This week in gaming CEOs:

Studio heads believe "GenAi is so fucking magical and will take us back to the old days of smaller teams and shorter production times" when the obvious answer is either make a smaller game or Universal Basic Income 😀 But when the bubble pops, the artists will be the first to suffer, not him.

"My son and [his partner] Yuta are living together, reasonably happily. But without the legalization of marriage equality, they cannot achieve a stable, grounded life. Please legalize it and make it possible for them to live the same way as everyone else in Japan."

Ever notice all these whiny assholes arguments boil down to "You HAVE to be subject to my thoughts and actions but I don't have to care about yours"

I’ve heard this before…

“In the journalism world, Johnson is best known for leaving two publications in disgrace after his plagiarism was discovered, and for taking—inadvertently, he said—money from a Kremlin-backed media organization, and for being a hard partier, difficult boss and surreally dedicated self-promoter”

Sony and Tencent reach confidential settlement over "Horizon clone" Light of Motiram, effectively ending the lawsuit www.eurogamer.net/sony-and-ten...

Techbros seem to love Tolkien, so here's an analogy to help you understand what genAI is. GenAI is The One Ring. You think your use is justified, b/c you don't have evil in your heart. But it came from evil, it is intended for evil purpose, & anything you do with it will be twisted to that end.

🧵 Cw: racism, transhate, sexual assault

The 43-page lawsuit alleges trademark infringement, adding that despite Bluebird’s “purported plan, it cannot bring Twitter ‘back’—Twitter never left and continues to be exclusively owned by X Corp.”

everybody is 12

"The effect is, frankly, catastrophic" - the voice actors and unions fighting back against gaming's controversial use of AI www.eurogamer.net/video-game-p...

it's so cool that he was able to run for president again and people elected him. just awesome stuff.

every conversation with a tech ceo

The fire might have started via a towel touching a heating element. Police are investigating the deaths as a case of corporate manslaughter brought about by negligence. Source: buff.ly/xjEVEXm

Whelp, Kit Harrington continues to be on my shit list. Guess when your career has collapsed, you gotta try to suck up to the fascist TERF lady. Sucks, cause I really did like his work in and out of GOT, and I know he had a hard go of it. But fuck him at this point.

The whole story — the door remaining locked, the open heating, the emergency button failing is making my safety engineer senses quite upset.

The Lords of the Fallen cornball CEO is reposting videos from Gamergate dorks glazing his game. Legitimately pathetic.

That’s great. 🫠

I fucking loathe these smug ass art-hating self-congratulating ghouls & the system that allows them to fail upwards into unfathomable wealth on the backs of 1000s of overworked creative people whose livelihoods get passed around like trading cards every time these dillwads have a stonks circle-jerk.

The Onion, 23 years ago. theonion.com/no-blood-for...

Perfect headline.

reposting this piece today for no particular reason aftermath.site/warner-bros-...

Reminder that naturalized citizens are people who jumped through every hoop, did all the paperwork, passed the test, and swore an oath to this country. They did it all “the right way” and still Republicans want to kick them out.

What this will mean, in practice, that if you are deemed an enemy of the administration, they will pore through your citizenship application paperwork looking for some reason to retroactively disqualify you. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/u...

Which also means it's likely to be focused on "enemies" of the Trump admin. And their relatives.

Is there any precedent in modern history for a mass shooting occurring in a public setting with 10+ casualties and the perpetrator not being apprehended? It's really hard to fathom.

Hey, guys! If you need a reason to *not* go back to Twitter, see below. I QT’d the first post with what I think is an uncontroversial historical point. It blew up, and out of the woodwork came the neoconfederates, antisemites, white nationalists, and other racists.

this man is absolutely deadset on destroying the republic because people are mean to him when he goes to martha's vineyard. we're all used to it but when you're reminded of it like this -- it's just shocking.

I keep thinking—as a historian—that it’s rare when doing research to find a politician who reveals his nasty innards so blatantly—with no sense of self or shame. Future historians who didn’t live through this will be absolutely open-mouthed.

Making this claim from the NYT Opinion Pages Home for Bland White Guys is certainly a choice.

Keep thinking about this term "pre-digested" that Kojima used to describe art that's instantly gratifying. And how it's better when people grow to love something instead. I've gravitated, as player and designer, toward the latter, but that term "pre-digested" is new and feels very strong.

Lord, I see what you've done for others. It’s real sick shit, frankly. You belong in jail.

LLM's are shitty predictive text generators that guzzle kilowatts like I chug Dr. Pepper. Machine learning is a valuable modeling tool to train computer systems on complex categorization and prediction problems.

To capture funding and ride the wave of the AI bubble, a variety of institutions (commercial and otherwise) have pivoted to calling their machine learning applications "AI." The paper I am linking below explains what's going on here. But there's also more to it than that!

If you're a video game worker looking to have a stronger voice on the job, stop corporate greed and get better pay, benefits and more, join @videogameworkers.bsky.social and build worker power to change the gaming industry for good. uvw-cwa.org

America has deindustrialized so much they can't even manufacture consent

Are these the same companies that told us the robot could do it?

So hey, why are the prices of RAM and SSDs going up so much…? www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/sw...

Everyone is more or less okay with it” dude you make people emigrate to work there because you don’t do remote work, they risk having to change countries if they disagree with it

"AI isn't going anywhere, it's here to stay, can't put the genie back in the bottle, just gotta get used to it." Just say that you are tired and exhausted and feel hopeless and want to give up. It's okay. Everyone feels pretty fucked at this point. Just say what you feel.

current news has me thinking about the Lake House Alan Wake 2 DLC where a bunch of out-of-touch scientists can't figure out why a bad writer like Alan Wake can evoke emotion from people but their gigantic room filled with automatic typewriters only creates slop that kills you

Steam's last major sale of the year starts this week, and it'll include discounts on some of 2025's best games and more.

Similar to how voice AI use has been suggested; for 'scratch' or reference. I know many actors, myself among them, who got jobs from the scratch work. Every example of AI being used I've seen is cutting away a job that someone coming up would take or get on their journey. Maybe that's the point.

First Oprah, now this useless rag. They don't interview the kids, because the kids have a laundry list of reasons why they're not talking to their parents anymore. Probably the biggest being 'they were making my life tangibly worse' and as adults, you are allowed to just say 'no, you suck, get out'.

PSA: Our roadmap for 2026:

Despite an already Herculean effort by our editor @nickcoffman.com, we need a little more time to get the show ready for you. The Hard Drive Game Awards will now premier 12/18 at 7PM EST on twitch.tv/harddrivemag