When I say that First Light is built for genre, I mean that every moment of the game feels like it is perfectly contoured over the model of the James Bond concept, folded and starched over the bodily form in ways that hundreds of professionals managed to accomplish over the course of several years. When I see the developing city emerge from the desert and the labyrinth of corporate managerial space capped with natural stone, I am prepared for genre to erupt at any moment.
Spectacular piece on First Light, James Bond, genre, and the current moment of IP acquisition and exploitation by Cameron.
2016 games media was clumsy. 2026 games media is a fucking disaster.
I started writing in games about 2015. Jay Castello and I are thus the same "class" so to speak. I'm sure I've seen them at some event or something back in the day.
This piece feels so familiar to me in many ways. I wasn't as attracted to Overwatch as Jay was, but I remember liking it at one point. Getting into games writing at that time was not completely amazing but it did, at least, feel like it had some sort of potential.
I left press writing in 2019 to go into the industry proper. At that time, I thought "well, I'll do this for a bit but I'd like to go back to writing eventually". I made the mistake of assuming that the games press would remain some degree of stable. It didn't.
So in the wake of that I don't regret my choice, but it does feel painful to think about some times. It feels like a completely different world now.
The ninth console generation will be defined by corporate greed, mismanagement, and anti-consumer practices that could very well alter the course of the games industry itself.
Appreciate this piece a lot.
I truly don't know what the future holds for this industry if we continue down the path of the last five years, but I can tell you it won't be good.
I want to talk about games through crises and mass extinctions.
Outstanding piece from Paolo Pedercini analyzing the history of video games through an explicitly materialist lens of markets and populational trends. Pedercini makes the argument that games must be, ultimately, decommodified if we want the art form to survive, and moreover that that process of decommodification may already be underway. Excellent analysis and writing.
More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.
Been poking through my old link docs from college. Will be posting a few classics. This is one of my favorite Bogost pieces -- he goes into why gamification is, most importantly, a method of ‘bullshit’. Not as just a generic slur, but as a method of obscuring labor with ‘games’.
"The last couple of years at Xbox have been quite messy, people start openly questioning Game Pass and saying it's cannibalizing sales," Schreier continued, referencing the hundreds of millions of dollars reportedly lost by putting Call of Duty in the subscription. "What might be good for the Game Pass folks may not be so good for the studios and revenue brought in for individual games."
Game Pass (and broader 'game subscription' models in general) are, in this dev's opinion, awful and parasitic and poisonous. In the metaphor of a 'race to the bottom' on pricing, for all intents and purposes they are the bottom. There is no cheaper option, which means that studios are not generating ongoing money which means that studios are actively putting themselves in danger by taking these Game Pass deals, which they also cannot afford not to do.
It's long past the time that we should be criticizing these models, and criticizing them extremely harshly, for what they are doing to the already-difficult games market.
Perhaps pro-AI developers didn't want to talk to me or I just didn't run into any during my survey, because I heard an overwhelmingly negative assessment of generative AI's origins, capabilities, and risks. By the end, I'd heard dozens of developers make a case against using gen AI at all.
Surprise surprise, no one wants this shit who actually works in games.
AI "assisted" Code is still generative AI and it's weird how people try to justify that it's not.
Good breakdown of a current messy situation regarding SpryFox and generative AI.
Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with FSR3 Quality and frame generation averaged 88 fps, compared with 232 fps on an RTX 4060 and 243 fps on Intel's Arc B580. Black Myth: Wukong reached 56 fps, while Forza Horizon 5 managed 48 fps on the Low preset.
Really strange framing on this article where the bottom line is that it offers 3060-level quality for $450, which in this current hardware market is perfectly good.
The Game Workers Conference is an entirely new game industry event made by and for the countless workers who make this massively influential industry and artistic medium succeed. The first iteration of the conference is being hosted by a partnership of various game industry unions and worker-cent...
Happening now! Some good talks so far.