I played Forgotten Land first, in coop with my kid, and now I'm a Kirby sicko. Have since played Star Allies and Dreamland, both great, and Clash, Fighters and Dream Buffet, which are all fun diversions.

Tsk, what's the world coming to, eh? Not like in my day, when as a child I was advertised to so aggressively that the jingle for a chocolate biscuit, decades later, is infused with the symbolic resonance of a lost past. I hear Kia-Ora isn't even too juicy for crows anymore.

LibraryThing? Has algo recs too, but lots of user made lists www.librarything.com/zeitgeist/li...

I think the trad games press can offer better value through deeper critical engagement, but that's still harder than ever, niche and - pertinent in this instance - unlikely to arrive on launch day of a new game.

This is all true, but I'm also less convinced than ever of the merit of covering small games, particularly in the "here's a quick post about its announcement/release" vein. No one reads the posts and a lot of these games evidently don't need the coverage to find an audience.

These are some of my favourite games and @pentadact.com is one of my favourite people so this is really just a huge opportunity to ruin a lot of things I love

Then Aaron Sorkin revives Studio 60 just to write another episode about it.

There's a later slide that's like, "some players are willing to spend $10,000/month!", the argument being, "so you should try to take that".

In fairness, that's effectively what this particular talk was arguing. 'Mobile games are making more money via F2P, microtransactions, etc. and now console devs are beginning to do it, too.' It's the dawn of the live service game. I think it's also the dawn of a more extractive way of selling games.

The "supply" here is: a person has bought your game, they'd be willing to spend more, but you're not offering them ways of doing so. So you increase "supply" to meet "demand" by offering DLC and microtransaction hats and so on.

It's not incorrect. It's just... exhausting.

These arguments always seemed to contain a moral component, as if you owe it to the work or its creators to wring the money sponge as tightly as possible. If your fans had money to spend on going to PAX, then by rights they should be giving that money to you and only you, as "owner" of the fandom.

Every video game industry presentation I saw circa 2009-2016 looked like this. "Consumers who were willing to spend more on games weren't able to". Oh no!!!!!