Election games

Pressing play on politics

Oct 24, 2024

The SuperJoost Playlist is a weekly take on gaming, tech, and entertainment by business professor and author, Joost van Dreunen.

The voting season here in the US is well underway.

The relentless spamming of messages and requests for funding has taken over my phone and it is really annoying. The insistence on relying on billboards, flyers, and TV commercials to sway the American vote is starting to show its age. It is wildly expensive and its primary modus operandi seems to be to bludgeon you into voting submission.

That is probably also why a growing share of American voters no longer spend much time with any of those channels. Traditional media have surrendered their position as a source of truth. They’re either a day late (print) or deeply biased (TV). There are a few exceptions to successfully rallying the voter base in this way (watching Obama drop a few bars from one of Eminem’s hits was excellent), but you can see the shape of things to come.

Podcasts are now the preferred medium to reach audiences. Judging by the number of appearances, expressed in the metric of viral comments and memes, we feel we are getting to know someone with higher fidelity than the obviously ritualized experience of televised interviews.

But if you truly want to get to know someone, play a game with them. Watch how they respond to challenges, puzzles, conflicts, and opportunities. For instance, is someone a sore loser and willing to admit defeat? Do they manage to broker alliances to strengthen their position, or are they purely playing for themselves? If nothing else, an entire generation has by now grown up playing multiplayer games that, regardless of genre, teach us that coordinated teamwork beats any solo player regardless of skill difference. Hell, it’s enough for me personally that Walz, like me, is an undying fan of the Sega Dreamcast.

After the last election when Biden took over Animal Crossing: New Horizons I was hopeful we’d get to see a more playful side to politics. Maybe it’s too soon. But I fully expect the next generation of voters to better connect with politicians who can hold their own in an hours-long live stream. At least it’ll be more sincere than watching someone’s grandpa pretending to pull a shift at McDonalds.

On to this week’s update.

BIG READ: Europe’s game makers place their bets

It has been a rough period for interactive entertainment in Europe.

This week Stillfront’s CEO and founder, Jörgen Larsson, was promoted to customer. The firm, which is valued at $745 million, plans to split itself into three separate entities and clearly management is being reshuffled, too. Similar to Embracer (see below), instead of relying on an outside firm for aggressive restructuring, Stillfront has seemingly elected to do the hard work itself, stating in a press release that the firm, has

“important work ahead to improve the company’s growth and achieve the cost savings communicated in connection with the announcement of a new management structure with operations divided into three business areas.”

Similarly, Ubisoft is trying to decide whether it should sell itself, but, I’m told, doesn’t like the idea of private equity coming in to fillet its organization and squeeze its IP for profit. The firm has 19,000 employees worldwide with many of them based in countries where letting them go would be prohibitively expensive and raise a bunch of bad press. Currently, the firm is valued at $1.3 billion, a shadow of its former self. And, speaking of shadows, all the speculation and restructuring leaves the French publisher stumbling along towards the inevitable moment of truth when its hotly-anticipated Assassin’s Creed Shadows does see the light of day. Will it hold up against Ghost of Yōtei? Unclear. Much like the firm’s current plans.

Embracer, the most valuable European game maker at $4.5 billion, finds itself in the wake of a frantic acquisition period. It has set a new course and is in the process of divesting itself into three separate divisions. Of course, Embracer’s fate was clearly inevitable, as it over-committed itself to building a massive pan-European portfolio without the necessary operational infrastructure to ensure its 200+ simultaneous projects would succeed. And, so it didn’t.

One exception is Polish publisher CD Projekt (valued at $3.2 billion), which managed to turn its frown upside down by heavily investing in fixing Cyberpunk 2077, releasing a notable expansion, and rebuilding trust with its fanbase. With far fewer IPs under management and instead focused on figuring out how to leverage its assets across a variety of different distribution options, it has managed to stay ahead in Europe’s overall market environment where the others continue to drag.

The European gaming landscape's current restructuring perfectly illustrates the Play Pendulum's swing back toward distribution innovation. After a period of aggressive content acquisition and studio expansion, companies like Stillfront, Embracer, and Ubisoft find themselves caught in the transitional downdraft. Their simultaneous moves to split into smaller entities signal an industry-wide shift from scale to efficiency - a classic marker of the pendulum's movement toward distribution innovation.

CD Projekt's success amid this transition is particularly telling. While its peers chased scale during the content innovation phase, CD Projekt focused on rebuilding trust and optimizing how it delivers value to players. Its strategic decision to double down on Cyberpunk 2077 rather than diversifying its portfolio shows how understanding the pendulum's rhythm can help companies navigate industry cycles. As we enter a new phase focused on distribution innovation, the question isn't just who has the biggest portfolio, but who can most efficiently connect their games with players.

Roblox rebounds

Following the Hindenburg research report that sent a shockwave through the industry two weeks ago, everything has seemingly returned to normal. Market analysts have mostly brushed off the short-seller’s accusations, and reiterated their recommendation to buy the stock. Roblox’s rejection of the report’s findings and the firm’s investment in safety practices and updated parental controls it launched this week, business is back to normal.

Concord’s $400 million flop

File this under the growing evidence of why we need a more robust delegation of games industry journalists. As it has rained layoffs in development and publishing, so, too, have mainstream publications and trade press cut a lot of jobs recently. In the case of GameStop’s Game Informer magazine, the industry lost a marketing channel, in part because of its growing obsolescence. But across the board, I’d argue, we’re losing IQ points.

Yes, Concord was a disastrous release in many aspects. And writing about a big incumbent failing horribly and publicly is like trade press catnip. But that’s no reason to abandon all mathematical principles.

This week, Kotaku revived the speculation that Concord was a $400 million flop for Sony PlayStation.

Let’s count.

Firewalk Studios, a wholly owned Sony PlayStation subsidiary, is located in Bellevue, WA, and, according to LinkedIn, employs 164 people. Next, according to ZipRecruiter, the average salary for a video game professional in Washington state sits at $110,726. Since the studio was only founded in 2018, Concord could have only been in development for a maximum of six years. Even if we assume that the entire company was at full capacity during the entire time, the total amount of money spent on salaries would only be $109 million. Let’s unnecessarily double that to include taxes, office space, insurance (if any), and everything else. That still only puts the total budget in the $200 million range, or roughly half the number Kotaku claimed.

Anyway, the perpetuation of poor information is, in my opinion, the result of the ongoing cutbacks among media firms. Instead of a professionalized press body, the mythologies that define interactive entertainment are written by people under immense pressure to produce and seek out headlines that drive traffic. I guarantee they do a better job counting that though.

Netflix shuts down its AAA studio

The push by big tech into gaming isn’t going as well as initially expected. After some initial fanfare, Netflix’s subscriber base has proven largely indifferent to the streaming giant’s gaming offering, as less than 1 percent of subscribers are playing their games. ~~It explains why the firm announced~~ Stephen Totilo over at Game File scooped the shutdown of its AAA studio earlier this week. (I previously misattributed this. Sorry, Stephen!)

Specifically, Netflix has decided to shutter its game studio in Southern California, even as it expands its gaming division under new leadership. The closure comes amid a strategic pivot toward casual games and Netflix IP tie-ins, with the company's gaming unit having released over 100 titles to date.

Nevertheless, Netflix remains a strong platform for game-based video content and several high-profile releases are in production. In lieu of a blockbuster console release, we can expect more casual and mobile titles. Frankly, the initial vision always seemed a bit too ambitious for a media firm that caters to a broad mainstream audience. Regardless of the infrastructural challenges required to facilitate seamless multiplayer gameplay, the wildly different economics behind high-end free-to-play content that requires ongoing support and live services are perhaps too rich for a firm accustomed to the far more manageable process of acquiring and distributing film productions and TV series.

Former Epic Games executive Alain Tascan, who recently joined as Netflix Games President, will oversee the company's growing slate of games including the upcoming Squid Games: Unleashed, set to launch alongside Season 2 this December.

PLAY/PASS

Pass. It took only a few hours for Nintendo to get datamined, revealing an upcoming title. Stop ruining the surprise!

Play. Brilliant minds think alike which is probably why Jason Schreier and I scheduled big deal events at the precise same time. Mine: a fireside with the Xbox CFO and King Digital’s COO. His: a book event for his recently released Play Nice. (Review incoming.)

NEXT UP

I’m headed to Denmark next week. Last year they warned me that the Danes do not like to participate in Q&A after a talk because the whole country, evidently, is shy and introverted. That is a wildly different experience from speaking in front of American audiences, who take a more Shakespearian approach and see a public talk as a private conversation. My goal this year is to get even a single Dane to raise their hand and call me out on something.