Rundown (2/22/2026) Diversify Your Formative Experiences

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This Week’s Topics:

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Diversify Your Formative Experiences

Let’s see, topic, topic… oh, here’s something I’ve been thinking about periodically for a few months.

At the tail end of last week, there was a story going around about how the younger generation of Japanese game likers are not attached to game series like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, preferring the likes of Pokémon. With the popular theory of this discourse being that this might be due to how dev cycles take as long as one’s childhood. If it takes five years for a sequel to be made, then someone who played the original at age 10 would be 15 by the time the sequel comes out, and their tastes might have evolved.

However, a series with routine releases, comparable to the rapid release schedule of Final Fantasy from 1987 to 2001 and Dragon Quest from 1986 to 1995, better matches the timescale of a child. This frequency allows these games, plural, to be part of their childhood, and gives them an opportunity to grow alongside these games. They get to see them, their worlds, and their approaches change as they themselves go about their formative years.

This is something that I have talked about before. Hell, I’ve talked about it with Final Fantasy in particular. I have a habit of bemoaning the lost art of a two year dev cycle and trilogies contained in a single console generation. You could even say I HATE how the long waits between releases can make it hard to get excited about the next part in a story. I’ve questioned if the idea of a game series is something that does not register with children of the modern era, and I think there is some merit in that.

As a thirtysomething shut-in who almost exclusively interacts with people in their 20s and 60s I have no idea what the youth are currently fixated on. Hell, I had no idea what they were fixated on when I WAS a youth. But by the numbers, I’m assuming that they are highly likely to be invested in games that can be played on their phones, that can be downloaded for free, and that match the schedule of a child. Basically, online free-to-play games like Fortnite, Roblox, any number of gacha games, and the cultural institution of Minecraft. These games always have something happening, always have something for players to do, are subject to some of the largest fandoms around, and allow someone to be part of an in-group by playing and by being passionate about them.

These games have been around long enough to last the bulk of a generation’s childhood, and have largely functioned as their childhood games. Fortnite is going to celebrate its ninth anniversary this summer. Halo‘s original run lasted from 2001 to 2010, and the first six Dragon Quests were produced within about nine years. Genshin Impact has been around for 5.5 years, which used to be a console generation. Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX, X, and X-2 all came out within 6 years. If you count Minecraft as being as old as its alpha, it is older than most high schoolers.

This concerned me previously, but I undercut my concerns, wondering if this is merely a different type of connection. That, perhaps, the youths are just viewing media differently. As something that is always around in this always online world, and a way for them to see a game grow with them in a more direct manner. Not reiterated on or reimagined with a sequel or spin-off, just built upon.

…Over the past few months, I have changed my tune and realized that this is just bad, actually.

Now, I try to not dwell too much on my childhood, but it was where the foundation of my sense of self was originated, my likes, preferences, and assorted quirks. Which are all formed by, well, formative experiences. What you do, what you’re told, how your parents raise you, how your teachers teach you. Children are basically sponges that suck up information. They don’t always do this in the way you assume, but they mimic what they see and are the product of what they read, do, and consume as children of an era where media is widely accessible. Which, for the record, is a pretty modern concept.

As such, I think that it is necessary that children are given a wide spectrum of experiences that they can use to form a foundational sense of self. These things spur their imaginations and make them more well-rounded persons, more curious, and more capable of contributing to the world at large. (Notice how I didn’t say the economy or workforce, as those are just social constructs created for the benefits of governments and capitalists.)

These experiences come in many forms. Friendships, seeing places, being given a holistic education that is committed to murky details, a diverse media diet of music, reading, shows, film, and games. These things, and countless others— like being around people of different races, classes, cultural backgrounds, proficiencies— help make a person into who they are. They forge their values, perspectives, and generally make them better people.

Furthermore, I think it is important that these formative years contain a balance of repetition and new experiences.

You give a child a movie, and they will rewatch it a dozen time. You give a child a TV series they love, they will rewatch that a dozen times. You give them songs they love, they may listen to them hundreds of times. You give them a game they can play with their friends, and… you get the picture. This repetition, this continued engagement, is a necessary part of a child learning how to understand something, how it works. Even if they are not able to articulate why they like it, repetition bakes in certain memories, experiences, and traits into a child’s mind, and helps them lay this foundation. There is a limit to this— doing math minutes every day for five years stops doing anything after a point, and watching something for the 51st time is probably not going to unlock some new revelation within a child.

I also believe it is of vital importance that children constantly challenge themselves with new experiences. Reading the works of different authors, experiencing different genres, different eras of creations, even if they whine about not wanting to watch “movies from the before times.” And especially things that do not all nicely fit into any singular groupings. Some of the most annoying, unimaginative people around are those who base their entire gaming lives around a couple of big IPs, and it boils my piss. It’s okay to have preferences, but if you only see variants of the same shit ad nauseam, you are never going to learn or grow, your mind won’t realize what can be. (I’m really glad that I had that Mecha Yuri and The Worst arc.)

Shifting specifically to video games, I think it is important to encounter new presentation styles, new control schemes, new ways that a game can be structured or laid out, and to see how games evolved over time. I was adamant about doing this back in the early days of Natalie.TF, where I just reviewed and played whatever caught my fascination at the time. It challenged me, forced me to try new things, and I look back at this time, even though it took place in my late teens and early 20s, as being formative to my tastes and understanding. I understand games better, understand the creative process better in general, because I played these titles, and I like to think that I carry bits and pieces of them with me.

I don’t have many regrets in my life, but one of the biggest ones is not taking in enough media as a child. Back then, I focused on a few pillars and did not force myself to get things I found impenetrable. I just bounced off them and went back to things I knew and understood. However, I wish I did. Then I would have so many experiences to fall back on, things added to my tapestry of understanding.

The reason I believe a diverse media diet is so important for young people is the fact that they are at the beginning of their lives. Precisely because what they experience in their early life will be playing on loop for their whole damn life. One’s past is the foundation of their sense of self. The nature of memory causes the past to compound upon itself, with memories layering upon each other and what someone did as a child having an increasingly evident impact on their personhood as time marches on. So try to make sure you have some good ones, weird ones, mid ones, shit ones, dope ones, and ones full of FEELINGS.

Not just because it will help one as a creator, a critic, or just understand a given medium, but because seeing different ways of doing things is… just good for the brain in general. It gives one more to consider, more to reflect on, and a broader understanding of people in general. If you do it while you are young, while you have oodles of free time and few commitments, then you will have a library of memories to look back on. …And I think that if someone does not do that, just has a relative handful of pieces of media they engage with, they will become a boring and uncreative person who is simply not familiar with things.

Which is a problem, as the only thing worse than being a bad person is being someone with nothing interesting to say and no damn personality.

.hack//Z.E.R.O. Announced
(But is This the Way Dot Hack Should Return?)

Continuing off the last topic, there are countless games I wish that I had the privilege of experiencing as an adolescent… and Dot Hack is one of them. Beginning in 2002, Dot Hack was a pretty expansive multimedia venture by Bandai, Tail Concerto (1998) developer CyberConnect2, and anime production house Bee Train, whose early years were defined by video game adaptations.

Dot Hack is set in a speculative future 2010 where the internet was closed to the general public following a highly destructive computer virus. This basically forced the internet to be reset, with the rollout being slow, the internet being smaller, and games being a rarity. This change after the release of a hugely popular MMO known as The World, which could be thought of as a predictive analog of World of Warcraft (2004) in terms of popularity. However, not all is well in The World, with players winding up comatose through mysterious means, and it is up to a cluster of veteran players and newbies to get to the bottom of this mystery.

The series was hugely influential to any trapped in an MMO genre later popularized by Sword Art Online (2012), and was part of a true multimedia blitz. The series technically began with the anime series .hack//Sign, which had the honor of airing on the American anime block Toonami in 2003, making it probably the best known incarnation of the series. Though, fans tend to primarily consider it a video game series, and primarily focus on CyberConnect2’s four volume RPG saga, released from June 2002 to April 2003. These volumes, Infection, Mutation, Outbreak, and Quarantine were effectively lengthy episodes of a veritable super RPG that was mostly remarkable for its storytelling. As games, they recycled assets, systems, and general stuff like crazy, only featuring minor improvements with each installment, and were based on MMOs of the era, for worse or… for worst.

It was a daunting journey, costing $200, if you were lucky, and lasting 60 to 100 hours. It was a kind of crummy deal in that respect, but I can see that this was necessary to make back its budget in an era of physical releases. There was simply not a better way to distribute what was effectively an early example of an episodic game. I’d say it was an impressive feat, an innovative early example of episodic gaming, and spoke to the gusto of the developers. Except this series has been a royal pain to collect because of this approach to production, and part four was hard to find, even in 2004.

However, the series was more than just the RPGs, even if that was the main pillar. There were spin-off titles, manga, novels, additional anime series, and lord knows how much merch. This allowed the series to expand to new people, but also made the act of keeping up with it rather difficult, especially with only certain things getting the localization treatment.

This scale issue was compounded when the series began its second wave in 2006 with .hack//G.U. A trilogy of games that functioned as a sequel to the original quadrilogy, featuring new characters, a new look to The World, and a new jumping on points for fans. Unlike the original run of games, which never left the sunny shores of the PS2, the G.U. titles received a remaster with .hack//G.U. Last Recode (2017). A package that made some contentious changes to the look of the original games and featured a short epilogue to wrap up the story being told with a neat little bow. Also, the G.U. games were not as impactful. They originally did not come out in Europe, did not hit North America until October 2006, less than a month before the PS3 came out, and had a small production run.

Later, 2010’s .hack//Link was an attempt at establishing a third generation for the series, with another time skip, another character refresh, and diving deeper into the series’ underlying lore. Except there was a slight problem. The PS2 was dead, development moved to the PSP, and this was in the era where publishers were just not localizing PSP games due to widespread piracy.

Any niche text-heavy title was fighting an uphill battle, and oodles of games were simply not localized. There were not enough translators, not enough buyers, and that did not change until the Vita, where Vita owners had incredibly high software attach rates and Vita ports to PC became a popular indulgence later in the system’s life.

Anyway, Link is largely ignored in the Western fanbase as they never got to play it. The most they got was a manga. Supposedly the story was good, for those who could read it, but the gameplay was trousers. This would mark the last Dot Hack title until .hack//Versus (2012), a PS3 crossover fighting game that was meant to celebrate the series. It’s an 3D arena fighter from the Naruto Ninja Storm devs, probably using the same engine, that tries to look more like SoulCalibur than any of the prior games, giving it an uncanny yet distinctly seventh gen look.

I’m sure it was a pretty fun time for fans, but unfortunately it was only released as a bonus with .hack//The Movie (2012). The Movie, which was NOT the first Dot Hack film, was actually a sequel to Link, but… I don’t believe it was ever localized. Ouch. …AND there was also an OVA exclusive to this game/movie Blu-Ray disc? What? Who comes up with this CRAP?

There was an attempt to revive the series via mobile games, namely through something called New World Vol. 1: Maiden of Silver Tears, but… I can clearly look at that and say it’s not Dot Hack. It’s just some generic fantasy mobile guff, and I’m glad it died in less than a year. It freed up resources to work on literally anything else.

After the release of the G.U. remaster in 2017, the series was put on the backburner as CyberConnect2 was in the middle of a transition. They tried to expand into the international market by opening up a Montreal subsidiary, tried to self-publish their own titles, and launched various ventures including the Trilogy of Vengeance. I’d get into their history at the time, but I already did that back in April 2023. Basically, they were taken off of Final Fantasy VII Remake, the Naturo Ninja Storm series came to an end, and the studio was running around for direction. They started work on Dragon Ball: Deadname to pay the bills, and their attempts at becoming an international game developer largely failed, closing their Montreal office in 2023.

Now, upon saying ALL of that… I would not even think about giving Dot Hack another shake as a series. From its very conception, it was based in the culture of early MMOs in Japan. Stuff like EverQuest, Ultima Online, and probably a LOT of Phantasy Star Online. Fundamentally, it was based on the idea of accessing a digital world that felt like another world, a parallel reality, that had ties to the real world. There was no way of knowing who someone was interacting with, there was no social media, no major online account system, and people generally did not even upload photos of themselves.

I would LOVE to see the franchise get a collection, or perhaps interactive museum, containing everything the franchise was. All of which could be contained in a single package so that future generations could use it as a reference point for not only a multimedia project, but a time in online culture. Though, that seems like a bit much to ask. Hell, a remaster of the original four games for PS4 was too much to ask!

However, I also believe, on a foundational level, that the appeal, allure, and culture of Dot Hack, dates back to the early internet, and that the franchise would not read correctly if contextualized around the modern internet. Because the nature of the internet is inherently different. There no longer is a divide between the internet and real life. News is delivered via social media, people connect with friends through texts and DMs, orders are placed online, like a billion people work on the internet. The internet is a tool for politicians to be elected, the most powerful companies in the world are all internet companies. And those without online accounts, email, and smartphones are effectively second-class citizens.

The idea of calling an MMO “The World” no longer registers the same way, because the internet is the real world. Without the internet, the entire global distribution and trade system would collapse, and people would not get the things they need to live. I have talked about this before, and I stand by it. The concept of the internet going away was conceivable in 2002, but it’s not in a post-pandemic world. The foundational people and companies of the internet are largely either dead or have turned to evil. The techno optimism of the 2000s is DEAD. While techno feudalism and techno fascism are a FACT of living in the 2020s.

While we depend on the internet, it lacks the majesty, wonder, and grandeur that it once had, and this majesty is essential to the ethos of Dot Hack. Hell, I would argue that we largely lack the same digital third spaces represented by these games. Even THOSE have been monetized so much that they cease to feel like spaces, and more like transactions where entertainment is bought with dollars.

To me, Dot Hack did not make sense in a post iPhone world, it did not make sense in a post Trump 1.0 world, and it does not make sense in a post COVID world. The internet culture has changed. Gaming culture has changed. MMOs are now mostly free-to-play live services with bespoke story campaigns. I think this idea only works in its own alternate universe with a different internet, rather than something set around the modern day.

Which brings us to the actual topic. .hack//Z.E.R.O. was announced as a reboot of the series that will reprise familiar faces, but rebuilt from the ground up after ten years of planning. The title is fully developed and self-published by CyberConnect2, merely licensed from Bandai Namco, the IP holder, meaning they have basically no oversight. So, what are they proposing to deliver? An action RPG that takes the characters from the original run and transposes them… ten years in the future from now.

…What? But… no, that does not work. Even if the internet did indeed go offline, and was rebooted, it is too important for it to not cause societal collapse and lead people to develop genuine madness. The whole concept of computer viruses does not register in the 2020s like it did in 2002. You gotta worry about scammers, pig butcherers, and malicious PDFs now than you do about trojan viruses. The idea of an AI hiding within a game, a core concept behind Dot Hack, no longer reads the same if it is set in the modern future. I have no idea how this concept could work in a modern setting, but this is something the developers seem inclined to explore.

I would be very concerned about this concept… if not for the background I just gave. CyberConnect2 is a studio of passionate artist and game developers, not a bunch of corporate suits. They are funding this out of their own pockets when they could be taking more licensed jobs at Bandai Namco. And if you look at the list of names provided in the vague yet stylish teaser trailer, you will see plenty of people who worked on the original Dot Hack series. This is a dream the developers have been building towards for a decade, and while I disagree with this idea on a surface level, I am typically glad to be proven wrong. Well, I guess it depends on how I’m proven wrong.

Maybe their plans on incorporating more of the real world, rather than just the emails and browser of the original, will allow them to tell a new type of story. Maybe I’m just not seeing the vision. I’m just offering my initial reaction to a teaser along with my usual history lesson.

No dates or platforms were announced for .hack//Z.E.R.O., but if I know anything about CyberConnect2, it’s that they put their damn hearts into everything they do.

…Also, just to clarify, but I have never touched a Dot Hack thing in my life. Everything I know from various info dives, references, brief splurges from fans, and these two great retrospectives from Jerrrdan.

Instead, the closest I ever got to Dot Hack was Cristopher Nioshi’s TVTome Adventures, which was my big sprawling adolescent anime. It was a sprite-based Flash series about a bunch of teens and twentysomethings playing an MMO, made by some guy in high school who wanted to make his own anime with crude sprite edits and teenage notebook drawings.

I’ve never revisited it, and I probably shouldn’t, as I’m sure it does not hold up, but it was a very informative work for me. It inspired me as a creator, and is one of the many things that leads to my complex about producing things too slowly or always being four years behind. If a damn high schooler could make a 74 episode anime series and the most I could do in that time was write three novellas, I was clearly not doing enough and waited WAY too late to start being a real creative.

Niosi also rebooted the series with Terrain of Magical Expertise, but… I did not like that as much. It was too streamlined and I just did not like what they did with the second season. Especially the redesigns. I also haven’t played the game though, and I probably should.

The State of Video Gaming in 2026
(Matthew Ball is BACK!)

OH SNAP! It’s finally here! Last year, Matthew Ball released a succinct presentation that went over the current state of the video game industry, why things were like this, what problems it’s facing, and where the minds of publishers are at the moment. It was an eye-opening piece for me, thorough and thoughtful, shaping how I view the games industry and setting a groundwork I’ve directly or implicitly referenced throughout the past year. This put Ball on the list for me, and this past week he released The State of Video Gaming in 2026.

As with the 2025 edition, I would strongly recommend going through this whole presentation, as it will help you understand what is going on with the games industry as a whole, because there is SO MUCH to unpack here. Let’s start with the basics:

After doubts of future growth, the worldwide spending on video games has gone up by over $10 billion, reaching an all-time high of $195.6 billion. This growth is reflected in PC, mobile, and consoles, but mobile has remained the dominant force in gaming.

Venture capital and private equity funding in gaming has continued to decline from its enormous spike in 2021 and 2022, falling another 55% compared to 2024 and reaching pre-pandemic levels. Though, if one considers inflation, rising dev costs, and rising costs of living, they might be worse.

The industry is seeing widespread collapse across various sectors, with major productions being canceled years after their public announcements, and layoffs continuing to remove people from the industry, with Ball citing 9,200 reported layoffs in 2025.

The layoffs from 2022 to 2025 have highly affected the North American games industry, with 43% being from California alone, and a total of 61% of all layoffs coming from North America. While there have been job hirings, 78% of these roles are opening up outside of North America, and a growing number of these roles are for outsourcing studios, who provide lower costs and reduced commitment costs.

The profit margins on games for “standalone gamemakers” that are not owned by platform holders outside China have fallen to worse than pre-pandemic levels and have largely plateaued over the past four years. The math here is a bit limited, as Ball is only pulling this data from 33 sources with public income statements. However, the fact that major publishers are less profitable than they were in 2019, despite customer spending having exploded by 40%, from $140 billion to $195 billion, is plenty concerning.

China has continued to become a dominant force in gaming, continuing to capture a disproportionate amount of annual growth. While only 20% of global spending is attributed to the Chinese market in 2025, that number has been increasing each year, and is showing no signs of stopping. Chinese spenders have continued to spend the overwhelming majority of their money on Chinese games, with 84% going to domestic products and only 16% going to foreign titles. Though this figure represents a notable increase compared to 2019, where less than 11% of Chinese spending went to foreign titles in 2019.

Taking all of these factors together, it’s easy to conclude that, while the Chinese market might seem small, it is growing constantly, and is a market well worth targeting with just about any title, indie or AAA. For years, I have been seeing stories about such and such non-China game doing particularly well in China, or it being a key market for such and such game. The most recent of which would be Mewgenics, Edmund McMillen’s cat-based tactical eugenics themed RPG, was doing very well in China despite not having any Chinese localization. Somebody made a crappy translation using AI, and that was good enough for a lot of people!

Worldwide spending on “console video game content” has increased significantly year-over-year, surpassing its 2020 pandemic peak. Yet looking at the breakdown of spending shows that a growing percentage of people are not buying games, DLC, or even microtransactions, but are instead subscribing to services. After a 2020 and 2021 peak, console games sales have stagnated, only being boosted by rising subscription revenue and the Chinese sales share quadrupling from $0.3 billion in 2020 to $1.2 billion in 2025.

Meanwhile, worldwide spending on PC content is simply going up. 2025 outdid 2024 by 7.6%, and that is NOT just because of an increase in Chinese spending, with the entire sector having seen 30% growth since 2020. However, the non-China changes in the console and PC sectors largely offset each other. While there has been some general growth, we are ultimately coming off of four year of market stagnation.

This cluster went from $63.5 billion to $69.9 billion in five years, and while that does represent 10% growth, basically everything went up more than 10% in price from 2020 to 2025. Meaning, if you take China out of the picture, the PC and console games industry is just stagnating. Not in decline, but not seeing net growth either.

Despite this, the sheer number of games being released has reached unreasonable levels. PlayStation releases went from roughly 600 in 2020 to 2,400 in 2025, creating a lot of noise that, by in large, has not affected the games people are spending most of their time with.

Five games on console eat up roughly 45% of all playtime: Call of Duty, EA Football, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto V, and NBA 2K. Another five games eat up about 35% of all playtime on PC: Counter-Strike, Fortnite, League of Legends, Minecraft, and Roblox. With both sectors having a 10% to 15% buffer of the next five biggest games, which fluctuate year over year.

However, they are rarely new games, as people still are not playing new games. From 2021 to 2024, only 4% to 7% of PC, PlayStation, and Xbox playtime was spent on new releases. And, beginning in 2023, over 70% of all playtime was spent on games that are 6-years-old or older. This sounds bad, and it is, but it requires an asterisk to clarify what Ball considers an old game, as he views annual releases as old games. So Call of Duty, EA Football, and NBA 2K are not considered new releases. Otherwise, these numbers would not make sense. …That still doesn’t make them any better, knowing that every new game released this year will only account for about 7% of overall gaming playtime.

Jumping ahead a bit, despite the continued domination of these super games, gaming is either stagnating or losing players across many key markets. The “Mature Market 8” as Ball calls them. A lot of people started or got back into gaming after the pandemic, yet across various countries and surveys, the industry has regressed to where it was in 2018/2019. New people are not getting into gaming, which limits the potential for the industry to grow.

This means the only avenue for continued growth, as demanded by shareholders and capital, is to further monetize the people who are still gaming. These players are already committed to existing games, meaning that the industry is effectively fighting within itself for people’s time and money. So if it seems that games are getting greedier with your time or money, or seem like they don’t respect your time, this may be one reason why.

Mobile game downloads are down and look to only be depleting. Mobile gaming played hours are stagnant in the US, same with gaming stream viewership. And while there are some pockets of growth, like the console/PC space in the UK— which just recently lost is last remaining nationwide game store, Game, it looks like an unattractive market to any investor. Especially when you compare it to something boring yet profitable, like the S&P 500.

This all begs the question of why is gaming not growing, where are these lapsed players, these lost hours, going? Well, they’re going to other forms of interactive engagement: Casino gaming, sports gambling, social video, creator pornography, chatting with an AI, crypto, prediction markets, and iGaming. All things that should have harsher regulations on them— except for porn, porn is fine— but don’t specifically because they are ways for the wealthy to siphon money away from the working poor in order to push them further into poverty. …My words, not Ball’s.

In the US, social media (specifically TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook) has peaked at 500 million hours per day, meaning the average American spends about 88 minutes on social media per day.

Since 2021, user spending on OnlyFans has increased by over a billion dollars every year, with user spending exploding from half a billion dollars in 2019 to almost $8 billion in 2025.

Crypto and memecoin activity and spending has been exploding since 2024. (Which is good for me, as I am a crypto tax accountant. If you need help with your crypto taxes, email me at tax at Natalie.TF.)

CRYPTO PEOPLE! HIRE ME AND I WILL DO YOUR TAXES!

AI apps, by virtue of their ability to create images, roleplay, produce erotica, and engage with a user, have spiked in popularity through 2025, seeing nearly a BILLION downloads in Q4 2025. So, uh, anybody who says that AI is deeply unpopular is wrong.

Prediction Markets, where users can bet on real world events through the act of gambling, have blown up in popularity in the final months of 2025, reaching over 140 million bets in Q4 2025.

Sports gambling in the US has dramatically grown since the start of the pandemic, soaring as much as 35% a year. Though, this is not just a US problem, as the rest of the world has more than doubled their sports betting activity since 2020. Only looking at the markets where sports betting is legal, it has become a $69.7 billion industry. …Actually, no, it’s MORE than that, the figure cited here is Gross Gaming Revenue, which is wagers less the amounts paid out as winnings. So this is what the sports gambling platforms are pocketing.

iGaming, a term for virtual casinos where players can “cash out” real money, has been undergoing a predictable rise. Despite only being legal in seven American States, it has ballooned from a half billion dollar industry in 2019 to $10.9 billion industry in 2025. While the rest of the world is, similarly, undergoing a massive surge in iGaming. The global iGaming market, measured by Gross Gaming Revenue, was only $11.3 billion in 2019, yet has grown to $54 billion in 2025.

Side note, as Ball is not super clear about this, but iGaming is counted as something separate from the video game industry, and is not part of the $195 billion chart this presentation began with. (Thank Cripes…) However, mobile casino gaming is considered part of the main $195 billion figure, where it has taken up a significant chunk of all mobile spending. A chunk that appears to be stagnating, and for pretty obvious reasons. Why would you play a casino game where you cannot cash out?

Focusing on data pertaining to Americans, Ball makes a point to stress that these alternative interactive recreational activities are not widespread across the general population. iGaming, crypto, prediction markets, OnlyFans, these platforms tend to have a lot of overlap, and no single one of these markets affect more than 10% of Americans. Seemingly most people don’t mess around with this crap, with “only” 30 million Americans having a sports betting app.

…Unsurprisingly, this cluster of users are disproportionately young men, ages 18 to 34. The prime demographic for video games for the past, say, 30 years. This demographic is only 15% of the US adult population, but account for 21% of mobile gamers and 29% of PC and console gamers. They also make up of 49% of all crypto trades (anecdotally, this is accurate), 44% of creator porn users (ditto), 43% of prediction market users, 37% of AI companionship users, and 37% of iGaming players.

Ignore the typo. Men 18-45 should be Men 18-34. Very easy mistake to make.

Young men are being lured away not by short-form video, as they only represent like 18% of the adult user base. Instead, their time, attention, and focus is being lured away by gambling, porn, and AI girlfriends. Now, this is not a problem just affecting young men. Ball did not break down the 35-54 demographic by gender, but I’m guessing that most of them are men. But this does mean that all of these interactive vices are taking away time that could be spent playing video games.

Also, survey results found that American adults are playing fewer games than they used to, with 59% of Americans who play video games saying they’ve cut back. It’s not just men, it’s not just young people, it’s everyone!

So, uh, gaming is just FUCKED, right? People who would have been gaming are off doing other stuff, things with higher engagement rates, stuff that promise arousal, cheap thrills, and even financial gains. With fewer game players in the market, there is less time and money to go around. While those who are still around and do play on PC and consoles are spending half their time on the same 15-ish games all the time, half of which are free-to-play titles.

Rather than reinforce a doomed narrative— playing the optimist— Ball then proceeds to dig up five growth areas in video games.

Gaming in “Mature Market 8″— US, Canada, France, Germany, UK, South Korea, Japan, and Italy— has stagnated or declined, but it is still growing in China, and in the rest of the world (ROW). ROW went from being only $22 billion of the market in 2019 to $40 billion in 2024, while China actually exceeded their 2021 peak, reaching $48 billion in global spending.

More people in China are picking up consoles and moving over to PC gaming, which I speculate is a response to a rise in third-person action games, i.e. Genshin-likes and Wukong-likes.

Mexico is seeing strides in gaming participation, growing from about 53% to 61% over the span of a decade, thanks mostly to mobile, but PC and console both went up about 2% of the general population in the same time. The country even surpassed Italy in terms of spending, which is not that surprising when your population is more than twice as big.

Brazil is a positively HUGE market for video games— always has been— seeing a staggering 83% gaming participation rate in 2025, with 40% playing mobile games, 25% playing console games, and 20% playing PC. FINALLY! A country full of gamers! …Except they are kinda a bunch of cheap asses when you remember their population is over 200 million, yet overall spending on gaming is under $2 billion. Guess that what happens when people grab Master Systems from shops and $1 games from markets for… decades.

Spain rose up to 60% player participation rate in 2025, with mobile and console both undergoing huge spikes, while PC gaming trails along at 25%.

Hell, this trend is similar across a bunch of SEA and MENA. While they are not big spenders— and mostly consist of mobile gamers— it is a sign that gaming does have room to grow, and become something that MOST people do.

Admittedly, the vast majority of players in these markets are using low-end or mid-end phones, but I’d argue that is a great sign. Historically, one of the biggest barriers to gaming for the longest time was getting cheap electronics in people’s hands, stuff they could use even if power went off in their city, and… phones are precisely that.

After some stuff I’m skipping over, Ball concludes on an interesting point. He illustrates that while layoffs mostly affected the North American industry, global job openings more closely match global revenues. 25% of global games job openings are in China, which makes sense as China is where 20% of games revenue is. 23% of openings being in North America because North America is where 31% of revenues come from. I mean, it makes sense to me, as I expect that number to go down.

In fact, one could say the layoffs are partially a response to regional market shifts, with the North American market maturing and other markets emerging. These emerging markets want to play games created by people in their region, who are better able to cater to local tastes. A shift that makes a lot of sense. If gaming is global, then why wouldn’t the development studios be global?

Next, Ball breaches a topic that I genuinely have no real experience with. In-app ads. This entire concept of ads in a game is something I only know about from secondhand accounts and examples I have seen. I only got a smartphone in 2019, mostly played Dragalia Lost, and never had to sit through an ad. Hell, I barely encounter ads in my day-to-day life of using the internet thanks to uBlock Origin and YouTube Premium. (I disable my ad blocker when visiting most sites I visit regularly, and, uh, I would rather just give them five bucks for them to turn the ads off for a year or three.)

Ball has NOT been talking about spending thus far, not ad revenue, which represents a dramatic source of revenue for games across the board. In non-China markets alone, in-app ads generated over $67 billion for the games industry. That is almost as big as PC and console spending. If one include ads, the non-China games industry brings in over $210 billion in revenue. Though, not all ad revenue of this is net revenue.

Of the $67 billion in ad revenue, $15 billion is collected by ad exchanges. And much of the reason ad revenue is so high in the first place is because mobile games are spending $24 billion on “user acquisition.” Paying to advertise their games to people, often inside other games.

Even considering this, ad revenue is still a significant growth sector in gaming. Pretty much biggest areas of growth in 2025, going from $57 billion to $67 billion (excluding China). And with the global economy looking pretty shaky, there is reason to believe that advertisements will continue to be a major growth sector.

Fortnite has its sponsor campaigns. EA sports games have been full of ads for decades. Ad-supported tiers for Game Pass have been rumored for quite some time. And if you know anything about unregulated corporations… you know they will put ads on anything. It might not turn players into payers… but it will let you profit off of their eyeballs.

For growth area number three, Ball highlights something I have been contemplating for quite some time. Platform fees. Excluding first party titles and services, $33.7 billion of the $132 billion non-China spending goes directly to platform fees, or 25.5%. This is a massive chunk of change for game companies, bigger than Japanese and Korean spending combined. Hell, it’s shockingly close to the $41 billion spend on “global content investment.”

To counter this, many mobile publishers have been taking advantage of the loosening restrictions of app stores to offer alternative payment platforms. Direct-to-consumer (D2C) channels with far lower commissions, like the Swedish Stillfront and Israeli Playtika. Ball highlights this as a reason why mobile growth has slowed, as mobile gamemakers are discounting in-game purchases if players use these D2C companies. Basically what Epic was trying to do with Fortnite before it was kicked off the iOS App Store. Even if this means gross revenue is about the same, transaction fees and cost of goods sold would go down, boosting net revenue. The power of accounting!

I would also theorize that supporting more payment platforms helps turn more users into customers… while making the accounting for this a royal hell. It’s bad enough managing transactions from PayPal, credit cards, and some other crap. But certain markets have a dozen different payment types. HOW?

Moving on, the next topic is outsourcing, which I find to be a quite interesting. Outsourcing has become a HUGE element of modern game development, with most games worth a damn having gotten assistance from support studios, or just been largely outsourced projects. This can be seen in comparing 2017 to 2025, where the costs associated with outsourcing ballooned from $6.5 billion to $14.7 billion, reaching 35.5% of total development spending, and looking like it will only get bigger. However, the nature of outsourcing also changed. Content development, QA/audio, and localization/support used to have a roughly 40/25/35 split, but now the split’s 74/16/10. Most outsourcing costs go into content development, and the reasons why are about what you would expect.

Developers need diverse skillsets, need people on the ground to make content, might not be able to find certain skills easily, and… outsourcing is often a lot cheaper. Because a lot of it is in APAC countries with lower costs of living. The nature of work also varies a lot per the survey Ball is citing. Most respondents said they used it for co-development, helping with engineering, and of course, porting. Though the most common use by far is helping with 3D asset development and animation. Making characters, providing concept art, animating cutscenes, even performing mocap.

Outsourcing lets games stay on track, allows a small core team to get the skillsets they need to finish their product, and in some cases, can outsize the main team by a comical amount. All of which I think are good things. …Assuming the outsourced developers are treated well, but that’s a labor rights issue, and we all know how great the games industry is on that front!

Lastly… I have been avoiding this subject despite it coming up earlier in this presentation. The specter hanging over this entire presentation is Roblox.

I thought I could not hate that pedophile casino any more than I did, but facts have the power of changing one’s perception. Ball begins by highlighting how Roblox represents over 4.5% of non-China consumer spending on video games in 2025, a meteoric rise from even last year, where it represented about 3.1% of non-China spending. And that… that is just baffling to me. The idea that one game can dominate much of the industry is nonsensical to me, but it gets worse.

Most of the growth we have seen this past year in gaming can be attributed to Roblox. Their users have been getting older and stayed on the platform. It saw a surge across Europe, the Asian Pacific, and the rest of the world. And while Roblox has been growing in the PC market, most of its engagement is just on mobile, reaching a disgusting 13 billion monthly engagement hours in Q3 2025.

A number that is so useless that I need to break it down into 1,484,00 years. A MILLION AND A HALF YEARS WERE SPENT IN ROBLOX A MONTH! Sure, the annual average was only about 10.2 billion monthly engagement hours. …But that is still 1,164,000 YEARS a month, or 13,968,000 YEARS of engagement hours in 2025. 14 MILLION YEARS WERE SPENT PLAYING ROBLOX IN 2025! Assuming a lifetime is 75 years, that is 186,240 LIFETIMES that were spent playing Roblox last year!

People spent more time on Roblox in 2025 than they did on Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined. Roblox is the biggest game in the world, bar none, and it is closer to Netflix in terms of engagement hours. Games within Roblox now compete with some of the biggest games in the world, with Grow a Garden attracting nearly as many monthly hours as Counter-Strike.

The best thing I could say about this is that… at least Roblox is paying people more. Their average quarterly payouts to developers were under $200 million in 2023, but they reached a staggering $450 million for Q4 2025. Which sounds good… until you realize that Roblox’s revenue per year exploded from 3.5 billion in 2023 to 6.7 billion in 2025! Sure, it’s more proportional, but you are telling me that LESS THAN 7% of revenue is flowing out to the developers of these games on your platform? Are you fucking me in my hemorrhoid-filled asshole? Instead, the money is just going to create an insane $1.25 billion cash flow and stock-based compensation for the executives.

I hate the fact that Roblox is so popular, that it is a walled garden, that it has such a relentless history of bad shit happening on it. Nothing is going to happen to it so long as the ship keeps on trucking along, or governments start cracking down and banning it. And, for the safety of the children and teens who use this platform, I hope they do.

As if trying to console ME specifically, Ball ends this presentation by reciting something that I rolled my eyes at when the Geoff Keighley backed The Games Business said it a few weeks ago. That there is no one games industry, but rather multiple industries.

This is something of a pedantic argument that I believe is correct, but I do not agree with the language used. Because you could say the same thing about any established industry. There is no music industry, but rather music industries, as music is made to appeal to different people and different demographics. There is no film industry, there is no television industry, there is no book industry. Hell, maybe there is no singular car industry. You can cut an industry however you want, carve out niches and product sectors that you specialize in and fixate on. But the things people are doing, the jobs that are created by the industry, and the products it produces, are all sold on the same shelves, given the same name, and made of the same stuff. They are part of the same industry, but are different genres, different sectors.

However, I will agree that it can be maddening, daunting, and distracting to look at the totality of an industry. It is often preferential to look at it in pieces, and that is something I constantly do when talking about gaming. I view packaged games as real games, and live services as crap to be derided, trying to steal people’s time and money, because there’s time and money to be stolen!

Getting back on track, Ball concludes this presentation by breaking down how you can break down the games industry. By device, by region, by content model, and by class (indie, casual, AA, AAA, etc.). This is a very useful way to conceptualize and view the scale of the industry, especially when paired with how growth is being distributed. Meaning I can tell that packaged sales, the games I care about, take up 12% of the industry, while live services eat up 83.7%, which matches what I have heard previously. Console player spending is in decline, PC player is about steady, mobile ads are growing, and the indie market, only about 2.2% of the industry, is shrinking while mobile keeps growing.

The things that got me into gaming, that I will keep boasting as the best gaming, will keep shrinking or staggering while ad-supported Chinese mobile live services will thrive. GREAT! I love it! …And that is not a wrong takeaway to have from this presentation. The industry is big, complicated, and while some forces are growing, others are stagnating or declining.

…Jeepers creepers, did I really let this go on for over 4,500 words? I guess I did, and with that, I’m going to do both of us a favor and cap off this Rundown. Three essays a week should be more than enough for you people anyhow~!

Akumako: “You’re not gonna write a conclusion or something?”

Nope, I have said everything I wanted to, and think I need to digest this glutton of information before I make any significant claims.

Bluepoint Games is Dead, Killed by Sony
(Because They Wanted a Remaster Studio to Make Live Services)

I DID NOT EVEN NEED TO MODIFY THE TEXT FROM THE FACEBOOK HEADER LAST MONTH! THIS KEEPS HAPPENING! AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!

…How the hell do you screw up something this simple?

Back in the early 2010s, Bluepoint Games was seen as the premiere studio for remasters. Their remasters of God of War, God of War II, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, the Uncharted trilogy for PS3, and Gravity Rush were all top of the line remasters. Sure, they had miscellaneous problems, but stayed true to the original games, made improvements where they could, and were better attempts than most other remasters coming out in that era.

However, after doing extensive work on The Nathan Drake Collection, they pivoted closer to Sony and began producing full-on remakes of their legacy IP. Shadow of the Colossus (2018) and Demon’s Souls (2020), while slightly contentious in their status as remakes as they changed the underlying look of their games, were high quality remakes. They made Sony money, so much money that they up and bought them in September 2021 as, well, they have worked exclusively with Sony for a decade at that point.

So, what would Sony have them work on next? What legacy title could they remake, or remaster, while bolstering their ranks to give Sony a steady stream of releases that refresh the value of dormant IPs? There are few bad answers to such a question, and Sony found one of them. They did not have this remake developer work on a remake, as this was the Jim Ryan era and Sony was going all-out with live services, so they had Bluepoint working on a God of War live service.

This was stupid, and the project was canceled in January 2025.

This presented Sony with the opportunity to course correct things at Bluepoint, to let them, I dunno, remake whatever they wanted after management’s mandate fizzled out with nothing to show for it. Instead, just over a year after canceling their dumb live service project, Sony decided to axe the studio altogether.

This is nonsense.

I know I just walked about how the console and PC space not being a growth sector, but that is taking a very broad overview. Anybody in the zeitgeist will tell you that remakes of decade old games are doing pretty well these days, it’s what the culture craves, and Sony KNOWS this. It’s why they announced a remake of the original God of War trilogy LAST WEEK! So the idea of them getting rid of a studio that is vividly experienced with remakes, that has worked on God of War across three separate projects (they helped out on Ragnarok), right after this is ABSURD!

Fuck Sony, fuck their monumentally destructive push toward live services, and fuck the wave of destructive acquisitions that plagued the industry from 2020 to 2022. Whatever business school graduate hope and optimism I had back then has proven to be a wild mistake, and the games industry has only found way after way to disappoint me with how little their owners care about artists, or the artistic medium they are so crudely profiting from.

Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen Ports Announced for Nintendo Switch
(Why Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen Suck and Are Beloved)

Ugh, and this is the second last minute addition of this Rundown. Goldarn it, I am going WAY over my hard limit for this, but I need to drain the bile now for the sake of getting someone to SHUT UP.

Following what I initially thought was a storefront leak, Nintendo announced that they are re-releasing Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen (2004) for $20 each on Nintendo Switch to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pokémon on February 27, 2026. With FireRed and LeafGreen being the remakes of the original Pokémon Red and Green released for the GBA in order to make the Kanto Pokémon widely accessible in the soft reboot system of the third generation games. …Also, Nintendo wanted a another Pokémon game for their handheld, and this fit the bill.

I could comment on how surreal or frustrating it is to see a regular GBA game releasing as its own title on this system, rather than be released via Nintendo Switch Online. …But I’ve know that would never happen for nearly a decade, and being right is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Now, the main question is why would they release FireRed and LeafGreen now of all times. Wouldn’t it make more sense to do a rollout of re-releases over the span of a few months, effectively giving people the opportunity to replay through the series’ initial entries, in release date order, during its 30th anniversary? …Yes, that would make sense. However, from the perspective of The Pokémon Company, they have already released Pokémon Red and Green and Blue once before, for the twentieth anniversary, and they want to start off this celebration with a bang by releasing a game they never re-released before. They could have started with Ruby and Sapphire, two games that have never been re-released, but they also want to maximize profits, so they are opting to go with the 2004 remakes of the first Pokémon games. Games that I have some thoughts on.

Pokémon FireRed was the first new video game I ever got, having got it as some sort of present as a kid, and as a kid with terminal Pokémania, I loved it. It was taking a game that I had memorized as best as I could through my Sandwich Islands strategy guide, but made it with modern visuals and more than a few colors at once. While I had played Pokémon Blue extensively, I never beat it, as I was a dumb kid, but I was far more determined to triumph through Pokémon FireRed, and it was one of the main Pokémon games I flipped through during that stretch of my childhood.

Now, I do not think that FireRed and LeafGreen are particularly good. The GB to GBA eras of Pokémon are generally tricky for me to go back to, as I am such a numbers bitch, and look at them as games that are made of problems. The learnsets are bad, the balancing is bad, the distribution of resources is bad, the games have this weird insistence on ignoring stuff from later games in the series, but not others. Held items are a rarity and distributed with a truly thoughtless approach. Evolutions that were introduced in Gold and Silver are just… not accessible until the postgame.

The Steel and Dark types are only vaguely represented with moves like Bite and Magnemite. The additional content with the Sevii Islands feels haphazard and half thought out, being both sparse with ideas and overly ambitious at the same time. Hell, even the design of these worlds feels very… “HD texture pack.” You compare the way this game looks to Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald, and it just looks a bit off, clearly operating under Game Boy design principles with a lot of things, despite being a GBA game.

They strike me as remakes that were too reverent of the originals to shake things up, but also changed certain things for balance purposes. You can find a Mankey and Charmander gets Metal Claw before Brock. Neat. The distribution of items and TMs are also different. Not always better, just different. You get Mega Punch and Mega Kick super early for… no good reason. And there is no ready access to good Dark or Bug type moves to take on Sabrina, because… what’s a balance?

Now, I do not think the games are bad by any stretch. I think they are WAY better than the original Game Boy games, which might be continuous to some. They were effectively 1992 games held together with duct tape and dreams, and I think most of the joy people get out of them nowadays comes from home brand nostalgia and trying to break them. Going through the GB games normally, they are bereft of countless quality of life features, many that have been solved for decades, have a wildly slapdash approach to general balancing to the point where I am comfortable saying “the developers didn’t know what the hell they were doing.” I can respect them, but I view them as games that, on a mechanical and gameplay level, were always jank, and have been outmoded through constant iteration.

Yes, yes, I understand that is part of the charm, that the games are a nostalgic touchstone for a generation, that they have a distinct vibe that was lost in the GBA era, and that they make people FEEL. I just didn’t have the same experience with them as, well, I got Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Blue on the same day in 2003— almost five years after I watched the fourth episode of the series at my grandmother’s house. My first Pokémon game was Pokémon Stadium. And I got a strategy guide for Red, Blue, and Yellow over a year before I got my Game Boy Advance. My trajectory with this series was jank, and my opinions are gonna be kinda jank!

FireRed and LeafGreen are considerably less jank than their originals, but I still view them as games cursed by their legacy, as they were the foundation for an ongoing generation of mods that built upon these titles in order to offer new experiences. Most are probably crap whipped together by some dumb teenager, but if you say that there aren’t FireRed mods, or ROM hacks, that are far better than the original, then… you simply don’t know what you’re talking about.

There are so many ways to make FireRed better, to tweak its shortcomings, and people have. So I tend to view the base game as… comparable to insisting on playing an unmodded version of Skyrim, or any highly modded game, out of principle. Sure, it’s official, what’s highly understood, and what’s documented, but does that really make the experience better?

That being said, I am approaching this as somebody with documented brain problems, defects, and disabilities, so I am weird and fussy with the things I like. I have literally been working on a spreadsheet project where I rebalance Pokémon learnsets for fun. For most people… this is basically what they want.

Let me put it this way: In terms of nostalgia value, few Pokémon games have as much value as FireRed. It’s a pure, raw, and classic Kanto Pokémon experience that puts a spotlight on the original 151 Pokémon for the clean majority of the game. It is a game that tens of millions of people played over the past 22 years through official cartridges, bootlegs, and of course emulation. Especially emulation. GBA games did well, but they were, and still are, very popular among people who emulate games, and I think one of the most downloaded ROMs of all time HAS to be FireRed.

For 14 years, FireRed was widely seen as the definitive Kanto game. If people wanted to go back and play an old Pokémon game, they played FireRed. If a group of friends wanted to get together and do a Let’s Play of Pokemon, they played FireRed. For a while, these were seen as replacements for Red and Blue, with those games being relegated to the dustbins before eventually warranting renewed attention after some nebulous point in time. Maybe Twitch Plays Pokémon, maybe when the 20 year nostalgia cycle kicked in during Pokémon Go’s heyday.

Plus, in my mind, FireRed is up there in the cultural pantheon of The Good Ones, alongside Emerald, Platinum, HeartGold, Black, and Black 2. Probably as number six, but still, it’s the official Pokémon game to recommend to a casual or lapsed fan, or someone who only cares about the older Pokémon they grew up with.

Akumako: “Uh, but wasn’t this game sort of replaced by Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee?”

Hell no! One, those games are forever on my shitlist for being handheld only games.

Akumako: “What are you talking about? They had motion controls.”

Bitch, you think I can reliably do a throwing motion with my shit-ass motor skills? No! They were handheld only games. They were made far easier than their predecessors, were rendered in a decidedly kiddy art style, removed many staple mechanics and systems that were present in FireRed. And removed the entire system of battling wild Pokémon, instead basing its gameplay around catching them via a dumb circle matching game that necessitated putting a piece of tape on your screen.

Akumako: “That’s literally not what necessitate means.”

I am of the mindset that a significant portion of people who grew up with Pokémon, like the older games, and are fixated on Kanto, in everything it offers, would rather just play FireRed than play LGPE. It might not be flashy, it might be hard to get back to with its pre physical/special split and trousers learnsets. But it does not feel patronizing.

Also… FireRed is itself a nostalgia title. It’s 22 years old, older than one of my friends, and Pokémon is such a widespread series that I could see any re-release of any mainline game take off. Anybody who cannot see why this would not have an appeal to some people, why this won’t likely go on to sell oodles, is just kidding themselves. Even though it’s overpriced at $20, it’s also only 20 bucks, and people are not as value driven so long as the price is below a certain amount. It’s a psychology thing.

Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond Leave Xbox
(I Hope This Kills Xbox Faster)

Ugh-er, and this is a Friday afternoon addition! Who drops hot news like this at 14:30 on a Friday afternoon?

Akumako: “You’re supposed to use Eastern time as the—”

SHUT UP, ya stinky demon! …Let me just make this quick.

This past week, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer and Xbox President Sarah Bond have both stepped down from their positions. With Spencer retiring after 38 years with Microsoft and Bond resigning after a 9 year stint at Xbox. They will largely be replaced by Asha Sharma, President of Microsoft’s CoreAI product, formerly of Meta and Instacart. Based on those credentials, that is all I need to know about her as a person.

Sharma is a corporate executive being brought in to steer a division that has been doing exceptionally poorly over the past year specifically. While she prattles about how she is going to change things in IGN’s puff piece on the story, I don’t believe her. Corporate executives are trained to say the right thing at the right time, but only act upon what is in corporate interests. With Spencer, you had some plausible deniability that he was built different, but, well, we all saw how that went.

So, what does this mean for Xbox? Well, I am of the mindset that a new CEO or boss does not inherently change any organizational structure, as their power depends on how much they want to do and how much they yell people around. It is possible that Sharma will make some significant changes, but as someone within Microsoft who was assigned this position, I think she will simply pursue the same path Spencer has.

…Actually, after I initially wrote this bit, it came to light that Asha Sharma is a natalist and an AI evangelist. How to describe natalism? …Basically, a natalist is someone who believes that every human has duty to create children and that a rising birthrate is necessary for The State to function, and for the correct races to prosper. It’s a common trait amongst White Supremacists (White Supremacists LOVE token brown women to legitimize their movement), fascism enthusiasts, and is part of the core of the anti-trans movement that has been pushed by the Epstein class over the past decade.

…Side note, but I love spinning up bullshit terms like fascism enthusiasts and Epstein class. They sound extra fresh in the mouth.

Anyway, back to the old guy. There is reason to put a lot of blame on Spencer for what he did to Xbox, how Xbox faltered under his leadership. Personally, I view him less as someone with a bold vision and more like a guy who was in the right place at the wrong time. Someone who was promoted up and up, beyond his skill ceiling, and who ultimately tried to be a big shot, tried to believe his own hype, while ultimately doing what Microsoft, as a broader institution, wanted. I do not believe he said “no” as often as a CEO of any division should.

This is not to forgive him for diluting the brand, destroying jobs, and destroying art. That man has blood on his hands, has caused thousands to suffer, and is almost certainly getting a golden parachute. I hope he never has a restful night’s sleep for the rest of his days, and that his children view him as a money pit before a human, let alone a father.

I do not expect Xbox to get better, I do not see a recovery arc as possible, and I do not think, in this politically rife era of human history, that people will want to forgive a company like Microsoft. The BDS movement has loads of reasons to say no to Microsoft, and most PC users will probably have horror stories of how they are destroying Windows. The Xbox situation is minor compared to them.

Though, their second-biggest sin is, after aiding in the lethal cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland, is being such a large proponent in the AI industry that seeks to destroy global personal computing as we know it. So, uh, fuck Microsoft. I hope they successfully kill Xbox as an institution, that their services have as much success as Copilot, and that their stock price goes the way of Ubisoft.

The only thing I would want from them, after fixing their busted-ass OS, are re-releases of their older games. But in this era of recompilations/decompilations of Xbox 360 games, I don’t need Microsoft. I just need the efforts of brilliant passionate people who care far more about these games than their legal owners.

Progress Report 2026-02-22

Source: PC Gamer

Agh. I am getting really bloody sick of being told that “this is going to get worse before it gets better.” SO MANY THINGS over the past decade has subscribed to that mantra, and I’m starting to think that maybe that entire adage is just coping, that maybe things are just fucked, period. Because if oodles of consumer electronic manufacturers go under because AI companies are trying to make electronics prohibitively expensive, then how will things get better? All that will happen is that an oligopoly will be formed, and they will be allowed to profit as they see fit, and these new prices will become the standard. It works out great for everybody except the consumer! And isn’t that what these corporate ghouls want? To siphon all capital, all life, from the lower classes in order to pad their wallets?

Like, GOD DAMN, I just want to be able to buy a fucking computer and hard drives every couple of years, but even THAT was too much of a luxury for these indignant fucksticks to allow? And we might need to deal with this shit for a DECADE? China has avoided invading Taiwan for DECADES because they knew that a component shortage would affect global trade and consumer technology, but if prices are going to go crazy… maybe they’ll just say fuck it, and do it. Maybe that’s what the ultra wealthy WANT! Because there ain’t nothing that plumps up the portfolio like a wet hot war!

2026-02-15: Watched anime with the Cassie, just bouncing between things, before watching some Transformingmorpher videos. Good times! Wrote 2,000 word preamble for this week’s Rundown. Re-read like a third of the remaining outline for VD 2.0 Act 3, rewrote and added like 1,500 words before I got burnt out on my own homebrand and the SCALE of continuity.

2026-02-16: Wrote 2,400 words for the Dot Hack game. Re-read more of the outline for VD 2.0 Act 3, fixing some inconsistencies and errors in the outline, which I’ve kitbashed over the past year. This part is going to be SO STUPID, but I was GROOMED for this shit, man!

2026-02-17: Read the Matthew Ball essay on the current state of gaming, wrote 4,400 words about it.

2026-02-18: Edited and did some rewrites of this Rundown. Made the header, and… how did this take me until 17:00? HOW? Rewrote like 2,000 words of outline and reviewed it. Was not in the mood to get started after my shower, so I decided to boost my gamer cred by, for the first time in my life, complete Super Mario Bros. (1985) and Star Fox (1993). I rewound like a bastard when I screwed up, and both of those games are very easy to fail in. The original Super Mario controls like butter and it is trivially easy to make mistakes with how tricky or nasty the jumps could be. But that is part of the design, as this was not a game to be cleared in an afternoon, it was meant to last a kid months. Star Fox looks great, has immaculate vibes, but it is tricky to go from modern graphics and high resolutions to a 3D SNES game like this. Wish I did this as a kid!

2026-02-19: Cranked out 500 word Bluepoint bit! Wrote 4,400 words for VD2.0 Act 3, FINALLY back to the actual writing part! Wrote 1,500 words for the FireRed and LeafGreen bit, because Missy drives me up a fucking wall.

2026-02-20: Wrote 666 word bit on Xbox! NUMBER OF THE BEAST! ALL POWER TO SATAN! Deeply frustrating day, as I should have been productive, but I just could not be. I did voting stuff in the morning to get it out of the way, because I am voting for 3 to 5 people. Had to help Mother with some chores, and had trickles of work come in today, distracting me. The stupid Xbox crap happened and I had to write an extension about that. I struggled to get the next segment off the ground as I needed the right outfits to visualize these characters. I know it’s stupid, but I need reference outfits sometimes! So fucking annoying on all fronts! I got diarrhea while trying to write the rest of this segment, but I netted 3,800 words for VD2.0 Act 3. That is acceptable.

2026-02-21: My flaking work schedule and clients sending random bits of tax crap messed with my mojo today, and I hate it. Wrote 1,800 words for next week’s preamble and made the header image, it took like five minutes. Wrote 3,200 words for VD2.0 Act 3, because I wanted to hit 5,000 words. I will need to rethink the connections for this current segment.

Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report

Current Word Count: 88,388

Estimated Word Count: 222,222

Words Edited: 0

Total Segments: 30

Segments Outlined: 30

Segments Drafted: 11

Segments Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 129

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