The Trilogy remasters. So, footage of the elusive GTA 6 leaking online was a huge deal.
When is Rockstar going to get back to publishing good games?
Second, this wasn’t accidental or the result of a cheeky employee risking their job, but outright theft. Somebody used social engineering to hack into Rockstar and stole work-in-progress footage (and more worryingly for Rockstar, the source code for GTA 5) so they could blackmail the company. All in all, it was a hugely embarrassing scandal for the notoriously secretive Rockstar.
Perhaps the worst part about the whole ordeal was the Internet’s response to the footage. Many derided and criticised Rockstar developers for the game looking unfinished… seemingly forgetting the fact that the footage was of an unfinished game. The public reception served as another painful reminder that a lot of people don’t understand the first thing about game development, and more frustratingly, don’t seem to care to learn.
The purported hacker responsible (a 17-year-old Briton) was soon found and arrested and has pleaded not guilty to the charges. However, that’s the last update on the matter so who knows if we’ll ever publicly find out how things wrap up.
7. Google Shuts Down Stadia A Month After Saying Things Were Fine
Some might argue that Stadia’s death shouldn’t be included on this list because it was so predictable. On one hand, they’re kind of right. While it certainly wasn’t without its fans, Google’s efforts to champion cloud gaming as the future of the industry just weren’t working. Worse, once it launched towards the end of 2019, Google’s lack of communication meant it rarely gave customers a reason to remain invested in the ecosystem.
Hyper Gunsport was one of the game screwed over by Stadia, and you should really check it out now that it is out on other platforms. It’s rad.
Stadia was attracting plenty of third-party support, with some major triple-A releases coming to the platform, but what it arguably needed more than anything was exclusives of its own – a killer app to make people go “Oh I have to get Stadia to play this.” That was the plan for a while, only for Google to give up on making its own games and shut down its internal development studios in 2021. In retrospect, that was the moment when even the most faithful Stadia supporters should’ve realised the service was doomed.
So, why am I including it here if so many people saw it coming? Firstly, Google dropped the news just a month after it assured customers that Stadia was doing just fine. There were rumours at the time of its closure and when asked about it, Google responded, “Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we’re always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro.”
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?
He has allegedly killed at least three consoles!
Secondly, Google didn’t even warn its partners at other studios that the service was shutting down. Many devs who were hard at work on releasing their games for Stadia woke up one day to learn that this source of revenue was no longer viable. And Google didn’t have the common courtesy to give them the heads up; they heard about it from news headlines. It is impossible to believe that Stadia’s closure was a spur-of-the-moment decision; this had to have been discussed and/or planned in advance. All in all, it just reinforces beliefs that not only did Google have no idea what it was doing with Stadia but that the tech giant had become so uninterested in gaming that it was fine with burning countless bridges on the way out.
That said, the one positive out of the whole thing is that Google is offering full refunds on any Stadia purchases made before it shuts down in January 2023. That earns it some goodwill considering it could’ve very easily just kept the money and told customers to deal with it, but that doesn’t change how woeful Stadia’s entire lifecycle has been.
8. Bayonetta Voice Actor Tanks Her Own Reputation And Everyone Involved Comes Out Looking Bad
Oh boy, now this one was a doozy. When Bayonetta 3’s first proper trailer dropped during a 2021 Nintendo Direct and gaming’s favourite witch was sporting a different voice, fans naturally took umbrage with the iconic stage actor, Hellena Taylor, being replaced. It was only this past October that PlatinumGames acknowledged the voice change, explaining that “various overlapping circumstances” prevented Taylor’s reprisal.
The award for Most God Damn Exhausting News Story of The Year goes to…
Then, just a week or so before Bayonetta 3’s launch, Taylor uploaded a damning series of videos requesting fans to boycott the game and give their pre-order money to charity, while also calling Platinum liars and explaining that the real reason she was replaced was that she was only offered a measly $4,000 for the entire game’s worth of acting. A pretty paltry offer for the lead role in a Nintendo-funded franchise that was positioned as one of the company's big holiday releases.
Between her emotional openness, even admitting her own mental health struggles, and the fact that voice actors tend to get treated terribly across multiple mediums (this controversy came not long after a similar incident regarding Crunchyroll’s decision to recast the main character in Mob Psycho 100 due to a pay dispute), the Internet rallied behind Taylor, with many cancelling their pre-orders and demanding answers from Platinum.
Then things got ugly. Taylor’s comments (let’s assume unintentionally) led to some attacking her replacement, Jennifer Hale, for undercutting a fellow actor. Diehard Platinum fans began to air Taylor’s dirty laundry in an effort to discredit her, unearthing some admittedly unfavourable beliefs she shared (at least one of the charities she personally recommended was an anti-abortion billboard fund). Regardless of Taylor’s political leanings, though, and the water becoming extremely muddy, none of that should change the fact that voice actors do get paid shockingly little and deserve a living wage.
That was when the Bloomberg report dropped. According to its findings, Taylor was actually offered far more than she claimed - $15,000 per each of her planned five four-hour sessions. A detail Taylor later admitted was accurate. Regardless of whether $15,000 is a good or bad offer for playing an iconic character in a first-party Nintendo game, the takeaway from all this is that Taylor lied and manipulated a dedicated and passionate following into siding with her.
The sad thing is, this game deserved to be discussed on its own merits instead of this…
I couldn’t tell you what Taylor is doing now or for the foreseeable future. I’d be surprised if she ever gets any prominent voice work again. Even if everything she said was true, causing such a stink against companies like Platinum and Nintendo would’ve likely got her blacklisted for being a ‘troublemaker’ - another bad practice video game companies are fans of. She’s certainly lost any goodwill or support from her former fans who no doubt feel betrayed for sticking up for her.
The worst thing about this whole thing is that Taylor ultimately undermined a very serious problem that permeates through multiple industries. Voice actors get very little respect from the companies that hire them. They’ve had to deal with poor pay for years and now executives are eager to cut them out altogether, and just have a bunch of robots do all the work. Taylor could have at least made more people aware of the plight of voice actors, but all she did was set a bad precedent for anyone that speaks out. Now, when voice actors complain of low pay, many will think back to Taylor’s actions and assume the worst.
9. Halo Infinite Just Can’t Catch A Break
I admittedly don’t play Halo Infinite but, even from an outsider’s perspective, it seems like its post-launch lifecycle has been something of a disaster. Things were looking so bright for the game when it launched last December. That much memed upon E3 debut and year-long delay (remember this was meant to be Microsoft’s big launch title for the Xbox Series X) seemingly became a distant memory, after 343 released a game that felt like a true evolution of the famed franchise.
Forge Mode is actually super awesome. But are you going to redownload Halo just for that?
But throughout all of 2022, every one of its far-to-spread-out updates only seemed to elicit nothing but frustration from its community. Maybe it hasn’t been as disastrous as something like Babylon’s Fall, but this is one of Microsoft’s most beloved franchises and the game that was meant to set up the next ten years of Halo. However, post-launch support, at the risk of sounding too mean, felt out of date - similar to when Destiny first launched content light and with no real endgame. Its first two seasons dragged on far longer than they had any right to, not helped by a drip feed of lacklustre content, and core features like campaign co-op and the Forge mode kept getting pushed back. Even when co-op did arrive, it was online only, with developer 343 Industries scrapping the traditional local co-op feature.
Everwild. Missing. If found, please return to Phil Spencer. Last seen E3 2019.
Things may be improving, with last month’s winter update admitting the past year hasn’t been the smoothest, but 343 has also seen some major departures, including its multiplayer lead, art director, and design lead.
All this points to some serious mismanagement going on within Microsoft. Halo may be the most public example but 2022 was the year in which we didn’t see any more of many already announced first-party Xbox games including; Everwild, Contraband, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Project Mara, State of Decay 3, Avowed, Fable, Perfect Dark and The Outer Worlds 2 all MIA. This paired with Microsoft (one of the richest companies in the world) needing to enlist outside third-party support on games like Perfect Dark and Fable, makes it look like all is not well internally at Xbox.
10. Everything About The Microsoft/Activision Acquisition
Microsoft’s intentions of buying out Activision Blizzard alone make it one of the wildest gaming stories of the year, what with it being the most expensive acquisition in the industry’s history. As the months have gone on, though, this story has become more and more of a farce, whether it be Microsoft and Sony’s constant and petty barbs reinvigorating the stupid console wars that should’ve been abandoned at the turn of the century, or the fact that both companies have become ground-zero of huge political and labour movements across the USA and the game’s industry as a whole.
There’s simply too much to break down here, but the whole thing felt like it was 100% guaranteed back in January. Microsoft’s prior buy-out of Bethesda went off without a hitch so many figured the Activision one would go the same way. Since then, Microsoft has found itself regularly defending its intentions as Sony and regulators express fears of monopolisation and unfair competition.
While Sony has long since gone past seeming like a stick in the mud simply trying to gum up the competition, the more Microsoft’s defenced itself the more its reasonings as to why this deal won’t affect competitivity in the industry start to border on hilarity. The mega corporation insists it has no intention of making Call of Duty (the biggest point of contention about the whole deal) an Xbox exclusive. Except for its most recent offer, it only covers the next 10 years. So, what would stop it from locking it to the Xbox after that? While having Call of Duty on every platform it can be on may make business sense, if every new Bethedsa game announced since that deal went through is only on PC and Xbox why would Call of Duty be any different?
Mfw a multi-billion dollar company wants to pay 68 billion dollars for me but also says I’m “nothing unique”:
Apparently, Call of Duty going exclusive wouldn’t be a big deal anyway, with Microsoft claiming that Sony would still boast a larger player base if every Call of Duty player ditched PlayStation for Xbox. It’s even gone as far as to call the franchise (and Activision’s entire library of games) ‘nothing unique’ or must-haves. This is strange considering the company is trying to spend roughly £50 billion on this middling catalogue. Microsoft has continued to insist that the real goal of this deal is to expand into the mobile market with the King division of Activision-Blizzard-King but I am flabbergasted that Microsoft tries to pretend Call of Duty isn’t a big deal when it’s one of the most profitable gaming franchises on the planet, trailing only behind Mario, Pokémon, and Tetris.
The company is eager to portray itself as the little guy being picked on by big bad Sony, citing that the latter has more and better games than it does - which is certainly an interesting way to comment on your company struggling to release any first-party games. However, even if you ignore that, while PlayStation may currently be more dominant in the gaming space, Microsoft is a massive corporation worth billions more dollars than Sony and has the ability to continue making investments this big that PlayStation could simply never afford.
I know I sound like a bit of a Sony shill but believe me, if things were reversed, I wouldn’t hesitate to call Sony out either. I was none too pleased this year when Sony acquired Bungie because this industry has already become so consolidated over the last 24 months that any merger or buy-out feels like yet another death blow to independent development.
I know if you have read this far then you hardly need me to tell you this but…
This story isn’t even nearly done.
It is also hard to feel sympathetic for Microsoft when it made a big deal about potentially cutting ties with Activision at the peak of the sexual harassment allegations, only to go and buy it once its stock prices dropped. Microsoft is an opportunistic vulture and its owning Activision isn’t going to magically fix its broken culture.
As it stands, EU regulators seem on the fence until the new year, while UK regulators are conducting a second investigation to better scrutinise the deal, and the US Federal Trade Commission is trying to outright block the deal with a lawsuit. I honestly think the buy-out will somehow find a way to be approved and finalised, maybe with large concessions, but wouldn’t it be so funny if it fell through? All that energy, all that money, all those promises and plans just annihilated. Regardless of what happens, this nonsense isn’t close to being over, and I feel things are only going to get wilder for 2023.
