5 Video Game Things I Learned | 2026 July 18 - July 24
This week was a tough week where I had to get a little creative with recognizing some older news in video games. News was light, but I managed to put together a list of five, still. In terms of those older stories, I have a glimpse into what I learned about L.A. Noire from a recent YouTube documentary, as well as coverage of a story roughly 15 years old regarding Electronic Arts and their Project Ten Dollar that I had never heard about. In more recent use, I cover the soring sales figures announced for Human Fall Flat and Palworld. Finally, I focus on a couple of shift in the industry having to do with Amazon and the initiative Games for Change.
The Unfinished L.A. Noire Successor
I believe I had heard of this project at some point, but this week I got a lot more information than I ever have before about Whore of the Orient, the spiritual successor (not an actual sequel) to L.A. Noire.
I loved L.A. Noire. While it’s not one of my favorite games I’ve ever played, I really appreciated it for what it was: a technologically innovative detective game with a narrative-focused adventure that, despite feeling grand and sprawling like the city of Los Angeles, deeply explores a narrow scope of features to tell its story. Despite tons of advances in technology for capturing video game cinematics and animations, I haven’t seen any other game try to accomplish what Team Bondi did with L.A. Noire in terms of focusing on reading NPCs expressions to press them for answers and solve a mystery.
Apparently, we could’ve had another game that was just that, though. Unfortunately, with a lack of investor support, that project, Whore of the Orient, died along with Team Bondi. While Team Bondi actually closed down before work on Whore of the Orient, many developers from that team were involved in the production of the game. It was slated to improve upon the mechanics of L.A. Noire by using newer technology and providing players with extended options when analyzing the believability of witnesses and suspects.
Whore of the Orient targeted a 1936 setting in Shanghai in which historically western powers had a great presence in an attempt to maintain peace. This came in the form of the Shanghai Municipal Police, a police force made up largely of westerners who oftentimes never even spoke the language of the city. The game would have potentially built mechanics around this by forcing the player to sort of “unlock” the native language over time in order to understand the people the main character would interview. Whore of the Orient would focus thematically on culture and the problems associated with policing a people whose language you don’t speak, ironically leading to massive injustices where police would shoot first and ask questions later.
I learned all of this information and more from Cade Onder’s documentary on YouTube that he posted a couple of weeks ago. He speaks with Dianiel McMahon, a writer on L.A. Noire and Whore of the Orient who has first-hand accounts of trying to develop this second attempt at what so far only L.A. Noire has done. However, that’s only the second part of the documentary. The first part dives further into the development of L.A. Noire, and I highly recommend watching the whole thing. McMahon dives deeper into working with Rockstar, the publisher of the game, and some of the struggles the team encountered with the new technology as well as more traditional game development challenges.
Project Ten Dollar
I started this series of weekly blog posts when I read about EA Spouse, a story that if it were to happen again today would take over headlines because of its cultural importance in game development, yet it had taken me far too long after the fact to have ever heard of it. “Project Ten Dollar” is another PR blunder for Electronic Arts that is more relevant than ever with PlayStation’s push to get rid of physical copies of games. Project Ten Dollar happened shortly before I really started to get into video games, so I didn’t get all of the details, and even if I did, I would’ve been too green to understand the ramifications.
EA instituted Project Ten Dollar under the leadership of John Riccitiello, a man who is a glutton for PR punishment. This is the same man responsible for floating the heinous idea of charging gamers to reload their weapons in shooters while he still ran EA. He also went on to become the head of Unity where, in 2023, he tried to shift Unity’s monetization model to a royalty-based one that saw Unity taking a slice of the pie for every “download” a game received. This move stunk to the high heavens of businessmen who have no understanding of the video game business. Every gamer and developer’s first thought that apparently the business heads at Unity didn’t think of was “What are ‘downloads’ in this context?“ Does that mean if a player buys a game, installs it, plays it, uninstalls it, then re-installs it to play it again, Unity’s going to charge developers twice for that player? What about patches and DLC? What about on cloud gaming services where the player never downloads the game at all? Unity struggled to answer these questions, Riccitiello left the company, and Unity pulled a complete 180 following his departure.
So yeah. That John Riccitiello.
Project Ten Dollar can be added to his resumé now in my mind, now. With Project Ten Dollar, EA sought to find a way to gouge money from players who bought EA games used. Under this project, every physical EA game purchase would come with a code. Players would then use that one-time code to download extra content for the game that added significant value to the experience. If a player who bought the new game then decided to bring it to a local game shop to trade it in, and another player came into the store and bought the same game used for a significantly cheaper price, the second player would have to log onto EA online and fork over $10 in order to get the content the first player received with the one-time code.
Frankly, I see where this thought came from, and I don’t think EA hit an all-time low or anything with this decision. It makes sense from a business perspective. Whenever a player purchases a used game, the publishers and developers behind the game don’t see a dime of that transaction. However, I do completely disagree with the view EA had about these used game transactions (and frankly all large game publishers still have about this practice in the industry). Companies like EA see used games as an afront to their business model. Companies like Nintendo had very similar reactions to video game rentals when that was a bigger thing.
I see these things as what should be the cost of being in the business of art forms. For as long as there have been books, there have been used books. For as long as there have been paintings, there have been art auctions. For as long as there have been take-home movies, there have been used movie stores. What’s beautiful is that there are consumer rights for this kind of thing. As we get closer and closer to entertainment being all digital, consumer lose their rights that they previously enjoyed with physical media. Streaming services are cracking down on sharing your account with friends. Platforms like Amazon Prime, PlayStation, and XBOX are reserving the right to take away your media at any moment for any reason even though you paid for it. Due to anti-piracy measures, you can’t share your digital game with your friends the same way as physical media. You also can’t resell the game to help mitigate the cost of it, while at the same time, game companies are refusing to drop their prices despite being able to produce games cheaper on digital storefronts. Project Ten Dollar was a step toward where we are today: a world in which we have to fight hard for our rights as consumers.
Amazon’s Shift in Gaming
This was a small story from this week, but Amazon apparently has restructured their gaming ventures under one umbrella. Previously, Amazon had three facets of their gaming business all siloed from one another: Luna as a gaming platform, free games with Prime that allowed you to get free games on other platforms, and game studios actively developing games. Now, they’re apparently unifying all of these under a single vision with the same goals in mind.
From the sounds of it, they’re going to be attacking the mobile market. Amazon’s General Manager of Gaming, Jeff Gattis, says that previously, “The thought was we're going to go get people to turn in their consoles and drop their gaming PCs and come to Luna. We've kind of abandoned that… we do see opportunity for people who don't own dedicated gaming hardware.“ In fact, Gattis firmly believes that “The world doesn't need another high-end gaming platform.“ Instead, what the world needs is further ways to experience incredible gaming experiences on mobile. “We think that group’s not being served,” he says, referring to the roughly 2.5 billion people worldwide who play video games but don’t actually own consoles or gaming PCs.
I honestly think this could be a really smart pivot for Amazon in gaming. Let’s be frank; how many people actually even knew Amazon Luna existed? I have faint memories of hearing about it, but I’m still not even convinced I understand what it is or what Amazon intended it to be. While I’m not always a big fan of mega corporations eating up more market shares, I think Amazon made a good choice to step out of trying to cater to what you might call “hardcore” gaming audiences. Gattis is right; there is some truly untapped potential in mobile gaming. Mobile gaming is the largest subset of the gaming industry by far. And Amazon just looked stupid trying to compete with the console and PC juggernauts.
Human Fall Flat and Palworld Sell Gangbusters
Last week, we heard about Fallout 4 surpassing 35 million units sold, making it one of the best-selling video games to ever release according to available figures. However, as figures continue to become available, we’re seeing players that have or likely will surpass games like Fallout 4 despite the large following that the Fallout franchise has.
For starters, Human Fall Flat apparently dwarfs Fallout 4! According to publisher Curve Games, the title has sold over 58 million units across all platforms. This puts it in the league of the original Super Mario Bros., tying the classic Nintendo game for 10th on the all-time best-selling list. Human Fall Flat hasn’t quite reached the heights of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or Terraria. However, it has managed to outsell fellow hits from small developers like Stardew Valley and Phasmophobia, as well as games from monster teams with tons of notoriety: Overwatch, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, etc. Furthermore, it has sold more copies than any individual title in a just about every major franchise, including: The Legend of Zelda, Call of Duty, Pokémon, Super Smash Bros., and many more.
Recently, Palworld has also reported huge player numbers. A couple of weeks back, developer Pocketpair announced that the game had surpassed 40 million players. However, this isn’t exactly a one-to-one with copies sold. Player counts are often times much higher than the number of sold copies because there are a number of ways in which people can acquire games for free, leading gradually to inflated player counts. This week, Alinea Analytics estimated the sales of Palworld to be around 30.5 million copies. If accurate, this figure doesn’t come close to Human Fall Flat, of course, but it would match reported numbers for Super Mario Odyssey and be within a million copies (both more and less than) of many juggernauts, including: the aforementioned Fallout 4, It Takes Two, Borderlands 2, and Monster Hunter: World.
The current state of the industry is such a mess. We see incredible sales numbers on what seems like a monthly basis and just as frequently see more and more employees losing their jobs. I just hope these mega-successes can lead to more money available for investment in new games at some point.
Games for Change Focuses on Parents
Games for Change put a smile on my face this week by talking about improving the communications that exist between the games industry and parents. For far too long, parents have been stuck in the headspace that games cause violence, limit sociability, and are an inherent threat to their children. Games for Change is looking to change the narrative by focusing strongly on what games are and what games are not. It’s especially important that this is done with “clear, accessible language” as well, according to Dr. Rachel Kowert, a Games for Change researcher.
I completely agree about the way that these messages are conveyed to parents. Despite the vast number of people who play video games, most are not playing Elden Ring, Red Dead Redemption, Borderlands, etc. These games are targeted to more of a core gaming audience, and a lot of parent are excluded from that. However, if that’s the case, parents can’t be informed using words that they don’t understand. If you tell such a parent that this game is an open-world, adventure RPG with a visual style akin to The Legend of Zelda and gameplay similar to The Witness, that’s going to get a lot of confused looks. In the same way, language needs to be changed to better advocate for games in a way that doesn’t alienate parents looking to make sure their kids are safe within the gaming ecosystem.