The list of publishers willing to put $60 million down on something that doesn’t have either extremely good name recognition or extremely safe, conventional design (plus the promise of franchising, always) is small and getting smaller. Hitman, Deus Ex, Dishonored, Prey, the Star Wars adventure game that just got…

Do you think they just dig games out of the ground for sale at market? The average cost of a huge game like this was $30 million a decade ago, that number’s got to at least have doubled. You put all your hopes of breaking even on $60 copies sold ala carte and your bottom requires more and more millions of copies to…

They’re tedious, but they’re the only way blockbuster games pay for themselves these days.

The outrage in response to these crimes is proof of both the endlessly aggrieved tone of video game discourse and also the insistence upon treating games purely as consumer objects rather than creative works.

Can we at least let the show air before we start getting Breitbart columns in the comments

Her first line is literally “I’ll sleep with anyone if they agree to be executed”, presumably because “I’m Cleopatra and my sexuality is my weapon” was too blunt but only just.

The general lack of vertical space makes the stealth more basic than it otherwise might have been. They revamped the combat because that’s the point of it. Stealth is an alpha strike thing.

Also the guy from Unity, who gets kicked out of the club on account of not caring

Wait are you guys seriously buying the notion that Ubisoft would walk away from a franchise that took 3 spots with 3 editions in the Steam top 10 the week it came out

*MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW*

I hope you prefer combing levels with a portable droI mean, hawk

the temptation to use that extended development period to stuff the game with even more of the series’ signature timesinks, collectibles, and distractions must have been immense. Instead, it smartly pulls hard in the opposite direction. 

It’s not a good movie by any stretch but it’s better than what we would have gotten had Kelly continued to coast on his poor man’s Lynch aesthetic. So I can respect it in that sense.

I’m clearly joking

I still have friends who are mad they cut Tom Bombadil. I get it, but I don’t get it. Anyway unless this show’s showrunner is willing to stand up to billionaire investors I’m sure we’ll be getting less Bombadil and more fantasy warfare.

with ease, he said

In all seriousness, I don’t know what black magic of marketing made people start approaching stories in terms of “universes” (I mean comic books obviously, but they’re all predicated on the knowledge that their worlds are fluid and maximalist) but you can’t build a show in the heavy shadow of a massive, complete…

They approved the prequel-prequel video games

If there’s one thing that people love about the Shadow of Mordor game series, it is the rich and critical contributions it made to the LOTR universe, its demonstration that there are so many stories to be told in the nebulous past before the books. People definitely did not love them solely on the strength of a…

There are a lot of reasons to expect that this won’t be good and yet, it will invariably turn out better than the LOTR show