Games world argues over sponsor accusations, review time and a November release clash

Aftermath's Luke Plunkett reports on a row at Parallels, a main event of Melbourne International Games Week, held last Thursday. Wren Briar, creative director of Unpacking, says organiser Freeplay removed her as a sponsor on the day of the show after a speaker called her a "zionist". She says the claim traced to Unpacking appearing on a listicle in The Jewish Independent, which she did not know about. Briar says she is Jewish, was born in Israel, moved to Australia at 18, did not serve in the military and has never expressed anti-Palestinian views.

She told Aftermath that her involvement amounted to a donation to Freeplay's crowdfunding campaign, which put her in a sponsor reward tier, and sending a logo on request. She was abroad and had no knowledge of the speaker lineup. Developers including Rami Ismael and Mike Futter objected publicly, and Briar says at least one Freeplay board member resigned over the decision. Freeplay told Aftermath it is seeking advice and cannot comment. The piece's framing, taken from Briar's own words, is that nobody checked the accusation before acting.

CounterpointFreeplay has not given its side beyond the "untenable environment" wording Briar quotes, and the speaker who raised the concern has not been heard from. Organisers and speakers who argue that sponsor associations can legitimately worry an event's participants would dispute that the decision was discriminatory, though Briar's account of how thin her involvement was is not contested in the piece.

Rock Paper Shotgun's Oisin Kuhnke responds to comments from Lybee Park, European CEO of Crimson Desert developer Pearl Abyss, to The Game Business. Park said critics had limited time and played a build that was not identical to the launch version. She added that the game's charm is spread across its world rather than the main quest line, so critics lacked "a fair chance to explore" it. Kuhnke, who says he has not played the game, notes that reviews broadly reached a verdict of "it's fine".

He grants that Park may be partly right: critics often get codes days before launch, and that can skew impressions of a very large game. But he raises two objections. The compressed schedule is the developer's and publisher's doing, and he does not expect that to change without a workers' revolt in the industry. More fundamentally, he says a critic's job is to identify friction and interest, not to play as the average player would, and a lukewarm review is not an attack on people who enjoy the game.

CounterpointPark and Pearl Abyss would say the gap between critic and user scores is real and that the review-window problem is genuine, a point Kuhnke partly concedes. Players who rate games on longer play would also argue that review scores based on a few days with a huge open-world game tell them less than user impressions do.

In Polygon's Switchboard newsletter, Oli Welsh looks at Nintendo's decision to release The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Switch 2 in the same month as Grand Theft Auto 6. He notes Nintendo has shipped roughly monthly exclusives all year, with Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave three weeks ago and Switch Sports Resort two weeks away, followed two weeks later by Ocarina. He calls the remake so consequential that it works as a new mainline Zelda, and relays an unverified rumour that Nintendo built it in-house rather than hand it to Grezzo.

The hook is a Saturday Night Live sketch last weekend that pitted Link against GTA 6's Jason, guns versus fairies. Welsh calls it silly but even-handed, and says it turns a perceived GTA monopoly into a duopoly. He concedes that a Barbenheimer label overstates things: the release dates are two weeks apart and Ocarina is far smaller in scale and cannot match GTA's sales. Still, he argues Nintendo stands to gain from exposure that pulls Ocarina into GTA's slipstream, and that its gamble could pay off.

CounterpointSales-minded analysts would likely argue that one sketch does not make a duopoly and that GTA 6's scale will dominate November attention regardless. Welsh himself says the two games appeal to different markets, which undercuts the idea of a head-to-head contest.

Rock Paper Shotgun's Oisin Kuhnke reports that Cyberleek, the group that has been leaking GTA 6 clips for some time, is now asking supporters to pay in its own cryptocurrency. If enough money comes in, it says, it will leak a playable build of the game.

Previously: Polygon's Josh Broadwell criticised newly leaked footage showing unreacted-to nudity as outdated, noting it may come from a debug build. — Saturday October 10 edition.