GYGO: The Military is Still on Twitch, but so Are Vtubers

Hello and welcome to GYGO! I’m Kael, your local good hunter, and I’ve been spending a lot of my time chilling with the doll in Bloodborne this week. That is, until i got distracted by Control‘s AWE DLC, which I’m now deep in. In between I’ve also found the time to pick up embroidery, which is actually super fun. Anyway between my thousand hobbies I also found some great, and not so great, news for this week!

The American Military Is Still On Twitch

I am now begging anyone to get the armed forces of off Twitch. Thinking about it gives me actual psychic damage.

In this week’s debacle Axel Torres, a member of the National Guard Twitch team, was shouting out the usernames of new subscribers when he repeated the name “6millionwasnt_nough,” a phrase used in neo-Nazi circles to reference the amount of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust.

The National Guard responded by denouncing the name and promising to educate their streamers about “screen names that may have racial or negative sentiment behind them.” Personally, I think there’s no way to educate a streamer on every possible permutation of racist dog whistle that might appear on stream. With an individual streamer, who can apologize and learn on an individual level, I think that’s okay. Within the context of an agency like the National Guard, I think it’s dangerous to have the rhetoric surface in the first place.

As reported by Vice, Torres himself has a history of sharing white supremacist ideas on his (now private) Facebook account. The reported posts pertained to the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and myths about Black families on welfare.

Mainstreamers Try Out Vtubing

Twitch streamer Pokimane, known for her on-camera Pokémon streams, shook up her community by dipping into Vtubing. Vtubing, or the practice of using a virtual avatar that tracks to your movement while you stream, is popular in Japan and getting increasingly popular in the US. It’s a way to stream that isn’t reliant on physical appearance, and according to Polygon, is a respite for streamers who feel pressured to be on camera but don’t want to get all dressed up.

But not everyone is into the anime-esque personas, and Pokimane was accused of bandwagoning or not “real” Vtubing. If it is bandwagoning, I think hiring an artist well known in the Vtubing community and telling people to look up other Vtubers is a nice way to hop on.

Former Lab Zero Employees Form Game Dev Co-Op

Former Lab Zero employees are getting back on their feet. The studio’s owner, previously accused of misconduct and sexual harassment, laid off most of the studio in late August.  Workers at Lab Zero coordinated on Discord to form Future Club, an employee-owned game design co-op. They’re still ironing out the kinks and seeking funding, but they want to give jobs to those laid off from Lab Zero as well as cut all ties with their former employer.

In Other News…

We now know more about the Xbox Series S, Xbox’s cheaper next-gen console, will handle backwards compatibility. While many hoped it would run enhanced versions of games from the Xbox One X, Xbox’s current-gen “pro” style console, it will actually run versions from Xbox’s current budget-style console, the Xbox One S. These versions still come with some improvements from the Xbox 360 originals, but should run more smoothly on the budget console’s lower RAM.

Remastered PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch editions of the Mass Effect Trilogy appeared on Portuguese online retailer GamingReplay this week. They have since been taken down, but not before getting a whole lot of people excited about playing Mass Effect on the Switch. There has been no official announcement about the release from EA or Bioware.

Devil May Cry 5 and Dragon’s Dogma designer Ryota Suzuki is joining Square Enix as a battle director. While I’m not sure how he’ll find time in between sessions at the war table and sword practice, as I can only assume being battle director entails, it’s rumored his first game with Square Enix may be Final Fantasy XVI.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States sent requests to Tencent owned companies like Riot Games and Epic Games to find how they are processing data on American citizens. This follows the Trump administration’s battle with ByteDance, owner of apps like TikTok. Tencent is the largest video game vendor in the world, and also owns apps like Discord and Snapchat.

A small team is working to restore watercolor drawings from Game Freak art director Ken Sugimori. The art was originally on collectible Pokemon cards only released in Japan. The team is looking for volunteers experienced in Photoshop and comfortable in restoration work.

Twitch, Dave Walters, Tanya Depass, and a whole team of POC creators are teaming up to create Into the Mother Lands, an all-new sci-fi RPG.

Beyond Good and Evil and Rayman creator Michel Ancel is leaving the game industry to work in wildlife. He stated that despite his departure Beyond Good and Evil 2 is going well and promises great things.

Microsoft now owns Bethesda Softworks, the studio behind The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The company promises to make Bethesda titles, including the upcoming Starfield, available on Xbox Game Pass for console and PC.

Left for Dead 2 is getting a content update after quite a few years.

The Kpop group BLACKPINK and PUBG Mobile have a mysterious collaboration in the works.

After almost a decade of service, Nintendo is finally ending production of the 3DS line of products.

A new story-driven Monster Hunter RPG is set to be released in Summer 2021.

Marvel’s Avengers just released an update that fixes more than 1000 bugs.

The Undertale 5th Anniversary Concert is really cute and I’m listening to it while writing this.

And Now Some of Trailers:

Final Fantasy XVI

Harry Potter Hogwarts Legacy