This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Globally Offensive Gambling Reform
- Amazon (Basically) Gives Up On Gaming (The Line Has To Go Up Somehow!)
- The Console Wars Ended A Decade Ago… (And All Industry is DOOMED!)
- Animal Crossed To The Next Generation (Animal Crossing: New Horizons Gets An Update After Over 4 Years)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Globally Offensive Gambling Reform
So, how should I kick off the Rundown this week? …How about with a spicy, possibly controversial, take regarding a topic that came out a bit too late for me to cover last week.
On October 23, 202, Valve released a controversial update to their flagship moneymaker, Counter-Strike 2 (2023). Or as I like to call it, Counter-Strike 2nd: Global Offensive 2023. A game that’s a truly massive part of the gaming zeitgeist, and a game for gamers! …With gamers here meaning gamblers. It is tempting to label and brand CS2GO2023 as a competitive and skill-based team shooter— to prop it up as a glorious pillar of the industry that attracts over a million daily active users… that’s a pretty misleading claim.
Counter-Strike (2000) and its initial variants were of a generation where multiplayer games just focused on being fun multiplayer games where you could shoot and shoot with your friends. However, that structure and the underlying goals of the game changed drastically with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012). A mostly live service shooter that only really found its identity with its infamous Arms Dealer update in 2013. This is when Valve introduced a marketplace of weapon skins and cosmetics for the game, provided to players via loot boxes obtained by playing the game. This was around the time Steam was expanding their platform with game item marketplaces and trading cards that encouraged players to trade around cheap JPGs for profile cosmetics and other guff.
Now, the reason why Valve launched this Arms Dealer update is pretty easy to intuit. Valve does not exist in a vacuum, they are a global company and were looking at how much players were willing to pay for skins and cosmetics in other games, particularly those from East Asia. They saw this as a way to keep people playing their flagship games, used it in several games, but the biggest success was easily Counter-Strike. …By which I mean it was a bloody disaster and Valve ushered in an underground gambling community, marketed mostly to young impressionable men.
The market of CSGO was a major gateway into online gambling for millions of young men— because the women were either all scared away or had too much sense to fall for this trick. It has caused immense harm to these people, warped up their sense of value, and gave them addictions that they have been carrying for upwards of a decade. There have been a bunch of investigations and popular video investigations calling out Valve on their complicity in these endeavors. I think People Make Games and Coffeezilla both did a great job at presenting the information in an engaging manner. For as much as I prop up Valve as a shiny beacon in the industry, they deserve immense criticism for facilitating this community. A global den of gambling addicts, money laundering, theft, and general scummy behavior, all under the guise of making money and uplifting oneself to a higher class.
The worst thing about this system is that… you cannot easily cash out. While you can sell skins for Valve wallet money, Valve does not let you withdraw your wallet balance into fiat via a bank transfer. (Though, they probably should.) If you got a $2,000 skin from CSGO, you would not be able to transfer it into your bank account like a good little human, you would just be able to use it to buy more skins, trading cards, games, or DLC. Which is why third party storefronts were launched with the expressed purpose of selling and buying CSGO skins, but with a looser grasp on what is and is not legal. These websites allow people to cash out at a reduced rate and also… just gamble in a casino driven by code, where the odds are made up.
All the ills of CSGO were transferred into its sequel live service, the aforementioned Counter-Strike 2nd: Global Offensive 2023, which cleanly replaced CSGO upon launch. You can still play CSGO today, but only on community servers and offline, meaning it is still preserved, market notwithstanding, and all skins transferred over to CS2GO2023. The transition between games did not cause that much a change in the operations of this virtual casino, but the minor update released last week sure did.
Effectively, Valve added the ability for players to convert rare red skins into the super rare gold skins. This skin upgrading was present amongst lower rarities for a long time, letting players convert commons to uncommons to rares, but golds were exceedingly rare and could only be obtained by chance. By my understanding, this is a course correction, empowering people to upgrade their digital assets while making the rarest skins more common. However, some people do not want that, because they have been hodling (technical and professional term of art) and hoarding gold skins for years, thinking that they would continue to appreciate in price over time.
Because of this massive market correction, the value of reds skyrocketed, while the value of golds plummeted, causing a market crash. The roughly $6 billion market cap of the CS2GO2023 crashed down to just over $3 billion (very briefly), and while the market is recovering, gold skins are likely not going to return to their previous value. I believe golds will be less valuable, reds will be more valuable, and the market cap, in general, will be lower than it was previously, only rising as more people become invested in the economy and the value of the dollar continues to decline.
Now that I have laid out the history, I have quite a few thoughts about what is going on here.
Firstly, I hate everything about this goldarn scenario, and the fact that this shit is even possible. I think Counter-Strike— and all competitive online multiplayer games— should return to the glory days of skill-based gameplay with zero progression systems. Not even a visible global ranking or leaderboards for hackers to wreck with bogus times. Back when the point of these games was not to profit, but to have fun. Games have lost that goal in the past 20 years, infused them with the pursuit of status and glamour. But at this point, you can’t put the genie back in the toothpaste tube.
Secondly, fuck Valve for allowing the market of their dumb video game to ever reach $6 billion in market cap. While market cap only represents a theoretical value, and nobody in their right mind would ever pay ‘market cap’ for something like this, that is still an obscene amount of money by most metrics. Valve could have sent cease and desist letters, DMCA takedown notices, and done the work to shut down the third-party market of Counter-Strike gambling sites and skin resellers. But they didn’t. They allowed a gray market to persist. While Valve did not profit from every transaction, they profited from the market activity, the frictional costs, selling fees, and the fact that more people were using their platform and spending money on other games.
Thirdly, the entire financial system has been fucked since 2008, probably even earlier than that.
Something important to recognize about markets, about the pursuit of profit, is this. Commerce and trading do not create value, they exchange value. Value is only generated when people make something. Value comes from ideas, from actions, from creations. A car is valuable because it is a car, a piece of machinery capable of doing things that are actively useful, and something that billions of people in the world want, on some level. Food is valuable because people need to eat it to live. Shelter is valuable because without shelter, you just die. A damn video game skin is only valuable when somebody wants it, and its value is comparable to a shiny stone found amongst gravel.
Cryptocurrency launched as an intangible asset class, propped up by hype, mutual agreement of value, and this belief that if enough people buy into it, they can create gold out of a hash of random characters. As a crypto tax accountant, I am completely of the understanding that crypto is, effectively, a worthless net negative on society. Yet, despite its inefficiencies, energy consumption, and propensity for fraud or general financial crime, is a multi-trillion dollar industry by hypothetical market cap value. Its highest and best use is skirting regulations, buying drugs in the mail, and stealing money from rubes. Yet it is seen as a store of value, and I work with people who have tens of millions of dollars in crypto.
The entire US economy is being propped up by like a dozen tech companies sharing around the same hundred billion dollars as an ‘investment’ in technology that they keep saying will change the world. Not by delivering value or fixing problems— we have the tools to fix most problems with the world, just not the capital, infrastructure, or public understanding. But by further consolidating wealth in order to create a world of luxury and poverty, with only a private police force, authorized by the plutocratic State to kill any ne’er-do-wells, to separate these classes. Wealth inequality has only gotten worse after the pandemic, has become comically extreme at this point, and people want out.
They see two options.
Get rich or fucking die.
This is why people gamble, why they look at things that people say are bad bets and keep on trying, why they believe in financial conspiracies, and why they seek out quick and easy solutions to hard and long problems. Because capitalism blows chunks. Safety nets are being set on fire because rich people want to see the working class burn. And too many people think they are able to read the market, manipulate others, and walk away as the winner, increasing their position in something while leaving behind losers.
This is the core of what the Counter-Strike skin economy is. Not a way to make money, but a way to exchange money. The skin economy is a mechanism for people to throw away thousands of dollars, destroying their lives, because they wanted a shiny skin for their stupid fucking gun in a stupid fucking video game. Those who abuse these misguided, swindled, and deeply susceptible people are rewarded with money, and Valve profits on every transaction that happens on their platform.
I hate this system. I do not think it should exist, think it makes for a categorically worse experience, and think that anybody who put their ‘savings’ In Counter-Strike skins is a moron. There is an extreme level of risk in keeping assets worth thousands of dollars in a digital asset with no backing, beholden to the balancing decisions and economics of a damn online game. It is so risky, in such an obvious way, that I do not feel bad for anybody who lost tens of thousands of dollars here. They could have cashed out with a shady third-party, arranged an off-platform deal, bought a bunch of video games, or just opened up a damn investment account like a normal person. Instead, they did something that any financial manager would SCREAM at them for doing.
One could say that people who invested in these skins were paranoid, uneducated, or gaslit by grifters who presented this as the best way to make money. I see people make bad investment choices ALL THE TIME in my day job as a crypto tax accountant (and regular tax accountant). People go all in on some bullshit memecoin, thinking, hoping, or praying that they will be able to make a quick buck off of it. Sometimes, they get smart, get lucky, and get loads of money. But you want to know who the wealthiest clients I have are? People who bought Bitcoin in 2014 and didn’t buy random altcoins.
Simply put, I have no patience for people going onto the internet to whining that their thinly traded speculative digital asset lost 50%. They could have offloaded, diversified their portfolio, but they chose to be a bad investor by keeping too much in risky assets. These people are adults. Adults who want to be unaccountable for their actions. When, no, they were in control, they were acting as investors, and could have sold their stuff and bailed. If you want stability or guarantees, there are plenty of safe opportunities to make money. Including investment opportunities without rigid winners and losers, where every newly minted 35-year-old millionaire isn’t being propped up by people who threw their meager savings into a blender.
With the stock market, with interest, with bonds, with all of this traditional crap, the winners and losers analogy does not really work. Because people always need money, always need the stuff these massive corporations are creating, and a stock market is an effective way for people to pool money around, receive benefits of corporate ownership, and siphon some of the value of these corporations via dividends and the appreciation of stock prices that, assuming everything goes well, will either remain stable and increase gradually over the long-term.
It’s by no means a perfect system. It is irrational, driven by hatred, and a tool for the 10% of the population who economically matter, but that does not mean any alternative is better. With all of these intangible digital assets, all people did was made a worse version of the stock market. One where things move fast, break frequently, and hyperbolic results only add to a cultish devotion of people who, despite their powerful feelings, don’t understand basic economics or risk management.
Amazon (Basically) Gives Up On Gaming
(The Line Has To Go Up Somehow!)
For as much as I like to mock, clown on, and generally get frustrated at multibillion companies for being unable to ship a game, the king of this merry batch of fools is easily Amazon. Xbox gradually destroyed their reputation over the span of 12 years, but Amazon? They never even got to the point where they could get a reputation beyond ‘the place where dreams go to die.’
Amazon has invested hundred of millions— probably billions— into forming a game development and publishing division. However, since their founding in 2012, they have struggled to put out games, and for a pretty clear reason. They wanted to put out massive hits, rush head-first into AAA game development, and build upon their library of IPs by establishing new studios. Establishing a brand new studio is difficult in the best of times, as you need to infrastructure, staff, and general understanding for a team to work together effectively.
Double Helix Games was a middling game developer of mostly licensed mid until they turned around their identity with Killer Instinct (2013) and Strider (2014). Both of which were pretty great. But their prospects were shattered after they were acquired by Amazon Games in 2014. Amazon put them on the multiplayer brawler Breakaway for years and years, but despite several open betas and an attempted revision to make the game more appealing, it slowly petered out into nothingness before being canceled in 2018.
Their Seattle-based Relentless Studios put out Crucible (2020), a hero shooter released right at the start of the pandemic. But despite having those good prospects before it, the game just utterly failed to attract an audience and was shut down after 6 months, being a colossal failure.
The publisher Amazon Games has attempted to handle the global launch of various games, such as Smilegate’s Lost Ark, Bandai Namco’s canceled Blue Protocol, and something called Throne and Liberty. But this era of a global publisher is becoming increasingly unviable and antiquated. Global publishers can just shut down a game to kill an IP’s international momentum if they feel like it, and many developers are simply handling the global launch in-house. Self-publishing, while expensive, is generally more profitable, as there’s a lot less administrative busywork and contract cost markup when dealing with a co-worker versus someone working for an outside company.
They have opened up various studios around the world, but the only game to really come out from all of these investments was New World (2021). A colonial MMO that did pretty well, I think, developing a fanbase and was seemingly not bleeding money. Which is hella impressive for a non-Asian MMO in today’s climate.
New World was the ONE thing they did right… and as part of a series of— at this point— routine layoffs, they are putting the game in maintenance mode. Amazon announced that the game will no longer receive new content updates. Seasonal events will continue along with bug fixes, minor updates, and you can still buy in-game currency. However, despite saying that the game’s servers will keep running throughout 2026, I just read that as an announcement that EOS will happen sometime in early 2027.
Oh, and while Amazon has not disclosed this at the time of writing, they have outright shut down their Irvine and San Diego studios.
So… what the fuck? Why do this? Why close game studios like this? Why shut down the only major self-developed success story that Amazon has had in a decade of game development? …For a better looking set of financials. Amazon is part of The Magnificent Seven stocks that determine the US, and much of the global, economy. They have been enjoying a massive spike in their share prices over the past two years, and REALLY want that to continue before things go to shit, so they are looking to cut corners.
They want to get rid of employees and replace them with robots, as Amazon warehouses are basically made for robots anyway. They want to cut all unnecessary expenses, and salaries are the easiest expense to cut. You just lay off a guy. And here in Capitalist America, there is rarely any punishment for just closing down an entire studio before the end of the month, leaving people scrambling for a new job with only days to find new healthcare.
Amazon’s corporate incompetency is downright staggering considering the deluge of resources at their disposal, and the more I look into this story, the angrier I get.
A tidbit that resurfaced alongside this story was a LinkedIn post from the former vice president of Amazon Gaming, Ethan Evans, who stated that Amazon was trying to challenge Steam… for 15 years. To which I have to say what the hell do you even mean challenge Steam?
Back when I got into PC gaming in 2013, Amazon was selling Steam keys for games. They were part of the system with little to no obvious aspirations to put them down.
After Stadia launched to irrelevance, Amazon has built up their Luna cloud streaming service in 2020, complete with a low tier that is free to all Amazon Prime members. Well, not Amazon Prime Business members, which is what I use through my job. However, rather than leverage this, they just kind of let it sit there. Amazon very have transformed this into a storefront where people can buy games and play them, and they have to an extent. You can buy games for Amazon Luna even if you don’t have Amazon Prime. However, the library is very limited, and you aren’t actually buying the game on Amazon Luna. No. Instead, what you are actually doing, is buying a copy of the game that you can stream on Amazon Luna, and a copy that is added to your synced GOG account. Or, sometimes, a game accessible via the Amazon Gaming app, something that I did not know existed until now.
Oh, but it gets weirder! In addition to offering a streaming service, Amazon Prime Gaming dba Amazon Luna has been offering free games to Prime subscribers for years and years. …But they are offering a mix of GOG keys, Epic Games Store keys, and keys for their own Amazon Games app.
…If you people have your own gaming app, why the HELL are you not pushing it as a storefront? What Amazon is trying to do here is comparable to the Xbox app for Windows. A program where people can buy games, access cloud games available via their subscription service, and download games from their subscription service. This should be easy and sensible, but they obscure this so much, so so little to keep people using their storefront, and receive basically zero press. When a game is launching on Epic Games Store due to whatever kickback Epic promised, that’s included in the trailer, that’s included in the press release. I don’t think I have see n a press release for Amazon Luna in years.
More so than their games division, this, this right here, is a showcase of the blistering incompetence on display at Amazon. They own the biggest storefront in the world, but they could not figure out how to make a Steam clone. They had Twitch, they could have directly advertised people to buy any game that was being played on stream. They have a game streaming service, could have added the most popular games on Twitch to is, so people could watch a streamer play a game on their secondary screen while streaming the same game on another. They had to core pillars, but when it came time to bridge them together, to become the Amazon of Gaming, they did such a poor job, had such little presence, that they were not even derided, they were unnoticed.
How do you even do that? Did their leaders of this division even know how Steam worked? Did they just not use, see, or look at their competing storefronts to see what worked? Did they not consult anybody who worked on these storefronts to learn what gamers want? Amazon has made Twitch a worse and less viable platform. They have wasted the time, careers, and resources of several game studios around the world with dead-end projects. They are utterly unable to market their games, and with every rock I turn over, I just find a new flavor of stupid!
For example, last month Amazon released King of Meat. A party brawler type game built around co-op and user generated content. I have never heard of it. It’s on PS5, Xbox, and Steam. It is NOT on Amazon Luna. It is big enough to have a premium Mister Beast collaboration. It is, by all metrics I can tell, a live service you’re meant to play with some friends. But it also goes for $30 as a base price, which is a big high for a game of this variety— friendslop should never be more than $20. And it capped at 253 players on Steam.
Again, this is Amazon. This is the ONLY game they released this year. And it had a launch that would leave any indie dev terrified.
The people making these decisions are ultimately responsible for this failure. But in the rigid hierarchy of corporate America, they are not allowed to be accountable for their actions. It’s always the workers, always the people who knew and said this was a bad idea, who are hurt in the process. And this… this simply cannot continue. Accountability needs to come back at some point. Otherwise, we will just be in a version of feudalism where corporate robots monitor our every move and send us to labor camps if we are not sufficiently devoted to their self-assigned divinity.
The Console Wars Ended A Decade Ago…
(And All Industry is DOOMED!)
So, following last week’s Halo: Campaign Evolved reveal, there has been a stupid resurgence of people talking about the console war, a term that I have complicated feelings with. As a kid, I actually found the idea of a console war to be a fun and novel concept, as it was anthropomorphizing companies into factions, having them battle it out like in a cartoon. Autobots versus Decepticons— Nintendo versus PlayStation versus Xbox.
But as I became a teenager, I realized that this was stupid. That games were all that really mattered, and consoles were just specialized computers that play them. But in order to access them, you needed money, and most people could only afford one, maybe two, and rarely three along with game libraries, unless you had a lot of money. Like a thousand bucks to spend on games a year.
Children are poised to get into arguments about what they have, as they want to think what they have is better because, well, it’s all they’ve got. If you get a bunch of little boys together and ask them who’s the fastest, they will, allegedly, all say they are the fastest before running off in a race. It is how child brains work and something that they gradually grow out of as they develop a more refined and mature sense of self. …But that does not stop some people from firmly associating with their favorite things into adulthood. Corporate loyalty has been a way of the world for over a century at this point, we all stink of it. While it could be cute and quaint in a relatively calm world where neoliberalism still ‘worked’ that is not the case nowadays.
Nowadays, corporate control over the world is overbearing, and liking brands so much that you assign your personality to them is… how to phrase it. Dehumanizing, embarrassing, a sign of low intelligence, a sign of low self-respect, a strong indication that someone will do anything for money, and also cringe as fuck. You can like brands, you can enjoy IPs, follow them, buy a bunch of corporate stuff that brings you joy— none of this is inherently bad. But the idea of a console war is a very antiquated, juvenile, concept that, looking back, only made sense as a matter of economic circumstances and demographics.
Games are so expensive, involve so many people, and are competing against so much entertainment that the idea of console exclusives makes less and less sense. Consoles themselves are likely to decline in popularity as new generations are being weened on PC gaming or mobile and just staying there. And I think the idea of exclusive games is, well, a bad one. It encourages people to buy multiple consoles to support software that could, in theory, run on a console they already own. It produces more products, more waste, and eats up more resources as different SKUs need to be produced, optimized, shipped, analyzed, compared, and listed.
Consoles have the benefit of just working out of the gate and having optimized versions of games for them— at least in theory— but the choice of where one wants to play a given game nowadays really comes down to personal preference. Some prefer playing games on handhelds versus a big TV with a controller. Some like to play shooters with their phone— I would call them degenerates, but they aren’t cool enough. Some like playing platformers with a keyboard and mouse, mapping the jump button to right-click— I would call them deranged, but they exist. (Like people who kin with politicians and refer to them in the first-person.)
I genuinely believe that console exclusives, or exclusivity in general, is a net negative. It is bad for exposure, bad for accessibility, bad for business— unless you are a console manufacture who wants a bigger cut— and complicates discussion. I have been a big supporter of games being ported and preserved on any device, just like movies, TV shows, and albums have been for decades. And I believe that games should be no different. Making something a console exclusive might have some vague communal benefit, it might make a person or group feel better by virtue of having exclusive access to something. …But I don’t think those people’s values should be catered to.
I think the console wars had a point. I enjoy hearing a Gen X burnout talking about the dumb schoolyard arguments they had Back in the Day. But we are well in a way past that. If I was writing a book on the history of gaming— Patron-period-com/tf/Natalie— I would say that the idea of console wars basically ended in the summer of 2013. When Microsoft ‘lost’ the console war with their terrible Xbox One reveal in May 2013 while Sony ‘won’ the console war with their E3 2013 showcase of the PlayStation 4. Not because they did anything right, but because they didn’t do something terrible.
Looking back at this whole era of gaming, it seems deranged to think that game consoles were going to become locked down online only boxes. That game discs were going to become little more than one-time license keys that would need to be renewed by authorized retailers. And I don’t think anti-digital preservationists actually recognize how close we came to this situation overflowing. To a future where you could not boot up a PlayStation 4 without connecting to the internet first, where the PS4 servers going down would lead to a hundred million consoles of ewaste.
This future did not pan out, because Sony made a big to-do about how they were not going to prohibit people’s ability to share games, while Xbox only reluctantly backed down. Consumer trust was already broken. My pet Audino, Missy Scrumptious, says that Xbox One was seen as the standard console over PS4 where she grew up— in Lynchville, Klan Kountry— but the fact of the matter is that the PS4 outsold the Xbox One by a factor of two to one. That ratio was maintained through the PS5 generation, and Xbox console sales have seeming cratered as they dropped the idea of exclusive games. Meaning Xbox does not have exclusive games, does not have the most powerful hardware, is more expensive than the competition, and its biggest asset— Game Pass— just went up significantly in price. Meanwhile, PlayStation Plus is just a worse marketed version of Game Pass with a worse library
It’s basically over at this point, and I think the best course of action is for them to basically make a slimmed down Windows OS for running games, license it to manufacturers, and let them make their own damn Xboxes. Put their games on everything and basically leave the hardware business. Well, except for the controllers. I… I still like their controllers.
Akumako: “That’s because you don’t touch other game controllers. You don’t know what you’re missing. You haven’t even opened up your Switch 2 controller because your Switch 1 controller ‘works fine.'”
To me, there is good reason to just accept that Xbox is gone, that the idea of the console war has been well and truly over for a decade. We are just now seeing the long-term ramifications of this as Halo is now coming to PlayStation. However, this is being presented by people as a big, hyperbolic, tide shift. And I feel the need to ask why. Is it because people were seriously buying into the console wars in Lear of our Yord 2025?
Akumako: “That’s an intentional typo by the way.”
No, I don’t think so. Instead, I think what I have been observing is a communal fixation on the past, on preserving the sanctity of division. Sonic being on Nintendo was seen as sick and wrong, but Sega has been a third-party developer for longer than they ever were in the console business. The Sonic IP is going to be 35 next year, and it will have been a quarter of a century since Sonic had a game for a Sega console. Yet some people still weigh their past in such high regard that they think the culture of their childhood is more relevant/important than the culture of today.
They are nostalgic for these childhood rivalries, and like perpetuating them because, well, it makes them feel young. It makes them feel like they are 12 again. It reminds them of when their mom was still alive. When their family still had money. When they didn’t have a gay son or wife whom they hate because nothing is ever good enough for her and they just want to crack open a beer, play video games all night, and then get a blowjob for being the breadwinner.
Akumako: “Your perspective of the world is really quite eerie.”
Eerie, or accurate?
Ugh. The… the underlying takeaway from so much of what I talk about in these Rundowns nowadays harkens back to the same conclusion that I have stated several times, but still struggle to accept. Everything going on in broader ‘gaming culture’ is a mess. Everything going on in broader culture-culture is a mess. Corporations are running the world, fucking around, and throwing people into the fire as they preserve their leaders, executives, and shareholders. People are frustrated by how the world is not what they wanted it to be back when they were younger. The shift in history and likely fall of an ’empire’ is in the process of traumatizing generations of people, as humans struggle to cope and grasp with societal collapse. And there is a persistent fear that genocide could come knocking on the door at any moment unless one aligns themselves with the people who won the genocide machines.
Politics are so vile, corporations are so powerful, and humans have trained themselves to eat all of their slop in a single bowl. Talking to friends, getting the news, watching live feeds of the latest global atrocities, and funny dog videos all exist within the same platform. They are all presented at the same scale, in the same format, with the same font. Lone humans are left feeling powerless against the scale of these threats. The outside world has been made dangerous with militarized police and crackdowns on basic freedoms.
From an economic sense, America has basically a solidified an 80/20 split of economic power, leaving 20%— more like 10% really— in control of 80% of the economy, of every asset in the world. Leaving the remainder of the population to fight over the remaining 20%. Other countries are not doing much better. And as wealth compounds and consolidates and profits only flow upwards to inflate the inflated, any and all sense of meaning starts to feel artificial.
So, people find little arguments, fight over scraps, over ideas, over how to articulate vibes because, well, when your only toy is a rock, it’s in your best interest to believe it’s the best rock in the world.
…Okay, this segment’s done. Rundown’s done. Go look at something else. I’ve got a flight to prepare for.
Animal Crossed To The Next Generation
(Animal Crossing: New Horizons Gets An Update After Over 4 Years)
For as good as the Switch generation has been for Nintendo, one of the more commonly cited grievances with their lineup was their handling of their premiere pandemic game— pandemge if you will, and I do. Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) was a magical game for many people, allowing them to connect with their friends and manufacture a virtual world. …A virtual world with a foundation of arbitrary mechanics and guff that exists to obfuscate the game elements under a thin veneer of realism.
There is a lot of negative things one can say about New Horizons. How it lacked expected features out of the gate. How slow its DLC rollout was. How they offered a paid expansion for what should have been DLC. And how, despite having the opportunity to turn this into the best Animal Crossing ever, they never made the game as good as it could have been. I have noticed a lot of negativity being expressed towards this game in the past year or two— probably part of the nostalgia cycle.
New release is GOAT, is praised for a few years, then the ‘it was mid and shit and gay and r-slur’ crowd emerges in the following years, as 12-year-olds become teenagers. Then people realize that, no, this game is good, actually, it is reassessed, and is seen as a bright spot or underappreciated gem. Because the 12-year-olds who played the game are now 22-year-olds adults. And then the game goes in and out of nostalgia cycles as it becomes retro ephemera.
Akumako: “Oi! Focus!”
Right, right. Ahem. It took over a year before New Horizons received a substantial bit of truly new content, and updates by in large stopped in late 2021, less than two years after launch. Which, for a modern online game, is quite bad. After this, people accepted that the game was just done, that this was a missed opportunity, and just wrote off the game as something that was fun, knowing they would need to wait at least five years before a new Animal Crossing experience.
However, apropos of nothing, Nintendo announced that they are releasing a free update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons and a Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game. This sounds like a great opportunity to revitalize the game and get people back to their islands, riding off of a 5/6 year nostalgia cycle… But what they’re adding does not feel like an update years in the making. It feels like a quarterly update to a semi-live-service.
- There’s a new hotel environment where players can decorate guest rooms, invite friends over to explore, try on costumes, and access a new scattering of outfits and furniture.
- The item inventory has been expanded from an arbitrary 5,000 to a less arbitrary 9,000.
- Mister Resetti returns as an NPC that exists to clean up furniture, weeds, and flowers in a defined space on the island, but in a way that seems overly complicated when… this could just be done via a menu. Most sane game developers would just do it via a menu.
- Going to sleep can now send the player to Slumber Island, a secondary environment where the player, their friends, and their animal inmates can all join them in creating a new playplace without terraforming the main island. …I assumed this feature was already in the game, as it is so deeply logical, but it isn’t. No wonder people thought the post-launch support was half-baked.
- Old Nintendo consoles are being added as furniture that the player can interact with to play Nintendo Switch Online games— in case you didn’t want to close the game to play Ice Climbers.
- As part of an odd brand crossover, the game is making getting prefab LEGO furnishings, so you can set up a LEGO workbench or a LEGO sofa in a room with LEGO wallpaper. It’s all prefab, nothing you can build yourself, and while it is a cute addition that will appeal to, like, 17% of the first world population, it’s also very random.
- Amiibo support was added for specific Splatoon and Zelda Amiibo, which causes certain NPCs based on their respective series to come visit you and, potentially, become animal villagers. They also unlock various bits of furniture as well, so if you want a Triforce in your house, you gotta pay $20 or $30 for a darn plastic toy. Thanks Nintendo.
- The Nintendo Switch 2 Edition upgrade will cost $5 and comes with a scattering of quality of life improvements.
- The game to run at higher resolutions, going up to a blistering 4K in TV mode, which is legit impressive.
- Up to 12 players visit an island at the same time, up from the 8 players allowed on Switch 1. Mouse controls can be used to move furniture and design patterns, which is nice.
- CameraPlay support was added, so you can look at a crummy webcam feed of your friends’ poorly lit faces, how erotic.
- A microphone item was added to locate villagers, activated by speaking into the Switch 2’s microphone. Because I guess adding icons to the map would shatter immersion.
None of these are bad changes— except for the Amiibo crap— but there’s also nothing here that couldn’t have been added… two or three years ago. It feels like this update was half-finished, sat on the shelf, and Nintendo only chose to push it through now. But why choose to push this out now? Why are these updates not coming out until January 15, 2026? Who announces a free feature update like this MONTHS before it actually comes out? Why wasn’t this ready for release on or around launch day of the Switch 2?
It makes no sense to me, but more than anything, I have to wonder if this will bring people back to New Horizons, a game they already played for potentially hundreds of hours. It’s not coming out before the holidays, it’s near the sixth anniversary of the game’s launch, and is coming out of nowhere, after the game was written off as a deadge (dead game). It’s another Nintendo WTF moment, and I… I keep getting befuddled by those.
Progress Report 2025-11-02
Yeah, it’s confusing. But if you follow the money, you can find what is actually going on. A bunch of investors are making money, caring about the short-term, and doing well, but the long-term looks bleak. Investors only need to wait a year and one day in order to get long-term capital gains and coveted 23.8% capital gains. Except they avoid those by capital loss harvesting. Taxes fucking suck because you can game the system if you have a lot of money necessary to choose the flavor of your income.
The world is burning, but we’re gonna have trillionaires within the decade unless somebody DOES SOMETHING!
Also, lol
lmao even
Coffeezilla actually did a very topical video about sports betting— something I failed to address in my preamble, despite being very relevant. And it did a better job of illustrating how Americans are becoming inundated, if not obsessed, with gambling as a means of getting by in life. Not updating my preamble, because I don’t care enough to rewrite a topical opinion piece.
2025-10-26: Mostly finished my time with PLZA and realized that I had to play and finish FlipWitch sometime THIS WEEK. So I started a second playthrough of that.
2025-10-27: Played more FlipWitch and worked on the 2,500 word preamble about Counter-Strike, but it got too long so I cut 300 redundant words from it, as 2 AM brain is not the most punctual or erudite or sensible.
2025-10-28: Finished FlipWitch, took nine hours, and it matches what I remember of the game, but now I have more recent memories and over 800 screenshots, because I am nuts like that. Wrote the 750 word Amazon bit, which took me a weirdly long amount of time to write, and I also cut like 300 words as I kept on tangenting. Orz.
2025-10-29: Bad day for focusing on stuff, but I fleshed out the Amazon bit by 900 words, did a 1,800 word console war bit, made some cheap header images, and edited this fish. Also wrote scattered segments for the PLZA review, roughly 2,000 words, I think. I was struggling to organize my thoughts for it. Between trip stuff, talking to friends, and helping my mother with work, I was just flighty. So I FINALLY started cleaning up my image collection.
2025-10-30: Added 1,000 word Animal Crossing bit. Wrote, I dunno, maybe 1,700 words for PLZA before Cassie woke up and the Shrine started poppin’ off.
2025-10-31: Cassie kept me at the edge of my seat for a good chunk of the day, so I was not the most focused. But I managed to write… 4,200 words for the PLZA review. Need to redo part 1, add a bit for mega/plus moves, and write a conclusion, as I think I have said most of what I wanted. Probably going to watch Cecilily’s review before the conclusion. SO MANY people uploaded 30 to 150 minute videos today, it was bonkers. Don Shnack, Mandalore Gaming, Ross Scott, Cecilily, LEMMiNO, Nil Nilgiree. Craziness. STOP IT! Go to jail and get turned into a battery for the military industrial complex. Also, tried doing some filing, but there is just too much stuff, dude. Too much stuff in life.
2025-11-01: Added like a thousand words to the PLZA review, getting a solid almost 8,000 word draft together, but I wanted to hold off on editing it. I got my stuff ready for my big trip, did some outstanding chores, FINALLY finished cleaning up my SORTME art folder after three months, and read some TSF comics, as I won’t be bringing those on my trip. I wanted to edit the PLZA review, but I kept talking to my girls on Disco, so I only got like halfway through. I’ll wrap it up tomorrow and get it ret-2-go for November 4th.