U.S. Senator Blasts Sony’s Monopoly On Exclusive Video Games

As Sony and Microsoft continue to battle over the latter’s proposed $69 billion dollar purchase of Activision Blizzard, more and more people—relatively powerful and influential people—are being drawn into the debate.

One of those people is Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell (representing the state of Washington), who raised the spectre of Sony’s monopoly of the “high-end game market” earlier today, and went as far as calling on US trade representatives to discuss the issue with Japan as part of ongoing digital trade negotiations.

During a Senate finance committee hearing on “The President’s 2023 Trade Policy Agenda”, Cantwell said—among a bunch of other international trade talk—“I’m told that Sony controls a monopoly of 98% of the high-end game market, yet Japan’s government has allowed Sony to engage in blatant anti-competitive conduct through exclusive deals and payments to game publishers, establishing games that are among the most popular in Japan.”

I’m going to pretend she’s talking about Final Fantasy there.

Accusing Japan’s Federal Trade Commission of failing to investigate this “exclusionary conduct”, she then asks US Trade Representative Katherine Tai “What do you think we can do to address these issues and create a level playing field?”

In response, Tai says that while there are currently discussions between the US and Japanese governments over the digital economy, “This is new for me, but let me take this back and I’m happy to follow up with you and your team on this”.

Aside from turning this from a video game industry thing into an international trade and diplomatic relations thing, it’s wild seeing Cantwell casually put this stuff on record. Like, we all know that politicians can’t be experts on everything they’re ever talking about, that’s part of the job (and is why they have advisors, and is why there are lobbyists), but anyone with even a passing understanding of the video game market knows this is a truly bizarre thing to say.

She’s referring to the Japanese market with her “98% of the high-end game market” statistic, one very carefully selected (by the USA’s own FTC last year) to exclude the PC, Nintendo and mobile games, and which in this case pits the supposedly monopolistic PlayStation against the underdog Xbox (which is true in Japan, a market Microsoft has been freely and fairly failing to crack for over 20 years). Which of course explains why the Japanese government has never given a fuck, since they would realise that the video game market is a larger and more complicated one than pitting two consoles against each other like it was still 1992.

On a global scale Sony doesn’t even have a 98% share of the God of War market, a series they own, since Steam is getting 30% of every sale on PC. Everyone from Epic to Microsoft (both American companies) hand out “exclusive deals and payments to game publishers” all the time. And if she wants to talk about monopolies, the latest Steam stats for the PC show that 96% of the platform’s install base is using Windows.

It’s very strange that, with so many actual and credible ways she could be criticising Sony’s opposition to the deal, she’s settled on some wildly inaccurate statistics and a direct attack on the Japanese government. Ah well! Let’s finish this blog and leave them to it, taking note that over the course of her political career Cantwell’s biggest individual contributors of campaign finances have been Microsoft  employees .

Microsoft Overcomes Major Hurdle Threatening Activision Deal

Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard inched closer in a big way on Friday. UK regulators announced a provisional finding that the acquisition wouldn’t harm competition, despite previously suggesting the Xbox maker might need to spin-off the Call of Duty business to get the sale approved.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority was initially skeptical of Microsoft’s promises to keep the military shooter available on PlayStation consoles for many years to come, arguing it could have a financial incentive to pull the blockbuster series from the platform in the future. The CMA now says that after receiving more detailed information about Call of Duty player spending, it’s clear that making the series exclusive to Xbox would lose Microsoft a ton of money.

“The CMA inquiry group has updated its provisional findings and reached the provisional conclusion that, overall, the transaction will not result in a substantial lessening of competition in relation to console gaming in the UK,” it wrote in a press release. The CMA continued:

While the CMA’s original analysis indicated that this strategy would be profitable under most scenarios, new data (which provides better insight into the actual purchasing behaviour of CoD gamers) indicates that this strategy would be significantly loss-making under any plausible scenario. On this basis, the updated analysis now shows that it would not be commercially beneficial to Microsoft to make CoD exclusive to Xbox following the deal, but that Microsoft will instead still have the incentive to continue to make the game available on PlayStation.

The CMA is still reviewing Game Pass

The regulatory agency is still investigating the cloud gaming side of the deal, with its final verdict/decision still not due out until 26 April. Call of Duty seemed to be the biggest sticking point in the CMA’s skepticism of the deal, however, and Microsoft seems to have now tentatively assuaged those fears. It’s also been busy shoring up its defense on the cloud gaming front by striking deals with several smaller competitors to guarantee its first-party games will be available on other services if the deal goes through.

One big question that remains is what a final deal between Microsoft and Sony will look like. An Activision spokesperson had previously claimed that Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan was unwilling to negotiate, stating his only objective was to permanently kill the acquisition. As that outcome becomes increasingly unlikely, the PS5 manufacturer will seemingly have no alternative but to hammer out the details of Microsoft’s 10-year Call of Duty proposal.

Read More: Xbox Cans PS5 Version Of Big Game Despite All The Talk About Player Choice

Determining the availability of Activision Blizzard games like Diablo IV and an upcoming Black Ops sequel on Game Pass competitor PS Plus will be a key part of that. In its latest argument to the CMA pushing back on Sony’s concerns, Microsoft went so far as to suggest that 10 years would be plenty of time for it to go make its own Call of Duty competitor if it was so concerned about losing it.

In the meantime, Microsoft still needs to get approval from European regulators and deal with an antitrust lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission. But investors seem more hyped for the deal than they’ve ever been. Activision Blizzard’s stock price shot up to $85 a share following the CMA’s latest announcement, more than at any point since the acquisition was announced.

It’s the most the company has been worth since it was sued for alleged widespread sexual harassment and discrimaiton.

    

Here’s What Happens in Ash’s Final Pokémon Anime Episode

After announcing in December that it was coming, the Pokémon anime finally aired its last Ash and Pikachu episode in Japan. The episode won’t be airing in English for some time as the anime is tied to a Netflix deal that releases batches of episodes periodically, so if you’re curious to see how their journey concludes after all these years, read on.

Spoilers for the final episode of the Pokémon Journeys anime follow:

As it turns out, much of Ash and Pikachu’s final episode, “Rainbow and the Pokémon Master!” doesn’t feel particularly conclusive as far as wrapping up their story. Rather, it’s more a confirmation that the two will continue on their own path, but it’s one we can’t follow.

Read More: All The Big Pokémon Games, Ranked From Worst To Best

The episode begins with Ash saying goodbye to Misty and Brock, who accompanied him throughout the special farewell episodes Pokémon used to send off the character. While Ash has had many traveling companions over the years, it felt right having him spend those final episodes with the original cast. Because this last episode is all about him, however, he parts ways with them as they head back to Pewter City and Cerulean City.

When Ash arrives back in Pallet Town, he spends some time at home with his mother before heading out into the town to see Professor Oak, with the episode giving us another cameo on the way: Tracey Sketchit. While his stint in the show was brief, Tracey was also a fan favorite in the early days, so it was nice to see him again, even briefly.

Once at Professor Oak’s lab, Ash visits some of his old Pokémon and then meets up with Gary, as we knew he would based on the original synopsis. When Ash and his old rival talk, he asks if his championship win has brought him closer to becoming a Pokémon master, and that question is the crux of the episode. For a lot of people in the Pokémon community, there are different things people come to the series for, and what makes for success in this world is up to the eye of the beholder. But for a long time, Ash has been vaguely gesturing at some idea of being a Pokémon master, so the episode asks: what does that mean to him? He doesn’t have an answer just yet.

We also circle back around to Jesse, James, and Meowth, who broke fans’ hearts earlier this month after seemingly disbanding. However, they’re still together and doing Team Rocket’s dirty work because they’re working in the kitchen for the group, instead of trying to steal Ash’s Pikachu. But because old habits die hard, they do make one final attempt at catching Pikachu before blasting off one last time, though they seem to have a bit more resolve that this is what they’re passionate about.

The last big cameo of the episode is one of Ash’s earliest Pokémon: Pidgeot. It’s been a while since the two parted ways; 24 years, in fact. The fucked up thing is that Ash promised to come back for it when it was released to protect a group of wild Pidgey in 1999, and that just never happened. But in this final episode, the two reunited and Pidgeot rejoined Ash’s team.

Then Ash thinks about what Gary asked. What does it mean to be a Pokémon master? Ultimately, the conclusion he reaches is that it’s to be friends with all Pokémon. It doesn’t matter how many championships you win, how many badges you earn, or how much you fill up your Pokédex. The true making of a Pokémon master is being someone who cares about all 1000+ of these critters. Honestly, I know the “power of friendship” trope might feel tired to some at this point, but that’s always been the underlying theme of the Pokémon series, right? Ash lost a lot of battles to get to this point, but it was worth it because he met so many new friends and Pokémon along the way. It’s a nice acknowledgment that despite being a champion now, the real win was meeting all the people and Pokémon he’s met in his journeys, and while we might not be following him in the future, it looks like that journey will continue.

The episode ends with Ash and several Pokémon taking shelter from a storm under a tree. Then, once the clouds part and the sun is shining, he and Pikachu walk along a new path, with Team Rocket floating in their hot air balloon right on their tail.

So in this final episode, nothing’s really ended as far as Ash’s story is concerned. He and Pikachu will still keep traveling the Pokémon world and meeting new friends, but we won’t be following him down whatever path calls. Instead, we’ll be hanging out with Liko and Roy, new characters with new stories to tell. The next season, which will be called Pokémon Horizons, got a new trailer ahead of its premiere on April 14 in Japan.

The Official Pokémon YouTube channel

For more on the end of Ash and Pikachu’s story, check out Kotaku’s interview with English voice actor Sarah Natochenny.

Devs Wanted To ‘Surprise’ Players With NPC Death

Vesemir’s death in 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt brought me to tears. Despite having very little familiarity with the games or the books before playing the third entry in this classic trilogy of RPGs, the moment my little band of misfit heroes lost an essential part of their found family was too much to hold it all back. As it turns out, CD Projekt Red’s decision to kill this character wasn’t easy. In a recent GDC talk, quest director Paweł Sasko revealed how Vesemir’s death was both difficult but necessary for narrative impact and urgency.

Based on a series of novels by writer Andrzej Sapkowsi, The Witcher video games march to the beat of their own narrative drum. Developer CD Projekt Red’s decisions for these characters rested solely on their own creative impulses and tread uncharted narrative waters, as the games are set after the books conclude. After the game’s second act, Geralt’s mentor tragically dies in a siege on the witcher training grounds of Kaer Mohren. It’s a powerful moment, striking the surviving characters where they’re most vulnerable: The reminder of mortality. According to CD Projekt Red, that was a hard call to make, but it was essential for giving Ciri, Geralt’s ward and virtually adopted daughter, the motivation needed to take the fight directly to the game’s antagonists.

During a talk at this year’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, as reported by IGN, quest director Paweł Sasko dove into the studio’s difficult decision to kill off Vesemir, a character central to the games and books that inspired them. It all had to do with giving Ciri the motivation needed to take on the Wild Hunt, and it’s a perfect example of why The Witcher games handle the themes of Sapkowski’s world so damn well. On killing Vesemir, Sasko said:

Ciri [needed] to actually make a decision that she’s not going to be hunted anymore. She’s going to be a hunter. She’s going to go after the Wild Hunt. But to do that, I needed an actual event that would break her inside, and that was the moment when I proposed to our writer’s team that we kill Vesemir.

Consider the use of language here in light of the world The Witcher is set in. The narrative often meditates on what it means to be a hunter in a world of dark fantasy. Who hunts what, and why—and who the real monsters of this world are—is a central struggle in many of the quests and the overarching narrative. And Ciri’s status as a “witcher” doesn’t follow the direct line that Geralt and other witchers have. So to craft a moment where Ciri feels a call to “hunt,” but not out of a mandate from the world around her, but rather from a driving need to strike back at the world’s true monsters, is simply poetic. It is emblematic of everything I love about this game.

Reflecting on discussions had during the writing process, Sasko said that “[the writing team] weren’t sure we should be doing that,” given the significance of the character in the books and games. But upon reflection of the potential narrative impact, the desire to embrace “artistic bravery” and provide Ciri with a call to action, it was a move too powerful not to make. Sasko also wanted to set a standard for surprising players, saying that he “wanted to do something that players wouldn’t believe we were doing. I wanted to surprise them, in a good way, I hope.”

It’s hard to deny how much of a turning point that character death is and it’s a reminder (game developers take note) of how the loss of a character can provide stirring narrative potential. The video of this GDC talk, titled “10 Key Quest Design Lessons From The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077” is expected to be available to those with passes in the GDC Vault on April 14.

Destiny 2 Still Has More Lance Reddick To Come

Zavala smiles at a young Amanda Holiday.

Screenshot: Bungie / Kotaku

The Destiny 2 community has been mourning the loss of John Wick and The Wire actor Lance Reddick along with everyone else following his recent death. But Bungie confirms the voice behind lead character Commander Zavala still has a few performances left to come in the game.

“As an actor, musician, gamer, and family man, the passion Lance brought to the things he loved was reflected in the eyes and hearts of all who loved him,” Bungie wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “For now, we will honor his presence through his performances yet to come in the game, and in the memories that will last us a lifetime.”

It’s not clear how much Reddick recorded for the game prior to his untimely passing. It’s possible his voice work for Zavala will conclude at the end of the current Season of Defiance or that his performances in the upcoming Season of the Deep and beyond were already completed. Destiny 2‘s story moves at a snail’s pace, and even a few dozen lines can go a long way in the game.

Reddick voiced Zavala for nearly 10 years, providing the King Arthur of Destiny 2‘s Camelot both a stern moral center and rueful humanity. In addition to paying their respects to the actor where his NPC appears in the game’s social hub area, fans have also been wondering how Bungie will conclude his sweeping narrative arc.

Read More: As Destiny 2‘s Commander Zavala, Lance Reddick Finally Gets To Be The Good Cop

The last time a core character died in-game, it was the exo hunter Cayde-6 played by Nathan Fillion. The plot point proved a major catalyst for events to come in Destiny 2‘s Forsaken expansion and fit naturally into the live service game’s evolution. It’s not clear if Bungie was planning a similar eventual fate for Reddick’s Zavala, who now exists in a much more story-centric version of Destiny 2 where characters’ emotional development are the focal point of each season. While Cayde-6 was a beloved video game character, losing Zavala is more akin to a hit TV show having to write off one of its main characters.

Key characters have been recast in the past, most notably the warlock Ikora Rey who was previously voiced by Gina Torres (Firefly) and has since been replaced by Mara Junot (Fireheart). It seems hard to imagine doing that with Zavala at this point, however, and there were previous hints that the character might not survive the game’s coming war with The Darkness. We’ll better know how Bungie decides to wrap up Reddick’s legacy later this year as Destiny 2‘s Final Shape expansion approaches.

Elden Ring Ray Tracing Is Busted After Year Of Waiting

Just yesterday, developer FromSoftware rolled out a new Elden Ring update that introduced ray tracing (RTX). It’s been a highly requested feature since the game’s February 25, 2022 launch. Unfortunately, just hours after patch 1.09 dropped, RTX is breaking the popular Soulslike in all kinds of ways, from crashing the game to tanking its frame rate, and folks aren’t too happy about it.

Read More: Elden Ring Gets Ray Tracing One Year Later, With Some Big Buffs And Nerfs

RTX is a technique that renders more realistic lighting. It also smoothes reflections, shadows, and textures to provide a more lifelike illustration of how real light interacts with digital objects. If you’ve played Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart or Spider-Man: Miles Morales on PS5, not to mention any number of fairly recent games on PC, then you’ve got a good idea of how RTX performs on modern hardware. It can sometimes seem negligible, especially if you’re blind like myself, but for those who can point it out, RTX produces some stunning visuals with regard to reflections and shadows that can make environments feel more immersive and believable. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, for instance, with its RTX update in December 2022, had more depth and felt moodier with the feature enabled, as shadows were darker and denser while light bounced off objects much more accurately. It looked nice. Elden Ring also looks nice the way that it is already, but any update that aims to make the pretty game prettier is welcomed. Sadly, however, beauty is pain, as players across the internet have reported copious issues when RTX was turned on.

Open Surprise

Ray Tracing is breaking The Lands Between

RTX is enabled by default following patch 1.09’s release, though it’s only available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. To turn it off, you’ll have to navigate to Game Options (on console) or Graphics (on PC) in the settings menu, then change your preference from there. However, playing the game with the feature turned on apparently causes a host of problems on all platforms. From Reddit to Twitter, players have been posting about the issues they’ve encountered.

“LOL so they added ray tracing to Elden Ring and enable it with the highest setting by default,” said Twitter user EmKUltra64. “If you have an Nvidia RTX or AMD RX 6000 (or newer) GPU and you load up the game today and notice performance suddenly tanking, maybe go into settings and turn it off. It’s not worth it.”

“New RTX update for Elden Ring isn’t that good for the performance it takes, minimal change with no significant enhancement to the looks and view of the game,” wrote another tweeter named CowHourr.

“The ray tracing implementation is very bad,” said Twitter user VG_Shrine. “It destroys the game performance even on an RTX 4090, causing heavy stuttering and making the game to run at 40fps. I hope that FromSoftware can get the ray tracing reworked in a future patch.”

Things seem to be worse on Elden Ring’s subreddit. There are a plethora of posts from folks complaining about how RTX is either crashing their game or causing it to run at “a rock-solid 5fps” on Xbox Series X. Yeah, that’s a yikes.

“The game just feels horrible with it on console at least,” said redditor 17sbaucum. “I felt like I was actually lagging in [the] game. What was the point of putting ray tracing in the game? It makes the game feel worse to play and makes no difference in how the game actually looks. I couldn’t tell you what changed when I turned ray tracing on.”

“Game is unplayable with ray tracing on,” said another redditor named Cooper-da-trooper. “Frame drops and hard crashes even on a top-end PC (3090). The game now crashes whenever I try to load one of my characters that was in Stormveil, this update is…really bad.”

“I just updated and fired up the game,” said redditor cyrod1il. “I turned off ray tracing because I absolutely hate the way it got implemented into the game, and there’s no DLSS so it’s poorly optimized and makes me lose almost 15 frames in [Leyndell, Royal Capital]. My character is at the Morgott bonfire right after I killed him, and I absolutely cannot fast-travel anywhere. When I do, the game [crashes to desktop]. Tried repairing the game, didn’t work. Thoughts?”

Read More: Elden Ring Stats Reveal What Bosses Killed Players The Most

My thoughts? Well, it appears ray tracing is busted. That’s not to say the feature is bad. Aside from Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, other examples of games with good RTX include Control, Cyberpunk 2077 (shocking, I know), Ghostwire: Tokyo, Red Dead Redemption 2, and many, many others. It just seems that Elden Ring’s implementation is poorly optimized, but that doesn’t mean it will always be that way. Give it some time. Things will probably improve. Or you could just, you know, play with RTX turned off. It’s not as if Elden Ring really needs it anyway since The Lands Between is already a beautiful if frightening place.

 

PS5 Bundle Goes On Sale For The First Time Ever, But Won’t Last

The PS5 sold out for years. Now it’s in stock and, shockingly, currently on sale for the first time since the latest-gen hardware was released. But the discount only goes until April 6, and who knows how long these cheaper bundles will last.

The God of War Ragnarök PS5 bundle is normally $560. Currently, however, you can grab it from PlayStation Direct, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Amazon, and GameStop for just $510. That’s a $50 discount on top of the bundle’s normal $10 savings. Sony says the PS5 bundle sale will go from March 24 to April 6.

The cheaper bundle includes one DualSense controller and the game, and is only applicable to the disc version of the PS5. The $400 digital-only version of the PS5 doesn’t qualify for the deal, though it’s still cheaper overall even if you include the full $70 price for a digital download of God of War Ragnarök.

Read More: 14 Things Every New PS5 Owner Should Try Or Consider

If you haven’t upgraded from a PS4 yet, this is a decent way to do it, especially if you haven’t already played the new God of War on the older console. Sony Santa Monica’s sequel is bigger and busier in almost every way. That does make it feel more bloated and occasionally less impactful than its 2018 predecessor, but it also means it’s a great game to keep you busy before needing to buy something else.

As the PS5 enters its third year, we’re approaching the time since launch in which Sony previously announced the upgraded PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro. It’s not clear yet if the console maker is planning a similar set of hardware overhauls for the PS5. One possibility is that the covid-19 shortages delayed Sony’s plans, and some early reporting suggests an updated model won’t be ready until 2024.

In the meantime, Sony’s ongoing support for the PS4 appears to be winding down. While last year’s God of War Ragnarök and Horizon Forbidden West were both cross-gen, the latter’s upcoming Burning Shores expansion is PS5 only, and Spider-Man 2, arriving later this year, will only be on PS5 as well.

                    

Controversial Ex-Epic Games Store Exclusive Now Free On Steam

Gif: Terri Vellmann / Doseone / Kotaku

If you’re like me and feel life is entirely too short to spend on important, self-congratulatory games (or people, for that matter), might I recommend 2020’s Sludge Life? Once exclusive to the Epic Games Store, it arrived on Steam about a year later where you could buy it for 15 bucks. Right now, though, you can grab it for free (for a limited time) as a part of a promotion for the game’s just-announced sequel which, believe it or not, is titled Sludge Life 2.

A trippy, low-risk platformer where you bounce around a world ravaged by pollution and work-induced alienation, Sludge Life has you tagging up various bits of property as you chat with disaffected locales who are going all-in on pessimistic readings of Nietzsche, are terrified of pigeons, or are really impressed that some random lady just straight up stole a washing machine. Upon its release in 2020, it caused a bit of a stir in Australia, where it earned the “RC” (Refused Classification) rating for its blatant ribaldry, thus making it ineligible for release on Nintendo Switch in the region (you can buy it on Switch in other regions for the standard $15 asking price). The game saw a brief exclusivity window on the Epic Games Store, but you can nab it now on Steam for the cool price of fuck all.

A worker talks to the player about how much they hate their job and life.

Screenshot: Terri Vellmann / Doseone / Kotaku

If you played, and enjoyed, the recently released High on Life, this game will be right up your alley—and hey, at least I’m recommending a game to you this time that isn’t voiced by someone who’s done some deeply reprehensible things, to put it mildly. In fact, it would be hard to believe High on Life didn’t take some inspiration from this game. The vibes are very similar and even the soundtrack, though composed by different artists, has a nice chill taste to it that fits the sentiments of this game perfectly. And had I known about it before, it would absolutely have been included on my list of games to play after that trippy experience; consider this entry number 13 on that one.

Read More: 12 Games To Play After You’ve Finished High On Life

Despite some potentially dizzying visuals with heavy aliasing and one instance of what I’m pretty sure is a depiction of self-harm (arguably much of the drug use in this game is also potentially triggering for some, so take caution), Sludge Life is a chill, amusing take on how much it sucks to be alive in this—a world that’s barely kept together by the coercive nature of economically-enforced labor. What an escape!

Fantasy Author Brandon Sanderson Asks Fans Not To Defend Him

Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy author who nets tens of millions of dollars in book sales every year, which puts him in the same book-selling league as George R.R. Martin. However, his financial success has not really translated into a similar mainstream visibility outside of his specific fanbase—until this week. The tech magazine Wired published a cynical profile about Sanderson yesterday, and the author’s fans are pissed. Things got so heated that Sanderson had to take to Reddit to tell his community to back off.

Sanderson is best known as the writer of The Stormlight Archive, The Reckoners, and Mistborn series—all of which take place in his original fictional universe, called the Cosmere. His books have extensive magic systems in them, and he’s known as the inventor of the concepts of “hard” and “soft” magic. He has also written the final books of the fantasy epic series The Wheel of Time, picking up after Robert Jordan passed away in 2007.

The Wired profile

Despite extensive successes and credentials, Wired editor Jason Kehe did not seem impressed by Sanderson as an author or as an individual. His profile makes some attempts to explain Sanderson’s worldbuilding prowess using his Mormon background, but struggles to connect with Sanderson’s personal life experiences, even though Kehe went to Utah to learn more about the author and the people he surrounded himself with.

As a result, the article is not very flattering. “At the sentence level, [Sanderson] is no great gift to English prose,” Kehe writes. “He writes, by one metric, at a sixth-grade reading level.” It’s definitely not a description that fans are used to seeing from a multi-million dollar selling author who penned decades worth of books.

Neither is Kehe impressed by the personal life that the bestselling author lives, or the manner in which he holds himself. “To my mind, I still haven’t gotten anything real from Sanderson, anything true. I’m not the first person he has toured around his lair to politely gawk at his treasures and trophies and his hallway of custom stained-glass renditions of his favorite books,” he writes. “Sanderson has lived so much of his life and fame openly, self-promotionally. It’s a major reason for his success.”

“I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly lame,” Kehe wrote, days before he met the author’s family or his fans. “He sits across from me in an empty restaurant, kind of lordly and sure of his insights, in a graphic T-shirt and ill-fitting blazer, which he says he wears because it makes him look professorial. It doesn’t. He isn’t. Unless the word means only: believing everything you say is worth saying. Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is usable, quotable.”

At the end of the piece, Kehe describes Sanderson as a god. Not because of his literary prowess, but because the author had created worlds that had enthralled so many readers over the course of decades. “If Sanderson is a writer, that is all he is doing. He is living his fantasy of godhead on Earth,” he writes. Kehe seemed to struggle to see any humility in a man who had a literary empire within his grasp. Kehe was a visitor from a distant land (San Francisco), and he took the velvet gloves off when he had to leave a review of his travels.

Read More: Subnautica Devs And Fantasy Author Brandon Sanderson Team Up In Cool-Looking Miniatures Battle Game

Fantasy fans reacted on Twitter

The internet responded loudly. “[The article writer] is nasty, jealous, catty, and uncharitable to someone who delivers value to millions of fans, and never has a bad word to say about anyone,” tweeted one author named Travis Corcoran. “I imagine he’s pissed that Sanderson isn’t nearly as good at ’constructing sentences’ as he is … and yet makes $20M/yr while the Wired editor makes, I dunno, $60k?” Several other people cited Sanderson’s kind personality and financial success as reasons why the profile should never have been published.

Even Activision Blizzard’s poster-in-chief weighed in. “The sneering tone. The gratuitous meanness of insulting a man in front of his family after he has invited you into his home. The bullying cheap shots at people you consider nerds,” tweeted Lulu Cheng Meservey. “Fantasy writing is valuable, being prolific isn’t a bad thing, people can like different things from you, and nerds are the best.”

“My basic feeling has always been: We write stories, and then they belong to readers,” wrote Kehe in an email to Kotaku. “Readers get the last word.”

Brandon Sanderson’s response

Look, nobody is coming for the human rights of fantasy nerds. And a writer who makes several million dollars a year off his own IP isn’t going to be toppled by some mean article. Even Sanderson himself thinks so. He wrote a Reddit thread today pleading for his fans to keep calm. He agreed that his life wasn’t very exciting for a profile, and that his ordinary and trauma-free life “is kind of boring, from an outsider’s perspective.” While he appreciated that his fans were willing to defend him, he wanted them to let Kehe be. He felt that the profile was not an attack on the community, and that the Wired editor had been honest about his opinions. Kotaku reached out for a comment, but did not receive one by the time of publication.

“[Kehe] should not be attacked for sharing his feelings,” Sanderson wrote. “If we attack people for doing so, we make the world a worse place, because fewer people will be willing to be their authentic selves.”

Dark Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Game Takes After God Of War

The Last Ronin comic is being adapted into an action-focused single-player video game that will play similarly to God of War. The popular and gritty 2020 comic, a spin-off of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, stars the last remaining turtle in a war-ravaged wasteland.

While most people think of TMNT as a cartoonish, family-friendly kids’ brand, the actual franchise is much more varied than that, with comics that get darker than anything you’d find on Nickelodeon. This isn’t a weird offshoot or an occasional one-off, either. The original comics that started it all were gritty and violent, featuring sharp black-and-white art and turtles who were less radical and more dangerous. And The Last Ronin, a limited-run comic series from 2020 written by the original co-creator of the franchise, returned TMNT to its grittier, more adult roots. Now, that fan-favorite comic is being turned into a big action-adventure video game by a yet-to-be-announced studio.

In an interview with Polygon, Doug Rosen, senior vice president for games and emerging media at Paramount Global, revealed the new, still-unnamed game’s existence. Rosen told Polygon that the upcoming third-person action role-playing game will be comparable to the recent God of War entries. He also assured fans that the story of the game will be “authentic” to The Last Ronin comic series.

This means that, unlike most other TMNT games, this upcoming adventure will star the lone surviving turtle in the dark, far future of the Last Ronin universe. So don’t expect all your favorite turtles and Splinter to be hanging out, eating pizza, and partying in the sewers in this upcoming game. Because all but one of them is dead. (The identity of the lone survivor is actually a big mystery in the comic and I won’t spoil it here.)

Rosen also told Polygon that just because TMNT is a brand popular with kids, doesn’t mean the devs will have to “dial back” the upcoming Last Ronin game to make it “something it shouldn’t be.” He further explained that he sees “opportunities for multiple TMNT games aimed at both young and more mature age groups” and that TMNT owner Paramount will take different approaches to create content for each group. For example, TMNT villain Shredder is showing up in Call of Duty. 

As for when you can play this new TMNT game, well, it’s not coming anytime soon. Rosen said the game is still a “few years off.” Rosen was also seemingly tight-lipped about where this game might land when it finally does release in the future. For now, you can go play TMNT: Shedder’s Revenge which is fantastic and out now.