It’s been a big week for shitting the bed. Quarterly earnings time got these global megacorporations acting out in increasingly strange ways as they fight to gussy up the spreadsheets and bar graphs before having to face the shareholders.
An awful lot has happened since Monday so let’s quickly recap the madness.
First, it was PlayStation announcing the dumbfounding enforcement of a mandatory PSN account on PC-bound Helldivers 2 players late last week. The heat of the player backlash to the decision was so intense that PlayStation had already walked it back by Monday afternoon Australian time, a lightning-fast turnaround for a global megacorporation. Like getting an aircraft carrier to perform a handbrake turn.
We then got a single day to assess that damage before PlayStation handed off the Villain of the Week hat to Xbox, which closed a swath of Bethesda studios that had previously done very well for them. The blowback to this decision, made in hopes of generating a bit of a stock market bounce ahead of what was sure to be a fairly unpleasant earnings call, was equally swift and felt more wide-ranging than it ever had. Even the die-hard Xbox fanboys who usually show up to defend the brand with their lives seemed to be infuriated by the move. Xbox then made things worse for themselves less than 24 hours later by allowing the head of Xbox Game Studios, Matt Booty to address staff, saying the company needed hits like Hi-Fi Rush immediately after killing the studio that made it. An absolutely insane thing to say, and you could be forgiven for thinking it couldn’t get much worse than that.
However, Xbox wouldn’t hold onto the hat much longer, though, because, by gawd, is that EA’s music?
Yes, that oldest of foes, Electronic Arts, the once most hated company in America, abruptly seized the hat back. This might come as a surprise to some — EA has settled into a vibe of benign evil in recent years, pumping out games that work best for its audience of sports fans, the occasional single player nostalgia trip, and running a surprisingly solid small games program. After the tumultuous 2000s when EA was nothing less than a snarling industry Heel, it has given up the theatrics for a tried-and-true investor-pleasing playbook. But that’s where the latest drama has come from.
In its latest earnings report, CEO Andrew Wilson told investors that there was “a real hunger” among developers to get around generative AI as a development tool. Wilson went on to say that he believed more than half of EA’s current dev processes could be “positively impacted” by the introduction of generative AI, which understandably created some consternation among the dev community. There are some parts of Wilson’s AI rationale that make sense — teams like the FC 24 team tasked with recreating the same football stadiums every year would benefit from tech that helps them put those assets together faster. But to suggest almost half the development under your umbrella could be given a lift with gen AI feels like corpo code for “We feel we’re retaining a lot of jobs we could potentially cut and replace with a computer.” This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that generative AI gets things wrong all the time and requires a human handler to double-check its work, lest it recommends you drink your own piss.
The only major pub to come out of the week having fully avoided the dunce hat altogether is Nintendo, which announced its Switch 2 console in the most Nintendo way imaginable — by saying it wouldn’t be talking about it. It’s a typically Nintendo way of going about things that have no choice but to respect it. It was also unique in that it troubled absolutely no one! Nobody was upset! In fact, it was kind of exciting to know for sure that New Hardware Time was on the way again. My thanks to Ninty for being the one bright spot in an otherwise sad, confusing, infuriating week.
A reminder that, at the time of writing, its Thursday. We haven’t even reached the weekend yet, and the PlayStation drama already feels like it happened weeks ago. This means there’s still time for another publisher to make a lunge for the crown. Place your bets in the comments down below.
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