National

Spoiler alert, this story offers hints to the answer of the Wordle game for May 25. 

Driving the news: If you struggled to answer Wednesday’s Wordle, you’re not alone, and this puzzle is ending some players' winning streaks, according to social media posts. 

The word game for May 25 is stumping some users who are taking to social media to vent, while others are searching for hints, according to Google Trends data.

Flashback: Earlier this month, the New York Times swapped out the May 9 Wordle word after discovering that the five-letter answer, fetus, relates to Roe v. Wade.

The swap was part of a long-running debate about how politically charged games should be.

What they’re saying: “Stinker of a word today, good luck wordlers,” one user wrote on Twitter.

“Wordle 340 is going to annoy many with that 1st letter...I can attest to that,” one Twitter user wrote. 

“It’s another one of *those* words, folks. Tread carefully!” another user tweeted Wednesday.

Spoiler: The Cambridge Dictionary defines the winning word as “to be able from your knowledge or experience to say that something is true.”

It's a word that rhymes with a couple more popular words, one of which is a popular piece of furniture.

Today’s Wordle is ending winning streaks

Spoiler alert: This story offers hints to the answer of the May 25 Wordle.

Wordle was acquired by the New York Times earlier this year. Photo: Getty Images

Games

Gaming

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

Technology

Axios Gaming

Players in the booming mobile gaming market are warming to in-game video ads but are much more into interactive ads, according to a new report on the sector compiled by Data.ai.

Why it matters: Mobile gaming is setting the standard for how games operate, so what’s accepted or successful in it may shape gaming overall.

Spending on mobile games will reach $136 billion worldwide this year, Data.ai estimates. That’s compared to about $40 billion each on consoles and computer gaming.

The U.S. made up about a third of that mobile market in the first quarter of 2022.

State of play: The common model for mobile games is that you can download them for free and then buy in-game items to have a better time.

That model is spreading in console and PC games, though in-game ads on those platforms are rare.

In-game ads on mobile, however, are common. And they don't just happen between levels of a game, as if they were a TV commercial. Popular free-to-play games like Farmville 3 often include ads that pop up midgame or that players are invited to watch or interact with to unlock rewards in the game.

Details: Of nearly 4,000 global players surveyed by Data.ai, a majority are fine with in-game ads in some form.

A fifth say they’re fine with accepting ads in exchange for game content and services.

About a third were a little more reserved, saying it depends on the app.

Just 6% said they would broadly rather just pay for the game and not see ads.

Video ads are contentious, but attitudes are moving.

They’re still more loathed than liked (The survey option “I can’t stand them” beat “I like them” three to one). But Data.ai reports the divide narrowed between late 2020 and late 2021.

More popular are playable in-game ads, which serve as short demos of other games in the Russian nesting doll that is mobile game advertising. Those get an “I can’t stand them” from about a quarter of mobile gamers, but more than half of players think they’re “OK” or even like them.

The bottom line: Mobile gaming is gaming’s laboratory for economic experiments.

Sign up for the new Axios Gaming newsletter here.

Report: Mobile game players don't mind playable ads

Mobile gaming is setting the standard for how games operate.

A prompt to watch an in-game video ad to receive a reward in FarmVille 3. Screenshot: Zynga

Video games

The creators of the action game Aztech built their unusual virtual world with a simple premise: What would have happened if the Aztecs hadn’t been conquered?

Why it matters: Aztech is an ambitious game from a small team in Mexico, a part of the world that has little representation in the industry and its culture. 

Released in March for PC and console, Aztech: Forgotten Gods puts the players in control of Achtli, a young woman with a magical arm that enables her to fly over a futuristic Mesoamerican megacity and battle the gods.

In a medium filled with adventures inspired by Anglo-Saxon and east Asian cultures, it stands out.

What they’re saying: “We aspire to be the voice of our people,” Edgar Serrano, cofounder of Chihuahua-based studio Lienzo, told Axios earlier this spring, shortly after the game’s release.

The studio started a decade ago, mixing contract work with original projects.

Its 2018 release Mulaka was an action game set amid the mythology of the Tarahumara, an Indigenous culture in Mexico. The game was narrated in the Tarahumara language, and hewed close to historical traditions.

Aztech began as an attempt to make something more fantastical while indulging the fantasy of an Aztec empire that spread across the Americas.

Lienzo’s games can reach three key audiences, Serrano believes:

Local players, like the young Indigenous people he met while making Mulaka, who he said knew little about their own legends.

The Latin American diaspora in the U.S. and elsewhere, who he believes are yearning for work that helps them reconnect to their roots.

The wider — and often whiter — world of people he believes seek some level of “social currency” in understanding other cultures. “If you play our games throughout, you're going to end up knowing a lot more than you knew before about our culture. And the things that stay with you are going to be true and authentic and researched.” 

Between the lines: Serrano is quick to point out that Aztech isn’t perfect. He calls it “over-scoped,” perhaps biting off too much. 

He’s still proud of the game and hopeful what Lienzo’s team of about seven developers can build in the future.

What’s next: He’s dreaming of a movie. Serrano has partnered with a production company to shop Aztech to Hollywood.

A video game from Mexico imagines a different kind of future

Says the developer: "We aspire to be the voice of our people.”

Video game screenshot of a woman flying toward the camera, with a futuristic Aztec pyramid in the background

New Jersey's Acting Attorney General Matthew Platkin said Monday that the state has launched an investigation into the social media platforms Discord and Twitch in connection to the Buffalo mass shooting.

Why it matters: The alleged shooter killed 10 people, all of whom were Black, and posted footage from the attack in real-time to Twitch, a platform owned by Amazon that often features live videos of gaming. The probe will determine whether lax content moderation and policy enforcement allowed the platforms to serve as a hub for violent extremism.

Details: The suspect in the Buffalo mass shootings allegedly used both Discord and Twitch to plan and publicize the shooting, according to Platkin's office.

The investigation will examine whether the platforms are "violating state consumer protection laws by failing to moderate harmful content and enforce policies prohibiting violent extremism and hateful conduct."

It will also focus on how moderation policies are applied to minors and children who use the sites.

What they're saying: "These social media platforms have enormous reach, especially with young people, and have shown themselves to be staging grounds for hateful and extremist content that may radicalize children and others," Platkin said in a statement. 

"Under New Jersey law companies must deliver on their promises, and the persistence of violent extremism and hateful conduct on these platforms casts doubt on their purported content moderation and enforcement policies and practices."

The big picture: New York has launched a similar probe into social media companies and other online resources that the alleged shooter might have used to discuss and amplify his intentions.

Go deeper: Live streaming motivated the Buffalo shooter

New Jersey launches probe into Twitch, Discord after Buffalo shooting

The suspect allegedly used both Discord and Twitch to plan and publicize the attack, which killed 10 people.

Photo showing a black gaming console set in front of a large screen with the purple Twitch logo

Photo: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images

New Jersey

President Biden has made the COVID-19 crisis and a post-Trump return to national unity and traditional democratic ideals his top priorities. From vaccinations to stimulus to schools, Biden is seeking bipartisan compromise while showing a willingness to use executive authority and bare Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate to implement his policies. Republican leaders are navigating deep party divisions over if and how to move beyond former President Trump.

Politics & Policy

Quality assurance workers at Activision-owned development studio Raven Software voted to unionize today, setting up what would be the first union at a big American game publisher.

Driving the news: The vote, administered by the National Labor Relations Board in Minnesota passed 19-3.

Why this matters: A labor movement has been brewing in the games industry, as workers raise concerns about long hours and alleged misconduct at numerous publishers and studios, big and small.

Unionization isn’t a panacea, but some have seen it as a step to getting better treatment.

Between the lines: This latest step for the self-described Game Workers Alliance, came after the QA workers went on strike last fall to protest the dismissal of contractors and then announced in January a plan to form a union. 

Activision contested whether the small group of QA workers constituted a viable bargaining unit. 

The NLRB had ruled in the workers’ favor, setting up today’s vote.

What they’re saying: “Our biggest hope is that our union serves as inspiration for the growing movement of workers organizing at video game studios to create better games and build workplaces that reflect our values and empower all of us,” the GWA said in a statement.

“We look forward to working with management to positively shape our working conditions and the future of Activision Blizzard through a strong union contract.” 

Activision has avoided saying whether it will challenge the election or proceed to bargaining with the unit.

“We respect and believe in the right of all employees to decide whether or not to support or vote for a union,” a company rep said. “We believe that an important decision that will impact the entire Raven Software studio of roughly 350 people should not be made by 19 Raven employees.”

Regarding what they’d do next, the rep said: “We’re committed to doing what's best for the studio and our employees.”

Activision recently converted more than 1,000 temporary workers to full-time roles. It also gave raises to its QA workers, excluding the Raven group because it said altering the pay of workers pursuing a union would violate labor laws.

What’s next: Activision has until May 31 to file an objection to the NLRB vote.

Activision workers vote to form industry's first big union in U.S.

Illustration of a gaming controller with different fist icons on the buttons. 

Sony Lawsuit

Gender discrimination lawsuit against PlayStation returns

The new lawsuit comes a month after a judge dismissed the first filing.

PlayStation logo and the silhouette of a woman holding a phone

Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Some top American game studios are taking stands on abortion, trans rights and the industry’s own responsibility regarding racism and extremism.

Why it matters: It’s a notable shift in a controversy-averse industry, and one that is shocking some players not used to the makers of the games they play taking a position on volatile political and social topics.

Details: Two studios went public this week, with a third reportedly taking a quieter route.

On Tuesday, Washington-based Destiny 2 maker Bungie Studios and its Black at Bungie worker group posted a reaction to the weekend’s racist mass shooting in Buffalo, New York. The studio had recently weighed in on the Supreme Court’s draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

Bungie acknowledged that people “far too often” are radicalized via online platforms and called for game-makers, themselves included, to do more to “examine their own platforms and invest in practices to combat bigotry in all its manifestations.”

On Wednesday, Texas-headquartered studio Certain Affinity posted a letter to employees from CEO Max Hoberman condemning “intrusions on the rights and dignity of transgender youth” and the “attack” on abortion rights from the potential ruling on Roe v. Wade.

This all followed a Monday report in the Washington Post that California-based Insomniac, makers of hit Spider-Man and Ratchet & Clank games, had quietly and successfully pressed its owners at Sony to match a $50,000 donation to a group that helps economically disadvantaged women get abortions.

What they’re saying: “The overall response has been incredibly positive,” Hoberman tells Axios, citing hundreds of supportive replies after he posted his letter publicly.

A half-dozen people told him that businesses should stay out of politics, he says.

“The fact of the matter is that some politicians aren't staying out of our business,” Hoberman says. “They are creating a hostile environment in states that we know and love and live in. This in turn is affecting the mental health and well-being of large swathes of our staff, and is outright hurting our business in tangible ways, such as employees leaving the states and difficulties recruiting to these states.”

Certain Affinity has about 175 employees in Texas. It says it will pay for "reasonable" relocation expenses for employees who want to move out of state due to abortion regulations. But the studio is not joining other companies that now promise financial assistance to workers who need to travel to get an abortion. Hoberman says doing so could run afoul of local law.

Yes, but: Most game companies are still keeping quiet these days.

In 2020 even the biggest ones like Nintendo and PlayStation expressed support for Black Lives Matter.

But taking a stand against racism is less controversial than taking one about abortion.

The Post says Insomniac and Sony won’t make their pledges public. That follows a Bloomberg report from last week that cited PlayStation boss Jim Ryan urging his workers to “respect differences of opinion” on abortion. 

The bottom line: A common thread through all of this is the will of the workers, which in these studios seems to largely be liberal.

Many employees expect companies they work for to express their values and to put policies and money behind them.

Video game studios are speaking out on abortion

Texas studio will cover some costs for workers who want to move out of state due to abortion regulations.

Illustration of Halo hero Master Chief standing in front of a field

Halo Infinite, one of several games worked on by Certain Affinity. Image: Microsoft

Activision Blizzard’s unveiling of a new software program meant to increase diversity in the casts of video games has become a textbook example of what not to do.

Driving the news: The publisher announced the “Diversity Space Tool” last Thursday as “a leap forward for inclusion in gaming,” but by Friday evening had scrubbed those words and more from its online announcement, as developers from the company began slamming it.

Details: The tool starts users with a blank graph, asks them to establish a norm in the middle for a character in a given game genre and has them plot out how different a given character is. It will create a larger shape for a character who is, say, non-white, queer or has a disability. 

Activision framed it as a method for “avoiding tokenism, stereotypes, and exclusion” and described “enthusiastic” reactions from its Call of Duty and Overwatch development teams. 

It called the tool “​​tangible software that would create and monitor guidelines for character conception and creation.”

But the announcement, which included images of the tool that showed numerical values assigned to characters’ ethnicity and sexuality, drew backlash online and across games media. It was labeled “mildly dystopian,” “creepy” and “a glorified Dungeons & Dragons character sheet that makes no ... sense.”

Two Overwatch designers tweeted that they hadn’t used or seen the tool before, and the references in Activision's announcement to the teams praising the tool were removed. 

“God I swear our own company tries so hard to slaughter any good will the actual devs who make the game have built,’” wrote Activision character artist Melissa Kelly in a tweet that went viral. 

"You know what drives our diversity?” she added. “The devs! We have people who work on the game from these cultures. That's it! That's literally it.”

Between the lines: One of the early architects of the tool says it was not meant to put a score on diversity or replace “common sense” when developers are making a character in a game.  

“The idea was to slow down time a little bit and have a little bit more discussion and reflection at that crucial point of creation,” MIT Gamelab research coordinator Mikael Jakobsson tells Axios. 

The project had started several years ago at Swedish mobile studio King by developers who were inspired by a presentation from Anita Sarkeesian, a prominent cultural critic who regularly speaks against stereotypes in game characters. The King designers created a paper prototype for graphing a character’s diversity, presented it at the Game Developers Conference in 2017 and tapped MIT to help make a digital version that could eventually be used by game makers around the world.

Jakobsson’s involvement with the project ended in 2019, when MIT gave the studio a workable version. The vision, he said, was to offer it as part of a workshop, alongside readings, and to avoid putting stats on character traits, lest it reduces efforts for diversity to “a numbers game." He lost track of the tool over the last few years and assumed it had been scuttled. 

Last spring, however, long before showcasing it to the public, Activision mentioned it in a message to shareholders as a top bullet point for its efforts tied to diversity, equity and inclusion.

What's next: The Diversity Space Tool is not being used in active game development, Activision said Friday. 

A tweet from company president Daniel Alegre last week celebrating its announcement has since been deleted.

Activision's video game diversity tool draws backlash

An early architect had warned about turning diversity into "a numbers game."

Composite image showing three characters from Overwatch and a graph with axes used to plot how diverse they are in terms of ethnicity, culture and more

An image of Activision's diversity tool from the company's Thursday announcement. It was removed from the post Friday night. (An earlier version, shown at a conference in 2017, gave character 2, Lucio, a greater rating for ethnicity.)  Image: Activision Blizzard

Tech giant Unity may be a gaming company by heritage, but its overall goal these days is to popularize 3D graphics in every walk of life, Marc Whitten, one of the company’s senior vice presidents, tells Axios.

Why it matters: Unity is already one of the leading creators of tools for making games, and is positioned, through key acquisitions, to make its tech more relevant to the rest of the world.

What they’re saying: “We think real-time 3D is going to reinvent pretty much every industry,” Whitten says.

To be clear, he didn’t mean to use the popular buzz term “metaverse” and its notion of virtual meetup spaces. We checked. “I think ‘metaverse’ is important,” Whitten said, “but I personally think real-time 3D is probably a broader definition.”

“There’s lots of things that are really just about people trying to get their job done — whatever that particular job is — where 3D itself and in particular interactive physics-aware simulation-aware 3D makes that job better.”

An example: Proximie, a company that lets a doctor remotely and virtually interact with a live surgical procedure, showing where to make an incision. Think of the construction and logistics industries too.

Buying spree: Unity has been hoovering up tech and tools companies in the past year, including streaming service Parsec, Hollywood special effects house Weta Digital and machine-learning character creation outfit Ziva Dynamics. 

The common denominator, Whitten says, is enabling more people to more easily create more 3D art.

As more fields embrace real-time 3D, they’ll need to make a lot more art, Whitten says, noting that game companies already have swelling art teams to keep up rendering their virtual worlds.

Between the lines: Unity is already so widely used in gaming and beyond, that the company’s able to turn out eye-popping numbers. 

It boasts that its Operate division, which supports games once they launch with ad and monetization tech, among other services, supported 200,000 launches last year.

Whitten says 15,000 projects are started in Unity each day. 

When game engine company Epic is brought up, Whitten says they’re not viewed as a competitor, since Epic-backed games still use Unity services. He is also ready to share that 70% of mobile games are made on Unity, and 50%+ of PC games are made on Unity.

One bad number for Unity: Its stock dropped 37% this week after reporting increased revenue but a net loss and acknowledging problems with its ad-targeting tech. 

Yes, but: Unity’s ubiquity has raised some concern internally in terms of who the company partners with. A Vice report in August detailed worker concerns about partnerships with the Defense Department.

Unity says it won’t support projects that cause harm to humans or the climate or deprive people of their rights, but critics aren't sure all projects truly adhere.

Whitten says there is “still work to continue to drive around those missions,” and said that in some cases the company needed to be more transparent.

What’s next: Look for many more games and projects made on Unity — plus an adaptation of the tools from Weta and others into products more potential Unity customers can use. 

Unity has goals far beyond gaming

"We think real-time 3D is going to reinvent pretty much every industry."

Photo illustration of Marc Whitten and a pattern of Unity logos. 

Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photo: Unity 

Workers at gaming giant Nintendo of America say the company’s reliance on temporary workers is exploitative and that efforts to bring about change have been stymied by fear of reprisal.

Driving the news: Current and former Nintendo contractors have been speaking up over the past three weeks, since Axios first reported a complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board against Nintendo and a contracting firm.

What they’re saying: “I loved what I did. I hated how I was treated,” a former contractor named Ash, who asked that their last name be kept private, tells Axios.

They worked in Nintendo’s customer service center for several years through 2015. Strict time-off rules for contractors and limited pathways to full-time employment added to stress that contractors could be dropped at any moment. That pressure, they said, aggravated a heart condition.

Ash says their moment of disillusionment came when their grandpa died: “I was told if I went to his funeral, I wouldn’t have a job when I came back.”

State of play: Ash’s story echoed those shared by seven other current and former contractors who spoke with Axios about their time at Nintendo.

Their accounts square with those published by gaming news sites Kotaku and IGN. Those outlets cited interviews with dozens of workers who say Nintendo treats its large contingent of contractors, technically employed by staffing firms, as second-class citizens.

These contractors fume about a status quo they believe was established to avoid violating labor laws: cycles of 10- or 11-month contracts that can be quickly cut short and are followed by two-month breaks, with expectations they’ll come right back. 

They describe employees who log three, five, even 10 years of these cycles, without many of the benefits of full-timers, but are never converted to full-time.

The contractors’ stories center on Nintendo of America, the U.S. subsidiary of the Kyoto-based maker of Mario, Zelda and the Switch. 

NoA, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, has for more than a decade supplemented its full-time labor force with hundreds of contractors, one longtime contractor estimates, who largely work in its customer service and product-testing divisions. 

Even in the company’s vaunted Treehouse, where games are translated from Japanese and localized for America, Nintendo uses contractors for nearly half of its team, two sources say, keeping them in that status for years at a time. 

“It goes up to every level,” one current localization contractor told Axios under the condition of anonymity. “It even affects the people writing the games you love.”

Nintendo hasn’t commented publicly about the uproar from its workforce and did not reply to questions from Axios. A few days after contractors began speaking out, NoA president Doug Bowser sent an internal message to employees regarding “stories appearing in some media today about alleged working conditions at Nintendo.”

“Like many of you, the executive leadership team and I find many of these points troubling, and we are closely reviewing the content,” he wrote. 

The message reiterated Nintendo’s “zero-tolerance for inappropriate conduct, including harassment, discrimination or intimidation.” 

A current contractor in product testing told Axios they found the message disappointing, as it didn’t mention the contractor issue core to so many accounts.

(Kotaku had cited four sources saying the NLRB complaint stemmed from a worker being fired after asking about unionization, which Nintendo, in a public statement, denied.)

Between the lines: Nintendo of America’s use of contractors is somewhat typical of game companies and the wider tech industry.

But contractors are disappointed with Nintendo, a wealthy company that markets its penchant for putting smiles on faces.

“Maybe it’s just because on some level I expected better,” the current testing contractor said. “These companies rely on a contract workforce with no stability.”

Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé, who worked in senior positions at the company from 2013-19, told Axios that “what’s being described is not the NoA I knew.”

He said the company hired “a significant number” of contractors, or associates, into full-time roles during his tenure but added that he “truly understands” the frustration of those who haven’t been.

He attributed the company’s use of contractors to the seasonality of Nintendo’s business, where it would generate 60% of its annual revenue around the holidays. “You can’t run a business at that scale without utilizing associate labor to get you there.”

Stymied activism: Contractors who spoke to Axios said they and their peers largely avoided pushing back against management, but two recalled a mid-2014 effort when a group of Nintendo customer service workers began meeting offsite to discuss ways to force change and possible unionization.

Those meetings ceased after their management at Nintendo-affiliated Parker Staffing found out about them. Two sources recalled getting an email from a Parker manager encouraging them and their colleagues to think of the company as a family and that organizing wasn’t necessary.

“It was union-bustering without technically being union-bustering,” a former contractor recalled.

A worker reckoning at Nintendo

Contractors are disappointed with company response.

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