A new report from Windows Central (spotted by VGC) claims Microsoft is preparing to introduce even more wrinkles to Xbox Game Pass.

Ahead of an additional plan and price hike for all tiers in September, it’s now claimed a cloud-only subscription is being explored. It’s expected to be cheaper and “more approachable” than Game Pass Ultimate, but a specific price range wasn’t listed.

This plan is allegedly aimed more toward non-Xbox owners, and potentially even players on other consoles. This one might also let players stream titles they already own via Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Windows Central further stated the Game Pass Family plan may return. It was tested in various territories in 2022 before it was scrapped, and allowed five people to share a subscription for $25/month.

Finally, the outlet claimed to have heard Microsoft was exploring an ad-supported tier, but wasn’t actively committed to it.

Xbox Game Pass is still being played with, for better or worse

Microsoft has been trying whatever it can to bring in new Game Pass subscribers in recent years. Mainly, this has taken the form of touting big games like Starfield as day one gets, with the newest being Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

This upcoming price hike comes just over a year after monthly prices for Game Pass Ultimate and the console plans saw a slight increase. At the time, the developer said the prices were spurred by a need to “match local market conditions.”

In response to September’s hike, the FTC decried the subscription service as a “degraded product.” With a new Standard tier that eschews day one launches for first-party games, the regulator accused it of enacting “consumer harm.”

Additional actions, such as laying off 1,900 people earlier this year and shutting down several Bethesda subsidiaries, are proof of Microsoft “exercising market power post-merger.”

Microsoft recently hit back at the FTC, calling those claims “misleading” and done to get back at its failed injunction (and lawsuit) to stop last year’s Activision Blizzard acquisition.

The regulator has “no evidence anywhere of harm to competition” from the merger, said Microsoft. “[Our] transaction thus continues to benefit competition and consumers–exactly what the district court correctly found.”

Windows Central’s full report on Game Pass’ potential future plans can be read here.

Update: Oh, hey. It’s out now.

Fallout: London, the massive fan-made Fallout 4 mod set in Poundland Prime (No Elephants, Some Castles, Canary Wharfare) has finally got a release date. Happy days, it’s actually today, Thursday 25th July. The news comes from Inverse, who’ve sent their dear alsatian companions sniffing around the mod’s Discord. Yesterday, Team FOLON lead Dean Carter shared the song I Just Can’t Wait (For Tomorrow) then, when sniffed at harder, confirmed that the ‘Tomorrow’ part meant tomorrow (as in, today), “Unless nuclear war happens.”

Watch on YouTube

Fallout: London is, of course, the massive total conversion mod for the RPG set in dear ol’ blighttown. Uh, blighty. It’s from a team of around 50 developers, and over 200 contributors, which is wild and humbling and, gosh, we don’t deserve modders. Activities include shooting antique rifles, dressing like a bobby, and milking mutant cows. There’s even a bulldog, named Churchill, that you can recruit as a companion. It’s a wildly ambitious and impressive project, featuring a load of quests, plus original voice acting from the likes of Neil Newbon (from Baldur’s Gate 3), and former UK Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow (not from Baldur’s Gate 3, iirc.)

Originally set to release back in April after five years in development, Fallout: London was delayed indefinitely thanks to a chaotic ‘next-gen’ update that broke a lot of mods and generally made people quite unhappy. It is, of course, oh-so-easy to adopt the misinformed stance that that big bad Bethesda clumsily got in the way of people trying to make their game interesting. So, anyway: Bethesda messed everything up for the people trying to make their game interesting, and the team had to delay things so they didn’t break.

More recently, Team Folon sent a build to GOG for testing, and it turned out that they still couldn’t get London and the next-gen update to play nice together. As such, players will need to downgrade their copies of Fallout 4 to run the mod. No hassle – London will ship with a custom installer that also does the downgrading for you.

“GOG have been amazing through all of this. To be honest, we’ve been the ones causing them the issue,” Carter told the Discord, via VG247. “What with us having things break due to the next-gen [update] and then needing the 3rd parties to update, then waiting for them to be fixed, only for the fact that at the 11th hour we’ve discovered that the next-gen [version of Fallout 4], even after updates, isn’t stable enough and thus we are now going out on the old version – [hence] the need for a downgrader.”

Anyways, that’s all in the past now, and Fallout: London looks to be playable and set to arrive just in time for the weekend. You can find the mod on GOG here. Oh, and if you missed the other good Bethesda news, Bestheda Game Studios announced a ‘wall-to-wall’ union this week.

Update (7/23/24): In a statement provided to Game Developer, Humble said its game publishing label is “undergoing restructuring” rather than fully shutting down. This restructure “involved much deliberation and careful thought, with the goal of ensuring the stability and support of our developers and ongoing projects.”

“We are acutely aware of the profound impact this decision has on our team members at Humble Games and deeply empathize with everyone affected. Our team’s contributions have been world-class and invaluable, supporting the launch of our games since we started publishing in 2017.”

Ongoing and future projects are said to be unaffected, and the restructure has “no impact” on Humble Bundle’s operations. It affirmed that it was “committed to making this transition as smooth as possible for everyone involved.”

Original story: The IGN-owned Humble Games was reportedly closed down this morning, and its 36-person staff was laid off entirely.

The publishing offshoot of the popular platform was cut, and seemingly without any prior warning. At time of writing, Humble itself has yet to comment on the matter.

Humble Games began in 2017 with titles like A Hat in Time and Aegis Defenders under its belt. Over the years, it’s gone to publish critical and commercial darlings like Slay the Spire, Unpacking, and Signalis.

Just last week, it’d published Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus from developer Squid Shock Studios.

“Like most of Humble Games today, I was notified that we were being laid off this morning,” wrote producer Kenny Schwarz. “As much of a bummer as it is to be in this position, I still appreciate that it’s been an amazing experience to work with so many wonderful and talented people!”

“Today is mine and my entire team’s last day at Humble Games,” added senior QA Emilee Kiefer. While mourning its end, she criticized the “volatile” industry and “people who only want exponential growth at the expense of making great games with great teams.”

“Billionaires and CEOs are making record profits at the expense of the employees who actually create the products,” she continued. “I believe we have the power to create studios that benefit us as game developers and not people that only see us as money printing machines.”

Last November, Humble laid off an unspecified number of staff from its publishing arm as part of a company restructure. Two years earlier, it had cut jobs in its engineering and customer service departments.

At time of writing, it’s unclear what will remain of games that Humble Games was set to publish, such as Monaco II and Breeze in the Clouds.

Apex Legends developers Respawn Entertainment have announced that poorly-received plans to overhaul the battle royale’s Premium Battle Pass will be partially walked back. Most crucially, the new passes – set to launch alongside the upcoming Season 22 in August – will no longer be sold exclusively for real-world cash; as with previous BPs, players will still be able to buy them with accumulated in-game currency.

“You’ve spoken, and we’ve listened”, opens the statement on the official Apex Legends TwiXer. “With the release of Season 22 we will restore the ability to get the Premium Battle Pass for 950 Apex Coins. We recognise that we could have handled the Battle Pass changes better – that’s on us.”

Several other changes will still go ahead, including the switch from one Premium Battle Pass per season to one smaller (yet still more reward-stuffed) PBP per half-season. Yet these were never the target of player ire, which has been laser-focused on that hard cash requirement since it was revealed by publishers EA a couple of weeks ago. In essence, this would have denied dedicated players the chance to earn future Premium Battle Passes for no additional cost, as each pass includes enough Apex Coins as levelling-up rewards to cover the cost of the next one.

Happily, that can now continue, as even these truncated half-season passes will dish out 1300 coins when completed – more than enough to chain together successive purchases. A wise change of course, then, even if it’s one that probably shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place. If you’re curious, here’s a full breakdown of each tier’s price and goodies:

Image credit: Respawn Entertainment

EA and Respawn aren’t entirely abandoning the cash-for-passes model, though, as in addition to the Premium Battle Pass, Season 22 will also introduce Ultimate and Ultimate+ Battle Pass tiers, each offering yet more rewards – and costing $10 / $20 respectively, with no Apex Coin option. While that means some will end up forking out $40 per season if they pick up both Ultimate+ passes – good lord, people, control your hat urges – I wouldn’t expect these to draw the same kind of rancor as the original set of changes. Beyond a couple of timed-exclusive skin variants, they’re only serving up some extra crafting materials and loot crates over the Premium tier, and are more of a genuinely optional upgrade that won’t leave Apex Coin buyers in the lurch.

Ubisoft Milan creative director Davide Soliani is departing the studio after 25 years.

Soliani has worked on a litany of titles over the year, but is best known for overseeing development of the Mario+Rabbids franchise as creative director. Prior to that, he worked on other franchises such as Beyond Good & Evil, Rayman, Rainbow Six, Just Dance, and Tomb Raider.

In a short post on X, Soliani said he was leaving Ubsoft to “embark on a new adventure.”

“Hi all folks. After 25 years, 11 of which beautifully spent working with Nintendo on Mario+Rabbids along the company of our incredible community of players, I have decided to leave Ubisoft to embark on a new adventure,” he wrote. “I can’t say more now. Thanks a lot for everything, truly.”

Ubisoft paid tribute to Soliani in a reply. “Thank you so much for all your incredible work Davide. It’s our turn to cry this time,” said the company. “Best wishes for the worlds you’ll journey through next.”

Mario+Rabbids sparks joy

Mario+Rabbids established itself as a bona fide franchise after debuting in 2017—following a famous E3 reveal that saw Soliani shed a tear when Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto hopped on stage for the announcement.

The latest entry in the series, Mario+Rabbids Sparks of Hope has reportedly sold 3 million copies, but Ubisoft seemingly expected more from the sequel out of the gate.

Shortly after it launched in October 2022, Ubisoft indicated the title had underperformed and perhaps should have been held back for the Switch’s inevitable successor.

During an interview last year, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in an ideal world the company would release “one [franchise] iteration on each machine,” and claimed Sparks of Hope debuted “a bit too early.”

Hindsight is 20/20, but with Nintendo yet to unveil its next console—which is rumored to launch next year—Ubisoft would have been waiting for some time.

I don’t know what the longest-running early access game in history has been (perhaps Project Zomboid?) but I know that zombie survival game 7 Days To Die is definitely up there. We first reported its appearance back in the dark ages of 2013. For context, that was the year Grand Theft Auto V came out. Whoa! Okay, calm down, sorry, I didn’t mean to panic you. Yes, the arrow of time is inviolable. We are all marching steadily towards our graves, I know. But at least now 7 Days To Die has finally released its fully baked version 1.0.

The 1.0 release comes out today and brings “more optimizations, polish, quality-of-life improvements, new content, new features, and new gameplay systems than ever before,” say developers The Fun Pimps, who must surely be tired.

Watch on YouTube

Their summary is also putting it somewhat mildly. The full patch notes are enormous. The world generation has been beefed up, making it faster and, theoretically, resulting in more interesting worlds. A bunch of new “points of interest” will now appear, including new theatres, high schools and hotels. There are new zombie variants (though I think this is mostly a cosmetic thing, for example, a new type of nurse zombie and a “bowling alley” zombie). There are new animal and vehicle models, lighting has been overhauled, a “new and improved Dismemberment Gore System” will make things bloody in some fresh ways, and there are now various “challenges” to act as tutorials for new players (replacing an old system of quests). There’s a bunch more stuff besides this that I cannot face communicating to you, lest it add another decade to the clock.

Even after all that, the developers say they’re not done working on the game. A roadmap for future updates includes hints of a weather system, an overhaul of traders, new bandits, and a story mode. All that is set to take them up to the end of 2025, they say.

I last played the horde-blasting starvation sim ten years ago, following its first shambling onto the scene. I liked it back then, enjoying the lonely log cabin defending and simple nightly defenses of my new home (then getting absolutely destroyed by a much bigger swarm). I’ll be diving back in to let you know how it holds up after all this time. It’s possible a decade of half-hearted survival games has blunted the edge of my enjoyment of the genre. But I do like digging pits for zombies to fall into. Check back for fuller thoughts sometime next week.

One of the defining changes in media in the 21st century – perhaps the defining change – is the switch to on-demand subscription services for most of our video and audio entertainment. This change isn’t just dramatic, it’s seemingly inevitable. Now that we have the technology to do this, the idea of going back to individual purchases of all music and movies feels just like that – going backwards.

It was only natural then, to expect that something similar would happen in the gaming space. And sure enough, some of the big players have tried to become the Netflix of gaming, including Microsoft, Apple, and of course, Netflix themselves.

As a player, I’m a fan of these. I have on several occasions suggested that Game Pass specifically is the best value in gaming. But over 5 years later, it’s clear that the service hasn’t taken off to the extent they might have hoped, leading to the narrative that it’s underperforming or a failure.

The state of game subs

Recent reports have Game Pass subscribers at somewhere around 34 million, which is simultaneously a large sounding number and a small fraction of the total Xbox and PC gamers. Consider that there are an estimated 120M+ monthly users of Steam, and that Steam doesn’t include Fortnite, League of Legends, Roblox, Minecraft and other titles that may boast more than that 34M figure by themselves. This slower than expected growth is being cited as a key reason for Microsoft’s recent studio closures.

A recent tweet by Circana’s Mat Piscatella reported that “non-mobile video game subscription spending was only up 1%” vs the previous year. That’s a tiny increase for what seemed like it could be the next big thing.

On the mobile side, things are a bit murkier. Subscriber counts for Apple Arcade are a little harder to come by, and due to the inclusion of Apple Arcade within the broader Apple One package, they may represent an overcount of the number of real users if we did have them. Similarly, Netflix technically offers games to all of its several hundred million users, but since it comes bundled in with the existing video subscription, that number represents only the number that have access to their game catalog, not those using it or those aware it even exists. Data from Apptopia put the number of players on a daily basis somewhere in the ballpark of 2M.

So what happened?

Given the ubiquity of streaming in music and video and the time these services have been available, a couple of potential explanations jump out. Either

While I can’t rule out A, I suspect B is more likely, and I’m going to make an attempt to explain what I think that flawed assumption is.

Two types of game

To start with, let me ask a seemingly simple question: are games a form of media? The obvious answer is “Yes”, but a more nuanced answer would be “They can be”. One of the biggest trends over the past couple of decades has been the rise of games specifically designed to be played for a potentially endless amount of time. The audience for these titles do not really treat “gaming” as a hobby so much as they treat individual games as a hobby.

This change can be seen in a variety of ways:

So while games certainly can be a form of media, not all gamers treat them as something to be consumed like media. Ironically, despite this article being about subscriptions to catalog services, subscriptions to individual games have actually done very well. Wold of Warcraft alone reportedly peaked at over 10M subscribers, putting it potentially around ⅓ of Game Pass by itself.

Amongst all these trends, there may have only been one clear trend in the other direction, and that’s in the independent scene. Not all independent devs of course, but prior to the last decade, it was unusual to see smaller teams competing for Game of the Year awards, whereas now that’s fairly common, and most of those tend much more to the experiential side.

Unfortunately, as you can probably tell from the words being used in this blog, there still aren’t commonly agreed upon terms for these two types of game, nor does any store (to my knowledge) let you search or filter by one or the other. All of which continues to make it easy to conflate them and overlook the importance of this distinction.

The size of the market

To rephrase the above, the core problem of selling monthly access to a catalog of videogames is the sheer number of gamers who simply aren’t looking for new game experiences every month. There may well be hundreds of millions of people who played a videogame today, but let’s start chipping away at that figure.

All the people who just play F2P games and don’t spend a cent on anything? They’re probably not potential customers, and I’d guess that this group could number in the hundreds of millions.

And all the ones who do routinely spend money in F2P games? They’re typically quite committed to those games, and hence probably not the kind that are looking to jump from game to game on a regular basis.

Ditto for the competitive gamers who want to find a game – be it FPS/RTS/MOBA/CCG/etc – that they can commit to for long enough to develop mastery.

Really, if any game in your Steam library has a playtime of over 500 hours, you may be getting enough value from the games you buy that a catalog service actually becomes worse value by comparison.

Anyone who just wants to play the biggest AAA games of the year will likely be ruled out too – there’s just not that many exceptional ones per year these days, and they’re spread across too many publishers and platforms to get a significant number on one service. Others may arrive later, but at this point I think Microsoft and Ubisoft are the only traditional publishers launching their biggest titles on day one on [the higher tiers of] their services, something Sony has thus far declined to do for their PSN Extra/Deluxe tiers. So this kind of player may be a potential customer, but may also lean towards signing up occasionally for limited time periods rather than being an ongoing customer.

Similarly, fans of indie games may also want to play whatever notable releases arrive in their favourite genres (or just anything getting enough buzz), but again, if you want to be part of the zeitgeist then you may also not be fully satisfied with this combination of occasional day 1 releases and semi-random older choices.

So what you’re left with is players who want to play a wide variety of games, either by indies or whatever back catalog premium titles are currently on rotation, and aren’t getting so distracted by other off-service titles to find the subscription service unnecessary. Oh and they also need to have access to the platform(s) your service runs on.

How big is this market? I have no idea. We’d need some far more experienced analysts to dive into that one. But I feel fairly comfortable saying that it’s likely nowhere near as big as the overall size of the gaming market might suggest. And it likely pales next to the largest single titles as well.

This concept of total addressable market is very important to the perceptions of success or failure, because if you hear that Microsoft are only reaching ~34 million of the multiple billion gamers, then it’s easy to conclude that it’s underperforming. But if you think that the number of people who might be interested in such a service might stretch to only around 100M, then they may have already reached around a third of the entire market. In most industries that’d likely be considered pretty good for a few years work at a new business model.

Why this goes unnoticed

Part of the reason this often goes undercovered in much of the gaming press is that the gaming press is comprised of people who need to be jumping from game to game on a weekly basis as part of their job. As a result, even if they do have their forever game that they can keep going back to, they also need to enjoy playing a variety of games every month or they likely wouldn’t be doing what they are.

There are of course people who specialise in covering a single game, though I suspect it’d be a fairly rare scenario that there was enough to say about a game that launched over 3 years ago to keep a gaming journalist employed full time, even if there were still 10M people playing that game. All of which leads to a strong focus on what’s new and upcoming over what the majority of players are actually spending their time on.

In other words, the market for gaming journalism is mostly the section that cares about what’s new and novel. And as discussed above, this section represents only a tiny portion of the total gaming market, and it may not be growing fast, if it’s growing at all.

But it is the segment of the market that’s most likely to be found regularly reading the gaming press or listening to their podcasts, so it’s natural to think of it as being more representative of the gaming landscape as a whole than it really is. And therefore to think that because their audience would likely appreciate a large selection of high-quality games for a reasonable monthly fee, that there must be a very large market for such a thing.

But it may still be a niche, as hard as that may be to believe.

The wrong solution

In the face of these perceived shortfalls, an inevitable solution will be proposed – that the service needs to expand into the kinds of games that can hold onto players for months or years. This can be seen both in Microsoft’s addition of bonuses for several of Riot’s F2P games on Game Pass, and in Apple’s reported pivot of the criteria they’re looking for in Apple Arcade titles. These notions, while understandable, may be missing the point. They’re understandable because, as discussed already, we know that there are types of games that can hang onto players for months or longer, and a game subscription service that had such a game might be able to keep someone resubscribing every month in the same way that a must-watch television series might keep subscribers around for the length of the season.

But they’re potentially missing the point because, also as suggested above, these can be exactly the kinds of games that can monetise on an ongoing basis all by themselves. And a game that can get a large player base to commit to even $5 a month directly probably stands to make a lot more than it could as 1 of several hundred games on a $10-15 monthly subscription.

This is one area where games are unique from the other media types. Movies and music can certainly get one-off revenue from a number of sources, but I don’t know how many musicians or film directors ever aspired to reliably make $15 a month from over 10 million fans as World of Warcraft did.

Similarly, any player who did find themselves primarily playing a single game on a subscription service might naturally start to wonder why they’re paying for hundreds of other games if they’re mostly just playing one, and could be supporting that single dev directly.

Takeaways

Given my rambling nature, there’s a few things to summarise here, but I’m going to focus on one in particular –  we need better labels for the variety of experiences games can offer. I have to believe that few people would treat movies, TV shows and Tiktok videos the same, despite all being video-based entertainment options. Spotify doesn’t treat music, podcasts and audiobooks the same, despite all being audio-based entertainment options. And I think gaming provides a similar breadth of forms, though we lack the language to differentiate them.

The closest any store I can recall has come to this distinction is the paid/free split on the mobile app stores, though I don’t think either has really done anything to explain what the differences are between premium and F2P games, nor does it do anything to separate F2P games from just plain free games.

After spending a little time pondering a few ideas for naming, I think the most logical options would simply be ‘finite games’ and ‘infinite games’, though perhaps some creators may wish to declare that they make finite games that just happen to take a year to finish, by which time they hope to have added even more content.

Such terms could help everyone in the gaming space. They would help developers better communicate what they’re making. They would help players understand what they’re playing or what they’re in the market for. And for the purposes of this blog, it would help analysts and the rest of us better quantify the size of various segments of the overall market.

Ideally, any catalogue service listing ‘finite games’ should also list an estimated playtime, in the same way that every video and audio service tells you the length of what you’re about to see or hear. Such times may have to include vague min/max figures to account for the variety of different experiences, but not only is this possible, Microsoft are already doing it on Game Pass through the HowLongToBeat data. Some worried that this would limit the reach of shorter titles, but I suspect the opposite might be true – from personal experience, once you have an ‘all-you-can-eat’ model, you develop a new respect for games that haven’t been padded out to meet some arbitrary hours-per-dollars metric. If you’re unsure about a game, knowing that it’ll only take a few hours either way can be a lot more encouraging than hearing a game gets really good after the first dozen hours.

Addendum

Most of this blog was written before MS announced the recent pricing and feature changes for the Game Pass tiers, but I don’t think anything above fundamentally changes. If anything, it may serve as an explanation for a possible strategy change. Remember the $1 trial month? That’s a thing you do when growing your audience is more important than short-term profit. Upping the prices and forcing players to upgrade to the top tier for what used to be the marketing slogan of your service (“Play it day one with Game Pass”) is something you do when you think that the smarter play is extracting more revenue from your existing users.

Robert Green is a game designer with 19 years experience making games across a wide variety of genres and platforms. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer or gamedeveloper.com. The author has also worked on games for multiple subscription services, but this isn’t a marketing post and I don’t have any confidential internal data to base this blog on.

I’ve never been a poetry guy, not because I don’t like it, I’ve just never gone out of my way to read them over books or whatnot. The poems I’ve engaged with the most are those read out during wedding ceremonies, those that pop-up before the start of a horror game, or The Tiger by 6-year old Nael that occasionally pops up as I’m doomscrolling. But thanks to the multiplayer web game “fridge poetry”, where you drag words to create poems, I might become a day-to-day poem guy. Going off my first effort, I don’t think many will appreciate my career switch.

Head on over to this site and it’ll transport you to the web’s fridge wall, complete with loads of magnets folks have already popped on there and arranged to create poetry. At the bottom right, you can generate your own words, too. All you have to do is drag a word around and plop it next to any others, rearranging existing poems or creating your own. And what’s really nice is that you can see other people’s cursors as they go about their business, before they disappear into the ether.

My first poem? I saw my opening, the moment I laid eyes on the fridge door: the night consumes blank. I saw the word “fortnite” hovering nearby. Smugly, I put the two together: the night consumes fortnite. I think of it as a sort of contemplation, let’s say, on how Fortnite both consumes people’s evenings and is also being consumed itself. Consumed by Disney and Lego and Ariana Grande – perhaps gleefully. The word “night” also sounds like “nite”, which I thought was clever.

Someone immediately dashed my work, hopping in to unpick my poem before leaving (fair enough). So I left another poem later, simply entitled: rock, paper, shotgun. And just as I did so, someone else generated the word “frotnite” and positioned it above “fortnite” in what was a rather beautiful thing that happened in real time.

Other poems on the door at the time of writing:

every raccoon is gay
meow! meowmeowmeow
[email protected]

Yeah, I really like that last one.

Epic Games former EVP of game development, Alain Tascan, has been named president of Netflix Games.

Prior to joining Epic, Tascan served as CEO of Umi Mobile, vice chairman at Funcom, VP and general manager at EA Montreal, and VP of production at Ubisoft.

Variety broke the news and explained Tascan will report directly to Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters.

“Alain brings over 30 years of experience in global video game development, production, licensing and building studios,” said Peters, discussing the appointment. “He has a passion for making great games and a proven track record of taking bold creative bets. We’re thrilled to have him leading Netflix Games.”

Tascan said he intends to build on the “remarkable foundation” the Netflix Games team has laid, and claimed the streaming company is “uniquely positioned to redefine the future of gaming.”

His appointment comes weeks after Netflix confirmed its VP of Games, Mike Verdu, would be taking on a new, unspecified role within the company focused on “innovation in game development.”

Netflix Games on the rise

Netflix is getting serious about making games. The company has acquired a number of studios in recent years, including Spry Fox, Next Games, and Night School Studio.

It launched Netflix Games in 2021 with a lightweight roster that comprised just five titles. It has since brought over 100 games to the platform and has more than 80 projects currently in development.

During a recent earnings call (thanks Polygon), Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters explained the company now has a better idea of how to approach and refine its video game business. “We’ve launched over 100 games so far. We’ve seen what works, what doesn’t work. We’re refining our program to do more of what is working with the 80-plus games that we currently have in development,” he said. 

I keep seeing those adverts for that Ray-Ban and Meta collaboration, where like, they’re smart glasses that let you browse the web with your eyes? Anyway, yeah, they don’t appeal to me at all. Not as much as “Dateviator” glasses, which come courtesy of Sassy Chap Games and their upcoming dating sim Date Everything! As the title suggests: you date everything, from kitchen sponges to lampshades, as they morph into absolute fitties once you’ve donned the special specs. It looks incredibly dumb but in the best possible way.

In what’s been coined as a “sandbox” dating simulator, the game sees you explore a home from a first-person perspective and don the Dateviator glasses to chat up everyday objects. We’re talking hoovers, cabinets, toasters, fridges – pop those glasses on and anything becomes 10/10 shaggable. While there’s not much info on exactly why or how or who or what is going on, the devs do say there’s a “critical path tying it all together”, with all dateable objects having three “relationship resolutions”: Love, Friend, or Hate. Imagine leaning in for a kiss with a nail clipper and getting pied. Unthinkable.

Watch on YouTube

There are other tidbits of info, like there being 100 fully voiced dateable characters (things?) all voiced by strong voice actors from all sorts of games like Final Fantasy XV, Persona 5, HiFi Rush and more. Not to mention that the game will cater for a “wide array of player preferences and tastes”, so everyone can get involved in… whatever this game is.

It has got me thinking, though. What household object in my home would I date? My coaster? My laptop sleeve? Truthfully, I think it would be my Sonic The Hedgehog lamp that isn’t actually of the character Sonic, but just the words “Sonic The Hedgehog”. Dear reader, what household object would you date? I am sure I won’t regret asking you such a thing.

There isn’t a release date yet, but you can follow the game over on Steam if you’re curious.