Welcome back to another quick roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news. Business business business.
Microsoft ABK: It’s not just the US digging into Microsoft’s attempt to purchase Activision-Blizzard. Apparently, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority is investigating the proposed merger specifically to determine whether it would harm competition or “result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.”
Game preservation: GI.biz has an interview with the curators of several game preservation museums and collections, who discuss the difficulties of preserving the entirety of game culture, not just the games themselves. It’s going to sound familiar to MMO players in particular, as the archivists zero in on the era of constantly updating games and abandoned middleware and APIs that are making preservation hollow: You can save the code, but you can’t execute it. “If the goal is to preserve a working copy of every game, we’ve already lost,” one preservationist lamented. “We know for a fact there are games out there we’ll never see again.”
Itch.io charity: Hundreds of indie game developers on Itch.io have banded together for a charity bundle supporting reproductive rights and abortion funds. “100% of the proceeds from this bundle will go to the National Network for Abortion Fund’s Collective Power Fund, which moves money directly to abortion funds across 20+ U.S. states, with a particular focus on the South and Midwest (where it is often most difficult to get access to abortions),” the group says. “NNAF’s partnerships with these abortion funds provide direct resources and funds to many of the people most impacted by Roe v. Wade, towards immediate action.” The current goal is $400K.
Take-Two: Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar are once again hassling modders, this time demanding that a hugely popular modder for GTAV and Red Dead Redemption 2, LukeRoss, remove all of their copyrighted works from his Patreon page. Of course, the modder points out that his work doesn’t actually include copyright violations, doesn’t exploit the games, and aren’t built using the games. Fortunately, Patreon didn’t immediately cave and is working with the parties to sort it out.
Electronic Arts: Company fans are often quick to dismiss the “social media intern” stereotype, but in the case of EA, it’s not all that far from the truth. As Kotaku reports, a particularly dopey anti-single-player-games tweet from the company last week that earned the ire of gamers also earned internal pushback from EA staff who work on said single-player games. Apparently, the tweet was conjured up by the outside company that runs EA’s social media accounts, which turns out not to be anybody in EA or its social media teams – and therefore likely came from folks who don’t game or at least have no idea about EA’s history to the degree necessary to avoid failing at a dank meme.
Fall Guys: The multiplatform F2P launch of Fall Guys (and yoinking of the game from Steam) appears to have paid off, as Mediatonic announced this week that the game has blasted up to 50M players in the last two weeks.
