Welcome back to another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news. Business business business!
Embracer
Embracer – the failson megacorp we keep an eye on because it’s been busy slow-shuttering Cryptic Studios and shuttling its popular MMOs to Deca Games – posted a brutal financial report this quarter (by its reckoning, it just finished up Q2). The company saw a net sales drop of 21% compared to this same period last year – and a 46% drop in for PC and console games – largely owing to weaker titles versus last year, when Remnant 2 and Payday 3 launched. Its back catalogue – where Star Trek Online and Neverwinter are factored in – also saw a 21% dip in sales across the whole unit, though given all the layoffs, we can certainly understand why. Grim.
Valve
If you for some reason spend a lot of time in the dark corners of Steam, you are probably already well aware that toxicity on the platform is beyond dreadful. In fact, just a few years ago in this very business column, we covered a Motherboard report on the degree to which hate groups had infiltrated the Steam forums. Well, it doesn’t appear as if much has changed: The Anti-Defamation League has released a new report analyzing “458+ million profiles, 152+ million profile and group avatar images and 610+ million comments on user profiles and groups” on Steam, finding “1.83 million unique pieces of extremist or hateful content” as well as “1.5 million unique users and 73,824 groups who used at least one potentially extremist or hateful symbol, copypasta or keyword.” Researchers also “found 15,129 profile avatars that contained the flags, emblems or logos of foreign terrorist organizations, the most popular of which was ISIS.”
The ADL ultimately argues that Valve’s enforcement of its moderation policies is insufficient and selective. “Valve [is] failing to systematically address the issue of extremism and hate on the platform.”
Good Old Games
Fans of classic PC games have surely picked up a title or two on Good Old Games over the years, so you’ll be pleased to know that the platform has announced a new games preservation program.
“We are launching the GOG Preservation Program, an official stamp on classic games improved by GOG,” the company says. “If a game is part of the Preservation Program, it means that we commit our own resources to maintaining its compatibility with modern and future systems. It also means that the GOG version of this game is the best anywhere.”
At its launch, the program will support 100 games on core PC configs, with complete manuals and DLC, tech support, and offline installers, though the company says it wants to expand to “all games no longer updated or maintained by their original publisher or developer” eventually.
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