Update Patch | November 2021

Winter is drawing in to bring snow, endless arguing over Game of the Year lists and far too many new releases coming out. There’s the small matter of the Halo franchise returning, coupled with titles like Solar Ash, Chorus (no, I won’t spell it Chorvs) and, of course, another upcoming game in the ever-surviving Five Nights at Freddy’s. But, before all that, we must look back on a pretty grim November.

1. Activision Blizzard 

The start of the month saw continued problems at Activision Blizzard. Jen Oneal, who took an executive VP position in August, stepped down from her role and delays to Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 were announced. Oneal said she wasn’t paid equally to co-lead Mike Ybarra, and was only offered equity when she resigned.

Then, an investigation by the Wall Street Journal damningly revealed that CEO Bobby Kotick had knowledge of numerous allegations of sexual misconduct within the company. The report claims that despite being made directly aware of these issues, Kotick did not report them to the board, prevented a Treyarch head from being fired over a sexual harassment case, and also faced lawsuits over threatening to destroy a flight attendant on a private jet who reported the pilot for sexual harassment. In the wake of the report, over 1300 employees demanded his resignation and have continued to do so, but the board has stood by Kotick, saying in a statement “The Board remains confident that Bobby Kotick appropriately addressed workplace issues brought to his attention.”

You should Google “Bobby Kotick Black Book”, interesting reading.

Since, a small group of shareholders have demanded his resignation, a right-wing political group has demanded Kotick’s removal from Coca-Cola’s Board of Directors, and the big three console manufacturers have each internally addressed the controversy, with PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan saying the company has “not done enough to address a deep-seated culture of discrimination and harassment”. Xbox head Phil Spencer said in an email to staff that the leadership team were “disturbed and deeply troubled” and that the company was “evaluating all aspects of our relationship with Activision Blizzard”. Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser emailed employees saying they had been “in contact with Activision” and are “assessing” potential further actions. Geoff Keighley has also confirmed that the company wouldn’t be a part of The Game Awards this year, although he did say in an interview with The Washington Post that they were still looking at how to “navigate” the issue

At the time of writing, Bobby Kotick is still CEO of Activision Blizzard.

2. Playstation Lawsuit

These issues aren’t just limited to Activision Blizzard, however. Sony is on the receiving end of a lawsuit from a former IT analyst for allegations of gender discrimination.

…Unless you are a woman that believes they deserve equal and fair treatment apparently.

The suit alleges the company has violated the US Equal Pay Act by discriminating against women “in compensation and promotion and subjects them to a work culture predominated by men.” Emma Majo, the analyst who filed the suit, is seeking approval for the suit to be expanded to a class-action lawsuit, alleging that other women in the company experienced similar problems.

In her own case, Majo alleges she was let go after submitting a gender bias complaint internally, with Sony telling her she was terminated as a result of a closure of a department, which Majo says she wasn’t a part of. Notably, she filed a complaint with California’s Department of Fair Employment & Housing (DFEH), the department that filed a suit against Activision Blizzard.

Sony is yet to publicly comment on the lawsuit.

3.  Ubisoft Updates

Ubisoft appears to still be struggling with its own sexual harassment issues, with the worker group A Better Ubisoft launching a new public petition following continued dissatisfaction with the company’s response. 

This is following the group’s open letter signed by 500 current and former staff criticising the company’s response to their allegations of internal sexual harassment, including a proposal “that Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft and other industry-leading publishers and developers collaborate and agree to a set of rules and processes for handling reports of these offences. This collaboration must heavily involve employees in non-management positions and union representatives.”

The petition comes following a meeting with Ubisoft’s Chief People Officer Anika Grant, in which they responded to the demands of the group. According to A Better Ubisoft, “There were some welcome acknowledgements in the presentation of management failures… Beyond that, however, there was no new information nor any steps to meet our demands.”

Those demands were listed by the group when announcing their petition, and include:

• Ending the movement of known offenders from group to group.

• A “collective seat at the table” for workers.

• Cross-Industry collaboration to agree processes for companies to follow.

• Involve employees in unions and non-management processes in the collaboration.

Nothing but solidarity and respect for the folks fighting for a better workplace.

3. GTA Remaster Trilogy Is On Fire

Rockstar launched their remastered trilogy of Grand Theft Auto games in the form of GTA: San Andreas, GTA: Vice City and GTA III. However, instead of players getting upgraded reminders of fun times having CJ follow the damn train, flying remote control planes and some other stuff with gangs, players found a broken mess not unlike the launch of Cyberpunk 2077.

CJ is very excited to tell us about a train he just saw.

Upon release, players reported numerous bugs including eye-wateringly bad rain effects, glitches from the original release making cars bigger upon sidewinding, and more poor glitches having made their way in. Additionally, Digital Foundry investigated the games (which you can watch here) and found a number of poor textures, stability issues on all platforms and a pretty dreadful Switch version.

Rockstar issued an apology to players for these problems, stating: “We have ongoing plans to address the technical issues and to improve each game going forward. With each planned update, the games will reach the level of quality that they deserve to be.” Since the first patch has arrived, over 100 bugs have been fixed, including the weather glitches. Additionally, the company has delayed the physical releases by a week to 17th December.

4. Xbox 20th Anniversary Stream Fun Time and Halo’s Surprise Launch (with a dash of controversy)

Xbox celebrated its 20th Anniversary with a number of 20th-anniversary gifts, unveiled both in a 30-minute stream and online on their social media platforms. A 20th Anniversary Xbox controller was unveiled and is in limited supply, and Microsoft created a virtual museum where players can find lifetime stats for their accounts.

BRING BACK THE BLADES YOU COWARDS!

The company hosted a stream to celebrate its 20th Anniversary, paying homage to the launches of the consoles (notably skimming past the original Xbox One from 2013), remembering the red ring of death like it was all a fun misunderstanding, and reuniting with The Rock (mainly so he could plug Red Notice on Netflix). At the stream, the company announced a whole host of new backwards compatible games, including the Max Payne trilogy and a huge number of other titles. Unfortunately, the company claims these will be the last titles to be given backwards compatibility treatment. However, the empathic nature of this statement has been walked back slightly in recent interviews.

However, the biggest surprise was the open beta launch of Halo: Infinite’s free-to-play multiplayer, which has been well received on the gameplay front, but has drawn criticism for its slow battle pass progression. Since then, 343 Industries has updated the multiplayer to make progression less of a grind (Editor’s note: but it is still pretty grindy). 

5. A Dreadful DRM Disaster

In other Xbox news, the company has been at the forefront of adopting Digital Rights Management (DRM) policies on digital downloads. The technology has been highly controversial and seen as a threat to game preservation by groups like Does It Play?.

Who wouldn’t love a company with this generic and corporate a logo?

This month, gamers found themselves unable to boot up games they’d bought on Steam after company Denuvo, who manage servers that track game activations and check against DRM, had a fault with a server. Gamers reported being unable to boot up titles such as the single-player Guardians of the Galaxy, Football Manager 2022, and more whilst the servers were down. 

In a statement to PC Gamer, Denuvo explained that an “unreachable domain” within their servers was the cause of the problems and that the company would “implement further improvements”. Of course, players were rightfully upset that games they had purchased couldn’t be accessed because of server issues. Denuvo did fix the issues on the same day.

6. Game Awards Nominations Announced Just in Time For Everyone to be Mad

Geoff Keighley’s yearly bonanza of advertising and awards has seen its nominees announced, with a number of games in the running for multiple big awards. 

The coveted Game of the Year award will be contested between Metroid: Dread, Psychonauts 2, Resident Evil: Village, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Deathloop and It Takes Two. These games are overall big nominees, with Deathloop up for nine awards, the most of any game. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is next on that list with six, and It Takes Two and Psychonauts 2 picked up five each. Other games picking up multiple awards include Guardians of the Galaxy with four, Annapurna’s excellent literal space opera The Artful Escape on three, and three nominations for Life is Strange: True Colours and Returnal respectively.

Wow! Wow, wow, wow. What a collection of four great indie games, huh?

As with every year, numerous trailers will be shown at the ceremony as well as the consistently brilliant Game Awards orchestra delighting us with its wonderful performances. The show is available online via your usual platforms and the nominations can be seen in full here.

I was more shocked to learn that there were people that thought Pragmata was ever going to release in 2022.

Patch Notes:

• The Golden Joystick Awards saw Resident Evil: Village walking away with Ultimate Game of the Year, with other big winners including Death's Door for best Indie, Dark Souls picking up Ultimate Game of All Time. 

• Epic Games have continued their acquisition ways, picking up Harmonix (Rock Band, Fuser) to create musical experiences for the metaverse. 

• Continuing with acquisition news, Take-Two have announced they have scooped up OlliOlli World developers Roll7.

• Playground Games have announced that an update to Forza Horizon 5 will add British and American Sign Language support to in-game cutscenes. 

• Delays have hit a number of companies, with Valve delaying the Steam Deck to February 2022, and Pragmata being pushed back by Capcom to 2023.

• Yakuza developers Ryu Ga Gotoku are working on a new IP alongside the acclaimed franchise, according to studio director Masayoshi Yokoyama.

• Phil Spencer, in a busy week of press for Xbox, has called for the industry to support legal emulation in order to maintain preservation of older titles in an interview with Axios.

• Take-Two have cancelled a game in development by studio Hangar 13 (Mafia III), with Bloomberg reporting that the studio hasn’t laid off any employees despite this and the associated $53m budget.

• Executive Director of the Far Cry franchise Dan Hay has left Ubisoft after over 10 years with the company.

• Square Enix branded Marvel’s Avengers’ sales figures “disappointing” in a statement and suggested that Crystal Dynamics was not the best fit for the game.