ZombiePie

After months of speculation, Embracer Group has finally sold Gearbox Software at a price tag of $460 million and the buyer happens to be Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc.The rumors of Embracer selling Gearbox have persisted since the start of 2023 as the company's leadership continue to maintain plans for contraction as it struggles with mounting debt. Take-Two being the buyer of Gearbox shouldn't come as too much of a surprise considering they have published every single Borderlands game since the start of the series. However, the sale comes with a major catch. Take-Two's purchase is only netting them Gearbox Software, Gearbox Montreal, and Gearbox Studio Quebec and the IPs associated with those outfits which include, but are not limited to, Borderlands, Homeworld, Risk of Rain, Brothers in Arms, and Duke Nukem. Oh, and Take-Two have confirmed that Randy Pitchford will remain as the CEO of Gearbox.

It's important to note that unlike its third party competitors like EA or Ubisoft, Take-Two is structured as a gaming holding company and doesn't itself engage in internal development. They instead primarily rely on their two publishing labels, Rockstar Games and 2K to operate game studios that they own. They also have a "third division," Private Division, which operates to gain publishing rights to mid-budget titles and indie games, and a fourth division called T2 Mobile Games/Socialpoint which does mobile games. Ken Levine's Ghost Story is maybe the company's fifth division, but that delineation is not very clear. Gearbox will be tied to the 2K division, which was already tasked with maintaining the publishing for the Borderlands IP, and is best known for the NBA 2K games, but also manages Firaxis as well as Hangar 13.

Embracer is retaining Gearbox Publishing San Francisco and some of Gearbox's subsidiaries like Cryptic Studios, Lost Boys Interactive, and Captured Dimension. This means that the rights to Remnant, Neverwinter Online, Star Trek Online, and Hyper Light Breaker will remain with Embracer. Likewise, the television adaption of Borderlands will not be impacted by this deal and Take-Two has indicated that it will not be completed until the first quarter of Take-Two's 2025 fiscal year.

It is INCREDIBLY important to note that while $460 million is a large sum of money, Embracer paid $1.3 billion to buy all of Gearbox Interactive in 2021. Even if the company's main objective is to reduce its debt, that is a major loss and this sale coincides with Embracer selling Saber Interactive and a number of associated studios to Saber to the tune of ~$250 million and staffing layoffs at Edios-Montreal as well as Lost Boys Interactive. Embracer already missed its Q3 targets and these moves are likely not the end of its attempts s to reduce debt.

There's some important news related to Giant Bomb's Blight Club feature. During the Giant Beastcast reunion panel, which was unfortunately not recorded, Alex Navarro announced that he would be taking the title "GAMES MASTER OF BLIGHT CLUB" in light of Dan missing/skipping his turn a little while ago. Alex's first decree is for Dan to play the following two games sequentially the moment he completes Superman:

1. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
2. Drake of the 99 Dragons

Why did Alex pick these two games? Well, they remain two of the lowest rated games from his tenure as an editor and reviewer at GameSpot. For example, in his 3.7/10 review for Terminator 3 he stated:

The game is, at its heart, a first-person shooter, but it also contains a boatload of CG and taken-from-the-film cutscenes, as well as a fighting game-styled combat system. This all may sound well and good, but Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines feels like a rushed hack-job of a game, with just barely enough cohesive action to keep it from completely falling apart at the seams.

Despite the fact that four different development teams worked on various aspects of Terminator 3, the game, as a whole, still feels completely slapdash and thrown-together. None of its gameplay components come together in any kind of an interesting way to make the game the least bit entertaining to play, and the muddy visuals, mediocre audio, and largely absent plot just don't make Terminator 3 anything worth recommending in the slightest. The only remaining thing that could appeal to anyone is the significant amount of film footage and random behind-the-scenes featurettes contained on the disc, but nearly all of this can be found on the recently released Terminator 3 DVD, which also has this footage in significantly better quality and doesn't require you to play through this mess of a game to unlock it all. If you want Terminator 3, watch the movie and pretend this game doesn't exist. You'll be infinitely better off.

Fun fact, Terminator 3 comes from developer Black Ops Entertainment and runs on the same game engine as Fugitive Hunter: War on Terror. You know... the game where you get into a fist-fight with Osama bin Laden in the name of avenging the death of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Nonetheless, the real doozy is Drake of the 99 Dragons which Alex maintains is "the worst game I have ever played," and his 1.6/10 review stands as a testament of that. In fact, the final paragraph of his review is absolutely scathing in its rejection of the game:

To simply call Drake bad would be a major understatement. Drake is simply an out-and-out failure in every single discernable category. Whatever style or pizzazz that Idol FX has tried to create for its comic book world is buried under a pile of cheap graphics, a lame story, awful audio, and an abysmal gameplay system that would still be painful to play even if it weren't as decisively broken as it is. There's nothing stylish or interesting about Drake, and, to be quite frank, any time spent playing this game is an absolute waste. If it isn't clear up to this point, let us sum it up with one simple statement: Don't play this game.

So, yeah, if Dan manages to survive this gauntlet then he is clearly made of tougher stuff than all of us combined.

Correct.

Piorot is and always will be David Suchet to me. There's no way you can change my mind. Don't even bother.

So, the point of contention I have is that it sounds like there's a possible difference of opinion if a "benchmark" should mark an average or median in a genre or if a benchmark should represent a "gold standard" for that genre. For me, as an educator, when I see the word "benchmark" I immediately think of the middle of a bell curve and with games that would be something that covers all of the bases and is a functional workman-like product.

Sometimes the "guides" are news reports in hiding in an attempt by management to get on the good side of Google's algorithms.

Generally speak, yes. Sometimes you get article that explain how to get new cosmetic upgrades in an online multiplayer without shelling out money. Sometimes you get fragmented suggestions on how you can level up a character in an RPG. Other times, it's a simple summary of patch notes.

Thank you for pointing this out; I fixed this.

As if the realm of gaming journalism wasn't already on shaky ground in 2024, Kotaku's Editor-in-Chief, Jen Glennon, has resigned in protest after the site's owner, G/O Media, apparently indicated it wanted Kotaku to de-emphasize news reporting and skew more towards game guide creation. Glennon's letter of resignation offers a scathing rebuke of the current management and ownership at G/O Media:

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

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

In its reporting of the situation, Aftermath indicated that one source still at Kotaku indicated that G/O Media indicated a guide creation goal for the remaining staff at around 50 guides per week. It is important to note, that in November of 2023, G/O Media hit Kotaku with redundancy layoffs amounting to twenty-three people which reduced the site to under ten paid staff members. Furthermore, G/O Media has joined Red Ventures in exploring using AI to generate content on its subsidiaries, which includes Kotaku, Gizmodo, Quartz, The A.V. Club, and The Onion, against the protests of editors on those sites.

If there is some good news, it is that it appears that the remaining staff at Kotaku have been in unison about resisting this change and G/O Media may be balking at their original plan. Senior editor at Kotaku, Alyssa Mercante shared this on Twitter:

Nonetheless, if G/O Media's efforts are successful, it would be another devastating loss to the gaming journalism profession and the loss of yet another source of gaming reporting.

Quick note to you and @bigsocrates because I had to fix this in both of your blogs this week, but using quotations ("") in an image you include in a blog or forum post causes the image to break. No one knows why, but just try to avoid using quotations in images.

Also, I enjoyed this game but Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders is the clear best game in the the Agatha Christie video game adaptation pantheon.

@bigsocrates I'm pretty sure your listed start date is wrong. My vote nonetheless:

1. Solar Ash

2. Battletoads

@arrohon: @turboshawn was the one who investigated issues with the premium feed last time. I'll try pinging him.

@winged_raziel: I will try to get to this soon, if not before the end of the day. There is some risk that a new edit can undo previous ones, but that is largely for textual-based submissions. If your next edits are new release date proposals or associations, you should be fine.