2. It Controls the Future of Trek Gaming
Saying that this new game is important to the future of Trek gaming is a bit of an understatement. Even in the golden years of the Interplay and Activision days, we were getting fewer games and quality was all over the place. By the time Legacy was released and bombed, Trek gaming was a husk of itself, sustained by mods to old games like Bridge Commander and eventually leading to fan projects like Star Trek: Excalibur filling the gap in the single-player Trek game market. While we did get Star Trek: D-A-C as a tie-in to the first Abrams movie, it certainly wasnt something Trek fans could get excited about and didnt even have much staying power (I totally forgot it existed before doing research for this article). If this game is good (and I hope it is), that opens the door to more Trek games in the future. Certainly not as many or as diverse a selection as we had in the late 90s/early 00s, but at least one big budget game every few years will be a welcome sight to Trek gamers. With Trek staying on the big screen for now, gaming might just be the only way to see new Trek material on the small screen.
1. Namco Bandai
One of the oddest things about this new Trek game is the fact that its published by a Japanese company, Namco Bandai, known in the US for publishing Dark Souls and infuriating mecha fans by never localizing any Gundam games. While its not the first time a Japanese company has published a big name western game (Square Enix published Deus Ex: Human Revolution), its pretty rare to see such a big name IP go to a company that doesnt have the best record when it comes to multi-platform releases (namely, PC versions of their games simply dont exist, aside from a few titles like Dark Souls). So what does the new Trek game being good have to do with Bandai Namco? Publisher stability, for a start. In the past decade, Trek has gone from one publisher to another, making a comeback difficult, since lots of time and money is spent on just making the publishing deals, never mind the games themselves. Then theres the fact that if the game does well on all platforms, we might not have to worry about things like a lack of PC pre-orders in the US (believe it or not, Britain has PC pre-orders before we do) with the next game. And who knows? Maybe Namco Bandai will warm up to releasing more games on PC. After all, there are always possibilities. Let me know what you guys think in the comments below or on Twitter.