It seems that many major players in the video game industry haven’t quite caught on to the fact that social media is essentially dead or dying.

I talked about this a bit in January in my monthly column. But I ended the article on a note upon which I probably should have elucidated.

At the time I wrote:

“Currently, I think brands and media need to focus on building up their own safe haven for consumers, readers, and fans away from social media and the like. Own your community and treat it well, because if you lose it to social media or Google, it may be forever.”

That dangling thought came back to mind when I recent spoke with Tim Courtney about, well, a lot of interesting things.

Courtney pioneered a crowdsourcing innovation that would later become LEGO Ideas. He turned the passion of LEGO fans into a $100,000,000-generating community. But more importantly, he did it in a way that respected and empowered fans and without the need to cede control to some outside source.

We got onto the topic of social media, and when I mentioned my thoughts about its slow death, he pointed out that what I was saying sounded a lot like the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Something I hadn’t been aware of.

The theory holds that people are retreating from the big public platforms to private, smaller digital spaces.

I couldn’t agree more. Where Yancey Strickler talks more about the implications for the internet when this happens, I’m more interested in how important it is for game makers to help either create or maintain those safe spaces.

When social media came along, a lot of video game discourse slowly moved over, leaving behind a lot of amazing places to wither away.

Forums still existed, of course, but they mostly gave way to behemoths like Facebook, Twitter, and the like.

Now, with social media crawling with Nazis, AI-created invasive porn, scammers (and Elon Musk) most people—at least those without some sort of fiduciary tie to the services—are moving away, on the hunt for green pastures, or perhaps a friendly copse in a dark forest.

My suggestion, which is driven by my own personal need for safer spaces, is also one that can help game developers in their need for a place to interact with authentic fans about the games they hope those fans will play.

Act now. Build those safe spaces. Invest the money and energy to create the kind of community you would be eager to join—before it’s too late.

I say, with more than a little personal interest in the outcome, that one great such place could be, and often is, video game publications.

If maintained, and many are, the comments on a website dedicated to the coverage of video games can be filled with authentic fans who want nothing more than to participate in the conversations sparked or driven by well-researched, well-written stories.

Of course, this requires a level of effort to ensure that these places don’t become their own dark forests, but it’s very doable.

Support your local gaming site—developers and publishers—now. Don’t do it just because they may cover your game. Do it because they are critical safe havens for your fans. At their best, these gathering spots spark meaningful conversations, inspire current and future developers, and—when necessary—demand the occasional course correction.

Create your own forums or open comments on your own sites. Build out your sites to include a form of editorial coverage. Hire those who want nothing more than to dive deep into your process, bring to light your passion, and help build a community that loves your creations as much as you do.

Whichever path you choose, do it soon, because it won’t be long before the people you so want to connect with have scurried away into unknowable pockets of an increasingly dark forest—leaving you behind.

It is, perhaps, the perfect time in Cuba to make a horror game.

Intertwined oil shortages and an economic crisis sparked by fuel shortages and the continued U.S. embargo, have rocked the island nation, leading to daily rolling blackouts as well as food, water, and medical shortages.

Back in 2016, when Cuban indie developer Josuhe Pagliery, started work on his first game, it garnered international attention at a time when he thought things couldn’t get any more difficult.

“I always believed Saviorless would be the game of difficulties,” Pagliery told me recently via email. “If you remember, there was no internet on the island in 2016 when development began. And it turns out that now we’re living through daily blackouts of 20 hours! One dollar equals 510 Cuban pesos compared to 24 in 2016; without exaggeration, more than 85 percent of the people who collaborated on the first project are now outside of Cuba; and to top it off, there’s now also the risk of an invasion or the implementation of a total naval blockade.”

Now, deep in development on his second game, Pagliery says the increasing difficulty of not just making a game in Cuba, but surviving, has helped to shape what this new title will be.

“After two quite stressful months with these thoughts in the middle of blackouts, I realized that making this game, with this subject matter, in this particular moment and context possessed a unique value as a work,” he wrote. “The potential to become an artistic record of what appears to be the end of an era in Cuba. I convinced myself that my terrible context could also be used as an artistic opportunity.”

His new game, Tasteless, is a low-poly 3D first-person horror game with a heavy narrative focus.

Pagliery hopes it will be the second title in a trilogy of “less” games that revolve around the concept of emptiness, and which shares some references in common with his first game.

Saviorless

Saviorless, considered by many to be one of Cuba’s first modern indie games, endured a tumultuous development that kicked off in 2016.

It survived a split-up of the development team, supply shortages, social unrest, and COVID, but still managed—after eight years of development—to launch as Empty Head Games’ first title.

“The reception from players was very positive, same with the press; the visual department was universally praised, as was the music,” Pagliery told me. “During development we never thought about sales, only about getting the first Cuban video game onto all major consoles and platforms. Sales were above average within what’s expected for a 2D cinematic platforming experience.”

Since release, the game sparked another wave of attention that included reviews, interviews, and presence at global events. It even received a nomination at the Indicade and Quirino awards.

Along the way, the game managed to connect with publisher Dear Villagers, and is going through the process of brought to platforms beyond the computer.

Pagliery said he hopes that the game hitting the console will lead to the studio seeing significant returns. But more important, at least for the developer, launching the game brought with it a number of important lessons and a desire to make a second independent game.

“I love making independent video games; frankly I can’t think of an activity I enjoy more,” he wrote. “No matter how much I complain about the sacrifice involved in doing it from Cuba, it’s simply the best!”

Tasteless

Where Saviorless was a side-scrolling 2D platform, Tasteless makes the leap to 3D and focuses much more on the game’s story.

“The game takes place mostly inside a house in Havana based on the house where I was born and raised,”Pagliery wrote, “and it’s about a father who is trying to resurrect his recently deceased son.”

The concept for the game was driven in large party by Pagliery, himself, becoming a father and realizing how completely fatherhood changes everything about a person.

The game views fatherhood not only as a “genetic and emotional bond, but also as a dynamic based on control and deformation,” he wrote. “The parallel with Cuba, starting from this family tragedy that in essence speaks of the death of the future, became increasingly present as I progressed; so I believe the project will have a certain documentary quality regarding these convulsive times in Cuban history, without necessarily being a game about Cuba.”

The core team working on Tasteless is made up of Pagliery, who serves as the game’s director, artist, writer, and designer; Miguel Nicolas, who handles programming; and Angel Menendez, who creates the 3D art and animation. The music and sound is being created by German Carrasco, and David Darias, is the technical advisor.

This time around, Pagliery hopes to get the game wrapped up in just two years, something he thinks he can accomplish despite the ever escalating challenges.

“I have much more experience, and it’s real experience, since it comes from having made almost every mistake a beginner can make and having paid the price,” he wrote. “I also now know the professional areas where I’m good, and by default, the others I should try to improve or simply avoid. The jump to 3D (although there are 2D segments within the game) represents a technical and artistic challenge, but far from seeing it as something negative, I prefer to understand it as a way to expand my expressive possibilities.”

Another boon for the game’s development was Pagliery’s decision to invest much of his own money into solar panels for his home and office.

“That was the only way I found to keep working and in the process preserve some peace of mind, investing in a solar panel system, which in fact I’m using right now in the middle of a nighttime blackout to write these lines,” he wrote. “The setup consists of an inverter, a battery, and six panels of 600 watts each, located on the rooftop of my building. Thanks to this we can continue working even under critical scenarios, like when the national electrical system goes down across the entire island.”

While the electricity affords him the ability to work when others on the island may not be able to, he’s not immune to other issues the blackouts create.

“The blackouts generate a survival logic in people, where life is reduced to its most basic aspects, in other words, it feels like devolving in real time,” he wrote. “And yes, it’s true that thanks to these panels right now I’m not as affected, but my parents are, and so are the members of my team, and this generates a feeling of guilt over something that’s not in your hands to solve.”

Pagliery believes the energy problems are the result of what he calls “profound governmental neglect, marked by the absence of real investment in energy infrastructure for years,” as well as the long-lasting embargo on the island.

“It’s an infinite loop, which functions as the perfect excuse to wield before the many problems or shortcomings on the part of the state,” he added.

The accumulation of problems in Cuba have also triggers a systemic crisis that Paliery sais extend to every level of life in the nation.

“Water and gas, for example, also depend on electricity,” he wrote. ”There are literally no cars on the streets; activities like cinemas, theaters, concerts have nearly disappeared. As always happens in these cases, culture is among the first victims within a free-falling economy.

“Everything is much more negative and hopeless, but paradoxically it’s perfect for a horror game. At this point, I’m starting to process all these infinite problems and shortages as fuel to keep working. In essence, I try to convert all these multiple ‘nos’ into a creative ‘yes’.”

Life in Cuba

With the embargo heightening issues on the island and talk of the U.S. somehow taking over the country, Pagliery said everyone on the island seems to have an opinion.

Pagliery points out that the U.S has always been present in the Cuban collective imagination, either as “savior or villain.”

“Possibly the place in the world where the USA is talked about most after the USA itself is Cuba,” he added. “That has been a constant throughout my life, since school; it was practically the only thing Fidel Castro talked about in his interminable diatribes.”

Since the U.S. attacked Venezuela, the blackouts in Cuba have worsened by 20 percent, Pagliery estimates.

“That tells you that the energy crisis in Cuba had already been dragging on from long before Maduro’s fall,” he wrote. “I can attest that in interior provinces of the country, like Cienfuegos, blackouts of more than 20 hours were already a present reality since at least the year 2024.”

Pagliery believes that Cuba is is obligated to make a deal with the U.S.

“I don’t think it’s even optional,” he wrote. “I know many people, generally outside of Cuba, adore that idyllic image of David versus Goliath, but the truth is, little David doesn’t stand the slightest chance against a giant. The concrete reality is that at just 90 miles away from the USA, the tiny island of Cuba cannot afford the luxury of confronting a rival like that. These are no longer the times of Vietnam. Anyone who demands that the Cuban people immolate themselves defending blackouts and misery, whether from the comfort of a smartphone or the regime itself, would in my eyes be someone pathologically malignant. It is the Cuban people who have solely suffered the consequences of this political standoff that now dates back 67 years, never their rulers or his relatives; perhaps it’s time to give us a damn break!”

He added that only the future can tell if the US stepping in would help or harm the country.

“It’s practically impossible to make the situation being lived on the island right now any worse,” he wrote.

As for the video game industry in Cuba, Pagliery doesn’t have high hopes for its growth any time soon.

“Forget about it completely!” he wrote. “If before it was unlikely to take off, given the terrible strategies of its managers and the dubious quality of their video games, right now that’s simply impossible. In fact, in the last six years, culture specifically is one of the sectors that has suffered the most palpable deterioration and institutional abandonment, both in the quality of its offerings and in its mere presence on the island.”

Elsewhere

Inside Outbound with vanlife true-believers, researchers, and cozy game dev Square Glade

The Greenening is a relaxing yet radical exploration of how we play incremental games

A visual tour of Fortnite’s Ice King and Foundation Return

Crimson Desert is the sort of glee-generating, open-world graphical powerhouse that clearly isn’t designed to be played on a handheld PC.

But after spending more than 125 hours with it on my handheld of choice, I’ve only really run into two issues: the text can be so small for my aging eyes that I occasionally have to use a magnifying glass to read it (please try not to imagine what that looks like, it’s sad) and the chance that I’ll throw the game across the room in a boss-fight-induced rage is much higher than if it were running on my chunky desktop.

Boss fights aside, Crimson Desert is the sort of game I’ve been waiting for without really realizing it was the exact sort of thing I need in my life right now.

I happen to be traveling for the month, and my only gaming form of entertainment is my iPhone and the beefy ROG Xbox Ally X. It also happens to be (currently) the worst month of the year in terms of Trump-driven rage, dystopia, and depression.

In short, I needed a comforting distraction but didn’t have my desktop handy to help wth that.

Along came an early copy of Crimson Desert, and I hopped right in. But, to my surprise, I wasn’t initially drawn to the game. The quests felt very hand-holdy, and the combat was simply me mashing the same buttons over and over. Is this it? I thought.

Fortunately, it wasn’t. By the time I hit 20 hours, I was fully invested.

I think the sheer complexity of controls, the depth of experience, and the (let’s call it straightforward) main quests had somehow initially coalesced into delivering an experience that seemed routine at best.

But once you get past those lengthy opening moments, by the time (at least for me) that I unlocked the second playable member of the Greymanes I was hooked.

It helped that Damaine is a badass rapier-wielding warrior who I triained up to essentially shiv people to death … which, of course, never gets old. Kliff, the main, starting hero, is also fun, but he’s more of my tank.

As you play the game, some wild stuff happens and new things unlock that make you realize just how deep this game goes. I don’t want to spoil any of the surprises, but just trust me when I tell you it’s worth the time to get past the first seven hours or so. I know that’s a crazy thing to say outloud, but I’m 125 hours in and have only finished a couple of the main quests.

Heck, I’ve barely touched the side quests. How am I supposed to concentrate with everything going on in the world.

As I pointed out, this game feels like the perfect experience for me right here, right now.

Some of the ways that holds true includes the fact that you can explore the world as, essentially, a naturalist, geologist, and biologist. You can be like the Darwin of Crimson Desert. It seems that nearly everything living in the world can be identified and is cataloged in the game’s Knowledge database.

If you open the Knowledge database when you start the game, you’ll discover ten categories, including things like People, Creatures, Mountain, and Gatherables. In each of those categories are a number of subcategories, and in each subcategory are a bunch of undiscovered things noted by question marks. Once you discover them, the question marks turn into the thing you found. But here’s the thing, you play the game KNOWING there’s so much yet to discover. It’s very hard to ignore once you know it’s there. (You’re welcome.)

So far in the subcategory of Creatures of Mysteries, for instance, I have discovered two of the world’s five Chimeras. Once discovered, it tells you about them, and when you see them in the world, they’ll no longer show up as unidentified.

For most of these, you need to either interact with them or … catch them to see what they are. The latter can be a bit unnerving when you, say, grab something moving in the grass and it turns out to be a yellow garden spider.

On the bright side, the game has 15 different types of cats and dogs—all of which you can carry and pet.

So you can see my problem.

How am I supposed to go find the dude in the castle who wants the thing done when there are so many cats to cuddle and dogs to pet? Why defeat the big bad in the second chapter when you can go mountain climbing, or be startled by a family of partridge scurrying from the underbrush during a forest amble?

I actually find myself completing more quests by accident than on purpose. I’ll be strolling through a field when I come upon something that gets me mired in some local issue, and then decide to sort things out.

I suppose in that way, Crimson Desert is almost more like the ‘70s TV show Kung-Fu than it is single-player World of Warcraft.

I should also mention that the complex and gratifying skill system allows you to focus on unarmed combat and grappling, if you’d like. So I can as easily take a guard out with a clothesline or body slam as I can a slash of my sword. I find it most enjoyable, though, combining the two. Using Damaine’s rapier to shank shank shank someone, and then follow that up with a spinning scissors throw, Captain America shield toss, and then maybe a shot from her gun. Did I mention she has a gun? She has a black powder gun. Poor Kliff has a bow, but he can get poisoned arrows.

There’s also a form of magic, which, frankly, I’m just starting to get a handle on. It’s use is required for some of the puzzles, and I believe for the BIG overarching story, but as I’ve noted, I’ve been too distracted.

A typical gameplay session for me usually starts with me thinking, ‘I’m going to turn off the music, crank up the sound effects, and quietly ride my horse through the woods to see what I find.’

Flash cut ten minutes later to me chasing a robber on foot, only to turn around and see two of his buddies attacking my horse “Wait, what? Why are they attacking my horse? I’m right here! Those fuckers! “

Then I spend 15 minutes chasing the other two down on foot because my poor horse needs a good rest. Usually, this involves a lot of cussing and some dirty looks from my wife, who only hears my reactions to what’s happening on the machine between my hands.

Once that’s done, I decide to proceed on foot, maybe identifying the occasional raccoon, or petting a dog, or seeing if I can climb onto a wild horse when it walks by.

There’s a whole bounty system built into the game that activates when you kill and steal. It’s by region, but is incredibly hard to remove aside from essentially turning yourself in and paying the bounty they put on your head.

You can find this and other details out about the game in its built-in guides, which also has a lot of mysteries to be discovered. For instance, I’ve only tried one (arm wrestling) of the 15 or so minigames and only discovered two of the 100 types of special equipment. One of those is a knuckledrill which is designed for mining but can make a mess of an enemy. The other is a mask, which you need if you want to do some robbin and stealin, stealin and robbin.

There’s a lot I haven’t really done much with, like camp management, which lets you build out your own base and even decorate it, recruiting more members of the Greymanes to play as, heck, I’ve only scratched the surface of the lifeskills like cooking, logging, and mining.

One thing I have done though, is travel as far as possible to the east and west of the game’s massive map. I sent Kliff east and Damaine west.

Damaine’s journey was relatively routine, though the further west she went the higher she climbed and the colder it got, to the point that her endurance lessened, her recovery slowed and frost began to tinge the edges of the screen.

Eventually she found herself in a high forest framed by mountains that warned her not to proceed. It was unclear if this was the permanent western edge of the map or something that was locked because of her low level and the incomplete quests.

Kliff discovered just how bizarre the game gets and how unusual the enemies become. He managed to skirt much of the massive, deadly enemies by riding horseback through forests, around castles, and—once—along what appeared to be a wooden train trestle that cut high above warring factions.

When he finally got to the edge of the map, I found a tiny island a swim’s distance from the shore. It was populated only by sea birds, so I scrambled Kliff to the edge and then looked out at what appeared to be an endless ocean.

There is still so much undiscovered, unexplored between those two edges of the maps, like circuses, ruins, magic, and lost friends.

I’m sure I’ll eventually play through the quests, but right now I’m too curious about all the details, little and big, stuffed into this grand experience.

And who knows, maybe when I’m done traveling in the real world, I’ll try my hand at a bit of virtual exploration on my desktop. Right now, though, it doesn’t feel like a requirement to me.

Elsewhere

Voice actors discuss what it takes to bring a grand adventure like Crimson Desert to life

Crimson Desert guide: How to manage your Greymane camp and recruits

Crimson Desert guide: Everything you need to know about crafting and cooking

Good morning!

Last week, the Epic Games Store’s news page was a smorgasbord of horror, homages, horseriding, and high school hangouts. Here’s your week in review.

Take a cast of talking guns, add a skateboard, mix in a human petting zoo, and add a dash of bootleg cosmetic surgery, and you’re not even close to the bizarre recipe for High On Life 2.

An AI takes control of a human body in Replaced, a game with the cinematics of Blade Runner and the combos of a Batman: Arkham game.

“We didn’t want to make a war game,” Creative Director Gérard Lehiany said about The Legend of Khiimori, which transports players to 13th-century Mongolia and substitutes history’s best horseriders for Genghis Khan.

What Resident Evil Requiem secrets lie hidden inside a steel briefcase, wrapped in yellow police tape?

Ancient alien secrets, thousands of planets, and a snarky, floating companion arrived in Residual, free this week on the Epic Games Store for mobile.

Stay out of sight and earshot, and be sure to unlock the best skills to become a stealth master in Styx: Blades of Greed.

On their last day of high school, three teenagers bond over the greatest music ever created in Mixtape.

A new and mysterious island, a pair of new characters, and a challenging, new post-game arena create the definitive dual-protagonist adventure in Ys X: Proud Nordics.

If you want to dominate Battlefield 6 Season 2, you need to know the best mechanics, builds, and attachments for the first-person shooter’s new weapons.

Resident Evil Requiem is not just horror, and it’s not just action. Producer Masato Kumazawa says it’s the best of both worlds.

I’m trying something new starting this week. As you may know, Pad & Pixel maintains the Epic Games Store’s news page, overseeing and creating 40 to 50 stories a month for the store.

I thought subscribers might be interested in a short round-up of what’s being created each week.

Please do let me know what you think and how we can improve it.

Now, on with Dave Tach’s round-up.

Good morning,

Last week, the Epic Games Store’s news page was filled with diverse stories about creating a game in war-torn Ukraine, reconnecting a fragmented world, finding great games for Valentine’s Day and Galentine’s Day, becoming a soccer hero (but not in the way you’d expect!), and much more. Here’s your week in review.

This year’s huge Epic Games Winter Sale was more intimate, with a tour of great and discounted games from AAA blockbusters to indie darlings.

Capture the flag meets a ticking clock and hidden treasure in developer Night Street Games’ Last Flag.

A team of scrappy liberators is on the hunt for stolen and stashed African artifacts in developer Nyamakop’s Relooted.

From war-torn Ukraine, a core team of developers at The Future Entertainment Company is building the Purple Lands, filling it with a mysterious fog, and populating it with nightmarish mutations in DDoD.

Practice makes perfect for mastering every motorbike class in RIDE 6, an arcade racing game that goes big on realism.

Valentine’s Day is a natural time to share with those you love, and the Epic Games Store is full of games to give and play together.

The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark brought America’s 34th-most haunted city to the Epic Games Store mobile app for free.

Save humanity from extinction and connect survivors from Mexico to Australia. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, coming soon to the Epic Games Store.

Backed by more than 30,000 members—developers, business leaders, and more—The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences lauded the year’s best games at its annual DICE Awards.

Women-led games from the Epic Games Store took center stage on Feb. 13, better known as Galentine’s Day.

There’s only one way to unlock the secret ending: Become an expert Coffin hunter in REANIMAL.

The players on the pitch may get the glory, but you’ll become the unsung hero in developer Triple Espresso S.A.’s Copa City as you manage money, volunteers, specialists, fans, and more for huge soccer events.

In a response to a question about how GDC Festival of Gaming will react to ICE agents if they request information about attendees or to access the convention, I was told that organizers are in “discussions with the mayor’s office … about the safety, security, and overall experience of attendees.”

When asked earlier for specifics about the discussions between city officials and GDC, I was referred to a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) by San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie in which he underscores the priorities of local law enforcement as protecting public safety, “including the right to peaceful expression.”

“We will continue to uphold San Francisco’s longstanding policies that keep local law enforcement focused on keeping our city safe—not federal immigration enforcement,” the mayor wrote. “If you see SFPD on the street, they are there to keep you safe, not to assist immigration enforcement.”

Earlier in the week, I raised concerns some have about the safety of international visitors to the show with GDC Executive Director, Innovation & Growth, Mark DeLoura.

When I asked whether organizers have discussed the possibility of ICE agents coming to GDC, which runs from March 9 to March 13, to conduct visa checks among attendees, DeLoura said they have had a range of conversations.

“We have really good partners in San Francisco in the mayor’s office as well as at the state level,” he said. “So that’s helpful for sure.

“These are questions that are very appropriate, and we think about a lot. I really think of GDC as being an international event, so I want it to be safe for international people.”

It’s not the sort of thing you might typically think about for a video game development conference, but with increasingly out-of-control Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agencies shooting and killing two people in the past month, it’s a question on the minds of some considering a trip to the United States.

Operation Metro Surge, which kicked off in December, has seen an increase in the brutality of ICE and Border Patrol, as well as the detention of U.S. Citizens and people lawfully allowed to visit or stay in the country.

Both France and Germany have issued advisories to their citizens planning to travel to the U.S., warning them to avoid Minneapolis in particular.

Over on LinkedIn, business development and strategist Cassia Curran wrote that “GDC is going to be very empty of Europeans this year.” And noted developer and consultant Rami Ismail wrote that when asked for travel tips to DICE and GDC, his reply was “Cancel. Genuinely. Cancel.”

“Unless you’re white, and fit the racist, sexist, and supremacist ideal of Trump’s US, or can pass as such, you already have reasons to be rejected,” he added. “Even if you are ‘perfectly’ Trump-approved, you are at risk of being the next news story of a foreigner being rejected or detained at the border.

“And I really need you to understand that *any* rejection or detention at the border is a permanent mark against entry, forever. That mark will stick past Trump’s eventual defeat, and it is unlikely future governments will allow appeal or go through case by case.”

All of this does beg a question, DeLoura noted:

“If we’re throwing an event for all game developers, why do we have an event just in the United States?”

That is something they’ve been looking into, he added.

Following my interview with some of the GDC folks earlier this week, the team sent over a statement from Nina Brown, president of the GDC Festival of Gaming.

“The GDC team regularly evaluates (and will continue to consider) locations based on attendee feedback, logistics, venue capacity, and accessibility,” she said in the statement. ”To address those concerns around travel and lodging costs, GDC works closely with local hotel partners to offer discounted rates to attendees, and works with the City of San Francisco to offer discounts for local businesses around the city.

“As event organizers, we are always assessing how we balance the choice of location alongside venue infrastructure, hotel capacity, and international travel access, to ensure that the event experience is the best it can be for our attendees from the moment they arrive.”

She also said that the folks at GDC “appreciate the concerns that some of our community have expressed in the lead-up to GDC Festival of Gaming. We work with local officials and legal experts to monitor any US policy changes, and our guidance to our international community members is to begin visa applications early and consult with their embassy on any additional requirements.”

Brown added that the convention’s safety and security initiatives in and around Moscone Centre include a 24/7 safety hotline, San Francisco Safety Community Ambassadors stationed around the center, security escorts upon request, and expanded training for festival crew.

While Brown noted that the organizers are seeing global participation from more than 60 countries so far, almost one-third (31 percent) of those surveyed by GDC last month for its annual State of the Game Industry report had already canceled travel plans to the U.S., and one-third were reconsidering future plans. It’s unclear what the past month’s events in Minneapolis might have had on that number.

The 2026 State of the Game Industry report was released by the GDC Festival of Gaming today.

While the negative impact U.S. immigration policies are having on the industry is perhaps the most timely fact in the survey, the deep dive into the state of the video game industry offers insight into myriad facets of the current state of game development.

The report, which surveyed 2,300 game industry professionals, highlights several troubling issues facing game developers today.

That includes the fact that layoffs have increased, not diminished, in the past year, that generative AI’s use is increasing despite those surveyed increasingly disliking it, that three-quarters of those surveyed regularly work more than 40 hours a week, and that, despite 82 percent of those who responded wanting to unionize, only 12 percent are.

There are also some interesting points that aren’t so bleak in the survey. For instance, the use of Unreal Engine in the making of games now surpasses Unity, and developing a game for a handheld PC system seems to hold an allure for many of those surveyed.

The kind folks behind the report spent an hour or so walking me through the findings and answering some questions about it. But before we dive in, an interesting, data-specific point. (ha)

Beth Elderkin, the primary author and researcher for the annual report, noted that the team decided to change the way they conduct the survey this time around. So, you can’t compare this year’s report to the previous year’s. It’s not apples to apples.

“We really wanted to reexamine the state of the game industry and figure out how to best represent the full game ecosystem,” Elderkin said. “I have long had a personal philosophy … that if you are part of making a game exist, you are a developer. So I wanted to dig deeper into State of the Game Industry and … figure out how I can better represent the game community and give them more of a chance to share their expertise.”

This time, the survey ensured that those with specific expertise could respond to questions relevant to their areas.

But, in general, the first year-over-year comparison won’t be possible until next year’s results.

Perhaps the biggest news coming out of the survey won’t be too surprising to those who work or have worked in the game industry: one in four video game professionals has been laid off in the past two years.

Despite the hope that the post-pandemic surge of layoffs would be over by now, it appears that not only has it not stopped, it’s gotten worse.

The top three reasons those layoffs happened, according to those surveyed, were “company restructuring,” “budget cuts,” and “market conditions.” The sentiment makes it clear that employees don’t view these or the other reasons given as valid.

Among that list of reasons for layoffs was automation and AI implementation, but only six percent thought that was the reason.

The AI-related questions yielded some curious results. Specifically, 36 percent of respondents said they use generative AI tools in their work. But before you pull out the pitchforks, know that the way they’re using it sounds mostly mundane. For instance, about half use it for writing emails, scheduling, or other daily tasks. About 81 percent said they use it for research or brainstorming, but only 5 percent said they use it for play-facing features.

More interestingly, 52 percent of respondents believe generative AI is harmful to the industry. In this case, the survey included last year’s responses, noting that only 30 percent considered it bad, and in the 2024 report, only 18 percent did.

The state of work in the game industry remains challenging, with half of game workers reporting that they put in 50 or more hours a week, and a whopping 21 percent saying they worked 60 hours or more in a single week over the past year.

The main reason given for the crunch (59 percent) was that “there was too much essential work to fit into a standard 40-hour-week,” right behind that was “self-pressure.”

So it shouldn’t be surprising that 82 percent of those surveyed in the United States said that they support unionization, while only 12 percent are actually in one. Interestingly, 58 percent of owners and executives from companies with at least 20 employees said they supported unionization.

Despite the fact that the past year has seen a shockingly large shift away from DEI programs and initiatives at large companies like Meta and Disney, 63 percent of those surveyed said they haven’t seen any changes related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, while 23 percent said they were unsure. The same can’t be said for schools, unfortunately, with 47 percent reporting they have.

Personally, the questions I found most interesting were those pertaining to the way the rest of the world views the U.S., given the current state of shocking, over-the-top immigration enforcement, and seemingly arbitrary use of tariffs.

About 38 percent of respondents said U.S-based tariffs are impacting their expenses, revenue, or financial decisions.

About 60 percent of non-US industry leaders and investors said current immigration policies have impacted their ability or desire to do business with American companies. While 18 percent of those at companies with at least 20 employees said that immigration and gender identity policies have impacted their ability to recruit or retain talent. That goes up to 21 percent when asking people who work at companies with at least 100 employees.

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I remain befuddled about the current state of SEO and the shift to GEO.

For those of you blissfully unaware, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, or the way Google (and other search engines) force people to write to ensure they show up high in a search result. Or at least it was that way five years ago.

GEO is replacing SEO, it stands for Generative Engine Optimization and is essentially the way you have to write to ensure that your work will be read by an AI and then summarized back to its searchers on Google (or some other search engines). (No need to visit the source, my friend.)

It’s basically the slop, devil-baby of SEO and GEN AI.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center released last year, when a search result includes AI summaries, the percentage of people who will click through to a source drops from 15 percent to 8 percent.

BUT, and it’s a big one, only 1 percent of people who use an AI summary will click on one of its links.

One percent.

Now this is the part I’m confused about.

The whole concept of SEO was to get better rankings for your site or your article in Google’s search results to help drive more traffic your way.

But it seems that the whole point of GEO is to ensure your work is being used for an AI summary, which ultimately DOESN’T drive traffic.

So why bother?

This feels like the end of something that, even at its height, wasn’t exactly fair, but at least helped at times.

Back when SEO was king, there was a sort of unspoken trust.

We wrote the articles and allowed Google to crawl those articles so the company could then create a useful service that would catalog everyone’s work and allow people to find it. Thus increasing traffic.

Google didn’t pay us (or most of us) for access. But we were OK with that, because they were simply creating a massive catalog in which people could search for things that they wanted to research or read. And then go to that source to dig deeper into the topic or story.

But now, we’re being asked to create content that is being used to feed Google’s Gen AI, which, in turn, takes our hard work and turns it into, hopefully, mostly very brief, often contextless, summarized answers. Those answers are given a bit more heft because they’re not just some chatbot spouting off ideas; they’re a chatbot taking the hard work of a human and stripping it down to its soulless, shortened summary. And people often trust the answer because the chatbot then points to the link and says, “Hey, I didn’t make it up, so and so(AP, New York Times, Game Informer, CNN) did a ton of work, so you can trust me. But no need to go read the article, this is all you need to know.”

So now, we do the work, Google bots scrape the words, and we get nothing in return. Google no longer wants to help people find things; it wants to be a flytrap. It doesn’t want you to ever leave.

Social Media is doing the same sort of thing. These sites are making it increasingly difficult to leave or, more specifically, it encourages readers to stay on their site. Some don’t allow links off their site, others treat them in a way that lessens the likelihood people will click through.

Instead, they want people to consume, to stay, to “engage.” So they push for shorter, for less context, for fewer routes leading away from their sites.

They encourage this enshortification (with apologies to Cory) to help create tiny little ouroboros of context-free facts, entertainment, emotions, and engagement.

You’ve probably heard that word before, a lot if you work in media. Engagement. What’s it mean? Why should I care? How does it affect me as a writer or someone who runs a site?

It’s essentially the way social media tricked everyone into no longer tracking click-throughs. Click-throughs, or clicks on a link from, say, Twitter, to your website, are meaningful. They have a direct impact on your income and audience. But engagement. Engagement means clicking on things inside Twitter, for instance. Engagement helps Twitter, not necessarily you. You can have hundreds of thousands of engagements on a post, but four clicks to your site.

Stop caring about engagement. Despite what your social media managers and experts, and nearly everyone looking to make a buck on LinkedIn, tell you. Engagement is good for social media companies, not media companies, not when it’s happening somewhere else.

There is a counterargument, one I don’t think is meaningful. The counter-argument is that engagement can reflect on how well you’re building your brand. But here’s the thing: brand building is happening in an increasingly escape-proof vacuum. Who cares if PadandPixel is HUGE on Twitter if no one ever leaves Twitter to interact with my writing?

Brand building only helps if it’s to a group of people who show a willingness to, to borrow a phrase, engage with that brand in a meaningful way.

I just don’t buy the argument.

So why should I care if Google’s AI is well fed or Twitter’s engagement is high, if I get nothing back from the deal?

What’s the solution?

Currently, I think brands and media need to focus on building up their own safe haven for consumers, readers, and fans away from social media and the like. Own your community and treat it well, because if you lose it to social media or Google, it may be forever.

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We are teetering on the tail end of the holidays, but I thought it would still be fun to send out a list of some of the cooler things I’ve been playing around with over the course of the year and call it a gift guide.

Maybe there’s not enough time to order any of this and get it to your home in time to wrap and give away.

But there’s plenty of time to pick some of this up and keep it for yourself.

Trust me, it’s all pretty cool.

Ollee

I’m not just a big fan of handheld gaming systems; I’m also a big fan of watches that can run games. Of course, you can just use an Apple Watch or an Android Watch these days to play some pretty neat things. But if you want to go retro, it’s going to set you back quite a bit to pick up a functioning game watch from the likes of Nelsonic, Unitrex, Alba, or Casio.

That’s where Ollee Watch comes in.

Ollee Watch is the product of an electrical engineer who loves to tinker. That tinkering eventually led to an amazing little do-it-yourself mod that can convert the classic Casio A158W (a $20 watch) into a sleek little smart watch with—you guessed it—some built-in games.

The mod, which will set you back $55 if you can get one, takes about half an hour to apply to one of the watches and delivers world time, snooze alarm, timer, stopwatch logging, sunrise and sunset tracking, step tracking, heart rate and temperature measurements, and two games.

It also syncs with your phone to keep the time correct and save what you’re tracking.

The best bit? There’s a whole roadmap of coming features, which includes more games.

Atari Gamestation

I talk and think a lot about the history of retro video game handhelds. But that doesn’t mean that the formfactor is stuck in the past.

Of course, we have modern handhelds like the Switch 2, the PlayStation Portal, and the Xbox Rog Ally X, but there are also some real standouts that aren’t designed for modern gaming.

These classic retro-focused wonders are hitting all year.

One of my favorites of 2025, though, is the smashing bit of electronic kit from My Arcade. The Atari GameStation Go ($179.99) isn’t just an Atari-themed handheld; it’s a handheld that manages to cleverly support most of the main controllers found in those old Atari games on consoles and arcade machines.

The system has a 7-inch screen absolutely surrounded by different controllers, including a spinner, a roller ball, a D-Pad, and—yes—even the number pad.

It’s a delight to play and is smartly designed. Check out my full write-up and interview if you’re interested.

Evercade

I’ve been fascinated with the entire Evercade ecosystem since the first handheld hit the market back in 2020.

The key differentiator with Blaze Entertainment’s approach to retro gaming is that the company sells licensed retro and indie games on cartridges that work with all of their systems.

It’s neat to have a little cartridge collection that includes Atari, Arc System Works, Interplay, Mega Cat, Intellivision, Commodore, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and on, and on, and on.

The best part is that the cartridges work on almost all of the systems that Blaze sells. So, for instance, you can slap your copy of the Taito Arcade 1 collection into the diminutive Hyper Mega Tech Super Pocket ($25) handheld and play it there. Or move over to the slightly bigger and more comfortable Evercade EXP-R ($99.99). If you’re hanging out in your office, you might want to move that cart into the Evercade Alpha ($279.99) mini bartap machine you have down there. Or, if you want to game on the couch, just bring the cartridge up to your VS-R ($99.99), which comes with two controllers and supports 1080p on your television.

It’s a great way to encourage cartridge gaming across a spectrum of use, and it also enables some indies to get a bit of that cartridge love.

MyPlay Watch

While the Ollee Watch Mod is a great way to show off your love of retro watch gaming, there haven’t been a ton of new watches designed to play games recently.

The one standout is the MyArcade line of watches ($79.99).

The not-so-smart watch launched as a Kickstarter for a Space Invaders version back in 2024. I chatted with Floor 84 Studios founder Jeff Hardy about the thinking behind the watch that I labeled “selective tech.” It’s an interesting philosophy, but the more interesting thing is the watch (now watches) itself.

One of the big differentiators behind the watch is that it doesn’t actually connect to your phone or the internet. Instead, it just chugs along doing it’s own thing. And that thing is diving deeply into specific games or publishers with not just gameplay, but also a cool take on the look of that era.

For instance, the Space Invaders watch includes the game (with shockingly accurate sound design from the original), but also has a slew of watch faces and interchangeable bands built around the iconography of the original game.

Beyond telling time and playing games, it can also track fitness data, but that’s it. It’s also enough if you’re a big fan of these titles.

Tetris is very similar to the Space Invaders watch, focusing in on the single title. And then the Atari 2600 watch features four games from the classic system: Pong, Centipede, Super Breakout, and Missile Command.

ModRetro

If you can come to terms with ModRetro’s backstory, the Chromatic is a well-crafted, hardy version of the Game Boy featuring a magnesium shell, a sharp, authentic color screen, support for Link cable play, native video streaming, and can play Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles.

The Founder’s Edition is mostly gone, but ModRetro has a new line of colors out for the Chromatic ($199.99).

I’m more focused now on some of the post-launch goodies the company is putting out. The company has about 20 original or remastered titles available on cartridge that you can pick up for the system. They include indies and remakes of Croc, Rayman, and a collection of Atari games. Each runs about $45.

Alongside the typical swag of crossbody bags, link cables, and headsets, ModRetro also has a Rechareable Power Core ($29.99) and—most intriguing- a little Mod Kit ($14.99).

The Mod Kit comes with a selection of D-pads and colored buttons along with the tools you need to swap them out on the system to make it more personal. It’s a great idea that I’d love to see more handhelds adopt.

Pac-Man 45th Anniversary Pocket Player Max

I’ll just rip the band-aid off: yes, we’re all very old.

Pac-Man is now 45 years old, and that makes you and me … well, let’s not talk about it.

To celebrate, the handheld-obsessed designers over at MyArcade put together this bundle of Pac-Man-themed handheld and travel case.

It’s clearly for the Pac-Man fans out there, featuring a colorful little zip case, screen protector, and lanyard, as well as the handheld itself.

What makes Pac-Man 45th Anniversary Pocket Player Max ($69.99) stand out for me is the choice of games the company decided to include.

Pac-Man and Pac-Man Speed-Up mode: Of course!

Super Pac-Man: While Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani may have called this a boring game, it’s a fun take on the old formula featuring a big (some say too big) Pac-Man.

Pac-Man Plus: Another 1982 title that skips the Pac-Man relationship games (Ms., Mr & Mrs., and Baby), but OK, that’s fine. It’s not a game you typically find outside of an arcade or TV game, and let’s face it, there was no way they were bringing a mini-pinball meets video game title to a handheld. (Oh, we miss you, Baby Pac-Man)

Pac & Pal: OK, the inclusion of this oddity is, well, genius. Released in 1983, Pac & Pal was a genuine Pac-Flop. It’s not that it was a bad game as much as it was a weird game. Fortunately for all of us, some wunderkind over at My Arcade saw this and decided to include it in this marvelous collection. Now you too can make your way through the maze, gobbling up icons from other Namco titles and hoping that your “pal” Miru doesn’t screw things up for you.

BuildaBoy

The LEGO Group is the master of breaking down cultural touchstones into little plastic bricks, and then teaching you how to build them up again—complete with fun Easter Eggs.

The LEGO Game Boy is such a product, with authentic details like the D-pad, Select, Start, A, and B buttons. Two included Game Paks, and even matching lenticular screens that mimic those games’ start screens.

What’s better than a LEGO Game Boy? How about a fully functioning LEGO Game Boy?

That’s right, modder Natalie the Nerd figured out a way to cram a Pocket CPU into the LEGO-brick-built handheld and get it to function. It doesn’t play Game Boy carts, but don’t let that stop you.

Natalie has a website set up for the Build A Boy to start taking orders once it’s ready (which sounds like early 2026) The kit will come in three flavors: completely pre-soldered drop in and play (aka the Brian version), Everything soldered, but doesn’t include the CPU or RAM. and 100 percent DIY, meaning you buy all of the components yourself.

The estimate is that the completely pr soldered version will run about $100. Sounds like a steal!

While it isn’t ready yet, you can pre-build your LEGO Game Boy to prepare.

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In an era when handheld gaming systems are growing increasingly bland—an army of glossy black rectangles framed with a familiar array of buttons and thumbsticks—My Arcade decided to do something very different: Embrace the potential chaos of too many controllers.

The Atari Gamestation Go features four face buttons, a directional pad, right and left triggers and bumpers, a spinner knob, a roller ball, and a number pad, all in the service of ensuring that people can play the games packed into the system in the same way they were played when they first hit consoles and the arcade decades ago.

The Gamestation Go comes packed with more than 200 games and lets you easily load your own legally obtained ROMs.

With its 7-inch screen, relatively light weight, massive game library, and ability to plug into a television via HDMI, the Go is likely to be my system of choice for visiting family over the coming holiday months.

And even without the excuse of family, I’ve found that the Atari system is getting a lot more attention than any of the other more than 200 handhelds I have in my collection.

A big part of that is the controls, and what a good job My Arcade did with implementing them in a practical, non-confusing way.

To be clear, if you’re a heavy retro gamer used to playing on the original systems—especially arcade machines—this is not a one-to-one experience. The spinner, for instance, is smaller than you’d expect and doesn’t have any travel when you stop twisting. It’s still very usable, but if you’re looking for something that does a better job of authentically recreating the arcade feel, I’d pick up one of the kits I’ve seen advertised for adding heft to the knob.

The roller ball, on the other hand, is a much faster ball than what you’d find in an arcade, and of course, much smaller. It’s designed to be used with your thumb, not your fingertips or hand. It can take some getting used to. Fortunately, several of the games do allow you to tweak the sensitivity of controls before you play.

The directional pad is slightly mushy, but nothing that will be noticeable in the sorts of games you’ll be playing. The face buttons are very snappy, but again, you’re using them to play games that once ran on systems like the Atari 2600 with a monolithic joystick and a single big red button.

The number pad is only currently used for the Atari 5200 games loaded into the system. They don’t come with overlays, but it’s fairly easy to flip back and forth between gameplay and the built-in instructions when you’re about to, say, pitch in RealSports Baseball. The instructions include overlays for the games that support them, showing, for instance, that pressing one on the number pad in Baseball will pitch a high curveball.

Despite my nitpicking, the controls were fine in general, especially for a system used mainly on the go, and that offered so many options.

One of the neatest design choices for the system is also tied to those controls. When you start a game, the controls or a circle around them light up a soft orange to let you know which will be needed. It’s a fun touch that speaks volumes to the overall approach My Arcade took in designing the system.

The system also features the iconic Atari logo badging at the top center, as well as some very ‘70s orange-to-black striping across one side.

The back of the handheld has a tuckaway stand that works nicely if you want to play with a controller, as well as two controller ports that are almost dead center on the back panel.

The game selection is quite robust, including not just titles from the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, M-Network, Recharged, and arcade, but also Pac-Man games, Balls of Steel pinball tables, and Jaleco and Piko games.

That’s a lot, but you’re sure to find something missing even among the list of 200 titles. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to load your own library of games. You just need to install the legally obtained ROMs onto an SD card in a folder called games, and pop the card into the system. On boot-up, it will ask you if you want to load local storage or the Micro SD Card. If you choose the SD card, you’re presented with a list of the games you loaded, which are supported. I found that some of those titles even support the specific controllers found in the system.

I haven’t spent a ton of time messing with ROMs, but I can say that the system does seem to support Lynx games, which is amazing.

I was also delighted to discover, when speaking to Michael Ponce, Vice President of Design at Dreamgear/MyArcade, that the built-in Wi-Fi functionality will eventually be used to expand the system’s library with the possibility of downloadable add-on packs. (Make sure to read my full interview with Ponce here for more insight into the system’s inspiration and design iteration.)

Playing the Go over time is surprisingly comfortable. Even running through the four to five hours of battery life didn’t leave me with sore hands or any annoyance caused by poor design choices. This is a system meant to be held and played a lot.

I’m not surprised to see that the pre-orders for the system seem to be selling out quickly. It’s the sort of handheld that skillfully bridges the gap between casual gamer, hardcore gamer, nostalgia player, and retro enthusiast.

Who doesn’t want to play the original Adventure on a system you can walk around with that sports the Atari logo, or Missile Command with a roller and Tempest, a spinner? Despite the fact that the system’s games hit the sweet spot of my pivotal console gaming years, I also still managed to find several games I’d never played before … and quickly fell in love with them.

My current obsession is with the firefighting real-time strategy game The Ignition Factor.

All of that said, there are things I hope My Arcade gets around to tweaking post-launch. Fortunately, all of them are tied to software, I believe.

I’d love for the system’s controller glow to activate as I scroll through the games. Or for there to be a way to sort by controller. After all, a big part of Go’s experience is playing a spinner or roller ball game. Why not make it easier to find them?

Probably the chief annoyance that’s going to surface, though, is that a lot of the games you’ll play won’t let you fine-tune the ball or spinner sensitivity, and it’s not easy to see, at first blush, which games support tweaking those controls.

I think this is because My Arcade is relying on what was supported in the original ROMs, but if they could find a way to offer system-level sensitivity adjustments for those controls, that would be amazing.

For instance, there is the ability to save your progress in the games, something that wasn’t originally supported in the titles. So I hope more sensitivity adjustments are on the way.

I’d also like to see WAY more games that support the keypad. The current offering is surprisingly enemic. That said, I’m sure we’ll see that tackled down the line when downloadable games arrive.

My Arcade’s Atari Gamestation Go is a pleasant surprise in an industry that seems to increasingly devalue the sort of creativity that strays from the pack of experienced success..

It’s the sort of system that, for a lot of people, is going to feel like it was made just for them, delivering the warm embrace of retro gaming in the ‘70s glow of a handheld that plays like a love letter to Atari.

If you can still find it, the Atari Gamestation Go costs a chunky $180. It’s scheduled to launch in late October, though Amazon is currently saying it arrives in early November.

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It’s likely that the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally will land to conflicting perspectives.

Seen through the lens of a lifelong console player, the system simply isn’t ready to be compared to the locked-down, slick user experience of a Nintendo Switch 2.

But viewed by a lifelong PC gamer, especially one with experience playing on today’s handheld PC gaming systems, that’s a different story altogether.

This story.

The latest iteration of Asus’ handheld gaming PC is more revolution than evolution, thanks to a deep partnership with Microsoft and an Xbox wrapper that stretches far beyond a bit of badging and an extra button.

The ROG Xbox Ally officially arrives on Oct. 16 in two versions. The ROG Xbox Ally, which features an AMD Ryzen Z2 A processor, 16GB RAM, and 512GB of storage, costs about $600. The ROG Xbox Ally X features an AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme Processor, 24GB RAM, and 1TB of storage, and will cost you about $1,000.

ASUS was kind enough to send me a review unit of the ROG Xbox Ally X a week or so ago, and I’ve spent my evenings playing everything from the Call of Duty beta to Battlefield 6, to games like Hollow Knight: Silksong.

As a handheld gaming aficionado and collector (I have more than 200 systems dating back to 1975 and including a half dozen handheld gaming PCs), I’ve extensive experience with various forms of user interface, game installation, and ergonomics. I can comfortably say that the ROG Xbox Ally X is one of, if not the, most powerful handhelds I’ve ever played games on. It’s also one of the more comfortable systems, and is on the cusp of delivering an experience that masterfully erases many of the traces of the biggest issues found in most Windows-based PC handheld systems: Windows.

Ergonomics

I was doubtful when I got my first look at the ROG Xbox Ally’s new design. It looked a lot like someone had slapped the grips of an Xbox controller onto the body of the ROG Ally X. While that’s a fairly accurate description, it turns out that addition has an oversized impact on the ergonomics of the handheld.

I’ve found that while playing during lengthy sessions on the earlier ROG Allys, I start to subconsciously straighten my wrists a bit, flattening the screen and making it a bit harder to see. I pull the system back up every time I notice this, but it’s an annoyance. I suspect it has a bit to do with the design, which has you gripping the side of a rectangle.

While the ROG Ally X tweaked the shape of the bottom corners of the system to smooth it out a bit more and remove a hard edge in the bottom corners, it didn’t change that behavior for me. The addition of grips, however, did.. Not only is the new design more comfortable, but the palms of my hands no longer block the forward-facing speakers on the system. The new design also has the added benefit of shifting your hand position out a bit, which more naturally places the thumbsticks right at your fingertips.

The face buttons, thumbsticks, directional pad, bumpers, and even the small back buttons all feel very similar to the Ally X’s, but the triggers feel more luxurious with a stronger pull and better sense of depth.

The other major change to the system is a prominent Xbox button, which instantly launches the redesigned Game Bar. The Game Bar gives you access to everything from settings to friends lists and captures. What I find most compelling, though, is that the home tab prominently features the other stores you’ve installed on your system. So, for instance, if you have Steam and the Epic Games Store on there, both of those icons are sitting next to the Xbox icon on your Game Bar home tab.

User Interface

No amount of revamped ergonomics, colorful lights, haptics, or Dolby sound will cover up the fact that a Windows gaming handheld is still a Windows PC. That’s something we learned as ASUS, Lenovo, and others fought for the crown of best handheld gaming PC. Despite its limitations on things like cheat software and some games, the Steam Deck managed to trounce the competition mostly because it wasn’t running Windows.

To my delight, Microsoft seems to have finally gotten the message and done a lot of work on making sure you don’t feel like you’re playing games on a Windows PC when you boot up the Xbox Ally.

The first big change is that you can boot directly into the new and improved Xbox app. Once you sign in on the start screen, the system launches you directly into the Xbox experience without a desktop in sight.

Visually, it essentially looks a bit like Steam’s Big Picture mode. It’s the Xbox app running in full screen, designed for console controls. More intriguing is what is happening in the background, or to be specific, what isn’t happening. According to Microsoft, when you’re in the full-screen Xbox experience, the system minimizes background activity and defers non-essential tasks to ensure more system resources are dedicated specifically to gameplay.

You can drop out of the mode and go to your desktop, but when you return, the system warns you that if you want to experience those features, you need to reboot.

The Xbox app also does an admirable job of supporting other storefronts with very little extra work on your part. Once installed and signed in, the storefronts not only appear in the app, the games you play most, no matter what store you play on, appear right at the top of the home screen under the Jump Back In section. Each game thumbnail features an icon to show which store it runs through. The whole experience feels like the best off-the-shelf launcher for Windows gaming currently on the market.

That isn’t to say there aren’t areas that could be improved. The search bar, which always looms at the top of every page in the app, bugs me. It seems like something that could be hidden until you need it. Its current design mars what would be a much more console-like view.

My biggest disappointment, though, is something I hope to see corrected in the coming days. Microsoft announced months ago that a new game badging system would be coming to the Xbox app with the launch of this new system.

But as of this writing (six minutes before embargo lift), the badges are nowhere to be seen. Once in operation, the games in the Xbox store should support what Microsoft is calling the Handheld Compatibility Program. This new initiative would place distinct badges on games showing that they are either handheld-optimized or mostly compatible with a handheld.

But the closest I’ve seen to that as of this morning is a category in the store of handheld optimized games, still shown without badges.

The badging system will deliver one of the missing pieces for a system that is very close to delivering something akin to playing on a purpose-built handheld.

Conclusion

So are these systems worth the price of play?

That really depends on what you’re looking for.

Even in its current state, the ROG Xbox Ally X does an amazing job of delivering a console-like experience on a Windows system, somehow hiding many of the annoyances that have increasingly plagued the operating system.

And it does so without diminishing the power of Windows. What I mean is that you can still go into the desktop and run anything that runs on a Windows machine. You can connect the system to a television or a monitor and watch movies. You can add a keyboard and mouse and write, do your taxes, browse the internet.

With its array of buttons and inputs (which include a touch screen), its many ports ( which include both Display and Thunderbolt support), a 7-inch, 120Hz refresh rate display, and easy-to-upgrade storage, this could very well become the future of gaming.

But that future comes with a price.

Is this an Xbox?

Sure, why not? But it’s more computer than console.

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A series of mysterious animated shorts popped up on number of official Nintendo channels this week, confounding and exciting fans of the Japanese game maker.

In the first of the two shorts, a baby left to their own devices chases a floating pacifier, eventually standing on up to take its first wobbly steps before falling into the quickly returning mom’s arms.

In the second video, the same event plays out, but now you can see it’s Pikmin, stars of four of Nintendo’s popular games, and invisible to the human eye, that are behind the bouncing pacifier.

While the videos were obviously relatively new creations, it reminded me of a conversation I had more than a decade ago.

After a bit of thinking and rooting around on the internet, I remembered what rang such a loud bell for me.

A dozen years ago, following a wide-ranging and fascinating chat with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto for Polygon, a Nintendo employee pulled me aside to chat once more with the legendary designer about a passion project of his.

When I entered the room, Miyamoto placed a 3DS XL on the table in front of me and started a video.

Miyamoto created the video with the help of an external animation studio. He told me at the time that he used the handheld’s Flipnote Studio to create a storyboard of sorts to hand over to the studio.

He went on to co-create a video asking people to put on their 3D glasses before a movie starts. He then had it placed in 60 theaters on 150 screens around Japan to see what the reaction would be.

The success of that experiment led Miyamoto to create a longer video, which he showed me at the time.

In it, a bunch of Pikmin stumble upon Captain Olimar blending up what appears to be red Pikmin, only for them to discover it was actually carrots.

Back in 2012, Miyamoto said Nintendo was still sorting through what it wanted to do with these animated shorts. Maybe sell them directly to customers.

It’s obviously been a while since I saw those creations—and Nintendo released three shorts back in 2014—but this new video and the success of the Mario movie can’t help but make me think that Nintendo and Miyamoto are once more discussing the possibility of creating Pikmin shorts.

I can see Nintendo releasing these fun little videos you can download directly from the store onto your Switch.

It’s clear that Miyamoto is still playing around with this idea, something that back in 2012 seemed to be more of a passion project than anything official.

He did say, though, that Nintendo wanted to figure out a way to expand the sort of offerings on the eShop.

I can’t imagine that’s changed.

I’ve reached out to Nintendo for comment and will update this story if they reply.

Handheld gaming systems are big business as of late, and it’s not just PC gaming handhelds that are taking off. There’s also been a rise in the popularity of retro gaming handhelds.

That category includes everything from the often Android-based systems designed to emulate classic console and computer games, to interesting new additions like the crank-included Panic Playdate, to systems that offer licensed versions of classic titles.

Evercade, for instance, released a rash of handhelds that accept proprietary cartridges packed with some amazing games. But what’s really got me excited this month is a new system coming out from MyArcade and Atari.

The Atari Gamestation GO is a handheld with more than 200 built-in games and (Here’s the really cool part) an integrated paddle, trackball, and number pad to play them with.

The system, which hits on Oct. 24 for $180, includes titles from Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, and Arcade as well as a few Recharged creations. It sports a 7-inch screen and Wifi.

The system arrives during what I see as a renaissance in handheld gaming. Michael Ponce, Vice President of Design at Dreamgear/MyArcade, agrees.

“We’re seeing a cultural return to tactile, authentic gameplay experiences,” he told me in a recent interview. “Handhelds are thriving because people want gaming that’s accessible, nostalgic, and personal—something they can pick up and play in any setting. For Atari, whose roots are in approachable fun, this is the perfect moment to bring a device that celebrates that history into the handheld space.”

The idea for the Atari Gamestation GO, though, came about after the launch of the Atari Gamestation Pro in 2023.

“That system established a foundation of authenticity and versatility by bringing together both modern and retro control schemes,” he said. “As we looked ahead, the idea was to take that same spirit of ‘all-in-one Atari play’ and make it portable, giving players the ability to enjoy the full breadth of Atari’s history anywhere.”

The design team was well aware that Atari’s storied legacy included games that used paddles, joysticks, trackballs, and, yes, even a keypad, and they wanted to honor that breadth of creativity by creating a system that could natively support all of those control types.

“We studied Atari’s most iconic titles—like Pong, Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command—and built the control set around delivering an authentic experience for those games,” Ponce said. ”The biggest challenge was ergonomics and reliability. Each input method—paddle, trackball, joystick, and keypad—operates very differently, and fitting them into one compact handheld required extensive prototyping. Balancing the sensitivity so that a trackball feels responsive while the paddle maintains precise resistance was particularly tricky. The engineering team spent months refining tolerances to make sure no single control felt like an afterthought.”

The trackball, he added, was by far the most challenging to lock down.

“Replicating the arcade feel of games like Centipede in a handheld form factor required custom components and fine-tuning sensor calibration. Getting it small enough without sacrificing the smooth, rolling motion was a major hurdle—but ultimately one of the most rewarding parts of the design.”

While packing all of those controls into a single system was challenging, the team also had to figure out what they wanted the overall design and shape of the system to look like as well. To do that, the design was chiefly informed by portability and comfort, and then layered in retro cues from classic Atari hardware.

The system’s rounded edges and proportions are clearly designed to make the system easy to hold for long gaming sessions, but the first thing you’ll probably notice is that matte black finish and Atari red accents that tie back directly to the brand’s iconic visual language.

“We see it as a bridge between past and present—modern in form by unmistakably Atari in spirit,” Ponce said.

Fans of Atari, handhelds, and retro gaming have had, perhaps, longer than expected to hunger for the system’s release. It was first shown off at CES in 2024, with an expected release date later that year. But that anticipation was met with mostly silence until this year’s CES, where it popped up again.

Ponce said the system was delayed because MyArcade wanted to ensure they had plenty of time to do quality assurance and respond to feedback from partners, licensors, and early testers.

The result of that way means the system now has upgraded screen brightness, improved battery efficiency, and that the paddle and trackball have both been fine-tuned for greater accuracy.

Of course, even the best hardware needs a nice selection of games to play on it. The GameStation GO will release with a focus on a core library of original Atari classics spanning arcade, 2600, 5200, 7800, and beyond. But the team also worked with partners to include a number of remastered or enhanced titles that take advantage of the hardware’s unique control options.

“The balance is designed so that fans get both authenticity and freshness in the same system,” Ponce said.

Better still, the Wi-Fi functionality will be used to expand the library over time, he confirmed, including the possibility of downloadable add-on packs.

“This gives the Gamestation Go room to grow beyond launch, with future updates keeping the system fresh for both longtime Atari fans and new players discovering the catalog,” Ponce said. “The Gamestation Go is really a celebration of Atari’s versatility. From the paddle to the trackball to the joystick, this system is designed to let players experience the full range of Atari’s history in one device—no adapters, no compromises.

“For us, the most rewarding part is seeing new generations discover these games in a way that feels authentic to the originals while being portable and modern enough for today.”

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Perhaps lost today in the tsunami of video game impressions, interviews, and general mayhem of Gamescom, Asus announced that the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X will begin hitting stores this October.

The handheld PC gaming system that the company co-designed with Microsoft will pop up on store shelves and online in the United States and across “key international markets” starting Oct. 16. Both versions of the system are being shown off this week at the ROG booth during Gamescom, along with a key new feature for the systems.

There’s still no word on pricing, which we expect to find out in the coming weeks.

While I haven’t had a chance to go hands-on with the system, it’s built on the bones of the ROG Ally and ROG Ally X, which is to say, it’s got a very solid foundation.

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Outwardly, the two sets of systems appear very similar in appearance with the exception of the added-on grips, horn-like handles that jut out from the body of the system to give it the appearance of an oversized game pad.

While I never felt the need for better grips for the Ally X, it does look like it could make the system more comfortable to game with over time, while reducing some of the svelte design that makes it easy to slip into a bag. The system also features a prominent Xbox button, placed just to the right of the left thumbstick. But more on that in a few.

As has been reported, the guts of the system have been upgraded to include the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 process (for the Xbox Ally X) and AMD Ryzen Z2 A processor (for the vanilla Xbox Ally). Memory, storage, and the display all remain unchanged. While the Xbox Ally X still has an 80Wh battery, the Xbox Ally gets a slight bump up from 40Wh to 60Wh.

For me, the biggest news coming out of today’s announcement is a bit more insight into how the team at Xbox has been working to make the handheld PC system behave a bit more like a console and a bit less like a Windows system.

Apparently, Xbox has been working with game studios to test and optimize “thousands” of PC titles for handheld compatibility. Most importantly for future players, this will be underscored with a new badging system that makes games “handheld optimized” or “mostly compatible” if they’ve been tested and work with the system.

Handheld Optimized means that the game is ready to go — with default controller inputs, an intuitive text input method, accurate iconography, clear text legibility, and appropriate resolution in full-screen mode, according to the Asus press release. Mostly Compatible means that the game may require minor in-game setting changes for an optimal experience on handheld.

The ROG Xbox Ally systems will also support advanced shader delivery, which allows the Xbox app to preload a game’s shaders during download, allowing it to launch as much as ten times faster, run more smoothly, and use less battery on the first play.

ASUS points out that the systems will also promise that the Xbox Ally X’s built-in NPU will unlock new AI-powered features starting early next year. So far, this includes automatic super resolution, which uses the NPU to upscale games running at lower resolutions, and Highlight Reels, which are captured automatically by the AI as short replay clips.

For many fans of handheld PC gaming systems, the big takeaway here is that the Xbox team is working to make the system feel more like a gaming device and less like a Windows device. It’s unclear how much the badging of games will be interwoven into the experience or if it will still behave like you’re battling with Windows to play your games.

Either way, it’s clear that Microsoft is aware that to make these systems competitors for Valve’s excellent Steam Deck, they need to reduce the friction between the myriad of gaming apps used on Windows-based systems and the games themselves.

I just want to be able to pick up a system like the ROG Ally and play a game without ever seeing anything that resembles Windows.

Last year, I detailed what I thought a handheld PC gaming system needed to do to continue to be competitive. While the ROG Xbox Ally seems to address some of those suggestions, there are a few unfortunately ignored.

The redesigned case addresses long-play comfort, and the Xbox work on badging could deal with the user-interface issues and game optimization. The system also appears to be designed for upgrading and self-repair. The beefier chips are also a great sign.

That said, the decision not to increase the X battery size and the lack of an AMOLED screen are baffling to me. It’s also a bummer that there’s no built-in kickstand, but at least it comes with a 65W charger stand.

As with most consumer electronics, the price is going to be a very important element of whether or not this system can even approach the level of mainstream success a console historically sees.

Earlier this year, Lenovo dropped its second wave of systems: The Legion Go S is a redesign of the company’s massive Legion Go, which comes in both Windows and SteamOS versions. Valve has also made it easier for you to install SteamOS in any flavor of AMD-powered handheld, if that’s what you’re looking for.

So we all continue to have evolving choices. If you’re at Gamescom, make sure you check out the upcoming ASUS systems and tell me what you think in the comments.

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That’s mostly because Xalavier is such a deeply thoughtful, interesting guy.

But the reason I first reached out to talk wasn’t because of the amazing games he was releasing - like Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, Hypnospace Outlaw, and An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs - but because of where he was living.

Xalavier lives in El Paso, Texas, the same city in the desert where I went to high school and where my mom and step-dad still live. I was amazed to hear that such a talented game maker was living in a city so unusual that it, at times, feels like a liminal space.

We’ve chatted about his love of the city and how it impacts his game-making. I found it so interesting that I thought it was worth delving into again for this very random podcast.

To set expectations, even though we chatted on the day Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking hit Steam, we didn’t discuss it. And although Xalavier will be the voice of the lead in the upcoming Hellraiser game, we really didn’t get too much into the game itself. However, we did talk a bit about horror in general and that particular horror.

Instead, this is a podcast about the process of making games, the luck that often drives success in this industry, and, of course, Triscuts.

I hope you enjoy it.

Audio engineering by Dave Tach.

This year’s Summer Game Fest Play Days was the best gaming showcase I’ve ever attended.

A little context, first.

There was a time, back when I ran things at Kotaku when I attended every major video game show in the world. It was, of course, a bit easier back then. Brazil’s mammoth show was just getting started, as was China Joy and Korea’s G-Star.

Back then, the major shows included Gamescom (formerly Gamescon), Tokyo Game Show, PAX, GDC, SXSW (to a lesser extent), DICE, and E3. And for years, I went to them all.

Easily, the best of the bunch for big conventions was Gamescom; it wasn’t even a competition. E3 certainly had the best first run of video game shows, but it was growing into a painfully large, sometimes absurd side-show, and then it got so small it was boring, and then it was open to the public, and everyone was confused.

Over the years, I would tell the folks at the ESA that they needed to make their show more like Gamescom: have a public area, but then have a smaller area only for press and business. That way, you got the best of both worlds.

As much as I enjoyed Gamescom, though, it was still a challenge to cover. It was HUGE; it was noisy, hot, and (for me at least), I would often forget to eat. (True story: I once almost passed out during a presentation, only to realize I hadn’t eaten in more than a day.)

Now, fast-forward to the present, a post-E3, post-COVID, post-plenty-of-gaming-sites era of video game conventions.

Clearly, Geoff Keighley has the ear of the industry; it’s through his spectacles that most major games are now presented. In 2022, Keighley partnered with the talented team at iam8bit to create a physical event, Play Days, to run in conjunction with the Summer Game Fest.

Each year, both facets of the show grow in different ways. This year, the SGF livestream hit 50 million viewers: simply breathtaking. I missed it, though, because I was flying in for my first-ever Play Days.

It was a mostly stress-free, incredibly valuable chunk of time spent playing games, interviewing developers, and filing stories promptly, all without being overwhelmed by a crowd or having to wait in line for an appointment.

It was as if, as I told iam8bit founder Jon Gibson when I ran into him, someone talked to a bunch of journalists about how to create the perfect show.

What does the perfect show entail?

First and foremost, the ability to do your job. That means a place to see the games and talk to the people who make them. In this case, the Play Days campus was spread across a small area of buildings and outdoor spaces. Setting up interviews was mostly pain-free, and I rarely had to wait in line.

Keep in mind that we’re all there working. It’s not that we think we’re too good for lines; it’s that we need to see as much as possible and then have time to write it up and file it away to our editors. Lines slow that down.

(Here’s a picture of me and some banana to undermine my point!)

There was also plentiful Wifi and tables galore where a person could sit and write out a story undisturbed. Lots of bathrooms. Heck, even free food.

That last one is super nice, but not necessary. That said, if you want to ensure that the press covers everything possible, provide them with everything they need in one place so they can simply fill their schedules with interviews and hands-on experiences.

I went to the show on my dime, mostly to cover stories for Epic Games Store but also to check out some stuff on my own.

Throughout two of the show’s three days, I had appointments for 16 or so games and managed to write up stories for a dozen or so. Not bad for an old man, but that was largely made possible because someone had finally figured out how to run a video game show for the press.

There is one major caveat: I'd still like to see more indies at these things, both in the Summer Game Fest mainstream and at Play Days. Maybe they should create an area for folks who couldn’t normally afford to bring their games to big shows like this.

Now, here are my favorite moments of that weekend at Play Days in no particular order:

• Having a developer mistake me for John Romero

• Hanging with two adorable SGF dogs

• Catching up with game devs, journalists, and PR folk I hadn’t seen in years

• Getting a hug from the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer, after I told him he never calls or writes (I still didn’t get an interview or time with anyone/anything at Microsoft)

• Running into the former head of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios and current nicest guy on the planet, Shuhei Yoshida

• The kind words from a mix of people who appreciated my work over the years

• Literally walking the beat, interviewing folks, and writing stories

• Treating a clutch of tired journos to some light apps and drinks at the JW one night

Now check out my stories from the show below; please take a look and let me know what you think. ALSO SHARE THEM FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!

The Stories

Relooted is the African relic repatriation heist game you didn’t realize you needed

Out of Words leaves you speechless with the power of its message, gameplay, and artistry

Infinitesimals in action is every bit as beautiful and daunting as you would expect

Hands-on with End of Abyss’ creeping monstrosities

Dying Light: The Beast dropkicked its way into my heart

Bandit Trap is a little bit Spy vs. Spy, a little bit Home Alone, and a whole lot of fun

Let fly with colors as you puzzle your way through ChromaGun 2

FBC: Firebreak takes on volatile pink ooze in its latest job

Serenity and beauty collide in sword-surfing game Sword of the Sea

Thick As Thieves is a study in observation and greed

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers asks players to master the art of distance

SPINE drops you into some masterful recreations of Gun Fu’s greatest moments

It’s been a bit more than three years since the Steam Deck landed, popularizing a way of gaming that, at its best, was a high-priced hobbyist pursuit.

While the Deck wasn’t the first handheld gaming PC (that honor goes to the Pandora, which hit in 2010), it was the first to spark the sort of interest that would lead to similar systems from several PC manufacturers, the desire to track sales by market research group IDC, and a push for a new type of chip from AMD.

In May of 2022, months after the release of the Steam Deck, I chatted with AMD about its decision to design chips specifically for the relatively new handheld gaming systems.

Frank Azor, co-founder of Alienware, former head of Dell's gaming and XPS divisions, and now AMD's chief architect of gaming solutions and marketing, told me at the time that AMD saw this as an entirely new category in gaming. The last time such a thing happened was more than 20 years ago when the first gaming laptops hit the market.

Three years ago, he said that the release of the ASUS ROG Ally would be a milestone, a marker along the path that will see a niche market grow into a major facet of PC gaming.

Earlier this month, I looked Azor up again to chat about how things have shaken out in the three years since he said that.

In a word: Great.

IDC’s latest numbers show that just about six million handhelds were shipped worldwide from 2022 to 2025. The research group predicts another 1.9 million will be shipped this year, including the Valve Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw.

Looking back at gaming computer trends, the early gaming laptop sales pale compared to what the industry sees for handheld gaming PCs.

“It took us a lot longer to sell millions of units in the PC gaming space than it has in the handheld gaming space,” Azor said. “So I think the category is significant.

“The handheld has sold exponentially more in a given year than gaming desktops and laptops sold in their first three years. They were selling in the tens of thousands for a long time.”

And those sales are not going unnoticed in the broader game industry.

“When I talk to game developers, it’s something that they have on their radar, something they’re considering for their designs and their user interface.“

As for AMD, Azor notes that a “significant” amount of those handheld gaming PC sales are running AMD chips, “I mean a significant amount.”

AMD announced a new slate of chips for such systems at CES earlier this year in response to the success. The first system to use the new AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, the MSI Claw A8, was shown off earlier this month at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan.

But there are surely more to come, and of course, more chips to follow as well.

“Handheld is in consideration as we’re planning the entire portfolio because it enables us to deliver a great gaming experience with more efficient methods to render the pixels, and efficiency is extremely important on this handheld gaming solution,” Azor said. “We’ve designed (our current portfolio) to be more scalable.”

OEMs like ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI are already beginning to hit their second-generation units. Still, it is rumored that Microsoft will show off its first take on the category during the Summer Game Fest in June.

I’ve long doubted that Microsoft would get into the handheld console space, and one could argue that even if the rumor of its ASUS-manufactured system is true, it’s not really a console. It wouldn’t, for instance, compete with the Nintendo Switch 2, which is also due out this year.

Instead, the systems (which will come in multiple SKUs when they hit this year) will focus on the Windows PC side of gaming rather than Microsoft’s Xbox console approach.

It will also still run Windows, which I suppose makes sense, and also—one would hope—signals the company’s desire and future investment in improving the operating system to work better with such gaming-first devices.

The point of all of this, though, is that it’s hard to write off handheld PC gaming as a niche when you have AMD creating chips for it as well as three major computer manufacturers, the biggest PC game store in the world, and the company behind the biggest operating system all joining the party.

That handheld PC gaming is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, seems like a reasonable statement to make. But what does that mean for the gaming industry?

Azor mentioned that developers are already starting to consider the form factor when they create their games, but the long-term impact of that has yet to be seen.

While he doesn’t have any hard numbers to support this, he also doesn’t believe that handhelds cannibalize the sales of other PC gaming form factors.

“I haven’t met one person who has replaced their gaming desktop or their gaming laptop with a handheld gaming device,” he said. “Everybody I've met, which is maybe in the hundreds, the handhelds have been a complementary device, something that they're using to play games in front of the TV, maybe when their family is watching a show, or they're using them during commute times.

“So it’s been a complimentary device, from my observation.”

And the coming holidays will be a great time to dip into the world of handheld PC gaming, if you haven’t done so yet.

Currently, the system to beat in terms of pure power appears to be the MSI Claw 8, which has no price or shipping date just yet.

Asus has the yet-to-be-dated or priced ROG Ally 2 coming. The current thinking is that this will come both as a ROG Ally device and as the Xbox handheld, rebranded with that system's colors. No word on pricing, but it’s expected to hit this year.

Valve's latest and greatest is the Steam Deck OLED, and they’ve said no new system will be released this year.

However, Valve announced this week that its latest build of SteamOS delivers official support for AMD-powered handheld gaming PCs, which brings us to the Lenovo Legion Go.

The Windows version of the Lenovo Legion Go S, which launched earlier this year, hasn’t had the strongest reception. This is likely because it features the AMD Z2 Go, a downgrade from the Z1 Extreme found in the original Legion Go. The idea is that you give up some performance for better battery life, but for many, it’s just not worth the trade-off.

The redesign of the body, though, nails the feel of a handheld. Ditching the removable controllers found in the original Legion Go, the new design is sleeker and feels more comfortable in your hands. It also now features adjustable triggers and a very tiny touch pad.

Things will get more interesting when the Steam-powered Legion Go S hits later this month. Interestingly, while Lenovo doesn’t officially support transforming your Windows Legion Go S from a Windows machine to a SteamOS machine, it appears Valve does.

The SteamOS 3.7.8 build brings with it “official support” for the Lenovo Legion Go S, as well as the release of a Steam OS recovery image for use in testing Steam OS on “your own AMD-powered handheld.”

This summer, already packed with gaming announcements, looks like it will become a key moment in the evolution of the PC Gaming Handheld. Expect to see the latest and greatest in the form factor over the coming months, and maybe, just maybe, an answer to why Microsoft has decided to invest in a branded handheld, but not yet solve the problem of making games feel native to such systems.

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It took about a year for Polygon to come screaming to life back in 2012.

It took less than a day to kill it.

Perhaps it’s premature to call the time of death for the gaming site once owned by Vox Media, but even if its new owners somehow recreate the splendid thing that was Polygon, it will never be the same.

The point of this column, though, isn’t to ruminate on the death of something special in the world of games journalism, but rather to talk about its unusual, spectacular birth.

That’s in some part because while I heard rumblings over the years about the site and its inner workings, I haven’t been a part of Polygon for nearly eight years.

But I was there in those first weeks of its inception.

That’s in large part due to Stephen Totilo. I brought Totilo on to Kotaku as a deputy editor in 2009, and in late 2011, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton forced me out. In the weeks leading up to my final days at the site I shaped, Totilo put me in touch with Chris Grant, who was building out a team to create a new site.

I wasn’t the first choice, but with Totilo not interested, Grant turned to me. After chatting with the other seven founding editors, I decided I wanted to pitch in and help to create something new.

The chance to build a new publication from scratch is rare. To do so with the full backing of a blossoming media company is almost unheard of.

It was a wild time. I went from running Kotaku and writing sometimes a dozen stories a day to suddenly feeling completely adrift.

Grant assigned “homework” to everyone based on their expertise and titles. I was the news editor, so my research was into the current state of news online, particularly gaming. Arthur Gies was to head up reviews. Russ Pitts handled both video and features; Griffin McElroy became the deputy news editor; Russ Frushtick initially was to run mobile coverage; Chris Plante, Justin McElroy, who wrangled us all, and Chris Grant were also the site’s co-founders.

That was most evident when we gathered in D.C. at the beginning of 2012 to hash out what the site would be from a blank canvas.

We presented our research.

We debated news coverage, news focus, style guides, grammar, features, videos, and reviews; sometimes things got heated. (Try convincing Arthur that reviews shouldn’t have scores.)

But we eventually settled on a working framework, a miracle in itself when you consider the eight voices in the room.

Next came the hiring. Each team had its own budget and had to decide how best to use it. Griffin and I decided to hire two groups of reporters for the news: those with little experience and those with a lot of experience. They were formed into two teams, with the less experienced reporting to Griffin and the more experienced reporting to me. Griffin and I would hold regular meetings to discuss news, but essentially, the teams operated independently under the two of us.

Beyond a lot of training and meetings, what came next is well documented in the Press Reset mini-doc Polygon produced about itself. Some were upset about the documentary for different reasons. (Was it an ego trip? Why did we fund the documentary with a Microsoft ad buy?) I still think it had an admirable goal and provided a level of insight into the making of a publication that you rarely see.

The site’s dress rehearsal came in February of 2012, with stories being posted on The Verge under the placeholder name of Vox Games. That same month kicked off a whirlwind tour of developers, shows, and even a talk at UCLA to discuss the emerging site and meet with the industry as a whole. (It included a hilarious Behind the Scenes visit with Activision where I both somehow forgot to bring my pad and pencil, and we momentarily bumped into Trent Reznor, who was working on some of the soundtrack for the game.)

On Oct. 24, 2012, Polygon popped into official existence with the sort of flare you’d expect from a major magazine. There was a beefy feature on Halo 4’s playtest labs, a Medal of Honor Warfighter review, columns, videos, and more news than you could imagine.

Externally, I’m sure it looked like Polygon came to life fully formed, which was the point.

Things continued from there. We grew, our traffic jumped in jagged spikes, and soon, we were competing with the rest of the gaming publications on the market. Eventually, we would top Kotaku to become the world's third-biggest video game site.

Along the way, things changed. I’ll leave it to others to argue whether it was for the better or the worse. The ideal, the sort of round table of leaders, was done away with, and Chris Grant took over the vision of the site. At the same time, internal groups (like those that discussed the style guide or ethics) were shut down as we refocused on running a site daily.

The site hit its first major snag in 2014, leading to some painful departures and eventually a hierarchical flattening. The concept of groups led by specific editors was eliminated, and we began to operate more ad hoc.

Finding myself without a news team to lead, I asked to be left to my own devices to work on some project and to be renamed executive editor, instead of news editor.

Grant was open to both ideas and granted me a surprising amount of freedom, budget, and a chance to work directly with the talented Matt Leone.

When I asked him for the time to chase down a wild, weird, esoteric story about pinball, he said yes without hesitation. What followed was one of my favorite pieces of my writing and reporting.

When I doubled down and asked to travel to Cuba to document the gaming culture there, Grant didn’t blink, and soon I found myself wandering the streets of Havana chasing down stories for what would become a dozen-story package—and my favorite piece of my work.

While I’ll always appreciate the freedom Grant gave me in those days, I found myself drifting away from the site's shifting goals and purpose. It was slowly evolving into a pop culture site with amazing work covering television, movies, comics, and video games.

I saw it as a contender to IGN. But I also saw it as a time to move on.

So I did, giving notice and moving to Rolling Stone and then Variety to briefly build up and then shut down their video game coverage.

These days, I run a consulting business that specializes in creating features, podcasts, and videos to underscore the value of video games and the people who make them.

I co-created a 50-episode podcast for the LEGO Group and worked with Unreal, Tencent, and the Washington Post in various ways. These days, I spend a lot of time running news for the Epic Games Store’s fledgling news page, among other things.

It’s all fantastic work, and I’m blessed to have it.

But I do miss those early Polygon days of sweating deadlines, working shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the most talented reporters and writers I’ve ever worked with.

To see all of that snapped away—so many talented people left without jobs—and Polygon handed off to a company with a less-than-stellar record isn’t just disheartening, it’s heartbreaking.

When you put so much of yourself into something, you elate in its success but also hope for its survival. I can’t speak for the other co-founders, but I think it’s safe to say we all thought this would be not just a place that served readers for decades but also a safe shelter for a new generation of reporters and writers—a place to tell stories that people want to read.

It’s perhaps a bit selfish for me to be most sad about that loss.

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Where famous blockbuster Nintendo creations like the Game Boy, DS, and Wii took the path less traveled to tremendous success, the Switch 2 is going a more familiar, less risky route.

The Switch 2 was designed around the core principle of making a more powerful Switch rather than focusing on unconventional play ideas.

The strategy behind the new console, which hits on June 5 for a penny shy of $450, was outlined in a dense Nintendo-led Q&A published on the company’s website the day Nintendo announced the Switch 2’s release date, price, and many features.

Three people from Nintendo’s Entertainment Planning & Development Department handled the answers to the surprisingly detailed, sometimes even pointed questions. Kouichi Kawamoto is the producer of the new console. Takuhiro Dohta is the console’s director. And Tetsuya Sasaki helped to develop the Switch 2’s system and development software.

Development on the Switch 2 officially started in 2019, though reading through the four pages of interviews, it’s clear that some of the features that made their way onto the system were concepts being worked on since before the release of the original Switch in 2017.

But when the company started really thinking about what the next system should be, it went through a seed-sowing stage, which ended with the decision to prioritize processing speed for the Switch 2 over everything else.

It raised the question (which, to its credit, Nintendo asked) why it wasn’t doing what it’s done so often in the past: focusing on a more unconventional system, like what was seen in the Wii and Ds.

“From Nintendo DS to Wii U, we offered new ways to play by implementing hardware features that weren't typical for game consoles at the time and asked software developers to take advantage of them,” Kawamoto said. “However, with Switch, we made that less of a priority.”

Instead, he added, the Switch prioritized the ability to play games both on a TV and in handheld mode, something any game could take advantage of. So ,with the Switch 2, the company again decided to make having unique hardware features less of a priority.

“We decided it would be best to keep the Switch system’s design and not make any ‘changes for change's sake,’” he said.

Interestingly, the trio all noted that unique experiences can still be created by adding accessories to work with the console. You can see this being played out with the original Switch in games like LABO and Ring Fit Adventure.

Even the Switch 2 is getting such an accessory at launch. The Nintendo Switch 2 camera will be sold separately and, when plugged into the back of the system, will seemingly support everything from live streaming to motion games.

While the Switch 2 appears very much to be a stronger processor-powered version of the original Switch, the trio did detail all of the significant changes that come with the system.

First, is the fact that the Switch 2’s hardware is so different that it can’t natively run Switch games.

“Switch 2 doesn't contain any Switch hardware,” Kawamoto said.

Instead, to achieve backward compatibility, the game data is being converted in real-time as it is read in, Sasaki said. He added that the company is still in the process of checking the more than 10,000 games available on the Switch to ensure compatibility.

The system also has a larger, 7.9-inch screen, more internal memory and storage space, and a sized-up battery to help reduce any loss of playtime thanks to the new specs. It also has USB-C ports on the top and bottom of the system, thank god!

The Joy-Con 2s seem to have been completely rebuilt; they’re larger, have a more robust rumble, are attached to the console with magnets (something Nintendo wanted to do with the original system but couldn’t figure out at the time), and now features a mouse mode.

The mouse idea came about after Kawamoto was playing a PC game using a mouse.

“The idea struck me that maybe the Joy-Con controllers could also be used as mice,” he said. “Switch 2 was originally designed to support a wider range of games by improving the system's processing speed, so with that in mind, I thought it'd be better to be able to play interesting games that require a mouse.”

It was also an idea that goes back to the formative philosophy of legendary GM of Nintendo R&D Gunpai Yokoi, who led the development of Game & Watch and the Game Boy: Lateral thinking of withered technology.

In other words, Nintendo could create new hit products by taking widely used technology that isn’t cutting edge anymore and using it for new and different purposes.

That’s one way to look at Nintendo’s decision to add a C button to the system tied to the ability to chat with fellow gamers. While in-game chat is by no means new, the Switch required players to use a mobile app to chat while playing, thanks to hardware limitations.

The Switch 2’s GameChat, though, is built into the system and supports not just voice by video, allowing players to share their screens or video of themselves (with the camera add-on) while they play.

The idea to include video chat as a pop-up in the game came from the use of video conferencing at Nintendo during COVID-19, Kawamoto said.

“Back then, we were using a video conferencing system to check the software we were developing with our team, but the screen-sharing function built into the video conferencing system only allowed us to share one gameplay screen at a time,” he said. “So, we had each person place their game screen in front of their camera instead of their faces. When we did that, it felt like we were all in the same place, each bringing our own console to play the game together, which was a lot of fun.”

Another neat feature is GameShare, which allows Switch 2 players to share their game on their own Switch or Switch 2 via local play. GameShre also works with GameChat for online play.

Initially, the team looked at a similar feature, Download Play, used by the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo 3DS. But they decided that downloading such large games would take too long.

“So, we thought that by taking advantage of the Switch 2 system's processing power and using the same streaming technology that Wii U uses to send images from the console to the handheld Wii U GamePad, we could share the gameplay instantly without having to take time to transfer the software,” Kawamoto said. “I thought it’d be nice if players could share games instantly and play together competitively or cooperatively.”

The team also pointed out that this will be the first time players can do a system transfer without having to create a new account. Previous hardware generations didn’t support account transfers.

“Since we established Nintendo Accounts and supported them on Switch, we've made various efforts to expand their use beyond our dedicated gaming systems,” Dohta said. “I think it’s natural for our customers to assume that those accounts, which they’ve used for various purposes other than gaming, can be used as-is on the new system.”

Finally, and probably not most importantly, the three discussed the naming of the Nintendo Switch 2.

Of course, the name is the least impactful thing about this latest console, but I was not alone in my angst over the decision to simply tack on a number to a successor console. It is, after all, a first for Nintendo.

It turns out that Nintendo really struggled with what to call this system.

“There were a lot of ideas for the name,” Kawamoto said. “We even considered ideas like ‘Super Nintendo Switch.’ However, Super NES, which came out after the NES, couldn’t play NES games. Since Switch 2 can play Switch games, it didn't feel right to use the same naming convention as Super NES. Switch 2 is a new system with improved performance, but we'd like players who get their hands on it not to focus on the specs but rather to think of it as the latest system developed by Nintendo.

“So, in the hope that it becomes the new standard for Nintendo Switch, we named it Nintendo Switch 2.”

I still think there’s an argument to be made that this is more akin to a new DS or Game Boy, which had all sorts of things other than a number slapped onto the end of their names.

I’ll leave the continued arguments over this to you and the comments section.

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While I’m probably best known as a writer, I’ve actually done quite a bit of work in the realm of podcasts dating all of the way back to Kotaku.

Back in those early heady days, before the big podcast boom, I experimented with a number of crazy concepts for audio and video podcasts.

Working with Adam Barenblat (now of Nintendo) and the wonderful (now sadly gone) Michael Fahey, we tried our hand at a sort of MST3K approach to games and trailers complete with silhouetted puppets. We did interviews where the developer had to play the game with us as we interviewed them, and I did my best to beat them at their own game. We had another where people debated each other, scoring points with salient points … or headshots. Stephen Totilo and I ran a weekly interview show with live call-ins. We even had our own Christmas Special. (Sadly, most, if not all, of these are now vanished.)

More recently, I teamed up with the wonderful Susan Arendt for a show about horror movies called Long Legged Beasties. I also helped create a 50-plus episode run for the LEGO Group called Bits N’ Bricks, exploring its history in video games. And another for Tencent about its games is called This is Level Infinite.

The point is that I like to talk, I like to interview folks, and sometimes, I record all of that and put it online. So, I thought I’d give it a try with my substack, and here we are.

To kick things off, I invited Richard Moss to chat about a neat new project he’s involved in called TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming. After watching two episodes of the doc, I was fascinated enough with it to want to talk to Moss about how it came about and some of the stories it explores.

After you have a listen, please take a minute to drop a comment to let me know what you think. Should I keep doing these? Who should I chat with next? Was it too long? Too short? Too boring?

Thanks!

ps. Here’s a link to my horror movie spreadsheet.

Nintendo introduced the Switch Slightly Bigger (SSB) today.

That they didn’t name it that may speak volumes about the future of a company once known for its crazy inventiveness, and surprising willingness to push the envelope on gaming hardware.

Afterall, Nintendo is the company that introduced a motion-controlled game console called the Wii, and pointed to Blue Ocean Strategy as the reason why it was zigging while the rest of the industry continued to zag.

While Microsoft and PlayStation were dug into an expensive, exhaustive war over chip speeds and graphic quality, Nintendo focused on the fun, turning their little white box into the fifth-best-selling home console of all time.

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The Switch, which came out after the release of the disastrous Wii U, managed to combine the best qualities of Nintendo hardware into a single hybrid system that could be played on the go or on your TV. It became the third-best-selling gaming system of all time, bookended by the Nintendo DS and the Game Boy.

Today, Nintendo broke its silence following months of anticipation (and leaks) with a video briefly showing off its next console: The Switch 2.

It’s the first time in the company's long history that they’ve simply added a number to a successor console. That may not seem like a big deal, but I think it could foreshadow a troubling evolution of the company.

Look at the Game Boy, for instance. When the company came up with an improved version of its massively successful handheld, it wasn’t called the Game Boy 2, it was the Game Boy Color. The same is true of its iterative improvements, which gave us the Game Boy Light and the Game Boy Pocket. I bet you can tell how those four systems differed from each other, even if you didn’t own them.

The Game Boy Advance was, well, a more advanced version of the original. And it received an SP (special) and Micro versions.

Then there was the DS, which led to the DS Lite, the DSi, the DSi XL. We later got the 3DS, which gave us the 3DS XL, the New Nintendo 3DS, the New Nintendo 2DS XL.

That Nintendo never used a number to define a new or iterative console says a lot about both the way the company viewed its creations and how it intended to market them.

A numbered sequel in hardware has traditionally been shorthand for “the same thing, but better.” PlayStation might not agree, but strip down its console and what you have is the same system, the same approach to gaming improved with more powerful chips and reworked software architecture.

The PlayStation 3 didn’t introduce a whole new way of playing games over the PlayStation 2, it just increased the system’s capabilities.

Now, look at Nintendo. The Game Boy popularized handheld gaming. The DS introduced touch-screen gaming and two-screen gaming to the masses. The 3DS delivered glasses-free 3D to the world. The Wii made casual gaming and motion gaming a massive hit. The Wii U attempted to deliver a hybrid system of sorts. The Switch nailed that idea with a system that was the best of both home consoles and handhelds.

But what about the Switch 2? So far, officially, all we know is what was shown in the roughly 2-and-a-half minute long video. It looks like the Switch, but bigger. The Joycons appear to have a mouse-like sensor and I’m sure the chips are much improved.

The Nintendo we all mostly grew up with would have likely called this something to connote that this is an iteration. Maybe the Switch XL, or the New Switch XL. But instead Nintendo decided to go with Switch 2.

I hope I’m leaping to conclusions here, but to me that sounds like a Nintendo that is giving up on its lifetime of innovation, its desire to thrill not necessarily with cutting edge technology, but with fun toy-like experiences.

If this is the Switch 2, then should we be expecting a Switch 3, Switch 4, Switch 5 down the line? Will they all be the same thing but with an added feature and better chips?

I hope not.

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