Rundown (7/06/2025) What Do People Do?

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: What Do People Do?
• Europe Might Be Able to Save Gaming! (Stop Killing Games is At The Cusp of Success!)
• Microsoft Lays Off Over 9,000 People (The Xbox Project is DEAD!)
• Everything’s Expensive, Nobody Can Buy Stuff! (And That Includes Video Games!)
• Natalie Just Learned About Project Code M (The Next Game From The House in Fata Morgana People!)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
What Do People Do?

Well, the original planned preamble for this week, a long rant on Persona 5X: The Phantom X (2024), went and transitioned into a full review— proud of her for that. So I need to pull up another topic I have been casually musing on. Something that represents one of my greatest roadblocks to understanding contemporary reality, humans in general, and a question I routinely ask myself when write stories.

What do people do?

More specifically, I should phrase this as a question of what people do when not going to work— because I can imagine what just about any job is like. And what they do when not at home, as I’ve lived in a home before, and I think I get the gist. …Meaning I’m really asking about third places! This is something I struggle with given how homogenized and limited my life experience is. I might not be a NEET— like some scrumptious individuals have claimed— but I am a shut-in who works from home and only leaves the house about once a week. I’m a 30-year-old who relies on a parent for groceries and other shopping.

This naturally creates some problems when I try to write stories wherein people do regular real life stuff because, dismissively, I don’t do stuff. This is not a new observation by any means, and acclaimed writers have been saying as much for over a century. You gotta live to be able to write about people living their lives. Being a writer, being alone, and living a solitary life where it’s nothing but you, your tunes, and your computer will warp your brain after enough time. The obvious answer to this problem is to go out, live your life, and use your experience to enrich your writing.

…My problem is that I don’t wanna do those things. I would rather just listen to or read what other people have said or written. Just add those experiences to my oddball uneven katamari of a brain, and roll forward onto my next thing. I like to think I can pick up on things well if they are explained to me, and I truly want to know how people go about their lives. What ‘average life’ is and what it is becoming across generations and classes.

This is a particular frustration to me because I am a body swap enthusiast, and part of the appeal of a body swap is living the life of another person. To be a good body swap writer, one needs to understand and have a fascination with the many different ways people live their lives. What they need to do, what they like to do, what they actually do, and what they would do if placed in this scenario.

I really wanted to explore this concept with Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 Sensational Summer Romp Acts 1 and 2, which follows like 20 people enjoying a big messy body swap and sex swapping summer vacation, mostly in their hometown. There’s no overarching conflict, everybody is pretty chill, open for whatever, and everybody has their own body swapper. While there are minor scuffles and conflicts, there is not a problem to solve or magical misuse to snuff out. It’s antics most of the time.

In pursuing this, I wound up creating a story with no designated main character, where perspective shifts were rampant, and random characters are routinely shoved together for the sake of drama and fun. That much was easy. I just made a spreadsheet and optimized things based on vibes and numbers. The hard part was giving these characters things to do, and I was running on fumes near the end.

Just going off my fading memory, the settings, excluding the houses, consisted of the following: A high school and its outdoors graduation ceremony, a public pool, too many restaurants, a summer carnival, The Museum of Science and Industry, The Chicago Theatre, a damn arcade, a park, a grocery store, the beach, the woods, a hotel, a mall, department stores, Chicago’s very own L trains, and an office. While this sounds like a lot of locations, it really isn’t.

Hell, I was so strapped for ideas that I send two characters into a cabin in the woods pocket dimension for the final chapter of Act 2. Double Hell, and to spoil things for a novel that has not even been written, with Act 3, I gave up thinking of new local locales the cast could peruse. Instead, I decided to send half of them away on body swapped or sex swapped vacations. But even that is just a bunch of city streets, hotels, restaurants, and woodlands. Realistically, are those the four more common locations people go to when on vacations? The local city, their hotel room, places to eat, and nature-y areas? I mean, yeah, aside from convention centers and airports. But that doesn’t—

Akumako: “NATALIE! You should set some Act 4 chapters at an anime convention!”

No, that’s stupid. YOU’RE STUPID! What would they even do at an anime con? Buy shit, hang out, allow some perverts to fulfill their perverted fantasy, and compete in some cosplay contest or something?

Akumako: “Yeah! With Bread and Yucca. Both of them could be forced to be there, and they can be noodged into lewd situations against their will!”

…Shit, that’d be peak moe. You’re making all kinds of sense right there with that! Good thing nobody knows who those characters are… And NatsuCon 2015 took place from July 24 to 26, 2015! It’s Collinsville, but that’s close enough to Chicago. I could call it NattieCon and have the characters get drugged and shoved in a van by some characters, forcing them to attend the convention for something! I could even throw in Richie and Reb for more domestic violence! That’s a great way to fill up three chapters before Lolapalooza wraps up the act on July 31, 2015, where the gang’s gotta become a band! Which absolutely makes sense, because they would just know how to play instruments because of my fucked-up idiot version of body swapping where characters gain the language who they swap with! And music is a language, bitch!

Akumako: “Shit, I need to stop enabling her.”

No, you need to KEEP enabling me, because this is exactly how I come up with ideas. Someone needs to kick the katamari for it to access a new area!

Akumako: “That’s not how Katamari works.”

Tangent aside—

Akumako: “Is that all I am to you?”

No, you’re a narrative device, now go back into your closet and generate me some stationary bike electricity!

Akumako: “But it’s hot in there!”

Do it, or else you’ll get the spoon.

Akumako: “…Fine.”

Sometimes I can come up with good ideas like that, places where I can put characters for location-based scenes of interest. However, it never comes to me as quickly as I want to, and it is hard for me to gauge if the idea is genuine or grounded enough. Do people actually do this? Do people actually enjoy this? Is this an interesting social/physical thing for people to engage in under the mantle of a body swap story?

I would look towards examples of great body swap fiction that I’ve previously highlighted. However, Press-Switch is often very conflict-driven and is centered chiefly around school and homes. Student Transfer’s locales mostly span homes, school, and maybe some area of intrigue like a store or café. re:Dreamer is a bit better in that regard, but that game’s not even 25% done with any of its major routes.

I guess the problem I’m running into with VD2.0 is the matter of scale, as I want it to be one of the biggest continuous body swap stories ever told. And… wait, I’m trying to write a 800k+ word story that I’m 370k words into, most of which consists of antics. Of course it’s going to be hard. That’s… that’s the point.

Akumako: “So, is this another one of those ‘Natalie just had to vent about something to understand it’ preambles?”

Yeah, exactly! It’s a healthy practice. People need to sit with their thoughts, just think about things, in order to get smarter and increase their self cohesion! Because you gotta understand yourself to become a better version of you!

Akumako: “…Oh, you also haven’t set a scene in a gym.”

…Why would I have characters go to a gym? They get all the exercise they need by walking, swimming, and fucking!

Akumako: “Think about the erotic factor of two small girls become big strong men.”

…Why do you keep making sense?

Akumako: “Because certain people— especially neurodies— find it easier to work through problems by talking to an imaginary friend.”

Huh. That is true. Akumako’s really just my therapist, and these are just what I do instead of going to therapy. It’s cheaper and helps me produce content!

Akumako: “…Sure, whatever help you sleep at night, bae.”

…That’s the end of the preamble, but this topic is not closed yet either. I know I’ve got a bunch of dorks in my audience, but I want to know what y’all do in life beyond school, work, futzing around with stuff at home, and chores like shopping. …Or, hell, lemme be more direct: What you would personally do after getting body swapped or undergoing a full physical transformation? This is your weekly CALL TO ACTION!

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Europe Might Be Able to Save Gaming!
(Stop Killing Games is At The Cusp of Success!)

Okay, okay, let’s start things off on an uplifting note, since Imma make this Rundown mad depressing.

Over the past year, I have discussed Ross Scott’s Stop Killing Games campaign. An initiative to petition the governments of the world, mostly Europe, to implement laws that prevent publishers from shutting down games, erasing gaming history, and invalidating titles customers purchased or otherwise spent money on. I have spoken out before about the inherently destructive nature of online-only gaming before, and this initiative is the biggest, most widespread, attempt to stop publishers from killing games ever launched.

I have been 100% on board since the plan was still in the discussion phases, and hopefully inspired some of you to sign both the European Union petition and the smaller UK petition. (I know Cassie, her boyfriend, and Chari signed them, so that’s something.) However, the petitions were languishing as months went on. Success seemed unlikely, and Ross Scott put out an update to rally people to sign these petitions.

Based on the dwindling progress, I was pessimistic when I saw this video. I thought this campaign would fail because it did not have widespread support from some of the most popular voices in gaming, particularly multi-language European voices. …But then fucking MoistCr1TiKaL, one of the biggest streamers and commentators in gaming, picked up on the campaign and gave it some much appreciated promotion. This caused a ripple effect, revitalized the campaign with only a month left to go. And I think they’ve made it! The UK petition has been pushed past over its 100,000 signature goal, and the European Union campaign cleared a million signatures. However, Ross is concerned that there may be some invalid signatures mucking up the EU petition, and has encouraged people to keep signing it.

At the very least, this subject is going to be sent to UK parliament, meaning we will receive some government decision and statement on the legality of killing games, but Ross Scott, and myself, are pessimistic about this leading to a good result. Still, a result is better than a contradictory mess.

The European Union is more likely to err on the side of customers rather than businesses, and they are truly the best chance we have to keep games from disappearing off the face of the Earth. And in this age of humungous live services, we need legal protections. So, if you are in the EU, and have not signed the petition yet, please do so. Do your part to make publishers to stop killing games!

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Microsoft Lays Off Over 9,000 People
(The Xbox Project is DEAD!)

The video game industry has been plagued by routine layoffs for over two decades at this point, but over the past three years, it has gotten woefully, unforgivably, terrible. Part of this can be attributed to companies over-hiring at the start of the pandemic when the games industry underwent a boom as people were locked inside. Then revenues stopped going up, and companies started firing people with no regard, no care, because to big companies, humans are just an expense. That’s what it looks like on a financial statement at the very least, and what do investors care about? Financial statements. Qualified dividends. And the price of the stock being higher than it was 367 days ago so they can net a long-term capital gain.

Anybody who runs a company, or works in the administrative end of a company, should be vehemently and ideologically repulsed by this callous treatment of workers, as it is so divorced from the reality of labor. Things do not get done without the right people. People need training and skills, companies need to invest in people before they become able to do what the company wants them to do, and without people, you cannot make money. However, through outsourcing, through abuse, and through cheap shortcuts, the biggest companies in the world have found ways to circumvent this foundational Business 101 insight. It has worked for them so far, because they keep on inflating their share prices with stock buybacks, relentless financial hype, and have eliminated most viable competition. Free markets have given way to oligopolies where people only have two choices, and if both of them decide to start shoving out buggy, bad products, there is nothing that can be done.

As an accountant, I fucking loathe the world crafted by these arrogant and callous large corporations, and am genuinely shocked that more disgruntled employees haven’t taken a lighter, rag, and bottle of whiskey and threw it into their boss’s office. Not to decease them, but as a warning and reminder that even if they are making 500x the average worker, they are still nothing more than a wad of flesh, and it burns just the same. …Or just pull an LHO or VLB after hitting up a local Walmart. Because they still let you support your Second Amendment right!

Akumako: “You’re gonna get on a list one of these days if you keep saying shit like that.”

Good. Put me on your lists, revoke my citizenship, eliminate my need to pay US taxes, just give me a 24 hour notice to GTFO. I’ve got $60k in cash, $14k in gold, $90k in retirement funds, and my family can pay the mortgage. I can make due.

Anyway, the big story this week was that Microsoft announced they were laying off over 9,000 people. We knew this was coming some days beforehand, but this was just the latest in a wave of layoffs that have been affecting Microsoft, and the FOURTH save affecting their gaming division. They laid off 1,900 people in January 2024 after buying Activision Blizzard. They shut down Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks in May 2024. And then they indulged in another 650 layoffs in September 2024.

This is NOT something any company should be doing. It is a violation of trust, a destruction of lives, and makes the whole damn industry worse off and poorer as it becomes harder and harder for people to make a living off of game development. This is the latest and biggest step Microsoft has taken in destroying their legacy. They have effectively demolished a project that they have been pursuing for 25 years. To quote one of the many articles I read through for this piece, “the Xbox project has failed.”

Going through the news here are the major takeaways:

• Microsoft laid off an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 in their gaming division. They had somewhere between 19,000 to 20,000 employees leading up to this.
• Perfect Dark Reboot has been canceled after multiple developmental restarts and over 5 years after its initial announcement.
• The studio founded in 2018 to develop Perfect Dark, The Initiative, was closed.
• Rare’s next big IP, Everwild, originally announced in 2019, with development spanning over a decade, was canceled. Meaning Rare is going to go a full decade without shipping a new game.
• HALF of the staff at the premiere Forza developer, Turn 10, were laid off.
• An MMORPG in development at ZeniMax Online, code-named Blackbird, that began production in 2018, was canceled.
• King lost 10% of its staff, or about 200 people, showing that not even the mobile divisions are safe.
• A new IP from Romero Games— As in John “Master of Doom” Romero, has been canceled and the studio was forced to shut down.

There have also been unsubstantiated rumors that other games in Xbox’s pipeline, such as that Avalanche joint Contraband, and frankly, I’d believe it.

…I might have been 17 months early, but I think it has finally happened! XBOX IS DEAD!

…Or at least it is dead as it was once known, as it was originally known. Now it is merely just Microsoft’s gaming brand. The publisher of Call of Duty and Candy Crush and Minecraft. Their PC gaming app. And the label of their game subscription and streaming service.

After this, and unless management is thoroughly gutted, it is now impossible to trust Microsoft to take care of a studio or treat its employees with the dignity of stable employment. You cannot trust them to ship games on time, on par with other titles, or even at all. And now I absolutely do not believe that they will even release next generation hardware beyond licensed boxes or handhelds. Because they have fully committed themselves to be a third-party publisher and subscription service. …In addition to being an ally of genociding Brown people to protect Caucasian interests.

Because that’s what all the shit happening in Gaza and Palestine is all about. The White race as epitomized by America and Israel would really like if they could round up all the sand n-words in the Middle East, kill them, have them kill each other, and enslave the survivors to harvest oil so they can make their economy go brrrrr. The continuation of this racial hierarchy, and lining the pockets of the military industrial complex is arguably the goal of 78% of American politicians, period.

So… how did this happen? Who is to blame for this? Well, one answer is that this is the fault of Don Mattrick. He pivoted away from core gamers during the Xbox 360 era to a casual audience with Kinect and had bold plans for an online-only living room surveillance device and cable box, dubbed the Xbox One. He messed up the Xbox brand, allowed Xbox to sink to number three during the 7th generation, and left Xbox waddling through shit creek wearing only some shiny military surplus boots.

However, the past decade of Xbox has been led by Phil Spencer. A Microsoft employee of nearly 40 years who rose through the ranks before being appointed as the de facto face of Xbox, given more and more responsibility as time went on. Ultimately, I think Spencer had a lot of good ideas starting out.

He made the necessary call to disband the Xbox One’s Kinect which, while gutting the system of its original vision, was necessary to compete with the PS4. He mandated backwards compatibility for Xbox 360 and (like 60) original Xbox games, which has remained a unique boon to Xbox hardware for the past decade. And the call to release Xbox games on PC was a good one. It has allowed the games to reach more people, perform better, benefit from mods, and led Microsoft to sorta fix their shit on PC.

…Though, I’ll be sucking shit off a cock before I use their dedicated Xbox app for anything more than a few games. The Windows Store did not work on my last PC. When I tried buying software from it last year, it cursed me with a piece of phantom software that likes to erase my meticulous settings, and cannot be removed from my PC. (I tried.) I gave it two tries, and I’ll never try it again.

I even think Game Pass, creating the Netflix of games, was a great idea. I don’t know if it was a great business move, same with putting all first-party titles on Game Pass, but I don’t think that’s really a stain on his time as the head of Xbox. Because his hands are coated with the blood of canceled projects, shuttered studios, and disappointing, blasé entries shoved out the door after turbulent development cycles. The problem with Xbox, above all else, is a problem of internal studio management. They announce games too early, and you never know if they are going to be released, or how they will be released.

Scalebound, Project Spark, Phantom Dust, Crackdown 3, even Halo Infinite. Xbox has simply been unable to deliver quality first-party software on a consistent AAA level for the past decade. Games come out disappointing, or they just do not come out. Rare’s back catalog is home to a library of ideas that were chopped down when they were past the testing phase. And when they do get their hands on a competent studio, they inevitably find some way to fuck ’em up. If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s only a matter of time.

More than their declining console sales, more than their mixed exclusivity messaging, this is what has been hurting Xbox over the past decade. Aside from maybe the Forza developers, they just cannot get out competitive titles like they used to in the 360 days. When they do, it’s something that was in the oven before they bought the studio, or it succeeded in spite of the corporate management, where developers were shielded by their prior success. And whose fault is that? It’s managers. It’s up at the top. It’s Phil Spencer and his buddies. Their goals, priorities, and mandates are what determines if games like this live or die.

Management has the responsibility to foster culture, and when Mattrick took over, when the Xbox One was being developed, a lot of the on-the-ground managers left Microsoft. Spencer had a responsibility to address this, to restore the culture of developers at Xbox during a pivotal time. When The Coalition was taking over for Epic Games. When Lionhead was struggling with Fable Legends. When 343 was internalizing and reacting to the less than stellar response to Halo 4 (2012). (Also, Halo 4 should have been an Xbox One launch title. Change that and change the Xbox One reveal, and you have a quite different modern console games industry.)

Their first-party was weak, needed time to grow and expand, and while they tried to address this by buying studios, they did not know what do with them. They did not have a plan specific to each studio, and did not devote the necessary resource to support them. They just had demands. Get this out by 20XX, put online multiplayer in this, develop this as a live platform. You could say that organizing first-party development was a problem with the Mattrick era. However… the Xbox One had a pretty decent line-up of exclusives for the first two or three years of its life. I mean, Sony wasn’t putting out gold before Bloodborne (2015).

…So, yeah, no. Unless he had direct orders from Satya Nadella or other Microsoft big-wigs to do something, this is Spencer’s fault. I think he had a good vision for Xbox, broadly speaking, but despite being a career game manager, he just could not manage the studios Microsoft had when he took the reins. Xbox needed to take measures to prevent development restarts, get games out efficiently, and ensure that they have titles just as good as anything Nintendo or Sony produces. They didn’t, their console business has faltered, and two of their biggest in-development titles were just shelved after investing what had to be close to $100 million into each of them. At best, Spencer is a corporate shill who speaks in corporate-speak lies to avoid culpability, and tried, but was routinely put in bad situations with no good answers. At worse, he is a woefully incompetent, if not inept, person who should have been fired years ago.

Also, I think the Xbox Series was a mistake. They misjudged their success with the Xbox One, thought they could compete with the PS5, and should have positioned the system as something more. If I were in charge, I would have turned it into a standalone Windows gaming PC. Just charge an extra $100 for both the S and X models, give it a legacy mode where it could play all Xbox One games, and keep the backwards compatible Xbox games. Of course, that would also require changes to Windows to be more optimized for gaming— something they are currently working on with the ROG Xbox Ally thing— and no proprietary storage. They really should have used NVMe drives like the PS5.

…But they didn’t do that. Instead, they just invested more and more while failing to address long-standing issues, while failing to address where their business was actually faltering. After Mattrick’s stint, they were never going to win the console wars, and they would still be doomed to be dead last, but things… things could have gone better if they went third party with grace, rather than lighting everything on fire like this.

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I really wish that I could get away from Microsoft, but as an accountant, I’m stuck with Windows for Excel, tax prep software, and OneDrive. Which is before getting into running games in a virtual machine and learning how to use Linux. Still, I could switch over to using a Windows Laptop for work and a Linux desktop as my ‘daily driver.’ It would be a pain in my bony ass, but it is possible.

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Everything’s Expensive, Nobody Can Buy Stuff!
(And That Includes Video Games!)

With the end of Q2 upon us, and the tariff shitstorm poised to begin anew, I’ve been seeing a fair bit of analysis of just how fucked regular people in the US are. Prices for everything keep going up. Layoffs keep on happening, just like in the above section, which is not even mentioning the thousands of other layoffs at Microsoft beyond gaming. And despite claims that the Republicans are going to bring back jobs (they literally never do), the opposite has happened. The public sector been gutted in profoundly evil ways. While the private sector has been shrinking and losing jobs, because why would you hire people when they could be abducted and shipped off to South Sudan or CECOT? No point in employing people if the government might disappear them!

However, I do not think things will go to irreparable shit, because the current administration is ultimately a tool for capitalist fascists who value profit above all else. And you know what is bad for these people? If people stop using their services. If their companies are hit by an economic recession, and their numbers go down. And I truly do believe we are approaching a breaking point, within the next year, probably less than that. Professionally, I have seen people struggle to make their tax payments, eschewing estimates in lieu of risking penalties, people praying that they don’t get hit with interests bills. And at my medical side job, a good 7% of all employees are taking out some employee or 401(k) loan, because they need the money to pay for home repairs. Yeah, no, that is not a sign of a healthy economy.

Still, I like having good Kosher data and good Christian numbers, and reading The Game Business gave me that. Yeah, I did not expect non-gaming numbers to come from there, but Circana does a lot of spending analysis stuff, and to explain what’s going on in gaming, you gotta know what gaming’s competing with. And the answer is grocery stores! Here are the key bits from the article and video I linked above:

• Consumer sentiment has crashed to where it was in July 2022, which was the tail-end of the pandemic, when people were still shaky about whether or not they would need to go on lockdown again.
• Affordability is the KEY issue for most people across the political landscape. More than immigration, crime, and civil rights. Being able to buy the things they need!
• Despite America being the richest country in the world, 97% of folks in the US are concerned about food costs going up. Which is fucking wild. Basically EVERYBODY in the country is concerned about food prices. 63% are extremely concerned about them. 51% of all upper income individuals are extremely concerned about them.
• 80% of people are concerned about a recession in the coming months. Which has led 62% to watch their spending more closely, and 45% to put off big purchases.
• Over 69% of people believe that tariffs will increase prices, but despite this, people still remain firmly mixed on tariffs, with about a third being supportive, against, or unsure about tariffs. Because I guess Americans really are stupid.
• Tariffs are making approximately 12% of the US population (30% of 41%) cut back on their spending on entertainment and video games.
• Estimates that 2025 would prove to be an upswing for video games, seeing a 4.3% increase in US spending, have been shot down to an estimated 4.7% decrease. That’s a 9% swing, and not all of that can be attributed to GTA VI getting delayed.
• Games as a whole are struggling against the Fortnite Factor, where people can play a familiar game on every platform, for free, and have a good enough time. Not that would be any surprise to readers of Matthew Ball’s scripture.

My takeaway from this is that America is in for a good decade of darkness, as people should not be focusing this much on being able to feed themselves. And that the games industry is in for a downturn as the (second) biggest games market undergoes a small industry collapse.

Now, what do I mean by that? …Time for another list where Natalie, Maiden of the Future, will attempt to Seer into The Unknown!

• Tens of thousands of games jobs will disappear, and they will not come back for a long, long time.
• There will be a spike in outsourcing and attempted AI usage.
• Gaming storefronts will remain open and the owners of the means of distribution will see little impact on their bottom line. Nintendo will be fine, Sony will be fine, Microsoft will be fine, Valve will be fine.
• Games spending will continue to go down precipitously as people either play the same games over and over, turn to free-to-play titles, or spend their evenings gooning out to TikTok.
• Spending on gaming hardware will go down, or at least not meet historic expectations, as a game console is over a week’s wages for a disturbing amount of people. (Lots of employed people are under-employed part-timers.) And you can’t game unless you eat!
• There will not be a rise in small independent developers following these rampant job losses. The market is too mature, it is in decline, and it is too cutthroat for even established independent developers to make it much of the time.
• Venture capital and private investors will remain sheepish of all but the most conservative or smallest investments. Because the risks of doing business in Trump’s America are too high to make domestic investments. Well, except for concentration camp manufacturing. Like Alligator Alcatraz! (Eucalyptus Idaho!)
• Games will still be pumped out, and there will be no shortage of games to play, but the types of games will be a continuation of every bad trend happening over the past few years.
• AAA production will be even more regimented and designed around engagement and monetization, and less around creating innovative, emotionally resonate experiences.
• Nintendo will keep being Nintendo, but will keep up their high price warpath, thinking that people will trust the Nintendo Value.
• Digital storefronts will continue to be awash with spam. (Why aren’t people calling AI spam?)
• Every month or three there will be some efficiently made creative ventures from a small independent studio that gets loads of press for ‘saving gaming’ or being a GOTY contender’ when it’s just a 1-in-500 fluke.
• There will be a lot of investor-funded titles produced for less than a million dollars, designed to appeal to a specific intersection of niches, or established IP, funded as a wild-ass lark for the sake of portfolio diversity.
• A bunch of smaller studios will pivot to making their own clout-chasing multiplayer misfit ’em ups. Because if a side project like PEAK can accumulate 2 million sales in 9 days, any batch of half-decent chucklefucks can if they get a good meme-friendly name.

I also want to clarify that this will not be an industry crash like the North American games console crash of 1983, as the industry is too developed for that, and we’re in a different world than we were in the Richard Rooadoot Ratters years. This will be similarly unlike the 2008 recession, which saw a time of growth in gaming, as it became seen as a more economical source of entertainment. Hell, that generation was home to (roughly) 500 million sales of dedicated gaming hardware, and the industry will never be able to achieve a similar feat. Gaming was unmatched back then, but now there are too many cheap digital engagement traps designed to serve them advertisement.

To a certain extent, gaming will be fine, will continue to be popular, and its many niches will continue to exist. The medium will evolve, people will keep doing interesting things with it, and while I expect the AAA scene to be a mess for a while… many people want that. But gaming, as an industry, will suffer a substantial blow as career veterans step down, talking their knowledge with them, never to return. A generation of wannabe game devs will be left overly skilled and unable to find employment— only gigs— much like many Computer Science majors,

…So, what can Americans do about that? Jack Bupkis! For the next four years, the primary goal is survival, retaining freedom, and doing enough to push back against this wannabe dumbass dictator who is destroying this country while also keeping oneself and their special ones safe. I’m just going to try to keep my head down, donate $100 to $200 to a good 501(c)(3) tax-deductible charity every month, and… probably grab a suitcase and laptop case soon. Because if I start seeing ICE fucking up Chicago, I’m getting the fuck outta here.

Where will I go? Not sure. I think I can stay with a friend in Germany as a short-term solution. My before tax salary is over $5,000, so the option for a Digital Nomad Visa is a tempting one, as the cost of living is lower in places like Costa Rica and Portugal. …But I also don’t want to think about this too much, as… well, I’m repeating myself at this point. And this brings up a fact underpinning pretty much any discussion of gaming right now. It kind of does not fucking matter because fascism is on the rise and nobody is going to come riding on a white horse to save America.

I mean, I think 30 dumb motherfuckers with a gun could save America, but terrorism is a White man’s game, and White men just love fascism!

…Cassie was right. I need to stop doing these segments. But I just can’t help it. I’m a rotten girl like that. …Am I say that being invested in politics is shameful? Yeah, I guess I am! Eh, it made sense when I wrote this, but not when I edited it! So, I should remove it… but I don’t wanna!

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Natalie Just Learned About Project Code M
(The Next Game From The House in Fata Morgana People!)

As part of their Anime Expo panel, publisher Aksys Games announced a bunch of titles. Games that spanned a veritable grab bag of increasingly obscure and esoteric Japanese games… but mostly physical releases or console release localizations of already released games. I was originally going to talk about their history, and how much I respect them for publishing 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2009), which did wonders to popularize visual novels in the Anglosphere, but that got too rambly, even by my standards, so I won’t pry on the likes of Ghost Parade and will jump to the main topic. That they announced the western (console) release of the next game from Novectacle, or Novect, the developers of The House in Fata Morgana (2012).

The House in Fata Morgana is one of my top 25 favorite games of all time. A stunningly beautiful story of loss, abuse, trauma, and reincarnation that I still struggle to articulate my adoration for. It’s utterly gorgeous, has a stunningly unique soundtrack, and with its 2021 Switch remaster and expansion, Dreams of the Revenants, its’s one of the highest rated games on Metacritic. Considering the structure of Novect is as a largely indie outfit, having spent most of the past decade putting out expansions and remixes on Fata Morgana, I have had no idea what they were working on. And with MangaGamer being a bit shit, I have given up on an official English PC release of the remastered version.

However, three years ago, they announced that their next title as Project Code M. A dual perspective murder mystery title set in the criminal underworld of modern Japan. A factoid that I completely missed. I also missed that they announced a self-published localization of the game, and that they demoed the game at BitSummit 2022. I’d feel bad about this, but the trailers only got about 20k views in both English and Japanese, so I think a lot of other people missed this before Aksys announced they’d handle the international console releases. Regardless of whether or not I’m really late, I can still appreciate a good-looking game, and Project Code M looks rad as hell!

The game sports a striking, lushly detailed, yet unsettling art style that’s uniquely its own, and a dazzling amount of animation for what appears to be a firmly independent project. The idea of a game where you play as both a criminal and investigator in a murder mystery story is a brilliant one that has been attempted before— looking at you, Indigo “Fahrenheit” Prophecy (2005). But based on their track record, I’d trust Novect with just about any story concept, and I’m glad to see that they are pursuing new, bold, and different ideas.

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Progress Report 2025-07-06

lol. I love how even when I go on about how the games industry is in a dire spot, there will still always be quirky, low-budget, yet passionately produced action games about Japanese school girls. Truly one of my favorite genders genres. Even if the industry is in shambles, D3 will figure out a way to still produce quality Simple 2000-ass games. …Even if they cost $50. Damn you inflation! We really need to just get rid of inflation, period, and have money retain its value indefinitely. I know economists would say that is impossible, but the economy is fake, the fuck do they know?

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2025-06-29: Good day! Played P5X for another six hours to wrap things up. Wrote 2,000 words on P5X. Finalized and edited the preamble ramble segment into a review. Then got it ret-2-go! Also, watched anime with Cassie. My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! is quite good. Look forward to seeing how the second season fares, but first, we gotta get back to Higurashi!

2025-06-30: Finished the Second Scenario in Hundred Line and cried a LOT! Why you gotta break my heart like this Kodaka! I was expecting HOPE, but this is just DESPAIR!

2025-07-01: Wrote 1,500 word Preamble, played more Hundred Line, clearing three mini-routes. Reset and Goodbye were neat, but Rebellion was just viciously unfinished, a major dip in quality by writers who were not giving it their all. Wrote 1,800 words for the Hundred Line review.

2025-07-02: Wrote 2,100 word bit on Xbox, because Imma rambly bitch! Wrote 400 words Stop Killing Games bit. Wrote 600 words for Hundred Line review. Played more Hundred Line. Thought about talking about how people 18-24 aren’t spending money on games, but I could not muster up the care and started rambling about the youth again.

2025-07-03: Wrote the 1,900 economics bit. Wrote a 1,500 word bit on Code Name M that I trimmed down to 500 words after getting way, way off-base. Then edited this dirty girl and put her on Natalie.TF. That ate up my free time for the day! No Hundo Lynn 4 Mii!

2025-07-04: Today was not that productive, despite being a free day. Cleared one route in Hundred Line, and it was amazing, and then started the worst route in the game by far. Hundred Line has a good battle system, but a three-phase battle takes 30 minutes. I did 10 battles today and had less than 30 minutes of story. I could skip these battles, but I want to judge this route on its merits! …But this route is going exclusively into F tier at this rate. (Yes, of course there will be a tier list!) Did chores, did a little bit of work, because a client sent stuff in, tried a sparkling fruit water drink that was in my fridge, and now I’m glad I made so many characters drink them. It was tasty and full of vitamins! Wrote 1,000 words for next week’s preamble. Discovered that I could still masturbate while sitting instead of laying. Heck yeah!

2025-07-05: FINALLY finished the Serial Battle route in Hundred Line. Took like 8 hours because I wanted to prove a POINT, like a DUMMY! Wrote 1,100 words for the Hundred Line review.

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