Dr_Awkward

@HalBailman Mocking things you've never heard of or don't understand is an interesting take in 2026.

@kmtrain83 ...except that it would be out.

@Divide_and_Wander There are more partners than Nintendos, so I am 100% on board with partner directs. Nintendo will Ninten*DO* what Ninten*DOES* in its own way and timeline, and thats the genius of Nintendo.

Caves of Qud shadow drop

@Entwickler I am not sure if I like the "Grand Strategy" or the "Three Act" structure better, but I certainly appreciate the way Firaxis has changed it up between the last 2 Civ games. (I keep them both downloaded on my S2.). I do miss Hotseat MP in the Civ7!

No walled gardens!

@Friendly The last 10 years in America have been defined by battles about who gets to say what and see what in legacy and social media. There are absolutely powerful people who want to control your thinking by shaping what you see. ALL instances of censorship should be resisted, particularly when it comes to artistic and political expression.

@AllBLK I am pretty sure people have finite amounts of time and energy, and one of these things is a bigger issue than the others.

Hey all you GKC boycotters: this is the actual thing to boycott. This is actual censorship, not the "servers might go down in two decades" hypotheticals.

@Robot99 interesting take, if you think businesses exist to lose money.

Caves of Qud shadow drop. The devs posted on bluesky that the game is in Nintendo's hands, and they expect it to miss their January release window.

@MattmanForever plenty of places already use generative ai that is trained on licensed data. For what it is worth: Tech has been laying off people wholesale for the past 2 years; it's not just an Ubisoft thing. It's more a factor that when interest rates were low (ZIRP), tech expanded massively. Inflation happened globally, and in the past two years, tech layoffs have been a slaughter.

@MattmanForever generative ai uses training data. Nothing inherently requires the training data to be scraped or stolen. ChatGPT: yes, trained on copyrighted data. A custom-built LLM: not inherently.

You are conflating a category of model with specific examples of that category.

@BBBBBBBBBBB tell me you dont know how GenAI works, without telling me you dont know how GenAI works.

@Johnny_Arthur Yes, Johnny_Arthur Game Studios, I am certain that you have the pulse on exactly what games the public wants.

@Pho You could easily have generative AI models that are trained on in-world lore, and then more NPCs who say things that are far more interesting than the repeated NPC-speak we all know. It doesn't require a microphone; you could type in what you want to say to an NPC.

Ancient Greeks thought that using writing implements, rather than rote memorization, were a scourge on the intellect; Gen AI is a tool in its first few years of existence. There are (and will continue to be) better and worse ways of using it. It is not "always plagiarism" if it was trained on content that was created to train it with a specific voice. If I trained a Gen AI model on the journals I've kept for decades now, so I could converse with versions of my past self, is THAT plagiarism? Of course not. Stop jumping to conclusions; your argument is half-baked.

@MarioLinkSamus well-reasoned points, but the ragebaited crowd here won't hear any of it.

Won't someone think of the buggy whip makers??? What about the lamp lighters?

@TheRazor believe it or not, the vast majority of SW games are not about the movie characters. We certainly didn't hear, "If youre gonna make a lone Jedi game, put Luke Sywalker in it." But hey, sexism's gonna sexism, right?

Both Star Wars Outlaws and Assassins Creed Shadows are solid games. Both underperformed due, in part, to screeching incels complaining about the games' protagonists.

Yes, SWO had issues at launch; they've been fixed.

Both games are worth a look on Switch 2.

@TheSaneInsanity this is the best take: all advertising sucks, ai-produced or not.

@Res462 how many jobs were cut to produce this photo?

Would someone consider the buggy whip makers? The cars took away their jobs!

Great, we've gone from woke/antiwoke battles to ai/real battles.

People need to get a life off of the internet.

@mattitudemf i think this is the best take; a lot of the console demand was pulled forward to the launch window driving those huge launch numbers upward; tariffs probably also shifted some demand earlier. I know I bought the S2 Christmas present I gave back in September(!) because I was worred about potential price increases and stock shortages.

Add to that the lack of a compelling new game for the Holidays, and i think you have a lot of explanatory power here.

That said, AC: Shadows and SW Outlaws were new to me and have both been very very good.

@Anachronism you missed a third option: delete games you are not actively playing and redownload later

@PikminMarioKirby lol you are delusional if you think that the tiny whiny internet anti-GCK folks are at all representative of the vast majority of consumers. I'm sure the vast majority of people DO NOT CARE whether their game is digital, fully on-cart, or a GCK. I am sure that the vast majority of people shopping for games in a store cannot tell the difference between a physical game fully on-cart and a game key card.

If I had little kids, there's no way in hell I'd buy them a physical copy OR GCK, because kids lose that kind of tiny ***** like it is their job.

The ONLY people who are crusading with you are a tiny whiny minority of all of gamerdom.

@somnambulance how do you know it has a shot at 2026 GOTY? It's not even released. How do you know it is good?

@FrenchVaniIIuxe Yeah, I wasnot a fan of Pocket Dungeon. I feel like they had great success with one single thing, and then spun it off into a bunch of mid-tier projects.

Runs well, look nice, though admittedly, i dont really care much about graphics or frame rates.

After the initial "wow" factor, I found the game pretty bland and wished i hadn't purchased:

-QTEs just kinda suck

-The "tombs" are infantile and very basic.

-The progression economy is too well funded, meaning that you can basically buy every upgrade; player choice is pretty meaningless because you can buy it all.

-Story elements are ludicrous: these valuable artifacts are just lying around, untouched by the cult? Seemingly hundreds of cult members? This all seems nonsensical.

-At times, the absolute and graphic brutalization of LC felt a big misogynistic.

-Gyro aim for the artifact viewer, but not for weapon aiming???

@Lizuka by calling a specific video game's difficulty an accessibility issue, one trivializes actual accessibility issues.

To all the people who claimed silksong's difficulty created "accessibility issues": this is what an actual accessibility issue looks like.

@the_beaver How many spanish-only speakers exist who would buy the game if it were translated? The profit margin is likely smaller than the cost of the translation team. We are not talking a AAA release, this is a fairly niche game that is now several decades old.

@metaphysician It's probably an even smaller number: the people in their desired markets who speak only the language that is being omitted, and would be likely to buy the game if the translation were made.

Great list. Unfortunately, even a GOTY win would be unlikely to quell the bleating about Silksong's difficulty.

@rvcolem1 oh, i think it is quite difficult, but agree that it can be beaten with patience and practice.

@teo_o "accessibility issue" lol. We are not talking about government services or jobs, or making games for people who have only one hand. Those are actual accessibility issues, and your petulant insistence that video game difficulty falls in that category trivializes the notion of accessibility.

@Oldstalk You're not stating your opinion on the game; you are claiming that you know better than the developers what made Hollow Knight a successful game. Those are two different things.

@SalvorHardin The only talking down I see re: silksong is to the people who insist that the game needs easier modes. If it is too hard for you, that is OK. Find a different game. I'd prefer if DK Bananza was more difficult, but guess what: that's not the game Nintendo wanted to make, and that's OK. I'm not out here on every single comment section whining to the whole internet about it. My life will be JUST FINE without DK Bananza having a hard mode. I am sure Silksong's difficulty will not cause you any harm.

@Oldstalk Right, the people who made Hollow Knight, didn't understand what made Hollow Knight great. But you do.

How many games have you published again?

@BaldB3lper78 lol i am nowhere near one of "the best gamers" and it was fine. Just took patience and practice.

So much whining about game key cards on here, but the sales numbers don't lie: the offline world is just fine with what is being sold.

@Striker21 it is called NSO and costs $80 for a year long family membership.

@SurprisedRobinChu redditors? The same people who were loudly complaining about the price of the switch 2, claiiming it was doomed and that theyd never buy it?

Yeah, ok.

@SurprisedRobinChu is it possible that your opinion is in the minority?

@HugoGED lol

@Shepdawg1 thank you for being a voice of reason.

@DreadfulDragon your comment shows perhaps why you are so bad at the game and insist on blaming the designers? Instead of thinking like the character you play as, you seem to expect to bumble around a dangerous world. Games have internal logic. I am so sorry that you cannot think outside your human experience! Good luck with life, and that wall!

@DreadfulDragon This is the part where it proves to be a YOU problem: "a reasonable person does not expect their vehicle to be booby trapped, therefore would not be looking for warnings and even if they saw them may not pay them heed"

What part of the world of Pharloom is supposed to be reasonable exactly? The talking bugs? The needle-wielding protagonist, a bug named Hornet? The bug religion?

You have entered a wildly foreign world, and brought into it far too many assumptions about how it operates.

git good.