Category Archives: Commentary
Of All Time
I was browsing a Reddit thread called “We haven’t seen a good space opera game where you play a spaceship commander with a loyal crew since 2012”. The image in the post was for Mass Effect 3, to remove any doubt of to what space opera they were referring. Quite a few people pointed out that, in fact, the Outer Worlds series has been released since then. Amongst the pushback that the Outer Worlds is even remotely close to Mass Effect quality, was this rejoinder:
It’s easy to forget that many people here are young kids who only know things that came out this year.
That’s why you constantly hear about <insert aggressively average game here> being “the greatest of all time”, because for them “all time” is like 3 years.
It’s funny to imagine being a part of a cadre of human beings for which it’s somewhat possible to have a comprehensive experience on a matter. Like, if you were to ask what is the greatest adventure novel of all time, you would have literally a thousand years of human written storytelling to go through. Conversely, the first videogame RPG came out in 1980, depending on your definition of RPG. Even if you limit it to “classical” console-style RPGs, that moves the needle to 1986 with Dragon Quest.
My own personal experience with videogames started in the late NES era, and only really kicked off in the halcyon Squaresoft/SNES days of the mid-90s. Although, even then, there were gaps. For example, I never played Final Fantasy 4. Indeed, I tried playing it a few times in the last decade or so, and couldn’t really bring myself to get particularly far. Which shouldn’t be too surprising considering how few modern videogames (that I even paid for!) I complete on average.
And that sort of brings me back to the quote. Obviously young people exist – I hear their distinct cries of “six SEVEN” down the road all the time. And there is always a conversation surrounding whether old games hold up to modern play, even by the people who profess their greatest of all time status. But it nevertheless feels… tragic? Is that an appropriate word? It feels tragic to imagine a young person’s entire view of quality being limited to such a small time horizon.
That is, of course, how everything works. Has always worked. “GOAT” has always had asterisks galore, even (or especially) if denied. Greatest (in my subjective opinion) of All (that I’m aware of) Time (up to this moment). GIMSOOATIAOTUTTM just didn’t have the same ring to it though.
P.S. This makes me officially old, doesn’t it?
P.P.S. I already had an Officially Old tag from two years ago?! I’m actively turning to dust right now.
Sorta Black Friday, 2025 Edition
I started writing a list of games I had an eye on at the start of the holidays, and it has since passed me by with nary a thing purchased. At least, not from this list. Regardless, here it is for posterity:
- Dragon’s Dogma 2 – $22.07 (GameBillet)
- Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition – $19.79 (Fanatical)
- God of War – $17.59 (GameBillet)
- Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice GOTY Edition – $29.99 (Steam)
- Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut – $31.75 (GameBillet)
- Horizon: Forbidden West Complete Edition – $32.35 (GameBillet)
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – $32.99 (AllYouPlay)
- Last of Us Part 2 Remastered – $33.98 (GameBillet)
On reflection, it’s pretty much just a list of every mainstream game released in the last 5 years. My actual wishlist is longer, but I sometimes forget that Steam doesn’t consider Black Friday to be a real holiday – most everything was not on sale, as it would normally be during the Winter Sale, for example.
What I did end up ordering this “holiday” season were technically two more Switch accessories. First was the 8Bitdo Lite 2 controller ($21), as a smaller controller for the Little Man. The normal Switch joy-cons sorta work for his hands already – using just one when playing Mario Kart 8, for example – but honestly I don’t like them all that much. If I want him to get more coordinated and better at videogames, getting used to a somewhat more “real” controller makes more sense. Plus, worst-case scenario, the controller itself works on Android devices.
The second item is the GameSir G8 Plus ($49 AliExpress), which is a telescoping bluetooth controller. While it can work with phones and even smaller tablets, the primary use-case is the Switch itself. There was a cheaper, Switch-specific option available, but again, I’m all about accounting for worst-case scenarios. To date, I have not played the Switch outside of Little Man co-op sessions in the living room, which means no Breath of the Wild (etc). If I’m being honest, I do not anticipate this purchase immediately solving that issue, but at least it eases some of the (future) potential friction.
Aside from all that, I am just continuing to quietly play Guild Wars 2 and Outer Worlds 2. Once the latter is finished, my plan is to move onto the last (hopefully) 10% of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, so as to free up 154 GB of space. After that… who knows. Baldur’s Gate 3 is right there. Death Stranding, too. Red Dead Redemption 2 as well. Or, you know, all of those Switch games I was talking about earlier.
Oh, or maybe Expedition 33! It is on Game Pass already…
Blowing Off Steam (Machine)
We have all the details about Valve’s new PConsole except the only thing that really matters: price.
There are a lot of reasons why Valve might be slow-rolling that particular detail. For one thing, the amount of free press being generated by endless videos and news articles (and blog posts, oops) is enormous. Ten thousand TF2 hats off to the Valve marketing department. Or perhaps it’s like a trial balloon to gauge consumer interest at various price-points. Or maybe the answer is dead-ass simple: because nobody knows what prices for components will look like more than two days in advance, let alone a few months from now. RAM prices have almost doubled in the last two months. It certainly wouldn’t be a good look for any company to raise the price of a console three times in a year.
The whole conversation about whether Valve is really trying to squeeze into the console market and compete with Sony and Microsoft is kinda immaterial, IMO. The given specs are not particularly competitive with a PS5, nor is it well positioned to even really play any of the AAA games that drive the majority of consumer spending in the console space. Right now, games like Fortnite, CoD, GTA Online, and similar won’t play at all due to (Linux) incompatibility with anti-cheat software.
What Valve is actually doing is pretty straight-forward: creating a PConsole that is equal to/an upgrade of what 70% of Steam users currently have. And technically 6x more powerful than the Steam Deck.
But they also have a chance to break into the coveted Azuriel market… if they stick the price landing.
See, I’ve talked about it before, but I have a very specific use-case that is not currently being addressed in the market: introducing my kiddo to Minecraft in the living room. We technically have a Switch, which technically can have Minecraft on it, but the reviews have said it sucks on a technical level. Sluggish, buggy, and local co-op is just about unplayable. Meanwhile, I have a perfect PC rig a few rooms down. Up to this point, I had been contemplating rearranging my computer room into a side-by-side setup and going from there, but there’s a lot to like about a potential all-in-one GabeCube solution. Not the least of which is how many hundreds of other games I could share with the little man.
…unless the Steam Machine costs like fucking $800 or something. That would be enormously dumb.
I have dabbled in the burgeoning handheld emulator space, and the ever-present elephant in the room was the Steam Deck. “Is this $250 handheld worth it… or should I just buy a Steam Deck for a few hundred more?” To be clear, there are a lot of reasons why you may not want a Steam Deck. For instance, it’s very large. If all you care about is N64 games, getting something that can (technically) run Cyberpunk 2077 is overkill. But what Valve (unintentionally?) did was create a universal, $400 anchor in the handheld space. And, yeah, the top-tier model retails for $650. However, imagine if the Steam Deck debuted at $650 for the lowest model. Would it have been as popular or been the reference point for this market? No.
So, we don’t know the price for the Steam Machine. We do know that it’s not going to be subsidized like consoles, and it’s going to be priced “like a PC” of similar specs. The reasoning is begrudgingly sound: it’s technically an open Linux PC. The PS3 was subsidized back in the day with the assumption Sony would make back the money in software sales, and yet the Air Force chained 1,760 of them together to build a supercomputer. Thus, outside of bulk discounts of materials, the Steam Machine is likely to cost roughly the same as off-the-shelf components. Which puts it high. Which puts it out of reach for my purposes.
The one positive that may result, regardless of price, is developer focus on their games being “Steam Machine compatible.” Which is somewhat silly to say, given that its already a PC. That said, we have seen an out-sized (compared with units sold) effort to make games playable on the Steam Deck. Part of that is pure marketing math – someone who already shelled out cash for a Steam Deck is likely focused on playing a bunch of games on it – and the other part is likely relief at having a discrete endpoint. A given PC owner could have any number of configurations, and nearly every permutation must be accounted for. Meanwhile, a Steam Machine is a Steam Machine. If it plays well on that, it probably plays well everywhere else. Although perhaps playing on a Steam Deck is good enough.
Which just might be the play, in my case, if the Steam Machine ends up double the price of the Deck.
Dumb Problems
I’m going to talk about a dumb blogging problem I experienced recently, so feel free to skip this one.
Like most problems in the world, it started with Tobold. I’ve been a persona non grata in his comment section for years now, but I’ve kept his blog on my Feedly for masochistic reasons. One of his latest posts was so unbelievably asinine though – “Trump isn’t doing any permanent damage!” – that I had had enough. That’s when I realized that I still had him linked over in the Blogroll section of my sidebar, so I figured I should take care of that too.
Big mistake.
Over the years, I have often heard people complain about WordPress, sometimes vehemently enough to drive them to self-host and even try and reinvent the Comment section wheel. While I had misgivings when WordPress changed to the “block” format many years ago, for the most part all the nonsense seemed to just happen to Other People. As it turns out, that’s because WordPress does indeed make inexplicable changes and then hides them in a sort of load-bearing Schrödinger’s box to surprise you with if you ever open it. “Looking to edit your Blogroll? Well, now it’s a Legacy Widget. Also, that widget doesn’t exist anymore! Enjoy the dead cat.”
Now, on the one hand, I can kind of see the logic. The original setup was clunky as fuck: you place a Blogroll widget in your sidebar, and then add entries to the “Link” section of your blog. The new setup is… add a list block to the sidebar with some hyperlinks. Technically, it’s a more elegant solution. Or would be, if they also added information on how to recreate the sort of red bar thing.
Guys, I was raging. It’s bad enough when you have a problem that you find difficult to articulate in a searchable way. But when the problem is caused by someone else laying a goddamn trap in your code… I get it now. The extra dumb thing was how I stumbled onto the solution. After several hours, I was finally giving up and willing to try and grab a JPG of the red bar and manually photo edit some text on it when I ended up right-clicking and Inspecting the bar, e.g. looking at the HTML code directly.
For future reference:
<h3 class="widget-title">
<span>Blogroll</span>
</h3>More specifically, you have to add the “Custom HTML” widget to the sidebar and then paste that in. Change the title in the Span section to match your needs, of course. I’m assuming that the H3 (header) design is keyed off of the overall Theme (I’m using Mystique) and color options of the blog.
Anyway, that was a lot more of my yesterday than strictly necessary. Also, the Blogroll itself is looking a bit sparse after trimming Tobold and several bloggers who no longer post. Honestly, I never even liked the static list in the first place – it’s just a poor substitute for the glory that was Blogspot’s dynamic blogroll. You know, the one that allowed you to link to 50+ blogs or whatever and display whichever ones posted most recently at the top? If there was ever a wheel that needed reinventing, it is that one.
Price Hike
You have likely heard the news already, but in the last few weeks Microsoft has increased the price of Game Pass, kind of significantly. The Ultimate tier went from $19.99 to $29.99, for example, which is a 50% increase. Even the PC tier where I’m at went from $11.99 to $16.49, which is a 38% increase. While Microsoft has tried spinning the “value added” from things like free battlepasses to a few F2P games, most everything is the same or worse.
I have a couple of things I wanted to say about this.
First, the amount of “I told you so!”s from people – including former FTC chair Lina Khan – who suggest the price increase is a result of the Activision Blizzard merger is kind of ridiculous. Yes, $55 billion is a lot of investment money that Microsoft expects a return on. However… do we imagine the Game Pass subscription was going to stay at the same level if the merger didn’t occur? Was Microsoft not going to lay off the same game devs as before? Subscriptions go up and to the right. It doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that Netflix and Disney+ will have a(nother) price increase within the next two years, with or without any mergers.
Incidentally, the math on people canceling their subscriptions is interesting. Even if just under one-third of people cancelled their subscription… Microsoft would still break even. Hell, depending on the network traffic and other server costs, Microsoft probably comes out ahead even if half of everyone quits.
For the record, I’m not here to defend the price hikes or Microsoft in general. We are absolutely seeing an across-the-board decrease in Consumer Surplus as a result of this, and it behooves everyone to double-check their internal math to see if Game Pass still makes sense. If all you’re playing is Hollow Knight: Silksong for the month, well, you were better off just buying it outright. Even the “free” copy of Call of Duty is going to start costing you extra starting in month 3 versus 7+ now.
But let’s not pretend that where we’re at today wasn’t worth how we got here. Microsoft was going to Microsoft anyway. The fact that we got to enjoy a comparatively cheap way to play videogames for years and years was phenomenal. The party is over now? Oh no, back to… buying videogames again.
Compare that to what’s going to happen when the AI music inevitably stops.
Self-Correcting
I feel there are many elements about AI that will eventually be self-correcting… in a sort of apocalyptic, crash-and-burn kind of way. For example, the AI-summarized web doesn’t leave much economic oxygen for people to create content worth summarizing. Assuming, of course, that ad-based revenue streams continue to make sense at all as we cross into over 50% of all internet traffic being bots.
On an individual level, I am experiencing some interesting changes that may also be self-correcting.
I have mentioned it a few times, but I have had a problem with watching Youtube (Shorts). As in, I would pop on over to quickly decompress from some other activity, and then 2-3 hours later, awaken from my fugue, algorithmic state having not accomplished anything that I had set out to. It’s a problem.
…or, at least, it was. Because I am now beginning to encounter (presumed) AI-directed, curated, and/or created content. And it repulses me in an uncanny valley way. Takes me right out of whatever hypnosis I was under and immediately causes me to close the tab. Which, of course, is great for me.
I put “presumed” up there though, because sometimes I cannot really tell. For example, this video about “15 forgotten garden traditions” is probably AI generated – it features generic voiceover on top of stitched-together montage of others peoples’ (at least attributed) content. Much like the now-maligned em dash however, perhaps that style of video is now just guilty by association? Another video was on The Saver’s Paradox and my AI-dar went off immediately. Looking further into the channel and thinking about what it would require to prompt that level of video though, it seems like it’s legit.
Perhaps neither of those videos bothered you in the slightest. In which case, congratulations! You are absolutely set up for a future filled to the brim with… content. For me though, the magic is gone.
It may well be inevitable that the quality of AI generation is such that it become indistinguishable from human content. In which case, why would I be on Youtube at all, instead of in my own prompt?
Self-correcting! As it turns out, even black holes evaporate eventually.
Old Man’s Sky
They just keep bringing me back, don’t they?
If you haven’t heard the news, No Man’s Sky (NMS) recently released yet another massive free update to the game. This time around, you can build a corvette-class ship that will allow you to… get up and walk around in your ship. That might not sound like much, but it is actually kind of rare even in space games, especially considering you do so with no loading screens. In any case, I decided I need to give things another go after 5 (five!) years.
What I encountered was still one of the worst opening sequences for almost any game.
I apparently have never commented on it before, but NMS starts with you awakening on an alien planet, your suit powering up, and then a number of warnings about your environmental protection waning. Conceptually, this is fine; other survival games start you out in imminent danger too. For example, ARK has you awakening on a beach and sometimes being eaten by a raptor right away. In NMS’s case though, it just feels… bad. Your visor scanner doesn’t work, sometimes you don’t spawn near required resources to refill your environmental protection, and you don’t have the terrain modification gun yet which otherwise trivializes most hostile weather (e.g. dig a tunnel and get underground).
Worse, I actually tried starting things back up by immediately choosing an Expedition. Big mistake. Expeditions were added to the game several patches ago, and they are basically more focused experiences where you start out on predefined planets and need to accomplish specific goals. The problem is that these are absolutely tuned more for advanced players with a good grasp of the underlying mechanics. Well, and the other problem is that everyone is thrown into the same subsets of planets, so you might spawn in an area where everyone has mined most of the nearby ore. More annoyingly to me though, is that when you are looking around for resources, you’re bombarded with dozens of (useless) player base icons, making finding things difficult.
So, yeah, don’t do what I did. Instead, get a foothold in the game and then go into an Expedition – including bringing some good loot in with you! – via a vendor you unlock a few hours in the game.
In any case, since I hate myself, I chose to start a brand new save on Survival difficulty. C’mon, I had 130+ hours logged already, right? Beginning is brutal, as mentioned, and you have to contend with some extra nonsense like smaller stack sizes for material, etc. Within about 15 hours though, I’m back to having 22 million units, 6000 nanites, and unlocking all 10 freighter storage racks.
No Man’s Sky has indeed improved tremendously over the years, but fundamentally it does still have a problem with “but… why?” It’s the same place I landed on five years ago, and unfortunately it does not appear much has changed. Well, OK, there have been a lot of changes. Expeditions, there are now Dissonant planets with corrupted Sentinels, there is a Settlement system, Pirate Dreadnaughts to fight/own, the new bespoke Corvette-class ship building system, and so on.
Fundamentally, though? When you’re on foot, none of the randomly-generated creatures matter; only Sentinels pose any threat whatsoever, and there are only like a half-dozen types. Why even have so many different kinds of weapons for your multi-tool if only one is needed to take down every enemy? Meanwhile, if you spend more than 30 seconds in space, you’re likely to be accosted by fleets of hostile pirates that will absolutely murder you if given half a chance. The space gameplay “loop” is not particularly deep, but nevertheless feels miles more complete than what you are doing in the other 80% of the game, e.g. walking on planets.
Having said all that… yeah, 130+ hours plus however many I muster this time around. I’m harsh on the game because I’m mad. Hello Games have added so much and just inexplicably left such a gaping hole in the center and I don’t understand why. Maybe having Gek pirates running around on foot blasting you would feel too weird or whatever, but apparently it’s fine when they’re faceless ships? OK, just use some of the six trillion randomized alien creatures and make some of them require that fancy mech to fight! Or lean more into those bug aliens that are apparently as ubiquitous as the Sentinels for (presumably) some kind of lore reason.
Or, I guess, ignore all that and hurry up and give me Light No Fire.
Following the Money
Found a news article (via Reddit) with a refreshingly straight-forward headline: Newzoo: North American gamers spend an average of $325 annually The Reddit conversation focused mostly on how inexpensive gaming is as a hobby in dollars-per-hour terms, compared to going to a bar/movie ($20-$80) or even a concert/sporting event ($150-$800+). You know, traditional talking points.
After actually reading the article itself though, that wasn’t what this report is about:
The motivations behind player spending in these regions also differ. 34% of North American players spend money to unlock exclusive content, while 29% do so on personalisation/character customization. […]
The report also found that there’s diversity in player spending patterns between regions. In North America, 27% of players invest in content packs, power-ups, and in-game currencies, 24% buy subscriptions, and 23% purchase battle passes.
What’s conspicuously missing is “percentage spent buying the game.” At least, I assume unlocking exclusive content does not count. And actually, all those percentages are kind of weird. Is character customization not also exclusive content? Are content packs not battle passes? Who knows.
Regardless, the through line is clear:
According to the findings, the West games market is seeing slowing “payer growth,” with a 1.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in North America and 3.1% CAGR in Europe between 2023 and 2027. As such, Newzoo and Tebex recommend studios “shift from acquiring new players to maximizing value from existing ones.”
There’s a tangled web of chicken vs egg speculation about why player growth has slowed. Market saturation? Higher prices and too much “maximizing value” squeezing people out? Shaky economic future? The rise of lifestyle/live-service/forever games like Fortnite, Roblox, etc? (Time) Competition from short-form video content?
Funnily enough, most of these points were covered back in January in the Hopes of the Game Industry. And the answer is… Yes. All of those things, simultaneously. There have been tremendous layoffs in the games industry this year, including high-profile sequels and nearly-complete games thrown in the trash. We mourn the loss of what could have been, but the suits see how only ~12% of gaming hours are spent playing new games. Why risk $100m+ and eight years building a game when you can “maximize value” out of established ones? And if you don’t have any of those games, just buy’em up.
Again, it could be an interesting debate about which happened first. Did escalating prices for new games send players back into the arms of familiar classics? Or did the introduction of microtransactions start making games stickier, as a means of assuaging sunk costs?
True answers, if any exist, are academic at this point. Developers are following the money and it’s hard to blame them. Well, aside from being increasingly incapable of making fun games even after 4-8 years and tens millions of dollars and are now choosing to erode your consumer surplus instead.
You can certainly blame them for that.
Continue Reading
In the spirit of Blaugust, allow me to give an unsolicited opinion: excerpts suck. If I see a post in my Feedly roll that is just a paragraph that ends with Continue Reading… I don’t. That blog gets dropped.
There’s really only two reasons to have excerpts on: you don’t know better, or you do. In the latter case, congrats on being a cog in the giant SEO/clickbait bullshit machine. Be better, if you can.
In case you’re a member of the former category though, for WordPress check Settings > Reading:
Are there legitimate concerns about having your blog content displayed in an RSS aggregator versus readers coming directly to your blog? Maybe. I have no idea if someone reading this post on Feedly will have their View register on my WordPress stats or whatever. I could also see concerns about post formatting if you care about that sort of thing. For example, I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to avoid orphan words in the blog proper. Seriously, check my posts sometimes (engagement!). None of which matters for Feedly readers though, because those line lengths are all over the place.
You might think me arrogant for suggesting that losing my subscription to your blog is a reason to turn off excerpts. I would instead suggest that forcing readers to open a new tab just for you is itself the height of arrogance. Do you yourself open tabs for every blog you follow every day, like it’s 2005? No.
Turn off your excerpts. Thanks for reading.
In An Age 
“Normal People Don’t Care”
Dec 18
Posted by Azuriel
There is a minor, ongoing media kerfuffle with the internet-darling Larian Studios (makers of Baldur’s Gate 3, Original Sin 2, etc). It started with this Bloomberg article, wherein Jason Schreier writes:
There are possible charitable and a not-so-chartable takes on those words, and suffice it to say, many people chose the latter. Vincke responded with a “Holy fuck guys [chill out]” Twitter response, with clarifications and emphasis that they only use AI for reference material and other boring things, and not with actual content. Jason Schreier also chimed in with an original transcript of the interview, as a response to others suggesting that what Schreier wrote was itself misleading.
As a side note, this portion of the transcript was extra interesting to me:
I suppose I should take Vincke’s word on the matter, considering how he released a critically-acclaimed game that sold 20 million copies, and I have… not. But, dead? Larian Studios has over 500 employees at this point, so things are likely different at these larger scales. I’m just saying the folks that made, you know, Silksong or Megabonk are probably going to be fine without pushing AI into their processes.
Anyway, all of that is actually a preamble to what sent me to this keyboard in the first place. In the Reddit comments of the second Schreier piece, this exchange took place:
do not engage… do not engage… do not engage…
Guys, it’s hard out here in 2025. And I’m kinda all done. Tapped out. Because SexyJazzCat is correct.
Normal people don’t actually care. We know this because “normal” people voted the current administration back into office. Normal people don’t understand that measles can reset your immune system, erasing all your hard-fought natural immunities. Normal people don’t understand that every AI data center that springs up in your area is subsidized by increases to your own electric bill. Normal people don’t understand that tariffs are taxes that they end up paying for. Normal people don’t understand that even if they didn’t use ACA subsidies, their health insurance is going to wildly increase anyway because hospitals won’t be reimbursed for emergency care from newly uninsured people. Nevermind the, you know, general human misery this creates.
Normal people don’t actually care about AI. But they should. Or perhaps should have, past tense, because we’re far past the end of a very slippery slope and fully airborne. Normal people are just going to be confused as to why computers, phones, and/or videogame consoles are wildly more expensive in 2026 (e.g. RAM crisis). Or if AI successfully demonstrates real efficiency gains, surprised when they are out of a job. Or if AI crashes and burns, why they also still lost their job and their 401k cratered (e.g. 40% of S&P 500 value is in AI companies).
The only thing that I still wish for these days, is this: people have the kind of day they voted for.
Posted in Commentary
3 Comments
Tags: AI, Capitalist Dystopian Hellscape, Jason Schreier, Larian, Normal People, Reddit