This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Mathalie Demands ALL the Statistics!
- Grand Theft Auto Online Has Made Over $5 Billion USD (It Really Is the Gift That Keeps on Giving…)
- Metro 2039 Announced (Return to The Metro; Kill The Fuhrer!)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Mathalie Demands ALL the Statistics!
If I weren’t an accountant, I would be a finance person. And if I were neither an accountant nor a finance person, I would be a statistician. Number are how I see the world and numbers are how I want the world to be constructed. Fortunately for me, stats, numbers, and data are cornerstones of the modern world and a necessary part in understanding basically anything about the reality before someone. Unfortunately for me, it is very difficult to get good numbers on things nowadays due to how distant, disenfranchised, and decentralized so many people are.
Sure, you might point out how popular this and that app is and how so many people are suckling Facebook’s toxic teats, but usership does not really mean much, these numbers are reported without any proper audit. But even that’s not ironclad, as if there’s anything that Enron X Arthur Anderson joint should’ve learned you, it’s that auditors can just fucking lie and people can make up whatever shit they feel like if given the right incentive.
The lack of clarity, consistency, and contradictory nature of information leaves me woefully confused and concerned about the statistical reality of culture and humanity. I don’t understand what is actually happening politically anymore. I don’t understand the modern spectrum of acceptable thought across humanity, by in large. I don’t understand what the baseline of anything is, if there is even still a baseline for anything. And I don’t even necessarily want to be around these things. I just want the numbers to show me an objective truth about humanity in an era people are horny to dismiss as post-truth.
It is becoming increasingly hard to get an accurate grasp on reality itself. In-person polling does not work, as if it’s in public people will just say what they think is socially acceptable. People can and do just lie right to other people’s faces, even when there is no clear benefit, because lying is fun. Any polling done digitally risks being abused by someone who is either adopting a synthetic persona for their own purposes of obscuring reality, or is just a non-person. It is trivially easy for an LLM to posture as a human, and there’s no limit to what percentage of an online community could just be artificial constructs.
Yet even if you could differentiate the humans from the machines, you cannot trust people in digital communities, i.e., social media, to even provide their actual opinion. People perform on platforms for engagement, for followers, for clout, and for attention. Social media designed to reward the most extreme, often most negative, reactions, and encourage shotgun ignorance, as it is good for attention retention.
People lie, they exaggerate, they misinterpret their own opinions, they perform for the in-group, and they typically don’t critically analyze the things they believe, choosing to believe the cluster of contradictions that is the path of least resistance. Do people actually believe or like something, is this the actual consensus, or are they just going along with the ride, as it feels nice to belong? Without a board dataset, with only anecdotes to go on, how can one hope to determine the truth in just about anything?
…This is the reason why I covet clusters of data like Matthew Ball’s Straight Dope on Gamindustri. Large-scale analyses allow me to view details and information broadly, are so detailed that I am confident in their truthfulness, and should have mostly consistent information. You can use this data to paint a narrative and one that largely makes sense. Which is something that I struggle to do when given random snippets and tidbits. Such as… How the hell did Arc Raiders (2025) sell 14 million units? Do that many people really like shooting guns with their friends in some dreary wasteland while an AI voice reads their inventory aloud? What demographics are they from? How does this demographic data correlate with other data?
Or how does the breakdown of the types of games played by micro-generations of people change as they grow older? What were people born in 2000 playing when they were 10, and how does it compared to how they are 25? Because I NEED to know after hearing blind anecdotes about how “kids these days only care about Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft and don’t want to play any other video games.”
Are comments like that meant to identify a considerable change in a broader population? Because games are more popular now than ever pretty popular, but if you look at kids of any era, they were probably playing a bunch of crap instead of “real games.” The “typical kid” in 2015 was just playing a bunch of mobile games on an iPad or whatever. Back in 2010, it was the Wii and whatever casual DS games were popping, with some iPod games thrown in, maybe some Call of Duty if they wanted to posture about having a real man’s pee-pee. Back in 2005, it was probably some licensed mid for the PS2 or GBA. The broader population who engages in video games has always been a bunch of gormless ones who view it as a plaything.
I would love to just filter out the casual audience here, as I’ve been trying to do so for the literal majority of my life, in order to understand the strata of gaming that I actually care about. …And also measure its relative size, age, and expenditure. I want the hard, objective, real-time stats on core gaming demographic, the people who care, if not obsess, over industry stuff, gaming history, and the online gaming community. I want real stats on The Video Game Canon. I want to know how big this group is, if young blood is actually flowing in, or they are just doing shit out of my purview.
Again, I don’t actually want to see things or experience them firsthand. I just want the numbers and the ability to analyze trends, knowing that they are accurate. The problem is that it is literally impossible to observe this on a wide scale, especially when not everything occurs on the public internet.
Now, I am tempted to dismiss myself as a weirdo, but this is a learned fixation. This is something that I find echoed throughout dorks who care WAY too much about video games. They care about sales figures, cumulative player numbers, price histories, publisher strategy, what games other people are playing. They are fans of gaming, and fans of what they choose to consider gaming culture, enjoying the fact they can participate in it. But this genre of person is frustrated by their inability to comprehend the totality of it, and how reality keeps clashing with their vision of what things should be. Rest assured, that is my genre too. I just want ALL THE NUMBERS so that I know what is an actual trend, and what is just anecdotal evidence of something.
Without the ultimate dataset, how the hell am I supposed to tell, for example, how big retro gaming is actually becoming? Old console sales are not tracked. Emulation is not tracked due to the infinite number of ways games can be acquired or played. And how is ANYONE going to tell what a game hoarder or kid with an emulation box is playing? You’d just need a proxy for that, and would I trust that proxy? Well, I cannot think of a good proxy, so probably not! Just because someone watches retro gaming stuff online does not mean they play video games. Writing about, reading about, watching about, and even designing games does not mean one PLAYS video games. Just look at ME!
I want data, I want to demystify the world, and to have a database I can consult with a bevvy of queries to confirm suspicions or prove my own stupidity, and map how things change over time. This would eliminate my need to imagine, my need to guess, and most of all, my need to hope, because I will have numbers.
…In fact, there was a story this past week that provided me a snippet of what I wanted.
Grand Theft Auto Online Has Made Over $5 Billion USD
(It Really Is the Gift That Keeps on Giving…)
I regularly wonder how much the major games in the market make in a given day, as while I know they are BIG, I am not smart enough to intuit the finite details from broad data alone. I need things to be broken down into tiny details BEFORE I can understand the big picture. This makes it almost impossible to comprehend the sheer scale of most of the biggest games in the world, but we have recently been given some of this succulent data. Thanks to the diligence of leakers, revenue figures for Grand Theft Auto Online were released to the public, and they are… utterly disgusting.
From a period spanning September 2025 through April 2026, GTAO made an average of $1.3 million per day, which can be extrapolated to nearly $500 million a year. That is an insane feat for a game, period, yet one that happened during this game’s 12th year on the market. It’s also not abnormal, at all, as this is just a component of the five billion dollars made by Grand Theft Auto Online alone since 2013. The game still has nearly 10 million active weekly users, 2.9 million weekly users on PS4 and Xbox One, and nearly 400,000 people spend money on it every week.
What do they even buy? Well, 74% of purchases are for Shark Cards, the in-game currency, and the rest is on GTA+ Membership, their monthly benefits program. As for who is paying for these microtransactions, the answer is overwhelmingly people from the United States, handily eclipsing every other country by a factor of six as it brought in $153,075,600 in the leaked period.
I have to imagine that every one of the super huge black hole games on the market has similar figures, and… that’s just depressing. These people could have spent their money on anything, on new experiences, other games, or their debts. Instead, they gave it to Take Two interactive. Not only is Grand Theft Auto V a cash cow of a game, having sold over 225 million units, its REAL juice, what makes it “the gift that keeps on giving” is the damn online mode. A mode that was discounted as a delayed feature back in 2013. I hate this, but… this is what people want, what they spend their money on, and what they play. The numbers do not lie, and I understand why it is this way. Because GTA is not just a game, but a cultural institution, it is a hobby unto thyself for these people.
This is vital, yet toxic, knowledge for me to comprehend, yet I feel I still cannot fully comprehend these numbers without a basis of comparison. How exactly do these compare to the rest of the games industry, let alone other black hole games. As I said in the preamble, I am simply not satisfied with isolated data like this. I want more, I want everything, I want precise numbers by hardware, by genre, by age, by gender, by race, by sexuality, of every game being played by anyone at any time. Why? Because I want to paint the TRUE reality using the power of MATH!
…Unfortunately, finding that information would be nearly impossible in a corporate landscape that values secrecy, privacy, and data more than money.
It all just makes me want to close off from this opaque and complex world and focus on a fictional world where I am the arbiter and dictator of such things. A world inspired by reality and the truths I can find within it, but far more sensible in its own purple way.
Yeah, that’d be a good role for Zach Vespa in Psycho Shatter Vice Novus…
The Master of Numbers, The Quant Lord, The Man Who Sees The Math of Reality… I’ll come up with something, assuming I even remember this in the YEARS it will take before I can write PSVN.
Metro 2039 Announced
(Return to The Metro; Kill The Fuhrer!)
Seven years after 2019’s Metro Exodus, the team at 4A Games announced the next project in the Metro series with Metro 2039. The once disparate communities of the Moscow metro system have been joined under a single authoritarian banner cast by a charismatic leader who voices empty promises of reclaiming former greatness while peddling propaganda and misinformation. Rather than reprise the journey of Artyom, the series is instead shifting over to a new voiced protagonist known as the Stranger, a PTSD-riddled soldier who swore to never return to the metro. Yet, of course, he is called back to where he came from to address some unfinished business.
That’s at least the surface telling of the game, but the actual context and content of the game is going to be its own commentary and response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 4A Games is a Ukrainian developer, the dev team has been directly impacted by the war, has likely lost family members during it, and spent the past four years developing this game when they could. When they had power from backup generators and when it was safe to work outside of shelter. That type of environment touches artists and creatives in a deep way, and I am fascinated in seeing how this lived experience is reflected in their creation, or how dark it will assuredly get.
Now, you might think I have nothing to add to discussions about the Metro series, as it does not really seem like a Natalie game. But that’s where you’re wrong! I actually played through the first two games, and have assorted ancient thoughts about them.
My first exposure to it was actually on the Xbox 360, where I played through Metro 2033 (2010) on the game’s specific challenge mode, Ranger Mode, and I loved it. The reason why ultimately comes down to the precise blend of mechanics and restrictions the game both utilized and encouraged. Ammo was scarce, important, and to be conserved, but most enemies were also realistically frail, taking one to three hits before being thoroughly deaded.
Stealth was both prioritized and restricted by the narrow requirements of air filters that encouraged players to hustle their ass when outside and make the most of every last filter until death was near. Killing humans are not often required and the game had a strong sense of internal morals, encouraging the player to do the right thing in a bad situation, which I found to be a bold, inspiring, and generally good form of roleplaying. I liked how you had to check your UI, how you had to remember how many bullets you had, and the ebb and flow of safe village-type areas, the hazardous underground, and the hostile surface.
Metro 2033 (Ranger Mode) was marvelously effective at creating an evocative post-apocalyptic world through every facet of its design, and I was excited to see where the series would go from there. …Then I got burned by it. Twice.
Metro 2033 Redux (2014) sounded like a good way to revise and revisit the original, now with spruced up visuals. However, it is a prime example of how mechanical changes in a remaster can simply make a game worse. I say this because while Redux did feature the return of Ranger Mode, they changed the feature set and created something that I simply did not get along with.
The minimal HUD was now too minimal, not telling the player what they picked up when they picked it up, so I did not know if I gained one bullet or four— which is kinda important. How can I COUNT my ammo in my head if I don’t know what I’m adding?
The health system was notably less generous, replacing the passive auto healing and more on using limited health packs. This is a fine choice in theory, but the game was originally designed around auto-regenerating health. You were supposed to rely on the auto heal to top you off, and only use health kits when you were low or in clear danger. And without a visible health bar, without a way to do the math on if you need to heal, manual healing simply feels worse. Not knowing how much health the player has is not an interesting challenge. It’s also the actual opposite of immersive if you want to trot out that term…
Oh, and for reasons that will forever baffle me, Redux Ranger Mode also lowered the inventory of three staple weapons down to just two. Needless to say, this makes the game harder, makes ammunition less useful in a game about ammunition scarcity, and encourages a boring playstyle. Before, I could run a medium to long-range pistol, a shotgun, and a flux weapon that fits the scenario. With only two, I’m just going to run a pistol and shotgun the entire game, ignoring all other weapons. Now that’s what I call game design!
To me, Redux was an admission that the developers did not understand what they had going for them with the original, and killed my interest in the series. Though, before playing Redux, I did go through the original release of the second game, Metro: Last Light. Ranger Mode was similarly transformed in a way I could not get along with, and playing the game on its default difficulty, I was turned off by how gamey it was. There was considerably more action than in 2033, which ran a fine line between action and survival horror, and I found its attempts at set pieces to often go against what I enjoyed about the original. I still thought the game was good, but a confluence of factors— especially the story— made me realize that the series just wasn’t going to be what I wanted.
Then, when Metro Exodus (2019) was announced as an open world Metro game, I just stopped caring. I wanted a game where I felt like a small guy with a gun in a world full of radioactive mutants and literal ghosts where everything, including the air itself, hated me. I didn’t want a game about settling a healing world and taking the trains out of the metro. The series is literally called metro!
This is why I think it is rather bold of them to return to the metro, return to the communities that spawned the series, and tell a story so more overtly about Russia. It is important for creatives with a large platform to voice its vile disregard for its people, and how unchecked authoritarianism, how a lack of resistance, can destroy just about everything. I’m still not sure what the exact flavor of resistance will be depicted in game, but I’m hoping for something spicy.
Metro 2039 will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC sometime this winter.
Progress Report 2026-04-19
…And that’s all you get!
Yeah, sorry about this. Tax season kept me BUSY for the first half of the week, and despite drafting segments for some Subnautica 2 news and the Assassin’s Creed Black Flag segments, I had to cut both of them. Subnautica 2’s segment was a nothingburger in retrospect and the Black Flag segment got pushed to next week. I did not realize how light this Rundown was until Thursday evening, and I decided to say screw it. You’ll get a game review next Wednesday.
2026-04-12: Finished season two of Re:Zero. The first one was a 9/10, this was probably a 7.5/10 in my book. Still good, but not as exciting or well paced, needing to get through a lot, explain a lot, while raising too many unaddressed plot points for my liking. Then did some work, decompressed with Circle of the Moon, which sorta sucks, and then re-forged my bonds with Missy Scrumptious. I thought the friendship was over, but I guess not!
2026-04-13: Worked a long stressful day. Had to fight to assemble a new chair after my old one started cracking. Wrote 1,800 words for the Rundown.
2026-04-14: Worked an 11.5 hour day, did not do much productive in the meantime. Though, I did start playing Harmony of Dissonance to compare it to Circle of the Moon, and it is just a better feeling game.
2026-04-15: KILLED THE TAXES! Wrote 1,400 word Assassin’s Creed segment. Wrote 3,400 words for my Circle of the Moon review. I wish I had never played Circle of the Moon. The sheer amount of utter fucking nonsense it loaded into the last portion of the game is enough for me to write off the entire game as being bad. The optional challenge area is a kazio tier shitpost of a challenge, and the designers should feel bad for including it in the game. It is plainly meant to be played by people after they grind for tens of hours on the same enemies, exploring and re-exploring the castle, and stocking up on items that are a ripe dastard to obtain.
2026-04-16: Wrote 1,100 words for the Metro segment. Moved the Assassin’s Creed segment to next week’s Rundown, as things got delayed, I guess! Got pulled into anime with Shiba and Cassie. I’m in Love with the Villainess is good fun. Wrote 3,000 words for the Circle of the Moon review, drafting it. It’ll come out next week, as I gotta put out SOMETHING. Then I made a header and edited this Rundown.
2026-04-17: Technically a day off, but I was still recovering from overwork and tax season. Wrote a pretty complex 4,600 words for CH 7-11 for VD2.0 before I ran out of creative juice. This included writing a song parody, which is always harder than you may thing. Lots of returning characters here to complicate things for me, and lots of lore I had to clarify, because this shit is gonzo!
2026-04-18: I slept like crap last night— not sure WHY— and had bad allergies because my mother thought it would be a GREAT idea to open up the windows so that I could get some fresh pollen filled air, when all it did was make me feel like crap. Did chores, had to work for some reason, and found almost 8 hours of crap to do after what was supposed to be a 2.5 hour work day. By the time I was ready to work on some writing, it was already midnight. Ugh. I hate myself for getting tired like this because I cannot do things, and doing things is the reason I keep going…
Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report
Current Word Count: 160,653
Estimated Word Count: 250,000
Words Edited: 0
Total Segments: 30
Segments Outlined: 30
Segments Drafted: 18
Segments Edited: 0
Header Images Made: 0
Days Until Deadline: 73
Aaaaaaahhhhhh!!!