Game industry veterans at upstart publisher The 4 Winds Entertainment are tired of how the mainstream video game industry treats players in the Middle East and nearby countries, and they’re doing something about it.

Driving the news: 4 Winds is lending development support to the upcoming multiplayer military-themed shooter World War 3 to address chronic cultural and technical issues for gamers in a part of the world where the player population is rapidly growing.

• Gaming in the MENA region — Middle East North Africa — is projected to reach nearly 86 million gamers by 2025 and generate $3.1 billion in revenue, according to a Niko Partners study.
• But big games are largely developed in Western countries and Japan, often playing into stereotypes and using multiplayer infrastructure that puts players in that part of the world at a disadvantage.

The details: 4 Winds plans to produce “local content” for the game, which 4 Winds head of localization, Nazih Fares, sketched out for Axios.

• “It can start [with] simple things that seem so normal for Western players, like authentic voiceover lines that an actual Turkish or Arabic soldier would say, having national flag patches you can equip on your in-game soldier.”
• Even that would be a big deal, he said. “For years, representation of these cultures have been tarnished by the bias of Western publishers' point of view or understanding of these regions, and thus why Arabs, for example, are the go-to bad guys" in shooter games.

Playing better: They’re also working to make the multiplayer game run well in a region where online gaming is hampered by poor access to servers.

• They plan to establish local servers, reducing so-called ping so that players’ interactions with each other register swiftly and online competitions feel fair.
• For years, Fares said, local players had to connect through distant European servers. When he was a localizer at Blizzard, he overcame internal resistance to get the company’s popular Overwatch game set up through Amazon’s lone server set-up in the region — in Bahrain — but even that can produce laggy connections for players located too far from it.

Between the lines: These are ambitious goals for a modest game. World War 3, which is developed by Polish studio The Farm 51, isn’t on the scale of an Overwatch or other huge titles 4 Winds’ staff worked on before.

• But their work is an effort to change how the industry works. “Our company is all from the regions we want to help grow — the Arab world, Turkey, Latin America and Russian-speaking nations," Fares tells Axios. “Those are the ‘underserved' of the gaming industry, the ‘emerging markets’ as they like calling them."
• “We're personally involved in this because we knew we couldn't change these mentalities from within as employees of these companies."

The New York Times' seven-figure purchase of viral word game Wordle makes sense when you see how much revenue the company generates from games and other non-news products, Axios Media Trends' Sara Fischer reports.

Why it matters: The company has been doubling down on games as a means to lure subscribers.

• New subscriber growth continues to come from non-core news products, like games, as well as cooking and its consumer reviews website Wirecutter.
• The Times' Games and Cooking subscriptions both surpassed 1 million paid subscribers in December.

The big picture: The Times has been publishing daily crosswords for decades but has recently begun to really focus on other digital games and their potential for subscriptions.

• The company launched a subscription Crossword app in 2016. It's since grown its gaming franchise to include a slew of brain-teasers, like The Mini crossword, Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed, Tiles and Vertex.
• The company said its games were played more than 500 million times in 2021.

What's next: The Times said in a statement that Wordle will be free to play for new and existing players, "and no changes will be made to its gameplay."

• Asked if the game would include ads, a spokesperson said "not at this time."

Sony's $3.6 billion purchase of Destiny-maker Bungie was not a direct answer to Microsoft's Activision deal, as it was in the works for five to six months.

• It's part of a trend not just of consolidation for content's sake, but of the industry's giants checking off their wishlists.

Between the lines: Microsoft has wanted more mobile and casual gaming: hence its appetite for Activision Blizzard's Candy Crush and Call of Duty Mobile games.

• Sony has lacked service-based games — those you don't just play once and put down but keep playing for months, as new content is added and as new micro-transactions are offered.

Check Sony's recent lineup: Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us Part 2, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, etc.

• All are critically acclaimed multi-million-sellers that competitors would love to have.
• But there's nary a post-release calendar of seasonal events and micro-transactions among them.
• That's not the kind of game Sony makes. But it's the kind of game, in the form of the ongoing Destiny franchise, that Bungie has been honing for a decade.

By the way: Bungie said today that Destiny 2's next expansion, which will kick off another year of content in a few weeks, has been pre-ordered 1 million times.

Go deeper: Big gaming deals by Sony and Microsoft signal an arms race

🛠 EA is delaying the first season of post-release content for Battlefield 2042 to focus on the game’s myriad issues, the publisher announced ahead of an earnings report today.

👀 Twitch users watched some 15.4 million hours of Pokémon Legends: Arceus in its first days of release, easily outpacing recent franchise releases, according to streaming tracker Gamesight.

⚾️ Sony’s next baseball game, MLB The Show 22, will also appear on rival Xbox and Switch consoles this year, though the Switch version lacks a stadium creator and only the PS4 version (not even the PS5) will allow users to upload their own music to customize player introductions.

🤔 Microsoft’s proposal to buy Activision will be reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission rather than the Department of Justice, putting its fate in the hands of an agency that has promised tighter scrutiny of tech deals, Bloomberg reports.

😲 An update to the virtual reality version of Resident Evil 4 will allow players to adjust which parts of their body they have to tap to grab helpful items, which may not seem important unless you knew that the game’s original settings resulted in players with breasts saying playing the game was painful.

VR to the ER: Metaverse Early Adopters Prove Accident Prone [Sarah Needleman, Salvador Rodriguez, The Wall Street Journal]

James Buckingham of Bedford, England, said he once accidentally struck a girlfriend in the head while playing “Beat Saber,” a VR game that involves striking moving neon blocks with laser swords, or sidestepping or ducking to avoid them, to the tempo of popular songs.

“I heard this shriek and the crumble of someone hitting the floor,” said Mr. Buckingham, 44. “I was terrified and threw off the headset immediately, and bless her, she’s laughing.” He said the incident had nothing to do with their subsequent breakup.

You, the readers, have voted, and I have obliged by selecting Cyndaquil as my starter in Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

• The adorable flame-type edged out Rowlet. It was close!
• But just 9% of you voted for Oshawott, enough to throw the election the other way, had this been a two-way race.
• Thank you to everyone who wrote in with their votes. This was our most popular reader request yet.