Year Ender 2023: 2023 in Gaming, Part 1: Microsoft ABK acquisition, widespread layoffs, physical-digital divide and more

Nearly every contemporary gaming system got at least one superb title and a handful of very good ones sprinkled across a year that truly left gamers spoiled for choice. (Representational Image)

2023 has been a landmark year for gaming — for reasons good and bad. But we’ll get into the intricacies in a short while. For now, let’s take a step back and gaze upon the landscape. There have been some truly great games this year and some not-so-great ones, a handful of companies have consolidated their position with acquisitions and mergers, while others have downed shutters, and the Government of India seems to have finally disambiguated between online gaming and gambling.

And so without further ado, let’s kick off this journey down 2023 with one of the biggest players on the gaming scene.

A year that should have been Microsoft’s annus mirabilis

Microsoft’s long-running legal battle across the US and Europe to secure its acquisition of big-hitting Activision Blizzard King finally came to a conclusion in October, and as the subhead suggests, it should’ve crowned a potentially fantastic year for the Redmond behemoth. The $68.7-billion move makes Microsoft, by its own admission, “the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony”.

At first glance, the obvious implications of the move are that Microsoft now owns ABK and all the subsidiary studies under its umbrella, like Treyarch, Raven Software, High Moon Studios and so on. Which, in turn, means that Microsoft stands to earn revenue from the games developed by these studios. But while Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has insisted that franchises like Call of Duty will not be turned into Xbox/PC exclusives, his company stands to make a great deal of money once these titles turn up on the Xbox Game Pass subscription service.

Unfortunately, this was one of the few bits of good news for the tech giant in a year that also saw its much-anticipated vampire open-world title Redfall crash and burn on launch, and Bethesda’s first new IP in 25 years, Starfield, release to barely more than a lukewarm response. And as the year comes to a close, rumours are swirling about a supposed next-generation Xbox console set to launch in 2026. This seems far-fetched, because why would a new one be so close when the Xbox Series X has barely been pushed to anywhere near its limits with the games on offer — none of which are Xbox exclusives. As I’d written earlier this year, “Over the years, it’s become painfully apparent that the Xbox is not necessarily the company’s priority, since all of its games are available on PC”. Regardless, we’ll wait and watch.

Government and gaming

Four years ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi minted himself a new generation of fans by name-dropping PUBG and Fortnite (it’s another matter entirely that he called it ‘Frontline’, but we got what he meant) at an event. Here at last, the new fans led themselves to believe, was someone who gets it. Little could have prepared them and a few hundred thousand others for the PUBG Mobile ban the following year. In the past, we’ve seen such games as Dragon Age: Inquisition, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas banned in India, but this was the first time a game as massively popular as PUBG Mobile got the treatment.

That was 2020 and we’re (for the next few days) in 2023 where BGMI has re-entered to fill the void left by PUBG Mobile’s absence. However, and the aforementioned 2019 false dawn aside, the Government of India’s struggles to grasp the concept of gaming continue. This was seen most recently in the lumping together of online gaming with gambling and real money gaming in the draft amendment to the Information Technology (Intermediary Liability and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 that entered the news cycle early this year.

As The Hindu succinctly warned in an opinion piece at the time, the government’s “definition of an ‘online game’, which is limited in the draft amendment to wagering platforms, may be expanded in future to include all games broadly”. Further, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar added that the draft has “proposed a self-regulatory mechanism which, in future, may also regulate the content of online gaming and ensure that the games do not have violent, addictive or sexual content”.

Online gamers breathed a sigh of relief in April, when the government disambiguated between gambling/real money gaming and online gaming. So while all is well for now, the spectre of content regulation in games still looms ominously, particularly considering how this was also the year the government sought to regulate content on OTT platforms.

Flash-forward to December and we saw the tabling and passing of the Telecommunication Bill, 2023 in Lok Sabha. While there are several parts of the bill, both in spirit and in text, that are worrying for a variety of reasons, I will focus on the bit that affects gaming. The bill, in essence, puts forth that all internet services (including but not restricted to messaging, email, video hosting and cloud computing) will be regulated by the Department of Telecommunications. It’s hard not to see online gaming (and eventually, offline gaming) coming under the purview of this.

A forgettable 2023 for cloud gaming

The most immediate aspect of gaming to be potentially impacted by the bill above is cloud gaming, which has already had a fairly disappointing year. The year began with the termination of Google Stadia services — something that had been announced back in 2022. For most Indian gamers, this wasn’t a huge loss since Stadia wasn’t available on these shores anyway. While internet speeds and bandwidth aren’t currently of a consistently high level across the board to recommend cloud gaming to all, Stadia was hampered by a few fundamental issues.

The first of these would be, as briefly alluded to above, connectivity issues. Even in the 20-or-so countries — a major limitation to begin with — in which the service was available, users experienced regular FPS drops and game crashes. The other would be a reliance on third-party titles stemming from the February 2021 closure of its own studio and the subsequent lack of original and exclusive content. And finally, there was no way the ultra-niche (going by the number of countries serviced) Stadia could keep up with the likes of Sony, Microsoft and Nvidia whose PlayStation Plus, Xbox Game Pass and GeForce Now respectively offered a far greater variety of gaming experiences than Google could.

On the Indian end of things, with none of the above-mentioned services available, JioGamesCloud continued to provide a glimmer of hope that Indian gamers too could experience high-end cloud gaming with the arrival of the odd AAA title (like Lords of the Fallen) on the platform. However, it remains in a beta state and it is as-yet-unclear when the real deal will be rolled out. That, unfortunately, is more than can be said for The Gaming Project, a cloud gaming service designed for users in India, that shut down shop in September citing ‘unforeseen circumstances’ and promising refunds to subscribers.

Clearly, the beast of cloud gaming remains untamed (or barely even sighted, as the case is in India) as 2023 comes to a close. Perhaps Amazon Luna can be the way forward in the coming year. The fact is that we still lack the robust infrastructure to render cloud gaming accessible and desirable to all.

Layoff bloodbath hits AAAs and indies 

Per unofficial estimates, the gaming industry has shed approximately 9,000 jobs worldwide. While this may not be a huge number in itself, it’s worth recalling that gaming is still a very niche business with a relatively small workforce of about 3.3 lakh (as of last year).

The gravity of the situation is evident when you look at the spread of the phenomenon. The Embracer Group laid off 904 members of staff (five percent of its workforce), Epic Games culled 830 (16 percent of its workforce), Electronic Arts was slashed  800-odd jobs (six percent of its workforce) in 2023 and ​​Unity Technologies let go of 265 people (a little under four percent of its workforce). Elsewhere, the likes of Ubisoft, BioWare, TakeTwo Interactive and CD Projekt Red (to name only a few) also terminated several employees.

Nonetheless, estimated to be worth around $250 billion in 2023, the global gaming industry is still big business, and there’s huge sums of money riding on the success of games and studios. As we witnessed this year, with Daedalic Entertainment’s in-house game development studio and Fntastic downing shutters in the wake of the disastrous launches of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, and The Day After, respectively, game development and publishing is a high-stakes… game.

With gaming having gone mainstream over the past couple of decades and public shareholders having entered the fray, the need for games to at least generate modest profits has become critical. As a result, we’ve seen a major avoidance of risk when it comes to games that are backed.

Seemingly gone (outside of the vibrant indie scene) are experiments with form, story, and gameplay. In their stead are annually-released, iterative titles, sequels, remakes, remasters, and reboots — essentially, safe games that are more likely to do enough to keep the registers ringing. Despite this risk-averse approach, developers, programmers, artists, VFX people, sound engineers, etc., are losing their jobs. It’s unrealistic to expect 2024 to be a massive improvement on this front, so the industry is set for another tightrope walk next year.

Digital and physical worlds collide

When it comes to buying games digitally and maintaining a collection, there are a number of advantages. For starters, there’s the convenience: want a game? Buy it online and download it. There’s no need to wait for it to be delivered to your home. Then, you don’t have to worry about scuffing up a digital copy of the game (like a DVD), rendering it unplayable. Next, you don’t have to get up, eject a disc, and put in a new one when you want to play a different game. In short, there are all sorts of conveniences digitisation brings.

However, the major flaw with the digital model is that you don’t necessarily ‘own’ or have access to your content forever. You are essentially renting digital property, and this has had plenty of gamers concerned for a while. After all, games are frequently delisted from online storefronts and at times rendered un-downloadable, even if you already ‘own’ them. The most recent example of the problems with the digital model is this recent Sony release.

The note states that customers would “no longer be able to watch any of [their] previously purchased Discovery content and the content would be removed from [their] video library” on December 31, 2023. Take a moment with that: you’ve bought videos to watch at your leisure, and are suddenly told that you will no longer have access to them, with no mention of refunds.

Update: In the time since publishing this story, Sony has announced that as per a new agreement, “consumers will be able to access their previously purchased content for at least the next 30 months”

Elsewhere, a large number of gamers were disappointed to hear that the long-awaited Alan Wake 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 would only be seeing a digital release. Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name saw a very limited (restricted to some parts of Asia) physical release.

However, the ultimate edition of Cyberpunk 2077 (including all the current-gen updates and Phantom Liberty DLC) emerged this month with most content included in physical form (only the Xbox Series X|S version has every little bit of content included; PC and PlayStation 5 versions require some downloads). And it’s this last part that remains an issue: games are ostensibly sold on physical media, but contain just a few MB of information. The bulk of the game still has to be downloaded.

A number of games did launch in physical form though, including some collector’s editions. The vast majority of headlines were grabbed by the collector’s edition of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PS5 — and not for any good reason. The physical collector’s edition included a steelbook case (a steel DVD case) and a massive Venom statue. The game shipped with this was available via a digital code. Regardless, there was much enthusiasm about the edition and pre-orders had been made months in advance.

The game launched on October 20 and customers were made aware that their collector’s editions would be arriving later. The delays continued and retailers had few answers for increasingly testy customers. Losing patience, they began cancelling their pre-orders and seeking refunds (which, according to most accounts, were granted), but Sony continued to maintain its silence on the whole affair. Until a couple of days ago, when the company began contacting customers to explain that due to “unavoidable circumstances beyond [its] control,” the product was going to be cancelled for India.

After that whistle-stop tour of some key developments in the world of gaming this year, stay tuned for the second part of this 2023 wrap that features a rundown of the games (good, bad and ugly) that saw the light of day this year.

Read part two here.