GYGO: Cyber-Fried Chicken. No, Really.

Hey, everybody! Emma here with this week’s hot and finger-lickin’ good gaming news. I hope you spent this very weird holiday in whatever way was best for you. I spent my birthday and Christmas painting a very satisfying Van Gogh forgery, but now I’m back and this news has stayed warm and crispy just for me.

Okay, so I’ll stop with all the chicken stuff and share my absolute favorite piece of gaming news of all time:

KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN GAMING CONSOLE

The KFConsole has an impressive list of specs, but perhaps best of all, it comes with a built-in Chicken Chamber, a warming drawer so you can keep your tenders, strips, and nuggets warm between matches. I never thought I’d need a gaming device that would remind me of my days working in food service, but boy do I want this. The jury is kinda still out on if this is real or if it’s a brilliant marketing stunt between KFC and CoolerMaster because there are no preorders or price point, but if 2020 could give me one thing, it would be for this to be real. After all, A Recipe for Seduction ended up being a real thing, so I can dream, right?

Onto Other Things, By Which I Do Still Mean Cyberpunk

CDPR is the gift that keeps on giving this year, as you’ve read about in the last two months of GYGOs. But this week, the news is less about Cyberpunk 2077 itself, and more about how people are reacting to it. People are still deeply unhappy with the way the game’s release was handled, and it’s leading to some perhaps extreme bits of action. First, this gem came out from Paste on the 23rd:

To briefly unpack this, the person who wrote this DID explain in their piece that they were not comparing a disappointing game release to genocide, but that they were attempting to draw a comparison between Hitler getting Man of the Year as an “admonition” and “warning” to the rest of the world and the fact that CDPR is acting in ways that will soon become the future of gaming unless we do something.

Okay, so that wasn’t a super thorough unpacking, because the headline is a metaphor that requires jumping through logical hoops to understand. Which, to my mind, makes it not a very good metaphor in the first place. I’m inclined to think everyone leaned into the insensitive sensationalizing of the video game/Hitler comparison for clicks. And if you take a gander at the ratio on that bad boy, you can see that it worked. Games journalism is WACKY, amirite?

But a Hitler comparison just wasn’t enough to throw at CDPR this week. Oh, no. They’re also getting sued.

An NY law firm has filed a class-action suit claiming that CDPR has violated federal securities laws and is attempting to get damages for CDPR investors after they released a game that was unplayable on base PS4s and XBox Ones. Essentially, the investors are suing because CDPRs reputation is damaged, and thus their original investment is no longer worth nearly as much. It remains to be seen if anything will come out of this, but if this lawsuit has teeth, we can probably expect Polish investors to (literally) follow suit.

The Raw Numbers Are In

As a final palate cleanser, Steam released its aggregate data about the games people were playing this year:

Don’t let the Keanu Reeves screengrab fool you, because the top game of the year is NOT Cyberpunk 2077, though it’s up there. Winning for both Top-Seller AND Most Played Game of 2020 is… Among Us! The little social deduction game that could (and is now out on Switch) has succeeded in stealing our hearts and running away with the lead title of Game That Made 2020 Suck a Little Less. And isn’t that the happy ending we all needed?