Here we are, it is Friday, and I have a few items to pick up that I missed or want to catch up on since I was away last week.

• WoW Midnight Ship Date – March 2, 2026

We knew we would be hearing this date sooner or later, but this was a bit sooner than I expected.  But, then again, so is the actual release date.

Yes, this was all announced last week, but I was away last week and I do have a couple of brief comments on the date.

First, this was a lot sooner than I expected it.  When they put out the “by June 30, 2026” statement I figured early May would likely be a close pick.  I even had a 2026 prediction around that, which I can now delete since we know the answer.  The perils of starting that post early.

The second is that this really could be seen as a statement of how much confidence the company has in WoW Classic right now.  My last bullet points post included the fact that that The Anniversary Edition of The Burning Crusade Classic was going to get it’s pre-patch on January 13, 2026.

That means that TBC will go live in the middle of the Midnight pre-patch run up.  While I am not a huge fan of TBC, even I went “Whoa, what?” at the plan to basically treat the TBC launch as something not worth promoting.  I made a bold statement about Blizz not wanting launches to step on each other a while back, but now it feels like I should rephrase that as “launches they care about” because the message I am getting is that they don’t care about TBC Classic.

TBC players feeling this right now

Now, maybe I am over thinking the situation, but I am trying to think about when Blizz has done this before.  And why bother letting TBC linger this long if the plan was just to launch it into the teeth of the next major retail expansion?  I feel like I have moved to the side of those who kept up with the “waiting room for Outland” narrative.

• Light No Fire – Announce No Date

AYFKM?

I feel like Sean Murray and crew might have forgotten a crucial lesson that was part of the No Man’s Sky launch, which is that gamers can get pretty angry when they feel you are toying with their emotions, even if it is just to move a ship date or to talk about features that won’t be there at launch.  Or maybe just talking about a game before its launch is somewhere actually on the horizon.

Such is the case with Light No Fire, which will have had a store page on Steam for two years pretty soon with no details or target date or anything as yet announced.  But Hello Games has been pushing people to wishlist the title in its big No Man’s Sky updates.  So it has FELT like maybe it ought to be close to at least early access.

Light no Fire… not in 2026 at least

Alas, it is not.  It is nowhere near being anything.  A “tiny” team is working on it in the “background” and the whole thing kind of pisses me off because they have been, as noted in the previous paragraph, pushing people to wishlist the game.

Basically, the message here is that Sean Murray is yanking our collective chain talking about a game that they aren’t even seriously working on.  As I started, so shall I end, by asking, “Did he learn fucking nothing from the No Man’s Sky launch?”  Way to piss all over nearly a decade of rebuilding good will with your audience.  Distrust mode engaged!

I am not going to do anything dumb, like harass them on social media or be a jerk about it.  It is just a video game or whatever.  However, since I write about video games daily I will now consider all news about the game bullshit until we get a launch date.  They haven’t reached the Mark Jacobs / Camelot Unchained level of distrust, but they have some work to do before I again take what they say about the game at face value.

• Musial Chairs on the Enad Global 7 Board

As I alluded to in that post about nostalgia, things have been afoot at the governance level of Enad Global 7, with a major stakeholder, Eros Capital Partners AB, basically demanding more money.

Enad Global 7

It started with a letter (linked above) issued to the previous board with a list of demands that were basically petulant whining couched in business speak about wanting more money out of the operation.  All the usual items are in there, stock buy backs, more dividends, and maybe just selling the whole venture off it it will make a buck short term.  No doubt Eros wants a cushion for some of its $2 billion in AI investments that they have to know are going to go bad.

And it ended with them electing their representative to be chairman of the board, giving all board members a raise in compensation, and gleefully wringing their hands and laughing maniacally.

Okay, a bit of literary license there.  I mean, they could actually be interested in making video games.  But they don’t sound like they are, and if that were so it would make them a rare unicorn indeed.

• The Saudi Purchase of EA Carries On

As I noted in the past, this is already a done deal, what with Jared Kushner being the point person from the administration to take the bribe from the Saudis.  He won’t actually do anything, he is just window dressing to make sure the administration approves the deal.

Electronic Arts – Early Days Logo

And I remain convinced that the Saudis are going to chop up EA like a dissident journalist.  I don’t think that is in doubt.  What EA ends up looking like two years from now will likely be much different, both in scope and focus, than the EA of today.

But more news is started to come out, such as the extent to which the Saudis will own the company… which is pretty much all of it… and what  they might do with the core EA franchises, which are largely sports related.  That Matthew Ball pieces spins a vision of what the House of Saud might by up to.

• The Most Cryptic Thing is Who Even Works for Cryptic Now

Oh Cryptic Studios, once a plucky underdog in the MMO world, and now it just keeps getting passed around like an obscene metaphor.

They used to have a nice little office near Vasona reservoir over in Los Gatos, not too far from Netflix HQ.  I used to drive by there now and again and remember seeing the sign.  I should have taken a picture, it certainly would have lasted longer.

Cryptic has struggled since NCsoft pulled the plug on City of Heroes, with Champions Online, Neverwinter, and Star Trek Online all having a rough ride, which led to the company being acquired and then shuffled along with the vast “this boom will never end!” industry optimism that left them in the grip of Lars Wingefors and the awful Embracer group.

Embrace This

Speaking of the Saudis, Lars took a handshake and some encouraging words to indicate that they would bankroll his plan to bulk up his company by simply acquiring any studio that would sell out,  This Katamari Damacy inspired plan did not inspire confidence in the Saudis, who walked away from the madness, leaving Lars to take the fall.

Ha ha ha… I kid.  Rich people never pay for their mistakes, they pass all the on to their employees then go back to having some toady tell them how smart they are.

So the last few years of the Embracer group has been them laying people off, cancelling projects, shutting down studios, creating subsidiaries to saddle with debt, and selling off anything that could find a buyer in this now bear market for video games.

And now it is Cryptic’s turn in the barrel as Embracer sells off Arc Studios, which is what Perfect World Entertainment ended up being called within the Embracer menagerie, to a Hong Kong concern who had already been licensing Torchlight Infinite.

The whole thing seemed rather fraught as to what is being sold, but I suspect that is less about Embracer trying to hold onto anything as much as it is what the buyer is willing to pay for.