A new whitepaper from two Seattle organizations exhibits research into how tabletop roleplaying games, such as Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons, can be used to help children and teenagers develop their social skills.

The January whitepaper is the result of a collaboration between Foundry10, an educational research organization, and Game to Grow, a nonprofit organization that focuses on using games as therapeutic aids.

Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) such as D&D are essentially collaborative storytelling exercises for three to six players. One player takes the role of a game master (a.k.a. referee or Dungeon Master), who sets up a scenario, while the other players create characters and play through that scenario. When a player takes an action, game mechanics like rolling dice are used to see whether or not those actions succeed.

The COVID-19 lockdowns led to a boom period for TTRPGs, as the games are necessarily social, and are easy to run via video text programs like Zoom.

Dungeons & Dragons in particular has been on a cultural upswing that predates the pandemic, thanks to popular live-play shows (Critical Role, Dimension 20), appearances in popular TV programs (“Stranger Things”), and high-profile players who range from Vin Diesel to Stephen Colbert. A major D&D motion picture, Honor Among Thieves, made its public debut earlier this month at the 2023 South by Southwest film festival.

“These make-believe worlds [in TTRPGs] are useful spaces for youth to develop these [social] skills,” Foundry10’s whitepaper hypothesizes, “as the ludic game space often has more concrete, easier to understand rules than the complex ecosystem of the ‘outside’ world.”

In its exercise, Foundry10 aimed to see what group problem-solving behaviors were exhibited by children and teenagers while they played an online tabletop role-playing game, both spontaneously and when prompted, and to see if those players made any progress on their social and emotional learning (SEL) skills over the course of the experiment.

Over the course of 10 weekly play sessions, Foundry10 and Game to Grow concluded that TTRPGs can be a helpful tool to aid young players’ SEL development. Since the game’s events are separated from players by a layer of imagination, it can provide a “sandbox” where players can “practice their regulation, collaboration, planning, perspective taking, and pretend play skills.”

This isn’t to say that TTRPGs by themselves are a therapeutic tool, but rather that trained professionals can use a TTRPG as a useful guided exercise.

The study employed four Game to Grow staff members as “facilitators,” a term that encompasses “game master, referee, storyteller, and teacher.” They weren’t there to simply run the game, but to make sure the game was a potentially useful experience for its young players.

“The game itself is a delivery system for learning therapeutic interventions,” said Dr. Raffael Boccamazzo, a Seattle psychologist and the clinical director of the gaming-focused mental health organization Take This. “The examples that [Foundry10 and Game to Grow] included in this report did an amazing job of showing the direct interventions by the facilitator that created the spaces for growth.”

The use of role-playing exercises for therapy goes back over a century. H.G. Wells’ 1911 non-fiction book Floor Games is sometimes cited as an early example of the practice.

Using more regimented TTRPGs as a psychological exercise or tool is relatively new, however, with little outstanding empirical research on the subject. Much of this can be traced to the controversies that surrounded the TTRPG hobby in the 1980s, when parents and lawmakers accused D&D in particular of being Satanic.

“There’s been a lot of stigma around Dungeons & Dragons, and the limited research that existed before the last five or 10 years was largely driven from a moral panic perspective,” said Boccamazzo.

Boccamazzo is a public advocate for the use of TTRPGs in therapy spaces.

“There was research done in the ‘80s and ‘90s that looked to see if there was a link to criminality in D&D players,” Boccamazzo says. “Getting past that and into a more nuanced take has been a goal for a long time, and I’m glad to see it’s happening.”

For the study, Game to Grow staff members ran weekly 90-minute tabletop gaming sessions for four groups of young players, ages 10 to 14, via Zoom. The games used 5th-edition Dungeons & Dragons, running adventure modules from Game to Grow’s Critical Core gaming system.

Critical Core is a standalone RPG with its own unique setting, which Game to Grow released in October after a successful Kickstarter campaign. Game to Grow executive director Adam Davis described Critical Core to GeekWire as a “’beginner’s box for TA-RPG’ [Therapeutically-Applied Role-Playing Games], with a ruleset similar to D&D.”

“[Critical Core] is very similar to D&D 5E in a lot of ways, but it’s simplified a little bit to highlight those SEL skills,” said Caroline Pitt, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Washington and a co-author on the whitepaper. “It puts a lot of focus on engaging with the imagination, creativity, and problem-solving.”

Each challenge that came up in the game, whether it was a mystery, a puzzle, an obstacle, or a fight, was presented by the Game to Grow facilitator as an opportunity to practice social and problem-solving skills. Players who had big breakthrough moments might be given in-game rewards, such as a point of inspiration.

Notably, Game to Grow’s facilitators did not actually try to avoid causing conflict between players or their characters over the course of each game. Instead, they treated arguments as a necessary part of the exercise, because those could lead to resolutions, teachable moments, and the development of the SEL skills, such as the ability to productively express emotions, that were the point of the overall exercise.

The Game to Grow sessions included additional TA-RPG mechanics such as a bonus token, which one player could give to another to enable them to retry a failed roll. Each session also ended with three check-out questions, which asked participants to share predictions for the next game, reflect on the challenges they’d just faced, and focus on another player or their character.

The limitations of the study, according to the whitepaper, included the relatively short-term nature of the games; the small, relatively homogeneous group of players, who were 70% male and 94% white; and a need for more thorough interviews with the study’s participants after each session.

Foundry10’s whitepaper is, at time of writing, available to read for free on its website via Google Drive. Additionally, Game to Grow has written a book on its TA-RPG approach, Therapeutically Applied Role-Playing Games, which is scheduled for release on April 5.

The whitepaper authors include Caroline Pitt, Katharine Chen, Jennifer Rubin, Dominic Gibson, and Sam Bindman.

Seattle studio Polyarc Games announced an open playtest for its next project, a new multiplayer VR game set in the same universe as its award-winning VR adventures Moss and Moss: Book II.

“The playtest is us beginning to introduce some of the things we want to do in the future with the company,” Polyarc CEO Tam Armstrong told GeekWire. “We knew from the beginning that we wanted to explore a range of game mechanics for our IP. The playtest is us publicly branching out towards that long-term plan.”

Armstrong and Polyarc have been careful to not say exactly what game is being tested, aside from that it’s a competitive experience for multiple players. While they do have an idea of what they’d like to make next, the plan with the playtest is to get some genuine feedback from fans in advance of an official reveal.

“We’re excited about what we have, but we want to make sure everyone’s excited, too,” Armstrong said. “I can say for sure that it’s a familiar setting, and it’s still within the Moss universe, with characters that people will recognize. …We do have a specific idea we’re trying, with no concrete timeline about when it’ll be done.”

In Polyarc’s Moss games, the player takes the role of the “Reader,” an unnamed person who’s found a magical storybook. This allows them to observe and interact with another world, where they meet Quill, an adventurous young mouse on a journey to rescue her uncle.

Moss: Book II was released last year, originally as a timed exclusive for Sony’s PlayStation VR. It was met with widespread acclaim, including a win for Best VR/AR Game at the 2022 Game Awards, and is currently scheduled for release on Meta Quest 2 on July 21.

“We’re very appreciative of the recognition,” Armstrong said. “I’m so proud of the team. I was one of the game directors on the first Moss, but it was a new group of directors for the second. They did an outstanding job and made a better game than the first.”

“We’re very happy that people love Moss,” he said. “Hopefully they’ll want to come back to this world and see some more of it in this new game we’re playtesting.”

Since the release of Book II, Polyarc has expanded from 20 to 45 employees and moved into a new office in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. It’s also adopted a new, more hybrid approach to its workspace, with several full-time Polyarc employees working from as far away as the east coast.

According to Armstrong, one of the unexpected benefits of switching from a single-player game like Moss: Book II to a multiplayer release is that it’s encouraged Polyarc, as a studio that’s focused on VR games, to adopt practices that are friendlier to creating a hybrid workplace.

“Once upon a time, in earlier generations of [VR] hardware when it was a little bit cumbersome, it was important to be able to share the headset with people and see what was going on in person,” Armstrong said. “The good fortune of working on a multiplayer game is that it’s forced our hand in making that game possible to work on in a distributed manner, since [its multiplayer modes] will need to be able to work across the country anyway. It was just a coincidence that worked out.”

Interested fans are encouraged to sign up for Polyarc’s playtest, which is being held on the weekend of April 14-16. Participants will need access to a Meta Quest 2 VR headset, and will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

One of the most popular games on Steam is getting an official sequel this summer, as Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software has officially announced the release of Counter-Strike 2.

This is the latest installment in a series of military-themed, comparatively realistic first-person shooters that Valve has published and developed since 2000. In Counter-Strike, players group into two teams, the Terrorist and Counter Terrorists, and fight one another to complete objectives like planting or defusing a bomb.

Counter-Strike has been a tentpole franchise for Valve for over two decades, since its initial debut as a player-created mod for 1998’s Half-Life. The most recent game in the series, 2012’s Global Offensive, is one of the highest-grossing games on Valve’s digital storefront Steam, with a popular esports circuit, and has maintained a steady population of players for over a decade.

Valve’s official announcement of Counter-Strike 2 confirms a rumor that had been in circulation since February, when fans on Reddit noticed that a new NVIDIA driver update contained new game profiles named “cs2.exe” and “csgos2.exe.”

Off the back of that rumor, CS:GO recently set an all-time player record on Steam, with just over 1.42 million simultaneous users playing at once on March 11.

Starting on Wednesday, Valve plans to select a number of current CS:GO players to participate in a limited beta, where it will test CS2’s new features in advance of its full worldwide release.

Those new features include a number of graphics and physics improvements, such as clouds of smoke that realistically interact with lighting and the environment; more responsive interactions between players and the game’s server; and “cleaner, brighter, better” in-game worlds, which have been built in Valve’s next-generation Source 2 engine. Other new features are planned for announcement later in the year.

CS2 is planned to launch as a free update for CS:GO this summer. Current players of Global Offensive will be able to bring their in-game inventory with them into the new game.

Amazon’s livestreaming platform Twitch is still the uncontested leader in its field, with millions of hours watched so far in 2023, but it’s taken a distinct audience hit year-over-year following big growth driven by the pandemic.

Twitch, which announced layoffs Monday, is still the largest livestreaming platform in the world by a significant margin. But new data from StreamElements and Rainmaker.gg shows a drop in hours of content watched on the platform, with 1.784 billion hours watched in January, down from 2.059 billion in January 2022.

That decline mirrors a similar drop that StreamElements/Rainmaker reported at the end of 2022. It comes as Facebook Gaming is on a slow but steady rise.

Twitch’s overall issue is straightforward: it had nowhere to go but down. On any given month in the last year, it’s comfortably shattered its pre-pandemic audience records, but much of its meteoric growth in 2020 was simply because almost every other form of entertainment got shut down due to lockdown measures. Twitch has still managed to hold on to a significant amount of its expanded audience, but now it’s got to compete with real life.

March has marked a period of change for Twitch so far, with CEO Emmett Shear’s abrupt departure and the layoffs, part of 9,000 job cuts at Amazon. Shear was replaced by former president Dan Clancy.

Live play of video games still makes up the bulk of the programming by Twitch streamers, with games like Valorant, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Apex Legends seeing their audience numbers spike in February. The all-purpose video-log category Just Chatting was still comfortably No. 1, however, with a full 263 million hours watched.

Seattle-based game developer Harebrained Schemes (Battletech, Shadowrun: Dragonfall) just announced its next project, The Lamplighters League and the Tower at the End of the World.

LL is a turn-based strategy game set in an alternate 1932. An apocalypse cult, the Banished Court, has fought its way to the cusp of world domination, which leaves a team of unlikely anti-heroes — the player’s characters — as the only thing left in the Court’s way.

“The forces of evil are so close to victory… The best of the best are dead,” said game director Chris Rogers in an announcement trailer. “So you’ll need the best of the worst — thieves, scoundrels, cutthroats, and traitors — to stop them.”

Harebrained Schemes was founded in 2011 by Jordan Weisman and Mitch Gitelman, who previously worked together on the Crimson Skies franchise. (Like Lamplighters League, Crimson Skies is also set in an alternate-history 1930s.) Harebrained was acquired by Swedish games publisher Paradox Interactive in 2018, shortly after the two companies partnered for the release of the 2018 PC strategy game BattleTech.

Lamplighters League puts the player in control of a small number of unique units in grid-based combat, as you pursue the Banished Court throughout the world in an attempt to prevent it from seizing the source of magic itself. You play as a cast of misfits and criminals, like a bank robber, a hitman, a “disconcertingly cheerful” assassin, and an occultist, each of whom brings a particular assortment of passive abilities and active skills.

Much like Harebrained’s Shadowrun trilogy, LL appears to be an attempt to recapture the feel of playing a pulp-fiction tabletop RPG. Like most tabletop RPGs, you’re not in charge of an elite cadre of soldiers; you’re barely in control of a bunch of weirdos who must somehow learn how to work together.

Further, each fight in LL has an “infiltration phase,” where you can slowly sneak up on your targets before the start of open hostilities. This enables you to take out isolated opponents, scout the area, and stack the deck in your favor as much as possible before the fight goes loud.

Harebrained made its announcement as part of a larger Paradox Announcement Show, which also included news on a a sequel to its realistic city builder Cities: Skylines and expansions for both Crusader Kings III and Europa Universalis IV. Paradox will also publish Mechabellum, a new robot-combat game from new developer Game River, on Steam Early Access in May.

The Lamplighters League is planned for release on Steam, the Epic Games Store, Xbox Series X|S, and the Xbox Game Pass later this year.

Turning players into creators represents the biggest market opportunity in video games in 2023.

That was one takeaway from a discussion last week about mobile gaming and the gaming industry. The event, hosted at Seattle’s historic Rainier Club, featured Nellie Hughes, design director at Xbox Game Studios Publishing, and Josh Ayala, CEO of Seattle-based mobile developer Perfect Day Games.

“The user-generated content space is … the next, biggest kind of sea change,” Ayala said.

Both Hughes and Ayala have children who worked on creative projects within various games, such as Roblox, the Minecraft marketplace, and Rec Room, all of which let players use tools provided by developers to make, trade, and even sell in-game items with one another.

Hughes said her 12-year-old was drawn to Roblox because he’s a content creator, which “pulls in a lot of kids, from all ages.” She also noted that the game allows people to create their own server.

“He was able to find a group of folks that he really liked, and the communication was there,” Hughes said.

User-created content in current games can include cosmetic items, such as Minecraft’s “Skin Packs” that offer a new look for in-game characters; the Steam Workshop for Valve’s Team Fortress 2, where players submit content for possible official inclusion in the full game; or entirely new minigames like Rec Room’s Western set.

This can be lucrative for both developers and players; Rec Room reported in December that it had paid out $1 million to content creators within its game, while Roblox announced last month that it had paid out over $500 million.

However, any game that primarily consists of user-generated content also sets itself up for significant challenges when it comes to effectively managing that content.

Roblox in particular has recently come under fire from multiple sides for its lax to non-existent moderation policies, including a viral thread on Twitter from earlier this year.

“As a parent, and as a video game maker, [Roblox’s] quality level is too low for me to be satisfied,” Ayala said. “There’s some content in there that’s not okay for my 8-year-old to see. [Roblox’s developers] are not doing a good job as the managers of that content, and at rules enforcement and age-gating.”

Minecraft and Rec Room, by comparison, work much harder at age-gating, with a decent overall success rate, which is a process that Ayala is actively studying.

“My objective is to reduce the friction,” Ayala said, “so anything that’s been built in a game should feel like it’s part of an intentional experience. That’s part of the fun of turning players into creators.”

The hour-long discussion also touched on the current fall-off in venture capital investments; the difference between “hardcore,” “casual,” and the relatively new “hyper-casual” categories of games; and the shift to remote work in games development.

“Hardcore” and “casual” are a couple of terms that get used a lot within gaming enthusiast and production circles, but don’t really mean a lot to anyone outside of them. In general, as Hughes and Ayala explained, they’ve come to be shorthand for the amount of time and effort that a game requires to be enjoyable.

A “hardcore” game is something that’s made to have several hours, days, or weeks sunk into it, whereas a “casual” game — like much of what’s typically available on mobile platforms — can easily be jumped into with no previous experience and are made to be played in short bursts. By these definitions, the average RPG or action game would be considered hardcore, whereas time-killing puzzlers like Bejeweled or Candy Crush would be casual.

A “hyper-casual” game goes beyond even that, to describe games where an average session only lasts a few minutes, or even a few seconds, such as the 2013 viral hit Flappy Bird. The latter is a quickly-growing category, particularly in the mobile gaming space, which makes up just over half of the global video game market.

“You guys in this room didn’t realize that you’re gamers,” Ayala said. “You probably don’t even call yourself a gamer today, but just like we’ve all got board games on our shelves at home, now everyone has games on their phone.”

The panel was part of the semi-regular “Biz Buzz” event, which is held by Mercosul Ventures managing partner and Business Committee member Walter Benadof at the Rainier Club. The “Biz Buzz” fireside chats are typically aimed at educating club members about “business happenings” in the city, according to Benadof.

A new report from the Seattle-based venture capital firm PitchBook indicates that the international video game industry entered a period of contraction in 2022, but new opportunities for investment are opening in fields such as VR, AR, the metaverse, and the potential role of generative AI in game development.

The quarterly analyst report on the gaming sector covers trends and issues predictions for how VC investments in video games will proceed over the course of 2023. This is PitchBook’s first report on the games industry in general.

According to the report, the fourth quarter of 2022 saw a significant drop in games-industry VC, with 62% fewer deals at 82% lower growth year-over-year. Even after that drop, however, the overall 2022 market ($13.3 billion in deal value) is almost four times the size it was in 2019 ($3.9 billion).

The report credits “macroeconomic uncertainty and regulatory scrutiny,” such as the various amounts of pushback Microsoft has gotten over its Activision Blizzard deal, for the 2022 slowdown.

“VC activity in 2022 reflects a nuanced investment landscape,” writes PitchBook analyst Eric Bellomo. “2021 represented a step-function increase across the industry, increasing everything from server traffic to microtransactions, and VC activity was no different.”

The decrease in investment in 2022 can be seen as a slight market correction, following a massive spike in VC gaming investment in 2021. Per PitchBook’s numbers, global VC deal activity in the video game sector more than doubled between 2020 and 2021, going from $7.4 billion in 2020 to $16.6 billion.

It also fits into an ongoing narrative of the video game industry’s perceived resilience to periods of economic turmoil. This goes back to 2008’s Great Recession, where the games industry didn’t seem to take as big of a hit as analysts thought it should have. One argument made at the time was that video games, despite a high initial cost of entry, can be a surprisingly efficient dollar-to-hour use of consumers’ entertainment budget.

That same reputation carried forward to the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, which shut down many other forms of entertainment, but didn’t make an immediate impact on the gaming release calendar. This was largely a statistical mirage, due to how video games’ production cycle works, but has led to a sustained period of audience growth. Naturally, VC firms followed.

That makes PitchBook’s look at the overall size of the games industry interesting, in that it encompasses five separate sectors: development (game creation), operations (monetization/optimization strategies), access (hardware and distribution platforms, i.e. digital storefronts like Steam), content (the games themselves), and experience (“ancillary products and services” such as streaming, in-game marketplaces, and social platforms).

Generally, market analysis for the games industry will measure the size of the market by focusing on overall consumer spending, such as Newzoo’s January report, which measured the global games market as a $92.2 billion industry.

PitchBook, by comparison, estimates the overall market for gaming to be $447.3 billion as of 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 5.9%.

This is by virtue of touching on parts of the overall sector that most other market estimates don’t typically cover, such the growing field of online gambling sites like DraftKings. These are technically also gaming apps, even if they aren’t anything that’s usually be considered a video game.

PitchBook’s report highlights the following opportunities for VC firms in 2023’s games market:

• Generative AI, though it’s still in early stages, could lower top games’ development costs through automating some of the coding process. With “AAA” video games possibly costing as much as $540 million to make (2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2), an AI coding “co-pilot” could knock off some man-hours in production.
• “Low-code” development tools, such as GameMaker Studio, let developers without a technical background pursue game development. In an environment where dedicated technical game developers are reportedly getting harder to come by (related: a 2021 earnings call by Unity), there’s an opening for investors to help create engines and tool suites that help make up the difference, as well as open-ecosystem creative games such as Roblox, Minecraft, and Rec Room.
• Free-to-play games’ audience share expanded rapidly in 2022, which has led to a new wave of interest and investment in in-game advertising methods.
• “Indirect revenue” in the games industry is a $100 billion market, which encompasses esports, coaching services, IP licensing, and collaborations with brands outside video games, such as Rec Room’s recent crossover with Masters of the Universe.

At the same time, PitchBook lists several potential issues for would-be games-industry investors:

• The tendency towards toxic workplace culture and “crunch” at all levels of the games industry makes employee retention a serious issue. According to the Game Developer Conference’s State of the Game report for 2023, well over half of professional game developers have been in the field for 10 years or less.
• In the face of high inflation and the slow move toward higher base prices for physical AAA games, there’s a real risk that consumer spending will drop in 2023.
• Blockchain/Web3 games have struggled to find an audience, particularly following the late-2022 crypto winter, and still don’t have a single “killer app” to drive adoption. A lot of game developers in the Web3 space are simply making Web2 games with a Web3 marketplace bolted onto them, rather than anything that really leverages the technology. It’s entirely possible that despite some true believers in the space and a handful of games that have found an audience, particularly in Southeast Asia, blockchain gaming may simply be dead on arrival.
• “The attention economy is a zero-sum game,” Bellomo writes. At the end of the day, games will always be a highly competitive market, because every game is working against one another, as well as other forms of entertainment, for a finite amount of every consumer’s leisure time. This is an issue that’s only compounded by digital distribution networks, which make it cheap and easy for even small developers to get their games in front of a global audience.
• Video games suffer more security issues, such as denial-of-service attacks, than any other industry, with a nearly 170% increase in cyberattacks since last year.
• The games industry generates a lot of data on a daily basis, and struggles to find ways in which to use it. In the event of widespread Metaverse adoption, that data load could spike to as much as 3 to 4 petabytes annually, with few solutions yet for creating appropriate analytics tools.
• Esports is traditionally an attractive field for would-be investors to create a beachhead in the games industry, but at the same time, has struggled for years with profitability. Last year saw the content platform FaZe Clan go public in July, only to face delisting by January. The audience for esports is there, with big games like Dota 2 attracting audiences in the millions, but the money’s harder to find.
• Cloud gaming is projected to blow up in a big way in the near future, as mobile gaming continues to grow in popularity and 5G continues to gain availability, but it’ll be an uphill climb against current market forces like local play.

Microsoft’s deal with Nintendo to bring “Call of Duty” games to Nintendo systems — if Microsoft’s proposed $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard goes through — is now official.

Microsoft President Brad Smith tweeted late Monday that the agreement, first announced in December, is now binding. “This is just part of our commitment to bring Xbox games and Activision titles like “Call of Duty” to more players on more platforms,” Smith said in his tweet.

“Call of Duty” will be available to Nintendo players on the same day as Xbox gamers, “with full feature and content parity,” according to Microsoft’s statement.

The deal is part of Microsoft’s effort to help convince regulators to approve the acquisition of Activision.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is attempting to block the deal and Microsoft is facing similar headwinds in Europe.

Reuters reported that Smith and other executives will speak to EU antitrust regulators at a closed hearing this week about the deal.

Microsoft laid out its case against the FTC in December, describing itself as “the third-place manufacturer of gaming consoles” and its acquisition target as “one of many publishers of popular video games.”

In opposing to the acquisition, PlayStation maker Sony has expressed concern that Microsoft might make future “Call of Duty” games and other big Activision titles exclusive to Microsoft Xbox.

The deal was first announced more than a year ago. It would be the largest acquisition in the Redmond company’s history, eclipsing its $26 billion purchase of LinkedIn in 2017.

A lot of Web3 video games have built their systems around the sale and trade of NFTs. Castaways, on the other hand, simply gives them away, and it’s rapidly grown its audience as a result.

Made in Seattle by the startup company Branch, Castaways is a massively-multiplayer, free-to-play survival game for web browsers that’s currently in alpha. Players enter the in-game world as shipwrecked survivors on a small, remote island, with a goal to build a home for yourself and others. It’s a peaceful game that’s equal parts Animal Crossing and Minecraft.

Castaways plays its Web3 integration remarkably low-key, particularly by comparison to other games in its lane. At first glance, I didn’t realize it was a Web3 game until I found the option in the menus to connect a crypto wallet to it.

Despite the “crypto winter” that struck in late 2022, Castaways enjoyed meteoric growth in the last quarter of the year. It went from 1,000 users in September to 300,000 in November, the same month that founder Dayton Mills was selected as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for 2022.

Mills dropped out of high school in Missouri in 2015 (“it just felt like such a waste of time to me,” he says) to pursue a career in game design, and initially began by running private Minecraft servers for profit.

“I taught myself how to code at 12, 13, by watching YouTube videos, and that was kind of my thing,” Mills told GeekWire. “Everything I did in the Minecraft world was just things I learned through the internet. I always knew, even since that age, that I wanted to run a game studio.”

Mills subsequently coded Statscraft, a software-as-a-service plug-in that provides user analytics for the operators of Minecraft servers, and sold it in 2016 to the commerce platform Tebex. From there, he joined a crypto startup in San Diego, then built a now-defunct app called Beekn.

In 2020, Mills co-founded Branch in Seattle with Connor Hollasch, another Forbes 30 under 30 awardee. They raised a $15 million round of funding from investors including Dragonfly, Coinbase, and Evernew Capital.

Mills said his broader goal with Branch is to “prove the viability of Web3 gaming.”

“I want to build the first real popular game that actually implements it,” Mills said. “Right now, there’s a great disdain for NFTs. A lot of gamers, especially, hate NFTs. I think it’s understandable; if you look at gaming history, people have hated monetization since the invention of the arcade machine.”

Mills pointed out the irony of NFT-related criticism from gamers, given that it’s “technology that was invented to liberate them from the thing that they hate.”

“[NFTs] are almost like taking away from the corporations and spreading things out into the community, allowing them to own bigger pieces of it,” he said. “At least, that’s the promise, and I don’t think anyone’s actually executed on it well yet.”

With Castaways, Mills’ aim is to deliver on that promise, with some of the lessons he took away from his time as a Minecraft server admin.

Castaways takes a lot of inspiration from the custom experiences that users and admins created on private Minecraft servers, such as the popular user-created map Skyblock. Rather than having a full world to mine for resources, Castaways limits its players to a small island and asks them to build that up from scratch.

Castaways players who are done with the game can subsequently sell their islands and inventories to one another as NFTs, in exchange for varying sums in Ethereum. Using an established token for Castaways, rather than minting a unique currency for the game, is part of Branch’s ambition to ensure the game’s overall sustainability.

Mills credits Castaways‘ sudden growth in 2022 to Branch’s “free to own” initiative, under which the company minted a line of NFTs and gave them away for free to active, engaged members of the Castaways community.

“We’ve been building this game iteratively, in public, for many months,” Mills said. “A few months ago, there wasn’t anything to do in the game except float around on a raft and talk to people. We had 100 daily active users. We said, ‘All right, you 100, we’re going to mint you this raft NFT. That’s gonna be yours. Thanks for playing.’ That was our first collection.”

By the end of August, due to word of mouth and social media attention, the value of those free raft NFTs had risen to roughly 20 ETH each. Subsequently, when Branch prepared to add islands to Castaways, it minted a set of 500 island NFTs that it pledged to airdrop to regular players of the game. Suddenly, Castaways had 25,000 users competing to score an island NFT.

“We have a lot of collections planned,” Mills said. “They’re always free. There are a lot of things for us to make, and so any time we make something, we just give it out for free. A lot of Web3 people come to the game for that, and then they stay for the actual game.”

Mobile gaming company Lightfox Games raised $6 million in fresh capital to help fuel development of a new game.

CEO Ryan Hanft-Murphy confirmed the new funding but declined to provide details about investors.

Founded in 2019, Lightfox is the Seattle-based studio behind the 2021 mobile game Knight’s Edge, formerly known as Super Battle League.

“In addition to our game, Knight’s Edge, we just started working on a new game that we are really excited to bring to the world,” Hanft-Murphy said in an email to GeekWire. Lightfox plans to reveal further details about its new project this summer

Self-described as a “PvP Raid Arena” game for iOS and Android, Knight’s Edge teams players up in groups of three, then pits them against both monsters and other players’ teams in a race to be the first to complete each battle.

Lightfox employs nine people, and celebrated Knight’s Edge’s first anniversary in September.

Many of Lightfox’s founders, including Hanft-Murphy, are former employees of the Seattle gaming startup Z2, which was acquired in 2015 by King, the developer of the mobile-games juggernaut Candy Crush. King itself was subsequently acquired by Activision Blizzard in 2016, which shut Z2 down in 2019.

The mobile market is consistently the largest and most profitable sector of the video games industry. In a report from last month, analytics company Newzoo estimated mobile gaming as a $92.2 billion market, which is slightly bigger than PC and console gaming sectors together.

Lightfox previously raised $3.3 million in 2020 in a seed round that included participation from March Gaming, Hiro Capital, and Ed Fries’ 1Up Ventures.

An SEC filing for Lightfox’s latest round of funding lists March Gaming director Louis Gresham and Hiro Capital founder/partner Cherry Freeman. Both March Gaming, in Santa Monica, Calif., and Hiro Capital, in London, are venture capital funds that specifically focus on video game and metaverse technologies.

After the production delays and supply disruptions of the last few years, 2023 is where the games industry is set to really start picking up speed.

The Pacific Northwest is home to two of the biggest scenes for game production in North America, in Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., as well as the various studios within the growing Xbox Game Studios umbrella. Here are 23 new games with ties to the Pacific Northwest to play in 2023.

Ark 2

For the last few years, if you’ve wanted to play a game about riding dinosaurs around, your first port of call was likely Ark: Survival Evolved, from the Redmond, Wash.-based Studio Wildcard. Ark is a survival game where players are left empty-handed on the shores of a mysterious island, where you must contend with other players and hostile wildlife by building tools, fortifications, and weapons.

Wildcard announced Ark 2 at the 2020 Game Awards, which raises the stakes by marooning players on an entire jungle planet. Vin Diesel (The Fast and the Furious) and Auli’i Cravalho (Moana) are along for the ride as characters within the new game’s story, which is currently slated to debut at some point in 2023.

Baldur’s Gate 3

If you were into PC games at all in the late ’90s, you’ve probably at least heard of the two original Baldur’s Gate games. Set in the Forgotten Realms with rules derived from the second edition of Dungeons & Dragons, Baldur’s Gate and its sequel are sprawling CRPGs that sucked in a generation of players.

A long-anticipated third game in the series, Baldur’s Gate III, has been under production for the last few years at the Belgian developer Larian Studios, which is best-known for its CRPG series Divinity. Naturally, it’s created the game in partnership with Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast, the owners of D&D. BG3 is currently available in early access on Steam and GOG, with plans for a full release in August.

Colossal Cave 3D

After a couple of delays, Ken and Roberta Williams’ update of the classic text adventure Colossal Cave arrived on Jan. 19, as both a virtual-reality adventure on the Meta Quest 2, and a 2D first-person game that’s available on PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, and Epic.

Colossal Cave 3D is an explicit reimagining of the original Colossal Cave, as opposed to a remake or sequel. It features the same puzzles, characters, and environments, but they’ve been carefully recreated in a visual environment. Once again, you’re a nameless, faceless treasure hunter who descends into a cavern in search of riches, but end up having to contend with hostile dwarves, random traps, sleeping dragons, and peculiar obstacles.

Company of Heroes 3

2023 is turning into a weirdly good year for new entries in old franchises. Company of Heroes began as a 2009 real-time strategy (RTS) game set in World War II by Vancouver, B.C.’s Relic Entertainment (Homeworld), which got a surprise sequel in 2013. After a delay, Relic is publishing a new Company of Heroes through Sega on Feb. 23 for Windows PC, with console versions for Xbox and PlayStation coming at an unspecified point later in the year. CoH3‘s solo campaign puts players in the role of the Allies during the North African campaign in World War II, which will involve the invasion of Italy. In multiplayer, four armies are available, including the U.S., the British, the Wehrmacht, and the Afrikakorps.

Destiny 2: Lightfall

Bellevue, Wash.-based Bungie begins its tenure as a PlayStation studio with Lightfall, the latest expansion for the massively-multiplayer first-person shooter Destiny 2. It sends the Guardians to the city of Neomuna on Neptune, where you’ll have to deal with a colony that’s been cut off from the rest of human civilization for long enough to get weird; fight the cloned forces of the fallen emperor Calus; and play with a new subclass, Strand, which features its own grappling hook.

As usual, a new Destiny 2 expansion means new dungeons, a new raid, and a brand-new set of exotic weapons to grind for, along with a planned balance pass to certain weapons’ effectiveness. Lightfall is expected to release on all platforms Feb. 28.

Dungeons of Aether

Since it was founded in 2021, Seattle’s Aether Studios has been planning to build the next big game world, with the setting of its now-complete platform fighter Rivals of Aether as a basis. In the game’s fiction, Aether is a planet inhabited by anthropomorphic animals, who use various elemental powers to fight on behalf of their respective civilizations.

Developed by an internal team at Aether, Dungeons is a dungeon-crawling RPG starring four original characters, who end up in a fight against a crooked mining company underneath the town of Julesvale. It was initially announced for last October, but was then quietly delayed to Feb. 28 on Steam.

Fire Emblem Engage

Engage, released Jan. 20, is a bit of a throwback to the last few Fire Emblem games, particularly 2019’s Three Houses. Earlier games in the series were a peculiar balance between managing your characters’ social relationships with one another and simple but unforgiving tactical/strategy action. You’ll gradually assemble an irregular unit of fantasy warriors from whoever you can find, befriend, rescue, or bribe on your way across the world.

Forza Motorsport

The eighth entry in Microsoft’s first-party racing series has explicitly been designed to show off the Xbox Series X’s graphics technology. Developed in Redmond, Wash., by Turn 10 Studios, Motorsport provides you with a large fleet of digitally-recreated, licensed real-world cars that you can tweak, customize, and kit out as you see fit. You can then take them out to compete in-person and online against other racers, with a level of detail up to and including the effects of the in-game ambient temperature on the racetrack. FM8 has no set release date at time of writing, but is planned to come out this spring.

Gunbrella

If you attended last year’s PAX West, you might’ve seen Gunbrella in action at the Devolver Digital booth. It’s very much the sort of video game that’s been made by and for people who play a lot of video games, with retro graphics, a peculiar hook, and a steep difficulty curve. Created in Portland, Ore. by the indie studio Doinksoft, Gunbrella is currently listed as “coming soon,” with plans for release at some point in 2023. It describes itself as a “noir-punk” action game, where you investigate a run-down island in the 1930s in search of answers about a magical umbrella that’s attached to you by a curse.

Homeworld 3

Gearbox Publishing is bringing back the Homeworld series in 2023, with Vancouver, B.C.s Blackbird Interactive attached as developer, with several of the original Homeworld developers from Relic Entertainment along for the ride. Set 100 years after the events of the original two games, Homeworld 3 is a real-time strategy game where your space fleet is put up against a mysterious Anomaly that’s sweeping across the galaxy. It’s supposed to make its debut in the first half of the year.

Kerbal Space Program 2

For fans of imminent space disaster, a new Kerbal Space Program is planned to launch into Steam Early Access on Feb. 24. KSP2 has been redesigned from the ground up for current-generation systems, and is reportedly bigger than ever before, with unspecified “new features” that will be added over time. KSP2 is in production at Intercept Games in Seattle, after its original studio Star Theory was effectively shell-gamed out of existence in 2020.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Tears of the Kingdom is a direct sequel to 2018’s Breath of the Wild, which swept that year’s awards season, sold millions of copies, and provided the Switch with one of its first exclusive killer apps. The genius of BotW was that it broke away from the typical Legend of Zelda formula in favor of an open-ended approach that mixed its traditional gameplay with survival mechanics. With Tears, out on May 12, it looks like Nintendo’s decided the best way to go from there was up, with new flight and gliding mechanics that are reminiscent of 2011’s Skyward Sword.

Lifeless Moon

Lifeless Moon is a surreal, creepy adventure game, by Snohomish, Wash.-based Stage 2 Studios, about two astronauts whose lunar expedition suddenly takes them back to what appears to be a deserted version of their hometown. It’s an adventure game that co-creator David Board described to me at PAX as “not quite full horror,” as well as “sort of a prequel” to 2014’s Lifeless Planet. It’ll arrive via Steam in the first quarter of 2023.

Minecraft Legends

Minecraft‘s gradual infiltration of all other genres continues with Legends, an action-strategy game set in the game world’s mythology that’s due out April 18. Made as a collaboration between Mojang Studios and Vancouver, B.C.’s Blackbird Interactive (Homeworld 3, Hardspace: Shipbreaker), Legends is the story of a hero who unites and defends the Minecraft overworld against an invasion by the Netherworld. As with most things Minecraft, Xbox Game Studios will publish it across all platforms, including PlayStation and Switch.

Open Roads

Portland-based Fullbright has built its reputation on environmental-storytelling games like Tacoma and Gone Home, but Open Roads moves the studio into new territory as it creates an interactive mystery/thriller, about a mother and daughter digging up skeletons in their family’s closet. After Fullbright faced internal issues in 2021 that slowed the game’s development, Open Roads is scheduled for release sometime this year.

Pacific Drive

Ironwood Studios quietly opened its doors in Seattle in late 2019, just in time for COVID to keep everyone distracted. Its debut title, Pacific Drive, sets you loose in a version of the Pacific Northwest that’s suffered from some unspecified disaster. Your customized car is all you’ve got to outrun and occasionally run over the monsters that now inhabit the “Olympic Exclusion Zone,” as you head deeper inside it on a search for the source of the problem. Pacific Drive is due out this year for PC and PlayStation 5.

Redfall

Redfall is one of Microsoft’s big three games for Xbox in 2023: a 4-player open-world shoot-’em-up where a team of eccentric vampire hunters invades a small town in Massachusetts that’s been overrun by the undead. Come for the high-impact action with an assortment of strange abilities and technology; stay for the reliably weird design and story from Arkane Studios (Dishonored). It’s scheduled to come out at some point in 2023.

Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition

Nightdive Studios, in Vancouver, Wash., specializes in getting the rights to classic “abandonware” PC games and updating them to run on modern systems. It’s teamed up with Texas-based Apogee and the distributed team at New Blood to resurrect Rise of the Triad, a deeply silly 1995 first-person shooter that did a lot more to define subsequent games in the genre than it gets credit for. The new Ludicrous Edition for 2023 runs at light speed, preserves the feel of the original, and can be played without pulling your 486 out of storage.

Sons of the Forest

2018’s The Forest was a bit of a sleeper hit, which mixed survival horror with actual survival in a first-person game about a plane crash survivor trying to find his missing son in the middle of the wilderness. Endnight Games, out of Vancouver, B.C., returns to the theme but not the storyline in Sons of the Forest, where you’re sent to find a missing rich guy and end up fighting an isolated tribe of freaks. It’s planned to debut in February on Steam.

Spirit Swap

This has been on my radar for a hot minute. Spirit Swap, by Redmond, Wash.-based Soft Not Weak, is an indie game about playing competitive match-3 games to music. It is, by design, a colorful, calm chill-out experience that mixes lo-fi beats with occasionally demanding puzzle mechanics. That also comes hand in hand with a sort of indie-comics aesthetic, featuring cheerful witches, snooty demons, and a little bit of dating simulation. Spirit Swap is due out later this year.

Starfield

On the one hand, we just talked about this; on the other, it’d look weird if Starfield wasn’t on this list. Bethesda Softworks’ follow-up to 2012’s Skyrim takes its approach to open-ended RPGs into space, where you can fight or join pirates, navigate an awkward post-war peace, and completely ignore the primary mission objectives for hours upon hours of exploration. Expect it in the first half of 2023.

System Shock (2023)

1999’s System Shock 2 is one of the most influential first-person shooters of all time, to the extent that it’s overshadowed its predecessor, which was actually a dungeon crawler from the people who made Ultima Underworld. Vancouver, Wash.-based Nightdive Studios plans to put the original System Shock back on the map with this ground-up remake, which keeps the story but updates the gameplay to match SS2. This also serves to reintroduce players to one of video games’ great all-time villains, the hostile AI SHODAN. System Shock 2023 is due out in March.

Wizard With A Gun

Seattle’s Galvanic Games has put together some of the more interestingly weird indie games of the last few years, such as Gurgamoth, Some Distant Memory, and the Cyanide & Happiness-themed battle royale Rapture Rejects. Wizard With A Gun teams Galvanic up with the equally weird indie mega-publisher Devolver for a strange sort of Western adventure, where you and up to three friends craft items, fight monsters, and use the ancient magical technique of “having a pistol.” After several delays, Wizard is scheduled to drop for Switch and PC this year.

A new report indicates that Microsoft’s layoffs earlier this month have forced significant changes at its subsidiary 343 Industries, the company behind the Halo series of video games.

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier wrote Tuesday that the layoffs have put Redmond, Wash.-based 343 into a position where it’s “all but starting from scratch.”

It was previously known that Microsoft’s recent round of layoffs had impacted several companies in its gaming department, including Bethesda Game Studios and ZeniMax Media, but not the extent to which each company was affected. IGN reported that 25% of 343 Industries’ staff had been let go.

The layoffs led to a round of rumors that 343 would transition into a role as a publisher, where it would farm out its development efforts on Halo to contractors. 343 studio head Pierre Hintze took to Twitter on Jan. 21 to address the rumors, claiming that the company “will continue to develop Halo now and in the future.”

Schreier alleges, based on leaked internal documents, that at least 95 developers were axed at 343 earlier this month. That would represent somewhere between 10% and 20% of the company’s employees.

GeekWire has reached out to Microsoft and 343 Industries for comment.

343’s last big game was Halo Infinite, which was a hit with critics and fans upon its launch for PC and Xbox in Dec. 2021. In the 13 months since its debut, however, Infinite repeatedly came under fire for its sluggish content release schedule, with major series features like cooperative campaign mode and the Forge map creator only showing up 11 months after Infinite’s debut.

Previously, 343 had described Halo Infinite as a “spiritual reboot” for the overall Halo franchise, as well as a platform that the company could continually build upon. By the original plan, there wouldn’t have been another new Halo game for years after Infinite‘s release; 343 would’ve just kept releasing content packs for Infinite.

Infinite‘s troubled development seems to have put 343 on the chopping block, however. After the layoffs, the company is reportedly shifting its overall direction with Halo. This reportedly includes moving on to a new game from Halo Infinite; employing outside contractors like Certain Affinity, which already contributed to work on Infinite; and switching from the internally-developed Slipspace engine to Epic’s Unreal.

Wizards of the Coast is officially leaving its old rules in place to govern independently-published material for the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game.

As previously reported, a leak earlier this month indicated that Wizards, based in Renton, Wash., would seek to deauthorize and replace its Open Game License (OGL), a public copyright notice from 2000. The OGL allows third parties to create virtually any sort of D&D material for profit, such as adventure modules, sourcebooks, or live-play shows.

Wizards reacted to the leak with an apology to the fan community on Jan. 13, followed by a new set of terms for the OGL on Jan. 19. The proposed version 1.2 of the OGL walked back many of the controversial changes that were included in the Jan. 5 leak, but explicitly included the deauthorization of the original v. 1.0a of the OGL, as well as some additional stipulations.

As of Friday, Wizards has now pledged to leave the original OGL in place. It will also officially make the base mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons publicly available via a Creative Commons license, as mentioned on Jan. 19.

More than 15,000 fans filled out the survey that was linked in the Jan. 19 blog post, according to D&D executive producer Kyle Brink, and the results were overwhelmingly against the changes in OGL v. 1.2.

“These live survey results are clear. You want OGL 1.0a. You want irrevocability. You like Creative Commons,” Brink wrote on the official D&D Beyond blog. “The feedback is in such high volume and its direction is so plain that we’re acting now.”

The blog post includes a link to a new System Reference Document (SRD), version 5.1, for D&D under Wizards’ chosen Creative Commons license.

The SRD 5.1 includes a list of specific terms that are considered part of the “product identity” of Dungeons & Dragons, which prevents them from being used in third-party content. This primarily includes phrases and terms that are specific to Wizards-owned properties such as the Forgotten Realms campaign setting or D&D‘s particular multiverse, such as the city of Sigil, the Underdark, or the various infernal planes.

The SRD also explicitly excludes a handful of monsters, such as mind flayers and beholders, that were originally created for D&D. As such, they remain the intellectual property of Wizards and can’t be used as part of any Open Game License content.

According to Brink, Wizards’ original motivations behind changing the OGL are still in place, but they now intend to rely upon the D&D community to achieve those goals.

“We wanted to protect the D&D play experience into the future,” Brink wrote. “We still want to do that with your help. We’re grateful that this community is passionate and active because we’ll need your help protecting the game’s inclusive and welcoming nature.”

Community reactions to Wizards’ attempt to deauthorize OGL 1.0a have included organized boycotts; several social media campaigns; a groundswell of interest in competitors’ products; and the ORC Alliance, a hundreds-strong coalition of game companies that have signed on to support Redmond, Wash.-based Paizo Publishing’s upcoming Open RPG Creative License.

Wizards’ decision to abandon its attempts to change the OGL comes the day after its parent company Hasbro announced its fourth quarter financial results. Hasbro’s overall revenue took a 17% tumble year-over-year, with multiple departments reporting losses, and the toy/games giant is cutting 15% of its workforce.

Wizards of the Coast appears to be part of the only department at Hasbro that reported a gain in revenues for 2022.

Hasbro intends to eliminate 1,000 global full-time employees as a cost-saving measure, with no indication regarding where those cuts will be made. It also plans to continue a strategy from October, its “Blueprint 2.0,” that will emphasize “fewer, bigger brands” alongside its gaming and digital efforts.

Hasbro’s current CEO, Chris Cocks, was the president of Wizards of the Coast until Feb. 2022.

Microsoft aired a 44-minute pre-recorded presentation Wednesday to announce several release dates for upcoming games on the Xbox platform, as well as a surprise drop of a brand new game.

Xbox teased the broadcast, which it called the Xbox & Bethesda Developer_Direct, for several days leading up to its debut. It featured a collaboration between Xbox and its subsidiary Bethesda Softworks, headquartered in Rockville, Md., to show off some of the bigger releases for the Xbox platform that are coming in the first half of 2023.

Direct presentations like this are increasingly common in the video game industry, with companies like Nintendo, Sony, Blizzard, and Capcom using them to announce news and projects directly to their fans.

Xbox’s spin on the practice was unusual in that it put many of the games’ developers front and center. It created a focus on not only the games, but the people making them, and their excitement at what they’re currently producing. This included Washington state creators like Redmond’s Turn 10 Studios, working on Forza Motorsport, alongside developers in Austin, Texas; Hunt Valley, Md., Vancouver, BC; and Tokyo, Japan.

It’s a more organic approach to this sort of homegrown hype than the typical games-first broadcast, which may provide some insight into Microsoft’s overall approach to its video game promotion going into 2023. Xbox really seems to want viewers to be familiar with the people making their games, from studio heads and creative directors to producers and designers, and to know that any video game is a team effort.

The biggest surprise of the Developer_Direct was a new game, Hi-Fi Rush, from Bethesda’s Japanese studio Tango Gameworks. Tango was founded by Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami in 2010 as a horror-focused development studio, and was acquired by Bethesda later that same year. Its previous projects include 2014’s The Evil Within and last year’s Ghostwire: Tokyo.

Hi-Fi Rush, on the other hand, is a comedic action/platformer with graphics that make it look like an interactive Saturday morning cartoon. As Chai, a wannabe rock star who’s out to dismantle a futuristic corporation with his new robot arm, you’re encouraged to fight and move in time with the beat of Hi-Fi Rush‘s rock’n’roll soundtrack.

Aside from being a massive departure from type for Mikami and Tango, Hi-Fi Rush was scheduled to debut on PC, Xbox, and the Game Pass subscription service on the night of Jan. 25.

Other announcements at Xbox’s Developer_Direct included:

• Mojang Studios and Blackbird Interactive’s Minecraft Legends is officially debuting on April 18. Set in the mythological past of the world of Minecraft, this action/strategy game challenges you to unify the forces of the Overworld to deal with an incursion from the Netherworld. The Direct touched upon its player-vs-player modes, where both sides also have to watch out for attacks from AI-controlled piglins while they build their forces.
• The eighth game in the Forza Motorsport series didn’t receive an official release date, aside from that it’s definitely coming this year. The game will have over 500 licensed race cars to collect at launch, with over 800 upgrades to apply to them, with new systems that include realistic dirt accumulation, temperature affecting the surfaces of racetracks, and a single-player career mode.
• Zenimax Online Studios announced a new expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online, called Necrom, which will introduce the arcanist as a new playable class. ESO‘s time during the Direct was focused on pitching the game—the MMORPG spin-off of the long-running Elder Scrolls fantasy series—to a new audience of players who might only know the franchise from popular games like Skyrim. All 20 past chapters of ESO were made free to play for newcomers during the Direct.
• Arkane Studios’ Redfall got an official release date, May 2, and an extended look at the game’s systems and style of play. You’re one of 4 eccentric hunters who’ve come to the town of Redfall, Mass., to liberate it from the vampires who’ve taken it over. Redfall is an open-world game that can be played cooperatively with up to 4 players, and features the same open-ended approach to its various challenges that characterizes past Arkane Studios games like Dishonored and Deathloop.

All five games from the Direct are planned to be available on PC, Xbox, and the Xbox Game Pass.

A recent update targeted at lowering power consumption on Xbox consoles has drawn fire from some surprising quarters, including Sen. Ted Cruz and the morning show “Fox & Friends.”

On Jan. 11, the Xbox department at Microsoft announced an update for Xbox One and Series X|S gaming systems that would make them “the first carbon aware consoles.” The update, which is currently being tested in the early-access Xbox Insider program, introduces a new set of options to control how the console acts when it’s in sleep mode, in order to tie into Microsoft’s goal of being a carbon negative company by 2030.

The initial news of the patch came and went without much commentary, since it’s still limited to Xbox Insiders for product testing and has yet to be enabled for typical Xbox owners. It also doesn’t impact the devices’ functionality in any way that can’t be turned off, and in fact, it’s entirely possible that many Xbox players wouldn’t notice the difference.

Even so, the “carbon aware” update on Xbox began to draw fire from the political sector on Jan. 23, beginning with a piece on Blaze News that announced Microsoft “will force gamers into powering down their Xbox consoles in order to fight climate change.”

The Blaze piece largely misrepresents the features of the update, presenting them as if the update will automatically force all Xboxes to use the power-saving Shutdown mode, and as if that permanently disables several system features that are associated with the more energy-intensive Sleep mode.

Further commentary came on Jan.24 from “Fox & Friends,” which accused Microsoft of “trying to recruit your kids into climate politics at an earlier age,” and a tweet from Sen. Cruz that ties the Xbox update into other recent carbon-related controversies.

“First gas stoves, then your coffee,” Cruz wrote, “now they’re gunning for your Xbox.”

The Xbox Series X|S is unique among ninth-generation consoles in that it’s surprisingly difficult to turn off. Out of the box, pushing the Series X|S’s power button either activates Sleep or Shutdown mode, neither of which fully powers down the console. To do that, you have to go into the system’s power settings and force it to fully power down.

Since March 2022, Xboxes have shipped with Shutdown as the default option, but launch-edition consoles had Sleep mode turned on out of the box. Sleep uses 10-15W vs. Shutdown’s 0.5W, but allows users to boot the Xbox instantly and access it remotely. Sleep mode can also cause a few glitches for users if the Xbox is allowed to run for long enough without a full restart, like any other computer.

As part of Microsoft’s ongoing sustainability program, the Jan. 11 “carbon aware” update adds some of the same features that were introduced last year for Windows 11. An Xbox that’s plugged in and connected to the Internet will automatically try to gain access to regional carbon intensity data, in order to run automatic updates at points in time when your local power grid is drawing the most electricity from renewable sources.

“We encourage all players to learn more about the power setting options available to you,” wrote Blaine Hauglie, technical program manager at Xbox, on the official Xbox blog. “Every small step we take has larger collective impact – and choosing Shutdown (energy saving) can have real, meaningful impact.”

“For example, for every two consoles that switch to Shutdown (energy saving) for one year, we will save the equivalent amount of carbon removed by one tree planted and grown for a decade.”

While the update did automatically enable Shutdown mode for Xbox Insiders who had their systems set to Sleep, there’s nothing that prevents them from changing it back. The update also adds a new feature to Sleep mode that allows the option to adjust an Xbox’s active hours of operation, so it will switch from Sleep to Shutdown modes at user-specified points in time when no one’s using the system. This is intended to reduce the console’s overall power draw.

Dungeons & Dragons is, by most standards, the tabletop roleplaying game. There are hundreds of other pen-and-paper RPGs, but D&D was the first to hit store shelves and has by far the most name recognition. It’s on a short list of brands, like Jell-O or the Game Boy, where the name is often used as a synonym for its type of product.

Further, D&D enjoyed a period of “explosive” growth that spun out of the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. Going into 2023, it looked like D&D had everything going for it, including an upcoming live-action movie, Honor Among Thieves, and one of the most anticipated video games of the year in Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3.

Now, D&D might be about to hit a downturn, and it’s due to simple brand mismanagement. No company could realistically have gotten in D&D‘s way except its owner, Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast, and this month, it very much did.

Critical failure

As previously reported, a Jan. 5 leak via io9’s Linda Concerga indicated that Wizards had plans to deauthorize its Open Game License (OGL), a public copyright notice that the company adopted in 2000. Under the terms of version 1.0a of the OGL, other companies were free to create, publish, and even monetize original material that’s based on or compatible with D&D without Wizards’ involvement.

Over the ensuing 23 years, the OGL led to the creation of a robust industry based on D&D, which ranges from spin-off games to live-play shows and podcasts to tie-in products like blank gaming journals.

It’s generally assumed that D&D enjoys a majority share of the tabletop gaming audience, although accurate play data has been difficult to come by until relatively recently, thanks to the rise of independent virtual tabletop spaces. A 2019 report by Roll20 indicated that just over 51% of the games being played on its service in Q3 2019 were based on D&D.

D&D has built a big part of that market dominance off the back of the OGL for three editions and two decades, by allowing Wizards of the Coast to effectively outsource a lot of game material, especially weird niche stuff, to third-party creators. There’s always a lot going on with D&D, but Wizards doesn’t have to be responsible for or even aware of most of it. Even companies that are ostensibly Wizards’ competitors, such as Atlanta’s White Wolf Publishing (Vampire: The Masquerade), have produced material for Dungeons & Dragons under the OGL.

What Wizards’ current management didn’t seem to understand or appreciate was that messing with the OGL had effectively become a third rail. As early as November, the rumor that Wizards would repeal or replace the OGL as part of its current One D&D initiative was enough to cause its own quiet controversy.

That discussion came at roughly the same time as Wizards of the Coast’s parent company Hasbro had its stock downgraded, on charges that Wizards had oversaturated the market for its collectible card game Magic: The Gathering. Hasbro had also previously reported a 15% loss of revenue in its Q3 2022 financial results.

Then, in early Dec. 22, reports emerged that Wizards of the Coast CEO Cynthia Williams had attended an investors’ meeting where she described D&D as “under-monetized.”

That set the scene for the D&D community to expect some naked money grab from Hasbro, if not Wizards of the Coast directly. Then the Jan. 5 leak hit, which confirmed many fans’ most cynical thoughts.

As per the leak, Wizards had considered an update to the OGL that would put much more power in Wizards’ hands. Under the original OGL 1.0a, independent creators don’t even have to tell Wizards they’re making a D&D product. Under its replacement from the leak, OGL 1.1, the same creators would have suddenly owed Wizards royalties, earnings reports, and at least partial licensing rights on any published D&D work, past or present.

Wizards took a full eight days to react to the leak, which was more than enough time for things to start to explode. To put it simply, this appears to have been the road-to-Damascus moment where players, analysts, and competing developers have all simultaneously realized that it might not actually be healthy for Wizards and D&D to occupy this much of the tabletop gaming space.

Reactions to the OGL 1.1 leak have included:

• A boycott of the official D&D digital storefront, D&D Beyond, has been organized under the Twitter hashtag #DnDBegone.
• A second hashtag, #OpenDND, was built to encourage game designers to not sign onto OGL 1.1 and demand that OGL 1.0a be kept in place. At time of writing, an associated petition has over 77,000 signatures.
• Redmond, Wash.-based Paizo Publishing, creators of the Pathfinder tabletop RPG, has organized a coalition of independent game developers to develop a new OGL, the Open RPG Creative License (ORC). As of Jan. 19, Paizo’s ORC coalition reportedly includes over 1,500 companies.
• Kobold Press, headquartered in Kirkland, Wash., announced a new fantasy RPG under the working title of Project Black Flag that will be compatible with Paizo’s ORC.
• Swedish game publisher Free League issued a press release on Jan. 16 that it would develop two new Open Game Licenses of its own, which cover its licensed Year Zero Engine RPGs (Alien, Blade Runner, The Walking Dead) and the upcoming English localization of the fantasy game Dragonbane.

All at once, the Jan. 5 leak has damaged the D&D brand in the eyes of many of its most vocal players; led to at least one boycott of D&D‘s official digital storefront; and has given D&D‘s competitors a shot in the arm.

This includes the production and release of multiple new fantasy RPGs that are at least implicitly intended as alternatives for players who’re moving away from Dungeons & Dragons, some of which are being made by companies that were previously producing content for Dungeons & Dragons.

Damage control

Wizards of the Coast, for its part, does seem aware that there’s a problem. As a follow-up to its Jan. 13 apology, Wizards announced a new, significantly changed version of the OGL, 1.2 on Jan. 19 via the D&D Beyond website.

OGL 1.2, a “playtest” that Wizards claims is subject to change based on community feedback, explicitly walks back many of the more controversial changes in 1.1.

“What’s not in there? There’s no royalty payment, no financial reporting, no license-back, no registration, no distinction between commercial and non-commercial,” wrote Kyle Brink, executive producer for D&D. “Nothing will impact any content you have already published under OGL 1.0a. That will always be licensed under OGL 1.0a. Your stuff is your stuff.”

Under OGL 1.2, the core D&D mechanics will be “given to the community” via a Creative Commons license, which allows Wizards to maintain its copyright while also allowing others to freely copy, distribute, and build upon D&D.

That decision is tied to another feature of OGL 1.2, the explicit deauthorization of OGL 1.0a. This step is being taken, as per Brink, to allow Wizards of the Coast to use “protective options” that would be impossible under the terms of OGL 1.0a, in order to let Wizards act to address “offensive or hurtful content” published by third parties for D&D.

“We want an inclusive, safe play space for everyone,” Brink wrote. “This is deeply important to us, and OGL 1.0a didn’t give us any ability to ensure it.”

Other provisions in OGL 1.2 include a couple of unusual shots across the bow at independently-prodcued virtual tabletops (VTTs), such as Roll20 and Tabletop Simulator. The OGL 1.2 in its current state allows any VTT that simply reproduces “the experience of sitting around the table playing D&D with your friends,” but specifically disallows advanced features like custom spell animations.

This is widely seen by analysts (and cynical fans) as an attempt to preemptively stake out some real estate for D&D‘s own official VTT, which it announced alongside its One D&D initiative back in August.

Lawful neutral

Wizards’ insistence on deauthorizing the original OGL has led to an ongoing argument about whether or not it’s legally able to do so. This has given nerds, lawyers, and nerds who are lawyers a lot to talk about over the course of the last couple of weeks.

“At inception of the OGL, Wizards widely represented that OGL 1.0a was an irrevocable contract with obligations for both Wizards and participating publishers,” Azora Law’s Brian Lewis told GeekWire via email.

Lewis was the legal architect of the original OGL in 2000, and is currently working with numerous publishers, including Paizo, to develop the ORC license for the tabletop industry.

“Kit Walsh [senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation] argued here very persuasively that, viewed externally, this position has clear support under Washington law which holds that, unlike a license without consideration, an offer to contract cannot be revoked unilaterally once it has been accepted,” Lewis said.

As such, a legal argument can be made that the OGL 1.0a was a one-way trip. Wizards doesn’t have to offer the terms from OGL 1.0a to future third-party publishing partners, but it isn’t able to revoke that contract from anyone who’s already accepted it. Companies that have published indie D&D books in the last 22 years are theoretically clear to continue to do so under OGL 1.0a, but newcomers to the field are liable to have to abide by different rules.

What happens next

It’s not really a question of whether or not the new OGL will change tabletop gaming, because it already has. Dungeons & Dragons is entrenched enough in the landscape that this isn’t likely to be more than a blip on its overall radar, but it’s now going to face a broad assortment of new challenges over the course of the rest of the year.

This could include a talent drain, as new publishers and indie creators opt to try to make their own games or work with other companies’ OGLs rather than deal with Wizards; the possibility of some real sales pressure from Paizo and its partners on the ORC license; and fans losing faith in the company and/or its current leadership.

Wizards of the Coast was already walking a tightrope with a vocal portion of its audience, due to its habit of provoking regular controversies. Its most recent issues involved the September revival of the Spelljammer campaign setting, where a race of monkey aliens called the hadozee were given a new origin with some unfortunate historical parallels.

It’s easy to write a lot of the OGL pushback off as just Twitter being Twitter, but at the same time, a significant portion of Wizards’ success in the last few years has come from content creators, many of whom have publicly split with the company in the last couple of weeks. It’s going to take some serious work for Wizards to win them back, if it’s even possible, and a management shakeup is not necessarily off the table.

The biggest change going forward is likely to be the new dominance of open game licenses in the tabletop field. With Paizo’s ORC coalition in particular, a lot of smaller games are now going to be compatible with one another, which could go a long way towards connecting some of their audiences. In the current state of pen-and-paper RPGs, no one company can realistically compete with Wizards, but 1,500 of them working together almost certainly can.

Early on the morning of Jan. 14, two thieves hit four separate retail outlets in Kent, Wash., by backing a stolen Audi SUV through their front doors. This included GameBound, an independently-operated, locally-owned store that specializes in “everything that is geek and nerdy.”

A week later, GameBound was back in business, using the break-in to reorganize and come back “even better.”

It was the first robbery at the Seattle-area store since owner Kiet Pham opened it in 2017.

“I thought I had everything down, to the security, the cameras, the sensor, the bars,” Pham told GeekWire. “My store was heavily secured and gated. The one thing I couldn’t plan for was the car.”

The thieves stole multiple games and consoles from GameBound, in addition to inflicting what Pham estimates to be roughly $22,000 in damage.

The thieves also hit a GameStop, an Xfinity outlet, and an eyeglasses store over the course of the night, using the same SUV.

Pham said he’s working with his landlord to install bollards. If they aren’t able to do that, he said he may need to relocate to a safer area.

According to Pham, every other store in the same retail complex as GameBound has been broken into once or twice in the last couple of years, and a couple have been robbed every month.

Commercial burglaries in Kent were up 45% in 2022, according to data from Kent Police.

Last year, Seattle video game store Pink Gorilla also dealt with break-ins, but has bounced back and even opened a new location in December.

Pham doesn’t anticipate needing financial help with the store’s repairs, as he also happens to own an insurance agency, and made sure GameBound was well covered.

“It’s a good thing I wrote a really good policy for myself in the beginning,” Pham said. “I’m lucky. Still, as an insurance professional for 13 years, there are the labor costs and the time costs for cleaning up, and the deductible.”

The merchandise taken from GameBound on Jan. 14 includes complete-in-box PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, GameCube, Wii, Xbox, and Xbox 360 video game consoles; a Game Boy; a Game Boy Color; a Texas Instruments graphing calculator in its original packaging; and multiple Sega CD and Sega Saturn games. The items were all labeled with GameBound stickers.

In addition, the break-in destroyed four glass display cabinets and cases, the store’s folding security gate, and two items from Pham’s personal collection: original display kiosks for the Xbox and PlayStation, of the sort that you might’ve seen in video game stores when the systems were new. The kiosks, which will be difficult at best to repair or replace, are the only damage from the break-in that’s truly upset Pham.

GameBound’s “bread and butter,” according to Pham, is selling used video games, from current releases to old “retro” titles such as the Atari. In addition, GameBound offers toys, trading cards, and comics.

Pham took to social media last week to spread word of the break-in, as well as put out photos of the two thieves that were taken by his store’s security cameras.

Amazon has laid off employees at its Comixology service, according to reports from former workers.

News spread via social media Wednesday that much of the Comixology team had been let go, with some of the former employees alleging that the department had been reduced by as much as 75%.

Amazon began an 18,000-person layoff on Wednesday. Comixology is part of the Worldwide Amazon Stores business, which has been hit with the majority of the eliminations so far.

When asked for comment, an Amazon representative pointed to a Jan. 4 memo from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

Amazon has been shutting down several services and products over the past year as it looks to trim expenses amid the broader tech downturn, including: primary care service Amazon Care; a video calling-device for kids called Amazon Glow, the Treasure Truck deals program, and charity program AmazonSmile.

Comixology is a cloud-based digital distribution platform for electronic copies of comic books. It was originally founded in 2007 and was acquired by Amazon in 2014.

Comixology offers digital copies of both American comics and manga, which are made available to readers via cloud servers on browsers and mobile apps.

By the time Amazon purchased it, Comixology was already far and away the leading distributor of digital comics, with frequent flash sales and freebies that made it an attractive option for readers on a budget.

Further, many of Comixology’s competitors, such as Marvel’s digital library Unlimited, are subscription services and/or limited to a single company’s comics. As far as a single digital storefront for most if not all of the comics on American store shelves, Comixology was just about the only game in town.

Post-acquisition, Comixology continued to operate as it had before, through both Amazon and its own website. It launched its own subscription service, Comixology Unlimited, in 2016, which offered a selection of multiple publishers’ comics to read. In 2018, Comixology began offering original creator-owned titles on the service via its Comixology Originals imprint.

In 2021, Amazon announced that it planned to close Comixology.com in favor of fully integrating the site into its Kindle department, but put off the change due to “community feedback.”

When that integration did show up in February 2022, the results were immediately controversial. The move to Kindle was reported as markedly harming the overall Comixology experience, with users reporting a loss of image quality, the unexpected disappearance of books from libraries, no more offering copies of digital comics without DRM, and the inability to buy comics directly through the app. Six months later, many of the same problems persisted.

Wizards of the Coast issued a press release Friday to clarify that it doesn’t intend to implement a series of controversial policies that would have reportedly changed how it handles independently-published material for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game.

Those changes would have effectively reversed 23 years of precedent for D&D, by requiring licensors to go through Wizards to approve and publish work, as well as potentially having to pay Wizards royalties. It would also possibly have shut down independent productions, like live-play shows, that were based wholly or in part on D&D.

The policy shift concerns the Open Game License (OGL), a public copyright notice that Wizards of the Coast, headquartered in Renton, Wash., adopted in 2000. Under the terms of the original OGL, or OGL 1.0a, third-party creators can independently publish virtually any sort of material for D&D for profit.

This is what’s allowed a generation of RPG creators to make a living off of making their own content for D&D, and what’s led to successful independent spin-off franchises like Pathfinder, published by Redmond, Wash.-based Paizo.

Rumors had been in circulation since late last year that Wizards, as part of its current One D&D initiative, planned to water down or abolish the OGL. Wizards previously told GeekWire in November that it planned to continue to support third-party content for D&D, but didn’t comment further at the time.

On Jan. 5, Gizmodo’s Linda Codega broke the story that a new version of the OGL was in the works that represented a significant change to Wizards’ policies.

Under the terms of a leaked draft of OGL 1.1, dated mid-December, the original OGL 1.0a was deauthorized, which placed a number of current projects such as Pathfinder in legal jeopardy. Additionally, independent creators under OGL 1.1 were given a number of new rules to follow in order to continue producing D&D content.

These rules included:

• a new requirement for creators to report their product lineup, new and old, directly to Wizards of the Coast
• a tiered system where licensors were required to pay Wizards 20-25% of all revenue above a certain threshold
• a soft incentive to run all future D&D-based crowdfunding campaigns through Kickstarter
• an overt requirement that Wizards has a “perpetual, irrevocable” license to use any independently-created D&D material for any reason, effectively ceding at least partial control of any content to Wizards itself

The most damning change is arguably a clause that explicitly states that the OGL 1.1 only applied to roleplaying books and other materials. Anything else made with D&D that was not a not-for-profit fan work was actively disallowed by the OGL 1.1.

While there is a loophole in the document for products like livestreams and podcasts that are available for free but funded through voluntary donations, i.e. Patreon, the OGL 1.1, if implemented as written in the Jan. 5 leak, could shut down any live-play D&D shows that operate behind a paywall or subscription model.

For example, Critical Role, which can be watched for free weekly, would be safe under OGL 1.1, but Dropout.tv’s Dimension 20, which airs on a streaming service that requires a subscription, would not.

The Gizmodo article quickly went viral, which led to a massive outcry among D&D players. A second purported leak, sent by an anonymous “insider” to multiple D&D content creators on Jan. 12, resulted in several social media campaigns to boycott playing D&D in favor of other RPGs, and to send a message to Wizards by canceling subscriptions to its digital storefront D&D Beyond.

One of the strongest reactions to the OGL 1.1 leak came late on Jan. 12 from Paizo Publishing. It announced via its official community blog that it would create a new Open RPG Creative License, or ORC, that’s designed to be “open, perpetual, and irrevocable.”

The ORC is being built to be “system-agnostic,” which means it doesn’t support any specific game’s rules, under the legal guidance of Seattle-based attorney Brian Lewis of Azora Law, who previously helped draft the original OGL. Paizo has further partnered with a number of other independent game developers to create the ORC, such as Washington state’s Kobold Press (Kirkland), Green Ronin (Seattle), and Legendary Games (Seattle).

Wizards itself was notably silent on the issue until Jan. 13, eight days after Codega’s article was published.

In its blog entry, the company acknowledged that the changes in the OGL 1.1 were unpopular. Wizards’ goals with the changes in 1.1 were to “prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products”; to clarify that the OGL does not allow the use of D&D in Web3/blockchain/NFT games; and to ensure that the OGL is for “our players, and the community,” rather than major corporations “to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose.”

Wizards stated that further revisions of the OGL will not invalidate any content that was made or produced under its version 1.0a; it will not result in Wizards owning any rights to any independently-made D&D content; and they will not contain any royalty structures.

“Our plan was always to solicit the input of our community before any update to the OGL; the drafts you’ve seen were attempting to do just that,” Wizards’ staff wrote on the blog. “We want to always delight fans and create experiences together that everyone loves.”

“We realize we did not do that this time and we are sorry for that. Our goal was to get exactly the type of feedback on which provisions worked and which did not–which we ultimately got from you.”

Wizards of the Coast responded to GeekWire’s requests for comment by linking to the blog post on D&D Beyond.

The leaked changes to the OGL notably come at a point in time when Wizards’ parent company Hasbro is struggling with a sharp drop in its quarterly revenue.

Fans and analysts have repeatedly linked the OGL 1.1, which pulls much of the creative and licensing power over D&D back to Wizards’ hands, with the dire state of Hasbro’s other departments. A shareholder campaign in February claimed that Wizards, at one point, brought in almost half of Hasbro’s overall earnings by itself.

Pink Gorilla had a lot of issues with burglaries and break-ins last year, but the oldest retro/import games store in the Pacific Northwest is actually expanding its footprint in the Seattle area.

The company rang in 2023 with the opening of a new shop in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, its third location in the city.

The growth comes after a difficult 2022 for the original Pink Gorilla store in the International District, which was hit with a $14,000 burglary in July, followed by an armed hold-up in October, in addition to multiple other incidents such as broken windows. According to the store’s co-owners, the location had more problems with crime over the course of 2022 than it had in the previous 17 years.

Pink Gorilla was thinking about moving out of the International District, where several businesses have left in recent years. Instead, its owners have opted to open a new location in Capitol Hill, in part to make sure its employees keep their jobs, and its original location is staying put.

“We’ve been in the International District for 17 years,” Pink Gorilla co-owner Cody Spencer told GeekWire. “If we leave, that place is kind of doomed. It’s just a spiral. Another business leaves, then another and another.”

Spencer argues that the International District, despite its current issues with crime, isn’t beyond help.

“The community is definitely trying to save it,” he says. “The Business Improvement Area is trying to make it a better and cleaner place, and their efforts aren’t unnoticed. I don’t want to abandon [the International District], but I also don’t want metal bars all over my store, so why don’t we stick through it as long as possible.”

Spencer worked 12-hour days for almost two months to put the new Capitol Hill store together, which included installing heightened security measures from the ground up.

That new Pink Gorilla is in a 1,400-square-foot venue on 613 E. Pike Street, about seven blocks east from the Washington State Convention Center.

When I stopped by last week, I found the store was still partially under construction, but it features the same celebratory approach to the history and hobby of video games that characterizes the store’s other locations in the city. Pink Gorilla is designed to be fun to visit, even if you don’t intend to spend a dime.

The company deliberately patterns its store design and approach around Japanese video game outlets. It originally opened as Pink Godzilla in Seattle’s International District in 2005, but rebranded in 2009 following a copyright claim from Toho, the owners of the Godzilla franchise.

According to Spencer, the decision to put the new store in Capitol Hill came down to something simple: foot traffic.

“We have the lowest prices,” Spencer said. “The only way we can do that is because a lot of people come through. If we were out in a more rural area, we would probably have to be more expensive. [Capitol Hill] is a perfect mix.”

Pink Gorilla is currently hiring sales associates across all three locations.