The Sound of Silence: A Night Without AirPods and the Echoes of Unionization

Horror of all horrors, I’ve forgotten my AirPods for my night sojourn to the “coffee shop” (which is really the lobby of a gym where I need to hang out a few times a week while I wait on someone). This results in me not being able to listen to music, not being able to watch any TV shows or YouTube, and having to overhear the screaming of the nearby aerobics class who somehow convinces themselves they are working harder by screaming the lyrics of whatever pop music anthem their instructor has them bouncing to.

I’ll try and get a blog post out tonight regardless. This contingency might require a tech solution to prevent it ever happening again, like a spare pair of refurbished AirPods in the glove compartment or something.

So I hear that a group of 200 employees at Activision Blizzard unionized late last week. To-date most of these groups have been QA/test and your lower salaried disciplines.

This group, however, and one other in recent history, have been a “wall-to-wall” unionization consisting of multiple disciplines. The two gaps remaining in both this unionization and the one preceding it is that it has not been 100% or a specified majority of the workforce, and “wall-to-wall” has not included a voice track specifying a bulk of the developers.

Now. I understand the trend that says that everyone who is involved in a studio team with getting a product out the door is referred to as a developer. And I appreciate the effort to give praise to the entire team. I agree with that.

As a hiring manager in the software development and engineering space for the past 13+ years of a 30+ year career, when I say “developer”, I mean a hands-on-keyboard software developer or engineer.

There is a shoe that I am waiting to hear drop. Where it comes to salaries, I do have to draw recognition to the objective fact that there is a difference between an artist and a tester versus a hands-on-keyboard software engineer who writes code and even a test engineer, who programs scripts and telemetry utilities to automate testing and provide automated results. It’s not a matter of the latter disciplines are “more valuable” to the team, it is that they draw higher salaries, and in particular, are more critical and there is more competition in finding them on the job market.

As a result, these disciplines tend not to want to subject themselves to collective bargaining. Because it normalizes their max salary potential and dilutes it to a running median along with an employee base that will consist of high, medium, and low performers. So your high performers in STEM technical ranks tend not to want to unionize. And even if they think they are a high-performers and actually are not, those ranks still hold their max earnings potential in high regard.

That is a dynamic in which the gaming industry is still like the rest of the tech industry, and not yet Hollywood, where even actors paid millions of dollars are still incentivized to unionize along with actors who barely book enough work to qualify for union health benefits. Until the negatives of the current market state worsen (which admittedly they have slightly even since the MSFT-ATVI acquisition-merger) to the point where they impact everyone throughout the salary ranges and ranks, it will still be tough in my opinion to widen the unionization state of the employee base to something that is more ubiquitous like Hollywood.

But, admittedly, it has made steadier gains than I suspected and projected. While still an uphill climb, the fear of AI is making the notion of collective bargaining gain wider-spread interest than just voice-actors. Developers are starting to realize that if the suits come for one group of them, eventually they will come for all.

2025’s Genre-Busting Gaming Lineup: A Once-in-a-Decade Start?

This has been a bonga year for game releases. I know, I know – that phrase gets thrown around a lot. But 2025 really is something different. The year got off to a great start, hit a crescendo in April, and continues to maintain a strong cadence heading into the summer. And what makes this year so remarkable isn’t just the volume of good games, but the genre spread and the range of budgets and dev team sizes making noise.

Think back to Q1 of 2017. We had the original Nintendo Switch, Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, Resident Evil 7 – a staggeringly strong start. But even then, 2025 feels different.

The Genre Spread: 16 Games, 16 Experiences

Here are the genres of just the top 16 games currently in my personal rotation or backlog:

  1. JRPG (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
  2. Co-op Action-Adventure (Split Fiction)
  3. Immersive Sim (Kingdom Come: Deliverance II)
  4. 3rd-Person Action-Adventure (Monster Hunter Wilds)
  5. FPS (Doom: the Dark Ages)
  6. JRPG (Suikoden I&II HD Remaster Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars)
  7. RPG (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered)
  8. Sports (PGA TOUR 2K25)
  9. Spectacle Fighter / Musou (DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS)
  10. Open World Action-Adventure (Assassin’s Creed Shadows)
  11. Open World Action-Adventure (Days Gone Remastered)
  12. RPG (Avowed)
  13. 4X Turn-Based Strategy (Sid Meier’s Civilization VII)
  14. JRPG (The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II)
  15. 3rd-Person Action-Adventure (South of Midnight)
  16. Narrative Adventure (Lost Records: Bloom & Rage)

I hesitate to say “unprecedented,” but I truly don’t recall a year with this level of genre diversity, consistency of quality, and spread across indie and AAA budgets. It’s exciting, but also overwhelming.

Current Playlist Snapshot

Here’s where I’m at right now:

  • ✅ Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – Completed. Probably the greatest game I’ve ever played. It almost ruins other games for me.
  • 🔄 Days Gone Remastered – Enjoying it, but the mission design can be tedious.
  • ⏸️ Monster Hunter Wilds – On hold. Needs 2+ hour sessions to feel productive.
  • 🎯 Call of Duty: Black OPS 6 – I don’t have this in the list as it is not a 2025 release, but I am still hooked on the seasonal grind, which makes getting to the other stuff harder
  • 🔜 DOOM: The Dark Ages – Instabuy. No question.

When Indies Punch Above Their Weight

It’s not just the big-budget titles dominating discussion. We’ve got a JRPG and an immersive sim, both made by relatively small teams on modest budgets, that are legitimate Game of the Year contenders. Clair Obscur in particular has raised the bar in ways few saw coming.

Xbox Is Finally Delivering

Another factor: Xbox Game Studios is finally firing on all cylinders. For years, they had the resources but not the output. Now? Out of these 16 games, 4 are Xbox-published titles. And with these games going to PlayStation, they are more contributory to the overall industry output than ever. I don’t have Indian Jones on this list as it’s been on PC since last year, but with both that and Forza Horizon 5, it “feels” like overall productivity is much greater than in these past few years. And with DOOM: The Dark Ages dropping on all platforms except Nintendo Switch / Switch 2 soon, that count on titles delivered to PlayStartion will rise.

It’s fair to ask whether Xbox’s production stagnation in recent years (2020–2024) may have dragged down overall industry momentum. But that’s a topic for a deeper dive later.

For now, it’s clear: when Xbox shows up, the whole industry benefits.

What’s Still Coming in 2025

We’re not done yet. Still ahead:

  • DOOM: The Dark Ages (May)
  • F1 25 (May)
  • System Shock 2 Remake (June)
  • Mafia: the Old Country (August)
  • Gears of War: Reloaded (August)

If this pace keeps up, we may be looking at one of the all-time great years in gaming.

Let’s Talk

What’s blown you away so far in 2025? Anything on your list that I missed? What’s your GoTY frontrunner right now?

Hit me up on Twitter @gamelogiq or BlueSky @gamelogiq and let’s compare playlists.

Don’t Mistake Convenience for Acclaim: Why Xbox Games Are Selling on PlayStation

What you are witnessing now with XBox titles on PlayStation is the Napster Effect. Which really was more about supply & demand and price-sensitivity of Music rather than Napster, but “the Music Effect” doesn’t have the same hook.

Before Napster was introduced, market sentiment was that CDs were priced too high and offered a dubious value prop, with often only one or two tracks on an album deemed worthwhile. But another key factor was inconvenience. You could either submit to being an indentured servant of the Columbia House “5 CDs for a penny” introductory offer and then a limited catalog of CDs to choose one or two from each month shipped to you via snail mail. Or you trundled down to Tower Records, flipped through endless bins of CDs to find what you didn’t want, unless you were shopping for the Billboard Top Twenty, and then pay the aforementioned exorbitant prices. And so a chunk of the market opted for Napster due not only to price but also due to inconvenience.

Napster had its own inconvenience working against its value prop. Often the song you’d get was the right title, but was some bootleg cover. Both Napster and its zero-price competitor and eventual replacement, Bit Torrent, also got ID’d as being a transport and delivery mechanism for malware.

But even after Napster shut down in 2001, Bit Torrent continued to carry the “I’m not buying CDs” flag for many until 2003. When iTunes put a fork in the Free Music movement.

When iTunes began selling digital albums, and, here’s the banger, individual songs for 99cents a la carte, the market equilibrium changed. Free music with all of its inconveniences (including the music industry & the feds possibly randomly selecting you to make the example of) suddenly became less of a value prop to the vast majority of the market vs simply paying 99cents for a song that you wanted, could pre-screen digitally, and a purchase method that allowed you to buy only the songs you wanted from the album. Hunting for music in torrents, figuring out how to open your PC up to the channel, at the risk of getting bootleg fake files, malware or getting into legal trouble was not worth the value of even Free compared to 99cents a song.

What the market has said is that XBox titles and its catalog and portfolio were not of sufficient value-prop to warrant the majority of the market either subscribing to Game Pass or buying an XBox Series. Despite the low monthly cost and relatively low cost-of-access overall & the low entry price option of the Series S.

Console Warriors are now saying “Oh I guess PlayStation players really did want those games after all” when they see them trending well on the PlayStation store. They say Xbox is “winning” as if there is going to be a reversal on the HW sales trend due to the perceived positive SW sales trend.

No. The mindshare and brand equity of the game titles and the overall XBox portfolio have not gone up. This is a misconception. What has happened is that those titles have become more conveniently accessible for the market demo of PlayStation customer. Having placed those goods conveniently at the door-step of potential buyers, those buyers are happy to purchase them now that they are an Instacart or Wal-Mart grocery order level of convenience.

What the market said while those titles were only available on XBox or PC was that PlayStation mains considered that inconvenience factor to not be in equilibrium with the value-prop of playing those games. And today, PlayStation players are telling the market that they are ok waiting 3-ish months if need be to play those titles on their preferred platform. While they will also be able to play many of those titles day and date. On their preferred platform.

There is no effect such as PlayStation has suggested on PC, where they believe that they see PC gamers engaging with PlayStation IP, and then buying a PlayStation so that they can play those games earliest. PlayStation players are not flocking to Game Pass to play those games via the Cloud on their phone or tablet. And they are not flocking to buy XBox Series now that they have “had a taste of XBox titles.” So there is no “XBox is winning”. Xbox has established a dependency on PlayStation in the same manner that Ubisoft, EA, Take Two, and Capcom are dependent on a platform being supplied where they can deliver their IP. And PlayStation has a partial dependency on XBox as one of its stable of 3rd-party publishers it needs to support its platform in order to provide a healthy ecosystem that cannot be supported by its own studio titles alone.

PlayStation players, in the meantime, are just consuming what has become convenient. It is the market achieving equilibrium. Which it always will.

We All Might Have to Start Choosing Single Gaming Platforms Again

Xbox raised prices today. On literally everything. I think PlayStation did too. And the PC space has been getting hella ‘spensive for a long time now. I’ve been talking recently about what I am going to do about these rising prices, if anything. I’ve also been talking about the impact that playing Clair Obcur: Expedition 33 has been having on me. That latter one has had me thinking, as I wrote the other day, about buying consoles again and focusing on single-player, story-driven games. That would kill two birds with one stone. It’d split my gaming time up onto things less expensive than $2000 GPUs and let me get back into playing games from start to finish like I used to, and fewer GAAS games.

That was until The Great Price Hikes of 2025 went off today, having been sparked by Nintendo being so bold as to go first. Now I am encouraged to hover and hold position for a bit. Because I might just be escaping into a space that is just as prone to the risk of spiraling higher prices right alongside PC GPUs.

And what of those people who feel like gaming is a commodity experience that everyone should have access to? That these prices should not be getting so high that they become a luxury product and only the privileged and rich have access to them? 

Who’s gonna tell ’em?

We should be careful of how we use the term “rich”. When I think of that being a household income barrier to participation in gaming, I am thinking of households in the single digits of the upper income of America. We like to still think of those people as “middle class” because the gap between a $300k household and billionaires is MUCH greater than is perceived when we talk percentages. Because the top 6 – 7% can’t be THAT far away from the 1%’ers, right? 

Prices are getting high. But we are not yet at crisis levels and I am not sure we will get there in my lifetime. Is it getting so that some people who have not historically had to make choices now  have to? Sure.

One of my pushbacks about a lot of the console war talking points about prices was that they were centered around consumers who could only afford one console, and so they had to make choices. I didn’t have to make choices.

But I gorram sure do now. That’s also because I have creeping life responsibilities and new expenses encroaching on what was once a decidedly bachelor-centric lifestyle. And because in a time when prices held steady for a bit, I grew comfortable with not having to wait six months after launch to get the new cutting edge silicon. But I remember now that I used to. And I suspect a lot of us gamers used to make choices, and have grown comfortable during years when the industry held prices and we were living high on the hog. I am not sure we should be panicking (or letting clout-chasing influencers incite us to panic) just yet. We might just have to go back to a time when we were not gaming on every platform and when we were not buying every game day one. And make choices. Like adults. Sorry.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – A Midgame Reflection: Why I Might Be Returning to Consoles and Story-Driven Games

Several things have me re-thinking my approach to games. And my relationship with gaming overall. In general. One of those things is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I don’t want to go too far into that topic as I am still playing the game, and the slightest detail can be spoilerific. Maybe I’m halfway through or very close to it. But it is at least transformative in how it is making me think. This revisitation of how I game and manage my time in gaming. It may be time to start making some changes.

One of those changes first and foremost is that I may be returning to story-driven games. For a couple or decades now I have surmised that I do not stick with any one story for too long. I eventually get distracted by the sheer number of games but also the games that are more squarely in my wheelhouse. And by that I mean fist-person shooters and vehicle simulations. So many story-driven games are RPGs or action-adventure games and eventually I get bored. But there were times when those were in my wheelhouse. And it may be time to go back.

This also brings me to the current agonizing I’ve been doing over my hardware conundrum. Left and right I have things that I would have been interested in in the past that just have not lit a fire in my materialistic heart. GPUs and the Nintendo Switch 2 are primary examples of things that I might want one day.

Eventually. But the costs are too prohibitive and the hook just isn’t there. Or is it?

Tonight there was a bit of loosening of the rusty handle. As the very iPad I am typing this on, the iPad Air 13” M2, blipped an alert that in order to install the latest iPad OS update, I would need to clear out just under 12GB of storage. That’s a big no-no. I had been running an experiment since last year when I picked this up as only the 128GB model. The minimum storage SKU available. Since moving into the Apple ecosystem, I knew that my past proclivity had always been to buy Apple products with one of the top two storage SKUs available on the phone and the iPad. But on laptops and Mac minis, I’d decided to start low and see if I really need the extra space.

For the iPad this time, I’d decided to try that too. But I hate managing storage for OS updates and that is always an instant trigger for me to to bump to the next tier; in this case 256GB. But of course, the M2 is no longer available, supplanted by an M3 model this past March. And so here we are striking a thing off my list I’d said I could wait on. Oh well.

Yes, this is gaming adjacent; I do subscribe to Apple Arcade and game on my iPad too. So not directly gaming. But, my main point in this is that it has loosened up a bit of spring-time buyer constipation.

And that, in combination with my thought of returning to the general gaming landscape and not just dumping time into Call of Duty, World of Warships, Star Citizen, FIFA, and others, has me also considering that I am currently PC only. And there will inevitably be some of those games that are only on console.

Because, of course, as many people know, I have also been running an experiment to force myself to see if it is indeed true that I am just fine on PC only. And with these thoughts, I consider that I may not be. I have been watching and reading up on Donkey Kong Banaza. As well as Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition. And it may be time to return to consoles after a brief time out in the desert. Maybe. We’ll see.

In the meantime, as I agonize yet again over these things, it’s time to go watch more of that DK Bananza Treehouse.

Wall-E Was a Warning, Not a Business Plan for the Gaming Industry

I think there are some things to maybe not advocate so strongly for in gaming. Or at least to have a sophisticated conversation about full of cautionary tales rather than stumping for corpos, as that often drives you in the direction of campaigning against your own self-interests.

“We need to get back to industry growth” Do we? Maybe follow that thread to certain possible conclusions, rather than being a mouth-piece for members of the C-suite who will be vacationing on a beach in Tahiti long after their ruinous acts and decisions have left behind a broken industry.

Who exactly are we inviting in for that growth? Lapsed gamers who came in during the pandemic? Ok. That works. But that’s a finite pool. What happens after that? Oh, all of these nextgen “gamers” who…as Brendan Sinclair recently said on The Game Business Show…need a “feed bag of content hooked up directly to their mouths and content shoved down their throat”?

That notion gives me goosebumps. Is that who we want in the pool? Ostensibly lazier gamers who can’t stomach anything other than push-button on-demand experiences with zero effort via tablets and phones? You do realize what demographic you’re describing, right? Casuals. Extreme casuals. But even more so, entirely non-discriminating consumers. Who do not want today’s gaming entertainment experiences. But just want the gacha game touch-control teddy-pickers. Those are not gamers; those are glorified TV watchers. They engage their brains less. They are mindless. Aimless. Idle fidget-spinner “I-listen-to-music-as-background-noise” drones who consume from two or three screens at a time because they literally DO NOT CARE about the content on at least one of those screens at any one moment in time.

And once “game developers” realize that the market has just become a bunch of drones just seeking escapes from idle hands so they don’t bite their fingernails or rub on their private places every 5 minutes, they will care less about the content they make. It will become a commodity. And the race to the bottom will have culminated.

We often lump the Roblox people and the Minecraft people into the same pool, demographic, and addressable market as the people who want to play the next Assassin’s Creed, Forza Motorsport, and Intergalactic. But these are actually not the same, exact markets.

Has investment in Roblox led to more money to spread around to feed the wants of those other demographics? Absolutely not. That “growth” has not benefited the rest of us. It has been adjacent and concurrent, but I would argue it is almost a mutually exclusive bolt-on.

Is lowering prices the way to get back to growth? Free-to-play did an absolute nose-dive past any notion of there being a barrier based on cost. Everyone who wants to play today absolutely has an access path to do so.

I do not necessarily have answers for these things. But the point is to say that it is absolutely more complicated than “the future generations aren’t interested in consoles” (which is actually untrue + gaming on mobile is actually not frictionless) or “I’m not the target audience anymore”. Maybe it’s just a fact that those people voicing those perspectives actually just care less about gaming. Which is fine. But maybe they just don’t have the skin in the game to accurately address the market dynamic holistically.

I’m not going to advocate for the future of Wall-E, where, in order to show some positive percentage of growth, we invite in a demographic of people who are unwilling to lift a finger, figure out how to connect a RF switch-box to their TV (an analogy), make deliberate choices about their games, care nothing about gaming other than what is the lowest-cost-of-access, so they can float around on a hover chair and be beamed mindless blank screens. That evolution has been evolving in a creeping tide and it has absolutely harmed the industry and the hobby.

Industry growth should not come at the expense of industry extinction. But should allow it to evolve and progress by encouraging investment without leading to a race to the bottom.

GoTY in April? Grow Up – Against the Instant, Month-to-Month GoTY Culture

[from My Gaming Diary: Gamedate 78744.2]

I have some very austere philosophies on the Game of The Year discussion. First and foremost of which is that no one should be having this conversation until December of the release calendar. Amongst other reasons why, I feel it is actually denigrating and demeaning to the creatives and to the devs of studios whose games have yet to actually even come out yet.

But on Friday, Polygon decided they needed to be one who fired first. And there seems to have been a host of several articles across the internets concerning “what are your current picks for GoTY”? 

We need to give games room to breathe. And to live in their own space. We’re not all game reviewers and we do not need to process the impact of games on us in the same 1 to 2-week crucible of crunch trying to meet a deadline.

Drinking deeply of games should be in the same manner in which you try to imbibe a good wine. You’ll never be able to tell whether there are hints of chocolates, citrus, oak, and other flavors unless you hold the game in your mouth, let it splash over all parts of your tongue, give yourself time for the flavors to hit and change and change you as it is ingested. 

Too often we allow our commentary on games to be encapsulated in the social media cycle of clout chasing and the need to be seen instead of saying what we really think and feel. Games will hit you once upon the experience and then that experience will change and shift over time as you get further from it, as you take more things into consideration in interpreting its experience as you allow yourself time to think about it from all sides. I’m not saying you need to wait two decades until you’ve had more life experiences to be able to speak on how you felt about a game when it came out vs when you are an older, different being.

Those conversations are important ones to have too. Ones that we also do not allow enough space for in the gaming community. But by pushing the narrative of “what is my GoTY right now/so far”, we actually eke value out of the term.

And it should mean something. In our effort to “take back GoTY” from the media, we’ve already bastardized a once vaunted label and diluted it to just mean “my favorite game of the year”. In the application of the GoTY label, I feel we are often trying to overly laude a game’s merits by bestowing on it some transitory label, that is also simply transactional; because most pundits and influencers who use it are just trading a disingenuous critical opinion for attention. It is a transaction that is both fleeting and inconsequential. It means nothing until a game is actually held in regard in comparison to that year’s graduating class of games, and so nominating it to that year’s Hall of Fame means little when the full competitive field has not been delivered yet.

You can fully say that a game is your favorite so far this year. That makes sense. And it makes sense when something comes out that supersedes it. GoTY should be a gem held in reverence. It should also be possible for you to intellectually separate the notion of GoTY as a matter of critical acclaim from “favorite game of the year”, or “most fun game of the year”, as is our Superlative category on E2KG. Because sometimes we have more fun playing a game, and there is game with high replayability, a gaming world that we live in, a do-loop that is so satisfactory to us, that that may exceed what we want to anoint as the critical darling of Game of the Year.

Simply put, GoTY has become a label that has become weaponized. Either in the platform war, the dogmatic war between AAA, AA, and indie games, the design war of Western v Eastern, the genre war, or any other minor skirmish or regional Low-Intensity Conflict that dusts up in the ongoing battle of gamer hypocrisy and disingenuity. The guerrilla tactic of declaring an interstitial GoTY every time a major release drops, every month, every quarter…the engagement farming tactic of an influencer asking “what is your game of the year so far?”…is just that. Efforts to spool people up, invite either outrage or hyperbolic game-gushing for the sake of fanning flames. 

Just play games. Imbibe them. Live them. Drink deeply of them. Breathe them in. And isolate the conversation that makes you choose one above all to the only time in which it is warranted for such a conversation to exist. Once. At the end of the year. Anything else is just super-lame.

Adapt or Game Less: Notes from the Priced-Out Frontier [from My Gaming Diary – Gamedate 78738.1]

I wrote at length on BlueSky this morning about all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth I have been doing over the Nintendo Switch 2. The hand-wringing. Agonizing. It is much the same as I have done over the iPad Pro. And again two times over now about GPUs. And I realized this afternoon in an epiphany…this is the sort of thing that people do when they are priced out of the market.

It has led to a reorganizing of the natural order of things. That being the sequence of things on my Major Purchase Planning List. There are things that have dropped off. Things that have been substituted. Things where I have had to re-orient my target to a SKU decidedly downscale. 

In GPU-land, over the last two generations, I had become an RTX XX70 Ti and above consumer. Chancing to grab a 3080 Ti and a 4080 to-boot along the way. I am now looking firmly at the vanilla 5070 and maybe even the 5060 Ti and/or 5060. These are the times; they are a-changing.

It’s funny when the pundits crow their own misbegotten and claimed forewarnings that “the gaming industry is changing”. Funny how they never add that perfunctory stamp to that claim “…and as a result, you may be priced out of things you would have normally enjoyed.” Funny that they try to walk this line that everything is getting more expensive for the supplier, but you, the buyer, should somehow miraculously expect prices to remain the same. And if they don’t, then you are entitled to yell and scream about it. This is in strict, clinical, academic opposition to the laws of economics we all learn as children.

I prefer to dwell in reality. And to make decisions. Often those decisions are hard. Unpleasant. Uncomfortable. Difficult. Unfair. I find, however, that when I unchain my mind from past paradigms to think beyond entitlements, I often stumble upon unique solutions that I hadn’t allowed myself to consider before when things were easy. To consider technical paths that I had previously thought too onerous or inconvenient. 

I’m not sure where this will take me. But the options I am juggling right now…let’s just say that things could get very exciting.

Chasing Graphics: The Frustrating GPU Hunt in a Retail Nightmare

The GPU market at retail is a mess right now. And the answer that “MicroCenter has the RX 9070 XT in stock every day until 3pm” is a disingenuous take that everything is ok for everyone else in the global market who CAN’t get to a MicroCenter. Anything that is in stock tends to be overpriced. RTX 5080’s are going for $2100 and up. That for a card with a $999 MSRP.

Tech Spot Ran a story today about a retailer selling cards at MSRP but only via lottery. 

Lottery.

I’d laugh if I didn’t want to cry. I need a GPU. I’m trying hard to convince myself that I don’t need three. I had an RTX 4070 Super crap the bed last week. I don’t really want to replace it with another GeForce card. But good luck nabbing an RX 9070 XT. The only MicroCenter within striking distance only has the RX 7800 XT in sufficient stock that I’d be willing to get in a car and drive the 1.5 hours to get there without fear that they would be out of stock by the time I got there. At the end of the day, that might still need to be the move. The only other time things were this bad was during the pandemic. When no RTX 3000-series card could be easily obtained, I opted to go Red for the first time and got two RX 5700 XTs. It was a wondrous brief moment in time that allowed me to stave off stepping up to 3000-series cards until they were readily available at retail.

I’ve temporarily replaced the RTX 4070 Super with a Radeon RX 6700 XT. But Avowed is giving that card fits. And in my box with a RTX 3080 Ti, Monster Hunter Wilds is also making that card feel like it’s in a hallway fight with Charlie Cox’s Daredevil. In my box with an RTX 3070 Ti, which is only connected to 240Hz 1080p displays, things are copacetic. But of course if I were to upgrade the other two, I probably wouldn’t want that to be the only RTX 3000-series card loping along. 

Somewhere in here I’ll make a decision. Right now trying to upgrade my Apple ecosystem to the latest M4 announcements that came out last week has me preoccupied. But anytime I have to fire up Avowed or Monster Hunter Wilds I am reminded of this itch.

Admittedly I need to do enough testing to reassure myself that this is solely a symptom of those two games not being well-optimized. I know that’s the going conventional wisdom. But I always like to reinforce that with actual metrics I take in the lab. And I just haven’t had enough time to run different performance checks; multiple games on the 6700 XT that have known good performance envelopes. And then other titles on the 3080 Ti that are recent releases in the last six months.

The thing is I do not expect this issue to be rectified until well into May / early summer. And by then we’ll be hearing about nVidia’s mid-cycle refreshes of Supers and additional Ti’s. It’s enough to make me think about just going back to 1080p gaming and not worry about 1440p. I prefer frames over res, hands down no doubt. 

But another very serious consideration is to start gaming on MacOS. I have a Mac mini M4, and my MacBook Air M4 shows up tomorrow. Both should be pretty capable of gaming, no? I’ve given myself an easy checkpoint by downloading and installing Steam on the Mac mini M4 and Civilization VII. More to follow.

(Drafted on my Mac mini M4)

Navigating Nostalgia: Why Old Games Matter in a Rapidly Evolving Tech Landscape

PC World reported last week that nVidia’s newest GPUs are having a problem playing games from the early 2000s that use the PhysX API. While I agree with the author’s main takeaway, that this is not the ELE that many YouTubers proclaim it to be, it did make me reminisce about how much I play older games. 

A bit on that first part. The article attributed PhysX to nVidia. Even the Wikipeia entry says this in its first line. But they bypass the actual origin of PhysX (the Wikipedia getds it right further down). It came out of a small startup called Ageia in the early 2000s (it went retail in 2004), who sold PhysX cards as an add-in card to go into a short-length PCI slot and run alongside your GPU. When Ageia need to close-up shop after the bubble burst and after the industry suffered mass consolidation or outright dissolution of the GPU, SoundCard, and add-in card PC market, Ageia sold its IP to nVidia. I couldn’t afford the Ageia card at the time and was happy to see it get absorbed into the GeForce stack. Also gobbled up by consolidation were S3’s API, S3TC, which went into DirectX and OpenGL, as well as elements from the 3Dfx stack (Voodoo technologies and the Glide API) when nVidia also laid claim to them. 

OK. With that settled…again, I don’t think there is much ado about this. As a technologist, despite all this ongoing hubbub about game preservation, some level-setting needs to be done. Just how long should a game be playable? Many will assert that a game should be playable forever.

This mostly from the outrage bandits and engagement merchants. But that just isn’t practical. We have a hard enough time keeping things working from OS to OS upgrade. A game working into perpetuity is preposterous. It is also ridiculous to think that we will be able to set some standard, like “20 years” and apply that to all games as a rubric. Every game is different. Of different scope and scale. To say nothing about all of the technical elements that are beyond any one developer’s or publisher’s sphere of control. Things like APIs get broken every day. And so any effort in that vein will eventually fall apart.

But I do like playing me some older games. A lot, really. I’m that quintessential gamer who has started dozens of games and will play through the first 50% of the game but not finish it. And yet that will not keep me from coming back to it. Usually because I get distracted and do not want to stick with any 1 game for a single sitting when there are so many other games constantly passing by my windshield. But those beginnings, those openings…can still be like a warm blanket on a freezing cold night. Comfort food. I will often go back and revisit games that are 20 years old or more. And often re-start a game several times before finally embarking in a run to actually finish it. And, yes, I have often come up against the game I was trying to go back to once again and begin again and finally hit that magical point in the timeline when it was broken. 

But in a lot of ways, while I lament this missed opportunity, I just chalk that up to the unfortunate reality of the passage of time. I also quickly get over it when I am reminded, once again…I now have time to get to the other 300 things in my backlog. Sometimes being a gamer is both a blessing and a curse.

But mostly, it is just a blessing that there are so many games to play.