The Game Disband
Well, I’m glad I captured some video of Blaseball while I could. Blaseball.com links to a Goodbye message with credits from the The Game Band’s staff.
To summarize quickly, Blaseball was a live, online simulated baseball league, presented like an alternate reality ESPN.com scoreboard. Viewers/players/experiencers like me could watch games, bet fake currency on them, and vote on future changes to the Blaseball world, which could be anything from adding extra bases to unleashing Eldritch horrors.
I don’t have any clear data to support this, but it seems clearly that Blaseball was a Covid phenomenon, something to watch and talk about when nothing else was going on. Fan art and fan fiction flourished, and the world showed it cared about fake baseball players.
Blaseball had a big relaunch this year after some time off, followed by a new hiatus after what was apparently bad feedback on the relaunch (I found it very similar to the original version personally). In the end, there was never any way to spend money on Blaseball, so when the goodbye message stresses the unsustainability of the enterprise… Well, yeah, that makes sense. I vaguely remember an announcement from the team about future plans for paid content or options, but to my knowledge they never arrived.
The game had grown beyond a little hobby project, so some people lost their jobs over this, which is a real shame. I’m curious to know what happened behind the scenes and where it could have gone differently.
The WBSC eBaseball Power Pros Olympics have arrived
Kanggang from the Power Pros Discord made it into the Singapore Olympic Esports series for WBSC eBaseball Power Pros. Bit of a shame that that has to involve publicizing the guy’s real name and face, but hey, I guess you pay the price for fame. Best of luck to Kanggang and I’ll be interested to see how the big winners play the game (and what ruleset it’s played under, which is still a mystery this close to the event somehow).
A guide for the Eikan Nine Pawapuro mode
If you’re a fan or looking to get into the Eikan Nine high school management mode in Pawapuro games, check out the Eikan Nine Strategy Guide uploaded here. It’s a pretty good quality scan, so you can use the Google Translate app’s camera mode or something similar to translate bits that you’re interested in. It’s a truly rewarding mode to get into and surprisingly playable for players with little or no Japanese knowledge.