Rundown (3/29/2026) The Resident Evil Redemption

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: The Resident Evil Redemption
• FlipWitch: Temples of Temptation Announced (That TSF Metroidvania is Getting a Sequel!)
• Epic Games Lays Off Over 1,000 People (Because Time Sweeney is a Small-Minded Man)
• OpenAI Kills Sora (I Cannot WAIT for the AI Bubble to Pop)
• What The Hell’s Going on With Acquisitions and Closures This Week? (Everything is Falling Apart! Aaaaaahhhh!!!)
• The PlayStation 5 Gets A $100 Price Increase (Budget Gaming is DEAD. Politics Killed It!)
• Nintendo is Charging More For Physical Games (This Was Inevitable, and Here’s Why!)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
The Resident Evil Redemption

Bleh! I’m tired of talking about myself and my problems during these preambles! I want to talk about something FUN! So let me dig up a topic that has been on the tip of my mind for… about three months, but I kept forgetting to blow up into a proper article-length-word-based-doodad. That topic is Resident Evil and how the series went from where it was 14 years ago to where it is now. …But because I am me, you know I’m going to want to start from the very start, as I find information easier to parse when we begin at, where else, the beginning.

So! 1996’s Resident Evil was a landmark early PlayStation title that offered an experience that was distinctly unlike anything the median home console gamer had seen before. Games with horror elements and touches of gore had been around for a couple years, yet they were still a novelty, a new-ity. The concept of survival horror had not really passed through to the west, let alone the mainstream, until Capcom decided to push Resident Evil as a big title in both Japan and North America. It generated a bunch of buzz, was a bestseller on the system, and went on to create one of the most prolific video game franchises. Now, it is worth asking why, but the answers just kind of accumulate if you think about it for a minute.

3D and detailed pre-rendered backgrounds were strong novelties and were next gen compared to whatever the Super Nintendo was pumping out, so the game had an immediate graphical appeal. By using fixed-camera angles, the game had a level of cinematography and reduced gamey-ness that made it stand out as something unique. Despite whatever people say, horror is not niche, it is exceedingly popular, and Resident Evil delivered a particularly palatable flavor of horror. One that mixed mystery, zombies, and guns together in a widely enjoyable package. Some liked exploring a spooky mansion, piecing together a story, and solving puzzles, while others liked blowing up undead freaks with increasingly cooler weapons.

Retrospective looks at the game may point out the clunkiness and lack of quality of life features, but back then, many of those standards did not really exist. The limited saves were not a deal-breaker, as this was an era where a save system in general was not a given, especially in shorter games. Tank controls were a decently common approach on how to move characters in the third-dimension, especially in the era before the analog stick. And the so-bad-its-good voice acting was remarkable for just… being there. It sounded like a cartoon, sure, BUT IT ALSO SOUNDED LIKE A CARTOON! AMAZING!

Resident Evil was born, and it went on to be one of Capcom’s main pillars for the next decade, earning widespread acclaim with the next five major entries, while wiggling through its identity. Things became more serious in terms of the tone and execution, but I would argue the series never went too far and always kept a degree of levity and humor to its action. Which is important, as tension is vital to these horror-themed experiences, but they are also, fundamentally, power fantasies about surviving battles against biohazard freaks. They should be kinda stupid.

However, during the early 2000s, the series was undergoing something of a reassessment due to standards shifting against it. The era of pre-rendered backgrounds was gradually fading away as fully 3D worlds became a standard, and CRTs could not really capture the detailed backdrops of Resident Evil (2002) or Resident Evil 0 (2003). Tank controls became an increasing rarity on the PS2, where more fluid and player directed action became expected. And franchise fatigue from a once enthusiastic fandom and press urged the series to innovate. If it failed, then Resident Evil could be relegated as a series that had its spark, but lost its way. Instead, we got Resident Evil 4 (2005), one of the most celebrated games of all time, and you don’t need to tell me why. It is a spectacular action game that, while more boisterous and absurd than what came before it, captured the tension that was at the core of what Resident Evil is, was, and should be.

With that, the mechanical identity of the series was shifted, and people were largely on board with this new direction. However, Capcom did not fast track a sequel, as they were busy getting their footing on new hardware and the RE4 team splintered off to work on other things. Like God Hand and Okami« better games some would say. They could have tried to cobble together whoever, but last time they did that, they wound up with Devil May Cry 2 (2003). Nuff said. So Capcpom waited until 2009 to release Resident Evil 5, and… this was among the first does of gaming discourse I was really privy to, as it was lousy with controversy over its many design choices.

RE5 is not a bad game… but it sounds like it should be. The game begins in underdeveloped African environments where a buff White dude guns down Africans infected with a deadly virus that makes them insane and eager to kill. You cannot frame that in a way that does not stink of racialized violence with colonial overtones. The title eschewed the inventory system of RE4 for a quite bad quick access inventory system that encouraged a more aggressive action-oriented playstyle and just ignoring various weapons or items. The series, despite having arguably jumped the shark with… any number of things in RE4, went full pants-on-head absurd with its flesh monsters, boulder punching, and Matrix-ass-shit. Horror took a firm backseat, and the game was primarily an action title. Was it a good action title? Well, that depends on how you played it.

In a choice I choose to blame solely on Keiji Inafune— who did not work on the game— RE5 took cues from Gears of War and was designed as a multiplayer action experience first and foremost. Player one the reigns of sex symbol Chris Redfield while player two was in control of newcomer Sheva Alomar, an African woman meant to add greater context to Chris’s slaughtering. If one was playing the game as a single player title, they played as Chris, while Sheva functioned as the sorta-stupid AI companion who could, and wound, waste your items. This is why lots of people preferred Resident Evil 5 as a multiplayer affair. If you played it alone, like a little bitch, you probably had a less than stellar experience. If you played it with a buddy, you probably had a blast, as friendship is magic. …Even when both people are “bros” who like to say the N-word ironically.

This makes RE5 either the last great game before its downfall, or where things went wrong, depending on who you ask and then—

GOD DAMN IT! I just realized that Sheva Alomar is definitely an inspiration for Abigale Quinlan, as she was one of the few darker-skinned women of note in mainstream gaming at the time, and I could tell her damn race. Canonically, she is African, but she was clearly designed after Euro-centric beauty standards by a bunch of Japanese artists, as a character who a wide spectrum of players would be comfortable playing as. So her hair’s not coiled, or type-4, afro textured, or Black hair— whatever the preferred term is, I don’t know— it’s straight. Her skin is what Black people would call light-skinned, but I just viewed as Asian because… my school was like 33% Asian, so she looked Tibetan or Desi or Filipino or some shit to me. Still does! And here face was… it does not look like her voice and mocap actress, Karen Dyer, I’ll just leave it at that.

Resident Evil 5 was a monumental success for Capcom— their BEST SELLING GAME for almost a decade. RE was a gold star in an era of mixed results, and Capcom wanted to go ALL IN on the next Resident Evil game. Or at least try to. Survival horror was dead. Horror Action Entertainment was IN. And Capcom intended on creating a damn MEGA GAME— an action game to take Resident Evil and make it a Call of Duty tier juggernaut. This was Resident Evil 6 (2012), and… it fucked up the essence of the franchise, spitting on it, crapping on it, and reforming it into a pretty dope action game.

I can easily see the argument that Resident Evil 6 (2012) is an impressive action game, harkening back to Capcom’s roots in pioneering the character action genre, and functioning as a good fun shooter. Well, at least in certain campaigns, as the game was sorta four games in one. But people did not see it for that back they, they just saw it as another multiplayer shooter trying to pry away the Call of Duty demographic, and in retrospect, it is often seen as the bad one.

Back in the circles I flew in back then, the general consensus was that Resident Evil 6 (2012) was a “designed by committee” game. A title that was not appealing to the core fanbase, the people who love Resident Evil, but a customer who would simply not be interested in Resident Evil, even if it was literally a Call of Duty game with a different name. It was all too easy to see the title as the product of marketing departments, executives, and miscellaneous meddlers trying to eke out the essence of a series in order to deliver a bloated, directionless, and over-stuffed experience. Its story was too wild to be engrossing, its action was too overwhelming for any sense of mood to grip the player, and the entire game was once again designed around co-op from start to finish.

RE6 is still the lowest rated main game in the series, and while it sold incredibly well, surpassing 15 million lifetime units, 5 million in its first quarter, it was initially written off as an underperformer. How? Because Capcom put THAT MUCH money into this game, thinking that would make it their Call of Duty. Sure, the game sold, but the brand damage was considerable. Capcom let down their base, and it truly felt like the era of survival horror that games like Resident Evil established was simply over.

Resident Evil was too big to just go away, but it entered a period of reassessment, a dark age where it lacked the relevance and impact it had, and this persisted for a few quiet years. They still tried during this time, with the most noteworthy title being Resident Evil: Revelations 2 (2015). A title that was… experimental in most respects. It had an episodic campaign with a “dual protagonists” story and gameplay that attempted to cut the middle between a single-player and co-op experience by only giving one playable character a gun at a time. In a sense, it was a correction, a return to what the first Revelations did back in 2012, and to step away from the bombast of RE6. However, the title was ultimately a footnote in terms of sales and notoriety.

Then there was Umbrella Corps (2016), which was a subpar squad shooter with some novel ideas, but was met with a fiercely negative reception. It’s often seen as one of the worst games in the series, and marked the absolute low point for the series.

Capcom was trying to save face at this time by remastering the 2002 Resident Evil Remake, and Resident Evil Zero, freeing them from GameCube and Wii jail, but they were not huge sellers. They were old-ass games that had controls people either forgot how to use, never learned how to use properly, or just flat out never liked. But they were cheap enough to suffice as an impulse purchase at least. It was a sign of something. …And that something became promising when Capcom announced a remake of Resident Evil 2 in 2015, a move that was… deeply significant.

In part because of the incredible work done on 2002’s Resident Evil Remake, there was a growing community effort to get Capcom to remake Resident Evil 2, which was a truly massive hit when it came out in 1998. I’d argue RE2 is when Resident Evil only became a true staple for Capcom and A-tier game series. A remake of it could do a lot more, adapt the game around modern hardware, new gameplay systems, and help course correct the series after it lost its way.

There was nothing wrong with the original Resident Evil 2. Most of the first game jank of RE 1996 was ironed out. But for as great as the original Resident Evil 2 is, it’s not the type of game you can give to some teen-ager (nobody will get that reference, but that’s okay) and have them understand the appeal. Its backgrounds are either pixelated to shit or a blur fest that looks like nothing to eyes that are trained on high fidelity visuals. And tank controls… suck take some getting used to. When one first plays a tank control game, they are slow, they are clunky, they are driving a human as if they are a car, and that’s fucking weird. I don’t feel like a car when I move or spin around! And any game where one cannot just jump in and do something basic, like movement, with competence, will probably feel really bloody old.

Fans did not want to feel old, they did not want to feel bad for liking something that was old, and wanted to like something that fit the modern standards of the WiiPS360 era. …And Capcom kept tempting them with a Resident Evil 2 remake for almost a damn DECADE. This is the one part of this history lesson that I think has been utterly forgotten, so bust out yo eyedrops and peep this, homie!

Beginning in 2007, Capcom began unintentionally teasing fans with the idea or remaking additional Resident Evil games. Well, I say unintentionally and teasing, but from a certain perspective, they were literally remaking parts of older RE games, and did so three times within five years. Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles (2007) was a rail shooter for Wii that recreated scenes, locations, and characters from Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3. Developers achieved this by producing entirely new assets that were largely faithful, and looked, to a layperson, like they could be used to remake the first four numbered entries. Hell, there is an alternate reality where Capcom looked at Resident Evil 4 Wii (2007) and decided to do that, remaking the whole damn quadrilogy for Wii.

Instead, we got Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles (2009), another rail shooter, this time remaking scenes from RE2 along with Code: Veronica (the Dreamcast entry that used to be considered the bad one, but tastes change). It was truncated of course— but if Capcom was willing to put this much work in for a darn spin-off, why not just remake some of their most celebrated and successful games? The answer was because these Wii spin-offs were cheap, limited, and were ultimately made as theme park rides they could farm out to whatever side team.

The same is not true for Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (2012). I would cheekily describe ORC as “the fart that stunk up the room before RE6 shat on the floor”. It’s a game a squad-based military shooter that failed as a military shooter, a Resident Evil game, and a way to expand upon the setting of RE2 and RE3. Despite coming from the SOCOM devs, the title was rushed out the door and primarily sold on the premise of paramilitary urban warfare with zombies. …And the fact that you could kill Leon Kennedy in a non-canon mission. That never made sense to me. Nobody wants to kill Leon Kennedy. They either want to be Leon Kennedy or fuck Leon Kennedy. (I don’t believe in marry, fuck, kill— I believe in be, fuck, kill.)

If the title did not give it away, OCR was set in Raccoon City, and if resources were reallocated, then maybe this could have been a Resident Evil 2 remake. Yet we did not get that. We got a game that only diminished the name of Resident Evil and was, unfortunately, many people’s first time exploring this beloved setting. Remember, this was an era where you could ONLY legally access these games via PlayStation Network, and while you might think that PS1 nostalgia was big around then… it really wasn’t.

There’s a reason why most creators of the time only messed around with sprite-based games, as the attitude was that PS1 and N64 had not aged particularly well. It was not their time, not their place in the nostalgia cycle, and the late Gen Xers slash early millennials who ran retro gaming discourse back then were of a microgeneration that spend the late 90s going to school, getting jobs, and being broke-asses. Sure, they might have brought a PS1 or N64 with them to college, but they were not strictly formative gaming memories. They were too fresh to be nostalgic. Too new to be truly retro. But that changed as the 2010s progressed, the 16-bit throwbacks were expended, and now the PS1 is reveling in its 30 year nostalgia cycle.

…Sorry. Grandma here gets distracted by the darndest things.

Now that I’ve given you the backstory, you should be able to approximate the emotional state of Resident Evil fans circa June 2016. The last major entry was a dud, morale was low, and the only hope was a remake that was just announced last year. Umbrella Corps was on the horizon— it looked like shit. And the most exciting thing to happen was some re-releases. Survival horror was, admittedly, in a better spot thanks to indie horror ventures propping up the genre and the nascent medium of Let’s Plays was helping a lot. The face and shape of horror was shifting, based more around games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Outlast, Alien: Isolation, and the highly influential Silent Hills: Playable Teaser from Kojima Productions. Horror was shifting, most major titles were far from the third-person affairs like Resident Evil, and zombies had fallen out of fashion after a boom following the American cultural disdain of The Other that came with the 2008 financial crisis.

So, what did Capcom do? Well, they basically reimagined what Resident Evil could be on a ground level, delivering a title so different that I think it could have been its own new IP. No longer was it a grand, urban, or bombastic third-person action game. Now it was a crueler, meaner, and more disturbing first-person horror shooter set largely around a single Louisiana mansion full of evil psychotic residents. This was Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017), and it was the reboot the series needed. No major ties to the messy story that was spun around with spin-offs, side games, and CG movies. The more overt action elements were scaled back to tell a more grounded and terrifying story. And its new first-person perspective made the player feel far more vulnerable than they ever had before.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017) initially did pretty well, not quite up to Capcom’s expectations, but it got there eventually, selling over 16 million copies. It was rightfully celebrated, saw expansions that added more zaniness to the title, and set the series on a bold path to a new era. It was not without its flaws, and arguably deviated a bit too much, but it was, without a doubt, a step in the right direction.

…Then Capcom released Resident Evil 2 Remake (2019), which was when Resident Evil really felt like it was back. The over-the-shoulder gameplay that became the series’ identity from 2005 to 2015 was refined and upgraded for a modern generation, taking cues from titles that… took cues from RE4. The urban zombie filled setting from RE2 1998 was fully rebuilt and expanded, staying true to the spirit while making a deluge of smart changes with the world design to make it feel more real, more impressive, and more significant. If one imagined RE2 but with the mechanics of RE4 but for PS4, they would get this game. By releasing in 2019, the game nicely captured on the vital 20 year nostalgia cycle. It debuted on a pre-COVID internet where Twitter clips were still a thing. And it received the coveted 90+ Metacritic score, making it out to be an all-timer with enough buzz to get flowers come awards season.

RE2 did everything right. It is seen as an ideal remake, enhancing the original with modern technology and design standards while maintaining a spiritual accuracy. It made the series cool and accessible for a generation of people who were not around before the PS4 era, reintroducing and enhancing characters in ways that could not be done on the PS1. RE7 brought the series back, but RE2 2019 brought Resident Evil back.

From here, Capcom proceeded to do great work in capitalizing on the series’ newfound momentum, releasing remakes of RE3 and RE4, while Resident Evil 8: Village (2021) a spiritual reprisal of RE4. It was a cool thing to like. Every game was great— except for the Resident Evil 3 Remake, which was too short and too transformative. Capcom successfully blended two types of gameplay for the series— first-person and third-person— while maintaining a clear identity. And the series iconic characters were more accessible, if not likable, than ever before.

This is simply good franchise development, and ultimately led Capcom to capitalize upon the past decade of Resident Evil with this year’s Resident Evil 9: Requiem. A title that acts as a blend between old and new, different perspectives, and different flavors of horror, while maintaining a high level of quality. It tries to wrap up the story told across the series’ endearingly messy story, and largely succeeds because players have been told this story in the form of remakes. It’s critically lauded, is selling exceptionally well, and the broader community seems to love it. That’s a critical, commercial, and communal success! You love to see it!

I find this all so interesting because of how simple the success, the fix, appears to have been, when it is so deeply hard for a games company to achieve something like this. Konami’s Silent Hill is trying to make this happen across multiple studios releasing one new game a year, mixing new experiences with remakes, and it might just work out for them. Sega has generally done a good job in fostering their Like A Dragon series since it took off internationally with Yakuza 0, the Kiwami 3 situation notwithstanding. While publishers like Square Enix have kind of biffed both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

Final Fantasy has no consistency or direction, and for as decadent as the VII Remake trilogy is shaping up to be, a lot of people were just good after Remake covered the most iconic location. Final Fantasy XVI was basically its own IP, but not in a good way. And there is little reason to think we will get a Final Fantasy XVII in this decade. While Dragon Quest… has been nothin’ but re-dos for 9 years.

I find this all so fascinating because I LOVE it when we get a Resident Evil, when a game series is prominent, beloved, and consistent, with a fanbase that is left pleased and optimistic. Unfortunately, game development is so hard with this level of fidelity, involves all of these obnoxious standards, and is so risky that you simply do not see many Resident Evil level success stories. And… I’m just going to end it there, as this segment went on for 3,600 words. Whoopsie-doodle!

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FlipWitch: Temples of Temptation Announced
(That TSF Metroidvania is Getting a Sequel!)

Starting off this Rundown with a bit of good news— as it’s mostly downhill from here— I am pleased to report that FlipWitch is getting a sequel!

FlipWitch: The Forbidden Sex Hex (2023) is a TSF themed Metroidvania that was particularly pertinent to my interests when it came out. I played it, waited to review it until some DLC was released, but that never happened, and I reviewed it two years later. Having gone through it twice, I think it’s good, not great. The game is gorgeous, its soundtrack has the coveted honor of being part of my writing music bucket, and as an openly erotic title, it never had to hold itself back for ANYTHING.

However, its design felt very first draft in a lot of respects, with simplistic side quests, redundant collectibles, and some mild frustrations in its maps. Its gameplay took a few too many cues from Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight (2016) for me to not think about it constantly while playing. And as a TSF game, it was disappointing. Especially from a title that references the TSF element in its title… twice.

Still, I ultimately liked the game, thought it was solid at the very least, and as the first game from a new development studio, things could have gone a LOT worse. I ended my review my alluding to how I’d be interested in what they would get up to next, tossing around the idea that the developers would “return with a bigger and better sequel.” Well, it turns out I was mostly right, as developer Momo Games is working on a prequel by the name of FlipWitch: Temples of Temptation.

The title follows the protagonist’s sensei from the first game, Beatrix, back in the prime of her youth as she goes on her own quest to become a legendary FlipWitch. Plot details are scarce, but presumably the game will have her venturing through a world of monsters, magic, and big bouncy boobs in order to save the world from some miscellaneous evil.

The title was just announced and, looking at its Steam page, appears to be pretty early in development. While environments and character animations have been completed— and looking fabulous, like a generational upgrade over what came before, no proper gameplay was shown and the screen size seems inconsistent. Still, I am going to be there day one to see what Momo Games can deliver. As a TSF enthusiast, I feel that I need to give it a fair shake.

…Oh, and Momo Games also announced Passionfruit, a life and farming sim full of bouncy boobs. Not really my thing, but there is a strong lust for erotic life sims.

Anyway, that’s my obligatory non-compensated shilling. On with the rest of this extra large Rundown!

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Epic Games Lays Off Over 1,000 People
(Because Time Sweeney is a Small-Minded Man)

In case you are new here, you probably know my thoughts on Fortnite pretty well. I’ve never played it, observed it from afar, and view it as one of the most destructive successes in video gaming. What really popularized live services on consoles? Fortnite. What game did developers spend five years chasing, only for nearly every attempt to fall flat on its ass? Fortnite. What game normalized the concept of battle passes? Fortnite. What game is eating much of the industry, serving as one of the most played games on the planet for nearly a decade? Fortnite.

It’s not as much of a pedophile hellscape as Roblox, but is that really a point in its favor? I’m sure that Fortnite has merits as a game— far as I have parsed out, it pretty solid gameplay fundamentals after they relegated the building system to a side mode. And I have to respect the fact that it is this IP slosh bucket where you can see hundreds of different licensed characters in a given match. It obviously has some appeal as a big wet crossover shooter. Yet I still loathe it for making gaming a worse place in general, and do not respect it. If I could erase it from history, I would, and everybody would clap.

However, none of this dislike is positioned at the developers, who have suffered through years of abuse, existed in a culture of perpetual crunch, or were forced to eschew their own creative ventures to work on Fortnite. Despite building this game, they do not reap the fruits of their labor, as profits go to Epic Games CEO Tim Swiney Sweeney, Tencent, Disney, and a cluster of other investors. They are exploiters who mandate systems that keep people playing Fortnite above all else, to keep them coming back, and use quality, quantity, and general entertainment value. The purpose of Fortnite is to endear the players to dependent on a product, to narrow their mind, and prevent them from encountering more challenging or unique art.

…For the record, I would say the pretty much the same thing about my beloved Dragalia Lost. But at least it had a strong emphasis on story and characters, and only used multiplayer in a cooperative context, which encourages a collectivist and socialist mindset that is superior to— Guh! No Natalie, you cannot keep yapping about competitive gaming is bad, actually.

The actual story here is that Sweeney has chosen to fire over 1,000 Epic Games employees. The employees will be given four months of severance pay and six months of health insurance— which is damn generous by American standards— but they are losing what should be the most stable job in the industry during a true dark age for game developers. In the past few years, a third of all games workers in the US have been laid off. With all American money being poured into AI and the games industry being stagnant outside of China and emerging markets, there is reason to believe that many games workers fired now will be unable to secure a new career in games. This will then force the game workers pivot to a new career, doing whatever they can to pay their rent or feed their family. Like becoming gig workers making sub-minimum wage while a different corporate overlord helps themself to the fruits of their labor.

Sweeney states that the reason for this is that Fortnite is making less money, but this is a stupid response to diminishing cash flows, especially given how much good money Epic has spent going after bad over the past decade. The Epic Games Store (EGS) has been a project that ate up billions of dollars while failing to make a dent in Steam’s de facto monopoly of PC gaming. (If over 70% of business is done at one store, you have a monopoly.) Despite this, Epic still spends millions upon millions distributing free titles on EGS to help players build up a library, when they have almost eight years of evidence that this does not work. Oh, and the billions of dollars Epic spent in their lawsuit with Apple and Google over App Store fees? That actually paved the way for positive changes we are going to see across mobile platforms at large, but Epic sure didn’t get much benefit from it. It was clearly a passion project of Sweeney, who just hated that his margins weren’t bigger.

Also, even if Epic is not doing as well as it did previously, even if Fortnite’s engagement is declining, then so fucking what? Sweeney is a billionaire who does not need his annual bonus package. Fortnite is still one of the most popular games on the planet. If someone cannot keep one of the biggest games in the world running without raising prices, without cutting the workforce by 20%, then I think it’s safe to say they are a destructive idiot. A pitifully small man who benefitted from the hard work of brilliant people while refusing to learn or take responsibility for his stupid, stupid decisions.

Along with this announcement, Fortnite will be shuttering various modes on April 16, 2026. Rocket Racing, Ballistic, and Festival Battle Stage are all being removed from the game, period. They are not archived as side modes, but removed. Meaning that the game itself is now lesser. Great! I love seeing features that were in development for YEARS getting axed like this with less than a month for archivists to save information about them.

What more can I say other than… I hope that this speeds on Fortnite’s supposed decline in relevance and that the laid off workers can find some way to land on their feet and keep pursuing their passion.

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OpenAI Kills Sora
(I Cannot WAIT for the AI Bubble to Pop)

Well, this was an odd story to see while having dinner on a Tuesday evening. OpenAI is the face of AI in many respects— the creator of the plagiarism bullshit machine that is ChatGPT and the super plagiarism bullshit video machine that is Sora. Or, should I say, was, as OpenAI announced they are shutting down their Sora AI video generation platform, just months after having launched it.

Sora was always a dangerous tool that existed primarily to erode the concept of truth, of facts, and to allow peddlers of disinformation to sell lies to other people. With this tool, enough time, and enough dedication, people could make whatever video they wanted, including what looks to be incriminating evidence of actual crimes. All of this could be done in a few hours, a bit of knowhow, and enough money to spend on tokens.

Morally, this was an evil tool with a de minimis number of positive use cases next to its excessive capacity for harm. Harm to individuals, harm to IP holders, and harm to the minds of people who are given the ability to seamlessly fabricate reality with the power of a datacenter at their fingertips. AI video in general is one of the few things where I think the blanket term of evil is fully justified with no qualifiers. That is before getting into the fact that this shit is stupidly expensive to produce, losing GOBS of money. And for what? To give The White House the ability to generate propaganda of the president of the United States dumping feces on protestors?

…YES OF COURSE THAT’S A REAL THING THAT HAPPENED! DON’T FORGET HOW FAR SOCIETY HAS FALLEN!

So, why is Sora being shuttered? Well, the answer is probably that they ran into some legal trouble for obvious reasons. Or, perhaps OpenAI is running into financial issues and they want to cut off their biggest loser, as AI video is a financial trashfire. A hugely valued company like this, that is skirting around the idea of an IPO, does not shutter their a product like this without a good reason, and we should know what that is soon enough. Personally, I’m just glad that its death is imminent, and I hope every other AI video platform is met with the same fate. You cannot just remove this technology, but you can make it as popular as… NFTs in 2026.

…For the record, NFTs are not even popular in the crypto world anymore. I would know. I do crypto tax returns for almost 40 people.

Also, Disney canceled their contract with OpenAI to use their characters in Sora, which should be remembered to illustrate how little Disney truly thinks of artists and its intellectual property. They could just buddy up with another AI company so people can make licensed AI slop video of their characters.

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What The Hell’s Going on With Acquisitions and Closures This Week?
(Everything is Falling Apart! Aaaaaahhhh!!!)

I should really clean this up at some point and make a REAL template out of this.

…Wait, maybe I could have Missy make one for me!

With the last two stories, I would assume that the entire tech industry is going through some thangs, and it is. Yet this week was home to a flurry of stories that bopped between such extremes that I’m not even sure what to make of it.

Sony closed their first party studio, Outlaw Games. A studio that was quietly established in March 2025 and home to about 20 people but seemingly did not pass a year one milestone. …Or maybe new management just did not want to bother with a budding studio, as they are in preservation mode.

Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group decided to buy the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang developer Moonton Games from ByteDance for $6 billion. That is an INSANE amount to spend on any mobile studio, and is crazy timing considering how we’ve got a Brand New Gulf War boiling in the background.

Headup Games, a pretty acclaimed indie publisher, was bought by Thunderful during the pandemic acquisition spree, only to be purchased by the founder in 2024. They seemed to be doing alright, working on Super Meat Boy 3D and a nifty Hong Kong voxel brawler called The 9th Dragon. However, they have been acquired by a new company, Reforged Games. A name that I am not familiar with, but apparently they have a penchant for acquiring small-scale studios. In 2024, they acquired Ground Shatter (RICO, Knights in Tight Spaces), Extra Mile Studios (Lost Skies, Broken Sword), and Yellow Lab Games (Metavoidal). Clearly, they are planning something in a ttime when making games, in general, is not desirable, but I honestly cannot guess what.

Meanwhile, the French publisher Nacon is basically collapsing. For those not in the loop, they are pretty sizable player that went on an acquisition spree from 2018 to 2022, buying up the following:

• Big Ant Studios, developer of various C-tier sports games like Australian Football League, Rugby, Cricket, and… Tiebreak: Official Game of the ATP and WTA.
• Cyanide Studios, a developer of cycling games and 6/10 RPGs for cool freaks. Like Call of Cthulhu (2018), the Blood Bowl series, and the recent goblin stealth game Styx: Blades of Greed.
• Daedalic Entertainment, the developer behind the much beloved Deponia adventure game series and The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, one of the worst games of 2023.
• Kylotonn, developers of B-tier racing games like MXGP, WRC, and Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown.
• Ishtar Games, developer of cozy town management sim Lakeburg Legacies and sci-fi survival management sim Dead in Antares. They also publish games, I guess.
• Midgar Studio, developer of the forgotten Jet Set Radio like Hover: Revolt of Gamers and the Kickstarter JRPG love letter Edge of Eternity, which did well enough to get a successor, but I just remember it being in early access for years.
• RaceWard Studio who makes, uh, racing games.
• Spiders, a developer of often overlooked gem in the rough RPGs ranging from Mars: War Logs and Faery: Legends of Avalon to more modern action RPGs like GreedFall and Steelrising.

I somehow missed that they declared insolvency last month, and needless to say, this is not good. Not good for the developers or the French games industry as a whole. I’d speculate that Saudi Arabia might swoop in and buy them up, but with the studios having shipped several titles of note in the past few weeks (Greedfall: The Dying World, Styx: Blades of Greed, and Dead in Antares), I have reason to doubt. Companies like swooping in to buy games that are almost done, not games that already came out and got a 67 on Metacritic.

Oh, and Behaviour Interactive— formerly Ass-2-Mouth— bought The Fun Pimps, developer of the smash hit, 20 million units sold, survival game, 7 Days to Die. With what money? Dead by Daylight money? Because Behaviour has been expanding over the past few years, and I have no idea how they keep doing as well as they have been. …Also, Behaviour is making a Serious Sam multiverse game, because… actually, no, there is no logic in that. What connection does Behaviour have with Serious Sam, the OG throwback FPS currently under the tutelage of Devolver Bloody Digital?

I look at all of this and am just stumped, aghast, and confused as to where the industry could possibly be heading if this is just a sample of the things that are happening at the same time. I wanted to end this segment with something cohesive, but… nah dude, I’ve got nothing!

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The PlayStation 5 Gets A $100 Price Increase
(Budget Gaming is DEAD. Politics Killed It!)

…Oh, nevermind. Things are just fucked and some people are trying to grab the bag before they get much worse, or thing they can, somehow, profit from disaster.

This PS4 generation marked the last generation where game consoles consistently got cheaper and it’s starting to feel like that might be the last time where physical electronics will actually get cheaper due to the barrage of modern events.

The pandemic that has quietly persisted in the background, sacrificing people’s lives and health in order to pursue the interests of capital and spurring the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.

The tariffs that were implemented to give the fascist US government a slush fund for their “secret” police while robbing the American people of even more wealth.

The RAMpocalypse caused by American AI companies that want to replace labor, truth, and the very act of thinking with a service build on plagiarism and powered by fossil fuels.

And the flippant decision by the American government to create a Brand New Gulf War in order to, among other things, cause an economic depression via oil shortages, as the billionaire class knows how to profit in times of trouble. They are so rich they are immune to financial hardship.

The world order established after World War II is dead. 99% of people no longer have any say in how the world at large operates. The wealthy have gotten so wealthy that they think they can usher in a new economic order that benefits them— and only them— by hitting people with a barrage of economic disasters, while accelerating the destruction of Earth’s climate with heinous wars and casual genocide. A dead planet means they can sell clean air to people, bucko!

All of which is a preamble to say that the PlayStation 5 will receive a price hike on April 2, 2026, and the introductory digital only model is now 50% more expensive than it was at launch.

• The PlayStation 5 Digital Edition launched for $400, increased to $450 with the slim redesign, then increased to $500 in August 2025. Now, beginning April 2026, the console will be $600.
• The PlayStation 5 Regular Edition launched for $500, remained to $500 with the slim redesign, then increased to $550 in August 2025. Now, beginning April 2026, the console will be $650.
• The PlayStation 5 Pro launched for $700, increased to $750 in August 2025. Now, beginning April 2026, the console will be $900.

HOLY SHIT! We went from fucking 3DO prices with the PlayStation 5 Pro and are just one more price hike away from the world’s first $1,000 console! Sony probably does not want this— they just want to make money and are culturally, if not legally, obligated to put the costs onto the customer. They would rather make their money on digital sales. for reasons I’ll get to next segment. But this? This paints a pretty disastrous picture of the future of gaming as a whole.

People only are able to get into gaming if they can access video games. Love of the medium is directly tied to being able to get cheap gaming hardware and inexpensive games. It makes games accessible to children, and childhood experiences can foster a lifelong love. I know it did for me. However, if the dominant home console, before considering any games, cost as much as a MacBook Neo, as much as a Mac Mini, and far less than an entry level smartphone then… not as many people are going to get into games, period.

This price hike sucks for a lot of reasons. While the PS5 has sold very well, shipping over 92 million units, there are definitely people who have not upgraded as they lack a reason to. Many of the biggest games for the PlayStation ecosystem are still Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Saudi Arabia’s Football Club, NBA 2K, and Grand Theft Auto V. Millions have simply not upgraded to new hardware. And unless publishers keep supporting these platforms, assuming they don’t go the way of Genshin Impact and drop support, there will be a flood of players who would be looking to upgrade. And at this rate, what should be a $200 entry price, based on historical price drops, will now be $600. Inarguably more expensive than if they had bought the system back in 2020.

Anybody who has been waiting to snag a PS5 to play Grand Theft Auto VI at launch— and there are millions of people like that— will be left with a $700 bill (before US sales taxes). That’s a mighty high pricey ticket just to opt into what is predicted to be A Cultural Canon Event for the 2020s, and what if people just… say no? What if they simply cannot afford that and are already in debt from financing their groceries? Most Americans, let alone people in less developed— yet otherwise superior— nations lack a $1,000 in savings. Let alone savings for such a frivolous product.

I worry that people will just GIVE UP gaming, will just be priced out, and that this will make the medium smaller. I worry that the layoff endemic will consume HALF of the American games industry, that the industry will be in such a state where the PS6 will NEED to be the last console due to economics. I worry that the war on personal computers from AI peddling fuckbags will result in people being physically unable to play games without relying on a service. Everything is falling apart, and it is currently impossible to look at the future of gaming with a hint of optimism, as it is poised to be a casualty in a broader war by the wealthy against regular people. …And Sony raising the price of the PlayStation 5 is a part of that.

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Nintendo is Charging More For Physical Games
(This Was Inevitable, and Here’s Why!)

Well, this was inevitable.

This past week, Nintendo announced that they plan on changing the prices of their upcoming titles, with the physical version having one prices and the digital version having another. They were decidedly coy about this, not wanting to outright say how this price change would work in the announcement, but the gist is that they will be charging an additional $10 for physical copies. The first game subject to these new rules will be Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, releasing May 21, 2026, which will cost $60 digitally and $70 physically.

This is almost certainly due to the RAM crisis ushered in by destructive AI companies, who are directly responsible raising the costs of servers, hardware, electricity, and basic manufacturing components for electronics. Nintendo could eat the increased cost to earn goodwill among their customer base, but they are instead choosing to prioritize their financials by raising the prices of their physical games. That is what this is, a price hike on physical games, not them deciding to make digital games cheaper. This fact, combined with Nintendo’s willingness to push $70 or $80 games (Pokémon Pokopia, Mario Kart World), it is not unreasonable to think that Nintendo will release the coveted $100 video game sometime during the Switch 2’s lifespan.

By doing this, Nintendo is shifting the cultural norms, and I would not be surprised to see games adopt a similar “$10 physical game tax” as early as this holiday season. Yes, even PS5 games, despite the fact that I don’t think the costs of Blu-rays or plastic cases are going to go up dramatically.

Wait, plastics in general are going to become more expensive because it’s a tasty oil byproduct. And Trump could bomb Kharg Island any day so he and his crew can make a trillion dollars by gambling on Polymarket.

Akumako: “…The fuck you mean tasty?”

There are financial reasons for this, but I choose to view this less as a response to current events and economic troubles and more as the fulfillment of a decade-long dream. In fact, I have expected this to happen for SO LONG that I am not even surprised to hear this.

I was there when games switched from physical to digital. I still remember hooking up my Wii with a LAN adapter to access the Wii Shop Channel just so I could download games like Super Mario RPG and Mega Man 9. Back then, there was a lot of discourse over the prospect and promise of digital games, and one of the hotter topics were the subject costs, storage space, and convenience.

Digital games were not really sold on being cheap when they first appeared. They were cheap because they were smaller games, and you could not sell smaller simpler games for more than, say, $10 or $15, tops. But hard drive space was VERY limited early on, and replacements were expensive proprietary nonsense, so you could not have too many digital games. Sure, it was convenient to buy them while at home, but if you wanted to buy full retail games, $60 games, $50 games, you had to get off the couch and head to your local department store.

Digital games did not really start to gain traction until The Great Recession hit and people became more price conscious. This is when used game sales grew, when teens (like me) would plan for coveted buy two, get one free sales, and publishers hated this. When used games were sold, all the revenues stayed within the hands of store owners, with game publishers not getting a cent of royalties for resale. …Because that’s not how commerce work. This was a raw deal for publishers, who were already not making the most money off of physical games, which operated under margins that, looking back, were somewhat narrow. Any third-party publisher pushing a $60 video game was looking at a mere 45% profit margin on each sale.

This DAMN image is ingrained in my brain as the first time I realized how screwed video games were as a business. Every disc shipped and unsold represents a significant loss, and in order to make back a $50 million AAA budget, you had to sell about two million at a minimum. Simply put, THIS SUCKED for games publishers, and made the act of selling games a surprisingly hard business. Mind you, this was actually luxurious next to the way things were when publishers were slinging cartridges, which were WAY more expensive than CDs or Blu-rays, but if you made 100,000 copies that you can’t sell then, well, you just wasted millions of dollars.

Game publishers have always wanted to explore options to lower these production costs to improve their margins and make more profit so they could pursue bigger games. They were gung ho about the prospects of CDs that could be burnt for, like, a dollar, and loved discs because they were so darn cheap. Enter digital games, which were even cheaper. Records from this era are a bit spotty, but I feel comfortable in saying that the current industry standard for digital purchases— 70% to the publisher and 30% to the platform holder— was the standard back then.

To any business in the late 2000s, this sounds like the tits, the boobies, the whole damn potoo. They don’t need to manufacture anything. They don’t need to ship inventory. They just need to send some DATA to a server, upload some media and metadata, and have someone else sell it on their behalf, handling all the payment processing. Then, on each $60 game sold, they gave you $42, instead of $27. That’s an extra $15 in profit, an extra 25% of the base price, with zero risk of over-manufacturing. Like, bro, SIGN ME THE FUCK UP YESTERDAY!

However, publishers could not just pivot all of their business to online storefronts. They were new things for people. Customers were willing to spend $10 on a novelty. They had been trained by iTunes and the like, which charged that much for an album. But spending $60 on something intangible? Something that they could not sell or lend to a friend? That was a harder sell.

…Also, you could not buy retail games digitally at the start of the Wii PS360 generation.

Buying full $60 retail releases digitally on consoles was not really a thing until 2007, when Sony launched the feature, and it was not co-opted by Microsoft until 2009. Initially, this was a way to offer select titles to players, a curated list of “Games on Demand,” but through a sketchy release history over the course of the generation, nearly every title was eventually released digitally. Digital was always presented as an option, and one with some merit to it. It was faster and easier to just buy and download a game than head out to a retailer. If a game had a low print run or was expensive physically, you could just buy it digitally and access it that way. But the BIG one, the one that really made people look to digital as the future, was the sales.

With retail, sales were typically strictly seasonal or occasional, and you always had to contend with limited copies. I know I had to bounce between GameStops to find certain games I wanted as a kid, calling them up and asking them if they could hold this or that for me before I splurged $40 to get three games. But with digital, you could run sales whenever Big M or Big S wanted, and cut down prices as deeply as you cared to. You could make a $60 title only $10 for a week, tempting a lot of people to buy it on a lark, as an impulse purchase. Some of them will play the game, like it, and want to buy the sequel when it comes out. And if they don’t, well, the publisher didn’t lose any money on the sale, so what’s there to complain about?

It’s tempting to attribute this trend to the now institutionalized Steam sales, which is truly how Steam got people to use it as their default platform for games. However, this was also a routine feature on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. These deep discounts, combined with the routine depreciation of game prices from $60 to $30 or $20 in a few years, made it really easy to amass a digital library of games.

Akumako: “I think you’re losing the plot, bitch.”

Right, right, right. So, deep discounts brought people to digital platforms and helped coax them into making digital libraries, that’s pretty well known. But what’s less known is the discourse around game prices at the time, if digital and physical games should have a different base price. I remember peeping arguments about how digital games should be 10% or $5 cheaper to incentivize purchases, and it made sense from a certain perspective. You are trading the ability to sell something for cash, to lend a game, for a lower upfront cost and the convenience of having it delivered to you on demand. However, this never really happened, possibly out of fear that this would upset brick and mortar retailers who could just stop buying a publisher’s games

Throughout the 2010s, physical games declined due to several reasons. Digital storefronts offered people better and more immediate deals, letting them build up a library. Games were routinely shipped with problems, bugs, and required a day one patch to fix them, making a physical disc feel a lot less valuable. While DLC, through its nature as DLC, made parts of games inherently digital, begging the question of why go the hybrid approach when you can just have everything digital? Also, this was the smartphone decade, and people were really into the idea of digitizing their life. Their music, their books, their movies, and their games. In retrospect, that was a BAD CALL, but this was an era of techo-optimism, and people, like me, were stupid enough to buy the bluff.

Point is, just a decade after the option became available, the majority of console players to switched to digital. Since then, it has been the dominant way to play and purchase console games, so much so that I recall there being doubt about physical games even being a thing with the PS5 and Xbox Series. …And I do think that we are living through the last generation of physical games.

In a climate like this, publishers and platform holders are going to be looking for ways to end physical game sales. Physical game sales make less money for publishers, they make less money for platform holders, and they carry with them a deluge of shipping and warehouse fees that have only gotten more expensive. Game publishers DO NOT want physical games to be a thing, and we can see this with Game Key Cards, games that are just access codes on discs, and games that are just cases with fancy vouchers inside of them. If they could, publishers would replace all game retailers and key sellers. But they can’t without facing some hefty backlash and possibly losing out on sales from a certain genre of enthusiast— the diehard collector.

So, what do you do? Do you risk the backlash and lost sales of discarding physical games entirely? Nobody really wants to do that— even if Microsoft is sheepish about releasing physical discs with actual games on them. Or do you just raise the price to nudge more people towards digital? At this point, modern games retail is basically dead and cannot really retaliate, especially if you are a name as big as Nintendo. And if one person does this, then what’s stopping everyone else from doing it?

From my perspective, Nintendo could have done this during the COVID-19 pandemic and they would have simply gotten away with it. They could cite unprecedented times and jack up the prices of physical goods before just ditching discs and game cards with the next generation. They didn’t then, and now, looking at what I’m seeing… they’ll win. Nintendo is going to charge more for physical games, get away with it, and most people will follow, setting a new standard and normalizing a practice that will just become how games are. We have been witnessing the gradual demise of physical games for the past 20 years, and this is just another spork stabbing its underbelly.

I’d say choosing not to buy these overpriced games might do something, but I don’t believe it will. I think this is the next step step in denying people ownership of media, or at least charging a premium. The industry has wanted this, people like me have expected this, and now, now it’s just enacting on this long-held desire. Like I said at the top, this was inevitable.

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Progress Report 2026-03-29

In fact… Yo, Akumako! Play me out on some Scissor Sisters!

God, I love mixtapes…

Akumako: “…You ever notice how Natalie sometimes just STOPS pretending to have any cognitive awareness of what she’s doing and does something because it’s funny to her? It’s always been a bad habit of hers, an autistic tendency, but it’s been getting worse since she got put on house arrest…”

I’m not on house arrest! …Yet!

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2026-03-22: Was busy watching the Re:Zero movies and start of season two with my friends— Re:Zero continues to be excellent— and then worked until like 2 AM.

2026-03-23: Worked in the morning, left to get my teeth cleaned— I go to the dentist every four months as my gums keep getting inflamed and teeth are sensitive— and then worked a bunch with my boss. Stopped around 21:00, did my stuff and wrote the 3,600 word mini-essay on Resident Evil. Then was too beaten up with writing fatigue that I decided to start playing CrossCode.

2026-03-24: Wrote 1,300 word OpenAI and Epic Games bits. My boss had poop problems, so I was able to go back to work on VD2.0 Act 3, Writing 1,600 words after doing some location scouting for the new setting. I like to SEE the place my story is set in to cop the vibe, ya dig, my G? I was planning on doing more writing, but I was not in the right mindspace post-shower, so I made the header. Finding and resizing logos takes hella long, yo.

2026-03-25: Wrote 3,000 word industry collapse and Nintendo bits and cobbled together some visual assets. They might look rough, but they are more unique than what a REAL publication would try and pull, lazy rabbits. I’m the top rabbit around here, the TOPPIT POWER BOTTOM! (I am drunk, lol.)

2026-03-26: Edited this fat bitch, fucked this fat bitched, and shoved her into the oven for some ovening fun! Then I played more CrossCode.

2026-03-27: Worked some more, wrote the 1,000 word PlayStation bit, wrote the 500 word FlipWitch bit, wrote 1,900 words for VD2.0 Act 3, getting to the start of the climax of the arc. Also, played too much CrossCode again. I love video games.

2026-03-28: Wrote 1,500 words of VD2.0 Act 3 between working and chores. That’s it. I wanted to write more, but my schedule was very spotty…

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

Current Word Count: 144,626

Estimated Word Count: 250,000

Words Edited: 0

Total Segments: 30

Segments Outlined: 30

Segments Drafted: 16

Segments Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 94

Oh shit, I’m in danger…