As I get older, I notice that the open world formula is tiring! I much prefer a linear game told well than the same game with add-ons.

I was looking forward to Days Gone. I haven't had it spoiled for me, so I picked it up and when I realized it was open world, it killed my enthusiasm for it.

I just can't go hours on end forever just because.

For me, open worlds are almost a Nay! I've heard great things about Days Gone, and I want to play it, but the amount of time it will take to go through the story, because it's open world, I don't know. I get tired just to think about it.

What about you? Do you enjoy open-world games? Do you seek them?

I saw someone, somewhere, saying something like this recently: it's always easier to play the role of doomsayer than the optimist, because far fewer people seem to care if you're wrong when you're predicting something will fail.

I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but in writing this one it is undoubtedly at the back of my mind. This is because I think the video games industry - that is, the established order of massive, western developer-publishers, each making multiple games that cost hundreds of millions and employing developers in the thousands - isn't just in big trouble, now that GTA 6 has been unsurprisingly delayed to mid-2026. I think it's finished. The games industry as we know it is dead; it just doesn't know it yet.

The past week has been another brutal reminder. EA has joined in the fun of major layoffs, in obliterating the positions of more than 300 people and cancelling yet another project in the brilliant, dreadfully cursed Titanfall franchise, as well a

Source: Azul Crescent's silly scribbles

From the video description:

The Deepest Games are DUMB. How is it possible that this generation of game developers, who are clearly articulate and educated, be so obsessed with the idea of creating deep meaningful games, and yet consistently produce games that are shallow and automated? Also, why does it seem impossible for the depth of the games of the past to be re-created? There clearly isn't any technological barrier, so what is the problem?

One of the major problems that I discuss in today's video is the obsession modern developers have with making smart games and being perceived as these masters of human psychology and technology. Where this stems from is hard to know for sure, but there is clearly a trend of developers being able to find the areas of their game that contain the potential for depth, and then systematically eliminating them. Ironically a lot of these areas are labeled as "outdated" but what I think developers and reviewers really mean to say is dumb. No o

Hope: A Sky Full of Ghosts is a sci-fi point-and-click adventure where you, as Agatha Hope, captain a disjointed crew on a stolen spaceship. Your goal? Escaping the corporate tyranny on Earth.

Your decisions and wits will decide the course of the mission, your relationship with the crew and whether you survive or not.

It blends the spirit of old-school point-and-click games with a deep narrative full of character and secrets.

The games I think these would fit with the most are Star Citizen, Universe Sandbox, Eve, No Man’s Sky, Elite Dangerous and perhaps also Space Engine.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7CJecETsT9rG4NrMm52v7d

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5ePwUOZkDnI6tjDJOQeoyR

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2nK9teLw94Vn3kwZkRIGvk

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4QWdZyCv0UIm96wgQlQReO

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5HBEp9tSeMD00VTZFvyvA7

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4s4HvMwhVlMujMLMkCTAL9

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4cCLznVGhYSkfEOq56xoS1

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4i0LYo35ouXIz1kHKBXU9l

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1dJJzmvh1XTRMloCSgFerQ

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2zpzac4zteICqPi5ACgFnA

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2PzEOJNPuvTR26a5CdfKsI

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6TP7HEySEtm1ifehYs87r3

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6jix8LCpBABO2JBvNcv69A

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/39S7OehLyXbiC3CccRqe1s

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2aW

Fact 1: Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox announced this week that it will sell “some” of its upcoming video games for $80 — a hike from the previous standard price of $70, which itself was a hike from $60 just a few years ago. This comes in the wake of Nintendo Co.’s announcement last month that the new Mario Kart game for Switch 2 will be $80.

...

Fact 2: The three highest-reviewed video games of 2025 so far, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic, are Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince and Split Fiction. Those games cost, respectively, $50, $30 and $50.

...

Perhaps it’s a coincidence that the best-rated games of the year just happen to be budget titles. But I think the two facts above point to something else — a critical flaw in the video-game industry’s operations that has contributed to its plateaued growth and widespread layoffs.

Atari has put out updated versions of multiple classic consoles in recent years, following up its Atari 2600+ replica console from 2023 with the 7800+ in late 2024, all accompanied by honest-to-god physical cartridge releases containing classic Atari games like Berzerk, Space Duel, and Ninja Golf. However, the retro game maker just informed fans that those physical copies will now be more expensive due to tariffs.

Atari’s ‘80s-inpsired gaming lineup includes the wood-paneled 2600+ and streamlined 7800+, along with the Atari 400 Mini and VCS digital gaming set top boxes. The prices for those appear to remain unchanged, but the replica cartridges will seemingly go from $30 to $33, a small but noticeable bump due to recently levied import taxes. If you want the entire collection of old-school cartridges, you’ll easily end up spending over $60 in tariff-adjusted price increases alone.

I spent well over a month talking to investors to get the actual data behind what’s happening to the games industry. I was going to say “enjoy!” but it’s, uh, not great.

My wife asked about the sims. She has an m1 MacBook Air and I see there are 98 dlc options.

Do I need certain one or can she do free to play. Or is an older version better?

What do I need to know?

Big question: Why have alienated young men, especially in America, found their home in the populist political right? Part of the answer is that the populist right takes video games seriously.

Mind the gap: Games have typically been treated as a bit of a joke by wider society. Long-held stereotypes about games being worthless, provoking violence or turning players into addicts has created a gap between the experience of the millions who play games and the perception of the medium in wider society.

The art of persuasion: For most of us who love games, our way of dealing with this problem has been to try to change minds. We’ve talked about games as an economic powerhouse. We’ve argued that games have cultural power. And we’ve sought to support research that’s provided a level-headed perspective on whether games make people aggressive (they don’t) or if they negatively affect mental health (again, a pretty firm nope).

Tunnelling down: But others reacted differently. A small n

I made a website. It’s called One Million Chessboards. It has one million chessboards on it.

Moving a piece moves it for everyone, instantly. There are no turns. You can move between boards.

What

Well last year I made this game called One Million Checkboxes.

It was a pretty fun time! So I thought I’d do something like this again.

I worked really hard on this one. I hope you like it.

How

This was the most technically challenging thing that I’ve worked on in a long time. I’m going to save a full technical writeup until I see how my decisions pan out, since I think there’s a decent chance I’ll need to make a lot of changes.

But I’ll summarize a few things for you.

• Unlike One Million Checkboxes, I designed this for scale
• The game runs on a single server (!)
• The board is stored fully in-memory; it’s a 2D array of 64 million uint64s
• The backend is written in go. This is my first go project.
• I use a single writer thread, tons of re