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Hearthstone players will be travelling to World of Warcraft’s city of Stormwind when the game’s next set releases on August 3 (August 4 in ANZ). Across 135 new cards, United in Stormwind riffs on some of the ways in which Alliance players spend their time in the iconic city, from getting their first mount and visiting vendors through to learning tradeskills and following questlines.

All of these things will now have a Hearthstone equivalent, in fact. Mounts are created by casting special Mount spells on minions, but then have the added bonus that when that minion dies, the trusty steed with stats equal to the buff, is summoned on its own. Questlines, meanwhile, are three-part quests that center around Hearthstone’s new mercenary characters – and who can be played as the main reward once completed. Profession Tools, meanwhile, occupy the weapon slot, but have no attack value, instead providing a bonus when a condition is met. And lastly, Tradeable cards can be swapped with a random card from your deck at a cost of one mana. More on all those further down.

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Today’s announcement also revealed that Hearthstone Battlegrounds will be getting a major update soon, including “the largest minion pool shakeup since launch”. A number of cosmetic options are also coming to the mode, including a Battlegrounds Bundle called Beach Party that packs seven new sun-soaked hero portraits… like Grill King Bolvar and Chillin’ Vol’jin. For our money the best part of the pack, however, is the prospect of Tikilord Ragnaros, who is a fully-voiced alternate bartender and promises “scorching attitude”.

Battlegrounds will also be getting the Shadowlands bundle, which has eight reimagined designs that cast Battlegrounds heroes as members of the Covenants from Shadowlands. These include Finley of the Kyrian and Ysera of the Night Fae.

Now, let’s dive into United in Stormwind a little more, and take a look at all the cards that have been revealed so far, with a little help from Chadd Nervig, Senior Game Designer, Card Design and Liv Breeden, Senior Game Designer, Initial Design.

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Tradeable Cards

“We’re doing a year-long narrative,” explains Liv Breeden. “The first set being Forged in the Barrens – it’s that low level experience. It’s the Horde experience. It’s the fight for survival, really, as you get your grounding. But levelling up, we’ve gained some skills and we’re going to go to the big city. So on the other side of it is the Alliance set. So that’s where United in Stormwind comes in. It’s less about fighting for survival and it’s about living in the moment. This is a city with castles and walls and people trading back and forth. So we want a lot of buying and selling kind of feels. It’s more like the city set where we’re trading, and less about conflict and fighting. So that’s the gist of it.

“If you look at the new keyword Tradeable, that’s a big piece of that… like, Heavy Plate is gain eight armour. You can just play it like normal, but because it has the Tradeable keyword, you can drag it from your hand to your deck and trade it for a different card for just one mana. So these are cards that can be situational. Like, in a Warrior matchup – a mirror matchup, well, I’d rather have something a little bit more proactive or maybe a board removal tool. I don’t need the armour so I’ll trade that away, try and find something that I can use right now and then go about my day.”

“Tradeable we had at zero mana at one point in time,” says Breeden when I ask about the design process. “Which is really interesting because you’re like, well, it’s simpler if I can just trade this away. It’s super understandable. But from a mathematic perspective, every deck runs these because it makes your deck more consistent. You’re basically running a 28 card deck if you’re including two of them. So we went up in the cost so that this actually does cost something to do. There’s some more factors rather than just, eh, throw it away. You actually have to make that decision. And we think that’s really important.

“The other thing that we tried early on is we had Tradeable decks. The goal of doing Tradeable decks would be you just trade and you have a bunch of things on the board that trigger whenever you trade. So we had tons of Tradeable cards, but we found that the mechanic actually really shines when it’s on a few cards. When it’s really specific that including these in your deck is important, but it’s not so prevalent that I’m spending my entire turn just trading with myself, trying to find the right cards to make my deck super consistent. It’s about – you can make that decision, and it’s an interesting decision, but it’s not so every single turn I’m doing this thing.”

The team tested these support cards for the Tradeable keyword for a while, but found that having Tradeable cards as situational, but flexible, was more fun. In some match-ups, for instance, weapon destruction is a useless effect, so in those games a situational card like Rustrot Viper can simply be traded away. (Unless a Spider Tank will help, of course.) You may also want to utilise the trade functionality based on timing. Fire Sale, the new Mage AOE for instance, may be a valuable tool for the game you’re playing, but in the current situation you may want to dig for something else. That dynamic “brings a whole lot of just moment to moment fun, interesting decisions,” says Nervig.

“It’s actually really important that these cards just feel good on their own,” adds Breeden. “It’s not like I’m giving up something by getting the flexibility. These are cards that are pretty reasonable, like Heavy Plate or Fire Sale. For removal, I’m going to put this in my deck. I don’t feel bad about it. It’s closer to Choose One with Druid, but a little more generic in terms of class identity.”

Questlines

United in Stormwind’s legendary Questline cards are the return of a concept that Hearthstone has played with on several previous occasions. The original Quests debuted with 2017’s Journey to Un’Goro, with one for every class, and while they were hit and miss, the hits shook up the game considerably. Same too with Saviors of Uldum in 2019, which streamlined Quests to have the rewards automatically trigger – as opposed to being cards that had to be played – but was similarly impactful.

This time around, Quests are once again automatically in-hand at the start of the game, and instead of working towards meeting one large condition, have three small, sequential conditions to meet. Each stage that’s passed has a reward, and it all culminates in a big splashy legendary card once the final stage is complete. The team thought about having a passive reward at the end again, but “there is something really nice about the original Quest having that big slam moment of, ‘I’m playing this awesome thing, I have announced that we are entering a new state of the game. I now have spell damage plus three’…” says Breeden, “It’s like, ‘boom, I’m going to destroy you now.’ So I really like that we’ve taken the best of both worlds where it’s like, we get the power along the way, so we can have that big moment at the end. It’s not all or nothing.”

The fact that each of the three parts need to be completed in order adds a significant new wrinkle too. Take the Mage Questline, Sorcerer’s Gambit (above). “There’s a very unique play style here,” says Breeden. “You have to play a Fire, Frost and Arcane [spell] before moving onto the next step. So you can’t just play two Fires and move to the second step and get progress on that second step. No, I have to order which spells do I play? So you do favour putting cheaper spells in[to your deck]. Things like Flurry probably get a little bit more gameplay, which I think is good… the spell damage plus three [reward] is super huge…”

“As much as it sounds like, oh, that could just go in no minion Spell Mage,” says Nervig of what kind of deck will play this Quest, “I think popular versions of Spell Mage right now don’t actually run much Fire. And so it ends up being fairly important that you have an even mix of them, and that they’re cheap enough to mix them in the right orders.”

“That said, Mage gets a lot of Fire stuff this expansion,” adds Breeden.

The other Questline that’s been revealed so far is The Demon Seed for Warlock. This Quest demands that players damage themselves a huge amount over the course of the game, with the incremental rewards being Lifesteal damage to the opponent’s face, and the eventual pay-off being Blightborn Tamsin, who has a battlecry that for the rest of the game, damage you take on your turn damages your opponent instead. It’s a very Warlock-y idea, reliant not only on a lot of cards that damage yourself in addition to the hero power, but a fair amount of heal to ensure you survive to complete the Quest. I ask if this means Warlock will get more heal. “Warlock has a bunch of healing right now, as it stands, with the Soul Shards,” says Liv Breeden. “So I think that’s something we’re actively watching. Because… Warlock has a really good hero power. The downside is, is that you don’t have a lot of ways to heal yourself. And lately we’ve swung the other way where they’ve got a lot of healing. So I think we actually have to watch how much healing we give Warlock.”

The Questline cards also fit in with the team’s ambition to tell a yearlong story, as each features one of the ten mercenaries at the heart of that. “This gives us a way to tell a story of an individual character – their path through the overall Stormwind storyline,” explains Nervig. “[We can] see that, okay, Arcanist Dawngrasp starts out locked up in the stockades, and then they break out and then they escape through a portal room. And then you get the final, legendary minion version of them. Flavour-wise, it was really cool to be able to tell these stories. Normally Hearthstone cards are not the greatest at telling a linear narrative in the collectible cards. It’s more of a just slice of time or a setting. But this gave us that ability and so that was really exciting.”

“These are the breadcrumbs that we can use for single-player to really build off of,” adds Breeden. “So we have these snapshots in time. We can do a little bit more storytelling from the collectible [cards] and… standard play, but we also give these little hints at what’s coming up to players. That way they’re really excited to see how does this actually happen? How does Dawngrasp end up in the stockades? How does Tamsin open up this demonic portal and what happens to Stormwind as a result of that sort of thing?”

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 Mounts and Profession Tools

“Mounts are a huge part of World of Warcraft,” says Liv Breeden. “When you hit level 40, you want to get your mount. So these are the mercenaries’ personal mounts. You’ll see Xyrella on her Elekk mount, which operates similarly to a Spikeridge Steed, if you’ve played those cards. But we’ve also got new ones, like Ramming Mount, which give it a little bit of extra juice where it’s like – oh, I’m immune while attacking. And then I can ram it into it. Once you knock the rider off, the ram comes out and you can do it again. And the minion that comes out the back side has the same stats and effect as the buff. So that’s an easy way to remember it.”

Profession Tools, meanwhile, are an analogue to tradeskills in World of Warcraft. “These are cards that go in your weapons slot,” explains Breeden. “They don’t have attack values, but they provide some sort of benefit when you’ve met the requirements, when you’ve got enough crafting reagents. So Runed Mithril Rod is an enchanting rod. If you’ve ever played an enchanter in World of Warcraft, you know that you’re going to need every single green item to break it down to enchant all the other stuff in your hand.”

The Return of Shadowpriest

One of the most intriguing cards that was revealed today would have to be the Priest legendary card Darkbishop Benedictus, as it opens up a whole new (returning) archetype – Shadowpriest. The card has a start of game effect that instantly puts the player into Shadowform (the Priest hero power deals two damage instead of healing two) if all the spells in the player’s deck are Shadow spells.

It’s a significant build-around cost, but an exciting one. “I think it does almost create a new class identity for Priest,” says Liv Breeden, “where it’s like, yeah, I can go face, but at a certain cost. Nearly all of my healing, if it’s not Lifesteal, comes from Holy spells. So there’s a huge cost to going down the Shadow path.” Given Control Priest is quite a polarising deck in the current meta, it’s great to see a whole new direction for the class. “It’s one of their major archetypes [in this set], so they’re going to get a couple of pieces that go along with it,” Breeden says.

In terms of how the new archetype may play, Chadd Nervig comments that “I don’t know if it’s quite as just face-centric as something like Face Hunter. It’s a little more [of a] tempo-y, mid-range-y version of that. You do play some minions, but you’ve got that situational removal. You’ve got these spells that can go face, some limited healing through Lifesteal and two more cards that we haven’t revealed yet, but will fit in that nicely.”

And what of the fact that Priest had been capable of burst damage for many years before key cards like Mind Blast were removed from the Standard format to try and reshape the class’ identity? “There was a while where we were like, okay, Priest, no face damage,” Nervig explains. “But we decided – with making the right restrictions on your play style to go along with it – we think this is a cool thing to do now, to be – okay, if you’re doing the Shadowpriest thing and you’re very upfront about being a Shadowpriest and you have made these concessions to how your deck works, you can do that thing and be good at it. So the Shadowpriest archetype is definitely something I’m really excited for. And it makes you look back at your cards from previous sets and be like, okay, wait, which ones were Shadow? What’s my deck going to look like? What can I use out of those? I love that it re-evaluates or recontextualises the existing cards as well.”

“Shadowform is something that we’ve gone back to quite a few times,” says Breeden. “I think there’s just such a draw for the Priest fantasy of, yeah, there’s the healing part, but also the dark part. There’s just something about Shadowform that we want to keep returning to, and this is a tool that I think we could use in the future as well. We’ve tried cards in the past like ‘if you are in Shadowform, do something.’ And I think that with this sort of base, we can start doing those cards again. And so I’m excited to see what this looks like in the future, too.”

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Darkbishop, incidentally, is one of the two diamond cards coming in the United in Stormwind set.

Flightmaster Dungar

Another interesting card is Flightmaster Dungar, which lets you choose one of three flightpaths, each of which has a different reward… and requires a different wait. “The flight path is how you get in and out of Stormwind most of the time after you’ve been there once, when you’re playing World of Warcraft,” explains Nervig. “And Flightmaster Dungar’s your flightmaster there… [the card text] says, choose a flight path and go Dormant. You get the choice of where do you want to fly to? The three choices are Westfall, Ironforge and Eastern Plaguelands.

“And you get a different reward for that when he wakes up, based on how far away you flew. Westfall is only one turn away and it summons an adventurer, like in Wailing Caverns. Ironforge is a little further away. It takes three turns to get there and it restores 10 health to your hero. It’s a little more of a defensive play. And then if you want to go all the way to the Eastern Plaguelands, after five turns that does 12 damage split between all enemies, including face… So it’s a pretty flexible card, but it also has a lot of strategy around thinking about what you’re going to need X turns from now.”

“If I’m a Hunter and I’m super early in the game,” says Breeden, “maybe I’ll go for that more damage later because I’ll need that last push. But if they need the 2/2 now, then they can just get it next turn. And of course, Hunters are just going to skip that second option because they just don’t need healing,” she laughs. “And if you’ve ever taken those flight paths in World of Warcraft you’ll know that their lengths are appropriate… going to the Plaguelands? I’m going to go take a nap before I come back.”

Coolest of all, Flightmaster Dungar is available now for free as a celebration of the announcement, so log in to ensure you don’t miss out.

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United in Stormwind will be released on August 3 (August 4 in ANZ) and is already looking hugely promising. There are two pre-order bundles available now. The United in Stormwind bundle includes 60 expansion packs, two random Legendary cards and a Lady Katrana Prestor card back. The United in Stormwind Mega Bundle, on the other hand, includes 80 regular United in Stormwind card packs, 5 United in Stormwind golden card packs, two random golden Legendary cards from the set, a Lady Katrana Prestor alternate hero and card back, perks for Battlegrounds that last until the next expansion and the Ve’nari alternate bartender for Battlegrounds.

Cam Shea is an IGN veteran based in Sydney, Australia. He’s determined to keep making content about Breath of the Wild.

Dynasty Warriors is now streaming on Netflix.

Dynasty Warriors isn’t the video game-to-film adaptation you’ve been waiting for. Dating back to 1997, and composed of nine separate games, the hack-n-slash action franchise is a single-player tactical role-playing game that on first blush lends some potential for a cinematic rendering. For one, the over-the-top battles should equate to big-screen action sequences. The epic world-building allows plenty of creative flexibility. And the historical lore ought to imbue the proceedings with a potent aura. But director Roy Hin Yeung Chow’s Dynasty Warriors is a two-hour slog, missing the dumb hijinks and sharp fighting precision needed for an ultra-fun adventure.

The script for Dynasty Warriors is tragically underwritten. Three traveling soldiers Liu Bei (Tony Yo-ning Yang), Guan Yu (Geng Han), and Zhang Fei (Justin Cheung)—drawn together by honor and loyalty to the Han dynasty—work to restore the child emperor Liu Bian to the throne following the takeover of his nefarious chancellor Dong Zhuo (Suet Lam). Chow and screenwriter Chi-long To expect viewers to have a healthy dose of prior knowledge. It’s why the characters are without any type of backstory: how the trio of warriors came to unite or their individual origins. But unless you’ve played one or more of the games, you’ll be totally lost.

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Worse yet, Chow makes little effort to connect any of the hanging threads. The most powerful fighter in Dong Zhuo’s army, Lu Bu (Louis Koo), surprisingly falls in love with his commander’s unknown lover Diao Chan (Coulee Nazha). The committed Cao Cao (Kai Wang), a loyal servant to the young emperor who’s prepared to sacrifice everything and everybody to restore the Han dynasty to power, carries out a bloody heinous crime that’s never revisited.

And the three soldiers, who are granted a trippy hallucinogenic vision and powerful weapons by the mystical Master of the Sword Forge Castle (Carina Lau), never display the combined might one would expect from such magical abilities. 

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With regards to the ragged visual effects, the onscreen production value barely rises to the level of The Last Airbender. The large-scale confrontations between armies are rife with ghastly visual artifacts. Likewise, the soldiers’ robotic movements, akin to barely rendered stick figures, distract from the vicious scale of the carnage. The charitable inference would say these shoddy graphics are meant to hark to earlier gameplay iterations. Even if one affords such excuses, this is a film, and that carries a certain expectation of style and quality — both of which Dynasty Warriors lacks. 

Chow further disrupts the line between cinema and gaming through cheap, repetitive compositions meant to mirror the game’s cutscenes. It’s as though he began designing a game first. Gave up. And then repurposed the already shot footage for the film. The visual narrative choices make the underlying story to Dynasty Warriors incomprehensible, adds unnecessary fat to a bloated two-hour runtime, and barely provide the aesthetic quality of a low-res screensaver. If you want to watch a series of overexposed landscapes streaming in succession, skip this film. Turn on your television. And let the Chromecast slideshow do its cheaper work. 

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It’s difficult to quantify exactly what Dynasty Warriors does well. The gilded Han-era production design does add a resplendent sheen to the onscreen action. As do the vibrant, colorful armor. But that’s about it. The performances are without merit, struggling to add a coherent emotional throughline between the “1 vs 100” bloodshed. It’s why the final third of the action flick feels rushed. The soldier trio face-off in an anticlimactic battle with Lu Bu: replete with movesets like lightning-charged Spirit Bombs — only for the story to jump ahead five years into the future wherein Bei and Cao are now frenemies.

One can only guess that Chow and Co. want to turn this into a movie franchise. That would be a mistake. As they’d have to figure out what a movie is before making more. 

The Game Developers Choice Awards will honor Newgrounds creator Tom Fulp and industry veteran Laralyn McWilliams on July 21 as part of this year’s all-virtual GDC.

Fulp will receive the Pioneer Award for his creation and continued support of the website Newgrounds and Newgrounds Portal, which allows users to self-publish games, art, and animations to the internet for the whole world to enjoy. In the early 2000s this meant an explosion of Flash games and animations that heavily influenced internet culture as we know it today. Fulp also founded the game studio Behemoth, going on to create games like Alien Hominid (which began life as a Flash game on Newgrounds) and later smash-hits like Castle Crashers.

McWilliams will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award for her nearly 30-year career in the video game industry, which saw her work as creative director for Sony Online Entertainment’s MMO Free Realms and lead designer on the original Full Spectrum Warrior. She currently works at Microsoft as principal creative design director for customer success engineering. A regular conference speaker on a number of game-related topics, she is also an outspoken advocate of the idea that games are for everyone and for increased diversity in game development.

“Tom Fulp and Laralyn McWilliams have left an indelible impression on the video game industry and enabled and inspired so many others to create games,” says Katie Stern, GDC VP of Entertainment Media at Informa Tech, via a press release. “We are honored to have them join us at the Game Developers Choice Awards and they could not be more deserving of these awards.”

This year’s recipients were chosen by the GDC’s special awards jury, which is comprised of numerous industry veterans including PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 Lead System Architect Mark Cerny, Double Fine VP of Development Caryl Shaw, ID@Xbox Director Chris Charla, Double Loop Games founder and CEO Emily Greer, and Necrosoft Games Creative Director Brandon Sheffield.

Last year’s Pioneer Award went to Roberta Williams for her role as co-founder of Sierra On-line (later Sierra Entertainment) and her work on the influential King’s Quest game series. Past recipients of the Pioneer Award include Valve’s Gabe Newell, Sega’s Yu Suzuki, and Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson. Former Lifetime Achievement Award recipients include Deus Ex and Thief creator Warren Spector, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima, and, most recently, Uncharted writer and director Amy Hennig.

The awards will be available to watch for GDC 2021 pass-holders and will be held alongside the Independent Games Festival Awards. GDC 2021 will take place from July 19-23 and will feature more than 400 sessions for attendees to participate in virtually.

Humble Bundle is updating how its sliders work, no longer allowing purchasers to choose to give 100% of their money to charity. In a blog post, Humble Bundle announced that the company will now have a minimum of 15% to 30% of money going to Humble, where previously any purchasers could choose to have 100% of their money go to charity using the sliders.

This comes after Humble reversed the decision to remove the sliders completely back in May, taking away the ability for people to choose how much money goes to Humble, developers/publishers, and charity. Part of the backlash to that decision was removing the ability to give 100% of the money to charity, something that is considered a staple of the platform. In the new blog post, Humble said there will continue to be some 100% charity bundles in the future, but most bundles will have a minimum amount going to the online platform.

“The PC storefront landscape has changed significantly since we first launched bundles in 2010, and we have to continue to evolve with it to stay on mission,” the Humble Bundle team said. “The update will allow us to continue to offer great prices on amazing games, books, and software all while supporting important charitable initiatives with every single purchase.”

The way Humble Bundle works is that the store bundles together a collection of digital games, books, or software, allowing people to pay what they want for the bundle, with different dollar amounts unlocking more items in the bundle. After that, you can choose how much of the money goes to Humble itself, the developer/publisher, and charity.

In a 2010 Ars Technica interview, Humble Bundle co-creator Jeffery Rosen said, “Even if no one donates to the developers and they give 100 percent to charity, I would consider that a success.”

The addition of the minimum percent to Humble goes live in mid-July and the company said that the minimum will be clear on the store’s sliders, allowing customers to still adjust how much money goes to charity while ensuring that Humble gets a cut of each purchase.

There’s a really cool easter egg for retro fans in Sea of Thieves, but finding it is no easy task.

Spoiler Warning! If you don’t want to be spoiled on this easter egg, we recommend backing out now. Otherwise, please proceed at your own risk!

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Specifically, the newest content drop for Rare’s Sea of Thieves, A Pirate’s Life, features a Monkey Island easter egg that’s quite expansive. A Pirate’s Life is the new story campaign in Sea of Thieves and it’s comprised of five Tall Tales that center on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean.

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As a result, there’s easter eggs galore both in reference to the Pirates of the Caribbean films and the famous Disney rides. But it’s not just Disney — this collaboration also gave Rare the chance to show some love to a somewhat forgotten (or at least, it’s not been seen in a very long time) series also owned by Disney by way of Lucasfilm Games: Monkey Island.

The Monkey Island series is a point-and-click adventure series all about pirates: specifically the likes of Guybrush Threepwood. In Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, Captain Kate Capsize was introduced to the series and the Sea of Thieves easter egg centers on these two characters.

The actual Monkey Island easter egg can be found in the first Pirate’s Life Tall Tale titled “A Pirate’s Life” and finding it is no easy task. Head to IGN’s How to Find Monkey Island in Sea of Thieves guide for an extremely-detailed breakdown of everything you have to do in order to reach this Monkey Island easter egg.

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Once you finally do reach the easter egg, you’ll find yourself standing before the wreckage of an old ship named The Headless Monkey. Keep your ears open here because the music transitions from the Pirates of the Caribbean-inspired score playing in this Tall Tale to a rendition of the main theme of The Secret of Monkey Island.

That’s not all, though. If you step aboard the shipwreck, there are five Headless Monkey journals to discover written by Captain Kate Capsize and in them, she talks about what happened to her glass-bottomed boat, why Guybrush Threepwood went to the Sea of Thieves, and how she ended up in the Sea of the Damned.

These journals are quite the fascinating read for fans of Monkey Island wondering what some of their favorite characters are up to these days. If you’d like to read each journal for yourself, IGN’s How to Find Monkey Island in Sea of Thieves guide page has a full transcription of all five journals, as well as the location of each.

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That’s not all, though. IGN’s Sea of Thieves guide has full walkthroughs for all five Pirate’s Life Tall Tales, tips and tricks, answers to all your questions, and more. If you’re wanting to jump into the game for the first time to find this Monkey Island easter egg yourself, or if you’re a returning pirate who needs a quick refresher, check out this video detailing 15 tips for getting started in Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. In fact, he’s the bloomin cockroach who wrote IGN’s Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life guide. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

Beloved single-season sensation Freaks and Geeks is now available to purchase on digital platforms for the first time ever, meaning you can now own all 18 episodes of the quirky cancelled-too-quick series that was created by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, Spy) and executive produced by Judd Apatow.

Starring Linda Cardellini, James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, John Francis Daley, and other big future talents, Freaks and Geeks explored the universal experience of being a teenager back in the early ’80s, including all the fleeting highs and embarrassing lows. The series, with all its original music intact, can be bought on digital platforms — including Amazon, iTunes, and Google — and due to this huge news we had a chance to chat with Paul Feig about this fantastic, groundbreaking show.

One of the big reasons Feig yearned to make this series was that he wanted to portray teenagers in a more relatable way. “I was just frustrated that I hadn’t seen anybody, like, I had been in high school portrayed accurately on TV,” he explained. “Whenever I would sit around with friends, for some reason my stories from that period of my life got the biggest laughs because apparently weirder s*** happened to me than happened to most people. And so those were the stories that would just destroy when I would tell them.”

“I originally started to write it as a book years before, just to write all those stories down,” Feig added. “I remember I was really having fun writing this book and told my dad, ‘I’m writing a book about what I was in school.’ And he was like, ‘Well, who the hell wants to read about you when you were in school?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’ So we shelved it.”

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The book that Feig started to write, however, did help him when it came time to craft a TV show. “When I started to write the pilot, I went back and pulled out the chapters,” he explained. “The Dodgeball game was literally one of the chapters I wrote. It was based on a true story that happened to me. I just kind of knew, that’s why I kind of felt like, ‘oh, who wouldn’t want to watch this show?’ You’ll just have such a good time re-experiencing from a safe place — like a horror movie — the perils and terrible things you went through.”

“What I didn’t realize is people didn’t want that, especially back in 1999,” he continued. “It made them very uncomfortable. And so that was the rude awakening for me of hearing people go like, ‘oh, I couldn’t watch that because it was so cringey.’ I’m like, ‘didn’t you think it was hilarious?’ So that was kind of a bummer.”

The show famously did not fare well back in ’99, like Feig mentioned, but does he think it would have stood a better chance in a different, later era? “I think it would have fared better if we had done it 10 years after we had done it because we were just at a bad time for that kind of a show on television because game shows had overtaken all the networks. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was the biggest show. So there wasn’t a lot of patience for scripted shows that cost 10 times what a game show would cost.”

“And then you add on to that that we were a tone that wasn’t — I think Ally McBeal is kind of the only other show I could point to that I could kind of compare tones to — which is a dramatic, comedic hour long. Completely different story, but that kind of tone. Whereas the big show when we came out or that took off in the same world was Malcolm in the Middle. And that was huge because that was a very funny show, but that was very big and broad and over the top, and colorful and crazy, and all that stuff. I do think if we, yeah, I think if we came on later we at least would’ve gotten a couple more seasons out of us.”

Ultimately, audiences just weren’t ready for a type of show that made them anxious and squirmy. Not until things like The Office rolled around years later. “Judd and I just have a very specific sense of humor,” Feig said. “I’ve got a very Midwestern sense of humor, which just doesn’t like over the top stuff unless it’s justified. I like extreme characters, but I never want to go like, ‘oh, that’s dumb.’ They’re just doing that to get a laugh. I want to go like, ‘okay, I know a person like that who would do that.’ Or, ‘oh my God, that’s a situation that somebody would actually find themselves in.'”

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Over the past decade, we’ve watched as multiple properties returned for decades-later sequels and reunions — from The X-Files and Twin Peaks to the upcoming Frasier and Sex and the City revivals. So is this something Feig can see happening with Freaks and Geeks? “I’ve avoided it for all these years,” he admitted. “My answer, I always say, which sounds like a dodge but it’s kind of not, is if I ever had the greatest idea in the world or if Judd came to me with the greatest idea in the world for it and I was like, that’s the way to do it, then I’d be open to it. But you can count on your hand the number of reunions that you’ve watched and gone like, ‘oh f*** yeah, that’s great that they did that.'”

Freaks and Geeks’ cast remains, to this day, one of the best examples of an ensemble who were all just about to break out into huge stars. “They were all very driven too,” Feig noted. “I remember Seth [Rogen] wanting to hang out with Judd and I watching us write and stuff. And [James] Franco wanted to do the same thing. So they were very interested in all that.”

“You want to hear something weird? I’m here in Belfast. I’m shooting this new movie for Netflix. So I’ve been here for months doing it. If I look out my window, I’m looking at one of the studios where John Francis Daley is currently co-directing Dungeons and Dragons. How weird is that from so many different levels? Sam Weir doing Dungeons and Dragons as a movie. Wait, what’s happening?”

Freaks and Geeks is available for purchase on Amazon, iTunes, Google, and more.

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Nintendo is still pursuing a permanent injunction against RomUniverse owner and operator Matthew Storman–which in non-legal speak means that Nintendo wants to prevent Storman from ever reviving RomUniverse.

In June 2021, Nintendo successfully won a lawsuit against Storman. US District Court Judge Consuelo Marshall ordered Storman to pay $2.1 million copyright and trademark infringement damages to the gaming behemoth. The exact math behind the $2.1 million sum Storman owes to Nintendo breaks down to $35,000 statutory damages for each of the 49 copyrighted Nintendo games that were on the site and an extra $400,000 in statutory damages under the Lanham Act.

Nintendo originally wanted $90,000 in damages per game, totaling to a sum of $15 million. But the judge thought that Nintendo’s asking price was too high, especially since Storman had already closed his site and as a result, did not possess a stream of income anymore.

According to a documents obtained by Torrentfreak, judge Marshall stated, “Considering Defendant’s willful infringement, the Court finds $35,000 statutory damages for each infringed copyright […] would compensate Plaintiff for its lost revenue and deter Defendant who is currently unemployed and has already shut down the website.”

While the judge was largely on Nintendo’s side, she did not grant the company’s request for a permanent injunction against Storman. Judge Marshall ruled that Nintendo did not suffer irreparable harm from RomUniverse’s activities, a decision that Nintendo is contesting in its latest filing against Storman.

In a new court document obtained by Torrentfreak, the company argued that under the new Trademark Modernization Act, trademark infringers are automatically committing an act of irreparable harm. Following that logic, Nintendo is once again asking for the courts to issue a permanent injunction against Storman and prevent RomUniverse from coming back online.

In the same document, Nintendo also complained that Storman hasn’t been making the court-ordered $50 per month payments on the damages he owes to the company.

At $50 per month, it would take Storman 3,500 years to pay Nintendo the required $2.1 million. Considering that the human lifespan is at a maximum around a 100 years or so…you can do the math from here on whether or not Nintendo is going to see even a fraction of $2.1 million from RomUniverse’s owner.

Storman has also filed his own motion, appealing for the courts to reconsider the previous ruling and cancel the $2.1 million he owes to Nintendo.

Nintendo has history of being very litigious-happy and a fierce protector of their IPs. The company shut down a bunch of fan-made games through the years, like Pokemon Prism and No Mario’s Sky in 2016. Nintendo also sued an individual named Gary Bowser earlier this year for creating and selling Switch hacks.

American manga publisher and anime distributor Viz Media has announced, and also recently opened pre-orders for, Star Wars: Guardians of the Whills. The manga is expected to be released on August 10, and runs 196 pages.

The manga’s synopsis reads as follows: “Presiding over the Kyber Temple on Jedha, the Guardians of the Whills, Baze Malbus and Chirrut Îmwe, had hoped to maintain a peaceful balance despite the growing presence of the Empire in their Holy City. They struggle to maintain their beliefs as stormtroopers threaten to take over, when Saw Gerrera appears offering them a chance to help Jedha. How far are Baze and Chirrut willing to compromise for peace, or will Saw’s plan be too dangerous to risk?”

Set before and also directly tied into the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the Guardians of the Whills manga is both an adaptation and re-interpretation of the 2017 novel of the same name written by Gary Rucka and illustrated by Diogo Saito. It “revisits Baze and Chirrut before they meet the rebellion members who turn the tide in the fight against the Empire.”

Earlier this year, Viz Media also announced it will this fall release a new book of essays from enigmatic video-game creative Hideo Kojima, whose fans were likely not shocked to learn its full title was The Creative Gene: How Books, Movies, and Music Inspired The Creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid. Kojima’s book is due out on October 12.

July 2021 will see the arrival of Space Jam: A New Legacy to HBO Max, which stars LeBron James, Bugs Bunny, and the rest of the Tune Squad. While it is only available for those with the $14.99/month Ad-Free HBO Max plan, it gives fans a chance to see it if they aren’t ready to go back to theaters.

July will also see the premiere of No Sudden Move, a new crime thriller film starring Don Cheadle, Benicio del Torro, David Harbour, Jon Hamm, Kieran Culkin, Brendan Fraser, and Ray Liotta.

Check out the official trailer for Space Jam: A New Legacy in the video player below:

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On the TV front, a new Gossip Girl series is set to debut on July 8, which is a extension of the show that aired from 2007-2012. July will also see the season one part two finale of Genera+ion, the season two finale of Full Bloom, and the season two finale of Betty.

Some other film highlights include Judas and the Black Messiah, Tom & Jerry, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Eve’s Bayou, Freaky, and more.

Check out the slideshow gallery below for the highlights of HBO Max’s June 2021 offerings, followed by the full list:

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July 1

• ¡Come! (aka Eat!), 2020
• 8 Mile, 2002 (HBO)
• All Dogs Go to Heaven 2, 1996 (HBO)
• All Dogs Go to Heaven, 1989 (HBO)
• Behind Enemy Lines, 1997 (HBO)
• Beneath the Planet of the Apes, 1970 (HBO)
• Bio-Dome, 1996 (HBO)
• Black Panthers, 1968
• Blackhat, 2015 (HBO)
• Brubaker, 1980 (HBO)
• Cantinflas (HBO)
• Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, 1972 (Extended Version) (HBO)
• Cousins, 1989 (HBO)
• Dark Water, 2005 (HBO)
• Darkness Falls, 2003 (HBO)
• Demolition Man, 1993
• Dirty Work, 1998 (HBO)
• Disturbia, 2007 (HBO)
• Doctor Who Holiday 2020 Special: Revolution of the Daleks, 2020
• Duplex, 2003 (HBO)
• Escape from the Planet of the Apes, 1971 (HBO)
• Eve’s Bayou, 1997
• Firestarter, 1984 (HBO)
• First, 2012
• For Colored Girls, 2010 (HBO)
• For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada, 2012 (HBO)
• Full Bloom, Max Original Season 2 Finale
• Gandhi, 1982
• Ghost in the Machine, 1993 (HBO)
• The Good Lie, 2014 (HBO)
• Gun Crazy, 1950
• House on Haunted Hill, 1999
• Identity Thief, 2013 (Extended Version) (HBO)
• Ira & Abby, 2007 (HBO)
• Joe Versus the Volcano, 1990
• Judas and the Black Messiah, 2021 (HBO)
• Laws Of Attraction, 2004 (HBO)
• Lucky, 2017 (HBO)
• Maid in Manhattan, 2002
• Married to the Mob, 1988 (HBO)
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, 1997
• Mississippi Burning, 1988 (HBO)
• Monster-In-Law, 2005
• Mousehunt, 1997 (HBO)
• My Brother Luca (HBO)
• No Sudden Move, Warner Bros. Film Premiere, 2021
• Planet of the Apes, 1968 (HBO)
• Pleasantville, 1998
• The Prince of Tides, 1991
• Project X, 1987 (HBO)
• The Punisher, 2017 (HBO)
• Punisher: War Zone, 2008 (HBO)
• Rambo, 2008 (Director’s Cut) (HBO)
• Reds, 1981 (HBO)
• Reservoir Dogs, 1992 (HBO)
• The Return of the Living Dead, 1985 (HBO)
• Return of the Living Dead III, 1993 (Extended Version) (HBO)
• Rounders, 1998 (HBO)
• Saturday Night Fever, 1977 (Director’s Cut) (HBO)
• Scream, 1996
• Scream 2, 1997
• Scream 3, 2000
• Semi-Tough, 1977 (HBO)
• The Sessions, 2012 (HBO)
• Set Up, 2012 (HBO)
• Snake Eyes, 1998 (HBO)
• Staying Alive, 1983 (HBO)
• Stuart Little, 1999
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2003
• Tom and Jerry in New York, Max Original Series Premiere
• Trick ‘R Treat, 2009 (HBO)
• Tyler Perry’s Daddy’s Little Girls, 2007 (HBO)
• Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, 2005 (HBO)
• Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All by Myself, 2009 (HBO)
• Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes To Jail, 2009 (HBO)
• Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family, 2011 (HBO)
• Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion, 2006 (HBO)
• Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too, 2010 (HBO)
• The Watcher, 2016 (HBO)
• The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, 2007 (HBO)
• Westworld (Movie), 1973
• White Chicks (Unrated & Uncut Version), 2004
• The White Stadium, 1928
• Won’t Back Down, 2012 (HBO)
• Zero Days, 2016 (HBO)

July 2

• Lo Que Siento por Ti (aka What I Feel for You) (HBO)

July 3

• Let Him Go, 2020 (HBO)
• Nancy Drew, Season 2

July 7

• Dr. STONE, Seasons 1 and 2 (Subtitled) (Crunchyroll Collection)
• Shiva Baby, 2021 (HBO)

July 8

• The Dog House: UK, Max Original Season 2 Premiere
• Genera+ion, Max Original Season 1 Finale
• Gossip Girl, Max Original Series Premiere
• Human Capital, 2020 (HBO)
• The Hunt, 2020 (HBO)

• Looney Tunes Cartoons, Max Original Season 2 Premiere

July 9

• Frankie Quinones: Superhomies (HBO)

July 11

• The White Lotus, Limited Series Premiere (HBO)

July 12

• Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes, Documentary Series Premiere (HBO)
• Wellington Paranormal, Season 1

July 15

• Tom & Jerry, 2021 (HBO)

July 16

• Betty, Season 2 Finale (HBO)
• Space Jam: A New Legacy, Warner Bros. Film Premiere, 2021 (Only available on the $14.99/month Ad-Free plan. Streaming in the US only for a limited time.)
• Un Disfraz Para Nicolas (aka A Costume for Nicolas) (HBO)

July 17

• The Empty Man, 2020 (HBO)

July 18

• 100 Foot Wave, Documentary Series Premiere (HBO)

July 22

• Through Our Eyes, Max Original Documentary Series Premiere

July 23

• Corazon De Mezquite (aka Mezquite’s Heart) (HBO)

July 24

• Freaky, 2020 (HBO)

July 26

• Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes, Documentary Series Finale (HBO)

July 27

• Batwoman, Season 2
• Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (HBO)

July 30

• Uno Para Todos (aka One for All) (HBO)

Dates TBD

• FBOY Island, Max Original Season 1 Premiere
• The Immortal (Gomorrah Film), Max Original Film Premiere
• Romeo Santos: King of Bachata, 2021 (HBO)
• Romeo Santos Utopia Live from MetLife Stadium, 2021 (HBO)

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Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

After a console generation in which it seemingly abandoned indies in the face of the overwhelming success of the PS4, it appears that Sony’s struggle to court small developers is far from over. A group of indie publishers have taken to Twitter this week to express their frustrations with the console giant, pointing out issues like its lack of communication, frustrating bureaucracy, issues with discoverability, and severe limitations on when and how games can be put on sale.

The conversation was kicked off by Neon Doctrine co-founder Iain Garner, who wrote a Twitter thread criticizing “Platform X,” which he said was “a very successful console and does not have Game Pass.” Garner’s thread, which has been quote-tweeted by several indie publishers at the time of publication affirming many of the issues he lists, criticizes the so-called Platform X’s tools, communications, and interest in supporting indies. He calls out a lack of transparent processes, poor communication, an extremely limited ability to discount games, and an inability to get games promoted on the store without either obscure or expensive methods.

“Platform X gives developers no ability to manage their games. In order to get promotion you must jump through hoops, beg and plead for any level of promotion. And a blog is not as good as they think it is,” he wrote. “If Platform X doesn’t like your game, no fanfare no feature no love.”

OK. I am mad enough to burn some bridges. Because honestly, what’s the point of a bridge that I am not allowed to cross.

So here is a thread about Platform X. I will not be defining Platform X but it’s the operator of a very successful console and does not have Games Pass! pic.twitter.com/OJ2ZJz9BNy

— Iain Garner (@NeonIain) June 30, 2021

The conversation sparked by the thread comes at a time when Sony seems to be trying, in small ways, to nudge the narrative around its indie support in a more positive direction. Last year, it launched a $10 million fund to support indie developers during COVID-19, and it recently appointed Shuhei Yoshida to lead a new initiative to support indie studios. This is following a PS4 console generation during which Sony seemed largely uninterested in such support, letting its efforts lapse and be largely outshone by its competitor’s programs in ID@Xbox and Nintendo’s Nindies (later Nintendo Indie World), which have historically included in-person showcases, numerous digital showcases, blogs, tweets, behind-the-scenes support, and just a whole lot of games.

Following Garner’s thread, I spoke to four other indie publishers and two indie developers (one who self-published) about its contents, all of whom named Sony as the platform they specifically were criticizing, though they could not speak for Garner. Those I spoke to expressed frustration with various aspects of Sony’s internal processes, communications, and restrictions that they said made it more challenging to release games on its platforms, especially smaller games. They also lamented the challenges of getting indie games seen anywhere, but many pointed out that Sony actively hampered or was at least indifferent to these struggles, making PlayStation an extremely challenging platform for indie game sales compared to its competitors.

In all subsequent communications, Garner declined to identify which console he was speaking of, but context clues from the thread (such as the mention of official blog posts and certain pricing details) can be used to tie his narrative in with the stories of others who spoke up.

A one-way partnership

In our follow-up conversation, Garner acknowledged that at least some of the issues he brings up are common across multiple platforms, not just “Platform X.” For instance, he remarked in his Twitter thread that wishlists have “no effect,” but he and others later told me that this is largely true on all console platforms — it’s really only Steam where wishlists are critical to indie games’ success. Similarly, those I spoke to confirmed “lot checks” (a term specifically used by Nintendo, but which was used referring to compliance checks across all three platforms) are frustrating everywhere, though two people pointed out to me that PlayStation’s compliance checks were by far the most complex in terms of process, communication, and user feedback.

But Garner is adamant that what he calls Platform X is especially bad for indies, for a couple of reasons. The first, he said, is a challenging, frustrating amount of paperwork and bureaucracy involved with getting a game published on the platform. Multiple people I spoke to mentioned having to fill out numerous forms or go through various backend softwares to find the thing they were looking for, often without much help or support. Two said it was extremely challenging or even expensive to get a single dev kit, pointing out that Xbox had provided dev kits to either themselves or colleagues easily, and for free.

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David Logan, CEO at Akupara Games, offered an explanation for at least some of the frustrating processes those I spoke to mentioned. He told me that the main reason Sony’s processes for game submissions were more involved than others had to do with submitting products based on region, something the company had done throughout the PS4 era. So for worldwide launches, games had to go through separate submission processes for Sony America, Europe, Japan, and Asia, with Japan and Asia having their own portals and processes that required translation from Japanese to move through.

In 2020, he continued, Sony had begun working toward streamlining all this. But movement has been slow, and documentation is often an update or two behind.

“Parts of the process change on an almost weekly basis and it oftentimes needs to involve multiple reps, support tickets and parts of the backend (which is still split into two different pipelines) to make movement on specific issues,” Logan said. “We’ve been blocked by Sony directly on things like updating ratings, terminology usage, trophy visibility and patch review all within the last few months. However, my team does recognize the active changes and streamlining Sony is heading towards. Though there are instances where we wish it was similar to the pipeline we had grown accustomed to over the past few years.”

Slow or annoying paperwork is one thing, but the publishers I spoke with all confirmed that these issues were made worse for small companies working with Sony due to slow or non-existent communications processes. Logan said he’d had a support ticket open with Sony for nine months, which his company pings monthly trying to get assistance. Cristian Botea, project manager at Some Awesome Guys, said that while sometimes you might get a fast reply from Sony to help resolve an issue, “sometimes you might be waiting a month for a reply to something simple.”

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“A lot of the time, that reply feels like something that could’ve been somehow integrated in the documentation in a better way or better integrated and streamlined in the publishing process,” Botea said.

All of these process and communication pain points can be made a little more manageable, I was told by multiple people, with an account manager — basically a contact person for a publisher at the company who can help answer questions — getting their game in front of the right people and making sure the right paperwork is filled out. But as Garner pointed out in his thread, there was never a clear process for how to get an account manager assigned to him, adding that publishers without account managers have to go through a ticketing system. “We’ve all used one of those before, so you know what that’s like.”

Other publishers I spoke to confirmed similar difficulties. Sherveen Uduwana, who’s currently working on Midautumn and previously designed We Are The Caretakers, told me about his experience with this process from several years ago, acknowledging it may have changed since that time. His account lined up with Garner’s, with Uduwana pointing out that processing times for game submissions were often extremely long. And without an account manager to contact, there’s often no one at all to check in with about where your game is at in the process.

“At a lot of larger or more established studios, they just have contacts at all the storefronts that they can reach out to with questions, or to ask for an update or to help troubleshoot things,” he said. “But a lot of those are actually pretty informal and built through past relationships in my experience. So when you’re just starting out, the process is super opaque, even in our case we leveraged an existing relationship to start up a convo.”

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One developer who self-publishes and wishes to remain anonymous said that in multiple years of working with Sony, their relationship had always felt like a “one-way partnership.”

“I felt like if you weren’t the big names, you were just there, plugging away with minimal support until you eventually shipped your title,” they said. “Best way I can put it is that I was thrown to the wolves… and told ‘survive.’ Which I did, by trial and error. Everyday.”

Somewhat related to communications problems is the separate issue of discounts. As Garner pointed out in his thread, discounts on Platform X are “invite-only and also ‘very limited.'” Other publishers I spoke to, again referring specifically to Sony, confirmed that Sony is notoriously stingy with who it allows to hold discounts on its platform and when. Multiple people I spoke to confirmed this to be the case, saying that publishers can only run discounts when explicitly invited by Sony. Matthew White, CEO of Whitethorn Digital, told me that PlayStation sets the discount, with publishers able to agree or make a counteroffer, but timing and rate are ultimately dictated by the platform.

“You almost never get invited,” he said. “Say two in a year.”

White and others confirmed to me as well that no other platform runs its discounts like this, with most other storefronts allowing publishers to discount their games when and how they like with a handful of exceptions. It’s a move they say not only frustrates consumers, but also harms small developers who frequently use sales as an easy way to get their games noticed and talked about more broadly.

The unachievable front page

The other reason why Garner said Platform X is so much worse for indies has to do with discoverability. Garner told me his game, Vigil, initially had interest from “a higher-up,” but that didn’t matter once his game started going through the company’s processes.

“We were basically told that unless we had games that would push [next-gen] (super pretty) then they weren’t interested in providing promotion,” he said.

The final straw, Garner said, was a talk he attended recently where the company gave him and others a presentation about marketing. It was during this meeting that he was told the company could promote his game on its storefront  — if he paid $25,000 on top of the cut he already pays the platform for being on it at all.

“Honestly felt like a F2P tactic,” Garner said. “We slow you down and you can pay to speed up.”

The $25,000 offer Garner received resulted in some head-scratching from the other publishers I spoke to. Many hadn’t heard of it before the Twitter thread, though all of them confirmed it was too rich for their companies to manage. Logan suggested that for smaller developers, that price point could “amount to the entire lifetime sales of the title.”

“This is an amount greater than or equal to some indie developers’ entire marketing budget,” he continued. “That price tag definitely excludes most smaller and mid-size developers and publishers from consideration.”

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A Kotaku report verified the figures Garner is referring to, saying that pricing for even more visibility on PlayStation can go as high as $200,000, though it’s unclear how much visibility that gets a company. Kotaku also said that Microsoft “runs similar payment schemes for the Xbox store.”

The anonymous developer I spoke to had heard of the $25,000, saying they could understand asking for payment for such a spot to a degree — it is, after all, advertising. But they added that such a high number for a small spot effectively guaranteed small games would never be seen.

“It’s unreasonable, because you have no idea if that $25,000 advertisement will make you that money back,” they said. “$25,000 was mentioned and talked about but […]there are spots well over $100k for features. No smaller indie or small game is ever seeing that front page. So that’s why you will always see five to six major game studios on that front page. If an indie was to ever feature up there it would be monumental and celebrated to say the least.”

Two publishers pointed out to me that Sony will sometimes feature games on its storefront of its own accord, based on an internal analysis of how well they think the game will do. However, both said the process was obscure and largely out of developer and publisher hands.

Aside from the storefront issues, those I spoke to expressed exasperation that there really weren’t any other meaningful avenues to promote their games through PlayStation. When I asked publishers about the blog posts mentioned in the original thread and whether they were any help, Botea noted that his team had to proactively ask about it, and when they did, the deadlines made it unworkable. Logan said the blog process was “definitely one of the easiest processes among the partners” but also indicated that issues with deadlines and approvals for blogs could be challenging for developers on already-tight game release timelines. White told me that the blog was offered by Sony as “marketing support,” but then said it was “an awful joke that does not convert to sales in ANY way.” 

White had his own set of frustrations, which he laid out in his own Twitter thread opening with a “totally hypothetical definitely not real” breakdown of Whitethorn Digital’s revenues by platform. The pie chart doesn’t have percentages, but “Nolan North” is the smallest slice of the pie, only slightly outmatched by “Gabe” while “Proficient Sergeant” and “Plumber without a Wrench” take up most of the chart. He wrote that less than three percent of Whitethorn’s sales are on Platform X (which he confirmed separately to me to indeed be PlayStation).

Alright, I’m gonna unfortunately throw my hat in here as well. We **love** our Platform X friends, and I’m former Platform X employee myself, but we cannot move the needle on the platform.

Less than 3% of sales as a company are on PX. https://t.co/WjOTx43OLr pic.twitter.com/yXMsr9srYw

— Matthew White (@matthewmwhite) June 30, 2021

Why might that be?

“It took us more than eight months to get kits for PXs hardware, despite having numerous confirmed IPs on the title,” he wrote. “We have a full-time employee who spends more than half of his time digging through sales reports for PX, as they are sent in excel-driven invoices that require manual invoicing like it’s 1928. There is internal chaos with messages coming from random teams at random times.

“It’s impossible to plan launch support, vouchers for Kickstarter backers take months to generate, nobody will answer support emails. We get no store ops opportunities, PS5 featuring and placement is a giant mystery.

“I know it seems like I’m jumping on a dogpile, but it’s been really difficult to work with our developers telling them straight up not to expect sales on PX. I’d love to see that change.”

The future of indies on PlayStation

I asked Garner if there was anything he thought that Platform X could do to better support indies, but his response was not an optimistic one. “Honestly, I don’t know. They need to redo their whole system. It’s so broken in so many ways and they’ve been slapping band-aids on it for years. If they don’t fix it, by the end of the generation, [they] will be a rich boi toy with only the big boi titles and exclusives, everyone else will be elsewhere.”

Garner’s analysis lines up somewhat with past observations of the ways in which all three console platforms’ interest in indies have waxed and waned with their success. Not that long ago, after all, it was Xbox that was struggling with indie support, and as Uduwana pointed out to me, even Nintendo’s lauded indie support on Switch dried up somewhat in recent years once it became apparent that the Switch was performing well and no longer needed to court indies to fill its library.

As multiple publishers and developers pointed out in a 2020 interview with GamesIndustry.biz on this very subject, indie support tends to shift across all three platforms, depending on whichever one is “winning” or “losing” at the time. 

“History tends to repeat itself in video games, and we’re definitely seeing that again now,” said No More Robots founder Mike Rose in that interview. “Whenever a platform holder has arguably ‘lost’ a console cycle, they tend to then lean more heavily on indie developers for the next cycle.”

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And Sony is, at least on some level, trying. There’s the aforementioned $10 million fund for indie developers that it announced last year, as well as Yoshida’s initiative. And White made a point to tell me that head of PlayStation Creators and Double Fine veteran Greg Rice had been especially supportive and helpful behind the scenes in getting questions answered and games noticed. The anonymous developer I spoke to also affirmed that the recent indie push had made things a bit better for first-time developers. But it’s clear from the discussion this week that these moves either aren’t enough, or aren’t being felt by a meaningful chunk of the indie scene. We reached out to Sony for comment for this article, but the company has not responded.

Ultimately, the publishers and developers I spoke to aren’t asking for piles of free marketing, or instant approval for all their games. What they are looking for is a chance for their games to be seen in an overwhelming gaming ecosystem. When I asked what platform-holders could do to improve the ability of publishers and developers to get visibility for smaller games, Logan had a few suggestions:

“Being more transparent about the process to be considered for opportunities and what thresholds need to be reached, creating more opportunities for smaller titles to be featured in (right now many initiatives exist only for AAA titles), creating a more indie-focused branch of their platform, more financing for porting, and generally cleaner, better-documented pipelines.”

In a separate response in which he talked about the efforts made by distributors to promote indies, Logan also pointed out that the best features, sales, promotions, and other opportunities are largely for games that are already successful.

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“It often feels like the rich are getting richer, while the smaller titles struggle to survive,” he said. “Distributors will say they’re supporting indie games, but what they often do is promote the successful indie games. 99.9% of indie games are not Hollow Knight or Binding of Isaac, and those games really are in their own tier. I feel we need to continue advocating for supporting indie games, and not just any indie games, but the low and mid-tier indie games that can benefit from the money the most.”

There’s no easy solution to the problem of discoverability industry-wide. But those I spoke to pointed out that some platforms certainly manage discoverability better than others, or at least don’t directly interfere with indies giving themselves a boost with something as innocuous as a sale.

“We, the indies, ultimately just want PlayStation to be a more welcoming platform for us, listen to our concerns and feedback and allow for indies to thrive as well on the platform,”  Botea said. “Hoping that this grabs their attention in all the right ways and we can start on a constructive path to fixing this.”

The anonymous developer I spoke to was less optimistic, pointing out that the struggles indies go through on one platform or another is a topic that comes up repeatedly, but never results in meaningful industry change.

“We have these same conversations every year around indies, when a developer gets fed up and can’t keep it in anymore,” they said. “It gets talked about, improved just a bit, then thrown back into the same hole. I am not asking for us to be saved, just heard. Most devs already feel like they are fighting everyone including themselves, we aren’t looking for another enemy.”

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Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.