Valve backpedals on Paid Mods for Skyrim
Last week, Valve announced an immediately controversial update to the popular Steam Workshop mod distribution service – allowing creators to put their creations behind a paywall. The decision was met with near-universal disdain for the feature’s effect on a long-standing community, 25 percent payout to content creators, and reliance on mod creators to issue DMCA requests on other users submitting their creations.
After four days of enraged fans venting on forums, creating petitions and labeling Valve CEO Gabe Newell a “False God” – Valve and Bethesda announced they would be removing the service from Skyrim. In the announcement, Valve was quoted saying, “stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there’s a useful feature somewhere here.”
P.T. vanishes, taking Silent Hills with it.
Back in October, a mysterious “playable teaser” appeared on the PS4 online store entitled P.T. The atmospheric horror experience took users through one deeply unsettling hallway into a full-on descent into madness. Once some diehard fans solved the game’s deeply confusing final puzzle, it was revealed that the demo was for a reboot of Konami’s reboot of the Silent Hill franchise, entitled Silent Hills.
The project was set to star The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus, with Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim) and Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid) set to produce. However, after Kojima’s abrupt departure from Konami back in March, the status of Silent Hills was unknown. But this past weekend, a series of developments caused Konami to officially sign the death certificate. First, some eagle-eyed fans realized that PT was set to be removed from the PSN store on April 29 (it is now no longer available). Then at a film festival, Del Toro said the project hadn’t been moving forward and that it “breaks (his) greasy heart”. Reedus also commented that the game appeared to be dead. Finally, Konami formally confirmed that the game was cancelled.
Banjo-Kazooie is Back (In Spirit, At Least).
The term “spiritual successor” is tossed around a lot in this new era of retro revivals. Kickstarter has allowed the original creators of beloved classic franchises to bring back their old idols — without actually bringing them back. Mega Man creator Keniji Inafune raised millions in crowdfunding for his new platformer Mighty Number 9 (which will be seeing a retail release this September), Double Fine just released Broken Age (their fan-funded love letter to classic adventure games), and now the creators of Banjo-Kazooie will be campaigning to fund the creation of Youka-Laylee.
The Kickstarter was a vibrant success, hitting its’ £175,000 goal in less than an hour. The new 3D platformer is heavily inspired by Rare’s N64 classics, from the dual-lead character concept, to the vibrant visuals, even to the title font. Depending on how the crowdfunding round goes, the game is planned for release on XBox ONE, Playstation 4 and WiiU. Backers will be able to get the full game for a $15 donation.
Follow Chris Berg on Twitter @Mushroomer25