My Games of the Decade – A Look Back from 2019

I have noticed that a number of people and gaming sites are taking a moment to celebrate the coming change in the tens column of the year to take a look back at the last decade, the teens, and to pick out high and lows and bests and worsts and whatever.  As an end of year summary post is an easy pitch, so too must an end of decade summary pitch.

I didn’t do this back at the end of 2009.  I know, I checked and back in December of 2009 my posts… all 38 of them… showed only a low level of reflection, and that involved reviewing my gaming goals and predictions.  But the blog was just past the three year mark back then and I had yet to settle down and recognize how a recurring topic makes an excellent writing crutch.

With that in mind and some empty days to fill I thought I would join in on the retrospective action and pick out a list of what I consider to be my games of the last ten years.  I do have a decade of blog posts to refresh my memory here.

How I picked them is vague mixture or memory, blog posts, and any measure of how much time I spent with a given title over the time frame.  And, just to make this a bit more difficult, I am going to try to break these out into categories like some sort of award show, which will allow me not only to pick a winner, but then ramble on about other possible choices.

MMORPG – EVE Online

MMORPG is a special category in this list.  First because MMORPGs are the main focus of this blog and, second, because MMORPGs constantly renew themselves with expansions and updates.  So, unlike the other categories, I am not limiting this to games that launched this decade.  I would be hard pressed to pick an MMORPG I cared about that launched since 2010.  Maybe Rift?  And Rift fell apart for me with the first expansion.

So, with that out of the way…

Based on hours spent playing, number of posts written, and amount of time continuously subscribed, it would be impossible to pick anything besides EVE Online.  I’ve been playing EVE Online in a continuous arc since November 2011, when I came back to the game to see if the Crucible expansion would get the game back on course after Incarna.  And then I got tied up in the tales of null sec, where the stories are all player created, and have stuck around as a player/tourist ever since.  And, to loop back on how MMORPGs change, 2019 EVE Online is a lot different than 2011 EVE Online was.  Better or worse is up for debate, but definitely different.

As for other choices, World of Warcraft would probably place second, but a distant second.  I might even make it third behind WoW Classic if that wasn’t barely four months old.  Three disappointing expansions (Cataclysm, Warlords of Draenor, and Battle for Azeroth) and an inability to make things better has left me flat on the game.  They heyday of WoW was last decade, which is what WoW Classic is telling us.

And after that, what other choices could I justify?  I spent stretches of time in LOTRO, EverQuest II, Rift, Neverwinter, SWTOR, and a few others, but not nearly as much as either EVE Online or WoW.  So New Eden gets the nod, as nothing else comes close.

MMO – World of Tanks

I will make the definitional cut between MMORPG, where you can see or interact with hundreds or thousands of players in a virtual world, and MMOs, which are just online titles where a bunch of people can be in the same lobby, but actual game play is in limited arenas.

This was kind of a tough one, as I have pretty clearly spent more time playing War Thunder and I haven’t spent any time playing World of Tanks recently.  But when I do play, I like the way World of Tanks looks and feels, even if I am bad at it.  Also, I am way worse at War Thunder.

Other potential titles for me here included World of Warplanes (where I am even worse than War Thunder) or maybe World of Warships, though that never really clicked with me so my time with it is pretty minimal.  I never did play Destiny or the sequel or anything else along those lines, so World of Tanks it is.

Action RPG – Diablo III

This could arguably fall under the MMO banner, but I have chosen to break it out because there was actually some competition here.  The ARPG race this decade included Diablo III, Torchlight II, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, and even Titan Quest Anniversary Edition, all of which I played.

In the end though, I have to give the nod to Diablo III.  It started off badly, with the real money auction house yielding results predicted before launch and an itemization scheme that seemed designed to make that situation even worse.  But somebody at Blizzard finally got the memo and, with the Reaper of Souls expansion, things were turned around.  The good game play and simple story let me click away happily for many hours.  I have spent as much time playing Diablo III as all of the competition combined.

On paper Torchlight II ought to have been the winner, with offline play and mods and such.  But all the mechanics in the world couldn’t save it from simply feeling bland and aimless.  And Path of Exile, while it felt closer to the Diablo II source of the ARPG genre, died for me under latency issues that they never fully solved and the desire to be something of an MMORPG which made going back later a pain as they had added so many additional bits and pieces to the game.

Grim Dawn probably gets short shrift in all of this.  I feel like I should go back and play that some more, but I never quite get to it.  If I were CCP, Grim Dawn would be my Faction Warfare updates… always on the list, but never high enough to get the attention it deserves.

While I do not go back with every new season, I have ended up playing and enjoying Diablo III more than any of its competition.

Strategy Game – Civilization V

For me, Civilization V is pretty much the culmination of the series.  I have owned and played the whole run, plus the side paths like Alpha Centauri (good) and Beyond Earth (not good), and Civ V is it for the decade.  And I write that having played Civ II, Civ III, Civ IV, Civ VI Alpha Centauri, and Beyond Earth this decade as well.

Civ V isn’t perfect.  It has flaws, both unique to itself as well as the usual flaws of the series (slow and overweight at launch along with the whole mid-game drag), and it was controversial at the time, but it has weathered the decade for me.  I was annoyed I had to make a new Steam account to play it, having rejected Steam after Valve screwed up my old account in the early HalfLife 2 era.  But I got past that.  I played it in 2010 and I was still playing it in 2019.  Hard to argue with that.

Other possible picks were direct competitors like Stellaris, excellent war games like Vietnam 65 and Unity of Command, literally the rest of the Paradox strategic game catalog, which I own, as well as RTS titles like Age of Empires II HD and a good chunk of the Total War series, all of which played and enjoyed.  But for my strategy title of the decade I cannot justify anything besides Civ V.

Builder Sim – RimWorld

I created this category pretty much to find a place for RimWorld.  I mean, I guess it is something of a genre.  The direct competitors for this on my list included Stardew Valley, Oxygen Not Included, Medieval Engineers, Space Engineers, and Kerbal Space Program.  RimWorld was pretty much a lock here… and then I looked down the list of games and found Minecraft.

Minecraft isn’t an MMO or MMORPG and is a full on multi-player builder sim and holy cow I spent a lot of time playing it this decade.

But, technically, Minecraft became available to backers in 2009.  So it is really a last decade game, no matter how much I played it.  The early access thing muddies the water.  And while it gets updates, it doesn’t get the MMORPG exemption in my book.

So RimWorld gets the nod, but with an asterisk for Minecraft.

First Person Perspective – Portal 2

Another force category.  When I was looking down the list of shooters I had played over the decade, thinking that FPS could be a category.  But then there were also a few outliers that were not really shooters but which had the first person perspective.  That led me to expand the category, which then went from me trying to balance Sniper Elite III and Doom to just handing things over to Portal 2.

And I think that is the right answer.  I played the game, I own the sound track, my daughter and I know the words to some of the songs, and it had enough cultural influence that, of the games I played, it has to be the winner.  Also, it was a very good game.  But I also own none of the Call of Duty or Battlefield titles from this decade either, so I am not much of a first person perspective fan.

Racing Game – Need for Speed World

I actually own a few racing games.  More than I expected, such that I decided I had better make this a category.  This is one area where console titles might fit in.  But when reviewing what I played, the one game I miss is Need for Speed World.

It had a lot of problems, not the least of which was being published by EA, but its simplicity and bits of destructible terrain and shared world and excellent customization options made it something I spent a lot of time playing.  And, honestly, there hasn’t been anything quite like it since.

Console Title – Pokemon SoulSilver

Proof that I am not much of a console gamer.  Yes, we have still have a Wii and a PlayStation 3 still. The former is now in a box and out of sight and the latter has spent more time streaming or playing DVD or BluRay discs than actually acting as a game console.  I did put in some time with both, most commonly with the LEGO Star Wars titles.  But that was really a last decade thing.  The Nintendo DS and 3DS series was really the console I played this decade, and for me that console is all about the Pokemon titles.

And if I have to pick one of the DS titles… and I’ve played them all… it has to be Pokemon SoulSilver, where I finally caught them all.

Mobile Game – Pokemon Go

As with console games, I don’t really play all that many mobile games.  Stretching the definition to include things on the iPad I probably have a few options.  I played Neko Atsume (in Japanese, back when it was cool) and Monument Valley and DragonVale and Words With Friends and Prose with Bros and some less memorable titles.  Ticket to Ride got a lot of play time, though I’ve faded on it over the years.  And let us not forget all the time I spent hate-playing Candy Crush Saga just to try to beat it without paying.

But the one mobile game I get out and play every day is Pokemon Go.

It helps that it is the one and only video game my wife plays, so we play together.

Crowdfunded Title – Defense Grid 2

This was a depressingly easy pick because almost every crowdfunded gaming title I have been involved with either hasn’t shipped (e.g. Camelot Unchained, Star Citizen) or was kind of shit (e.g. Shroud of the Avatar, Planetary Annihilation).  Some I haven’t played (Project: Gorgon) and others fell apart (Hero’s Song). This decade saw the emergence of crowdfunding, along with early access, but it hasn’t really been a boon for my own game play.

But the one outlier was Defense Grid 2.  I played that and enjoyed it quite a bit.  Its only problem was that it wasn’t quite as good as the original Defense Grid: The Awakening.

Pirate Server – Nostalrius

I guess the polite term now is “emulator,” but they are still pirate servers.  They still exist by stealing somebody’s IP and work, and the noblest intentions in the world won’t change that.  These days every shut down online game that ever had half a dozen loyal customers seems to have an emulator project going for it.

That means there are lots of such servers out there to choose from.  There are even competing projects for games like Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes, not to mention the actual server software from CoH out in the wild.  I am still waiting for the legal shoe to drop on that one.

But Nostalrius, and the family of WoW emulators that preceded it, have racked up a special achievement.  They got a company as conservative as Blizzard to roll out the version of the game they were trying to bring back.  These servers were popular enough to get the company’s attention and had enough support that the idea managed to get past the obvious corporate reluctance to go there.

Basically, WoW Classic is a thing due to the work that went into pirate servers like Emerald Dream and Nostalrius.  Bravo!

Best Hardware Purchase – Blue Microphones Snowball

Not really a game thing, though something that helped with gaming.  Having gone through various headsets with good earphones but crap microphones I decided to opt out of the voice side of the headset thing by buying a decent desk mic.  So during the 2018 Black Friday sales found the Blue Microphones Snowball on sale and bought it.  And it has served me well ever since.  I am now free to use whichever headphones I like and nobody complains that they cannot hear me anymore.  I am fully ready to be a podcast or streaming guest!  Of course, I have also reached a point of irrelevance such that people have stopped asking me to be guests on such things, but I am ready if my topics ever begin to trend again!

Worst Hardware Purchase – Mineserver

I almost skipped this as a section, being unable to think of any gaming related hardware I bought in the last decade that was worthy of scorn.  And then I remembered the Mineserver.

Technically, I didn’t purchase this, I backed it as part of a Kickstarter campaign.  The campaign, launched by tech columnist Robert X. Cringely in Fall 2015, it was supposed to be delivered by Christmas that year.  The campaign funded successfully and we got rosy reports initially.  This was going to be easy.

And then it wasn’t.  This is what I get for trusting in the word of somebody who is not technical to assess the technical issues of a project.  I should know by now that things that look easy to those on the sidelines are often not easy down in the code.  Also, Cringely’s next successful business venture will be his first.  I had forgotten about that.

This was also a bad example, amidst many bad examples, of how not to run a campaign post success.  Communication was sporadic.  The excuse was that he only wanted to report when there was good news, but apparently there hasn’t been any good news for a couple of years now.

Cringely was blowing smoke up our collective asses with some pie in the sky “maybe this will turn into a business and I’ll give you all shares” nonsense, but then his house burned down in the Santa Rosa fire and he has declined to update the Kickstarter campaign page or send anything directly to the supporters since.  Instead he occasionally makes reference to the campaign, mostly to blame people who are angry about the whole thing for the lack of any progress. In his world, all of the problems are the fault of the backers.  Money down the drain.

Best Game Purchase – Minecraft

This was a tough one.  There have been a lot of games I have bought and gotten a ton of play out of, that ended up being great and bargains at the price I paid.  Defense Grid: The Awakening was a candidate, as was the Mists of Pandaria expansion for WoW and even the first year of Rift.

In the end though, I am going to call Minecraft the winner, because the criteria here is purchase during the last decade, and while Minecraft became available in 2009, I didn’t buy it until 2015.

Even with renting a public server for a shared experience, the dollar per hour value of the game was pretty damn high.

Worst Game Purchase – Star Trek Online Lifetime Membership

There were a lot of competitors on this front, like every single game in my Steam library that I purchased and never played.  But none of them could measure up to the cost and impact of Star Trek Online.

I pinned such hopes on Star Trek Online and it ended up being so not the game for me.  While many will point to Warhammer Online as the end of hope for a MMORPG that would eclipse WoW or Star Wars: The Old Republic as the last gasp attempt at a big budget MMORPG, Star Trek Online was the boiling pot of hope that burned my hands and convinced me not to get invested in an MMO before it is live.  And no more up front lifetime subscription purchases ever.

Disappointing at launch with mundane and repetitive game play (even for an MMO), I probably ended up paying the most per hour played for it since the time of CompuServe and GEnie and hourly connection charges.  I tried to return to the game a couple of times, but Cryptic just piled on features to try and keep the game going, turning it into a confused jumble that still held no seed of attraction for me.  It was so bad I was surprised when it went free to play mostly because I was sure it must have already gone that route.

So if you want to know why I am such the cynic now, occasionally mocking those who get excited and invested in games based on a vague feature list and a few artists concept drawings, Star Trek Online is a big factor.  And yes, I know it is somebody’s favorite game.  Everything, no matter how bad, is somebody’s favorite.  If you enjoy it, carry on.  But for me it is an example of the kind of garbage, half-assed MMORPG effort that tarnished the genre and sped up its decline.  And none of that was helped by the game embracing things like lock boxes.

STO will be mentioned in the next few month in review posts as we get through its 10 year anniversary, but I doubt I will ever post about again until I write an obituary about it.  I generally don’t waste my time on games I do not like.  This post was an exception.

A New Decade

And so it goes.  I made it through this post and only had to reach into the past decade twice.

Soon it will be 2020 and a new decade will be upon us.  Not that an arbitrary changing in numbering means anything really, but we like to put things into nice neat categories even if we have to make them up.  I certainly made up a couple above.

I do wonder what the video game industry will be ten years down the line.  Mobile has become the big money maker while things like VR, hailed as the future, languish due to various technical and physiological reasons. (The puke factor is real.)

I especially wonder about games in my MMORPG category, the shared world online experience that seem to go on and on.  Ultima Online and EverQuest are still going past the 20 year mark, while World of Warcraft and EVE Online are now past 15.  Will we be celebrating 25 and 30 year anniversaries when 2029 is coming to a close?  Will I still even care?

The Apology

The cynical side of me was betting that Blizz would just ignore this and hope it went away.  And, given that there were 40,000+ hardcore cheering fans inside the convention center and about 40 protesters outside as the opening ceremony began, they probably could have pulled it off in the short term.

Instead, the first thing that happened was J. Allen Brack got up and read his apology for what happened.  You can read the text here.

Reading from the teleprompter

As one would expect, the reactions to this were many and varied.  Ars Technica called the apology vague.   Massively OP put the word “apology” in quotes, so I guess they were not buying it.  But they have taken a hard editorial line against Blizzard.  I don’t recall them putting in little editorial apologies for covering other badly behaving companies like Riot.

Others seemed to take the apology as enough.  SynCaine declared victory for the protest.  They certainly got a response.

My own reaction remains somewhat mixed.  The apology was actually fairly vague, though this was a speech at a fan even and not a courtroom elocution, so it was probably too much to expect a rehash of every detail.  Brack said he was sorry for what happened and didn’t shift blame or claim extenuating circumstances.  He didn’t say that the Chinese or Bobby Kotick or whoever made him do it or go the NBA route and try to cast himself as a hero by going on about on how he talked the Chinese down from an even harsher penalty.  He didn’t mention China or Hong Kong at all.  The only thing he did seem clear on was that Blizzard did not live up to the standards to which it claims to aspire.

But what are those standards?

You have to parse things carefully to figure out what he was sorry for, and even then it is pretty opaque.  He said Blizz was too fast to pass judgement then too slow to respond to the outcry that judgement caused.  I think the latter at least is correct.  Going more than a day made things worse certainly.

As for not living up to the purpose of the company, there was some hand waving about bringing people together across the world through video games.  The promise was to do better on that as well, though I am not sure what better or worse really looks like.

He did not announce any specific changes either, nor hold up a “Free Hong Kong” sign, nor put the flag of Hong Kong or the guy walking around dressed up as Winnie the Pooh up on the big screen behind the stage.  Going openly and loudly against China was all that would appease some people, and that was never going to happen.  Blizz was never going to jump into the political ring.

And he didn’t let Blitzchung, or the two teams that were banned for showing support for Hong Kong, off the hook.  Their suspensions stand, and I am okay with that.  There were rules about that, Blitzchung knew them, knew he would likely face sanction, and chose to disobey them for a higher cause.

Blizz, in my opinion, still has to penalize him for what he did, because he did do something wrong and he knew it.  Blizz rescinding the ban would just send the message that it is okay to bring your politics into the tournament.

Most people seem worked up about the ban because they support Blitzchung’s message.  I am sure those people would be find suspending somebody who said something that didn’t align with their world view, which is the typical free speech hypocrisy we see every day.  Blizz isn’t the government.  They don’t have to allow free speech in their tournament.  So as long as Blizz applies bans in such circumstances independent of the message, I think they’re acting correctly.

It would be different if Blizz were to go after somebody for political statements they made on their own time or tried to lecture people about the situation in Hong Kong.  That would be a whole different kettle of fish.  But participating in their tournaments on their dime you have to play by their rules.

Given that, I am not really sure what the promise to do better really means.  I guess it will mean being consistent with a six month ban for similar violations, applied regardless of message, that taking away prize money earned is wrong, and that penalties should be more slowly deliberated on and more quickly communicated. Maybe?  As anybody who has watched (and understood) the show BoJack Horseman knows, apologizing or feeling bad about what you’ve done doesn’t matter if you don’t change your behavior.  So is that the behavior change?  If not, what is?

For the most part I liked that Brack got up first thing and spoke about this issue, rather than ignoring it or downplaying it or waiting until after 5pm on a Friday to post it to their site.  And the apology had some good aspects, as I mentioned.   But the promise to do better didn’t leave me all that reassured as I am still not clear as to how that translates into action going forward.

So it is complicated.  I am no fan of China.  I haven’t forgiven then for Tienanmen Square.  They are a totalitarian, repressive regime and are engaged in ethnic cleansing as I noted previously.  Letting them into the WTO was a mistake to my mind, given how the abuse it.  The idea has always been that a free market will infect China and force it to liberalize. (Though the real plan has always been simply to make money, because we’re like that.)

The problem is that China doesn’t have a free market.  Every company in China operates only at the sufferance of the government and must be expected to act as agents of the government on deemand.  Any foreign company that does business in China has to partner up with one of those government approved entities, give it control in a joint venture, and be ready appease the Chinese government on demand.  So I would have rather Blizz avoided that altogether.  But that ship sailed years ago and they are hardly alone in doing business in China and to sanction them while giving Apple, Google, GM, the NBA, or whoever a pass doesn’t work for me.  And should you even punish a US company when many of its main competitors are owned in part or in whole by companies like Tencent and NetEase? Doesn’t that essentially help China more?

This is me thinking too much about the whole thing.

If after the apology you’re still on the #BoycottBlizzard bandwagon, I get it.  I don’t think you’ll get what you want, and you really aren’t doing anything to hurt China, or even support Hong Kong, but if Blizzard disappointed you then withholding your support is reasonable.

As for my own reaction, I didn’t rush off to renew my WoW subscription or pre-order Shadowlands.  My financial support remains withheld for now.  But it seems much more likely that I will do both when I feel the time is ripe.  I still have a good amount of time left before I need to do either.   This incident won’t stand in my way, but I will remain sensitive to how Blizz may behave in similar circumstances going forward.  And I wonder who will push the boundaries next and how Blizz will respond.  They could still mess this up.

The Ogres of Loch Modan

Loch Modan occupies the same spot in the level curve as Westfall, being good for players up to about level 20.  It has long been my practice… since my first serious ventures into WoW… to run both the human and dwarf/gnome starter zones.  The pacing is about right if you bypass a quest here and there, and you never start running up against quests in the orange or red range.

That and I enjoy both zones.  They are similar in being smallish zones that feel bigger than they are, yet very different in layout.  Westfall has you ranging out from Sentinal Hill near its middle while Loch Modan is almost the inverse, with the loch in the middle forcing players to travel in a circle around it.

Loch Modan – Classic Map

Unlike Westfall however, Loch Modan does not have a dungeon at the end of its main quest line.  Even with the vanilla experience curve there is probably a limit to the number of low level dungeons you need.

There are, however, come elite ogres to battle with if you want a group challenge, congregated in the Mo’Grosh Stronghold in the northeast part of the zone.  I mentioned them in a previous post as we passed through Loch Modan in a series of quests that ended up with us in The Barrens on the way to Ratchet.  There are three “elite” quests that send you into ogre valley, and we had only knocked out one.  So this past Saturday we decided to take on the other two.

Well, some of us did all three since we ended up with some alts in rotation.  The main group has still not formed up.  Earl is still mid-move and Bung was away for the weekend, so it once again fell on alts to keep us busy.  I’ll have a whole post on alts later.

Actually, one main was with us.  Ula was on as her level 20 mage, a key part of the planned main group.  But Skronk was on with a level 19 dwarf paladin and I had my level 20 restoration druid, rounding on what would have been a decent group in EverQuest.  We had a tank, a healer, and a mage for crowd control and DPS.

The first two quests come from Thelsamar, while the third is part of the quest line around Stonewrought Damn.  After running into The Wetlands you come back and need to get a drop the ogres, which is kind of a pain because the rest of the quest line is soloable, with a group quest popping up in the middle of the chain.  Later WoW would never do that except to lead you into an instance.  Classic has no qualms on that front.

So off we went to take on the ogres.  And it went pretty well.

Fighting an elite ogre

As I said the last time we were out here, a dedicated healer changes the equation.  We were able to take single ogres without issue and pairs with some effort, though Ula was quick on the polymorph to sheep them if we needed.

We were again sitting at a cave to fish out some of the specific ogres we needed.

Orge cave screen shot from the previous trip

It was also said that the drop needed for the Stonewrought Dam quest would only drop from the ogres in the caves, so we kept on them.  But once you’ve cleared the easy cave… easy because your group is up to it… then you start eyeing the more difficult cave.  The cave where Chok’sul lives.

Chok’sul is the named ogre in the area, and one of the quests is to slay him and bring back his head.  Slaying him was the stretch goal for the evening, but we started off so well that we decided to head over and see about him.

His cave, the main cave in the valley, is deep.  Oddly, for me it was quite recognizable as the same cave used for some of the ogres in Nagrand in The Burning Crusade.  Never remake an asset when you have a good one to hand.

The cave itself wasn’t so bad.  We had to knock over a couple of ogres to get way into the back where Chok’sul was.  We found him there with two attendants.  We hoped that we could get one or both of them on their own, but when the pull happened we got all three.  Ula sheeped one and we tried to burn down the other two as quickly as possible.

We killed one attendant but in keeping Skronk alive I had pulls aggro with healing and Chok’sul was on my druid, pounding him to paste before I could adjust.  In hindsight there were a few things I could have done… going into bear form, for example, might have kept me alive longer since I had aggro… but I went down.  And without heals we were all soon running back to the cave.

When we got back we found we had made the classic WoW Classic blunder.  We had wandered into the cave after another group had cleared a bunch of it.  We saw them headed across the valley.  But rather than suspecting anything we wandered straight to the back of the cave.  But as we were running back to our corpses most of the cave respawned and we were in an ugly location with a couple of ogres wandering close to our corpses.

The plan was to resurrect and take, use a health potion quickly, then take whatever came at us.  We knocked down the closest one, but ended up wiping as we caught a couple more.

Back to the cave again.

The second time our position was better.  The ogre we had slain had been alone to one side of us, so we had a safer spot in which to resurrect.  There was still an ogre on us, but we were able to take him down right after we resurrected.

Ogre in the cave – note all the skeletons

Or space cleared out, we turned our attention to see how the Chok’sul situation had developed.  It looked like the respawn popped another ogre in between us and Chok’sul, but it looked to be far enough out to be able to pull on its own.

That ogre mystic up and off to the right

We got lucky on that.  Skronk was able to proximity pull only it and we had cleared enough space for ourselves to be able to break line of sight so it would come to us.

The bigger bit of luck was that Chok’sul attendant, the one we killed, did not respawn.  So we only have Chok’sul and another ogre.  It was time to sheep the ogre and let Chok’sul come and get us.

We were able to knock him down, though his ogre helper had to be re-sheeped before we were done with him.  Then we all looted Chok’sul to get his head right away lets something else go wrong and leave us in another situation.

We then went after the other ogre, dispatching him.  We were done with that quest, we just had to fight our way back out of the cave.  Fortunately getting out wasn’t so bad and we were able to clear our way to the cave entrance without further mishap.

There we took stock.  Chok’sul’s head had been obtained and we had knocked out the various ogre flavors that needed to be slain.  However, despite all that work in Chok’sul’s cave, we still had not come up with the crystal drop needed for the Stonewrought Dam quest.  It was back to the smaller cave, where an ogre at the entry waited for us.  We slew it and got the drop at last.  It was time to get out of Mo’Grosh Stronghold.  As with Chok’sul’s head, the corpse nicely yielded up a crystal for each of us.

We still needed a drop each from spiders and crockalisks, so spent some time hunting them.  Unlike elite ogres, they were only dropping one each.  But we were able to burn through them as fast as we could find them… finding them being the only real issue.  Eventually though we all ended up with the quest items we needed and headed back to the dam to turn in the quest.

After that there was a small matter of jumping in the water to defuse a Dark Iron blasting charge set to blow up the dam.  Then it was the final quest turn in.

As with the end of the Deadmines quest after you slay Van Cleef, Chief Engineer Hinderweir VII shouts out your name for the whole zone to hear when you wrap up the quest line.

A shout out for the help

After that it was back to Thelsamar for the other quest rewards.  Probably the best item received was the ring for slaying Chok’sul.

A ringing endorsement

It is not the best ring in the game, but for me it was the first ring I had received.  And any ring with some stats is better than no ring at all.

There is a post brewing in the back of my head about comparing how gear gets doled out in WoW Classic, where certain slots are not filled for many levels… shoulders just started to drop for us while rings, trinkets, and headgear are still mostly to come… to how a game like EverQuest II does it.  I cannot recall a slot you can’t fill by level 10 there, though one would need to loop in crafting, and there is another comparison to be explored I suppose.

Anyway, post ideas for the future.  But our Saturday night adventure in Loch Modan came to a successful conclusion.  Hopefully it won’t be too long before we get everybody together and into the Deadmines.

Expecting Too Much from New Eden

Last Tuesday afternoon, just after I got home from work, I brought up the launcher for EVE Online.  I did so by accident, as I meant to bring up the Blizzard launched to play WoW Classic.  But I let it patch and run up just to keep it current.

Then I looked at the online player count and was a bit surprised to find it below the 15K mark, and you know what came to my mind right away.

First known occurrence of “EVE is Dying”

I realize that a weekday afternoon, and one after a three day weekend in the US, isn’t necessarily a peak time, but 15K seemed pretty low.

For the past year or so I have come home in the afternoon to find the count between 20-22K most days and, as I have written in the past, I generally consider low ebb later in the evenings, when the Euros have gone to bed and it is safer to move things around, to be about 18K players online.

I had heard The Mittani talking about diminishing peak numbers on consecutive Sundays since the start of the Chaos Era, but that seemed premature to me.  You could chart small declines, but I thought you really needed to get past the login bonuses and free SP event before the numbers would start to really be telling.

Well, here we are, Chaos Era in full swing, more nerfs on the way with the September update, and no promotions or events in progress.  So Goons are working on gloomy charts, Nosy Gamer is having a look at NPC and player destruction that doesn’t bode well, the MER has NPC commodities as the new biggest ISK faucet, and my own anecdotal evidence all seem to add up to something being amiss, manifested in the concurrent player count numbers, which you can see over at EVE Offline.

I realize that CCP doesn’t mention concurrent player count anymore, preferring the trend towards daily and monthly active users, the darling metrics of the mobile domain where ads are often part of the revenue stream. (Have you seen Candy Crush Saga lately? There has been a pretty big swing towards “watch an ad video, get a booster!” in their model.)  But the concurrent player count feels more like the reality we play in, so a dip is not good news.

This has, naturally enough, led to a cottage industry over on /r/eve and in the forums and wherever else about what CCP needs to do to fix this.

What I find interesting is how many people can move straight from the stance that CCP is both slow and incompetent to a grand master plan for fixing EVE Online that pretty much demands that the company be both quick and excellent at their craft.

My poster child right now is this post, which is a master class in glossing over reality.  The premise is that CCP should add back walking in stations, shove whatever Project: Nova is right now into the mix, and try to turn the game into what Star Citizen aspires to be some day.

Leaving aside my myriad objections to avatar play in EVE Online (summed up as: You have to build a whole different game to support it), the very easy jokes to be made at the expense of Chris Roberts, and the completely half-assed, evidence free, changing horses mid-stream vision being espoused, what in the last sixteen years could lead anybody to believe that CCP has the capability of doing this in any time frame that doesn’t include the heat death of the universe as a benchmark measurement?

I remain convinced that people outside software development think that just because it is easy to describe something it mush therefore be easy to develop.

That is not the way of the world.

Just last week I suggested that CCP wasn’t going to be able to fix the new player experience in any meaningful way that would have even the slightest impact on new player retention.  I mean, I wrote “point and laugh” as my possible response to whatever they come up with, but that was what I meant.  And I say that because of CCP’s history.

It is like when people say that CCP should make things like level 4 missions more fun… something else I have seen come up as part of this… and I again wonder what people think has been going on since 2003.  Do you think that CCP has not tried?  Also, your idea on how to do this is badly considered garbage that won’t work.  Just accept it.

The game is what it is, having grown and developed almost spasmodically over the last decade and a half.  It hangs together on social bonds, vengeance fantasies, pretty screen shots, angry memes, and the sunk cost fallacy, and anything that CCP could do to “fix” the game has a pretty good chance of upsetting that balance.  I swear the corporate motto ought to be, “We did not see that coming!”

Which isn’t to say that I don’t think CCP can do things to help the game along, and even make the NPE better.  There are lots of ways the game could be made better.  But what CCP needs to do is way down in the fundamentals, blocking and tackling level stuff.  There is no room for Jesus features any more as there are too many balls for CCP to keep in the air as it is.  That one labelled “faction warfare” rolled under the couch a couple of years ago.

But what you don’t do is mask things with uncertainty.  Chaos is not a viable business strategy unless you’re selling safety from it.  Rational people, when faced with chaos, tend to try and find a safe place to weather the storm.

Anyway, we’ll see what comes to pass.  I fear that the Chaos Era may have officially pushed me into the bitter vet status, so i’ll probably just go play some more WoW Classic.

Top Five MMORPG Stories I am still Waiting for in 2019

We are here in the final third of 2019, just four months left to go in the year and it has been a blur so far.  Everything has gone by too fast… except for those last two weeks before WoW Classic, which seemed painfully slow.

But there are still some new stories I am waiting for to pop up, things I feel certain we’ll hear about between now and the end of the year.

So I put together a list of five such news stories that I will be watching for between now and New Years Eve, and I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get them all.  These are, of course, steered by my own interests.  Your mileage may vary.

1 – Blizzard – WoW Classic Plans

Less than a week ago Blizzard let WoW Classic out into the wild and suddenly the retro sound track of life started playing Oops!… I Did It Again as the WoW team once again unleashed an uncontrollable juggernaut into the MMO scene.  2004 all over again, and Blizz will be some time getting it under control.

But with that much positive feedback on WoW Classic, including the stock price getting a bump, they cannot possibly leave things as they are.  They have to announce a plan for future retro operations.  They have hinted at various things, but the board of directors will want the ongoing stock boost that will come with an announced path forward.  It can be more fresh WoW Classic servers in a year.  It can be plans for The Burning Crusade.  It can be a tech breakthrough to eliminate queues.  But they have to announce something.  If there isn’t a whole session about this at BlizzCon 2019 I will be disappointed.

2 – Daybreak – The Breakup

Part of my New Year’s Predictions for 2019, we have been getting hints about Daybreak becoming multiple studios with Darkpaw Games and Twitter accounts for a while now.  Somebody has to be buying some or all of the place.  At some point… probably on a Friday afternoon after 3pm Pacific Time if I know Daybreak… they are going to have to spill some news on this and give us something in a press release.  Waiting for that Friday afternoon.  My vested interest here is to end up with a company that is focused on the EverQuest property that won’t be distracted by, or need to bear the burden of, fruitless attempts to make battle royale a thing again at Daybreak.

My current tinfoil hat theory is that CCP moving EVE Vegas to San Diego for 2020 along with the EverQuest team putting out a questionnaire about a possible player event in 2020 adds up to Pearl Abyss buying some, if not all, of Daybreak.  Maybe they want PlanetSide Arena as well, or maybe the don’t.  We’ll see.  The odd part about this crackpot theory of mine… other people have written more about it than I have.

3 – CCP – New Player Experience

CCP has been fretting about new player retention… again.  Despite the fact that their numbers seem to land pretty solidly within the industry norms, they want to do better.  An admirable goal, for sure, and they have declared that they are pulling resources from other projects to work on this.

The problem is… well… have you played EVE Online?  Nothing short of a complete revamp of the UI is going to make it more comprehensible.  And it is still an 16 year old MMO, a market position where a 2% new user retention rate is considered viable.  So I am waiting patiently for CCP to announce their plan to tackle this issue mostly so I can either be amazed or point and laugh.  I expect to do the latter.

4 – CCP – The Golden Parachute Escape

It was a little less than a year ago that the Pearl Abyss acquisition of CCP closed.  That included a series of performance goal to meet in order for CCP and its investors to get the full $425 million.  I expect that once the first anniversary of the acquisition hits in October we will see a quick exit by some of the vested CCP honchos, with Hilmar leading the pack.  I would buy into his statements about how he loves to interact with EVE Online players a lot more if he didn’t already have a foot out the door on his way to a new venture.

So the news I am waiting for concerns the disingenuous rats deserting the ship.  After that maybe somebody will have a better plan than chaos and pitting various player groups against each other in order to improve EVE Online.

5 – Blizzard – New Games

I had a bunch of possible items for fifth spot, all of them Blizzard related.  For example, what ever became of Diablo Immortal?  NetEase says it is done.

If nothing else, I have the core of a BlizzCon projection post already set.

But on that list, the easy first item was to hear about new games that Blizz has been hinting about.  And not an old new game.  Not Diablo IV.  But a new new game.  Blizz has found success in the past making new versions of the games the main developers have enjoyed.  This has been somewhat diluted by the growth of the company.  It is no longer a bunch of people who enjoyed raiding in EQ so they decided to make WoW, but I still want to see what they have going.

Summer Movie League – Toy Story 4 Merely Dominates the Week

Were done with week three and there already seems to be a pattern for this summer’s Fantasy Movie League and the box office in general.

And that pattern is “under performance.”

For the third week in a row the top new releases of the week have failed to hit their expected numbers.

This past week saw Toy Story 4 dominate the weekend as expected, and even set a Pixar record for Friday numbers… which included the Thursday night previews… and yet fall short of expectations.  The film was being projected to bring in between $145 and $160 million.

Instead it barely broke the $120 million barrier.

That is still literally dumpsters full of cash being hauled in for a movie that is well reviewed.  Everybody I know who saw it recommends it.  Even Jason Scott called it “… the best and most well made unnecessary sequel I’ve seen.”

It just didn’t get to where the industry thought it would.  Is this just not a summer for movies?  Because the other two new films, Child’s Play and Anna, both missed their estimates as well.

Anyway, I went all in on Toy Story 4.  Taking advantage of the lack of penalty for empty screens, I went with the Friday + Saturday pick I mentioned in last week’s post, leaving blanks.  That wasn’t an awful pick in hindsight, but it wasn’t as good as the full lineup I went with for other leagues.

With Toy Story 4 pulling up the way it did, the scores for the week ended up looking like this:

1. Goat Water Picture Palace – $95,542,794
2. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $89,080,065
3. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $88,349,964
4. grannanj’s Cineplex – $87,148,187
5. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $86,931,732
6. Conical Effort – $86,931,732
7. Joanie’s Joint – $86,648,508
8. Too Orangey For Crows – $85,698,734
9. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $83,672,691
10. Ben’s X-Wing Exp(r)ess – $43,148,969

The perfect pick for the week was 1x TS4 Friday, 1x Child’s Play, 1x Aladdin, and 5x John Wick 3, the last being the best performer, which was good for $109 million.  But nobody in the league got that.

Goat got first going with Friday TS4, Sunday TS4, 2x John Wick 3, 1x Avengers: End Game, and three empty screens. and getting in

Hamster rang in second with 1x TS4 Friday, 2x Child’s Play, 1x Dark Phoenix, and 1x Avengers: End Game, earning an extra $2 million because Dark Phoenix was the worst performer of the week.

Conical and I both went the 1x Friday TS4, 1x Saturday TS4, and six empty screens route.  I only came in ahead because I had the better estimate on the tie breaker.

Of note is SynCaine, the only person on the list without Toy Story 4 in their lineup.

Unfortunately, the most common pick was forgetting to pick this week.  Ben’s pick was a roll over of his pick from last week and several people past 10th place were in the same boat.

All of which left the overall scores as:

1. Goat Water Picture Palace – $256,899,574
2. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $246,793,598
3. Too Orangey For Crows – $237,172,334
4. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $233,860,872
5. Joanie’s Joint – $224,306,550
6. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $220,641,904
7. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $219,431,873
8. grannanj’s Cineplex – $183,864,990
9. Ben’s X-Wing Exp(r)ess – $176,726,850
10. Conical Effort – $171,160,273

There is still not an insurmountable gap between 1st and say 7th place yet.  That could be made up over the next ten weeks of the season with small wins.  Anybody below that is probably going to need a big win or for the front runners to pick badly or miss a week.  It has been known to happen, especially over the summer.

Then there is the alternate season score:

1. Goat Water Picture Palace – 26
2. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – 23
3. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – 19
4. Too Orangey For Crows – 15
5. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – 15
6. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 14
7. Joanie’s Joint – 13
8. Ben’s X-Wing Exp(r)ess – 10
9. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – 9
10. grannanj’s Cineplex – 9

That is, of course, much tighter.  Win a few weeks and you’ll be on top or vying with those who are.

All of which brings us to week four of the season.  The choices for the week are:

1. Toy Story 4 – $752
2. Annabelle Comes Home – $319
3. Yesterday – $136
4. Aladdin – $126
5. The Secret Life of Pets 2 – $74
6. Child’s Play – $73
7. Men in Black International – $69
8. Avengers: Endgame – $59
9. Rocketman – $41
10. John Wick 3 – $38
11. Godzilla – $23
12. Shaft – $22
13. Anna – $18
14. Late Night – $17
15. Dark Phoenix – $16

We have an off week for blockbusters, so Toy Story 4 is fully expected to hold on to first place by a large margin this week.  Given a standard 50% drop it ought to be worth $60 million at the box office.

There are two new films on the list this week.

The first is Annabelle Comes Home, the latest entry in the Conjuring universe, which includes The Conjuring series, the Annabelle films, and The Nun.  Horror, especially during the summer, is always a wildcard for me.  The Annabelle movies have done well in the past, often better than expected.  But what happens when Annabelle is sharing theaters with Child’s Play?  Does a supernaturally evil doll care about one that is evil via a software issue?  And does the fact that some drive-ins are doing the pair as a double feature have any impact?

The long range forecast is for $31 million.  However, the long range forecasts have also been too optimistic pretty much every week so far, so how much stock do you put in them now?

Given the $60 million estimate for TS4, the FML pricing seems to indicate that they think $25 million is more on par.  Do you take two Annabelles as an anchor or one TS4?  Maybe?

The other new film is Yesterday, which features Himesh Patel as the only person who remembers the Beatles.  Something happened and they are no longer part of our timeline, only for whatever reason one musician remembers them and their songs… and, of course, can play them and remembers all of the lyrics to the key hits.

So he spends a while trying to figure out why nobody has heard of the Fab Four, then proceeds to make bank by introducing the songs of the Beatles to the world, claiming them as his own.  Along the way, hilarity no doubt ensues.

Now this brings up a decent late night dorm room discussion, which is whether or not the Beatles catalog is timeless and would become hits no matter when they appeared in history, or if they are part of their time and might not get noticed today.  Does I Want to Hold Your Hand go anywhere in a world with 50 Cent?  Can Elenor Rigby make a dent against the last know pop song ever, Uptown Funk?  Would Hey Jude have to be Hey Dude as the trailer suggests?

Feel free to argue about that in the comments.

The film was written by Richard Curtis, whose works are well known, and directed by Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame, but I am having a hard time getting behind it, if only because I know in my gut the ending has to restore the Beatles to the timeline and it will be all for naught or end up with Paul McCartney suing or something like that.  Amusing premise, likely has no satisfying ending.

And the long range forecast seems to agree, pegging this at around $10 million.  Decent, but no summer blockbuster.  The FML pricing likewise puts it around that point.  On the other hand, this is the Beatles we’re talking about here, which probably means my 70 year old aunt and all her UC Berkley friends will want to go see it.  I don’t know.

And the rest of the field is just leftovers from past weeks.

So what do you pick?  Do you go with the likely stability of Toy Story 4 and back fill with some titles that might break out or be under priced based on their previous week performance?  That might get you 1x Toy Story 4, 1x Yesterday, and 6x Anna.

Or do you bet on a pair of Annabelles, with something like 2x Annabelle Comes Home, 2x Yesterday, 1x Rocketman, and 3x Dark Phoenix, the latter being the worst performer in week three, which might make it subject to over-conservative pricing?

I am leaning towards Annabelle, but the filler is still wide open for me.

Whichever way you go, get your picks in soon.

Summer Movie League – Pets and Phoenix Falter

The first week of our summer Fantasy Movie League is in the books and was marked by the two big releases falling short of projections.

Both the Secret Lives of Pets 2 and Dark Phoenix opened up last week, projected to be $50+ million and $40+ million respectively, but neither made their mark.  Instead SLP2 was just past $46 million and Dark Phoenix only crossed the $32 million mark.

Instead, the anchor of the week for the perfect pick was 3x Aladdin, which ended up somewhat over the modest projections for it going into its third week.  The perfect pick of the week ended up being 3x Aladdin, 1x John Wick 3, 1x Avengers: End Game, and 3x A Dog’s Journey, the latter also being the best performer of the week.  That was worth $101 million.

Nobody in our league went with the perfect pick, or even anchored on 3x Aladdin, and the scores sorted out as follows:

1. Goat Water Picture Palace – $91,105,328
   
2. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $80,360,143
   
3. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $79,555,422
   
4. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $77,230,126
   
5. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $76,936,780
   
6. Ben’s X-Wing Exp(r)ess – $75,985,803
   
7. Too Orangey For Crows – $74,604,906
   
8. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $69,881,816
   
9. Joanie’s Joint – $65,313,730
   
10. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $62,588,778

Goat led the pack anchored on SLP2 and Aladdin, but was boosted by six screens of A Dog’s Journey, which earned an extra $2 million per screen by being the best performer.

I was apparently the only one who decided to see if the lack of penalty for empty screens would make it worthwhile to pile on higher priced features.  If you use the Cineplex Builder it will always give you a full lineup as it does not seem to adapt to the rules of individual leagues.

Different Rules are Different

But I went with 1x SLP2, 4x John Wick 3, and 1x Bharat.  Not a huge pick, but enough for third place, though that was in part because I got the $2 million bonus per screen for having picked the worst performer of the week, Bharat.   I was also the only one to do that.  Not suspicious at all.

And so it goes, one week in.  Being the first week, the one score list is all I need, but now we are on to week 2 and four new releases.  Here are the overall choices:

1. Men in Black International – $536
2. Secret Life of Pets 2 – $352
3. Shaft – $334
4. Aladdin – $271
5. Dark Phoenix – $205
6. Godzilla – $143
7. Rocketman – $130
8. Late Night – $96
9. John Wick 3 – $80
10. Avengers: Endgame – $56
11. MA – $55
12. The Dead Don’t Die – $28
13. Detective Pikachu – $26
14. Book Smart – $11
15. A Dog’s Journey – $11

First up on the new titles is Men in Black International, which is expected to top the week, if only just.  Well, it is expected to get to nearly $40 million, but that doesn’t feel like much after the pre-summer blockbusters that have already launched.  Still, it is a soft week, so it will be king.

On the plus side, Men in Black is a well known franchise and people really liked the first one.  On the downside, the two sequels did not bring much new to the franchise, as the Honest Trailers review of the series points out.  And there is Will Smith playing the genie in Aladdin rather than wearing the dark suit.  Oh, and the reviews so far stink.  Still, if you’ve already seen Godzilla, John Wick 3, and Avengers: Endgame what other options do you have?

I guess there is Shaft.  They got apparently the only person worthy of playing John Shaft, Samuel L. Jackson, to take the starring role… and I say that because he was who they tapped for the Shaft reboot of the same name back in 2000 as well.  I believe this is actually a sequel to the film from 19 years ago, and takes place 20 years down the line in the story as well as in reality, so SLJ makes perfect sense.  But the original Shaft films were very much of their time back in the early 70s and I am not sure how well that translates to 2019.  That it took nearly 20 years to get a follow on doesn’t bode well.

Shaft is currently pegged at about $23 million, which would mark it for 3rd place in the box office this weekend.

Then there is Late Night, which stars Emma Thompson as the only female late night talk show host on the air who turns to Mindy Kaling when her ratings begin to drop off.  The film is being distributed by Amazon Studios, isn’t expected to be big enough to get make the long range tracking list, is priced into 8th place in between John Wick 3 and Rocketman, and will probably be on Amazon Prime in a month in any case.  Somebody projected $5 million for it.

And finally there is The Dead Don’t Die, which might seem like a Game of Thrones reference, but isn’t.  As a low budget zombie film, you might dismiss it, having seen it priced way down the list, just ahead of the aging Detective Pikachu.  It might not even crack $2 million.

But then you go and look at the cast… which includes Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Rosie Perez, Carol Kane, Selena Gomez among others… and you wonder how this cannot simply make more than that.  Seriously, the name didn’t register with me, but once I looked it up I wanted to go see it, and zombie films are not really my thing.  Even with mixed reviews it feels like it is priced too low to me.

So with that in mind my early week lineup is 1x Men in Black, 1x Aladdin, and 6x The Dead Don’t Die.

Picks lock late night tomorrow, so get yours in soon.  Next week we will face the juggernaut of Toy Story 4, guaranteed to be a 3 day split.

SuperData Sees Apex Legends Jump in Behind Fortnite

SuperData Research released their chart for February digital sales this week, so we have new data to gaze upon.

SuperData Research Top 10 – February 2019

On the PC end of the chart, the top four remained in the same positions we saw them in January, with League of Legends still in second place.

The interesting bit comes with fifth and sixth place, the race between Fortnite and the newly launched Apex Legends.

Apex Legends was on fire from the moment it launched, heading to a huge number of players very quickly.  SuperData posted a supplementary chart on Twitter about the quick growth of Apex Legends.

SuperData Research time to 50 million downloads

For all that speed and hype however, Fortnite managed to stay ahead of the bright new star of Apex Legends, grabbing fifth place while the new kid ended up in sixth.  Missing completely from the chart is last month’s sixth place finisher, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.  So maybe we know who took the hit on that front.

The rest of the chart is rounded out by World of Tanks, which climbed up a spot to seventh, DOTA 2, which went from tenth last month to eighth, Word of Warcraft, still flagged as “West,” which is down in ninth, and FIFA 19 Online, making its first appearance on the chart in tenth.

Also missing from the PC chart is BioWare’s Anthem, another big February launch.  However, unlike Apex Legends, a lot of what is being said about Anthem is negative.

In the middle on the console chart FIFA 19 and Fortnite held on to first and second place.  Then we have the two big February launches, Anthem and Apex Legends in third and fourth.  Then there is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, holding on to fifth, keeping it on the upper half of the chart for three months running.  Down the list, Grand Theft Auto V stayed alive another month, clocking in at eighth.

On the mobile chart, the top five stayed the same, with Candy Crush Saga and Pokemon Go swapping positions compared to last month.  Of note is sixth place entry PlayerUnknowns Battlegrounds Mobile, the first time one of the mobile ports of a battle royale title has made the cut.

For comparison, EEDAR also has their list out for February, which mostly combines digital and retail, and which is US only, making it the orange to SuperData’s apple I suppose.

1. Anthem
2. Jump Force
3. Kingdom Hearts III
4. Far Cry New Dawn
5. Red Dead Redemption II
6. Resident Evil 2 2019
7. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate*
8. Metro: Exodus**
9. NBA 2K19
10. Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII**

*No digital data
**No digital data for PC

EEDAR’s report also shows Apex Legends topping the social media impressions, followed by Fortnite, League of Legends, CD:GO and DOTA 2.

Back to SuperData’s report for February, it contained the following supplementary notes on the digital video games market for February 2019.

• Worldwide digital game spending returns to growth. Consumers spent $8.2 billion on digital games across console, PC and mobile in February, up 2% compared to February last year. Growth came primarily from mobile, which was up 9%. This more than made up for the 6% decline in premium PC, where the market continues to face a tough comparison against sales of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds last year.
• Apex Legends has the best launch month of any free-to-play game in history. Apex Legends generated an estimated $92 million from in-game spending across all platforms, with the majority coming from console. Despite this, Fortnite still came in above Apex Legends in the top grossing rankings.
• Anthem makes over $100 million in digital revenue at launch. Anthem was the top-selling title by units on console in February, with an above-average digital download rate. In-game spending came in at $3.5 million across both platforms.
• Hearthstone takes a sharper downward turn. Hearthstone revenue had its largest year-over-year decline ever this month, dropping 52% across PC and mobile, partly due to heightened competition within the genre and likely franchise fatigue.
• NBA2K continues its exceptional run. Life-to-date through February, NBA2K19 in-game spending is up an estimated 42% compared to NBA2K18, showing some of the highest growth seen from any mature AAA franchise in recent years.