Looking back at 2022 makes me feel tired. Tired for a lot of reasons, including getting laid off and having to start a new job, the failing health of my parent’s generation and having to manage that, another election season, the Russians, the general state of the world, and Elon Musk… I am very tired of Elon Musk.
I am also tired of hearing the word “charcuterie,” which I think I have heard more in 2022 that in all my past years combined. I believe my wife unironically said “charcuterie” 14 times last week alone.
2022 is what we get
But here we are at the end of the year and another staple annual post here, something else that makes me feel a bit tired. Some years I start writing this post in May or June, so it is easy to wrap up. And then there are years like 2022 where I am throwing something together at the last minute.
For looks back at past years, there is a list.
- Looking Back at 2021
- Looking Back at 2020
- Looking Back at 2019
- Looking Back at 2018
- Looking Back at 2017
- Looking Back at 2016
- Looking Back at 2015
- Looking Back at 2014
- Looking Back at 2013
- Looking Back at 2012
- Looking Back at 2011
- Looking Back at 2010
- Looking Back at 2006
Anyway, let’s step right into this steaming pile so I can get it over with.
Blizzard
Highs
- Shipped the Dragonflight expansion in 2022!
- Characters don’t use “borrowed power” directly in Dragonflight!
- An actual plan announced for how Dragonflight is going to play out!
- Shipped Overwatch 2!
- Shipped Diablo Immortal!
- Launched Wrath of the Lich King Classic!
- Gave us a ship date for Diablo IV!
- Actually announced a NEW GAME, something in the co-op survival genre!!!
- Microsoft acquisition promises a cleaning of house when it comes to their loathsome corporate overlords
Lows
- Dragonflight didn’t get that “what a great launch” compared to past expansions press release, a staple of expansions since WotLK, which is probably a bad sign
- Dragonflight repeats the Shadowlands theme of a quick run to level cap and then the next two years in end game grind
- Dragon riding on special dragon mounts… is still borrowed power
- That two year Dragonflight roadmap is pretty light on dates and details
- This new survival title is way out in the future
- Overwatch 2? That didn’t seem to make much of a splash
- Heroes of the Storm??
- StarCraft universe???
- Diablo Immortal just lacked a cryto connection to fufill all of our worst monetization expectations
- Diablo IV seems unlikely to hit its mark when it comes to a ship date and that was probably thrown out there for the benefit of Microsoft
- No matter what happens with the Microsoft acquisition, the people who made Activision Blizzard a horrible place, who led by example in making it a hostile work environment, will be rewarded handsomely for all of their bad deeds
- Oh, did I forget about Blizz and NetEase falling out, leaving Chinese gamers in the lurch?
Enad Global 7
Highs
- EverQuest and EverQuest II get expansions, updates, and 64-bit upgrades
- Mini-expansion and new starter areas for LOTRO
- PlanetSide 2 hits 10 and tops its past world record
- A lot of press coverage about their unannounced Marvel super hero title
- They shipped some other titles… I’m sure…
Lows
- EverQuest and EverQuest II got absolutely no other attention from the company
- The idea of LOTRO on consoles seems less likely now than it did two years ago
- Marvel super hero title cancelled… again… after getting all that attention
- Daybreak titles make up most of the software revenue and almost all of the recurring subscription revenue
- The company is now pretty much run by the Daybreak team, which has a track record of shipping nothing new and simply milking old titles
- It probably says something that I have this little to say about the company
CCP
Highs
- FanFest was back!
- Big expansions were back!
- The Uprising expansion saw players coming back and the daily population count rise!
- The MER is now better than ever!
- Faction Warfare finally got some love
- The Photon UI is starting to come together
- Finally listened to players on about the economy
- Finally listened to players about resource harvesting, and specifically about locking resources into low sec
- Finally gave us corp/alliance logos on ships
- Came out against putting crypto in EVE Online
- After many complaints CCP pulled the Prospector Pack, which sold a fitted ship, from the web store and promised not to sell ships in exactly that way again
- We actually had a few big brawls in null sec, including that recent one at H-PA29
Lows
- Whatever EVE Vegas was, or whatever was going to replace it in the US, that seems to be dead
- Kind of a long wait between announcing Uprising and actually getting to it
- Spent a whole YEAR not listening to players about the economy or resources while every obvious prediction came to pass
- EverMarks for logos are annoying, gated busy work to get logos that we would happily spend money or PLEX on
- Faction Warfare remains an all-in commitment for your character, so if your corp or alliance isn’t all-in you need an alt
- The Photon UI is still slower and less responsive that the old UI, especially under TiDi
- We’re quite a ways from the next big war in null sec
- 33% price increase for subscriptions… in US dollars and Euros, which means it was a lot more for some people in other countries
- Did you see the player count between the subscription price increase and the Uprising expansion?
- The player count is on its way back down now that the expansion has been around for a bit
- CCP prefers Monthly Active Users over any direct player count, and they have been obviously goosing that number with generous login rewards and give aways, but MAU does not reflect people in space
- The infrastructure of sites that support EVE Online saw a notable decline in 2022 with sites going dormant or altogether dark
- CCP only backed away from crypto “for now” after putting them in the Alliance Tournament and highlighting their CEO meeting with crypto evangelists
- CCP thought the Prospector Pack was a good idea and, while they claimed to be listening to feedback, did not remove it from the store until their pre-planned promotion was over
- Also, while CCP removed the Prospector Pack from the web store, they continued to sell it directly in-game as a pop-up offer to new players who ran the career agent missions for mining, thus making their statements about not wanting sell fitted ships generated out of thin air yet another bald faced lie
- CCP is clearly going to sell fit ships again
- EVE Valkyrie and CCP’s other VR games have now been shut down.
- CCP is still devoting resources to making a first person shooter despite that market being both crowded and dominated by a few titles as well as CCP having shown no special insight nor innovation on that front
Other Gaming Industry Notes
Highs
- Valheim gave us the Mistlands at last
- Pokemon Scarlet and Violet!
- Another big Minecraft update
- RimWorld got the Biotech expansion
- LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalks Saga finally made it out the door
- Guild Wars 2 got End of Dragons
- Pokemon Violet and Scarlet
- New World seemed to be trying to get its act together
- Lost Ark has hung on to its opening success and remained pretty stable
- Solesta was a pretty solid, if a bit low budget, table top RPG simulation
Lows
- That Game Awards were boring; stop trying to make them the Oscars and just do your own thing
- Amazon took its sweet time trying to fix New World, and it is still something of a mess
- Meta can’t make the metaverse happen even with an annual burn rate in the billions
- VR actively set back by Meta after they kicked legendary John Carmack to the curb along with his idea of lighter, more affordable headsets, instead opting to follow the Juicero guy and his plan for a more expensive, more awkward path forward for VR hardware
- Much of the year was spent again with crytpo bros trying to conflate their horrible idea with things like the metaverse and online gaming
- Just when it seems to be clear to most that cryto in video games is a bad idea, THAT is when Richard Garriott decides to prove once again he is the 21st century harbinger of death for video game trends by announcing his own shamelessly transparent cryto NFT video game scam
- Crowd funded MMOs continued to prove, with very rare exceptions, that their promises are empty and that you should never give Wimpy a hamburger today on the promise of being paid on Tuesday
Television, Books, and the Media
Highs
- Still a lot of stuff to watch
- Amazon gave us a Middle-earth show and William Gibson’s The Peripheral
- HBO gave us House of Dragons and more Westworld
- AMC gave us the final seasons of Better Call Saul and The Walking Dead
- Netflix continues to surprise with new content like Wednesday and The Glass Onion
- Even Disney+ managed to give us Andor, a welcome entry in the Star Wars canon
- I liked most of the movies I saw this year, including Top Gun: Maverick, Bullet Train, The Batman, and…. um….
- Books… I am sure there were some new books released… lots of them probably
Lows
- A fair chunk of what I mentioned above ended up being something of a disappointment
- Netflix is chaotic and is as likely to green light garbage or cancel something you really enjoy
- I feel the fragmentation of so many streaming channels more and more with each passing year
- It was a bit of a struggle to find things that were both new and good in any media
- HBO Max is just pulling a bunch of their original content to avoid paying royalties, proving once again if you want to have access to something reliably you should own the physical media
- I think I saw one movie in the actual theater this year, Top Gun: Maverick
- Thor: Love and Thunder really tried hard to recapture the magic of Thor: Ragnarok… and kind of failed
- Top Gun: Maverick was the US box office leader in 2022… not that it was bad, but there apparently wasn’t anything better (Avatar: Way of Water fans will bring up the overseas box office, but that is like losing the objective and claiming you won the ISK war… it doesn’t count… also, TG:M is still winning on that front)
Blogging and Social Media
Highs
- The blog is still here and running, now sixteen years into is existence
- I posted for 1,000 days in a row
- Blaugust was a thing again this year
- Some people still visit this site regularly
- I did have some good interactions on Twitter, which remains my social media of choice
- I spent quite a bit of time on Twitch
- If social media gets bad enough, blogging might see a revival!
Lows
- Fewer people visited this site this year than in any year since 2007
- Any resurgence of long form writing like blogging will probably bypass established blogs to jump onto whatever the trendy platform of the day ends up being
- Posting for that many days in a row sounds a lot more interesting than it is… and it doesn’t sound all that interesting
- Email subscriptions on the blog pretty much broke this year, and WP.com doesn’t care in the least
- Bing decided it doesn’t like WP.com sites, so the bit of traffic they sent me petered out
- The local neighborhood of blogs shrank some
- My time on Twitch was mostly it being in the background so I could collect channel points or game drops honestly
- Facebook remains a horrible dumpster fire
- I cannot train Instagram’s algorithm to show me what I want
- Elon Musk is trying to turn Twitter into the biggest and loudest dumpster fire in social media
- There is no direct replacement for Twitter and what it was
- Mastodon has moved from a small collection of individually managed fiefdoms with their own rules and norms and tribes and echo chambers into a somewhat larger version of all of that
- Post News is that condo you just bought and are trying to furnish with a limited budget and no free time
- Hive doesn’t run in a browser
- I used to joke that Linked In was business Facebook, but it has really become that, and I don’t mean in a good way
The World
I’m not sure I have any highs. There is a war in Europe, COVID is still a thing no matter how hard we try to pretend it isn’t, attacks on voting rights, democracy, and free speech have become just part of the normal way of things, and, as always, nobody wealth or famous ever faces any real accountability unless they hard somebody else wealth or famous. And don’t get me started on people who are billionaires. If we could harness self-absorbed narcissism, our dependence on fossil fuels would be solved.
2023
And we’re on to a new year this weekend. Let’s hope for something better.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 