Unfortunately the concept of 'ZIRP' has now fully escaped containment as is being used to explain literally anything that's changed since the 2010s

It might turn out to be a cool device but for the avoidance of doubt it is not going to be a pillar of anything and no serious analyst thinks otherwise

I regret to announce that the Americans are at it again

Just realised why Hades II's combat is so much more satisfying than every other game around at the moment: no parry mechanic

Excellent use here of the journalistic "amid" to imply a link between any two events that happen at roughly the same time

Wake up, babe. New heresy's just dropped.

Even as a fairly seasoned grand strategy hand it's hard not agree with a lot of this. People keep saying that Paradox tutorials are good now. This is a lie. They are terrible.

Solution to climate change: abolish all physical objects

For reasons that seemed to make sense at the time I wrote a thesis about this and the answer is: yes

This is true. Usually cutting jobs is hard to sell to investors because it looks like a sign of failure. "We don't need these jobs because of AI" is a way of covering your ass while sounding forward-looking.

What is the actual principle people are trying to defend here? "Oh it's just traditional ML not AI, that's fine" What are you talking about?

I presume they weren't *trying* to simulate a hallucinogenic experience here but that's sure as hell what they got

I have some sympathy for the "whiny babies" argument (some of these people really are whiny babies) but really this is a pretty weird way of looking at things. You can't just berate the audience into paying more.

Including some of my thoughts on the Xbox thoughts on the Xbox profitability story. While "profit margins" for business units are sort of fake, this story does underscore how the games business will always struggle to deliver to kinds of profits that Microsoft is used to.

Is the games industry profitable? Yes, and has been throughout the entire recent layoff wave. But profit margins did slide dramatically post-covid as costs shot up but revenue didn't keep pace. Margins have recovered since then, mostly thanks to reduced personnel costs.

The American mind cannot comprehend a nice train

Would be interesting the trace the relationship between the Japanese tourism boom and the emergence of a bunch of Western-made games set in Japan

Today in Americans Forgetting the Rest of the World Exists. Can't believe that a structural shift that has happened in every other Western democracy would also happen in America. Guess it must be due to some highly specific domestic factors.

Ubisoft now takes 5 years to make an Assassin's Creed game when they used to churn out one a year. Covid didn't help but it's clearly pretty marginal to the bigger picture here.

This guy is to me the prime example of Twitter being dangerous for your brain. He's been frog-boiled from normie centrism into fascism without even noticing.

Teleportation is murder

Having a familiarity with the Ikea product range really ruins your enjoyment of Airbnbs

I've never seen Scarface which is weird because I like mob movies. But it increasingly feels like my biggest generation-specific hole might be never having seen any Studio Ghibli film (which five years ago I'd heard of).

*guy firing up Astro Bot* Great, another brutal tale of betrayal and vengeance

Yes, finding good non-mainstream games is hard and that's a problem. But it's a problem that exists just as much for other media as it does for games, and if you're not at least aware that serious games *exist* then sorry you're just incredibly incurious.

Roughly half of the games market is fairly financially transparent in that it's made up of publicly traded companies that mainly or exclusively produce games and so have to publish fairly detailed information about their revenue, costs, headcount, etc.

Easy to forget for those of immersed in games that plenty of people out there are still asking incredibly tedious questions like this

GDC clearly is not changing its name to "Festival of Gaming". It's obviously just a new tagline.

If you want to make a game where the main character shoots hundreds and hundreds of people dead I feel you should have to set it in a context where that isn't a completely insane thing to be happening

A good 40fps mode is a beautiful thing

Dead god can people not just be normal about this game?

Schiphol doesn't get enough credit I think. For an airport of its size it's remarkably good. (Passport control tends to be the only hitch, intra-Schengen flights are golden though).

I think people focus too much on opaque storytelling in Souls games (which is absolutely fine imo) and not enough on how mechanically opaque they are (which is a pain in the ass). Obsure lore? OK, whatever. But it should be possible to work out how to play the game without the aid of a wiki!

N: Edinburgh E: Tokyo S: Punta Arenas W: San Francisco Doing pretty well on three dimensions but oddly have never been more than a few hundred miles north of where I was born.

For one of the most expensive games ever made Spider-Man 2 sure does have a lot of bugs

TIL there are 12 Switch 2 games

Epic did an incredible marketing job making UE5 almost synonymous with the idea of realistic graphics among normie gamers, but the "UE5 = amazing graphics" meme is now rapidly losing ground to "UE5 = terrible performance"

This post has been responsible for me seeing an uncountable number of bad takes this week

Counterpoint: no it won't

The video game theory of everything does kind of run into the problem that when you exclude lightweight mobile stuff there hasn't actually been any increase in the number of people playing games in like 20 years.

Has anyone done a deep dive on why game subtitles are so bad? Almost all games just completely fail to absorb best practice from film/TV here.

Games industry scratching its head, unable to fathom why the market won't grow

No AI content rules are just completely unenforceable. It's incredibly hard to prove and even if you manage to find a clear cut example it can just be waved away as a mistake.

It's not even possible to figure this out by playing the game

This console generation will be the last. Just like all the previous ones were.

One of my dad's fondest memories is that he was at a party in New York in the 1980s where the topic of whether the US should bomb Libya was being discussed and he bamboozled his interlocutor by knowing the population of Libya. He has shared this anecdote hundreds of times in the years since.

So Act III of Clair Obscur... looks suspiciously like they replaced most of the intended content with a montage and skipped straight to the final level you'd have to say

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? The games industry is not on a relentless upward curve to world domination and in fact is struggling quite badly.

4 months today since Civ VII came out. Anyone still arguing that it's good?

This is a really good piece and I fully agree that games deserve more recognition and attention. But the games industry needs to look at itself here as well. When the industry has largely given up on trying to reach a mass audience is it any wonder that most people aren't interested?