PC Games from Japan on Steam

And a New Year Rolls In!

Well hey there! I see you clicked and came here yet again to keep old daicon company? My goodness, you really are a sentimental one, coming here each year! Do you really have a liking for my company? You're just taking pity on me, aren't you?! You can be honest! I'm not above enjoying some pity visits now and then~. In all seriousness though, its great to see you.

As you can see, this New Year we're away from home, so we'll just have to hold up in here from the cold, and bide our time.~ In the background there's the pops and cracks of fireworks, I'm sitting in bed passively viewing segments from RTA in Japan, whose lineup this year was quite frankly phenomenal. (I'm now really wishing we could have streamed it live in a group.) The screen this T480s I'm typing on keeps flickering intermittently, and the only remedy seems to be swipping left on the trackpad. Anyone ever have this? Maybe it just wants to be pet every now and then.

What can we talk about this year? I'm not short of things to drone on about, but I'm making an active effort this time to reign it in a little this time. Once I get started (and had a lil sippy), it can be hard to shut up, especially when I have fine company like you.

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Looking here now, it says 21 years on Steam. Like daaaamn. I don't doubt it, because it actually feels like it this time. The date on my "Years of Service" badge is Dec 23, which represents...? The night I first got broadband internet! Technically the night after, as the first was spent downloading every scanned doujinshi I could find (that itself was a session to remember!). The next day I wanted to experience online gaming beyond the limits of dial-up, so I busted out my old Half-Life CD (still handy for account recovery!) to install Counter-Strike and... oh damn it's this Steam thing. I hated it. Everyone did. And cable did little to help my skill in CS. I went back to file-sharing later that night (CD-Rs goin brrrr), but thats how I ended up here. So how did YOU get here?

Of several animations seen this year, "16bit Sensation" comes to mind as perhaps the most fun for me. It's a show about time skips, the game creation, and several other rushed nascent ideas, but its manga counterpart, on the other hand, reads more like a antidotal documentary and rundown of early PC game development in Japan, particularly of "galge" titles. Both game me that feeling of wishing I could go back and be a PC game developer back in the 90's (thinking only of the rosy parts here)! It gave me that peculiar feeling that I can only describe as having nostalgia for a past I never experienced(is there a name for such a sensation?).

Since I can't (currently) time skip (in a physical sense) and build a team of close colleagues to work with, I'll settle by going back and playing some of the early VNs I've missed (which is like, almost all of them), and hopefully achieve some sort of vicarious satisfaction that way. What I'd really love is to see any projects you might be working on, games or otherwise. If you ever need some extra motivation, maybe 16bit Sensation be a good show to watch, so I'd recommend it in that context.

This next year I'm wanting to spend some time exploring VR. I can't exactly say why I've had this strong desire to do that. I blame part of it on visiting a VRChat pop-up museum for Serial Experiments Lain that was full of special information, and you could watch the anime with others in a public space. Haven't done that since Gmod Cinema (it was me who kept putting up the videos of old people bathing... sorry.)

Anyway, recently I just received the components in the mail to build my own SlimeVR sensors for body tracking. And so, already being devoid of grace in this reality, soon I'll have a whole new reality to be awkward in, I guess! I'm actually looking forward to it, and exploring public VR spaces, and seeing Vket and other events from new angles.

I think the other part of this extends from a desire to meet new and old friends this year, and I guess I see VR as some venture toward that. You see, there are people I haven't spoken to in years who I think about often, and I want to spend less time thinking about those sparse and meaningful moments, and more time experiencing new moments with them and others. Am I making sense...?

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Thinking back on the start of 2024, despite whatever I may have said, I really questioned if this would be a good year. In the terms of gaming, I honestly think this might have been one of the worst in decades. That's quite a pessimistic statement at first, but honestly I think it's maybe an exceptionally positive one, and I hope that somehow comes across here.

This year had some spectacular gaming downfalls, each a weighty topic worth discussing on their own, but together it like a clear signal that's hard to argue against. 2024 was like as if the game's market was sat down and had a talk with its own customer base (a talk it never wanted to have) and told that it wasn't going to have everything it wanted.

To me, it's looked like a talk between overly accommodating parents and the child who has long had reign over them. Though it'd like to think otherwise, the industry has slowly had to wake up to the matter that it isn't the parent in this metaphorical home, but the overindulged child instead, and its had to realize it's been wrong in nearly all its ambitions against its own customers, whom it forgot is in charge. Throughout 2024, that's left us with an ugly portrait as its tried to resist this realization with all its might, play the victim, and other illusions that have long since dissipated.

A shift happened, and a decade of coddling it with staggering growth has left the games industry unable to cope with a change in plans, it seems. With many different ambitions being dashed, things have begun to unfold, and the unraveling of it all has been this year's entertainment: Concord, a $400 million dollar investment, endured less than 2 weeks of life, showing how vast the divide between corporate studio and players is, and how frail the live-service industry is when it was sure it could preordain a hit on its own terms.

There's little I can add to whats already been said about it (I honestly feel tacky bringing it up), but I view it as the destined failure of a company to trying to chase into live-service money despite no one wanting that. The comically unappealing characters do take the cake, and hey, atleast I actually played it! I can say I'm one of the few who actually tried Concord, during its promotional beta. I thought it played ok, atleast (I tend to review positively though).

But that's nothing. Most spectacular of all, we may get to see the crumbling of Ubisoft in some way. Isn't that amazing? A member Sneakydude555 posted in a comment that Ubisoft "will not exist later this year or early Next year." I used to think that was wishful thinking, but now with Ubisoft is in the midst of trying to prevent its own death spiral, it seems ever more likely. Remember them just earlier saying gamers need to become "comfortable" not owning their games? At the tail end of this year, they committed to providing offline modes for the latter The Crew titles, and other off-brand behavior like updating Steam achievements into their back catalog. It's amazing how a company starts doing sensible things when they're in dire financials, but little pittances like these don't really drum up feelings of sympathy in me. If anything, they come across more like motivated players (which of course they are).

We're paraphrasing here, but the point is this industry, characterized as Ubisoft or otherwise, can't just suddenly catalyze a soul (and the passion that come with it) to carry it to the next decade with actually fun, meaningful games, no matter how sorely it needs to. It put executive interest in the driving seat, for which there's no room for anything else at that point. It has to chase after trends, even if they lead them off a cliff. It can only just pretend to care about "things" in the most tactless ways. It's run out of fools to dupe and is currently running out of game journalists to market for them.

It's worth remembering that this is an industry that's not just abused its customers, but its workers too, with cutthroat layoffs (which they'll quickly blame on you through various proxies). The same companies who chant "we're for everyone" are the ones raising prices to unsustainable levels. The same ones that pretend to care about identities will sell you a $10 in-game gender change. The same ones who are laying off quarters of their workforce are also paying exorbitant consultants to decipher the mystery of how to put black characters into a game. Who can trust these guys?

And this is not to celebrate the continued waves of layoffs this year. This industry has become full of frauds, it's been obvious for decades, so there's some silver lining in seeing the complacent studios roiling with the reality that the years of undue sway they've had is evaporating while gamers leave them behind. Hack writers, out-of-touch studio heads, and other narcissists who dislike their audiences... it's becoming increasingly harder to be an abusive fraud and still find players (or bid for their sympathies).

So I wouldn't fault anyone for wearing a smile while the industry shrinks, that doesn't make you a bad person. After all, you aren't the one laying them off. However, this is far from a finished story. I just hope that in the years that come, none of us are softening our hearts to them. We didn't make them adversaries, or poison the well with unbridled green. If the industry shrinks and faces change, we'll have to remember this decade.

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In terms of better things in gaming to happen this year, I think its the continuing of the Stop Killing Games initiatives, but you already knew I'm big fanboy. I'll say it again, I think the engineered reliance of games on external services is the largest and most complicated problem facing games today, and an issue I worry we'll look back on with regret in future decades.

At the same time, I could see this being something we remember with pride if we establish a future where games are actually owned, and knowing we were a part of that. And if that'll be the case, we will only have ourselves to thank (as its always been). I certainly don't believe any force within the industry will come forward to help this cause. I was watching the (drunken?) rants of Chet Faliszek, former writer of Valve, who's take on SKG is that it's "gamergate types" who hate modern games, trying to stand in the way. When he says that he and others he knows within the industry are laughing at it as nonsense, I really wonder who he means by that. Former colleagues at Valve? His own studio? I'm not sure.

Taking that in, it really can feel like we have few allies in this pursuit, but I've learned that maybe some of these guys aren't as qualified as we used to think. According to him, Concord isn't a live-service game because it costed $40. Even though its dead just like a service game. AKA a perfect example of what we've been railing about. So maybe we should safely disregard what he, and other ex industry vets (and those who pretend to be as such), have to say on this matter. This isn't about what they want. They just want us to be complacent and play the next steaming bowl of slop.

At any rate, I'll keep talking about StopKillingGames periodically, and I'll be doing an announcement regarding it sometime in the next month or so. Currently, the EU citizen's initiative is sitting at over 400k signatures. Can it go all.. the.. way...?

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If you're still reading this strange and aimless year-end missive, thank you. I know there's many other things you could be doing, so I feel really fortunate to have the company.

The messages mean a lot to me, seriously. It's you guys I want to get to know better and hang out with in this coming year. in 2025, I want to be around more, playing more doujin games, or maybe something new, alongside some of you, and see what happens from there (...making things awkward already).

I have a followup post coming soon, to talk about some other things and changes, so expect some more blobs of text in the near future. I plan to be doing this for as long as I'm around, and I hope that's a really long time. Somewhere along the line though, the ball dropped when I wasn't paying attention (I don't mind, I don't really do the whole countdown thing), so now's my chance to wish you all a Happy New Year from the East Coast. It's been a special night.

To finish a thought from before, it really is up to us to see through to the changes we want, both externally and internally. In years ahead, as heartache and lonely seasons dim your eyes, I hope you'll trust that inner world you carry in you to guide you, even if there are only the solitary thoughts and dreams that have always accompanied you in there. Its bigger than you know in there, bigger than the internet we share even. Oh don't believe me? All will understand someday~.

...Don't give me that look! I didn't say anything weird. We're just being ourselves here, and don't pretend like you're not a little odd yourself. We're quite alike, you and I.~

I'm not sure how you'll interpret that, but just know that you're quite well liked by me. You'll come and visit again next year? I hope sooner than that, but for now lets find a warm corner, have a long rest, and prepare to face the new year ahead of us with bright, sharp eyes.

My warmest wishes, I look forward to hearing from you. Happy New Year!