Adell

I'll be stuck home for a few days, so a little gaming corner: I've been losing my life to Final Profit since buying it on the last day of the Steam sale. What a game.

Its a shopkeeping game with an engrossing, addicting loop, but the real deal to me is that its less of a mindless grinder and more of a deliberate showcase of the corruption of capitalism.

The protagonist is an ousted queen that vouches to defend her kingdom from the approaching Bureau of Business by playing their own game, establishing her shop and vying to be a Lord of Business, unwittingly - and sometimes wittingly - ruining lives on her way.

One aspect that catches my attention is that the game doesn't try to pretend there is a "good" way to be a capitalist. Even your "Generous" choices are still taking advantage of people, of the situation you find yourself in, pushing addiction, exploiting weaknesses, blackmailing and cheating your way out of debt and into growing your fortune - and growing the Bureau's fortune, of course. No matter who is playing the game of capital, they're the ones in charge, and they're the ones making the rules and the profit.

Although there's a few "wink wink get it" type of jokes that I'm not particularly fond of - the 4th wall breaks, or the Loot Box/Battlepass items - overall its still an amazing surprise, and that's from someone who already knew what type of mood the game had.

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Jen Glennon, who took over as editor in chief of Kotaku in October, resigned Thursday. In a resignation letter seen by Aftermath, Glennon says that she made this choice due to the management team’s recent decision to deprioritize news in favor of guides.

Glennon is the second editor in chief of Kotaku since Stephen Totilo’s departure in 2021, following Patricia Hernandez, who was fired in August 2023. (Aftermath co-founder Riley MacLeod functioned as interim editor in chief prior to Hernandez's hiring.)

“After careful consideration, I have concluded that the current management structure and decision-making processes at G/O Media are not aligned with my values and goals for Kotaku,” Glennon wrote in her letter of resignation, which was addressed to G/O Media executives Jim Spanfeller and Lea Goldman.

“I firmly believe that the decision to ‘invert’ Kotaku's editorial strategy to deprioritize news in favor of guides is fundamentally misguided given the current infrastructure of the site,” Glennon wrote. “[This decision is] directly contradicted by months of traffic data, and shows an astonishing disregard for the livelihoods of the remaining writers and editors who work here.”

Glennon also announced her resignation on Twitter, writing, “I've resigned from Kotaku and Jim Spanfeller is an herb.”

According to a source close to the situation, Kotaku's staff will be expected to create 50 guides a week at the site. Currently, Kotaku’s homepage features a prominent “game tips and guides” module at the top of the page, in a space that was previously reserved for major stories and breaking news. Staff members have criticized the homepage redesign on social media, noting that Kotaku’s major source of traffic is not guides.

Aftermath reached out to G/O Media for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Since Great Hill Partners’ acquisition of the sites, then known as Gizmodo Media, in 2019, the overall portfolio has seen a decline in traffic as well as an exodus of editorial leadership and staff—the co-founders of Aftermath included. Most recently, Spanfeller announced the sale of Deadspin and the layoff of all staff working there. In November, Paste bought former G/O Media site Jezebel, following the site’s closure and a full layoff of its staff. In March 2023, former G/O site Lifehacker was sold to Ziff Davis.

Well. Sounds like that's really going to be the end of Kotaku as we know it. 50 guides a week and no news, just like every Gamer™ wishes

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Now that Baldur’s Gate 3 has been a huge success both critically and financially, people are looking forward to what’s next for developer Larian Studios. However, according to studio founder Swen Vincke, the future doesn’t lie with the Baldur’s Gate franchise or Dungeons & Dragons as a whole.

During a talk at the Game Developers Conference on Thursday (spotted by IGN and confirmed by Polygon in a video on the official conference TikTok), Vincke said that Larian won’t be working on any DLC, expansions, or a sequel for the game. It would be handing the IP back to Wizards of the Coast and moving on to unrelated projects.

“Baldur’s Gate 3 will always have a heart — a warm spot in our hearts. We’ll forever be proud of it, but we’re not going to continue it. We’re not going to make new expansions, which everybody is expecting us to do. We’re not going to make Baldur’s Gate 4, which everybody is expecting us to do. We’re going to move on, we’re going to move away from D&D, and we’re going to start making a new thing,” he said.

Michael Douse, director of publishing at Larian, confirmed the news in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “Had a lot of time to reflect on this incredible adventure as everyone has, and I can’t explain how excited I am for the next. Hope you join us for that!” he wrote.

Vincke spoke more about the decision with Gamespot. He explained that he initially wanted to make more Baldur’s Gate, but decided against it.

“That’s not what we were made for,” Vincke said. “That’s literally the opposite of what Larian is about. We want to do big, new things. We don’t want to rehash the thing that we’ve done already.”

All of this doesn’t mean Larian won’t continue to work on Baldur’s Gate 3. Just last month, Douse announced that the team would be working on a “cross-platform plan for mod support,” with implementation still many months away.

Hasbro, which owns Wizards of the Coast, recognized how successful Baldur’s Gate 3 was in its 2023 financial report released last month. It stated that much of Wizard of the Coast and digital gaming’s growth can be attributed to Monopoly Go!, Magic: The Gathering, and Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s also been a huge success critically, winning multiple awards. Just a day before the announcement, Baldur’s Gate 3 won four trophies at the Game Developers Choice Awards (also put on by GDC), including game of the year. It also won game of the year at The Game Awards in 2023.

Hasbro is therefore interested in growing its gaming output and leaning on the Baldur’s Gate franchise, as company CEO Chris Cocks mentioned in an earnings call to coincide with the report.

“2024 is about returning consumer products to profitability, investing for long-term momentum in games, and driving significant improvements in Hasbro’s bottom line [...] In short, we’re putting all the right pieces together to keep investing in our growth initiatives while expanding the ways our franchises reach fans through digital games,” Cocks said. “We expect a long tail into 2024 and beyond for this mega hit.

However, Wizards of the Coast was hit with layoffs right before Christmas 2023, massively impacting the D&D and Magic teams. This includes the team that helped with Baldur’s Gate 3, according to Vincke.

lol good for them. Its a shame they had to dip into this cursed property in the first place, but I hope they got some large bags of money and can go back to doing their own thing for a while

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The ambitious, yet flawed Alpha Protocol is available for purchase once again. The 2010 game, which was developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Sega, was removed from all platforms in 2019 because Sega’s music licensing rights had expired. The game is making a comeback as a DRM-free exclusive on GOG.com, available today for $19.99, with an additional 10% launch discount lasting through April 3.

What’s now available is a definitive edition, of sorts, containing all of its original music, as well as support for modern wireless controllers (including the DualSense, Switch Pro controller, and Xbox Series X controllers), text localization support for 8 languages, Windows 10 and 11 compatibility, and cloud save support. The game also sports achievements on GOG, which were previously only available on consoles. What this re-release of Alpha Protocol is not, however, is a remaster. The visuals and core game are unchanged. GOG.com produced a mini documentary on how it brought the game back, and I’ve embedded it at the top of the post.

Alpha Protocol’s return to an online game store is a rare thing to see in the news cycle, especially in 2024 when it’s more often to hear stories of the opposite happening. For instance, in early March, Warner Bros. Discovery surprised indie devs with the news that games published under its Adult Swim Games label would be “retired.”

Polygon reached out to Sega to see if it’s planning to bring this updated version of Alpha Protocol to more platforms, but it didn’t respond in time for publication.

"Ambitious yet flawed" is a fair description for Alpha Protocol. The game was basically "little fun things" sprinkled all along, from multiple interactions with characters depending on which path you take, both in narrative and in gameplay, as well as secrets all around.

The actual shooting and fighting was far from ideal, especially in bossfights, but the game still feels at least little unique to me for coming out with a "The US military industrial complex is fueling conflicts and supplying terrorists to keep its profits up" plot in the midst of so many CoD's "The arabs are evil and our brave soldiers need to keep the peace" stories