By Walt Hickey

Baldur’s Gate

Hasbro, which owns Wizards of the Coast and thus the Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property that fuels the Larian Studios game Baldur’s Gate 3, has reported that they made $90 million in licensing fees from the game since August of last year. The company reported that they expect to continue to make a tidy haul in licensing fees from the smash-hit game through the third quarter of this year. The game is a bit of an enigma to me; half the players I talk to describe it as a daring and exciting role-playing game that puts the player in an immersive world of fantasy and heroism as they attempt to save the world from ancient evils, while the other half of the players I talk to describe it as an elaborate dating sim where one must seduce a roguish elf that is also a vampire named Astarion.

Cecilia D’Anastasio, Bloomberg

Beat, The Market

When an aspiring artist wants to make a new song, there are all sorts of marketplaces available for them to license the rights to a beat off of BeatStars, Soundee or YouTube. It makes it way easier to get a song concept off the ground at an inexpensive price point — an instrumental beat can cost as little as $2.99 — but there is a catch. The licensing deals for these producers’ beats will typically involve allowing an artist nonexclusive license to a song up to a capped number of streams, which, again, is perfect for a young artist trying to experiment with their sound. The catch comes when one of these things becomes a bona fide hit, at which point the leverage is entirely with the producer, who can now ask for whatever amount of money or royalty they desire. Otherwise, per the contract, the song’s got to come down. It’s a great arrangement for producers who can turn hits around: Give a lot of work away at a rock-bottom price on spec, and if something becomes a hit, your payday has arrived.

Elias Leight, Billboard

Funds

In 2021, video game companies with an all-male crew of founders raised $4.1 billion in funds across 223 companies, while the same statistic for all-female founded companies was just $1.2 million in five companies, and that is not a typo: It’s “million,” not “billion.” Companies with mixed-gender groups of founders raised $400.9 million across 62 deals. Since then, funding has crashed for the industry as a whole. Still, the disparity was ridiculous; gaming companies led by all-male founders made $400 million in VC funding, while those led by women made $1.6 million through October.

Nicole Carpenter, Polygon

Skin in the Game

An Austrian artist named Wolfgang Flatz attempted to sell his own living, tattooed skin at an auction led by Christie’s, with the auction purporting to be “the first time an artist has sold his real body as a work of art during his lifetime.” The auction, however, has been called off after a Swiss collector who — and I can completely understand why — preferred to keep his name out of the press bought all 12 pieces for an undisclosed seven-figure sum. For the time being, the collector will receive black-and-white photographs of the lots, but they will be transferred to the collector upon the demise of the artist. It’s not without any precedent; who could forget Self by Marc Quinn, which was eight pints of his frozen blood sold for £1.5 million in 2005.

Riah Pryor, The Art Newspaper

And The Rockets’ Red Glare

A new analysis of 138 performances of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before sporting events and presidential inaugurations analyzed the vocal pitch of the performers to figure out who gave the most daring and vocally intricate effort, by assigning a “diva score” based on how much they deviated from your standard, basic, do-it-as-written performance of the national anthem. The most common keys for women who sang the song was in F sharp, with 20 performances, and the most common key for men was B flat, with 12. Basketball games’ anthems had the highest diva scores while NHL games had the lowest. Some singers were in the set many times, and some are consistent — Carrie Underwood’s in the data four times, and they all sound pretty much the same — while others (like Jewel or Kelly Clarkson) basically sing a different song every time. The most elaborate was Chaka Khan at the 2020 NBA All-Star game.

Jan Diehm and Michelle McGhee, The Pudding

Investments

A new analysis found that since 2021, and owing in large part to three specific pieces of federal legislation, some of the most economically distressed counties in America are receiving a disproportionate share of investment compared to their current share of economic production. An economically distressed county is one where a place has a prime-age employment gap above 5 percent and a median income below $75,000 per year, and there are 1,071 such counties. All told, 13 percent of the population lives in one, but they’re responsible for just 8 percent of gross domestic product. That said, federally-led investment is flowing into them disproportionately, which is what you’d want to see: These counties have gotten $82 billion, or 16 percent of announced investments in semiconductors and electronics, clean economy, biomanufacturing and heavy industry, so-called “strategic sector investments.”

Joseph Parilla, Glencora Haskins, Lily Bermel, Lisa Hansmann, Mark Muro, Ryan Cummings, and Brian Deese, Brookings

Indo-European

Half the world speaks a language in the Indo-European family, but where that mother tongue first actually emerged — and who spoke it — is still the subject of linguistic debate. The Proto-Indo-European language split into 10 or 11 main branches, and two of those are extinct. The primary theory is that the first speakers were nomadic herders in the steppes of Ukraine roughly 6,000 years ago. This theory is attractive, because a whole lot of the words that all the Indo-European languages have in common are words that would be important to people who moved around a lot, like the words for axle, wheel, harness-pole and a verb meaning “to transport by vehicle,” and wheels and axles were invented 6,000 years ago, ergo that’s the mother tongue. The second theory is that this language is actually from 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, and emerged in Anatolia, in modern Turkey, from people who farmed for their livelihood. A new analysis of 161 Indo-European languages presents evidence in favor of this second theory, but the debate is very far from close to being settled.

Kurt Kleiner, Knowable Magazine

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