Category: Editorials

[NM] Rockstar North Paid No Taxes, Earned Tax Relief


It’s hard to look at Rockstar North and not see dollar signs (or pound signs) around the massive success of Grand Theft Auto V, but this week’s news is sure to set some fires in more than a few bellies as the company’s finances come into more scrutiny.

TaxWatch UK a thinktank that tracks business earnings reported this week that Rockstar North has made an estimated $5 billion in profit over the last six years. Despite this massive amount of profit, the company still determined that it deserved tax relief and claimed £42 million between 2015 and 2017, or 19% of all government credits issued to the industry during that period. And with all of this income, can you guess how much Rockstar North paid in taxes? That’s right, absolutely nothing between 2009 and 2018.

The thinktank noted:

“It is outrageous that the UK taxpayer is being asked to shell out tens of millions of pounds in subsidy to the developers of Grand Theft Auto, when at the time that the game’s developers put in their tax credit application Grand Theft Auto V had already generated several billion dollars in sales and profits. This is a drive-by assault on the British taxpayer and corporate welfare scrounging at its very worst.”

It should also be noted that no one is claiming any illegal activity on the part of Rockstar North. The news of Rockstar’s nonexistent tax bill is likely to come off as especially egregious considering the company recently opened up a literal casino in Grand Theft Auto V where players from certain countries are able to buy virtual chips with real life currency.

(Source: TaxWatch)

Whatever Happened To: RedBedlam Ltd.


As I delve deep into the “whatever happened to those people” part of our ten year anniversary, one game caught my memory like a flash of lightning in a bowl of chocolate pudding. Whatever happened to that game The Missing Ink?

Actually that answer is obvious: It was shut down. The Missing Ink shut down its servers way back in January 2014 without much of a blurb from the press at the time. The closure was not meant to be permanent as developer Redbedlam announced that they would be retooling the game and keeping the two dimensional paper cutout characters while expanding on the three dimensional world and the things that it offered. That never happened, The Missing Ink never relaunched and for that matter it doesn’t look like Redbedlam ever acknowledged the game’s existence after January 2014.

So what the hell happened to RedBedlam? Thankfully for us, the company is a UK business and as such its records are on public display over at Companies House. A few months after this announcement, RedBedlam posted its fiscal results for the year ending May 31 showing net assets of £136,838. In October 2015, RedBedlam would release the game Bedlam, a first person shooter with a rather odd art style. The game would peak at 315 concurrent users on Steam but not until 2018.

By 2016 these total assets would plummet to £21,385, which appears to be where the company starts circling the drain. Bedlam receives its last patch on November 4, 2015. Fast forward another year and the assets drop to £3,072. By this point the company is running as a shell corporation, as the fiscal reports show that there is only one employee hired, down from five in 2016.

Companies House later filed to strike RedBedlam off of the official record. Apparently someone was around to contest this, as the proposal was removed with cause shortly thereafter. By the end of the 2018 fiscal year, RedBedlam was a dry husk; its fiscal earnings showing a net negative in assets and zero employees still on record.

Of RedBedlam’s eight officers, only one remains: Kerry John Fraser-Robinson, who is presumably keeping the company up and running in name only to pull in what few sales Bedlam is offering and to make phone calls in hopes of getting some investors on board. Otherwise it looks like this is the end for RedBedlam.

Whatever Happened To: Insel Games?


It’s been nearly a year and a half since we talked about Insel Games here at MMO Fallout, so I thought why not check in and see if they even still exist?

The last time we talked about Insel Games was in February 2018 when the company did something very, very stupid. Insel Games popped up a few years back to crowdfund the western releases of Wild Buster and Guardians of Ember, two top-down ARPG titles that performed fine enough on Indiegogo. Wild Buster raked in roughly $13k and Guardians of Ember a slightly more impressive $80k. Wild Buster even boasted Serious Sam and Duke Nukem among their character roster.

I’ll let Insel Games describe themselves:

“InselGames is a small independent publisher of online games based in Malta. Members of our team have worked on games such as Last Chaos, Fiesta Online, S4 League, Florensia, Everquest 2 and Planetside 2. Our goal is to bring you the best independent MMOs with a fair business model (TLDR: no pay-to-win)!”

I know what you’re thinking: What was this big stupid thing that Insel Games did? Well, the CEO got caught attempting to manipulate Steam reviews for Wild Buster after the title didn’t meet initial expectations and Valve gave the company the big boot. All of Insel Games titles were removed and the developer was banned from the store front. However it happened, Insel Games lost or gave up the publishing rights to both Guardians of Ember and Wild Buster. Guardians of Ember transferred to GameForge while Wild Buster renamed itself Champion of Titans and moved over to IDC Games.

You might be thinking that Insel Games just dissolved and died off, what with their getting banned from the largest PC game store and losing what few titles they had publishing rights to, and you would kinda be right. Right now the Insel Games website has two titles listed under “Our Games” with no mention of their prior published titles. The first game is World of Fishing which some of you may vaguely remember. World of Fishing shut down two years ago with players receiving free keys to Guardians of Ember as compensation. Whoops.

The other game appears to be titled MAD: Revenge of Narc. The website notes that this is a working title, but I’m assuming that it too is dead. I can’t find any mention online of an MMO with this name, and reverse searching the three screenshots on their website also doesn’t turn up any results. The Malta business registry similarly doesn’t have any status listed for the company.

So it looks like Insel Games is basically dead, assuming their domain isn’t simply waiting for whatever funds have already been invested in it to dry out.

MMO Fallout Turns Ten, And I Remembered Its Birthday


MMO Fallout is ten years old this week, and unlike the last three years I actually remembered its birthday this time around. Honestly I wish I had more prepared for this momentous occasion that is basically to my own enjoyment and everyone else’s annoyance, but in the meantime enjoy some snapshots of MMO Fallout’s early years.

I will remember you…

Will you remember me…

Don’t let your life pass you by

And then everything went downhill from there until we get to the modern day design of MMO Fallout as shown below:

[NM] Bethesda Introduces More Non-Cosmetic Cash Shop Items


It’s a new day, and that means another opportunity for Bethesda to remind us that the company can’t be trusted. The latest update that hit live servers just yesterday (July 16) introduces a new item to the Fallout 76 cash shop: Scrap kits.

Yes, scrap kits. Another instance of Bethesda selling items for real money in order to fix an inconvenience that they purposely added into the game in order to set up the player base to later spend real money. As the official website states:

“Scrap Kits are new one-time use items that you can use to scrap all the junk you’re currently carrying and immediately deliver the resulting components to your Stash. They can be used anytime, anywhere, without needing to visit a workbench or your Stash. You can unlock Scrap Kits in the Atomic Shop using the Atoms you’ve purchased or those you’ve earned by completing in-game Challenges. Upon purchasing Scrap Kits, you will be able to select which of your characters you’d like to receive them. Any Kits you own will appear under the Misc. tab in your Pip-Boy and can be activated there. Upon using a Scrap Kit, it will be consumed.”

And just to remind everyone, I have included a link to the Gamestop article where Pete Hines states that the Fallout atomic shop would be cosmetic stuff.

“All the content we ever put out for Fallout 76–all the DLC, all the post-launch stuff–is going to be free. That’s important. And to say, the Atomic shop is cosmetic stuff. To make sure folks understand–look there’s a line. There are people who have crossed it, but we’re going to stay on the right side of it in terms of the things you can spend money on and how this stuff works and what you’re getting for your $60,” Hines said. “That you know, when they put out new content or features or whatever, I’m getting that stuff for free. That feels right.”

The update comes alongside the addition of a greenhouse building that players can purchase and plop down, one that does not actually allow you to grow plants inside of it.

More Fallout coverage as it appears.

Crowdfunding Fraudster: Kickstarter Suspends Shady Campaign RAW


Check out the .gif image above. What if I told you this game was being worked on by a team of three people? What if I then told you that this game is being funded for just $78 thousand? What if I then told you that the dev team hopes to have this out by December 2019?

You’d probably accuse me of propping up a scam, a point that is now moot since you can no longer back the project. RAW is a self-described “sandbox open world hardcore MMORPG with unique approach to social structure and high attention to gameplay details,” and its creators Killerwhale Games from Germany want you to know that just because the overwhelming amount of detail being put into the game’s systems versus team size and development time/cost make it sound like a massive scam, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

What sort of crazy, near ponzi-scheme promises is KWG making? Well just check out their description of car mechanics and house building.

“For example, if you buy a car, you need to monitor its technical condition, because it will break down over time during normal operation. If you want to build a house, you need to purchase materials and find a truck to deliver them to the construction site. To better understand our approach, read the following blocks, which reveal it more deeply.”

But the buck doesn’t stop here. RAW is promising a world where everything is player built and player supported on the island. Want fancy cars? Someone has to buy and import them to sell. Town needs gasoline? Someone has to build and start a gasoline store. But watch out, because other players can steal your stuff, so you’ll need good security systems and, you guessed it, that’ll be another player’s duty.

The pitch eventually gets so tedious that even the least logical person couldn’t possibly believe that this team has the funds or capabilities of putting all of this in an online game. Working shifts and dealing with city parking, including paying fees to park and possibly dealing with your car getting towed if you park it somewhere illegally. Every car having engine, suspension, battery, generator, brake system, fuel system, each with their own failure systems, each with separate maintenance intervals. Every car having a unique key, needing to register the vehicle with the DMV in order to legally drive it. Power lines to bring electricity to the city. An immune system so your character can encounter diseases or indigestion from too much Taco Bell.

And if you read all of these awesome features and thought “this game sounds like a scam,” you’re not alone. While Killerwhale Games might have been rubbing its hands in glee after thrashing their funding goal (raising $193 grand of the original $78k goal), Kickstarter has stepped and put the kibosh on the whole campaign. The developer, naturally, has responded in a manner you’d expect from a professional game developer and not as a fraudster called out on his fake game:

Guys, expect our message about the current situation in discord. Shitstarter closed the project without even trying to figure out what was going on. The gameplay video was almost finished. We will continue the project anyway, because a huge amount of effort has been invested in it. Please don’t listen to a bunch of offended by life idiots and their bullshit. Thank you for your support and faith in us.

Best regards, Alex Tretiakov, Killerwhale games.

MMO Fallout looks forward to continuing coverage of the completely legitimate RAW MMORPG.

Mobility: Knights Chronicles, Or How I Played the Gacha Game


This week I played Knights Chronicle.

I’m not entirely sure how to go about this week’s Mobility impressions piece, because it wasn’t presented to me in the normal way that I usually look at game updates. Normally when a developer/publisher reaches out to someone like myself to cover new content, what usually happens is they’ll provide a press account or provide access to a beta/PTS version of the game in order to preview said content. That didn’t happen here.

Knights Chronicle just dropped the RWBY collaboration event a few days ago, and the update introduces five new playable characters from the Rooster Teeth anime series:

  • Ruby Rose
  • Weiss Schnee
  • Blake
  • Yang Xiao Long
  • Cinder Fall

As part of the update, Cinder Fall is easily obtainable through the in-game event dungeon. The rest are held behind loot boxes.

And that’s where we get to the meat of this impressions piece: Knights Chronicle is a gacha game, so in addition to my crystals earned in-game, I was given a small stipend of (premium currency) to draw heroes and hopefully, MAYBE, get something from the event. Each draw costs 200 crystals, roughly $20 in currency, and pulls 11 random heroes from the giant pile with a few guaranteed to be rare quality. I might have the opportunity to talk to you about things related to the event that I’m supposed to be talking about. Maybe.

Yang Xiao Long is also free, which makes three locked behind loot boxes. Pretty good, all things considered. Unfortunately my luck didn’t quite stick and after roughly $160 worth of hero summons, I had yet to obtain another hero. Roll another set and boom! There is Ruby Rose! So at this point I have yet to unlock Blake or Weiss Schnee, and who is to say that I ever will within the next couple of weeks? Obviously that assumes that my drive to continue grinding crystals holds up. I’ve spent some time reading the Reddit for Knights Chronicle and found people who have spent 4,000+ crystals (over $300 worth) in order to get the whole set of five. I’m not going to do that.

The characters themselves are quite powerful, so if you are a heavily invested fan of Knights Chronicle, you’re going to want to get in on this action. Cinder Fall’s leader skill increases fire allies’ attack by 40%, and her passive gives heavy bonuses to heroes with Fall Maiden(s) and at level 60 gains the ability to resurrect. Yang has a 60% chance to assume a stance that will let her counterattack, inflicting 200% additional damage if the caster was also counter attacking. Ruby Rose also has an ability to avoid fatal damage, while Blake summons ghosts to mitigate damage and Weiss Schnee stacks damage on damage.

You may notice that I haven’t actually talked about the gameplay of Knights Chronicle, and that’s because this game doesn’t have a whole lot going for it. The goal in the game is the same as it is with any gacha game: Collect heroes, pay money to get better heroes, and then look at your cute anime heroes. The gameplay portion where you set your team of five heroes through multi-tier encounters where you gradually level up their ability to do more damage and take more damage, to beat monsters that can also do more damage and take more damage, is ancillary, and only serves to reward you with more cute anime heroes and heroines for your collection to look at and reminisce about that time you spent $100 to get the shiny version. It’s like video game baseball cards, but you probably won’t be showing them to your kids in 20 years.

It would have been nice if Knights Chronicle had offered players some method of obtaining the whole set of RWBY by playing the event, because to players outside of the whales this whole thing is likely to come off as another example of the exploitative mobile market. This isn’t to say that Netmarble shouldn’t be able to monetize the games as it wishes, but the characters are the whole point of this events, and the whole notion of having a light at the tunnel where players can take part in the event, put in some cash of their own, and if they are dedicated enough come out with all of the heroes even if the ridiculously low odds don’t work out, which is the purpose of the event. Rather, when you have an event where you can spend hundreds of dollars worth of currency on a limited pull and the game still sticks its middle finger up and says “no you can’t have this,” and then graciously holds out its hand for more money.

That seems more likely to just convince people to quit. In fact, the longer this event goes on and the more obvious it is that the remaining characters are out of reach, I can feel my enthusiasm dropping like a stone. It’s cynical and it knows it, for a game that is deeply focused on that small minority who will pay hundreds to thousands of dollars on singular events so they can build a collection of .gif files of their favorite waifus and husbandos. Who needs to care about what I think when these whales will gleefully troll users out of the customer base in order to feel like their SSR-ranked Weiss Schnee is more exclusive and thus makes them a more special person, even though they put $500 of their real money for the third time this year into something that will probably be gone by 2022.

Nothing I say in this article is going to convince people to pull in one direction or another. The person who refuses to play these games because they view the gacha mechanics as manipulative and built by companies that will gladly ring you dry for nearly nothing in value and then hold out their hand for more, they aren’t going to suddenly start playing because I said the RWBY models are better quality than they are in the anime. On the other hand, the guys who could have put a down payment on a new car with all the money they’ve sunk into gacha games aren’t going to have a change of heart because I pointed out how alienating the event is.

I have no idea how to end this impressions piece, so I will leave you with a word of wisdom: Don’t pre-order games.

Everyone Missed It: Daybreak Permanently Closes Everquest Player Studio


Since Daybreak has fallen out of the public spotlight, nobody notices when they shut things down anymore.

Flashback to March 1 and you will find producer Nick Silva stating that the player studio is absolutely not dead, and will in fact return better than ever.

“In the meantime, we will be evaluating options for overhauling the Player Studio site with the intention of allowing broader categories of submissions and a more streamlined submission process.”

Unfortunately the player studio is yet another reminder that anything coming out of Daybreak should be taken with a grain of salt. In an announcement on June 22 that absolutely nobody noticed because not a single gaming website (including this one) reported on it, Daybreak quietly took the Everquest/Everquest 2 Player Studio out back and gave it the Old Yeller treatment. The announcement is as follows (their strikethroughs, not mine).

“Over the years, EverQuest II players have remained some of the most dedicated in any virtual world. Since Player Studio first launched, we have constantly found ourselves impressed and humbled by the boundless creative talents of our players. Over the years, members of our community have created countless new items that help bring even more color to the world of Norrath. After nearly 6 years, the Player Studio program has concluded for both EverQuest and EverQuest II. Player Studio items that have been previously approved will be released and remain in-game, but players will not have the ability to submit new items. We’d like to thank each of you for sharing your creations with us.”

This sunsetting makes Planetside 2 the only game remaining with Studio support, and the term “support” might be generous. The Planetside 2 sector of the Player Studio is performing fantastically, with the creator forums seeing an entire thirteen posts over the entirety of 2019. One of the posts is lamenting the fact that the user’s creation has been in limbo for over a year with nobody bothering to look at a simple decal submission. There has been roughly one developer post on the entire studio forums in the last two years, and that was to announce the initial suspension of new creators.

Source: Daybreak

MMO Fallout Reviews the EWin Champion Gamer Chair


Editor’s note: The chair being reviewed was provided by Ewinracing Corp.

Those of you who read MMO Fallout know that I am the prime authority on activities involving sitting on your duff. By day I am just a mild mannered MMO reporter, so I spend a lot of time typing on my laptop. Also by day I am a student attorney which means doing a lot of legal research, sitting in court, writing up stuff, and you guessed it…sitting down while I do those things. As a six-figured debted student, my history of chairs has generally fallen into the “what’s on clearance at Office Max” stack, chairs that are not exactly ergonomic, don’t provide lumbar support, and cost less than a new video game for a very good reason (low quality). Unsurprisingly, I’ve had some back problems arise from this.

So you can imagine my excitement when Ewinracing Corp reached out and wanted to talk business. If you don’t know who Ewinracing is, they sell those gaming chairs you might have seen your favorite Youtubers being sponsored by. They also sell gaming desks, tablet holders, and mini-PC sticks. I accepted the offer, and because I am a champion they shipped me out an Ewin Champion Series chair in my favorite color; Neon Green, and the rest as they say is about to be written in this review.

This is, without a doubt, the best chair I have ever sat in and Ewin was kind enough to not make me review this chair in the form of a Youtube video which is to everyone’s benefit. The chair itself is made of high-density separated foam over top a metal endoskeleton with a 120mm gas lift that claims to support up to 330 pounds. I am not close to two thirds of that weight, and it seemed rather unprofessional to purposely try to break the chair by hauling several people onto it in a way that it was not designed for, but given the metal skeleton I am willing to give EWin the benefit of the doubt and say that you should be good to go in terms of body support.

As far as office chairs go, this is a sturdy, sturdy bird. I did give the chair a heavy wiggle and bounce test to see how it held up as in my experience I’ve found that these self-assembled chairs tend to not feel completely secure, but the Ewinracing Champion Series chair is sturdy as a rock. If you have ever assembled an office chair, you already know what you’re doing here with the exception that there are covers for where the back screws into the base that you don’t normally find on other chairs. Even the bolts that come with the chair are thicker than I’m used to seeing, and add to the feeling of sturdiness that the Ewinracing chair provides.

The first thing you’ll notice about the chair if you are like me are the pillows. It is incredible how much of a difference some simple lumbar support can make on your sitting experience, and for the past few days I have sat in this chair and did not have to adjust myself or have any issues with back pain after prolonged sessions. The pillow is very comfortable and it can be adjusted higher on the chair if you’d prefer that kind of back support. As someone who is six feet tall with much of that height being in my legs, it’s refreshing to see a chair that rises high enough that my feet don’t touch the ground. In addition, the EWin chairs feature what they call “4D” adjustable armrests, which is really just a fancy way of saying that the armrests go up and down, rotate left and right, and even go forward and back. As someone who is rather finicky about my armrests, this is a big positive.

But when I received my chair, I wanted to know just one thing: Does the chair actually recline as much as it does in the videos, and is it as comfortable as they say it is? Short answer: Yes. I’ll be honest with you folks, this chair scared me the first three or four times I sat in it. I just had to check out one of the major advertised features of the EWin racing chair, that being that it reclines back to a point that on a regular office chair would just lead to the whole thing toppling backwards. Unlike a regular office chair, the Ewin gaming chairs have their center of gravity closer to the back of the chair.

This allows you to recline to a point where someone might just be able to check your teeth given proper lighting. It’s terrifying the first few times you do it, because anyone who has taken a spill backwards over their office chair knows that they are not generally designed to recline like this and stay upright with a person leaning all the way back. This isn’t anything to do with the chair itself, which I will reiterate is completely sturdy and gives no indication or reason to believe that it isn’t stable. After a few times reclining the headrest back, I can comfortably lay back on my Ewin chair without the fear of the thing toppling over and me injuring myself on the hardwood floor. It’s perfect for veg out sessions watching Netflix on the TV that is way too large for my tiny room. I recommend getting used to the idea by lowering the chair to a point where your feet are still planted on the floor while the chair is all the way back.

The shape of the chair itself forces your back into a healthy posture, and while it does feel weird at first, you pretty quickly get used to it.

Now let’s talk about negatives of which I can think of very few. The Ewinracing chair is as heavy as you would expect a thick metal framed chair to be, and this could be an issue during assembly if you are buying it because you have a really bad back and assembling a standard chair is already an issue. The chair itself is also very firm, which people who like a soft chair might find disagreeable although the pillows should take care of any of those complaints. There’s also the matter of cost of which this chair is roughly $350. Three hundred fifty smackers is going to sound like a lot for a “gaming chair,” especially when you don’t have the luxury of sitting in the chair beforehand like you do at most office stores.

After having the opportunity to try out what in my opinion are the best gaming chairs in the business, if Ewinracing contacted me and said they needed the chair back, I would happily pay for the chair to just be able to keep it. Don’t tell anyone that I said that. Yes, it’s easy to say that a product is a great value when it is provided for free, but I can say with complete confidence that the Ewinracing Gaming Chair is worth every penny.

Photographed: The clearance office chair

Thankfully you don’t have to spend every penny to get one of your own. If you head over to the official website, you can get 25% off of your purchase of an Ewin gaming chair with the coupon code “mmofallout” (without the quotation marks).

I want to thank the folks at Ewingaing Corp for offering up this great opportunity.