Rundown (7/12/2026) Microsoft Slaughters ‘Em Up

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This Week’s Topics:

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Microsoft Slaughters ‘Em Up!

I am sick and tired of talking about how much I do not like Microsoft.

They force themselves into being the dominant operating system for the overwhelming majority of intermediate level computing. They are one of the, I dunno, three companies your organization’s software suite can be tied to. The company has done irreparable damage to the world through their use of lethal intelligence and have done their fair share to make the world worse through the peddling of their AI garbage.

When it comes to gaming? Well, I cannot say it was all bad. Microsoft was a welcomed force for a decade or so. They threw around money to get games made, gave developers experience and opportunities, helped push online play better than Sega ever could, and did a lot to establish the idea of indie games in the public consciousness. The first ten years of Xbox were good… but then it all went so, so wrong while getting so, so much bigger.

People like to say that everything went wrong with the Xbox One, but that’s them recognizing the climax and not the rising action leading into it. Xbox was founded by a group of scrappy, passionate, and eager people who wanted to take the gaming world by storm and create something that spoke to the young American zeitgeist. They did that, delivering a system with titles from a bevvy of studios, managed by a group of people who were eager to learn and do their best, to make this bold experiment work. They did not have a preconceived notion of what this or that game should be, and were happy to let developers do as they please, while shifting their vision into focus. Not as a boss, but a team, or, in some cases, they just gave them the money and collected the goods.

This was an era of big spending, big relationships, and big chances that ultimately worked out, leading Microsoft into a good spot with the Xbox 360, which enjoyed a dominating run through 2005 to 2008. …Except for the fact that over 50% of all Xbox 360s shipped then, uh, died. But the games were good— good enough for them to maintain a lead over PlayStation 3 during Sony’s first arrogant era… and then it all kind of fell apart.

After a lacking launch year, Sony went back to the drawing board, reinvested in their exclusives, partners, and brokered deals on myriad developers. They were trying to bring people over by delivering the best games. Microsoft looked over what Sony was doing and said… fuck that.

In 2007, Xbox management began undergoing a significant pivot. Don Mattrick took over where Sega’s Peter Moore left off, and brought with him a culture of arrogance and assurance. There was a belief that the Xbox 360 had already beaten the PlayStation 3, which was lining shelves as other systems shot off them. With one competitor down, Mattrick set his eyes on Nintendo, wanting to beat them at “family games” while continuing Microsoft’s years-long goal of dominating the living room.

The internal target demographics shifted towards a more casual audience. The 7-year veterans of this 6-year-old brand saw the writing on the wall and left, pivoting to a new venture at a new studio or bailing out of games in general. The firm relationships that Microsoft had fostered with their partners became a lot less generous and more expecting. And the prevailing culture across first-party studios began to shift. Microsoft was done with their “let’s try everything and see what works” era and in its “we must develop games with a target audience in mind” era.

None of this was an overnight transformation, but you could see how much the direction was changing as early as E3 2009 when the Kinect was revealed. And you could feel that things had changed sometime around 2011. They largely stopped publishing unique or interesting titles beyond Kinect and Xbox Live Arcade games, focusing on major franchises while Sony was having a darn renaissance of creativity on the PS3 during the latter years of its life.

During this dearth of unique exclusives and sequels to established IPs, people were hoping that the Xbox 720 would set things right. After the lackluster launch of the Wii U and captivating promises of the PlayStation 4, people were hoping that the NeXtBox would capture recapture the creative era of 2011 to 2008, when Xbox was something exciting. Instead, well, do I even need to say anything about the old Xbone? The focus on TV— analog TV— was a complete misfire, and many of the unique features of this all-in-one entertainment device were poorly explained. Xbox was always a multimedia device of sorts, but the portrayal in the reveal completely misunderstood what anybody wanted. Some contrarians may say it was just too early, I say they should get an always online pacemaker.

Xbox’s reputation sank, at least among the diehards. Casuals did not give a crap, they never do. Third-party relationships were shaky. Many first-party studios on the chopping block, downsized or shut down. It was looking like Xbox might be on its way out. And… I think it should have. After the Xbox One was the clear loser in the race from the first few months, Microsoft should have just run things out, go third party, and accept that this industry is only big enough for four. Nintendo, Sony, PC, and mobile.

Instead, they decided to throw around money it. Game Pass was a concept that only sorta worked because Microsoft paid tens of millions for exclusivity contracts to every publisher they could contact. They bought developers in bulk in 2018… despite lacking the staff needed to manage them. They also started funding more games… but were really bad at shipping them, or making them genuinely good. Hell, even established studios, the few that remained, were struggling in this environment.

Combined with the decision to release every Xbox One exclusive on PC, the Xbox One spent the majority of its life as a second-rate console with nothing going for it. The features it launched with were cut after not enough people were using them, and it did not have the best version of anything you could play on it. They were constantly playing catch up for a decade… and then they bought Activision Blizzard King.

It was after that merger that everything seemed to be going wrong. The industry’s post-pandemic boom had ended, and Microsoft began to shed their new purchase with vigor. Thousands lost their job, teams were tattered, projects were canceled, and the entire narrative about Xbox games shifted as the brand seemed to be transitioning to a third party role. The publisher was spread too thin, directionless, and far too big for its management team to control. So, what did Microsoft do? Get rid of the head of Xbox for the past decade, force his successor to step down, and replace them both with an outsider from the school of move fast, break things, and destroy lives to make financials look better.

Every failing of Xbox for the past two decades has been the fault of boneheaded managers who thought they were brilliant because of their business learning. Every canceled project was canceled due to bad leadership at the top. Every studio closure was due to mismanagement. Every busted launch was due to corporate not being able to pull their fucking weight, and every single fucking time, the boots-on-the-ground workers were the ones to get punished. Management was given severance packages, stock options, and luxurious bonuses while taking the credit and none of the blame. The laborers were given 15 minutes to empty out their desks and say goodbye to their friends.

They had something, I believed the hype when I was a little one, but they lost it, and no matter how much money they threw its away, they could never get it back again. Because they lost the knowledge of how to manage, how to commit to something, and how to allow people to make good games.

We have known that another round of closures and layoffs have been coming for weeks at this point. I just did not want to mention it, as I do not like giving these corpse fiddlers more attention. So, per the official announcement and reporting, what did Microsoft kill this time around?

Well, 1,600 people lost their jobs, effective July 6th, across their entire, amounting to roughly 10% of everybody under the Xbox umbrella. These people no longer have the means to make a livelihood, pay their bills, and are being thrown into an industry during a time of a horrific downturn. 1,600 additional people have their jobs taken away sometime within the next month. They do not know who will be cut, when it will happen, but are expected to be productive little worker bees until it’s time for them to be eliminated.

Why do all this? Well, it’s not because Microsoft is losing money on Xbox, but because it is not making enough money. Because its margins are too low. Because management did a bad job. Because this is the way a 21st Century American Business operates.

Roughly half of everyone working at Id Software has had their jobs stolen from them, the literal day before releasing the Doom: The Dark Ages Revelations expansion. They were working on the fourth Perfect Dark reboot, a co-op Doom game, and a John Wick inspired new IP, but now they have been cut down to a mere support studio. In fact, it’s even worse than that. Id has institutional knowledge from decades of expertise. They made IdTech. They MAKE IdTech, and that engine is incredible at what it does. Yet now, after Unreal 6 is supposedly going to be a plagiarism machine, Microsoft wants them to do support work on Unreal Engine games?

Do I even need to EXPLAIN how that’s one of the stupidest things I’ve heard all year, in 2026?

A fourth of Obsidian were separated from their friends and colleagues, despite routine promises that their job was to create unique and interesting games. Obsidian’s plans for an Avowed sequel were also thrown out in favor of a corporate mandated Fallout game. Which… why did you tell them to start work on a sequel to a new IP when you were going to have them work on an IP that people have wanted them to return to for a decade? Obsidian is a multi-team studio, so why couldn’t they manage both projects?

The Elder Scrolls Online developer, Zenimax Online, fired 213 employees, ravishing whatever plans they had for their successful and enduring MMO, just a year after canceling a pretty far along MMO called Project Blackbird. Why were they targeted? Well, much like Id, it’s probably because of their efforts to unionize, which Microsoft CANNOT accept. I cannot stress how cuts like these, of this proportional, can utterly devastate a studio, robbing it of institutional knowledge, all manner of efficiencies, and leave behind something far less valuable. The value of any studio comes directly from its people, and without them, you just have a bunch of disparate IPs and code.

Even regular Zenimax’s Maryland offices fired 166 employees, truly spreading the damage around to everyone.

I cannot stress how bad this is for the future of all of these developers. How callous, short-sighted, and generally stupid this is. Hundreds of lives have been upended due to chronic management and cynical financial motives. This is unjust. This is utterly irrational. And this is woefully reprehensible.

In addition to these layoffs, Microsoft is also firing 3,200 non-Xbox employees, just as a routine matter of fact, because they are seen as unnecessary. Tech companies have normalized this process, yet it should forever be recognized as an act of avarice, as an injustice, and a decidedly anti-human behavior in an anti-human industry run by members of the anti-human class.

In better news, various companies and projects have been divested from Microsoft.

IO Interactive’s semi-announced Project Fantasy, and online RPG, was assumed to be a Microsoft-backed venture. A week before this news, IO announced that a “relationship with an external partner” came to an end, meaning they will need to seek new funding and a new publishing partner. As a direct result of this, IO Interactive Istanbul has been shut down. We don’t know how many people worked at this office, but all of these can be counted as further Microsoft elimination.

Double Fine (Psychonauts, Kiln) and Compulsion Games (We Happy Few, South of Midnight) are being divested and will become independent studios once again. They will receive “runway funding” and full ownership of their IPs to keep them going and give them a source of cash flows from game sales. This is the most preferable outcome for these studios. They may need to seek out external funding for projects, but they can no longer be shut down by an uncaring corporate overlord.

Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have both been sold to undisclosed buyers. Their upcoming titles, Senua and State of Decay 3, will still be published by Microsoft, and it is unclear who owns their IPs.

Thanks to the responsible labor laws of France, Arkane Studios is still in negotiations regarding if they will become independent or be sold off. This will hopefully not affect the release or Mavel’s Blade, announced in 2023, and rumored to be a 2027 title.

Alongside these eliminations, Microsoft will be restructuring their game division around their biggest IPs. They plan on expanding Minecraft to be an even larger focus, competing with the user-generated content platform of Roblox. Bethesda Softworks is going to be focusing on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, likely in response to the lukewarm reception of Starfield and insulting stagnation of both IPs. Other major IPs, such as Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein were also mentioned, even though they gutted the studio that made Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein!

All of this is bad, yet I only expect it to only get worse from here. Microsoft has gotten a taste for mass cancelations and layoffs over the past two or so years, and I have no reason to expect them to continue to destroy people’s lives in their pursuit of profit. I would not be surprised to see studios like Rare, who has only released one original game this past decade, to be eliminated whenever Sea of Thieves’ revenue drops and player counts dry up. After they wrap up Clockwork Revolution, I could easily see InXile be shut down, as they are too small for Microsoft. Obsidian and Id already lost a lot of staff, and if they wind up being treated like an Activision studio, put on support work for the rest of their days… I would be disappointed, but not surprised.

As Microsoft pursues short-term growth and their much desired “focus,” I expect them to shed away all but their biggest hits, and shoot down any smaller project that does not aspire to sell eight figures.

I once wanted Microsoft to succeed, but now? Now, I want Microsoft to fail. They do not respect their past, their series, and especially not the people under their employment. The people running it are ghouls who view their job as not to create meaning, but to extract wealth for their shareholders. While the people actually making the games are not being treated as if they are utterly disposable. I hope everything they ship does below expectations, I hope their stagnation over the past year persists despite their best efforts, and I hope the Xbox Helix does 3DO numbers.

…Oh for fuck’s sake. Just when I thought this could not get any worse, the slaughter shill herself, Asha Sharma, was appointed to the Federal Reserve’s “Productivity and Jobs” task force. How? How does someone cut SO MANY jobs before being given a position like this? Is it because she has AI experience and the Fed wants to adapt the market to AI? Because she’s a natalist AI evangelist. She’ll just sell you bullshit! That’s all she’s done, playing to a crowd that will lap up whatever she wants, try to act like she is making good changes, before adhering to the whims of her boss, who wants number to go up.

How? How does this utter nonsense keep happening? Aaaaahhhhh!

Physical Versus Digital: The Price Discourse
(Beat That Sucker To Death Uh-Huh-Huh!)

I DID NOT WANT TO MAKE A NEW HEADER FOR THIS BIT!

So, I already tried to beat the whole “PlayStation is no longer going to produce discs” subject to death last week. However, in perusing more of the endless discourse about this, I feel that I missed a point that is well worth interrogating. Digital game prices versus physical game prices. This is something that has always been the subject of debate in some flavor or the other, and it ultimately goes something like this:

Digital game prices are ultimately set by the publisher, who has the ability to drop the price, set sales discounts, and determine how much a game costs across all platforms. They can keep a game at the full retail price and barely budge on it, even five years later, or they could deep discount it to a few bucks because they want more people to play it. It is ultimately the publisher’s prerogative, based on what they think is best, the age of the game, and what will earn them notice on a storefront.

Physical game prices are partially controlled by the publisher, but the retailer and store ultimately set the price of the game. Outside of the launch window, and accounting for used games that people sell via retailers like eBay, the price fluctuates wildly and games can be found for a wide variety of prices. This variability of physical game prices can be a boon for deal hunters. Combined with retailers running promotions, such as bulk purchase discounts, it was possible for a patient, eagle-eyed, and knowledgeable person to buy many games for cheap.

I personally have good memories of buying used games via a defunct service called Glyde, and getting many games for a fraction of their new price despite being a year or two old. I remember when Amazon gaming used to have Black Friday flash sales where you could get month-old AAA games for $20. And I was a loyal GameStop Buy 2 Get 1 Free-er back in my teens. So I understand the physical perspective pretty well.

Based on these facts alone, recognizing that there are so many ways to buy, distribute, and resell games, it is easy to conclude that games are indeed cheaper physically. However, based on my personal experiences, I don’t agree with that. I think this perspective is glorifying retail as a race to the bottom for prices while not acknowledging the way digital gaming storefronts typically work.

Physical game retail has a bunch of moving parts, and that can cause prices to decline over time as inventory is cycle out and people sell and resell their copies of games to the next eager buyer. However, this only works for games that have enough copies in circulation, which has always been a problem with some games. If demand exceeds supply, then the price does not go down, it goes up, and unless the publisher manufactures more of them, which they might not, then the price stays high, potentially higher than the MSRP, until demand declines.

This generally does not happen, but there are many instances where a successful game maintains a pretty consistent price throughout its life, as people are not eager to sell it and shops don’t have trouble selling it either. There’s no one fit all for physical games, and some most commonly purchased physical games, Nintendo first-party games, are notorious for their inflexible pricing. Furthermore, there is an acquisition cost to all physical game purchases. You either need to go to or be at a store to purchase one, or place an online order and wait for it to arrive. While this does not add to the monetary cost of a game, it does add a cost of time, opportunity, transportation, or shipping fees.

With digital games, you need to download that, but downloading is an inherently passive process. You can do anything while something is downloading. And despite publishers ultimately setting the price, they have a very good incentive to discount their games. Because otherwise, people won’t buy it.

I am something of a digital game hoarder, and tend to pay a lot of attention to the way the prices of digital games shift over time. Namely, I notice that they continue going down, or rather, they get increasingly lower sale prices as they try to appeal to both impulse shoppers and those with low reservation prices. Also known as people who never pay more than $20 for a computer game. If people are patient, the temporary sale price of a digital game will likely reach their reservation price, or a price significantly less than its launch price.

This is a phenomenon that began in the late 2000s when digital storefronts were new and publishers were trying to get people to use them. They would begin gradually discounting their games to appeal to people with lower reservation prices, hitting 25%, 33%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 67%, 75%, maybe even 90%. Because digital games do not need to worry about any physical costs or COGS, publishers can actively make money selling a 2,000 copies of a game for $5. That’s not much money, but some money is better than no money.

Keeping track of game prices this way is actually pretty easy thanks to resources like Is There Any Deal, which let you set notification prices, or discounts, on games you’re interested in. They then notify you whenever the game goes on sale or is part of a bundle. While lots and bulk packagings are a thing for physical games, it’s virtually impossible for any of them to compete with the value per dollar ratio of a digital bundle, because all they’re giving away are license keys, which cost nothing to produce.

In my experience, the majority of games I’m interested in all participate in this race to the bottom, their prices rapidly declining over months before I can pick them up for under $20. Not every game will participates. Plenty just keep a modest 25% discount for years or never dip below 50% off, but there is an incentive to keep discounting games routinely, as you get “visibility” for doing these discounts and can better compete with other titles on the storefront. This is what we have noticed, time and time again, on the PC platform in particular, where digital only has been the way for over a decade, and most people just buy games on Steam.

Accordingly, I find it hard to believe that Sony would do things much differently. Could they stop discounting their first-party titles while giving them a disproportional placement on their storefront? Yes. But there’s a fine limit to how many copies of a game someone can sell at $70 before people just stop buying it and start buying another game instead. Sony knows this, because spreadsheets say that discounts make revenue go up. Any company that doesn’t significantly discount their games has a massive hit on their hands, which would not go down in value physically.

All of this is to say that… I think discussions about games being cheaper physically or digitally are more theoretical and rely on specific scenarios. Sure, there are plenty of times during a year when it is correct to say physical is cheaper than digital, because publishers are not running sales and never bothered giving their game a price cut. But when digital copies are on sale, they can be cheaper than any physical copy would be. You can say physical prices are more stable, because they are, while digital prices vary more, because they do. But doing some napkin math, I am still buying games for roughly the same price I was as a teenager. Which is bonkers, as inflation basically doubled since 2009, and I’m making hella more skrill than I was in 2009.

If you want cheap games, you can find them for both digital and physical sources. To get cheap physical games, you need to look around or wait for a sale. To a get cheap digital games, you just need to wait.

Though, I will need to give points to physical retail for game discoverability and browsing, as console digital storefronts are just so terrible to browse. Steam figured out how to make recommendation and discovery work a decade ago, and made the store a fun place to explore. The PlayStation Store is so ass that I feel like they should pay me to look at it. It’s a literal and clear downgrade compared to the store they had 13 years ago, and that’s impressive. The same goes for the Switch 2 eShop, which is just a list of trending and upcoming titles. Sure, I am fine seeing that, but why is that ALL you are showing me?

Steam, GOG, Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming, all trounce console storefronts because they are actually designed for people to scroll through a list full of small categories, full of things to grab their attention. They are made to be browsed, while console storefronts feel like they want you to get in and get out as soon as possible, when it didn’t use to be that way!

However, I don’t want to gas up physical game stores as something spectacular. These stores often just have rows of games to sift through, often just alphabetically, with a few games on display as promotions. You need to pick things up to examine them, and gloss over the spines of crap you don’t care about, and maybe need to pick them to view their actual prices. It’s a different, more tactile, experience, but I don’t think it was very great for discoverability. I genuinely don’t think I ever found a new game that I wanted when browsing a game store as a child, as I went to the store with a goal. I would browse before going to the store, call them up, and see if they had what I wanted in stock. So, no, I don’t buy that physical browsing was this magical experience.

But all of this discourse is partially moot by virtue of the fact that physical releases have SUCKED for most games for over a decade. Every major game gets content updates, patches, and DLC, none of which are on physical media. If anything, a physical release should never come at launch, but after a game is actually done, has gotten all of its post-launch content, and has left the limelight as a new release. Every physical release should be a “Game of the Year Edition,” basically, but that would not be advisable for MANY reasons, and these games would, inherently, by missing the succulent launch period, be relegated to collectibles.

…Goldarn is this topic complicated.

I didn’t even address the simple fact that if you want games, and want games that are cheap, there’s the vast world of indie games and devs hocking their shite for a fiver every bloomin’ week. Games that never get a widespread physical release. But those just don’t count because they’re lesser games?

I’m not trying to say that we don’t need physical games. We had a good thing going before Sony decided to make history on us, and there was a decent harmony between physical and digital. I just want to acknowledge that it wasn’t all blackjack and moonshine.

…Also, to make this abundantly clear, as I think I am being too subtle, I truly do think the response to the end of physical media on PlayStation consoles should be for everything to move to home computers. It’s the final frontier. The audience around game consoles has been decaying for years, the price point of home consoles have risen to unreasonable levels, and gaming is becoming a luxury hobby as people are strapped for cash.

If we cannot solve the memory crisis plaguing electronics, we can at least put a cap on how good games need to look— they look real bloody good— and switch over to devices capable of doing more than play video games. Because if you are spending computer prices on a game system, it better be able to run a web browser…

Fakku Acquired Fairytale’s PC-98 Catalog!
(PC-98 Games in ENGLISH on STEAM!)

For all I say about games preservation, and for as much as I want every game— ever— to be available via a DRM-free digital storefront, I am fully aware that’s not practical. There’s no governing authority controlling the industry that could demand such an action, and it ultimately comes down to scrappy companies whose goal is to preserve games themselves, set a precedent, and try to shift the culture. I wish it didn’t need to be this way, but as we have seen… this month, we cannot trust institutional giants like Sony and Microsoft to care about anything beyond their revenue. Studios, library, legacy, IP, people, they don’t care. But you know who does? Weirdos, perverts, and freaks. My kind of people!

If you know anything about Japanese hentai books, you’ve probably heard about Fakku. They’re a big name, put out a BUNCH of stuff, rack up licenses, and are big enough to print many of their localized titles. They do good work from what I have seen, and I am always thrilled to see erotic goods companies like them succeed. It makes the world a less puritanical place in its own way and keeps people creating.

…Oh and Fakku also does games. Their store only has 244 games, including decensor patches, and Fakku themselves has published about 15 titles— only some of which are on their own store, for some reason. But considering they brought back True Love ’95, I think it’s safe to say that someone on payroll has a love of the classics. (Someone named Jacob apparently.) Accordingly, it’s not too shocking that Fakku has licensed the PC-98 back catalog of legendary developer Fairytale. With Fairytale being one of the more prolific developers on the platform, delivering some bangers that you’ve definitely heard of before if you’ve stepped into the PC-98 zone.

The announced titles include the following:

  • Dengeki Nurse, a high octane comedy adventure game with a bonkers story, loose hospital theming, and RPG combat where you beat the clothes off of men and women alike. It’s profoundly silly, absurd, and is already up on Steam.
  • Pia Carrot, a 1996 dating sim about working in a restaurant with a gaggle of cute girls that spawned a series, anime adaptations, and really struck a chord with the burgeoning bishoujo game fandom of the era. Check out the Amelie Doree on it to learn more.
  • Shinjuku Monogatari is one of Fairytale’s earlier adventure games, and one I never heard of. From a cursory glance, it’s a sepia tone story of adolescence, growing up, and arranging the fake kidnapping of a high school girl, only to wind up being her bodyguard as she is attacked by Yakuza thugs. Neato!
  • Ballade for Maria is a detective adventure game following JAKE SPIKES from NYC as he travels down to Boston to investigate a series of grisly murders in an adventure full of horrific sexual violence! There is NO WAY this is going to be release on Steam.
  • Jinmon Yuugi casts you in the shoes of a detective taking a lavish cruise dead woman before him. With his freedom maintained through some legal loophole, he is able to traverse through the ship, talk to its passengers, solve the case, and free his name. Classic murder mystery stuff.
  • Necronomicon, a Lovecraftian horror adventure game about, well, the usual Lovecraft trappings, but through an early 90s Japanese lens. Check out the Amelie Doree on it to learn more.
  • The Man Called DRACULA, or Dracula Hakushaku, a DRACULA simulator! You, as DRACULA, wake up to find your harem all dead, and venture out to find new women, secure them, capture them, and accumulate what is rightfully yours while staving off the vampire hunter Van Helsing.
  • Dead of the Brain 1 & 2, a legendary pair of horror adventure games that traversed the language barrier through their provocative imagery, receiving several fan translations over the years. It’s been covered a lot, but I enjoyed Basement Brothers’ PC-98 Paradise’s video on it.
  • Marine Philt, the successor to Dead of the Brain, this time aping the Alien series and having the legally distinct not-Xenomorph traipse around a near future Japanese city. Horror and social turmoil ensue, and all I know about the game comes from Basement Brothers’ video on it.

Needless to say, this is SUCH a cool and exciting thing to see. Sure, some of these games have already been translated, but even with a translation, you’d need to deal with the headache of emulating PC-98 games. This can be a bit tricky, because the emulator’s in Japanese, and there’s a reason why some people just use Asenheim to get a taste and leave. We need something as accessible and easy to use as DOSBox to make these games available to a Western audience, but an official release that you can just run as a modern program… sounds pretty good too.

Now, Fakku are not the only companies re-releasing games of this era. Project Egg and DLSite come to mind. However, official releases of PC-98 games in English are largely unheard of. And I am all for it!

Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis End of Service Announced
(Another Final Square Enix Live Service is DEAD!)

Sometime in the 2010s or so, maybe earlier, Square Enix adopted a positively boneheaded policy where every division needed to be working on both regular console games and mobile games. This led to a glutton of mobile live services titles, some original IPs, most just Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Dozens have been released, yet all but four of them are defunct, dead, and cannot be played. I’d go out to bat and say that this is one of the reasons why Square Enix games are some primo unc shit— I’d call them uncge, but that word looks dreadful and sounds worse.

I truly hope that Square Enix just STOPS with all of these attempted mobile game budgets start soar past nine figures, but before then, they’ll probably need to cull their four remaining titles. For the record, those are Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy (2026), Dragon Quest Smash/Grow (2026), Emberstoria (2024), and Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis (2023). With Ever Crisis being the oldest and latest title set to be put on the chopping block.

Now, this is a somewhat frustrating affair because Ever Crisis was a project with some girth and appeal behind it. It was meant to be a flavor of expansion and remake of the original Final Fantasy VII and its related spin-off material, the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. With its pre-rendered backdrops and stylized 3D models, it seemed like it could be the graphically updated version of Final Fantasy VII people said they wanted. …Instead, it was just another turn-based live service.

Another game whose combat was bogged down by a deliberately complex gear system. Another game that insisted on using flashy graphics for combat sections, when it could have just had a cohesive visual style throughout. And another Square Enix joint that just had to be a sequel in addition to a recreation of prior games. I wanted it to be something good, but the modern era of live service RPGs draw too much from console RPGs to feel like their own thing. I can respect the likes of Granblue Fantasy and Uma Musume, but games like Ever Crisis always strike me as games that should be packaged games, not live games. Then again, I’d say that about every Genshin-like there is, so what do I know… other than what a better future would look like?

On October 6, 2026, right after the game’s third anniversary, right after it finishes retelling of the original FFVII and Before Crisis, Ever Crisis will come to an end on . They are releasing new stuff right up to the very wen, and afterwards, they are wrapping up shop. I can only hope that they will use what was developed here for some supplemental side game released after the FFVIIR trilogy is over. It would not be the first, or second, time Square Enix has salvaged a mobile game, and so long as they keep this up, I will continue to buy them, as a sign of support. But until that happens, this is the end for another live service venture, and a reminder that with live services, death is inevitable.

…But with DRM-free digital releases, games can live forever. :P

…I better make a note to buy Final Fantasy Resonance sooner than later.

Mario Kart Tour End of Service Announced
(No Offline Version – CONFIRMED)

Well, this was inevitable, I just didn’t expect it to end so lamely. Despite all that investor clamoring and earnest efforts, Nintendo has been largely phasing out their mobile efforts, only allowing Pokémon to flourish on the platform. Miitomo? Dead. Super Mario Run? Not updated for years but doesn’t depend on a central server. My beloved Dragalia Lost? Been dead for going on four years, and I still miss H.E.R. Dr. Mario World? Dead. Pikmin Bloom? Few cared and it’s a tool for the military industrial complex to know where they should bomb shit. Animal Crossing Pocket Camp? Given a king’s treatment with an offline version, showing that Nintendo cared about their product enough to sell them and not shoot their face in.

Fire Emblem Heroes? Still going on, likely costing little to produce and raking in a good profit because of modern whaling techniques. Fire Emblem Shadows? I played that game for four hours, and I still don’t think it’s real.

This brings us to Mario Kart Tour (2019), the successful Mario game on mobile, and a game that entered maintenance mode on October 4, 2023. No new content was added, revenue dried up, and I thought EOS was inevitable. Then Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete happened, and I assumed that was Nintendo’s strategy going forward. (Even if they didn’t do it with my beloved Dragalia! Bring her back Nintendo! Bring back, bring back, bring back my daughter to me, to me~!)

Instead, nearly three years after this decision, Nintendo both announced that Mario Kart Tour will go offline on September 29, 2026 and will NOT receive an offline version.

Come ON, guys! You made the game, could sell it for $20 to weird freaks who buy games for their phones, but instead you just harvested what you could for Mario Kart 8 and are trashing it? Did Pocket Camp Complete not do well? Because I bought it— not just to say I did, but I’m committed— and expected like a million other people to. But no, instead we’re just left with zilch.

It’s AMAZING how all three of the big console makers have gotten onto my shitlist for destroying things within the span of a SINGLE WEEK by doing dumb shit that’s bad and disrespectful for the medium. Killing off a distribution means, killing off jobs, and killing off games. None of these three bastards can be trusted to NOT piss their pants, and they refuse to be potty trained.

Progress Report 2026-07-12

I’M NOT COOKED YET! THIS BREAD AIN’T DONE!

I don’t know how else to say this, but at this rate, game consoles are going to rapidly become a niche novelty for older enthusiasts and rich people in the next decade. The secondhand market is going away and the physical media presence at retailers will dry up. Hardware is no longer cheap next to a home computer that you can write off as a business expense and do whatever with. The online subscriptions are only going up in price, when they’re free on every other platform.

The controllers are stupid expensive for no goldarn good reason other than a need to innovate, somehow. Any upgrades require buying entirely new hardware. You can only get games from one store, when we JUST finished a years-long campaign to open up more stores on mobile platforms. You cannot control or manage digital purchases without risk of them being removed from your account. You cannot modify or alter games outside of what’s sanctioned on the OS or game level. Plenty of the biggest indie hits, including oodles of friend slop, are just not on consoles. You can’t refund games easily. And the studios who make the exclusive games people buy consoles for are being shut down or stripped bare of expertise.

There is no longer a good reason to buy a PlayStation or Xbox. Every good thing about consoles has been stripped away, and this has been one of the worst years in the history of gaming because of that. There will be one last hurrah with Grand Theft Auto VI, the cultural event of the generation, but after that? The day it comes out on PC in less than a year, it’s over. We can finally move onto a new era… and I hope we learn the right lessons.

That lesson is not to just stop engaging with a hobby you like, or pronouncing an end of history for the period where you stop caring about games, or stop gaming outright. I keep seeing men— because it’s always men— talk about how they will just stop caring about games if they cannot own a piece of physical media representing them. They make up all these rules about how “buying indies is fine, because they are cheaper, but I cannot get connected to a $60 game I bought digitally.” And I’m like… you have over 10,000 posts on ResetEra, have made hundreds of threads, and have a literal job where you talk about games to feed your family. The hell are you on about?

There is emotional catharsis in having a cutoff point, but don’t say you’re gonna do shit unless you’re actually gonna do shit. Don’t be like my dad, you dads. When shit sucks, don’t reject modernity and embrace tradition. Build something new, develop something better, because the past is dead, and you cannot live there.

2026-07-05: Watched Re:Zero Season 4 with the friends. Good times. Hunkered down and wrote my review of Help! I’m Turning Into A Mermaid!, currently about 4,600 words and it just needs to be edited. I’ll hold off a few days before I edit it, as it’s not due out until the 16th. Got bored, wrote 1,400 words about physical vs digital games.

2026-07-06: Edited the Mermaid review, loved that game, then decided to work on next week’s preamble, as my mind kept drifting to a subject, wrote 2,300 words for that.

2026-07-07: Busy with work for most of the day, decided to clear up this week’s Rundown, as my thoughts were scattered and messy. That’s basically editing 5,000 words, getting rid of some crap, adding info on the Fakku games, and doing a quick thing for Ever Crisis.

2026-07-08: Orz. Busy with work and got sidetracked with some nonsense where I was looking up the sources of Student Transfer songs for Cassie. Now I know that I should use the likes of MoppySounds, Hurt Record, and PocketSound if I ever need some music licenses. DAMN. Wrote the 500 word Ever Crisis bit before bed.

2026-07-09: Wrote 400 words for the Mario Kart Tour bit, decided to stop procrastinating and get on with the Mega Dimension review. I hate it, it makes me like Legends Z-A far, far less than I did just playing the base game, and it’s all because of how terrible Hyperspace Lumiose is on every possible design level. It looks like nothing, you have no directional aids, combat is a burden, you are wasting resources with every attempt, everything is timed, and the rewards for everything are bad. I wish it was just boring, but no, it is actively infuriating on every level.

2026-07-10: Worked, got really fucked up by trying to do my day job, do CPE, and do CPA studying all at once, and then work longer than expected on a spreadsheet I HATED. When I get anxious, the only calming thought I have is of the sweet release of death, and I am adamant that I do not want to think of anything else, because I believe in death as the greatest and most powerful force in all the world. Mega Dimension also still sucks, and I hate it for making me dislike a game I really enjoyed. It is tumor. Decided to start work on the next-next week’s Rundown preamble, writing 2,000 words and doing some statistics stuff.

2026-07-11: Finished the main campaign of Mega Dimension, but I know it will go on FOREVER at this rate. Everything takes three time as long as it ought to, and the game has no new ideas at this point. We had a resolution, we had a post-game, and this DLC is FULL of padding for the sake of padding. Also, I put 20 hours into this game this week alone, SOMEHOW.

Natalie.TF 2026 Progress Report

  • 2026-07-16: Help! I’m Turning into a Mermaid! Review – DONE
  • 2026-07-22: Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension Review
  • 2026-07-29: Class of ’09 – Puzzle Showdown Review
  • 2026-08-04: Natsumi Legacy Route – Student Transfer Scenario Review
  • 2026-08-06: Maria Mania Legacy Route – Student Transfer Scenario Review
  • 2026-08-12: Natalie Rambles About Monkey Man
  • 2026-08-??: Beast of Reincarnation Review
  • 2026-09-??: TSF Series #019: A Change of Flesh
  • 2026-??-??: re:Dreamer Review #6
  • 2026-??-??: Coffee Buns Review (TSF Game)
  • 2026-??-??: Fate Stay Night Remastered Review (Shiba & Rain Request)
  • 2026-??-??: A Mirror’s Curse Review (TSF Game)
  • 2026-??-??: Thread – A Tale of Identity, Monsters, and College Review (TSF Game)
  • 2026-??-??: TSF Showcase 2026-01: Chronicstuss (Ouran Request)
  • 2026-11-18: TSF Series #020: Chateau del Bitz
  • 2026-12-30: Natalie Rambles About 2026
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