Let’s close some tabs, including one about Dino Crisis
Odds and ends about Nintendo's Mario sales, a Bungie lawsuit twist, Star Wars race horses and more (probably too much more, to be honest).
My computer battery is running hot and the top of my browser looks like this…
So it’s time to get to some of the tabs I’ve been neglecting.
Let’s see what’s in there, shall we?
Warning: Some of these tabs have been open since November!
Tab: Capcom’s list of platinum titles
Reason it was open: Every three months, Capcom updates a web page that lists all of its games that have sold a million copies. (The chart-topper is Monster Hunter World at 28.1 million copies, when a later game+expansion bundle is also counted).
I was looking at this list several weeks ago, wondering if there was anything surprising worth writing about.
I didn’t find anything too shocking, but there was one small thing that I thought I might post about eventually: July 1999’s survival horror game Dino Crisis is listed as the 52nd best-selling Capcom game ever, with 2.4 million copies sold.
So what?
Well, the 51 games that ranked higher are almost all from actively maintained Capcom franchises, including Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, Dead Rising, and Dragon’s Dogma.
Key finding: Dino Crisis ranks slightly higher than the best-selling game in the Onimusha series, which Capcom is bringing back with a new game next year.
Dino Crisis fans often ask for a revival. Given its placement on the list, they have a decent argument.
Tab: Bungie’s motion to dismiss a sci-fi writer’s Destiny 2 copyright lawsuit
Reason it was open: Back in October, I spotted a lawsuit by a sci-fi writer, Matthew Kelsey Martineau, who alleged that Bungie’s plot for Destiny 2, specifically its depiction of an enemy faction called the Red Legion, was lifted from the author’s own writings on WordPress. People can say anything in a lawsuit, and I did not see enough substance in this one to find it worth publishing. Others did. Nevertheless, I track new cases like these to see where they go, which is why I wound up opening a tab last December to read Bungie’s response to the suit.
Bungie’s take, filed in late December, is entirely dismissive, of course, but the aspect that stood out to me—that made me think: I should write about this at some point and keep this tab open to remind myself to do that—is that Bungie’s lawyers had to submit fans’ YouTube compilations of their game’s cutscenes to help make their case.
See, Bungie is notorious for “vaulting” content from Destiny 2, deleting it from the game as they add new content. They said in 2022 that they’d stop, but that doesn’t mean they’ve restored what they previously removed. One chunk of the game that they’d excised years ago was the original campaign for Destiny 2 which is all about a war with the Red Legion. That put them in a minor bind with this lawsuit, because, as they told the court in the Martineau lawsuit, they cannot just submit a copy of Destiny 2 as a trial exhibit to establish the facts of their game’s story.
9. Because (1) Destiny 2’s narrative is only available to players in the form of a live-service video game that has changed significantly over time, and (2) physical copies of Destiny 2, and any 2017 version of Destiny 2, are no longer available, the attached videos are the best possible way for the Court to review the accused work.
Thus, they submitted the 10-hour “The Complete Story of Destiny! From Origins to Final Shape! Light & Dark Saga Lore & Timeline” by YouTuber MynameisByf and “Destiny 2: The Red War All Cutscenes (Season 1)” by “the Destiny “superfan” and YouTube content creator, @DestinL” to help make their case. They are Exhibits B and C in Bungie’s motion to dismiss.
An incredible unexpected downside of vaulting for Bungie. Thank goodness for YouTube.
Tab: A small claims lawsuit against Activision
Reason it was open: As noted, I keep an eye out for video game-related lawsuits. Back in December, I found what seemed like a minor suit against Activision. The person suing wanted $800 from the Microsoft-owned mega-publisher. Their reasoning was explained in a form I had open in a browser tab, but I could not decipher all of the handwriting in the plaintiff’s filing.
Amazingly, leaving the document open in a tab for nearly three months, does not make a person’s penmanship more legible. I got most of it, but not all…
Xxxx xxxx cancel due to no solutions provided to my xxxx cases(?) made and Steam has stated they don’t provide support for these games and Activision does not understand they they are listed on Steam’s site as the main source for help.
There’s a hearing on the case in April. Maybe I’ll figure it out then, though it’s pretty clear this is as small-fry as it gets.
Tab: All Work and No Play, a 2021 book review by Sam Adler-Bell
Reason it was open: A friend who was struggling to find the motivation to play video games with the frequency that he used to found this essay and shared it with me.
It’s really good. An excerpt:
Usually I spend untold swaths of time playing games whose status as entertainment—much less as art—confounds me, even as I trudge on, checkpoint to checkpoint, level to level. What kind of subject am I being shaped into by these processes? And what kind of political economy demands that sort of subject? What, to be blunt, would I be spending my time doing otherwise?
Tab: The video games you may have missed in 2024
Reason it was open: In theory, there was going to be a slow period of game releases at the start of 2025. I would use that time to catch up on great games I’d missed. I’d study this December 2024 article from The Guardian to help me fill in the blanks. Oh, right, Caravan SandWitch! Maybe I might have time for Pepper Grinder? These Phoenix Springs and Crimson Diamond games sound cool.
Alas, not only did I not get to these games (yet?), but I also had never even finished going through this list until today.
Tab: Banishers Is The Most Overlooked Game Of 2024
Reason it was open: Sensing a theme yet? Another reminder about a 2024 game that intrigued me, but that I didn’t play as much as I wanted to.
Tab: Examining the trajectory of “Ryu ga Gotoku,” an entertainment for adults that has grown to be one of SEGA's flagship IPs, and its further evolution! [Part 2]
Reason it was open: Every so often, a company will post an in-house interview with their game developers. Sometimes there’s drama around these Q&As, but usually they’re pretty tepid.
In November, I spotted a then-new, official Sega interview with the lead developers of the Like a Dragon series. It contained some useful back-story about changes made in the long-running franchise, but two other things had stood out—just not enough for me to write a post about it.
The first was this quote, from Masayoshi Yokoyama, director of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio (which makes all the series’ games), about the changing demographics of the Like a Dragon series:
…recently we are very grateful that our female users are increasing, but we have absolutely no intention of changing the game content as a result of that. In fact, the characters who we make because we ourselves think they are cool sometimes link in with popularity among women so I think that, in the end, if we make something good that quality comes across regardless of gender [or] age group.
The second was this graphic of all the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games. Wow!
Tab: Nintendo’s 3rd quarter financial results - slideshow for investors
Reason it was open: After Nintendo reported its sales for the holiday season, I noticed a bunch of headlines about October’s Super Mario Party Jamboree selling more than six million copies before the end of 2024. That’s nice, but wasn’t there another marquee Switch exclusive last fall?
I opened up Nintendo’s most recent earnings slideshow, and there was a slide promoting Mario Party Jamboree’s big numbers, but there was nothing as prominent for Mario & Luigi: Brothership, the game Nintendo put in its prestigious pre-Black Friday November release slot.
I scrolled down and found one fine-print mention of it having sold 1.8 million copies between its Nov. 7 release date and the end of the year. Jamboree had tripled that with three fewer weeks.
Mario & Luigi Brothership had been the third Mario role-playing game Nintendo released in the span of 13 months, after Nov. 2023’s Super Nintendo-to-Switch remake Super Mario RPG and May 2024’s GameCube-to-Switch remaster Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. I looked up Nintendo’s results for holiday 2023 (another tab I’d left open!) and found that the Nov 17 SMRPG, with 10 fewer days on the shelves in 2023 than 2024’s M&LB sold 3.1 million copies.
Is that a textbook example of diminishing returns, I see?
Tab: Twitter/X post by Katsuhiro Harada about Tomonobu Itagaki.
Reason it was open: Tekken lead creator Katsuhiro Harada occasionally writes shockingly revealing (and shockingly long) tweets about his career. In late January, he wrote a 3000-word post about his hot-and-cold professional relationship with Ninja Gaiden/Dead or Alive pioneer Tomonobu Itagaki (about whom my only decent anecdote is that he once interrupted our interview to tell me I had “the eyes of a gambler”).
I finally read Harada’s Itagaki epic today. It’s captivating. An excerpt:
Cautiously, I picked up the phone. He said, “Could you come to Tecmo’s headquarters? Just you, alone.”
It reminded me of getting summoned by a delinquent upperclassman behind the school building back in middle school. For a moment, I considered declining, but in the end, my curiosity got the better of me.
I agreed to his request and headed to Tecmo’s headquarters the following day, alone.
Tab: Press kit for development studio Ground Shatter
Reason it was open: While preparing for the meeting to try the upcoming game Knights in Tight Spaces, I read through development studio Ground Shatter’s website. Their official studio description was too excellent for me to ignore, so I kept the tab open, thinking I’d do something with this.
Well, I’ll do something and paste it below:
Ground Shatter is an independent games developer. It is a supercut of every three-point landing from popular media. Ground Shatter is the feeling of finding a Neo Geo MVS amidst the cranes and pushers of a sea-side arcade. If Ground Shatter was a caring, nurturing parent it would be your mum. If it was an insult it would be "your mum". Ground Shatter knows the only way out is through. It is a fireside chat with a puppet owl.
Ground Shatter is killing the games industry.
That is just the start. Go to their site and read the whole thing.
Tab: Wikipedia entry for Blendo Games
Reason it was open: I recently got an email about Brendon Chung’s Blendo Games having a new demo in Steam Next Fest, for a game called Skin Deep, and the wikipedia page confirms that, yes, the developer of Quadrilateral Cowboy and 30 Flights of Loving, hadn’t released a game since 2018. I like his stuff, so I will check the new demo out.
PR description for Skin Deep: “an immersive sim set in space. Each level is teeming with possibilities and the ability to creatively find solutions and free space crews entirely staffed by cats.”
Tab: Not a Single Star Wars Outlaws Player Has Unlocked Their Own Fathier Yet
Reason it was open: Back in the mid/late-2010s, I had a great time covering developer mysteries and fan discoveries involving the Ubisoft series The Division. So I was hopeful that there’d be similar opportunities around August 2024’s Star Wars Outlaws, the latest game from The Division’s studio. That hasn’t happened, but, in the hopes that it would, I kept a tab open for a late-December tease about players still not fining a secret way to get their own Star Wars race horse. I can’t tell if anyone figured this out yet.
I closed many other tabs today, but some were boring and some are tied to future reporting that I can’t write about yet. Sadly, even with nearly all the tabs closed, my laptop fan is still spinning and my computer sounds like it’s about to take off. Time to book an appointment at the Genius Bar.
Item 2: In brief…
🧊 U.S. video game consumer spending in January totaled $4.5 billion, down 15% from a year prior, with hardware sales hitting the lowest January mark since January 2020, per industry tracker Circana.
👀 Surgeon Simulator studio Bossa Games is laying off an unspecified number of developers, as its co-founder Henrique Olifiers predicts massive change in the industry, VGC reports.
On LinkedIn, Olifiers wrote: “In our view this is not a phase, it’s a fundamental transformation of the games industry, a reshape of how games are made and by what kinds of teams. The industry of two years in the future will not look like the industry of two years ago.”
💡 Alexis Garavaryan, CEO of publisher Kepler Interactive, says his company is looking for games made by developers who are inspired by a wider range of art and experience.
In an interview with Games Industry, he said: “…we particularly cherish games that look outward, beyond games, drawing influence from every form of art, culture and experience. A lot of games are very inward looking, referring mainly to other games and a small group of totemic IPs from other media. We see an opportunity to create an identity by working with developers who look elsewhere for inspiration, and I think you can see that in our portfolio already.”
I like the format!
Went in wondering how your browser history was relevant. Left actually feeling really informed. Nice read!