Get Your Game On Wednesday: Welcome to the Church of Hanzo

Welcome to Wednesday! I’ve been sinking my teeth into NieR: Automata and a second Ladykiller in a Bind playthrough—this time learning more about the Boy—while the rest of the gaming world is drowning in daddies. Will I ever catch up on the hot gaming trend of the day? Probably not, but I’m always on top of the news!

This Week Does Right By Indie Developers

It’s been a good week for indie games. Xbox Live’s Creators Program allows developers to self-publish their games to the Xbox Marketplace, and those titles are now beginning to appear for testers. Because of the software used, any game available through this program is also available for Windows 10 users. Though there’s no full release date yet, it’s expected that these games will be available for all users sometime this year.

A new service called Jump aims to be the on-demand streaming service players want with fewer of the hitches. Games won’t stream directly from the cloud, eliminating the potential for poor performance due to internet speed. Even better, the company aims to do so without alienating or taking advantage of indie game designers by encouraging them to join on once the initial sales peak is over. It’s not a perfect solution, but that they’re striving to include indie developers at all says a lot.

Though it’s not specifically indie-focused, Facebook Instant Games allows designers to get their games in front of millions of people with significantly less effort than launching on another platform. Its Messenger integration and simple tools mean it’s a great opportunity for both existing and new developers, though, naturally, there are some limitations on what kinds of games are likely to be successful given the audience.

Get Or Get Rid of Your Classic Games Now

For the classic game fans among us, this has been a week of ups and downs. In up news, the SNES Classic is available for preorder! In down news, it’s already selling out from sites like Wal-Mart. If you want a copy, be sure to get on the notification list or risk losing out forever thanks to another planned limited run.

In better news, if you’re a collector of Atari games, you might be sitting on a goldmine. Titles like Gamma Attack and Air Raid are worth considerable sums if you have them in workable condition.

Gaming News Tidbits

Geek Chic, known for creating luxury tabletop gaming tables, recently shut its doors. Court documents show why: the company was massively in debt, with over $7 million in liabilities and only $1 million in assets.

Though Victor “Punk” Woodley didn’t take home the grand prize at this year’s Evo, he did get something pretty great; former WWE wrestler CM Punk personally recorded him a message telling him he did a great job. How sweet!

We’ve got some new game announcements this week! A second season of Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us is on the way, as is a second season of their Batman series, and a fourth and final season of The Walking Dead. And while it’s not a new game, Overwatch’s Doomfist will finally be entering public play this week, so prepare for several solid days of insta-picking on the part of every single person in Quick Play.

Speaking of Overwatch, are you a stan for the elder Shimada brother? Good news—there’s now an official church of Hanzo you can join.

That’s it for this week! Enjoy your dream daddies and hopefully I’ll get all the fuss someday soon.

Melissa Brinks

Melissa Brinks is Sidequest’s editor in chief, co-creator of the Fake Geek Girls podcast, author of The Compendium of Magical Beasts, and an aspiring beekeeper. She once won an argument on the internet, and tweets at @MelissaBrinks.