From the Void Gaming Awards 2024
By Marc Eybert-GuillonHello and welcome to our second yearly celebratory awards article for a year when nothing went wrong and nobody’s life was ruined in the name of profits by greedy and overconfident executives! After all, this was the year that saw the release of the first ‘quadruple-A’ video game, so what could go wrong?
BEST OWN GOAL
Suicide Squad, Concord, Redfall, xDefiant, Foam Stars, Anthem, Skull and Bones…
Which of these released this year? Which of these were terminated this year? No one knows and no one cares, because no one asked for them. The perfect embodiment of capitalism ruining a medium’s landscape as publishers rushed to produce as many live-service games as possible in the faint hopes that one of them would hit gold. Thing is, you can’t capture an audience in an already crowded space with an uninspired and half-baked product made by teams that would rather have been making anything else, no matter how much money you throw at it.
The appropriately titled Suicide Squad had all the production value in the world, a large marketing campaign and the backing of a massive franchise, yet it landed like a wet fart. Just a month later, Helldivers 2 came in with close to no marketing and kicked ass. The difference? The latter was made by a team with a proper vision and the will to realize that vision.
It’s that simple.
BEST INDY GAME
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Indulge me, please. I’m a pretty big fan of the original Indiana Jones trilogy. My cat’s called Indy and I’m one of those people who say “There’s only ever been 3 Indiana Jones movies”. I saw them at a formative time in my life and they will forever be part of my culture and influences as a result. Suffice it to say that I was anxious coming into this release. I was excited at the potential, but also scared of the AAA landscape and the track record of movie adaptations in general.
Well, I couldn’t be happier about the result. MachineGames really came in and delivered way above expectations. As a game, it might become a modern classic. As an adaptation, it’s a gold standard. It’s that good. As a gamer, I’m having a ton of fun exploring these gorgeous locations, uncovering secrets and punching fascists all day. As a fan of the original films, I feel at home. The game does an incredible job of replicating how these movies looked, sounded and felt, from Troy Baker’s incredible performance to the overall tone, sound design and even the choreography and camera work of the cutscenes. All that without giving into nostalgia bait and gratuitous fan-service (apart from the intro, which I’ll allow considering how the rest of the game plays out). This game couldn’t have been made cynically, as it’s drenched in the love the devs clearly have for the original material and the vision they have for their own entry into that canon.
What I take from it is that this is what every AAA game should be. By that, I don’t mean that every AAA game should be a big budget franchise single player action adventure first-person blockbuster. What I mean is that ‘AAA’ should signal a game developed by an experienced team at the top of their game with the resources to fully realize their vision. It doesn’t have to be big-budget. It can be live-service, single player or whatever else. What matters is that AAA publishers trust their studios to make the games they want and know how to make.
LET. THEM. COOK.
It does feel bittersweet to imagine what masterpieces we might have gotten from the likes of Arkane or Rocksteady if they had been treated the same as MachineGames, but let’s hope the industry eventually learns from all of this.
Less Suicides, more Indianas.
‘GO PLAY IT’ AWARD
Mouthwashing
This is the sort of game that’s best experienced if you know as little as possible going into it, hence the award’s title. Just know it’s a psychological horror game that’s at times quite disturbing, so you’ve got to be ready for that. It’s also quite short (2-3 hours), so my recommendation would be to settle for a one-session playthrough to really take it in wholly.
This is the sort of game the AAA industry can’t make because it’s too niche, too small, too personal, too artistic… even though it would cost them the price of an executive’s watch to produce. Thankfully, the indie scene is here to provide us with these sorts of completely unique and deeply affecting experiences. Thank you.
‘RUN AWAY’ AWARD
Alpha CRC
Just run a quick search for posts about Alpha CRC on LinkedIn and let me know what you find. Here, I’ll do it for you:
'Alpha owes me over 5k € in unpaid invoices from 2023.’ Jesús Melcón Vega
'Alpha owes me 6,000+ € in invoices.’ Eleonora Imazio
'They are overdue by more than one entire year.’ Ricardo Douglas
'[They] owed us more than 20k.’ Ana Abad
'All of my communications and emails were ignored for weeks.’ Arturo Pérez Ortega
This localization agency has been stealing from translators for at least a decade. They’re a notorious late-payer, and more often than not a non-payer altogether. They are banned from the Proz.com Blueboard, where companies post translation job offers, and they were threatened last year with a class-action lawsuit, which reportedly ended up getting most of the translators involved paid, as the company seems to operate under the motto “Don’t pay unless threatened”, as demonstrated by this statement from an anonymous source:
'I used a debt collection agency to get my long overdue payment.’
Another source confirmed that these issues date back long before the recent public backlash, recalling having to fight for six months to get paid for an urgent €900 job back in 2012.
Alpha’s regularly tried claiming that these delays are caused by cashflow issues they are working to resolve, but since this has been going on for years, they’re still around to this day with $33 million in revenue in 2022 and they tend to magically find the money to pay when they feel threatened, it would be safer to assume that they are simply trying to get away with robbing as many people as they can.
The client list on their AI-laden website includes Blizzard Entertainment, Konami, Bandai Namco, Wizards of the Coast and other high-profile gaming companies.
Whether this is all incompetence, greed or a mix of both, none of the options are good, which easily earns Alpha CRC the prestigious ‘Run Away’ Award!
MOST BRAZEN SCUMBAGGERY
LocalizeDirect
LocalizeDirect, while not one of the largest localization agencies out there, is a staple of the industry, albeit not always a welcomed one. Their most prominent claim to infamy was their steadfast refusal to credit translators, to the point where they’ve been called out directly in some of the games they worked on, which is otherwise unheard of.
It is important to note that they recently supposedly revised their policy to provide their translators’ names if developers ask for them (conveniently leaving the door open to not doing so if the developers forget to ask).
However, they were involved in an event this year that would have made Alanis Morissette proud, as we caught LocalizeDirect greatly exagerating their own credits. While perusing their website, we noticed they were listing games as part of their portfolio that we had worked on (some of which we had provided full localization services for, which made the situation particularly suspicious). Upon enquiring with the games’ publisher, it turned out that LocalizeDirect had merely handled a couple of marketing posts during a week when we were unavailable. No in-game content, just an isolated bit of PR.
We would never go after small studios or individuals for slightly embellishing their CVs, as we know it’s hard to get noticed out there, but it’s quite egregious to see a large company essentially stealing credits off of a technicality, and it’s especially ironic when that company is infamous for having spent years preventing the proper crediting of translators.
LocalizeDirect has now removed the offending games from their portfolio.
EVIL CAPITALIST AWARD
KEYWORDS & THE AI GRIFT
AI exploded in recent years, but it’s also more recently stagnated and even regressed as it’s started running out of original material to steal and feed upon, and started learning from its own output, devolving more and more into a cursed self-destructive technological Ouroboros.
The advent of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney was fun and impressive, but a couple of years later, pieces of art featuring those telltale strange details and that characteristic plastic feel have come to drive people off.
Chat GPT was fun and impressive too, but now every company Twitter apology that feels slightly off gets an “Is this AI?” response.
We’ve been told for decades that machine translation would replace us, yet games with dodgy translations still get lambasted for using AI.
AI can’t make it past the uncanny valley. Approximating human craftsmanship was easy, replicating it is near-impossible. At the end of the day, because of its very nature, generative AI cannot create, it can only regurgitate imitations of previous works, like the stuffed corpse of a long-dead pet.
The reason general interest in AI is waning is that past the novelty of “Cool, a computer can do that!”, what makes art of any kind resonate is the human connection it creates. Humans communicating feelings and ideas these algorithms cannot even have. We inherently do not have a deeper interest in what robots can do beyond the initial curiosity of discovering what we can manage to make them do. Look at chess: AI’s been beating top human players for decades, yet people keep watching actual people play chess.
People who really want AI in arts are people with no interest in these art forms, but rather in the money they can squeeze out of them. There are many companies in games and localization trying to push for the increased use of AI at their workers’ and the medium’s expense. Keywords takes the award because at this year’s GDC in March, one of their representatives sat in a room full of passionate game localization professionals and told us that they were fully embracing AI for the vast majority of their projects and that we should essentially suck it up and accept that machine translation has become “good enough”. I wrote an article about that event and my visceral reaction to it, which I invite you to read.
Fuck these people.
BALATRO AWARD
Balatro
Balatro.
BEST SPEECH
Swen Vincke
We at the Official Swen Vincke Fan Club like to celebrate the best moments in Swen Vincke every year. After all, the man cooks any time he’s handed a microphone.
Jokes aside, listen to him. His words are extremely important:
🤍 See you in 2025
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