Crypto News: Vampire diaries

Happy Friday! It's Cecilia here as we head into Memorial Day Weekend. That means you have one extra day to sink your teeth into this week's hottest new game–and my interview with its developers. But first…

This week's top gaming news:

Activision Blizzard workers at subsidiary Raven Software voted to unionize this week, forming the first legal union at a US-listed game company.
TikTok is taking pages from Twitch's playbook, releasing new monetization features this week that were first popularized on Twitch.
Mafia 3 developer Hangar 13, part of Take-Two Interactive, laid off several employees this week.

A couple times a year, several friends ask if I'm playing a game I've never heard of, all at once. It's a little thrilling — like getting a call from someone upwind of a storm heading your way. This time, the game was a "dark fantasy vampire survival role-playing game." I was like, "No. Also, what?"

"When you hear that, your eyes kind of glaze over," says Jeremy Fielding, community manager for Stunlock Studios, the developer of V Rising. The game's strange genre-medley didn't hinder it from selling 1 million copies at $20 each within a week of its May 17 launch. Or from attracting more concurrent PC players this week than hit AAA game Elden Ring.

Activision Blizzard Inc. President Mike Ybarra tweeted that he'd be playing the game this weekend. Top Twitch streamer Michael "Shroud" Grzesiek has been livestreaming V Rising in 13-hour strings with titles like, "I'm not addicted."

"I'm kind of worried about him," says Fielding. He added that Stunlock Studios didn't even ask Grzesiek to play — he found the game organically.

Stunlock Studios is a 38-person shop based out of Skövde, Sweden. After five other games, V Rising is their first mainstream hit — still just in early access after three years of development. "It's nothing we could have possibly expected," says Fielding. "One in like 30,000 games blows up like this."

Competition in the world of video games — and particularly those released on PC marketplace Steam — is notoriously stiff for smaller and mid-size studios. In 2021, about 11,000 games were released on Steam, a significant increase from the previous two years. Just last month 790 games debuted on the platform. The increase is due in part to demand, but also to the availability of easy-to-use game-making software from Unity Software Inc. and Epic Games Inc.

"The gaming space is high-risk, high-reward," says V Rising's producer and lead world designer Max Tiilikainen. So what chemical mixture rocketed this game to the moon?

In V Rising, the player is a vampire fighting for survival in an unfriendly forest world. Dodging the sunlight and gathering resources like wood, the vampires craft armor and weapons to fight beasts and also build elaborate castles. But they're not alone. V Rising is best enjoyed as a multiplayer-game. On 20- or 40-person servers, players group into small clans to take down threats like vampire hunters, magical monsters and even each other.

The new vampire game from a small Swedish developer has become a fast success with its mix of vampires, survival and adventure. Source: Stunlock Studios

V Rising hits the right buttons on several levels. I feel both relaxed and accomplished repeatedly clicking my ax against trees to gather wood. Building a castle is strategically satisfying. And fighting monsters and players is an injection of endorphins.

The game follows in the footsteps of other viral survival games like 2013's basic survival game Rust (which sold 12 million copies across PC, Xbox and PS4 in 9 years); 2015's dinosaur survival game ARK: Survival Evolved (which sold 16 million copies across all platforms in four years); and 2021's viking survival game Vallheim (which sold 10 million copies on PC in just over a year).

Stunlock Studios worked just as hard on the marketing as they did on production, says Tiilikainen. Stunlock advertised V Rising on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter — but it's hard to get fans interested in a product they can't get their hands on yet. The best they can theorize, says Fielding, is that Stunlock Studios made a game that authentically satisfied their own taste; not some imagined other person's.

Still, it's hard to ignore the steady stream of hits in the survival genre. I asked Tiilikainen whether there's some base human need games like V Rising are satisfying. "Any human being can relate to going out in the forest and trying to survive there. And it fascinates us — especially since we don't live our lives like that anymore," he says.

I think it might even be a little deeper than that. Going out into the forest alone, building a fire alone, sleeping under the night sky alone — that's not what fascinates most of us. It's the idea of bringing ourselves and our friends somewhere unknown and seeing what we can build together, unfettered from material realities.

What does it feel like to lend your friend enough stone for them to build a cathedral? What does it feel like for them to give you their blood after you've been mauled by a wolf? In daily life, those are uncommon experiences, but they satisfy a universal desire to build trust and depend on others.

V Rising's social power may also be its greatest marketing asset. The game itself is a blast. But the reason my friends are texting to ask if I'm hip to "this new vampire game" is because Stunlock Studios designed something that scales in fun proportionally to the number of friends playing along.

See above.

V Rising, a gothic, multiplayer survival game from Stunlock Studios. Source: Stunlock Studios

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox at Microsoft, says he will recognize the union formed at Activision Blizzard's Raven Software studio after Microsoft's purchase Activision closes, Kotaku reported.
Netflix is developing a series based on hit PlayStation video game Horizon Zero Dawn, according to Deadline.
Tencent pulled out of financing Top Gun: Maverick, over concerns about Chinese officials' reactions, the Wall Street Journal reported.