[GGM] Nintendon’t Remember Much
After my first encounter with Super Mario Bros, there is a videogame gap. I went from that formative gaming memory to the next gaming memory being “having a lot of Nintendo games.” Were they bought for me? Were they someone else’s? Who owned the Nintendo? It’s a mystery, lost to the ages1.
From this time period, I remember the following:
Top Gun: the Second Mission – Until literally right now, I had not realized that we had the Top Gun sequel and not the original. When looking for a video of the gameplay, I was like “Where is the tree level? There was definitely a tree level.” Anyway, this game was my father’s favorite, primarily because Top Gun was (and probably still is) his favorite movie. It was fun enough for the time period, but none of us ever got past the tree level, so we just played the opening mission a bunch of times.
Super Mario Bros 3 – I ended up playing a lot of SMB3 in this time period, easily 5x as much as any other NES game. I only skimmed a bit of the playthrough video I linked, but I was immediately reminded how much additional depth (and difficulty!) was added to the overall formula over the original. I also very much liked how you had a limited ability to choose the next level you played, rather than being forced into the next one immediately. Also, proper boss fights were memorable.
Zelda II: The Adventures of Link – My first Zelda game… and what a nightmare for young kids to play. Did anyone legitimately beat this without a guide? Much like with Top Gun, I started this game a bunch of times but never really got very far. Or maybe I did, but later? My strongest memories were the fact that the cartridge itself was golden, leaving the main road was scary, and I never got past Mirror Link.
Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse – Funny story with this one. It was around Christmas time, and I remember my parents asking me what game Santa should buy. They had also told me that Santa knows when you have been naughty or nice… even when no one is looking. I was getting older, and this struck me as suspicious. Why would they need to know what Santa should bring me, if the old man had around-the-clock surveillance? So, I hemmed and hawed with my parents all through December, while voicing aloud the game I wanted while alone in my room. The result was Castlevania 3.
It was not the game I had wanted. And so I learned two important lessons that day.
Blaster Master – When I think about my overall favorite game from the NES era, it would be Blaster Master. This is another one of those “start a hundred times, never finish” games, but it is also one that somehow feels way more advanced than its peers. It has side-scrolling action platforming with a tank car that jumps (!!), features progressive movement unlocks that allow you to find more secrets as you backtrack, and has an entirely separate 3/4 perspective dungeon aspect when you leave the vehicle?! Also, while Duck Tales gets a lot of praise for its soundtrack, Blaster Master is on the same tier, IMO.
1 My mother was not in the position to be buying games at the time, so I assume my father bought them. At the same time, it would have been very uncharacteristic for him to do so, especially as evident later in the 16-bit era (foreshadowing!). So, it is possible that they belonged to someone one of them were dating, or maybe someone staying with us, who eventually let me have possession of them later on.
[GGM] In the Beginning
I’m starting a new post series called Gratuitous Gaming Memories, or [GGM]. If you aren’t interested in new lil’ Azuriel lore drops, feel free to bounce when you see it. I’m mostly writing these posts for myself – hence the gratuitousness – and for Little Man to discover later, providing that the internet still exists in a recognizable state in ten years. Let’s roll.
My earliest memory of any videogame was the original Super Mario Bros for Nintendo. Getting there requires some setup.
I grew up in relative poverty, in a very poor state. At the time, I did not realize this, and so it didn’t bother me (neither then or even now); that was just how life was. My mother was young when she had me, like around 20, and my father was not much older. They divorced when I was 2 years old which, again, I did not particularly recognize as being outside the norm. Weekdays were spend with mom, weekends were spent with dad. Luckily, they were pretty amicable. Life moved on.
One of the things I always remembered with mom were our “expeditions.” Essentially, just walking around town. I do not recall whether it was a matter of necessity (car not working, etc), to combat boredom, and/or conduct healthy exercise. In any case, keeping a 5-6 year old boy occupied and on-task for a multiple-mile walk was difficult, so we often… kicked rocks. As in, I would kick a hefty rock down the sidewalk, then she would, then I would, and so on. Sometimes the rock would hit a crack at a crazy angle or perhaps you put too much force into it, but that was all part of what kept it fun.
At some point during the walk, I kicked the rock a bit too hard and it bounced up and hit the side of a parked car. Which was sitting in front of perhaps the largest, fanciest house in the small town we lived in. I wanted us to flee the scene, but my mother took us to the open front door and wanted to apologize. I’m not quite sure how the conversation went, but at some point I was sent to wait in the living room with the owner’s kids… just as they turned on Super Mario Bros.
I was transfixed. I don’t even really remember if I got a turn with the controller. In fact, I don’t have any memory at all of the following… however long it was. It’s like a dopamine cigarette burn in my head.
Afterwards, we left, and continued on our expedition. After putting some additional distance between us and the fancy house, we found the next rock for us to kick. I remember that very specifically.
But the seed had been planted.
Switch to Switch 2
Longtime readers may recall that I was debating between the Switch vs Switch 2 last year, once Little Man came to a videogame awakening. I ended up purchasing a new Switch OLED bundle with Mario Kart 8 for $275 total last July. Plus, a kinda dumb amount of games… almost all of which got played! He’s not quite ready for Smash Bros yet. I am overall pleased with how that situation shook out.
Now, a year later and almost exactly to the day, I also bought (and since received) a Switch 2.
The Switch 2 bundle cost a total of $426.60, which is obviously much higher than the original Switch. Plus, you know, I still have the original Switch. What gives? Several kinda sorta related things.
- There is a pending $50 price hike for the console in September
- Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake releasing in 2026
- I already own Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom plus have Nintendo expansion pass subscription, meaning I could get upgraded graphics/fps for when we start playing that
- Super Mario Sunshine is coming to the GameCube emulator (requires expansion pass)
- Missed the most recent Costco eShop gift card sale, e.g. $500 credit for $400 spent
- Donkey Kong Bananza is closest to Mario Odyssey, so Little Man may enjoy that
- Switch 2 version of Minecraft releasing in October
That, no doubt, sounds like a lot of explanation concerning a topic that should warrant none.
“Who you trying to convince?” Yes, me, myself. I routinely agonize over $15 game purchases, and whether 67% off is worth it considering the all-time-low was 70% three months ago. I once bought a game from an overseas storefront and ended up getting my bank account frozen “out of caution,” all trying to save $3 versus just buying it on Steam. I was not in any way depending on that $3, it was just the principle of the thing. I mean, hell, it was a Steam code in the first place!
Whatever. It’s done. The Switch 2 is fully functional – the refurbishment tag apparently referred to the box having beat-up corners – and has replaced the original Switch in all ways. I could sell the original for… looks like $160 on eBay at the moment, but my assumption is that it will stick around. Partly as a backup device, partly as an inheritable device, and partly because my wife mentioned she may want to play stuff on it. Theoretically, I could do local co-op with some games, but I have not yet done the research for which games require two copies and which can be shared.
It is kind of funny/sad looking at the list of games in the Nintendo eShop and realizing how many I already own on Steam, often for much less. Although, now that I’m looking, maybe not. For example, We Love Katamari REROLL is like $7.50 on Switch and the IsThereAnyDeal lowest was $5.77 two years ago. Donut County is $3.24 versus $2.43. I even bought that last one in a bundle deal like two months ago. Huh. For some reason I thought that something like Hollow Knight: Silksong retailed for more on Switch, but apparently the MSRP is the same.
I still prefer gaming on the PC, and Steam allows for me leverage my Retroid Pocket 6 if I need to go mobile, but this is starting to make me think about some things. Not for now, but perhaps in the future.
Sign of the Times
A few weeks ago, the Ohio State Fair had a poster contest. Grand prize was $1,000. It was won by someone submitting the most banal, directly-copied AI slop imaginable:
You don’t need to take my word for it. The officials came out and posted the following:
When the poster contest was originally formed in 2024, the use of AI was permitted if explained as a part of the application process. However, we recognize that the use of AI has changed greatly over the last few years in ways we didn’t anticipate, and will be reevaluating the rules and processes for 2027, which will include prohibiting the use of AI. We are committed to celebrating Ohio artists, with a number of other competitions that don’t permit AI, including the fine arts exhibition, creative arts competitions, mural contest, and plein air painting.
To be fair to the artist prompt engineer, there weren’t any rules against it. Which is honestly surprising, considering Colorado had this same exact issue back in 2022 during their State Fair art contest. Also, who in the Boomer fuck was judging this contest in the first place? You can use the original link to see 2nd-5th place, any of which I would argue are objectively better than what was selected.
Of course, I’m kind of assuming the others weren’t just AI themselves. Second place has me suspicious.
Anyway, add it to the pile.
What Would You Say You Do Around Here?
There is a sentiment that some “light” usages of AI are okay because it simply reduces the friction a bit on content creation. For example, Kelly writes:
But if AI can be helpful for things like blog production. I know, for example, that blog posts with an image are several times more likely to attract someone’s attention than one without an image. I lack time and artistic skill to create my own images, but I can craft a prompt and get a suitable illustration in seconds. This is hard to ignore, and I will continue to avail myself of the AI services that provide image generation from time to time.
On the one hand, I get it. If you perceive a gap and there is a tool available to bridge it, why not?
On the other, much larger, much heavier hand, what do you imagine is going to happen next? Not in a “cog in the agentic death-march” kind of way, but on a much more practical level. You generate an image for a blog post to attract more attention. Supposing that that advice still works here in 2026 – I have my doubts – you get the traffic at the expense of blogs that don’t. So, those other blogs start generating images too. Now… what? The competitive advantage is gone. Who gets the clicks?
“Blogging isn’t a competition though!” Then why do you care about having a generated image at all?
Not trying to single Kelly out, or really any of the specific AI enthusiasts still in my Feeds. You do you. It’s a transformative technology for coding and a few other industries, yada yada yada. I just happen to agree with the general sentiment of Anarchae:
If I asked a question on this site and got a response and went back and forth a bit, I had a pleasant interaction with a human being and feel good about the distro and its community.
If I later find out that person just copy pastes questions into an LLM and then copy pastes back in a response, or is a full on bot-run account, there is a feeling of betrayal. I thought I had a genuine human connection, but it wasn’t, it was just a computer program. Now that sours my opinion of the distro and I probably won’t bother coming back. I was given the equivilant of the Customer Service Chatbot, who would be happy about that?
No one with an internet connection is hurting for content. No doubt you could vibe code a blog tonight that automatically prompts ChatGPT to spit out a randomized topic-of-the-day post every 24 hours. Or six hours. Or 15-minutes. We aren’t here for that. We aren’t here for the AI image that is only vaguely related to the topic at hand and is more meant to be clickbait. We aren’t here for the grammatically perfect, literal textbook outlined prose with the phone emojis for some reason. Every single AI refinement makes you less distinguishable from every other (presumed) person also on the gear.
Be human. Have messy human thoughts with the wet meat between your ears. Who are we trying to impress? None of us are making any money on this and it ain’t because we got some syntax wrong.
Or don’t, I guess.
I Sorta Made a Logo
One “requirement” for Warp Point was to make an 88×31 pixel logo to represent your site. So, I did:
I created it by hand over at PixilArt. I mean, the text was just typed, the background is one color, but I drew the birds myself! All… 11×8 pixels of them.
It’s just now occurring to me that anyone not viewing this blog full-screen from a desktop computer may have no idea why the logo has third birds on a wire. I just checked on my own phone and, yep, you can’t really see any of the background image even if you select “Desktop Mode” in Chrome. Obviously, Feedly or any other RSS program is not going to include that either. For posterity, there’s birds:
For further posterity’s sake, there isn’t anything special about the birds or the image itself. I’m relatively certain it just happened to be one of the hundred rotating desktop backgrounds I found back in my college days, the WordPress theme needed something when I was moving from Blogspot, and I liked how the gray gradient made my text pop. I do like ravens, but not enough to recognize whether those are ravens, which they probably are not. Sort of look like finches, but it would not surprise me if they were something dumb like pigeons. Whatever, birds are about as cool as anything else, so just send it.
Don’t worry, I don’t plan on doing 31 days of stream-of-consciousness posts. Just a few.
Discoverability
I think about the tragedy of discoverability a lot.
Maybe “tragedy” is not the right word, but stick with me for a moment. Think about your absolute favorite song, or movie, or game, or book. Was encountering that now-favorite thing inevitable? For some things, maybe the answer is Yes. If you had a Super Nintendo in the 90s, odds are pretty high that you were aware of Final Fantasy 3 (6) or Super Metroid or other bangers that were pre-internet famous even in their day. Then again, perhaps that was a bias I had from reading gaming magazines like Nintendo Power or Game Pro back then. And, of course, it presupposes you (or your parents) had the cash to purchase it for you.
When looking at my music collection though, almost all of my favorite songs were never in any way inevitable. Fifteen years ago, I was working an extremely boring data entry job that nevertheless allowed us to listen to music. I had the entire internet at my disposal, and yet you don’t know what you don’t know. Where does one listen to music, that isn’t just the same 17 songs on the radio? My solution was these monthly indie rock playlist drops, such as BIRP, where you can download like a hundred separate songs, and then winnow them down to the usually 2-3 that were my style. From there, I would download that musician’s discography and then winnow that down, finding more diamonds in the rough. Rinse and repeat.
If I did not have that job, or did not discover the indie rock playlist – which I honestly have no recollection of where I would have encountered it – then some of my favorite songs would just… not exist, from my perspective. Yes, I would still have had my prior favorite song that I did encounter, so in a way it’s relative. In a more concrete way though, it’s very much not relative because my new favorite had greater depths and more fulfilling pathos than what came before.
My job has changed quite a bit over the years, and I no longer felt it was a good use of my time sorting through a hundred songs of what felt like UK punk rock for a single good song. So, I stopped around 2018, it looks like. How many diamonds have slipped through my fingers in the last eight years? Maybe fewer than I think, given I have leveraged more Youtube algorithms for exposure to new stuff. Then again, just like with AI generally, it’s exceedingly proficient at giving you more of what you like, rather than something totally different that you might like more.
I do not know if there is a solution out there for discoverability, other than just putting yourself out there. The corporate machines of the world are certainly spending billions of dollars in trying to put your eyeballs on their products, but for the average piece of content, it’s likely random happenstance at best. And that’s really too bad.
In unrelated news, I’ve signed up for Blaugust again this year, and threw my hat in over at Warp Point.
Impressions: Palworld, 1.0
It’s been about 2.5 years since I last touched Palworld. With its 1.0 release, it felt finally time to go back.
TL;DR: I haven’t booted up Hearthstone or Guild Wars 2 a single time since, not even for weekly quests.
I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about changes, as I only played around eight hours back in like… v0.12 or whatever. What I can confirm, broadly speaking, is that the game pretty much plays like it did 2.5 years ago, minus the bugs. All of these impressions are coming from around ~30 hours of game time on default, Normal settings.
The gameplay loop is the same with ARK: explore a defined map, grind resources, capture creatures, repeat. The big difference is that Pals are much more inherently useful in all aspects of the game. You can summon Pals to help you fight/tame other Pals. You can summon Pals and then ride on them over land, sea, and/or air. You can summon Pals and utilize them as living flamethrowers, grenade launchers, miniguns, or even as swords. Crucially, you can deploy Pals in your base to farm resources, craft ammo, plant/harvest crops, and otherwise keep you company. And because Pals can be useful for all of these different scenarios, you are encouraged to capture all of them in the off-chance they are better at a given task than what you have, rather than just the completionist “gotta catch them all” achievement.
The actual act of playing the game has been an interesting experience for me. Palworld very much feels like a AA game… which it is, with MSRP of $30. The title screen, the menus, some of the textures all kinda scream “stock Unreal assets.” More than that though, some red flags immediately raised to me when I discovered that the first resource after Wood was just “Ore.” Not Copper Ore, not Iron Ore, just… Ore. In the past I have railed on designers having excessively prescriptive design, e.g. Copper Sword, Iron Sword, Silver Sword, etc. Palworld does have other tiers of items, like Refined Ore and others, but having “Ore” the baseline was indicative of an overall balance towards volume than rarity. Which is indeed how it has played out thus far.
What I do appreciate (to a degree) is how many different activities are available in the game. There are faction bases that you can attack in the open world, which gives you some loot. There are instanced dungeons, which contain some Pals and resources that only spawn inside. There are open-world “bosses” that are effectively super-charged Pals. Base raids are a thing, unless you either pay the messenger for them to go away or turn them off in the menu. There is also Fishing, which can net you some nice rewards and high-level Pals. Respawning treasure chests are strewn about in the land. In short, there are plenty of distractions when exploring, such that you may end up not actually accomplishing the thing you set out to do, unless you are able to ignore everything else.
In short, Palworld is great! For now. I can imagine a scenario in which some of these activities get old after a while, in which case the loop collapses. I also find it difficult to imagine replaying the game later, since the map isn’t procedurally generated. I believe there is an option to randomize the Pal locations, but I’m not certain how much extra juice that will provide. Best-case scenario would be for there to be ongoing support, ARK-style, with perhaps new maps eventually, whether created by Pocket Pair themselves or dedicated modders.
Then again, there is something to be said for having an experience that is just over when you’re done.
Out of Breath (of the Wild)
I may have mentioned in passing that I am playing through Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW). This was originally going to be supervised watching of Little Man playing, but the mechanics proved too punishing for him, and so he wants to watch me play. So I have been, for the last several weeks. I believe we are roughly halfway through the game, but it is hard to tell.
Broadly speaking, I don’t find BotW very fun at all. In fact, it feels like it’s designed to be un-fun.
I’m certainly not treading any new ground here, but for posterity, the biggest offender for un-fun is weapon durability. In BotW, every single weapon you pick up in the game (sans one) will eventually shatter. In some cases, it makes sense, like your tree branch or skeleton arm breaking or whatever. Other times, you have Royal weaponry that has presumably survived countless battles over dozens of years… and it’s gone after fighting three goblins. “Realism!” I guess? No blacksmiths anywhere, but we have ancient robot technology and teleportation and food that makes you immune to lightning.
I can see the design goal. It’s exciting starting out practically naked and eventually becoming a force of nature by scrappy adventuring. Defeating a powerful foe and claiming it’s deadly weapon for yourself feels good! There’s also no reasonable way to introduce more than a dozen different weapons into a Zelda title without having a mechanism to enforce you not just using the strongest one all the time.
That said, it just feels awful at every stage in the game and warps player behavior. I think this is the first game I have played where the stronger you get, the more you are actively punished for engaging in combat. In the early game, you use whatever you can get to just survive. Later on, defeating some strong enemies give you powerful weapons… which you then have to stow away while you flee from every low-level enemy encounter, lest you waste precious durability on trash. At some point, no combat is worth engaging in. And when you do engage in extended combat sequences, you get the fun experience of pausing combat multiple times as you toggle through menus, debating which weak-ass weapon you are OK with breaking just to be rewarded with vendor trash, at best.
And oh god, the menus. Defeated enemies don’t drop hearts; you must consume food to regain life, or otherwise get back to civilization. There are dozens of different ingredients, all of which you have to – painfully slowly – experiment with to determine if the resulting meal is worth your time. 99% of the time, it was not. In fact, the vast majority of the food is functionally useless considering it might restore 8 hearts, despite you only have like 5 at the time. The only ingredients worth a goddamn are ones marked “Hearty X,” which when cooked (at a lit cookpot), result in a full refresh of all hearts plus some extra temporary hearts. So, you cook them, 1 at a time, because while you can technically combine up to five ingredients to stack the temp HP, it is much more functional to refresh all hearts plus get 4 temp ones X times than one refresh with 20 temp hearts once.
Meanwhile, your adventuring is entirely spent scouring the countryside looking for hidden shrines. Completing one shrine gets you one Spirit Orb. Turning four Spirit Orbs in lets you get one extra heart container, or one-quarter of an extra stamina meter. Where I’m at right now, I believe I have eight total hearts (started with 3) and a full second stamina meter, so… 28 shrines completed? I’m supposed to get to 13 hearts for reasons, so that’s another 12-20ish shrines depending on a few factors. Sigh.
It’s dumb, guys. When there’s actual quests going on, things are decent, but I was once awarded an heirloom weapon of a dead friend and even Little Man said “No, we can’t use it, because it’ll break!” Was that the vision? The developer intention? “Nothing lasts forever, kid. Get used to it.”
You know, maybe there was a zeitgeist I missed when Breath of the Wild first came out. Being able to climb literally everything was undoubtedly novel at the time. My first experience with that came from Craftopia, which unabashedly stole it and several other things from BotW, and so did every single open-world gacha game that came out since then, so experiencing it here in 2026 was no big deal. I’ve also heard all the stories about peoples’ minds being blown when they realized the first plateau was just the tutorial and how big the world was. Yeah, okay. I got that back in 2008 with Fallout 3, but I guess some players weren’t even born yet. Something has to be someone’s first.
But, seriously, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills or something. BotW is a big, beautiful… empty, sterile world that drains you of resources for interacting with it. In Fallout, I relish every opportunity to scour empty buildings of Aluminum cans or rolls of duct tape. Ghouls or Raiders appear? Fantastic! More loot, more XP, more character progression. Even if a particular ruin is a bust for any of those things, there are often environmental vignettes that can be poignant.
That doesn’t exist in BotW. There is zero reason to ever clear a goblin camp. The only reason to explore is to find either another Shrine (puzzle) or a Korak Seed (puzzle), to incrementally gain more HP/Stamina or more items slots, respectively. Every heart of damage you take or damage you deal is paid with busywork later. Sloooooooowly cooking up food, collecting up arsenals of garbage weapons, or enduring loading screens teleporting around to “farming spots” where you can more easily gather the best versions of either. That’s not exactly the power fantasy I’m expecting from a Zelda game.
That said, my opinion is clearly wrong: Breath of the Wild enjoys a ~97 Metacritic rating, and has sold 35 million copies. The game indeed embraces nonlinearity, encourages exploration (for the first few hours), has minimal onscreen UI for an open-world game, and has challenges that can be overcome in a number of (occasionally physics-based) ways. What more could the average gamer ask for?
Not being punished for interacting with said world, for starters, I would say. Apparently, that’s just me.
In An Age 
In-Game Ads
Aug 15
Posted by Azuriel
I was doomscrolling today and came across this Youtube Short from Legendary Drops concerning in-game advertising being more fully explored by EA, Microsoft, and Sony, all practically at once:
I actually watch quite a bit of Legendary Drops, as he has some rather humorous (and compelling) takedowns of AAA studios and the nonsense they are engaging with these days. Which, apparently, includes feeling the temperature on including advertising within the games they are selling. The Short itself does not contain links to specific articles, so I had to do some digging around for the links.
As the Sony article points out, this is not everyone’s first rodeo:
It is 2026 and we are probably all well past this being a particular shock. F2P mobile games have had advertising since forever, including more pernicious gameplay-affecting ones. Indeed, one of my most-played mobile games is Tavern Rumble, a roguelite deck-builder that will give you the equivalent of +2 Strength, healing, etc, if you watch some ads after each fight. That’s… not OK. I ended up buying the “ad remover” for the game for $10 or whatever years ago, but even now, it’s hard to say whether the boosts are just extra, or whether the game was specifically balanced around them. For example, having played Candy Crush, you could not possibly convince me that some of the RNG in certain levels are beatable without power-ups, whether accrued for free over time or purchased directly.
And don’t forget the weird shit too, like Monster Energy drinks in Death Stranding:
At the moment, it is not entirely clear the exact direction the enshittification is going. When looking at the EA page, they are talking about “dynamic, real-time placements, from stadium signage to custom in-game content.” Any sort of sports game would probably look uncanny without real-ish ads plastered about, considering that is what everyone sees IRL watching from home. Same with the hoods of racing cars, etc. With XBox, it sounds a lot more like a “free with ads” subscription tier rather than seeing a Microsoft Copilot banner in the Master Chief’s visor. With Sony… who even knows, to be honest. Sony has been losing so much money lately that it would not surprise me that they end up being the worst ad offenders eventually.
Steam sometimes gets touted as a bulwark of consumer protection… and it’s true, to a point. Steam does not run ads in the client, and specifically forbids games from having mobile-esque ads:
That same policy does allow “product placements,” which is largely reasonable. As jarring as seeing Monster Energy drinks in your videogame can be, it is difficult to draw a distinction between that and the fact that a very Norman Reedus is the one doing so. As long as you don’t have to drink a verification can, I guess it can slide. Christ, was that really 13 years ago?
In any case, as odious as advertising is generally and how annoying it is seeing it infiltrate yet another facet of our lives, I feel like it may end up working itself out. If a particular game is festooned with ads, and it breaks immersion, don’t buy that game. If there are ads in the storefront, well, yeah… stores often do. Just about the worse-case scenario might be forcing ads to display prior to playing a game, which sounds like what Microsoft is testing in the context of a “free streaming” offering. Which is a tradeoff you ostensively signed up for.
Ultimately though, the days for any kind of corporate shenanigans may be numbered. The entire business model around AAA gaming is on the verge of collapse, so I kinda doubt even the C-suite are going to gamble throwing ads into their next 6-year, $300+ million game and have that be the reason it failed. Sony can take their toys off Steam and go home, but hilariously, their ability to output said toys within their own console generation has the same upper limits as everyone else. Let them release a $1000+ PS6 with five exclusive games, a locked-down storefront, and sprinkle some intrusive ads for flavor and see what happens.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Enshittification, In-Game Advertising, Legendary Drops, Sony, Verification Can