From leadership to layoffs, 26/06/2025
What's going on with games leadership and how can we make it better?
Latest Gaming Articles
Video Games are Good
As Motivators of Curiosity
In Queensland Australia one can find the wonderfully named, University of Sunshine Coast. Recently coming out of this university is a study that reveals an equally wonderful paradox: that intellectual passion can emerge not just from instruction and classrooms but from playful engagement.
The Esports World Cup: serious tournament or soft power play?, 19/06/2025
A little from Column A, a little from Column B
Rami Almalki
•
Jun 19
I appreciate your fair view on this topic in some parts, and I can assure you that even the crown prince himself loves video games. see here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ILklFSD5iXw
So even now in Saudi we start hearing about new companies and Saudi games coming to Steam this year. So it is not an attempt to polish Saudi Arabia's image and its human rights record. And, just like in the World Cup in Qatar, they prohibited drinking alcoholic beverages during the game matches, and everybody was happy, even considering one of the safest World Cups ever for women and fans in general. About the rainbow, we see even in the USA and many other countries, a lot of people refuse to force these rainbow agendas on their people and their children, so trying to make it a human rights issue is ridiculous. It's simply respecting other countries' religions and cultures.
And Concord failure is not far from remembering and many other games that force their rainbow agendas on players, and if you can't see these games and why they failed, I don't know what to say.
If you just realize that we are a young population and as you said, about 75% of Saudi people are 35 and under so it's not strange to see the World Cup for gamers in an event like Riyadh season.
About the Newcastle accusation, the latest numbers show that Saudi making a lot of money by investing in football. So it's real investing, not polishing Saudi image.
This is why I beleive in our forign minister when he said: if Saudi arabia did anything, people go skeptical about it and have to critisize it, it's damn if you do, damn if you don't. So we will do what we see is right and what represents us.
Thank you George
Rami Almalki
Saudi Arabia
tomasrawlings
•
Jun 19
Good summary of the situation. Thanks
Play-through: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild - Part 1
Chronicle of my play through of The Legend of Zelda BotW on Switch 2.
Play-through: is a new format where I will be writing in more of a diary format for bigger games that I am playing. The first game I am trialing this with is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Switch 2.
Oh to be able to experience BOTW for the first time... Lucky for you you get to play it with the power of the Switch 2! As others have said, I'd treat BOTW and TOTK as their own separate things, the experience you will get is vastly different from playing OoT, TP or WW, not better or worse just different. You're in for a treat!
Your experience with the map and open world felt a lot like when i played elden ring for the first time. The map was huge and there was no clear direction to head. If you can easily take down enemies then you are on the right track, but there are times where it's best to just run away.
I haven't played a Zelda game since Majoras Mask, but I really liked all the characters throughout the lore. I'm a pretty big Sheik fan.
Game Journal: June 2025
A list of games I played on my steam deck or switch 2 in June with 2-3 line comments.
Every month I collate the games I played that are new to me, or I haven’t played in a long time and revisited. June was the release of the new Switch 2, so this list includes games played on Steam deck and Switch 2. Did you get a Switch 2 this month?
I’ve been playing Octopath Traveler 2 on Switch and honestly getting a bit bored of it! But determined to finish. I like the art, the music, the different storylines, it’s just going on a bit too long for me
Love the fact that your backlog consists mostly of new games :D I wish mine would to :D
J’ai déjà joué à tous les jeux de Broken Sword en anglais, Timo, et je les adore. Ça me plairait beaucoup de les rejouer en français !
Summer Game Announcements! // June Bonus Blog!
we're rich in spirit and video games
What’s this? A surprise second newsletter blog thing? You thought it was the Summer of Games? WRONG. It’s actually ✨ Long Form Media Summer ✨. That’s right! Time to strap in for another big written piece (because we couldn’t fit it all into one newsletter hehe) celebrating all of our friends who did SO MUCH this June!!
Your Favorite Video Games Are Secretly Washing Billions in Criminal Money
A Complete Analysis of Financial Crime in Gaming and Its Impact on Players, Companies, and Investors
That Fortnite skin you just bought? That Counter-Strike weapon? That World of Warcraft gold? They might be helping drug dealers, human traffickers, and scammers turn dirty money clean. Here's how criminals hijacked gaming—and why nobody saw it coming.
Blast From The Past
Thoughts on retro-style modern video games
I describe this newsletter as being about “mostly urbanism,” and today’s piece is one of the reasons I say “mostly.” I’m writing about a video game today, kind of a wandering review of a game I’ve been playing on the Nintendo Switch.
"It doesn’t have some weird, uncanny, internetty darkness to it, like some of these retro-modern games do..."
That was my concern when Cuphead came out a few years ago. Anything modern done in that old style now has to have something "edgy" and uncanny to it. I knew it was a really HARD game, but I didn't want my kids to play it because it was likely to have some sort of weird adults-only humor to it as well. Imagine my surprise when it was just a really, really well done run-and-gun with mildly unusual characters - and that's it. I want more games like that - quick and straightforward.
When every single game added a crafting mechanic (I can't just buy grenades, I have to concoct them from 4 different ingredients I scavenged in the wild) I started to lose interest. I love the stories told by games like Horizon: Zero Dawn or Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but man, does it take forever. I just went back and played Zelda: The Minish Cap, a Game Boy Advance game, and finished it in probably 15 hours of game time. I could do one dungeon in an evening of playing after dinner and then pick it up again easily the next night. That's all I really feel like I have the time for anymore and I miss it.
Grammar Through Video Games
A series by Prof. Rock’s Learning Arcade
The Future of Affordable Gaming
Imagining brighter horizons for the video games industry
TIGHTENING THE BELT
Lots of productive thoughts in here and the section about the Triple-A industry coughing up blood made me chuckle.
I think for me, my brief stint at university (hated it) and getting into retro really hammered home the sheer price of a lot of modern games/gaming for me. When you can buy a Wii or a DS for £40 in the UK, often cheaper and most Xbox, PS2 and 360 games are below £5, it really puts things into perspective; I can't look at a Triple-A game now without thinking "That costs 2 consoles."
As for your question at the end about worth and what I'm generally willing to pay? If something is £20 or below I'm inclined to try it even if I have only a vague interest in it; that's a sum of money as to where I feel even a single weekend of enjoyment out of it is fair. Between £30-50 I usually mull it over for a few days or make sure there's literally nothing else I want to play otherwise. Anything above £50? I only buy Nintendo games at full price at that bracket, they aren't perfect but I find them consistently not disappointing.
Arts funding for gaming is an absolutely inspired idea, and one that I've never heard floated before, but it really should be. I suppose the fact that it hasn't been discussed already is indicative of the continued dismissal of video games, the very problem we'd like to solve.
Another thing that I kind of wonder about which could have a massive impact on the future of gaming (especially indie/solo developers) is UBI. Obviously, this is highly speculative, and the future is so uncertain right now that such a policy could be seriously considered this decade, or ignored for another 100 years. We just don't know.
The most convincing case I've seen was made here:
This study argues that UBI is actually far more affordable than people think, and the benefits for people involved in financially risky ventures such as making art are obvious. Of course, it would be vigorously opposed by landlords, employers etc., because if we had an actually good safety net they'd have to start treating people like human beings, and they don't want to do that.
Summer Games Fest doubles down on AA, as chaos sweeps LA, 12/06/2025
From Geoffmas Day to riots in L.A.
We’re Screwed If We Don’t Stay in the Agentic AI Loop
Will humans flourish with the technology or sleep and play video games?
The tech world is aflame with discussion of AI agents and agentic AI (which I think are basically the same thing, but this article begs to differ). If you have somehow managed to escape this onslaught of agent-focused verbiage, some of which is justified and some is clearly hype, here’s a quick definition. AI agents are AI programs that can not only inf…
I was listening to the June 20th Hard Fork podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hard-fork/id1528594034?i=1000713818870 with the founders of Mechanize - who “want to automate away all jobs…”.
It’s hard to know where to begin unpacking that vision. If jobs as we know them disappear, where will value be created? Who will capture it? And what exactly will people do with their time and lives? Who will buy products after all jobs are automated? With their universal basic income? (UBI) As you suggest, UBI is politically toxic in much of the current U.S. landscape.
Without structural redistribution mechanisms, value will be concentrated in the hands of a few, not shared as part of an AI-powered societal abundance.
Consider the irony: the financial services firm you are advising may well employ individuals who earn below a living wage—people who must rely on taxpayer-funded assistance to survive.
Here is a Claude researched document on the details-
Financial services workers rely heavily on taxpayer-funded assistance despite industry’s record profits:
The founders offered an analogy to the decline of agricultural work—how people once couldn’t imagine life beyond the farm. But this historical comparison glosses over key differences. That transformation unfolded over generations, not years, and was accompanied by new industries and sustained public investment. Today, the speed and scale of AI-driven disruption is unprecedented.
They downplayed the immediacy of job displacement, suggesting it’s a distant concern. But consider what’s happening now: millions of driving jobs are already under threat from the likes of Waymo and Uber. Entry-level roles across industries are quietly disappearing through automation. Add to that a volatile political climate and a growing economic divide.
This isn’t a distant hypothetical. It’s already unfolding.
Perhaps I might say we are already screwed even if we do stay in the agentic loop.
28 June 2025
Sharing Saturday - Favorite (video) games
Somehow the topic of video games came up in the comments the other day, and that seems like a fun thing to share today. If you’ve never played or never liked video games, what other kind of game is your favorite?
Skee ball, or as we kids always called it, skeet ball, was more my thing. And pinball. When my parents and I went on winter vacation to this place in the Pocanos, before dinner they would sit at the bar drinking a cocktail and send me (well supplied with quarters) to the kids' place, where I'd perform feats of wizardry.
As children, my cousins and I played Monopoly, Clue, and Chinese Checkers, and card games like Go Fish and War. Later, backgammon.
Is this the sort of thing you mean? Video games are beyond me.
(After dinner, sometimes this place in the Poconos had entertainment; once, The Amazing Kreskin performed. I have a photograph of him and my mother on stage each holding one end of a rope, Mom dressed in a pretty winter outfit. He actually was amazing. Good old days.)
Oooo one of my favorite topics! Some of my favorites back in the day were Galaga, Centipede, Phoenix, and Dig Dug. On Atari it was Pitfall and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. On my Commodore 64, it was International Karate and Space Taxi. I skipped the whole Nintendo era in the 90s while in college and picked it back up when the graphics got a lot better in Half Life on PC. After that, I got into the Far Cry series and the other famous Ubisoft series, Assassin's Creed. Other favorites are the Elder Scrolls (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption, and recently, the Yakuza series. I know some people think it's a juvenile but I find it endlessly fun and a good way to blow off the stress from work.
When I was a kid, I had a Commodore 64 and took a programming class at the Y. I was obsessed with programming and would spend hours typing in the code for a video game from the pages of Compute magazine. I wanted to design video games, but they didn't have any specialized programs when I went to college (1987 - 1991), so I majored in Computer Science. Well, that turned out to not be quite what I imagined, and though I loved programming, I was more interested in designing and writing a storyline, so I ended up dropping out. Anyway, I still enjoy programming and video games as a hobby, and think it was probably a blessing in disguise that I didn't go into either one as a career. Might have ruined the fun.
Fact or Myth: Jobless Medicaid Recipients Just Watch TV and Play Video Games All Day
How to Investigate the Reliability of a Statistical Study
Since the beginning of 2025, I have become increasingly familiar with my Senators’ email addresses. I have been contacting them frequently with my concerns about our current administration. Lately, many of my emails have been about multiple parts of the “big beautiful bill.” In my most recent email, I expressed my concerns about the enormous proposed cu…
Press Start To Go Home
“The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” and Video Games as Virtual Homelands
I don’t know if I will get into this game. It looks so drab, I scoff as I overlook White Orchard in “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.” It’s my first foray into the beloved RPG from CD Projekt Red, and at first, I am not impressed. (It’s reminiscent of that botched “Cyberpunk 2077” launch.) As Geralt directs Roach on a dirt road amongst straw-thatched roofs and…
Post-Pop-Up Serenity: Vibe Coding My Design Website & a Mini Game for Nostalgia 🎮
Post event serenity, vibe coding, and a little contemplation on video games and nostalgia
Edge Esmeralda Wrapping Up
Gaming Goes Green: Planting Environmental Awareness and Sustainability in Video Games
The video games industry, one of Asia’s most emerging sectors, is increasingly recognizing its environmental footprint—from manufacturing and distribution to energy consumption and data infrastructure.Tech and gaming companies across the globe are demonstrating their increasing awareness by various initiatives. Read more about how the gaming world is st…
Will AI Fashion Have Its Debutante Moment Through Video Games?
A look at how AI could bolster fashion in games, not threaten it.
Good morning! Today we’re publishing our first guest post – an article on the potential of video games to be a launchpad for AI fashion by James Davis of Drawn Distant. James was formerly the Gaming Editor at High Snobiety and has a blog dedicated to bringing a style perspective to the world of gaming. If you aren’t subscribed already I’d highly suggest you
The Stardew Valley Guide to Finishing Things
Video games can capture our attention for hours, but we struggle to complete simple tasks. Try this tactile index-card game to bridge the gap.
Picture this: It's 2am. You've just spent the last six hours completely absorbed in a game—maybe you were building the perfect city, managing a virtual restaurant, or tending to digital crops. You planned every move, op…
In Internal Family Systems, firefighters are the parts of us that LOVE immediate feedback, action and games.
The more I can create a game out of absolutely anything, the more I can get my firefighter parts on board with healthy habits.
Vitamin D? D minder app = goal, 1 million IU of D from the sun every summer.
Sleep? Oura ring daily feedback.
I have to-do apps on my phone but they don’t fully work… maybe not tactile enough.
I have index cards — I’m going to try this!!!
Here’s to upping my gamification of daily tasks!
When I was in college, I chose to write a thesis. I could have taken an extra class. I had never written a thesis and there was no manual. A friend of a friend introduced me to someone who was also writing a thesis and he told me about index cards. Life changing. I went from completely frozen and zero progress to writing bite sized quotes and references on the index cards that turned into paragraphs then finally into a finished 68-page thesis. Index cards can be adapted to many uses. Thank you for reminding me how index cards are life saving devices.
Art and Video Games
Like running through an art gallery
I was reading a newsletter today and there was that research about Online Art having a positive impact on mood and health that is comparable to going out in nature or visiting an “in person” art gallery.
Stories in Video Games
Video Games, since their initial start, have gotten extremely popular. In 2022, the global video game industry made $184.4 BILLION dollars, while the film industry made $26 billion (according to Forbes). Obviously, from the data, the video game industry is far surpassing film, and most likely novels.
Love this! "You’re making memories in the fictional worlds instead of simply observing them" - I love this about video games. There are so many with great stories!
defibrio raises €13.5M, scaling saffron cultivation + iceland is a hotspot for video games.
*TGI(m)F. edition 147. i’m kay, and this is your 360º-view of the nordic startup ecosystem. covering culture + growth on a weekly basis, delivered to your screen for easy reading every sunday 💌
notices
Nintendo Switch 2 launch: nine experts weigh in on the newest video games console
Journos, boffins and players run the rule over the Switch 2's prospects
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