The layoffs across the games industry over the last two years have been widely framed as a cost correction.

They are. Maybe you were fortunate enough for your 1200-person company to sustain itself on one big hit, but an economic downturn shrinks your audience considerably and makes it tougher for you to break even, and that’s assuming the quality of your game and marketing are just as good as your last hit.

I saw this firsthand while leading the external production team during the development of Immortals of Aveum. The project makes a useful case study precisely because it was ambitious and structurally complex: one of the first major titles built on Unreal Engine 5, with multiple external teams contributing across characters, creatures, weapons, and first-person gameplay assets in a multi-vendor AAA environment.

Maybe the problem was that a brand new team made something so ambitious on their first go?

The question is no longer whether external development is essential. It’s whether the industry is willing to treat production continuity as infrastructure — or continue optimizing for short-term cost while the capability that made AAA possible quietly fragments.

Maybe we ought to question whether AAA as the author knows it is really necessary. We can get excellent production value out of small teams that reduces the risk of not breaking even, and Unreal 5 is pretty damn good at enabling that. There’s an enormous success like Clair Obscur, but then there’s also a more modest success like The Alters or The Thaumaturge. I find it interesting that, despite their name and some pretty undeniable successes, a US studio like Supergiant Games can still measure their workforce in the dozens, not hundreds. I’ll bet they’re pretty good at retaining that talent.

And then in 2019 Kojima would make a game about a guy delivering Amazon packages to people hunkered down and social distancing amidst the imminent threat of death.

In middle school, in homeroom, I sat behind a guy who could not contain his excitement for MGS2. It was the first week or so of school. Every day it was a countdown to when he could play the game. “One more day, man. One more day until Metal Gear Solid 2.” So the next day, I asked him, “So how is it?” He was shellshocked. “Snake died, man.” Excitement was gone. His day at school was ruined. I didn’t check in with him later, but presumably, a 7th grader couldn’t make heads or tails of the ending of that game, if he made it that far. I didn’t play it myself until a few years later, and it was one of the most talked-about endings in all of video games, because it was so barely comprehensible, at best.

If you played it at launch though, it did have a rough time scaling up to PC hardware that was better than consoles. It was pretty infamous for that back then.

I was a Goldlewis main for a while too. I hope you can get in on zoners without White Wild Assault now.

Certain engines form certain reputations, but those people need to see enough counter examples to realize that the engine is just a contributing factor to what the resulting game is. Unity had “a look” for years, because so many devs used the default lighting, but then you realize that stuff like Cuphead, Hollow Knight, and Subnautica all run on Unity, and that reputation fades.

No. You can make just about any engine do just about anything, especially if you’ve got low-level access to it. If this question is implying something about Unreal, just level set your expectations for the performance things that usually come along with that, but it’s not a foregone conclusion either.

For my money, it’s one of the best games ever made, especially fighting games. Though I’m not a fan of how this version has to overwrite previous versions of the game. I get that doing what Ultra Street Fighter IV did with version select is tougher to do, but this game has rocked the boat with system mechanics changes a number of times at this point.

That’s right now. The economy changes, and that investment is a response to how it’s changed. It will change back again. We’ve been here before.

The days of appealing to the mass market of lower and middle class consumers, is over

It’s not over forever. We’ve had K-shaped recoveries in the past, which is why we have a name for it.

The turn based mode in Pillars 2 was so good that if you prefer turn-based to RtwP (which I think is most of us), I’d recommend playing Pillars 1 this way, even though it wasn’t initially designed for it. I’m not in the mood for a replay of Pillars 1 right now, but if I was, that’s what I’d be doing.

I’ve got a UGreen NAS for media hosting, and I’ve been loading it up with Blu Rays and DVDs for the past few weeks to stream via Jellyfin. Going alphabetically, I’ve now made it to the letter J in my library, with 54 movies and 407 episodes of TV ripped so far. I have a tiny comic collection that I started playing with in Komga just yesterday. I intend to scale up slightly, with all of my other self hosting needs handled by a mini PC, which should be enough, that I can retire from its gaming use cases when the Steam Machine comes out. I’m trying to figure out all of the pieces I need in order to safely expose that to the internet for my friends without the use of something like Tailscale. When I started, it was like that Simpsons gag where Homer went from reading Advanced Marketing to Beginner Marketing to looking up the definition in the dictionary. But after about 50 YouTube videos all explaining the same concepts slightly differently between them, it’s starting to click.

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Live service has broken people’s brains.

Well, I definitely wasn’t going to buy a PlayStation 5 when it was $500, but now that they’ve stopped putting out versions of their games on PC that run better than PlayStation versions, and now that the console costs $650, I’m definitely enticed to buy one!

I don’t know. A lot of people are saying this correlates to Chinese New Year, but I don’t know how that correlates to video game playing. I do know they’re largely only playing a handful of games like PUBG, Dota 2, and maybe Counter-Strike, so maybe they’re coming and going according to new updates releasing for one of those games, but they do come and go in waves.

There is a space for rentals to exist, but if you know exactly what you want already, the price of that indie game you’re looking for already isn’t very expensive, especially during a sale. We’ve probably got a bunch of these games in our libraries already just from bundles.

When Chinese usage goes up in a month, they’re just about all on Windows, which drags Linux usage down. A lot of Chinese players from last month did not return this month, and Linux usage went up. Linux users didn’t double, but the total number of Windows users went down.

Gaming centers that buy the same hardware in bulk, is what I understand. So naturally, they’re going to buy them with Windows pre-installed.

They fluctuate a lot, but I have yet to see a fluctuation that can’t be explained away as “a ton of Chinese players played this month” or “a ton of Chinese players did not return this month”. You can check Gaming On Linux’s Steam Tracker page, and the rise has been fairly steady when you filter for English only. That said, these surveys are often revised a handful of days after initial posting, so check back in a week to see the more accurate data.