I don't know what all of it means, yet; nobody does. I'll be right backstage when Phil Spencer discusses the manifold futures that may occur. Outside of a couple very specific instances - and I think this applies almost exclusively to a few Sony owned, marquee studios - the exclusivity that once allowed a platform to differentiate its silicon is just a new way to lose money. Helldivers 2, whatever else it may be, showed Sony and maybe everybody else what good it was keeping your toys to yourself. Square Enix learned that the tentpole games it wants to make barely make financial sense as exclusives, even on a console with almost sixty million units. So what does it look like when you represent the most massive agglomeration of game development talent, brands, and resources that has ever existed? Is exclusivity real in that case? Is it real, chat.

Pictured here: young Noah, who for some reason shares a fascination with Alien and Aliens with my own youngest creature. Called Ronia, she has red hair and blue eyes, which I think is the rarest phenotype. Anyway! These youths could not be more different, but they are absolutely united on this: Alien and Aliens ball hard. That is to say, they ball out of control.

Club PA members of any level can order our August sticker pack today! You’ll just need to be logged into the PA store with your Club credentials to see it in Gabe’s Sticker Shoppe. I got a Cricut machine for Christmas last year and this is our 8th straight month of producing a sticker pack here at the Krahulik household. I design all of these myself and then they are printed,laminated,cut and packed by my lovely wife Kara. This month’s offering includes a sheet of Merch Friend Tokens (MFT’s) and a large Automata sticker.

There’s lots of big games dropping this month and plenty of reasons to be excited. I am cautiously optimistic about the new Visions of Mana game. I played a bit of the demo on PS5 but I don’t like demos that will not let you carry your progress over. It might be weird but the game I’m actually most excited for this month is Gundam Breaker 4.

Yeesh. It's been rocky for a minute, you could say since the PSN debacle, but the relationship between Arrowhead and the powerful audience their game built has always been somewhat testy. In the company's Twitter profile, it leads with the phrase "A game for everyone is a game for no one," which I think is just a fascinating thing to say. The version on the page is even surrounded by tildes, which lends the affair a kind of insouciant charm. At the end of the day, it's a profound statement of intention. Maybe a little aggressive. But you can't say they don't live by it.

Valve has a new game in the works that got a big writeup on the Verge even though there is a message when you start the game asking folks not to talk about it yet. In the 25 years we’ve been making Penny Arcade Jerry and I have had the opportunity to see more unfinished projects than I can count. We’ve seen games that never even got released, hardware that is years away from release, board games that are just the designers notes and doodles on 3x5 cards. Occasionally we are asked to sign an NDA but most of the time it’s just a request not to share any of the stuff we see commonly referred to as a “Friend-D-A”. Actually it’s usually someone kindly asking “Please don’t make a comic about this.” and guess what, we don’t. We don’t talk about these projects for two main reasons:

They don't have Spongebob yet - yet - but boy do they have a lot of other shit. Fortnite's "one weird trick" is ingesting intellectual property in such a way as to unify it, aesthetically. You can also see the skin all the time, because you're looking from outside. It's clearly a kind of collectible figurine that is wearing a bunch of other collectibles. PUBG had crates and stuff too, but they were always very… odd. This is something else. There is something about the juxtaposition of milsim lookin' tacticool and… I dunno… Cheech & Chong?

I actually love Call of Duty and play the new one every year but I could do without all the IP crossover skins. Watching Cheech kill a Zaku or Homelander teabag Nicki Minaj is not what I’m looking for in my military shooter. I understand why they do it. Obviously it’s money but in my opinion that money comes at the cost of your games identity whether the game be Call of Duty or Magic the Gathering. It works for Fortnite because fortnite isn’t a game with an identity. It is a big blank billboard ready to advertise the latest movie, TV series or shitty truck. You can't dilute something that was never concentrated.

I always sort of feel bad for films that people use to calibrate the zero point on their scale; once that consensus rips through, and all the switches get flipped down. I haven't seen it, but I have a hard time imagining that a movie that doesn't literally kill the viewer rests at some point above zero. I mention that because I'd heard it had a zero on Rotten Tomatoes! But it doesn't have a zero. It has a six! It's not much better, but… still. It isn't the other number.

Colin Kaepernick getting into turnkey IP theft reminds me a little bit of when people were taking the FTX money. They couldn't really have understood everything that went into that decision, and I think it's more or less the same thing here. "AI" is a variety of things, many of which are almost toys at this stage of adoption: social media filters, chatbots, that kind of thing. That person probably isn't going to have a strong understanding of what underlying processes result in a picture of them on a couch being transformed into a picture of themselves as an Anime Paragon. I think this is most people, frankly. It's a buzzy space because people with draconic amounts of money slaver at the prospect of a neofeudal order. Similar to a few years ago, when "blockchain" and "Web3" were the magic words that gave petitioners entre to the secret vaults, now we just got some new words. "Online" was once one of these sacred words, for example. "Social," etc. If all you have to do is say some words, I can understand why a person would say the words. Especially if it could mean freedom - blessed freedom, once and for all - from artists.

There are a couple interesting projects that popped up in our “Feeling Nostalgic” feed this week. This feature on the site pulls up comics from the archive that appeared on this day years ago. It just so happens that two very cool series ran during this period.

This is something Gabe and our mutual friend Kris Straub share - a suspicion that ghosts may be real. More than a suspicion, perhaps. They live their lives in accordance with the undeniable, universally understood fact of spectral incursion. I haven't gone into it super deep with Gabe but I can guess at the techniques he's developed to ensure his safety - and the safety of his family. Kris told me that he leaves shoes upside down, with the holes against the carpet, because… I'm trying to remember. I think the idea was that the open shoes implied an entity, and that was sufficient to create a point of ingress? Was that it?

It's all true; it is possible to enter the Halls of Denigration and secure yourself a key. Through the dark alchemy of Twitch Drops, your attention can be transformed into a closed beta code for Marvel Rivals. Well, maybe. They don't have an unlimited amount of codes to drop for Twitch. And it only goes until tomorrow. There was some other arcane text around getting it, but as I gazed upon it the sigils began to swim. How much danger was I willing to enter in order to maybe get a key for an Overwatch clone, ten years after the fact? I closed the browser.

I spent the last week working on stickers, but now I’m ready to open up new commission slots for August. I started doing these last month for the first time in 25 years. Before that I had only ever offered commissions during the Child’s Play charity dinner. It’s one of the requests I get most often though and after discovering the site Artistree I decided to give it a try on a regular basis. Last month I did four commissions and really enjoyed the process! I’ve worked with lots of big companies over the years but getting to work one on one with PA readers was awesome. Nothing beats hearing directly from someone how much a custom drawing I did means to them and I want to do more of that going forward. 

At a certain level, Disney seemed to think that it had a Captive Audience with the MCU and that it didn't really matter what they did with it. It turns out that it matters a lot! It matters a lot if the movies you make are good. With a pair of movies that brought in almost five billion dollars, they capped off and paid everyone for their ten year investment in a way that feels earned but also, you know… final, with real stakes. Once they lost that scaffold they lost the plot. There wasn't any attempt to earn audience anymore, they had them. When they stopped being captivated, they stopped being captive. Now Disney has flipped the script; they've decided to go with captive creators instead.

The hour is here!