Latest news with #MidnightSuns
WIRED
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
Meet the Game Developer Turning Fanfic Into Deadpool DLC
Mar 18, 2025 9:15 AM When Emma Kidwell started working on new content for Marvel's Midnight Suns , she turned to her fanfic roots. She isn't the only one following the rules of fan-written stories to develop fresh ideas. Emma Kidwell photographed in San Francisco on March 17, 2025. Photograph: Darrell Jackson Before she started writing video games, Emma Kidwell loved Twilight fanfiction. Her 'bad, self-insert' stories found a home on DeviantArt, an online community where people posted fan art, original work, and so much more. 'The low barrier of entry made it very accessible,' Kidwell says. Her writing turned into role-playing in forums, and Twilight fandom gave way to a love of video games like Mass Effect . Today, Kidwell is a writer for Firaxis Games and a rising star in the world of game narrative. Her work includes Hindsight , Borderlands 4 , Life Is Strange 2 , and Sid Meier's Civilization VII ; she's been featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 and The Game Awards' Future Class of 2023. This week, she's hosting the annual Independent Games Festival (IGF) awards during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. All of that is happening alongside her talk about how writing in fandoms as a kid helped her write DLC for Marvel's Midnight Suns . Writing fanfiction, it turns out, isn't so different from writing licensed characters. 'I'm role-playing when I'm writing Marvel IP for Firaxis,' Kidwell says. 'Fanfiction gave me that foundation to build off of.' Fanfiction has often been considered a lower form of writing, as either self indulgent or outrageously erotic, the sort of work one does in secret. In the internet culture pantheon, few fanfic writers have ever achieved fame, and those that have sometimes do so for the salacious nature of their work. 'My Immortal,' an infamous Harry Potter fanfic, is still referenced in interviews even today. Writers such as E.L. James, who created the Fifty Shades series (originally a Twilight fanfic), however, have begun to turn their work into something profitable. Others, like Kidwell, have turned it into a runway for their careers. 'I think because of fanfiction's relationship to marginalized communities, it wasn't initially seen as being a valid form of writing,' Kidwell says. Clearly, that's wrong. The gaming and fanfic communities make for a harmonious marriage. The story-driven nature of most games means plenty of fodder for fans craving new narratives, but writers on well-known sites like Archive of Our Own can—and will turn—anything into an original story. Even Tetris. 'Fanfiction is your sandbox,' Kidwell says. 'You get to play. There are no rules. You get comfortable playing around with characters that aren't yours and doing whatever the hell you want with them.' For Midnight Suns , Kidwell was given four characters to choose from, including Deadpool and Storm. Whatever she wrote would be based on the comic versions of the characters, not their cinematic counterparts. While researching both characters, she had a revelation: 'This is really similar to what I would think about when creating an original character in a role-playing setting. How would this character fit in with other established characters?' Writers in Kidwell's position still have to stick to the rules of the franchise, including its story canon. That hasn't kept Kidwell from being able to tell the stories she wants. 'I think a big, common misconception with IP writing is that it's super restrictive,' Kidwell says. 'But I think there's a lot of creative freedom within certain boundaries because you get to inject a little piece of yourself into these characters. It's just kind of like a puzzle: figure out how you can do it authentically and how you can do it in a way that makes sense for the game.' Kidwell still role-plays in her spare time. Right now, she's deep into the Dragon Age community. 'I see IP writing as kind of the in-between,' she says of fanfiction and fiction. It's a natural next step in role-playing: 'I'm just doing it in a professional setting now.'
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Epic Has No Plans To Stop Giving Away Free Games After Giving Away $2,229 Worth In 2024
Every month you can go on the Epic Games Store and snag a usually pretty decent game for absolutely free. It's not clear if this largesse is meaningfully moving the needle in the company's battle to establish itself as a competitor to Steam, but it's certainly a nice bonus. And after giving away $2,229 worth of free games across the entirety of 2024, the Fortnite maker reiterated that it has no plans to stop the giveaways anytime soon. 'Our Free Games Program has continued to deliver PC favorites to new audiences for the 5th year running,' the company wrote in a new recap of stats from the last year. 'Epic players stocked their libraries with over $2,000 USD worth of great PC titles across 89 giveaways. The program is not slowing down and will continue in 2025, on both PC and mobile.' 2024's free Epic games included Control, The Callisto Protocol, Marvel's Midnight Suns, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and tons more old and recent releases, from small indies to big-name blockbusters. Epic reports that 595 million free games were claimed during the year. In the past, the company has revealed that such giveaways can cost it tens of millions. And the library Epic Games Store users can amass this way is more than enough to theoretically keep them busy until they die. But elsewhere, the data shows that Epic Games Store is still primarily a vehicle for existing Epic-owned and -operated hits like Fortnite and Rocket League. Both were in the top five most-played games on the platform, alongside Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Grand Theft Auto V. The company reported $1.09 billion spent by 295 million PC players on the Epic Games Store last year, but only $255 million of that went to third-party games. For comparison, Microsoft estimated Valve's annual revenue at over $6 billion back in 2021. So the Epic Games Store is still very much a Fortnite launcher with a ton of other cool stuff grafted onto it, but it's certainly not just a Fortnite launcher. And with that in mind, the company also signaled what's ahead for its digital storefront in 2025. The roadmap includes an overhaul of discoverability, new social features, the addition of pre-loading and a new download manager, as well as the ability to finally gift games to other people. All of this is being done with the intent to seamlessly integrate it across an Epic Games Store mobile app as the company lobbies regulators the world over to force iOS and Android to play nice with it. We'll see if, as that grand vision comes closer to being a reality, the Epic Games Store finally becomes a more central force to be reckoned with in PC gaming. For now, it's still a great place to snag tons of cool games for free. . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
