Rundown (10/19/2025) If The Internet Dies, Then What?

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: If The Internet Dies, Then What?
• Re-Whatevers Continue to Be a Nightmare (There Can Be No Order Without Vision)
• Idiots Like Natalie Are Keeping Gamindustri Alive! (Only 4% of Game Players Buy Games Every Month)
• Who Even Wants a PS6 Anyway? (Other The People With More Money Than Sense…)
• The Future of The Next Generation of Pokémon Got Leaked (TeraLeak 2: Da FreakLeak Just Dropped!)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
If The Internet Dies, Then What?

Something that has been irking me for a while is how some people go on about how ‘the internet is dying.’ This is something that has been said, theorized, observed, and feared for about a decade at this point, but there are two things that always annoyed me about this phrasing. The first is that their definition of the internet tends to be a narrow private definition.

The internet is a core part of the modern world, and a tool that is baked in deep across nearly every sector of life. Governments use it as a tool to share and collect data, representing a dramatically more effective medium than the likes of mailing, faxes, and phone calls. Businesses use it as the cornerstone of their structure these days, a means of contacting companies, providing customers with information, and many of the biggest businesses in the world today only became giants with the rise of the internet. The global supply chain is only as developed as it is today because of the internet, and people’s quality of life directly benefits from it. Because it is simply a better, faster, and more widespread means of communication than more analog formats.

The internet is a tool to make appointments at all hours of the day, buy things, review banking and financial information outside of The Pit, obtain information on laws, regulations, and businesses. It lets people find facts that people in the before times would need to read a book to discover. It’s the mechanism that allows multiple offices to access a shared server of information and process objectives on their Workflow Dashboard™. It lets people to download software and/or drivers that make personal computers actually useful. These are primary and core things that the internet does, and not even the most vile of technocrats want to destroy this. They directly benefitted from this structure, and would go literally insane if they could not look at their wonder slab and see numbers go up in real time.

This is what the internet, at its core level, is. And how is that all dying? Are the streaming platforms and entertainment companies who depend on the internet dying?

No, that is not at all what people are talking about when they talk about the internet. They are talking about a collection of platforms, apps, and online services that allow ample user-generated content, allow people to chat with a userbase of millions of people, and the places these people go to get content that is not locked behind a subscription fee. They mean YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, Discord, fan sites that have been absorbed by Fandom Inc., and any member of a collection of flashy SVGs that are used to represent the internet. People often referring to the internet as a collection of websites that they frequent, rather than the internet as a broader concept.

Now, it is true that a LOT of people use these services. They are the loitering grounds for the terminally online. They are people’s primary means of interacting with the internet, and are the websites they frequent thanks to Web 2.0’s mass corporate consolidation. If you use the internet regularly and recreationally, chances are you use some of these platforms in some level, or ones similar to it.

Forums still exist, and there are oodles of blogs like this one, but there are a growing generation of people who view the internet as just these ‘websites.’ Or rather ‘platforms.’ Or rather ‘apps on their phone.’ But the thing about all of these things is that they cost money to run, money to maintain, and sometimes money to access. I pay hundreds of dollars a year keep Natalie.TF alive, independent wikis like the Dragalia Lost Wiki need to pay monthly server costs to stay online, and anybody wanting to make something online will either need to deal with the restrictions of a platform, or pay to keep them alive.

Akumako: “No getting distracted! Keep up that focus!”

When I was a kid, this was all normal. I did not have social media until I was in high school. I just used the computer to visit fan sites, watch videos on places like GameTrailers and IGN, and visit about a dozen or so comic sites, including Smack Jeeves. It was still bopping between different platforms that served as central hubs, but I was never under any disillusion that this was the entirety of the internet, and I was finding new sites every couple months, bookmarking them, and cycling through them when I was bored. But as websites shuttered and projects were abandoned— or died— a lot of things just centralized around these few pillars. It made the internet smaller, easier to use from a damn phone, and as much as I hate to admit it… I only visit like twenty websites recreationally these days. Natalie.TF, Gematsu, YouTube, Nebula, Brisky, Wikipedia, Archive.org, DeviantArt, Pixiv, ResetEra, Patreon, Electric Hentai, Bulbapedia (I know), Insider Gaming, VGC, Game Informer, Game Developer, GameIndustry.biz, The Game Business, and Ken Klippenstein’s blog (because the world SUCKS). And like half of those I only visit as RSS feeds.

So, moving onto my second problem with the so called ‘death of the internet’ I have to ask what happens if ‘the internet’ dies. All social media is down, Discord dies, Twitch steams are down, TikTok stops working, no more Instagram or Pinterest. It’s all just gone, actually dead. Poof. And YouTube… if YouTube dies, I think they should just set the whole planet on fire. So let’s aim for the middle ground and say all the videos on the site are now hosted on Tubi. Email is still around, your hospital’s patient portal is still around, RSS still works, blogs are still alive, you can read the news if you have the cash, you can still gamble on sports. Heck, you can still play the stock market while on the potty. But communication is relegated to group chats, IRCs, forums, texting, DMs, and smaller means of communication. Mass communication is DEAD. Now what?

Wouldn’t people just rebuilt it? Make their own Cohost, Mastodon, or Bluesky, but keep them smaller and avoid dirty White man money? Probably, but that answer is boring. Let’s say these things are banned, cannot be scaled, and websites are just not allowed to host that many users. No more than 50,000 active users on each forum, and comments are banned outside of blogs! What would happen then? Well, at that point, we just have the Web 1.0 internet but with OneDrive, Netflix, and SAAS, and people would just kinda sorta be stuck with that. People who tweeted a bunch would start up blogs on the indie web or NeoCities, and information would be spread through word of mouth, exploration, and just stumbling onto random websites more often, rather than relying on centralized sources of information.

…And isn’t that what people want? A broader, more creative, unmonitored, internet for weird freaks to do weird freak stuff where the site owners get to determine the rules? Because that… that sounds pretty nice. Well, unless you rely on the internet to make a living, and want to be discovered.

You see, things did not go viral very often on the early internet, at least not on the modern scale, and making money on it was nearly impossible. You’re an artist? You have a site showing your artwork? And you have a commission forum they can fill out to communicate with you directly? And you can support payments because web-based payment systems are still around? Great! …But how will they know you exist? Would DeviantArt or Pixiv or any similar big art platform be allowed after this purge? No. At most, it would be a Danbooru. So how are you gonna get paid?

If you make hours-long videos on entertainment, how are you going to host your videos without YouTube? How are you going to get ad revenue without them? How are you going to pay to host them?

The death of the internet is a scary thing… because it will fracture audiences, destroy the livelihoods of creators, introduce new exorbitant costs to people who want to make stuff on the computer for other people, eliminate millions of jobs, and destroy tens of billions in value. And I mean value value. I would lose track of literally hundreds of people, folks would just vanish, there would be a tidal wave of lost media, and discoverability would go to shit without searching tools. The sense of cohesiveness, of being a group of people, all over the world, centralized, would fall apart, and interactions with other people outside of a circle of friends or regular forum go-ers or site commenters would crash.

We would lose much of what Web 2.0 brought. Some people would just resort to legacy media, trusted brands, and would effectively go back to their aughts habits of watching TV, following stations, and checking specific websites. It would empower those with the means to maintain sites— namely legacy media— and they would still be able to sell whatever narrative they want through slanted stories or by not reporting on what they don’t like. ICE officers are in New York City, arresting people at voting booths? Not according to the New York Times. Someone recorded video of them assaulting someone and shoving them in a van? Cool story. You gonna email that to someone, or what?

There is temptation to look at this regression as a positive, as an end to the malaise of modern social media, but to lose that would be a massive loss for creators. It would ruin millions of lives, make entertainment harder to find, and prevent people from accessing or discovering information (and misinformation alike). You might not have grandmothers being lied to by AI trash on Facebook, and they might only be able to text their friends. But if… Fox News is any indicator, even a ‘legit’ source can spew utter trite, lies, and nonsense and not be held accountable. If there is no space to widely criticize power structures before hundreds of thousands of people, that only empowers them. And do we want to give that up? To go back to the internet having as much sway over politics as it did during the drafting of the Patriot Act?

I mean, if that was the case, then Trump definitely would not have gotten elected, because GamerGate wouldn’t have happened. But nowadays? Eh, a dead internet seems like it would only hurt people in the long-term… And maybe that is the angle for a lot of the technofascists who want to dominate the world as de facto king. They built this structure, used it to amass their power, and if they just destroy it, if they turn off Twitter, Facebook, and everything else, right before an inconvenient event, then… they would have successfully plunged the world into darkness. The richest men in the world retain the lion’s share of their wealth, becoming kings in a new information dark age where people start willing to accept servitude over death, and the truth is deemed illegal by the state.

…Or maybe they will just let things die slowly as ‘the internet’ maintain its importance, but does not allow people to share anything ‘upsetting.’ Or ‘rude.’ Like showing police officers setting a pregnant Black woman on fire with some incendiary grenade. Or calling the president a fuckhead.

Actually, no, between those two options, maybe we should actually kill ‘the internet.’ It would kill the Magnificent Seven with it!

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Re-Whatevers Continue to Be a Nightmare
(There Can Be No Order Without Vision)

I swear, I wind up talking about re-whatevers once a month at this point, and frankly it’s tiresome at this point. I have been seeing a lot of contrarian takes about the recent wave of re-whatevers. But after hearing about the latest potentially bullshit statistics, I lost my bananas! Because rather than there being any clear winner, any clear thing that people wanted from re-whatevers, we got the freaking Prego pasta sauce answer! Where customers don’t want one specific thing, they want several distinct things. Plain, spicy, or extra chunky!

Okay, okay, lemme preface things because that’s what I, as an essayist and novelist— gosh, that makes me sound so fancy—ought to do. About a month ago, GameIndustry.biz put out an article about a report by MTM that found that, surprise-surprise, the majority of their surveyed video game players are fans of remakes and remasters. I read the article, but it was short and mostly stated how big of a part of remakes were in the modern gaming climate. This past week I tiredly watched a video about re-whatevers— I get bored when doing mind-numbing work— and learned that GameIndustry.biz only reported part of the findings, and curbed over the more interesting factoid.

35% of survey respondents want re-whatevers to change narrative or gameplay elements. 30% don’t want re-whatevers to change narrative or gameplay elements. While the remaining 35% are more want a balance of those two. Now, I am not fully confident about this survey’s findings. They only reached out to 1,500 people from the US and UK— which is kind of the bare minimum in my brain. And the report they issued makes routine use of AI images instead of stock photos, because I guess that’s how you look professional these days. By being objectively lazy. However, I still want to believe these results are right, as they sound like they should be.

A 35/35/30 split is about as clear as a three-way split you can ask for in any study, and I intimately understand where all three of these groups are coming from. Because I would hazard that views on re-whatevers are ultimately more of a spectrum and people’s placement probably shifts depending on the situation, these are the three big pillars I see represented in re-whatevers.

Some people want old stories, worlds, designs, and mechanics to grow with them. They view games as technological feats, consider old games to be worse, believe that games age, and want everything to look, feel, and play in accordance to modern sensibly. That games should be remade and should be changed. So, to these people Silent Hill 2 Remake (2024) is Silent Hill 2 (2001), replacing the original. Resident Evil 4 Remake (2023) is the new version of Resident Evil 4 (2005), replacing the original. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter (2025) is just a better, fuller, more definitive version of the original 2004 title.

Some people want the same core experience, but want it to look better, be fuller, and be more expansive. They want remasters like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (2025) and view it as a clean improvement over the original version. Something they can present without being laughed out for being an old, something ‘new enough for the children to enjoy.’ Whatever that means! These are not the original, their audiovisual changes alone create a different experience, but one that is sufficiently similar and sufficiently modern to agree with what they want.

But what I, and presumably the no changes team wants, is… just the old game but with some modern display and quality of life features. Some optional touch-ups, and maybe some rebalancing for good measure. Things like Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered (2024), Patapon 1+2 Replay (2025) or anything Nightdive does. The original assets should be used, the game should run at higher frame rates and resolution, the original physics should be retained used, and the same vibes of the original are present. What I want, and what this 30%, wants from a lot of re-whatevers are, effectively, the definitive versions of these game. Not straight ports that do not change anything. Assuming they are done well, they should be seen as the way to play these games. And if you played these, you played the best version of these games.

Now, this is HARD TO DO. From a technical level, it is hard because of the innumerous complications that come from making a game. And from a business level… well, we get to the core behind everything wrong with video games. In the world of business, doing things perfect is stupid when you can aim for good enough. Which… just circles back to the fact that re-whatevers are not artistic decisions. They are business decisions, made to make a profit, maintain the value of IP, and harvest the benefits of a 30/20/10 year nostalgia cycle with the right game in the right time.

This is why Snake Eater was given a complete facelift to make it look and play like a modern game, because it made the game more relevant, significant, and feel like a bigger cultural moment for players. Why Trails in the Sky was a full remake in every aspect, rather than being another spruced up version of the original game. Because the presentation, voice acting, perspective, and generally accepted game design modernity of the game makes the game appeal to people who would not touch the original because of how crusty it is. It is a brilliant way to bridge existing fans and newcomers who are interested in playing something they have heard about, but don’t know much beyond its good reputation. Old fans get to see something they loved recreated, and new fans can opt into a game with an existing fanbase from the moment it was announced.

A port or remaster of an older game can do gangbusters if it is a beloved IP— look at Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2, which has easily sold a million copies already. And it can introduce a game to a generation of people who weren’t around to play the original, captivating them about as much as a new game. But there is a lot of less intensive re-whatevers lack this cross-generational appeal. These types of release risk only catering to nostalgia or to existing fans. I know that some Zoomies are really into old FPSes and boomer shooters have a tendency to appeal to virile 19-year-olds with peak reflexes. Yet I can’t imagine that a lot of people under 20 gave a crap over Nightdive’s Heretic + Hexen bundle from earlier this year.

This desire for business success, for profit, is what drives the heart of the games industry, but I do not think that it is right to let that dictate how older games are re-issued upon the world. Furthermore… I do not trust people to be able to recognize a good game with a poor remastering from a good game with a good remastering.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary (2011) is often considered a pretty poor remaster of the original Halo for changing the aesthetics of certain environments. It was an uneven update to the original, removed multiplayer features, and physics, in favor of something lifted from Halo Reach (2011), and is seen pretty contentiously by Halo enjoyers as a whole. But it was widely praised for its new visuals, and more criticized for feeling dated or janky next to Bungie’s later entries in the series. The remaster was seen as good, but now it is seen as a mess, with the saving grace being the ability to turn that crap off and play Halo (2001) in HD.

I would like to think the past 14 years have made things better, but when I saw the glowingly positive reception to the Final Fantasy Tactics remaster, I felt like I had fallen into another realm. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles (2025) contains a mostly faithful port of the original game and a heavily altered version of the original. But it is by no means the objectively best version of the game, due to the many things from other versions that were changed or altered. With a game that has been as transformed as FFT, which received all sorts of ports and variants, a definitive version would need a bunch of variables that players can toggle between. But instead of giving people choices, the game locks itself in either an updated remastered style with new art assets, new UX, and a permanent filter. …Or basically a PS1 ROM with no bells or features. Oh, and the game costs $50. $60 if you want the real version.

It’s immensely frustrating how non-standardized these re-whatevers are. How pretty much every dev team on every project has different ideals and goals for what a re-whatever should be. How different people seem to actively want different things from re-whatevers. And how little general documentation exists for determining what every re-whatever does or changes. But… it also does not really matter, now does it?

Older games, unless shut down via end of service, don’t really die. The world of retro gaming is thriving with accessible emulation and easy access to ROMs. ROM hacking is allowing people to create their own damn remasters of beloved games as they force in quality of life improvements, translations, bug fixes, and texture packs. Decompilations are basically remasters of games, filled with oodles of extra goodies, while allowing people to play as vanilla of an experience as they want. And for people who are not part of the no additions crowd— for people who want re-whatevers to change a lot, then they are probably pleased by the recent stretch of lauded re-whatevers that make such transformative alterations.

It’s messy, frustrating, and my love of neatness hates the fact that all of this is so inconsistent. Because things COULD be so much better. But… they just aren’t going to. Because this works. People are playing re-whatevers are enjoying them, they are generally good games in varying respects. I can’t get mad about people playing souped up re-whatevers of games that came out when they were, like, 5. For as bad as the industry may be when it comes at any sort of preservation and how these re-whatevers are not helping… if you want to play older games, just use your darn search engine and spend five minutes looking and you’re good-to-go.

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Idiots Like Natalie Are Keeping Gamindustri Alive!
(Only 4% of Game Players Buy Games Every Month)

Something that I routinely forget is that fact that many people don’t really play games as much as they play a game. That there are significant contingencies of game players who just have a handful of stable games that they play without really caring about the broader industry or medium. Most of these games tend to be online multiplayer titles that they play with friends. Sea of Thieves, Helldivers II, Marvel Rivals, Counter-Strike— the school shooter staples. Any number of gacha-based or gacha-vibe live services. Annualized sports games. Or dominating first-person shooters that allow users to fulfill the masculine urge to kill their friends and become top banana numero uno. (I swear, there is some logic behind the nonsense I write. It is just so opaque it’s basically a wall.)

I have always known that these people were core components of gaming, that this more casual audience was the majority. But I always liked to reassure myself that there were tens of millions of motherfuckers just like me. Dorks who follow gaming news with vigor, who read articles, watch reviews, listen to a podcast about games, and buy games with an irresponsible frequency. I think this because these are my people, and are the ones who fill up the communities that I be messin’ wit. But per the latest research from the market analysis firm Circana… that’s not the case.

As you can see with the graph in the header, a third of game players purchase games at a rate of less than one a year. Just over a third buy games at least once a quarter. And another third buy games every six to twelve months. The people who regularly buy one or more games a month are a mere 16% of the respondents, presumably all regular video game players. And people who wind up buying multiple games a month via major sales or bundles or deep discounts, or just pick up several games at launch only amount to… 4% of regular game players.

Now, I am inclined to write off the third of people who buy less than one game a year as serial free-to-players and broke-asses. But that’s just me coping and trying to hide from what this data is actually telling me. That the ways of the industry have changed drastically in the past 20 years. That live services, free-to-play titles, and gaming subscription services have ushered in a base of millions of people who don’t buy games, despite spending a significant amount of their free time with games.

A group of millions— tens of millions— view buying games as less fashionable when subscriptions and free-to-play games are promising higher value with a far lighter investment and more variety. Either this audience is growing as the population of game players grows. Or existing players are shifting from buying games to not buying games as their tastes are shaped by… publishers more concerned about user engagement, retention, and loyalty over profit. Regardless, people like me are a far smaller population that I would have ever cared to admit.

The enthusiast market is relatively small, filled with people with low price sensitivity, or high monthly budgets. …But they are pretty much the pillar preventing the games industry from collapsing. This is not good, but I also feel that there is not much to improve this situation. You can’t take a serial Fortnite player and expect them to gel with any shooter you throw at them. There’s a generation of people who like online gaming and don’t really care about things like… story, characters, progression, or gaming as a broad medium with a rich history and background. It’s just something for them to do while they unwind and hang out with their friends. Like going the third place was back when that was affordable and shitty people weren’t so openly toxic.

My stupid gut says this feels like a disaster waiting to happen, but I don’t think it really is. I think we’re just in the midst of gaming becoming a centralized part of people’s entertainment palate. Not everybody who watched TV in the 1970s was devoutly invested in it. They just caught a few episodes of whatever when it suited them, or they just stuck to the news. It was radio but with pictures. A free newspaper! People who saved up some nickels to visit the movies in the 50s were not invested in the world of film and cinema. They were just going for some cheap thrills and to share an experience that everyone could enjoy. The majority of humans today listen to music, but they probably only care about a narrow snippet or what’s trendy at the moment.

Most people who engage with entertainment mediums do so on a casual levels. They do not try to engage with everything, follow industry news, press cycles, or post about it on dedicated locales. Those who do are the real nerds. This is how entertainment mediums and industries work, and as gaming becomes mainstream, as it becomes part of the average person’s media diet, they will engage with it in an average person sort of way. They will only take in a certain amount, and will never be an enthusiast. Arguably, that has been the case for decades, but unlike TV or music, gaming always required dedicated hardware and upfront investments to enjoy. …Except now you could just play oodles of games on your phone or PC.

The industry is still trying to figure out how to incorporate gaming into people’s daily lives. How to get their attention and dollars and keep the industry, the biggest entertainment industry, relevant in the lives of people in the same way other mediums are. Except games are not a passive medium that you can just watch or play while you’re making dinner. You need to have some understanding of how they work, and put in an intimidating level of effort before one can ‘succeed’ with regularity. You need to learn how to play a game, how to play each and every game to an extent.

The medium is inherently different, despite being positioned in proximity to them and… it makes sense that people would just want to stick to something they know. It makes sense for them to engage with it with as much anything else in their lives.

…Okies, got that out of my system. In case it is not clear by now, Rundowns double as a way for me to process new information I am fed. I like writing it down, articulating it, and allowing whoever is reading this to glimpse into my corrupted mind and see how it ticks.

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Who Even Wants a PS6 Anyway?
(Other The People With More Money Than Sense…)

Something that I have been seeing in the fields of gaming discourse has been mutterings about leaked specs of new gaming hardware and consoles. Mark “Marble Madness” Cerny talked future console tech in a move meant to tease the PlayStation 6. Leakers said that the PS6 is coming out in 2027. And per some leaked specs, people seem to think that the Xbox 5 will be coming out in 2027 as well. This all tracks with the standard structure of generations we saw last time. The PS4 era lasted 7 years, so it makes sense that the PS5 era would last just as long… or does it?

In short, no, no it does not.

The past few years of hardware advancements for computers have been overwhelmingly dominated by AI technology. From creating bullshit machines to ugly-ass image generators to something so horrifyingly convincing that it sparks immense concern regarding the future of… humanity in general. In terms of graphics tech though? Shit has sucked! GPU prices kept going up, performance has remained poor, and PC gamers seem to be at their wits end with just playing intensive games.

I would argue this is mostly due to bad optimization— something that happens when you have a dev team of 400— and some kinks in Unreal Engine 5 in particular— which probably launched too early. But if PC games are struggling so much, AI upscaling is developers’ answer to bad performance, and people struggle to tell the difference between PS5 and PS5 Pro games, then… what’s the point of a PlayStation 6?

What does it do that cannot be done before? …Raytracing? Machine learning to make games look like they are covered in high res butter? Better loading times are already minimized via NVMe SSDs. There is little reason why games shouldn’t be able to maintain the elusive goal of 1080p and 60 fps on existing hardware. And while I understand some people want to make games look nice on their big 55 inch 4K TV as part of their entertainment center… those people are not numerous enough to warrant exclusive software. Regular people, making something shitty like $11 at Food Trough, would need to spend a months’ wages just to get the $600 to $900 hardware. And for what? Statistically, they are just gonna use it to play Sportge (Sport Game), Militaryge (Military Game), and Fortnite.

Talk of a new console also feels insane when games are still being released on last gen consoles. The PS4 is not getting the latest and greatest of anything, but it is still being supported. You can still play Call of Duty 2025 and Saudi Arabia’s MAGA Football Casino 26. Indie games are still targeting it as a platform. And you can get meaningful experiences on the system. It’s not selling, but people are actively using it all over the world. Sure, you could say the same regarding the PS2 during the PS4 era, but the PS2 in 2009— three years after the PS3 came out— was not getting the support the PS4 is getting five years after the PS5 came out.

New hardware is going to have diminishing returns, will be expensive, and it feels like the PS5 generation just got started. Most of Sony’s big first-party titles were crossgen through 2022 or so— due to Pandemic Issues. Game publishers kept undermining it by presenting last generation versions. A lot of the big PS5 exclusives have been underwhelming due to various reasons. And while there are big games that are only on PS5, Xbox Series, and PC, it kinda feels like this generation only really started in late 2022, when we got meaningful exclusives.

What I am really justifying with all of these factoids is that… the vibes are off on a new generation of gaming hardware, you finna cop my ish, bae. Yes, there are performance issues with current tech, but pushing graphics further will only make the problem worse. Introducing new hardware in what is likely to be the midst of a multi-year recession is bad optics if anything else, with people already PISSED at $70 games and the Switch 2’s $450 price tag. And even though we are on ‘schedule’ for an upgrade, it feels too soon to be drumming up excitement for that, when I think people would be cool with the PS6 not coming out until 2029, maybe even 2030. There are a lot of problems in gaming, but under-powered hardware ain’t one!

…Also, lol to the idea of there even being an Xbox 5.

The Xbox ROG Ally X has shown Microsoft’s vision for the future of Xbox. Branded gaming devices that do not even run Xbox games, but instead just play Windows games on a slimmed down version of Windows 11. I can believe they will keep the brand, but I feel that Xbox games and Microsoft-made Xbox consoles are going to become a thing of the past by the end of the decade. Costco stopped selling anything Xbox. Word is that Target and Walmart are ditching their Xbox sections.

Frankly, I would LOVE to for Xbox to stop being a dedicated platform going forward. At this point, it has become a dirty word to me, and I don’t want to say something is coming to Xbox Series. It just upsets me, because I have talking about Xbox since… right before the Xbox One reveal. I was an Xbox 360 enjoyer humper, saw the brand decline in real-time, and slowly lost all faith in their ability to recover their ecosystem. Now, I just want them gone. Or, more likely, they will just persist as a storefront, a licensed brand, and a broader publisher. Given their size, I think that is the best approach, and I know developers would LOVE to remove two SKUs from their releases.

So, yeah. I hope that the next Xbox is just a licensed pre-built Windows PC. And if that is the case… then release it whenever, because PC gaming does not follow a strict generational structure like consoles. Well, at least not nowadays. In the 90s, you had a new PC generation every 3 bloody years.

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The Future of The Next Generation of Pokémon Got Leaked
(TeraLeak 2: Da FreakLeak Just Dropped!)

The great Game Freak TeraLeak of October 2024 was one of the most exciting things to happen to the world of Pokémon enthusiasts in… a long time. Obscure development details, scrapped concepts, beta content, rejected designs, and oodles of insights into how games were made. All were shot off into the ether, overwhelming the broader niche of Pokémon diehards, and some misinformation probably slipped in there. Because what is truth anyway? A miserable little pile of secrets!

Akumako: “That does not even make sense…”

I followed this pretty closely— as closely as I could while destroying myself during my biannual State mandated crunch period— and I knew that what we received in October 2024 would not be all the information. That there was more to be released by the leaker, as they had gathered information on future games and the development of Pokémon Legends: Z-A. And this past week— days before the release of PLZA— the leaker returned and regaled the world with a deluge of information. About PLZA, Scarlet and Violet, and the many games Game Freak has in the planning stages leading up to 2030.

Now, I took a laissez faire approach with the 2024 leaks, but these are leaks of a different color.

The leaker unleashed this deluge of information days before Pokémon Legends: Z-A was released, when we were already getting drowned in leaks for that game. People who are leak adverse are going to be bombarded with untagged leaked information. People in the Pokémon content sphere are going to be pressured to split their attention between Z-A and the new leaks. A new game is generally less exciting when you are seeing beta footage where… the game looked better in some respect. And that goes doubly so for test footage of in-development games that are slated to be released in one to three years.

I don’t mind that the leakers are dropping this information— the artists working at Game Freak are not owners of their work, they have no right to their work under our current legal system. These are corporate assets leaking and so long as they are not employee information, I view that as a truly victimless crime. Corporations do not have feelings, or hearts, or blood. But this is something that can harm Pokémon as a multimedia franchise. It is disrupting a new release, showing in-development projects, and the response to them will, most likely, lead to developmental pivots. I know the leaker was going to release these documents eventually, but… Maybe wait a month or two, guys? Because this is not going to help people enjoy PLZA.

That all being said, let’s go over the cornucopious amount of stuff that was released as part of this leak. I won’t cover everything, but I’ll try to log the highlights.

• Pokémon Legends: Z-A was originally going to feature fully modeled windows and generally higher levels of detail. Gameplay was going to be more shooter oriented, at least at some point in development, rather than the real-time command based system seen in the full game. And the developers were doing something with a 4v4 multiplayer mode that has aesthetic and mechanical similarities to Splatoon. Ride Pokémon, namely Gogoat, were also originally going to be across Lumiose City.
• The Generation 10 Pokémon game, Project Gaia, is not actually based on Greece, as was previously believed, and now appears to be based on Southeast Asia, though mainly Indonesia. Which I think is a fantastic location, given how that country is full of smaller islands with their own subcultures and unique geography.
• Project Gaia has the formal name of Pokémon Wind and Pokémon Wave, rather than the previously circulated Winds and Waves. And various tech demos have been revealed showing off the water and wind tech Game Freak hopes to feature in these games. However, tests on high-powered work stations do not translate to finished games, and every Pokémon game over the past 15 years has seen technical cuts.
• Wind and Wave will feature two elder patriarch and matriarch box art legendaries who reside on inaccessible islands, using their powers to guide humans and Pokémon alike.
• A major component of Wind and Wave will be a rare Seed Pokémon that can only evolve on the islands housing the box art legendaries. Its evolution has a wide variety of variations, likely pertaining to various features and colors, meaning they will be, in theory, unique for every player. The island they are evolved on is also procedurally generated to some degree, reflecting the player’s actions throughout the game, with each island being unique in some way or another.
• Wind and Wave will feature new models for some, if not all, Pokémon, including slight redesigns or alterations. This is likely a delayed response to criticisms over the games using 15-year-old models that have been spruced up with new textures and animations, but is all around good to see. Additionally, they are also replacing the game engine with a new next gen engine dubbed Pokémon Engine X.
• Wind and Wave will also have a Breath of the Wild like structure where you can visit the main goal after the tutorial, so long as you are strong enough. But, realistically, players will want to explore and complete the game’s challenges, which are based on… Sustainable Development Goals? Not sure how that works, but that’s dope!
• Various game budgets leaked, though I would hazard to guess that they are only partial, internal, or incomplete budgets. Most people reporting this stuff have never seen an internal Japanese game budget document. So if you hear them say something like ‘they made this game for only $20 million, what a bunch of cheapwads’ realize that is literally impossible considering everything these games do. That is probably less than the North American marketing budget.
• The Scarlet and Violet DLC went considerably over its budget, which will lead Game Freak to scale back their ambitions for future DLC. Personally, I suspect the Synchro Summon feature caused some of that inflation, because that was a crazy ambitious thing to throw into some DLC.
• Pokémon Legends: Ho-Oh and Pokémon Legends: Lugia were originally intended to be the follow-up to Pokémon Legends: Arceus. This makes complete sense as a follow-up, as people thought that a Pokémon Legends: Celebi would be the most obvious direction for the developers to go. Especially with Johto being due for a revisit. And the choice to split it into two versions is… lol. I hate the dual version thing, but I’m not even surprised.
• Pokémon Legends: Ho-Oh and Pokémon Legends: Lugia would have followed a temporally displaced protagonist, involved the Burned Tower, and the origins of the Legendary Beasts. (Because I guess they weren’t just resurrected variants of their Paradox Pokémon predecessors or blessed Eeveelutions.) However, this 25th anniversary title was shelved, probably because Game Freak did not want to make such a similar game back-to-back. They wanted to experiment! And bless them for that!
• Game Freak is, or was, working on a third Pokémon Legends title, codenamed Ringo, which I would describe as a… Pokémon X Pikmin style game. Set in Galar 1,000 years ago, Poké Balls have not been invented, and trainers command a small legion of Pokémon to fight enormous Dynamax Pokémon. All before capturing them using primitive, giant, stone Poké Balls capable of sealing them away. It sounds like an insane pivot, promising real-time strategic combat against truly massive threats, and is in line with the more Pokémon X Action Game dreams that many diehard fans have dreams about.
• Game Freak is also working on, or at least planning, an online Pokémon dream game that has probably been the basis for at least one of those browser-based Pokémon MMOs. Project Seed aims to be an online-driven game where players explore multiple regions based on provinces of Japan. Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, and Kitakami, and presumably new areas wedged in between. All while promising to be an open world, open-ended experience where players can exist in a shared space.
• Generation 11 is already in planning stages to some extent, with the debut title slated to come out sometime in 2030, meaning we are back to the four year generational cycle. Thank god.

This all sounds great on paper. We get a new generation on a new engine— dubbed the Pokémon Engine X— that will finally ditch the 3DS framework that every Pokémon game nowadays is built off of. We’ll get a new gen in 2026. DLC will probably drop in 2027. A new Legends game set in Galar with a radically different gameplay system would probably drift to 2028. Seed could maybe launch in 2029. And 2030 will be the start of a new cycle of annual delights, all of them at least aiming to do something ambitious, and without the chunky old framework.

…Except all of this is just a collection of plans. Year-old plans. We don’t know if any of these projects were canceled. If feature creep will set in and core elements will be cut. Or if the tech demonstrated here will need to be kneecapped due to the Switch 2 not being up to snuff. These are cool ideas, but we cannot expect them, because they were made public, and we have a documented history of Game Freak changing their mind, the direction of these games, and cutting features when they prove to be inconvenient.

I am stoked for everything that is planned here— even if it means that remakes or the much anticipated Unova return will need to wait until the 2030s. But I cannot assume that any of this will actually happen, as game development is messy, and nowadays, it seems like every big project requires a development reboot or two. So, yeah, these are cool ideas, but I’m just going to view them as that until proven otherwise. Ideas.

…Except for Wind and Wave, those are too far along to NOT be real.

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Progress Report 2025-10-19

I am so damn tired, but I explained why Milky Vampire OWNS and started playing Pokemon Legends Z-A, so I’m happy!

2025-10-12: Wrote 1,000 word PS6 section, wrote 1,500 word re-whatever section, between working on a Sunday, because taxes!

2025-10-13: Wrote the 1,000 bit on the 4% of game players statistic thing while my boss was writing a letter. Spent too long looking into the Pokémon leaks and chatting with Missy Scrumptious. Made this week’s terrible header image, because I wanted to get it in the bag and to hold off on writing about the Pokémon leaks.

2025-10-14: Wrote 1,600 section on the TeraLeak 2. Edited the Rundown and that’s about it. So busy with taxes, and so stressed!

2025-10-15: Final tax day, I fucking did it, felt like shit for half the day, because I was coming off of a week-long adrenaline boost, and still worked basically a full work day, because of billing and a last minute return we sent out at 20:30. I resumed work on TSF Showcase 2025-12, adding 2,100 words before brain became hamburger.

2025-10-16: OKAY! WORLD STAR! WORLD RECORD! Or at least personal record. I wrote 11,900 words for TSF Showcase 2025-12, an all-time best for writing stuff in a single day. I just need to write a conclusion, but at 1:30 AM, the brain lacked the beef needed to make the engine sputter like a goose. HONK HONK indeed. I am going to bed, I have a meeting in eight hours. Also, I like waiting to write the conclusion. Next Day brings clarity, bitch!

2025-10-17: Worked in the morning, Pokemon legends Z-A arrived in the mail, and I wound up playing it for 11 damn hours.

2025-10-18: Chores, went for a WALK, played PLZA for like 10 hours, like a bitch-ass-boss. Good shit, hood shit, wood shit.

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