Bowls of Soup: An Update
It’s been a while. Time to get back into it.
Destiny is winding down, Marathon is in its second season, ARC Raiders has cooled to a respectable pace, and I opened a restaurant. The world has moved quite a bit since the last time I wrote. It’s strange, I remember hearing someone say there was this immense social media machine in the works. They warned people to not over assume their own sphere of influence. They also pointed out, calmly and directly, if you don’t post for a few days, a few weeks, a few months, nobody will notice. No one is going to come after you. It’s strange because, despite hearing this and internalizing its message, I found myself constantly self-flagellating.
[One Month Later]
See…?
I wrote the first paragraph and life got busy again. Now it’s July. It is, in fact, no longer spring. Destiny is officially over. Bungie laid the majority of the team off. Another instance of a big buyout eventually impacting the livelihoods of the folks that built the thing worth buying. I wish I had a harder time saying I told you so. I wish it was easier to feel something. At this point the ship has sailed on AAA game development and publishing. The good shit is coming out of small creative houses. The big box devs are drip feeding live service games and releasing bloated games that have a propensity to get in their own damn way. I find it amusing that I have difficulty thinking of the last AAA game I bought and loved. Fuck loved, played. Battlefield 6 feels like an exception to the rule. Serialized shooters are hardly new enough between iterations to merit really any discourse. And as much as I think this iteration really did improve in all the ways it needed to, all the ways I wanted it to, I’m not campaigning for it to win game of the year.
I have had a lot of ideas since opening the restaurant. A lot of thoughts that have swam in the limited free space in my brain. It’s cramped in there, but there is always room for meandering treatises on the state of games and the community around them. I’m going to attempt to flesh some of those out here. We’ll see how it goes.
Standardization in the Industry
I have had this thought for a long time, but with the rampant rise in hardware costs thanks to the damn near nuclear proliferation of AI and its compulsive need to leech resources from every sector of the world’s resource pools, I think it’s time the industry makes moves to level the playing field. NVIDIA and AMD are constantly upgrading GPUs. I’m not sure we are going to be able to stop this. But it’s high time the game development community set a standard for a generation of games. Obviously this standard won’t be followed by everyone, and perhaps this is even a good thing. Naughty Dog, should they ever release another game, is going to make projects that push hardware to their maximum. If this is to be assumed, so be it. Games like this will run on lesser hardware, just not at its most optimized. A bullet we will just have to eat to be on the “cutting edge of visuals.” Blech. Nearly everyone else should be operating under a community decided edict to create games seeking to optimize affordable, accessible hardware.
The NVIDIA 30 series can still manage to run most games on higher settings, the 40 series certainly can. Why aren’t we deciding, as a whole, to build towards the limitations of the 40 series? This would allow players to have a solid benchmark, while simultaneously allowing the higher end hardware to become niche, rather than essential. GPUs and Memory are both at all time highs right now. Take a step back, standardize development towards accessible equipment, allow the markets to calm, or adjust, or collapse, or fucking return to sanity. Dear god.
Anger at Sony/Bungie
I understand wanting to be pissed off about a thing you loving coming to an end. Frequently that anger is actually sadness given a voice loud enough to draw the attention of like minds. I understand this. The reality that has settled over Bungie is one that I take no joy in recognizing. When the Halo creators (along with Oni and Marathon before that) left Microsoft there was an inquisitive air to what could possibly come next. Then they signed a deal with the devil in Activision. That partnership started well enough, but eventually cracks formed and they split away from them. I don’t need to relitigate history on this, I’m sure. But then they did it again. They sold to another massive company with far more interest in profit than art.
Perhaps that’s harsh. I don’t know. But let’s look at the reality laid out in front of Bungie as they went into the PlayStation buyout. In 2022 Bungie is eight years into Destiny as a released title, likely twelve to thirteen years of destiny as the company’s primary project. They are on their fifth year of Destiny 2. In the world of console games, this is already an extremely lengthy coattail. Now here we are in 2026. Destiny has been Bungie’s mainstay, genuinely their only product, for fifteen plus years. And what do they decide to develop for their next big project? An extraction shooter. A genre I am absolutely in love with, but a genre with a very niche, oscillating, markedly inconsistent. I love that Marathon is back. I think the game is genuinely fun and extremely well made. But! BUT! If anyone thought an extraction shooter was going to save a studio with as many people as Bungie has (well…had…) you were lying to yourself.
Now we’re on the other side of a third (?) round of layoffs, Bungie is ever decreasing in manpower, and Sony looks like they bought a a whole cow at slaughter just to carve away the meat so they could use the bones for beef stock. What’s worse? If Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is to be believed (and why wouldn’t it be), its far more likely Sony bought an ailing cow, propped it up with expensive meds, then killed it themselves. Again, to extract the bones and discard everything else. My heart breaks for Bungie, and I worry that one of the best FPS developers over the last thirty years is destined for the woodchipper as Sony tries to update their aesthetic with expensive mulch.
Xbox is Dying
Boy oh boy was I wrong about Xbox. Following the Don Mattrick nosedive that was the launch of the Xbox One back in 2013, Phil Spencer revitalized a community that was rapidly becoming disillusioned. After the dominance of the Xbox 360, a “dominance” that was rapidly evaporating, they dove head first into concrete. Goodwill? Decimated. Corporate vision? Nearsighted. Player retention? Have you ever tried to hold a cup of water in a paper towel? Phil Spencer took over for Mattrick four months after the Xbox One launched. In the years that followed we saw a bevy of studio acquisitions, culminating in the Activision acquisition in 2023. We also saw the launch and growth of Game Pass. It genuinely felt like Xbox was trying to win a different game than Sony.
Well…they didn’t win that game. Phil “retired” in February. I use quotation marks because, despite Phil’s claims that the departure was amicable and long planned, there are sources with verity that claim the shakeup was not, in-fact, Phil’s idea. Sarah Bond, President of Xbox, was also not retained. No words, very little descriptive text. Just movement. Matt Booty, formerly Head of Xbox Games Studios has essentially filled Sarah Bond’s role and Asha Sharma is the new CEO. Booty moving up doesn’t impact me, he’s been around for a while and seems to be…doing things. Sharma is a bit of a wildcard. Her last job, coincidentally with Microsoft, was as the President of CoreAI. Specifically the Product team. There are a number of reasons to be suspicious of an internal hire at Microsoft you have never heard of, most concerning among those reasons being the shuffling of someone in charge of the AI team into a role overseeing the creative branch that is Xbox. I put my anxiety to the side for a moment to see what happened next.
Before Spencer’s departure, Game Pass saw a sharp price hike. From $19.99 to $29.99. As could have been predicted, the hike prompted a shearing of subscribers that deeply scarred the company. This hike arrives in October. Raucous dissent follows. In February Phil Spencer is out. Asha Sharma replaces immediately. In April the price of Game Pass drops to $22.99. Sharma is quoted in a memo as saying “Game Pass has become too expensive for players…”
Here is the thing.
The timeline here sucks. Microsoft is too big a company to operate without premeditation. You don’t accidentally overprice something and lose a huge chunk of your subscriber base. Not when you are a nearly three trillion dollar company with extensive resources for market research. Many people saw Xbox getting bloated and greedy, hiking the price, losing subscribers, firing the CEO, appointing a new CEO, and righting the ship by lowering the price. Technically speaking, that is what happened. But that read is too sanitary for me.
What I see is Xbox losing faith in the Phil Spencer experiment. Game Pass was a huge success. But companies like Microsoft are obsessed by the “cancer model”: infinite growth within a finite system. There are only so many people on the planet. You only have so much of a market cornered. Yet, companies like EA, Activision Blizzard before the buyout, all want to see growth repeated. Year after year. Increase in user base by 10-15 million in 2023? They want to see 20-25 million in 2024. Then 30-35 in 2025. When those numbers miss the mark, rather than adjusting their expectations, they shear their workforce to makeup for the lost progress. Keynesian Economics at work. According to Keynes’s model, wages don’t fluctuate when sales fluctuate. You can’t pay your employees less because the company missed its goals. Therefore, to make up for fiscal shortcoming, you maintain the wage of the workers, you just layoff a chunk to accommodate for your shortcoming. The problem is, these layoffs decrease spending. You know, because a ton of people no longer have jobs, which leads, then, to more fiscal downturn. Which then leads to more layoffs. And while Keynes did try to accommodate for this with governmental intervention, the government hasn’t been keen on supporting workers over businesses for over forty years. Instead you get what the game industry is going through unilaterally right now. Decreased productivity, spaced out release schedules in large studios, fiscal fluctuations, and large scale layoffs. Guess what follows…the same exact cycle, repeated. Add to this the fact that the game industry saw an expansion of consumer spending during Covid that made corporates eyes very large, and the return to normalcy the last five and a half years has seen is wrongly identified by the market as a shortcoming of the studios, rather than a logical shrinking of the spending pool for normal consumers. We can all touch grass again. Sorry we aren’t spending all of our money on Animal Crossing and Netflix.
Sharma comes in, immediately starts talking about the things that gamers find the most based (“no AI slop in our games”) and then she drops the price of Game Pass down to $22.99 because “players.” But notice she didn’t drop the price back to what it was? Back to $19.99? That was VERY MUCH on purpose. Microsoft took a calculated risk. They hiked the price under Spencer, possibly even to use it as evidence for their motive to remove him, they replace him with a new face that no one has any opinions about, she plays the “gamer’s best friend” playbook perfectly, and then lowers the price of Game Pass to appease the angry masses. But most importantly, still increases the price of the service by a net three dollars. They negotiated with their consumers by themselves. They did a bad thing, asked themselves “how could we do this bad thing?”, then fixed it themselves and said “don’t worry, the bad thing is all better now.”
Now, a few months later, they are laying of 3200 employees across their studios, they are selling off four or five studios, consolidating a few into larger umbrellas, and then moved Mojang, of Minecraft fame, and King, of CandyCrush fame, into Sharma’s personal management portfolio. Currently Arkane Studios is negotiating for its life. God-fucking-dammit.
It’s no longer hard to justify liking Xbox. If you still do, you have just been looking the other way and covering your ears for too long. God I hope we get another Halo game before Microsoft decides to drop the Xbox endeavor entirely. But then again, maybe I don’t…
Gaming Taking a Backseat to Running a Restaurant
So I did a thing. A big fucking thing. Back in April, well in all honesty starting back in January, my uncle and I opened (transplanted?) a restaurant in St. Louis. What used to be a sushi and ramen restaurant called Blue Ocean, on the Delmar Loop, was forced to close due to previous management dropping a few very expensive balls. What followed was Ben tirelessly seeking funding, finding a new spot, and keeping the good bones of what was left at Blue O to open Oni, a new sushi and ramen restaurant in The Grove. I went from making a few soups for prep at Blue O, to becoming the Head Chef and taking over the entirety of the hot menu. To say it has been a wild change of pace would be an egregious understatement. My life is fundamentally different than it was just a few short months ago.
That being said, four months in, things are going really well. The work is relentless, and tiring, but fulfilling in a way I was wholly unprepared for. Our ramen, my ramen, has been a talking point for people around town. On just our second day open a Japanese woman asked to speak to me. Terrified, I left the shelter of the kitchen to speak with her. She went into detail about how the idea of any one bowl of ramen being authentic to its parallel in Japan doesn’t make sense, that a single bowl in Japan is made differently from region to region. She then said, despite that, my Tonkotsu was the closest thing to the ramen from back home she had ever had.
I am still trying to process that.
It has been a huge life balance curveball. My gaming has declined significantly, only just now starting to return as I work out the balance of things. I play games differently now. Small bursts mostly. But my love for the game industry and the people creating them hasn’t died, it’s just been buried beneath truck orders, boards full of tickets, burns and knife wounds, and a frightening lack of sleep.
I feel like I understand Bourdain differently now. I know I do. And I just know my grandpa would have been fucking pumped to have been around for this. But I guess, in the absence of them both, I have to be content with living a life that makes my five year old, at his preschool graduation say, in response to being asked what he wants to be when he grows up, “a chef like my dad.” Fucking oof, dude. Fucking. Oof.