Welcome back to the Updater newsletter. Happy April. Thank you for supporting this business for over two years now. It’s been a helluva ride so far. I just got back from South Korea and northern China, and in a week I’ll be out at Coachella finally after all these years. In the meantime, I’m working on a story for the New York Times about gaming and legacy.

I’ve been reading Wolf Hall, the only book of human writing that humans preferred, in a New York Times survey. It’s historical fiction about Henry VIII and his infamous quest for a son. It is a pageturner.

Recently, I sat down with former Instagram designer turned Lily’s World game developer Emily Pitcher, aka Sondering Emily, to discuss her upcoming game and the role that “taste” has to play in a slop-saturated world. The designer launched features at Instagram like pinning posts and adding multiple links to a bio before she was laid off by Meta. Emily’s game, Lily’s World XD, investigates a young girl’s lost computer.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: How did you become a game developer, and how does your past experience in the tech industry inform your current outlook and taste?

Emily: The moment I started, I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I made 13 games in those 2 years; I was hooked.

I notice that a lot of game developers focus too much on the creative side of development and neglect the business side. That’s fine for developers who aren’t looking to turn it into a career. Since I always aspired to leave my corporate job for independent development, I appreciated the business strategy I learned in tech, i.e. how to create a pitch deck, how to express myself professionally in a meeting, and how to run a competitor audit. These are all skills I now use as a full-time game developer.

Q: There is a lot of social media discussion lately about how “taste” is more important than ever now that we are facing an onslaught of AI. What is your take on that?

Emily: I find it amusing because I’ve always thought about the ‘taste gap.’ Taste is a given as a creative. I’m shocked at how easily people are impressed by ugly AI art. When I get a game that is obviously built with AI, it looks like it. For most creative people, taste is the prerequisite, not the skill itself.

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Entering Korea as someone who looks ethnically Korean but isn’t has been an intriguing, yet ultimately hollow experience. Greeting people with a happy “Annyeonghaseyo,” and then ultimately disappointing them, and then multiply that experience by hundreds of instances, is a minor inconvenience at best, and a somewhat bittersweet experience at worst. It gave me the very curious feeling my fellow journalists described back in Paris, when they greeted locals with “Bonjour,” only to be struck with an onslaught of French they couldn’t comprehend.

Much nuance was lost. Communication with locals involved halting single-word sentences of Korean and English. An example:

Korean stew restaurant owner: Where [are you from]? Ilbon [Japan]?

Me: America. USA.

Owner: (looks confused)

Me: (swapping over to Chinese) Meiguo.

Owner: (realization dawns) Migook!

(Silence befalls us as that exchange was somewhat exhausting)

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Hey all, I didn’t attend the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco this week, however, I still have interviews scheduled with devs, just after the show. Follow along to see what I’m doing instead this month.

Can A.I. code at a senior level?

Is A.I. coming for us all, or is just over-hype from A.I. companies? If you’re on the same side of the internet that I’m on, you may have seen a lot of alarm bells ringing… but the people ringing them have all the wrong incentives for us to take their claims at face value.

Ever-skeptical, I noted claims that A.I. can now code at the level of a senior software engineer. I should disclose here, my partner works at Spotify, and his work is growing even more A.I.-heavy, although it’s actually resulted in him putting in more hours than before. I heard echoes of this across the tech and gaming industries.

Earlier last week, think tank policy director Eli Dvorkin told the New York Times that “A.I. can now write code at the level of a senior software engineer.” He reasoned that a new plan should be created to ensure students developed the skills needed to use A.I. I posted this excerpt from the article about how New York lagged behind other states’ school systems in adopting A.I. onto X, formerly Twitter, and received plenty of replies from engineers and game developers.

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First, I’ll go over how Inverse works, how it may just yet survive us all, and then I’ll explain why I’m no longer with the firm. I got exactly one negative comment stating I wouldn’t have been kicked if I was doing great work, but after I responded, the guy backed off and apologized. Because sometimes you do get kicked for doing great work. Especially in this ever-evolving (devolving?) space.2

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This is all part of some grand scheme, a way to live life more intentionally, slowly, quietly, and in a way that subverts the common outcomes. Out with the busywork, meaningless stories, and networking parties where you forget everyone afterward anyway. In with the intentional goal-setting, curated gatherings, and deep, hours-long conversations with heartfelt humans. In 2026, if almost everything is false and you can only believe in yourself and your unshakeable faith, then you know exactly where the energy should be kept.

In 2017, I quit my job of being a marketer and copywriter of Korean skincare brands. I realized that being an advertiser means saying something complimentary about your product even if it verges on fallacy, while being a journalist is to be a truth-teller. Both careers involve storytelling, but one traffics in a desperate urge to sell, while another is centered around elevating the human experience. Now when the lines blur and either job is indistinguishable from the next, don’t we have a problem on our hands?

Ethics mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but for me, I just make sure the work I do never leaves a gross taste in the mouth. That’s why while I have shed the stricter guidelines of the most thoroughbred institutions I have been a part of, I still take note to only talk about the places, the experiences, the people I can really stand by. Sometimes I still think about the time I recommended a high-end treadmill, only for it to receive a massive recall months later for rolling over small children and pets. Awful stuff. As much as I vow to not make that sort of mistake again, I also can’t predict black swan events.

My newsletter is evolving, and soon, it will shed its current name. (More on that later.) Updater was a reference to The Washington Post’s Launcher, of a specific time and era. I’ve said this from the beginning: Instead of only focusing on gaming and technology, this is a newsletter that is about living. For as long as we’re on this earth, we have problems. We have stories. We vie every day, just to survive, but maybe also, to thrive. It’s about all of that. And more than that, it’s about culture. How we see each other.

I have been very fortunate to have been pigeon-holed into the gaming space early on in my journalism career. It was perhaps a beat that very few wanted to cover (for reasons that still remain unknown to me), but I jumped on the chance. Gaming is a microcosm of living. Each virtual world you enter is an approximation of someone’s dream. Just like a book shows you the thoughts of its writer, a real-life chance to neuro-link without the risks, a game is a little peek under the curtain of someone else’s brain. Or a massive corporation’s. It all just depends.
So all that is to say, it should be a natural transition for this newsletter originally about investigative gaming scoops to now be about culture and life at large. Or in ’s words, I’m making this “a niche-less newsletter.” I will have more to share on this later, but I wanted to get the winds blowing this direction first and let you all know what was on my mind. My self-confidence is back, my unshakeable optimism is at hand. It’s taken me some amount of time to come to this conclusion, but I think my whole life has been leading up to this. It was just super hard to see coming because we didn’t have the words for it back then.

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As I write this newsletter to you, over a cup of Job’s Tears tea, stacks of Christmas books to read1, and my incomplete Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 run, I’m reflecting on how far Updater has grown and the profound lessons the year has offered up. In 2025, I spent more days at home than I did going out to networking events and industry get-togethers, taste testing soups I was making, and refining my quick-time reflexes.

A Taiwanese pineapple cake rounded out the year — I began the year in Taiwan, procuring some for my mother, and ended it at the Game Awards, interviewing Konami where I was ironically offered a cake by the Japanese developers. Speaking of award ceremonies, the year was bookended by two of them, from emceeing at the New York Game Awards in January alongside the Iron Lords podcast host, to watching Evanescence and co. take the stage in Los Angeles this month. By the way, I’m fully intent on continuing my tradition of two years in a row of completing a Game of the Year RPG months after it won at the Game Awards. I’m 50% of the way done with Expedition 33 and still noodling over my anti-fan take about how it swept the awards circuit just before I need to fly out to Vegas for the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show next week.

While the circular nature of gaming releases can make one feel like running on a hamster wheel, 2025’s slate of projects did more than shake things up. This is the year I tested Claude and Gemini and put them head to head. (Nothing they said was worth including in this newsletter, but I was able to uncover all of AI’s flaws and promises.) I now have a finer appreciation for pilates, driving to Jersey, and devoting at least five minutes a day to studying Chinese, expanding my literacy. I cooked watermelon gazpacho, congee, and bone broth soup. The year kicked off with a pineapple cake cooking class in Taipei 101 and ended with a Moroccan cooking class at Brookfield Place in FiDi. It’s funny how I’m always learning how to cook in a skyscraper.

Speaking of traveling, I saw gamers everywhere: at a Hoyoverse cafe in Berlin, in Westchester, New York, out in Paris, and in a strip mall down in Kauai, Hawaii. I wrote up a story for the New York Times in September, while juggling my Borderlands 4 review for Inverse. My shooter skills have definitely leveled up; what would have taken me eighty hours in 2019 simply took me thirty, carefully allocated throughout the weeks for self-preservation.

Since Inverse is the underdog and not even a mid-sized website as some consider us to be, we have to be a bit agile and scrappy at getting scoops. And 2025 marked a huge push into covering the intersection of fashion, beauty, and gaming, an area I just don’t see a lot of explicit coverage or focus on, so I’m excited to see how it evolves.

I’ve worked at Inverse and run this newsletter for just over two years now, so to celebrate, here’s a list of some of the greatest hits over the years, from Updater, Inverse, the New York Times and beyond:

• Hideo Kojima Says, ‘People Don’t Understand Me At All’

  In which I sat down with Kojima in Los Angeles this past June to talk fashion and Death Stranding confusion.

• 3 years later… they won

  Call of Duty workers finally won their contract, putting an end to a three-year saga, and as someone who covered this story from the start, I had to speak with them again.

• The Decade’s Finest RPG Is Now A Fashion House Serving Looks

  Disco Elysium’s head of fashion Kristiina Ago gives her first-ever interview.

• She Counted Calories as a Teen, Then Created a Game About It

  My New York Times essay on Jenny Jiao Hsia’s award-winning indie debut, Consume Me.

  Updater, Shannon Liao's gaming newsletter is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoyed this year-end essay, consider becoming a subscriber in 2026.

• The Next Silent Hill Could Leave Maine Behind For Good

  Konami developer Motoi Okamoto began by saying he couldn’t say much about the next game, and ended by walking me through his favorite South American authors in a wide-ranging interview I still have more to share on.

• Borderlands 4 Review: The Series May Have Caught Its Second Wind

  This review marks the return of Inverse’s Borderlands coverage and definitely not the last, judging by how much the multiplayer mode has caught on with fans.

• I’m Obsessed With Yakuza 0 On The Switch 2 — But For All The Wrong Reasons

  For several months last summer, I learned mahjong from my Bay Area friends in real life and then taught all my East Coast friends how to play, and spent dozens of hours playing Yakuza.

• Mario Kart’s Most Viral Character Is About to Be Put Out To Pasture

  Sometimes the most delightful story comes along, about a cow.

• Rebel With A Co-op

  A profile of Josef Fares, who made Split Fiction, a very solid Game of The Year contender that I originally suspected might win.

• Blue Prince Was Not Made For Everyone, Creator Says

  An exclusive interview with Blue Prince game designer Tonda Ros.2

• Grand Theft Hamlet Made Me Contemplate Life, the Universe, and Everything

  Seeing Shakespeare reenacted in Grand Theft Auto just imbued this occupation — nay, dare I say, calling — with a higher purpose.

  There’s too much more I could name, but an honorable mention goes to my interview with South Korean life sim inZOI’s game director about his beliefs in Stoicism and how they were woven into the game, and my interviews with beauty gurus Charlotte Tilbury and Pat McGrath for their Genshin Impact and Candy Crush collaborations, respectively. I also have to shout out a trip to Paris where I saw lots of great Pokemon atop uncannily similar buildings.

In the past years, I’ve gotten several scoops on Arcane’s deleted lesbian sex scene, Fallout, GTA 6, seeing the Nintendo Switch 2 early, and profiling the publisher of Doki Doki Literature Club. I’ve also infuriated hordes of Black Myth Wukong fans by calling their game boring (in their defense, I do find some of the critiques of the game could also now be leveled at Expedition 33’s earlier areas — more on that another time.) And none of this is to mention some of the incredible coverage I’ve had the honor of commissioning over the years from freelancers, on wide-ranging essays from an early, poetic Balatro recommendation from Renata Price, to Harper Jay’s essay on friendslop, on Stellar Blade and the male gaze, and Patricia Hernandez’s GameStop reported feature on the dubious items that people trade in. From staff, there is a steady stream of excellence that is too long to name, but I will shout out Hayes Madsen’s most recent Remade series of interviews with Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest developers, Robin Bea’s science of cozy report, and Trone Dowd’s apt Instagram reels that always bring you into the fold.

My original plan for this newsletter was to keep it to a few sentences of introduction and a couple of stories to highlight, followed by a few Netflix recommendations. We’re already clocking in at over a thousand words, so I’ll keep the TV suggestions short. Watch the Japanese reality TV show Badly in Love if you want a taste of influencer Yakuzas attempting to date each other (poorly), or the Korean soap opera Penthouse if you miss the Game of Thrones-level grandeur in schemes and backstabbing. And if you just want to soak in a witty, well-written film full of the zeitgeist, there’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery which I actually think pairs quite nicely with this time of quiet reflection and gratitude. Games I’m playing: Hades II (finally got up to Mount Olympus!), The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (aspirationally, this is next), Expedition, and League of Legends. All at the same time.

With that, a fond goodbye to the Year of the Snake and hello, horse year. I’ll see some of you out in Vegas. Cheers.

PS.

I wanted to share a recent Cyberpunk 2077 interview I did with CD Projekt Red, as an exclusive on this newsletter. Kepen claims that new Macs can run Cyberpunk 2077 as of this year, and burn less power compared with the standard PC graphics cards.

“Mac is focused on efficiency... you can just see the power draw go significantly down and without actually compromising quality,” CD Projekt Red senior release manager Artur Kepen says. “Frankly, I’m not touching my PC anymore if it weren’t for the fact that I still just have a couple of games on there.”

Although the Mac release comes five years after the PC and console releases, Cyberpunk PR estimates that the actual process took around 2 years, between negotiations with Apple and the work itself. The team declined to comment on Cyberpunk 2077 plans to come to iPhone and Android and on whether it is already planning on a Mac release for the upcoming Witcher 4.

When asked about how the 2025 Mac version avoided the launch-day bugs that plagued Cyberpunk in 2020, Kepen says, “When it comes to bugs for Cyberpunk on Mac specifically... we were just building from a more advanced version from the get-go.”

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Bari Weiss will now be the editor-in-chief of CBS News? That’s huge. That means the line between legacy media and Substack has essentially been erased. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, fewer people are reading the news, and more people are watching reels and TikToks. It’s pushing the average journalist into leaving this field behind, or pivoting into becoming a content creator of sorts. Or just getting left behind by the times.

If every average person can pick up their phone and start recording, and start interviewing people on the street for man-on-the-street interviews, taking photos of their food and posting reviews like they’re the next big food critic, then journalism has indeed been democratized. And in this loud, crowded bar, where we’re shouting over one another, who is getting listened to? It may sometimes be the children of those we once listened to. Power, in all its forms, may still look a lot like it did fifty years ago. The social media hustle does benefit a lucky few, but for a quiet majority, it is just a time sink, with little payout.

If everyone and their uncle has a Substack, how is anyone supposed to keep up? If we all want to DJ and nobody wants to dance, and we all want to be writers but nobody wants to read, how is that sustainable? I imagine a future full of motionless parties, with massive holes in the center of the dance floor, as people bashfully stand in corners so they’re not embarrassed. A tumbleweed blows through, as one lone newspaper lands on the ground, no one to pick it up.

The challenge is amplified on platforms that seem to elevate the most controversial opinions and the loudest voices. Things are either too divisive or they’re often too bland. I’ve noticed the proliferation of slop on YouTube, and Netflix, of content that doesn’t seem to say too much and doesn’t feel like it has a point. And of course, with AI video tools now, that is only projected to get worse.

Yet media isn’t entirely dead. One reader is still better than none. If no one else dances, you can be the one who does, and rack up all the views for it, too.

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The cameraman says something to the effect of “Alors, on danse,” and I also began to hop from one foot to the other. This was the final Pokémon Legends: Z-A preview event, held in Paris, the city that Lumiose City is based on. Although I couldn’t get a straight answer of what exact restaurant one of the boss battles took place in, I did get to spend the weekend at various brasseries that looked like they could be teeming in Pokémon, in game.

I’m back after a whirlwind month of travel and recovering from whatever bug I caught on the flight back from Berlin. This month, I traveled to Paris, got off on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower to play Z-A and write about it for Inverse, and turned around a story about the indie game Consume Me for the New York Times. Meanwhile, I haven’t forgotten about my loyal Updater newsletter subscribers, and so here’s your monthly issue summarizing some of the bigger stories in the gaming world. (This list is by no means exhaustive.)

• Saudi Arabia, Jared Kushner, and others are buying Electronic Arts for $55 billion. It’s a jaw-dropping deal to wrap your head around, which analyst and fellow Substacker Joost van Dreunen writes, just highlights the value of the gaming industry.

• Robin Bea has the story on Hollow Knight: Silksong and how it’s still too hard after an update.

• I reviewed Borderlands 4, my first time playing the series, and gave it an 8/10. This one was a doozy, clocking in at around 60 hours. Then, talking to other journalists, I later discovered I had been playing the game on easy mode, essentially. The game is not quite tuned for single player unless you made the same choice as me to play as Vex with her clones.

• Hades 2 is out of Early Access, which means more people besides games journalists will be picking this one up now. It may be time to actually dive into this world.

• Hideo Kojima interestingly tweeted out my article commemorating Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain, a story that acknowledges the rift that grew between him and Konami. Quote from the story: “In 2025, Konami just remade MGS3 and it’s clear that the franchise is not anywhere close to fading from our collective consciousness quite yet, even if Kojima has expressed regrets for not owning the rights to his baby. But the fallout seems increasingly in the past for both parties. In the recent Death Stranding 2, there are still the marks of the Metal Gear legacy, especially in sudden stealth mission moments and in the general world exploration. And the developers of the remake have expressed that they wish Kojima would try their game.”

Bonus anecdotes

I went to Berlin for the first time, as recommended by various friends, and experienced several culture shocks, including a nudist sauna, German trains that actually close their doors before boarding time, a bathroom at the co-working space with four doors that locked in various ways, unlimited beer almost everywhere, a soothing microplastics ban, and an elitist club that turned me away at the door. Apparently, you should really know the name of the DJ performing tonight to get into Berghain. It’s not enough just to wear leather and say you want to danse. Oh, and traveling during the Berlin Marathon is just an absolute nightmare with road closures throughout.

Next up, it’s New York Comic Con, followed by Twitchcon, and Halloween spooky festivities. And we do plan a presence at the Game Awards in Los Angeles later this year (we’re early this time!). As always, thanks for subscribing!

After almost three years of negotiations, 19 quality assurance testers at Call of Duty development studio, Raven Software, have ratified their first union contract with Microsoft. In 2021, Raven workers began unionizing following the layoffs of over a dozen testers. (At the time, I broke the story for The Washington Post.) Those layoffs, plus other cultural issues being raised at Activision Blizzard, coupled with an increase in video game unions, led by testers who had long felt expendable and reportedly mistreated.

“It feels like we’ve been sprinting a marathon, and so to finally be at the end of it is kind of unbelievable,” says Erin Hall, quality assurance tester and Raven bargaining member.

The contract guarantees a 10 percent wage increase over two years, and grants most of the Wisconsin-based workers permission to permanently work from home. It also addresses the issue of crunch, by requiring employers to give seven days’ notice for any mandatory overtime, and abolishing many instances of mandatory overtime. Job descriptions will also become defined and the promotions process spelled out, which was another long-time ask from workers.

“How do you progress within QA? How do you get promoted? How do you get a raise?” says Autumn Prazuch, who is also a bargaining member and tester. “For so long we haven’t had those [answers], to be able to curate them with the company and come to an agreement… that I think is our crowning achievement, the thing that I’m most proud of.”

Hall and Prazuch have served as the two bargaining committee members for almost three years. They consistently met with Activision Blizzard’s lawyers, while the company was in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, and after the deal was finalized.

"If our unit of 19 people can do this, anybody can, as long as you're committed to actually just doing the work and seeing it through to the end," Hall says.

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The Raven contract is one of very few in the video game industry, joining the likes of ZeniMax workers, who help develop Fallout and Elder Scrolls. But more developers express interest in unionizing each year.

"We've had a lot of people that had formed other unions that reached out to us and were like, You guys inspired us to do this," Hall says.

Over time, Hall and Prazuch hope the newly ratified contract could serve as a template for future video game unions.

"When we started our contract, we didn't have a lot of references in the video game industry, so we had to start a lot of it from scratch," Prazuch says. "I think that this makes it easier for future bargaining tables."

To celebrate and unwind, the two plan to play some of Xbox’s next big release, Grounded 2. That reminds me to ask them for any union-related Call of Duty references, if they had any.

“Stay frosty,” Prazuch says, after thinking for a second. “Don’t put that, please.”

“Make that the big quote,” Hall quips.

On a personal level, the two testers, who have known each other their whole adult lives, spoke of how they had grown from the drawn-out experience. Hall says she used to have a “crippling fear of public speaking” but through organizing, she was pushed to meet with Senator Bernie Sanders and speak at substantial labor events. As for Prazuch, this interview represents a milestone for her.

“You’re the first interview I've ever given the permission to use my name. So this is a monumental moment,” Prazuch says.

For our next newsletter, I’ll be publishing the full Q&A of the above interview, just for paid subscribers only, so please stay tuned!

Recently, I flew to Los Angeles for Summer Game Fest, and sat down with Hideo Kojima to talk all things Death Stranding 2 and his interest in fashion. You may have seen the Inverse articles, but here are some things he told me that didn’t make it onto the site.

Inside Hideo Kojima’s Inner World

Playing Death Stranding 2, I was immediately struck by how the character you control must immediately travel across some tough terrain. As Kojima put it, he presented the player with plenty of challenges.

"Yes, I think you'll be surprised at the first stage when you start playing Death Stranding 2. I present a lot of hardships at the start,” Kojima tells me. “Most games are easy recently — they don’t give you challenges. But people will understand why they’re facing these hardships. You don't have to do it — you can just watch the main character carry the dead body, or you can do it yourself. I want people to overcome the challenges presented."

Death Stranding 2 follows the events after the original game (of course), but this time you have to help connect folks across Mexico, and later, Australia. By your side is the trusty sidekick, Dollman, who I find rather creepy yet endearing.

Just like the first game, things are weird and hard to follow, but there’s a delightful sense of human connection and wonder at exploring the different maps.

"Games are a combination of art. I grew up watching movies, and I learned fashion and music from movies,” Kojima says, “Music is important — musicians create music for games. I wanted more collaborations with fashion brands."

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The Nintendo Switch 2 is upon us. For those who have not been following every second of news about this console, it’s possible to miss this. It feels like a quieter console launch than usual.

My first impressions are on Inverse but I’ll say a little more here. The Nintendo Switch 2 feels like that graphical and processing power update that developers were really waiting all these years for, to do real justice to games like Hades II or Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition. The game download speeds are still quite slow, but the storage is seriously expanded, so I can finally have more than a handful of games on the native console, even without buying an SD card upgrade.

I have my review unit in hand, and will be bringing it with me on my travels to Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles this weekend.

Does AI have free will already?

A Finnish philosophy professor, Frank Martela, has studied Voyager, a large language model-based AI agent in Minecraft that other AI researchers created, and found that it could potentially have free will.

I interviewed Martela who tells Updater that the AI agent essentially could have free will because it makes complex decisions that resemble human behavior.

“On different runs, the Minecraft agent can make different choices,” Martela says, “Our best way of explaining and predicting their behavior has to assume that they are capable of making free choices.”

Martela says that AI is becoming more like an adult, making choices that need the proper guardrails in place. And he says we’re still not there when it comes to reaching artificial general intelligence (or AGI).

“A few breakthroughs are still needed before we get there,” he says. “But it’s hard to say whether those breakthroughs are two or 20 or 100 years ahead of us.”

Bonus links:

• Rockstar Games announced on May 2 that it’s delaying GTA 6 until May 2026. It’s not that surprising. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told IGN in an interview, “While of course, delays pain me — how could they not? — the most important thing to do is to support your teams in their search for perfection.”

• After five years, Fortnite is back on iPhones. The appeals continue, but it does look like the end to a drawn-out battle. Epic declined to comment beyond social media posts from CEO Tim Sweeney.

• This was an impressive feature from The Gamer about how this Hades-like was delisted from Steam in China. It has a gorgeous look to it and I still mean to try it.

• In worrying AI news: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/anthropic-says-its-claude-ai-will-resort-to-blackmail-in-84-percent-of-rollouts-while-an-independent-ai-safety-researcher-also-notes-it-engages-in-strategic-deception-more-than-any-other-frontier-model-that-we-have-previously-studied/

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At A Netflix Screening

The other day, I went to see Love, Death, + Robots Volume 4 at Paris Theater in New York, with a Q&A with the producer Tim Miller afterwards. There was a mysterious third seat on the stage, and my neighbor in the audience suggested Mr. Beast was in attendance.

Miller says due to a studio closure, the Hunger Games-like short (episode 7) he was working on needed to be remade. That delay gave Miller enough time to come across Mr. Beast on Amazon Prime Video’s Beast Games and think “what an asshole” and then decide to cast him as the villainous game host in his short about rich people watching violence as spectacle.

Mr. Beast played off the critiques here, and jokingly said that the audience should threaten Netflix executives that they would cancel their subscriptions if Love, Death, + Robots was not renewed for a fifth season.

Last month was a big month for Mr. Beast news. He also announced that he’s working on a novel with bestselling author James Patterson. It’ll be interesting to see the social media mogul take his salesmanship to the literary world. As Harper Collins president and CEO Brian Murray told The New York Times, “He’s like: Failure is not an option. I’m going to move these things.”

What I’m obsessed with

• Last Saturday, I immediately binge-watched Mountainhead, a film (on the newly renamed HBO Max streaming service) that satirizes the tech industry. Putting you right into the minds of four tech billionaires, it suggests a world quite similar to the one we live in which is run by simpletons, charlatans, and frat boys. I was rather impressed with the level of accuracy I felt the story followed and how the scenes of riots breaking out across CNN did not seem like too far of a stretch from what we’re familiar with.

• Last month, I avidly watched The Devil's Plan. It’s a show that initially sparked my interest in logic games and puzzles. This time around, I got the funny idea of studying formal logic from it. Season 2 features Justin Min, an actor of Beef and The Umbrella Academy fame, but like the first season, my favorite characters never get enough screentime.

• Now I’m reading Eat to Beat Your Diet, by physician William Li, about how some foods have the power to heal. It’s a concept familiar in Eastern medicine, but one that somehow feels vaguely foreign and novel in a Western tradition.

You already know I will be downloading Mario Kart World tonight at midnight and seeing multiple other gaming companies this weekend. It’s not-E3 weekend in Los Angeles, and I’ll be reporting back with what I’ve learned.

How quickly things can change.

NetEase’s Seattle-based president of global investments and partnerships and notable gaming investor, Simon Zhu, announced on LinkedIn on Friday that he’s no longer with the company. In his post, he also highlights a behind-the-scenes look at his job for the past twelve years, and a few thoughts on the industry’s future.

Zhu has been previously quoted in Updater, the April 2023 edition, as saying, NetEase doesn’t provide quarterly guidance to investors so developers won’t feel pressured to crunch to meet internal deadlines.

In his Friday LinkedIn post, Zhu expressed an emotional hope that indie game developers will be able to push through, despite the obstacles. He described the reason he entered the space: “I realized that even the best developers, after early success, often couldn’t pursue their dream projects due to complex business terms such as profit-sharing constraints.”

Zhu’s department at NetEase defied industry trends, investing in creators that few were already backing. But Zhu’s departure is more indicative of the new trend that NetEase CEO William Ding is cutting back on gaming investment.

In other huge moves, Discord CEO Jason Citron is stepping down and handing the reins over to Humam Sakhnini, formerly of Activision Blizzard. This move is pretty huge. One of Sakhnini’s accomplishments was overseeing the acquisition of King by Activision, which then went on to be an extremely lucrative business for the company. “I’m a lifetime gamer and I love games, and you could tell that there’s something there [in the mobile space],” Sakhnini told me in 2021 of his first time playing “Candy Crush” in 2012. “We saw the hallmarks of what we’re seeing in console and PC, which is that this could be a very long-lived franchise, which it turned out to be.”

Here’s a quote from Citron explaining the move, emphasis mine: “His deep gaming industry expertise and proven track record of scaling businesses while fostering genuine friendships through play and shared experiences positions us perfectly for our next phase of growth. I believe this transition will accelerate our momentum and unlock even greater possibilities for Discord, our consumers, partners, and the overall gaming ecosystem in the years ahead.”

I’m reminded of speaking to one gaming veteran who said the CEO you found a company with is not the one you want to have on board when you’re scaling up the business.

League of Legends’ New Season Leans On Nostalgia

On April 30, League of Legends is getting its next season of Spirit Blossom, which essentially means Eastern themes throughout, beautiful flowers, cute skins, and just more of everything fans want. And you can believe the updates are exactly what the fans want. Some of the tweaks are just downright specific. Some even revert numbers to what they were before, just based on fans’ complaints.

I asked Riot how it stays true to the vision while incorporating so much player feedback. Lead gameplay designer Matthew Leung-Harrison said, “We use player feedback to determine whether we're violating principles, and we use our skill as designers to write down what those principles mean, and what they should be.”

Captivating puzzler Blue Prince

I’ve been trying out the new Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion remaster, but before that I was sinking a hundred hours into Blue Prince. I also spent forty minutes speaking to Blue Prince creator Tonda Ros, who was much more willing to give an interview than some other debut indie game developers (such as Balatro’s LocalThunk, who has been elusive even at award shows). I’ve published much of the interview here already, but here are some parts that didn’t make the final draft:

Ros says he tried his hand at game development just to see how hard it was and began by looking at a tutorial for 30 minutes to see how difficult it was, and realizing he was willing to keep going. "Within three months, I had the first prototype of the game,” Ros says, “At that point I decided to start dedicating myself to it.”

Ros is a good example of somebody who didn’t wait around for anyone to give him permission, or for some amount of funding to land on his lap. Using money he made from running ads on a Magic the Gathering fan site he owned, he worked on Blue Prince for eight years until the game was ready.

As IGN writer Tom Marks writes, it feels like Blue Prince was made for him. Ros clarifies that he made the game for himself in fact, but it just so happens that he shares that taste with several games critics and a wider pool of people.

While he wouldn’t tell me his favorite part of the game, saying it was a tough call, he did describe his favorite part of watching people playtest his game — the first few game sessions. “At least as a designer, it’s always fun to watch people gradually learn the rules of the world,” Ros says, “The way people figure things out and learn is drastically different from one person to another, and there is never so much learning as in those first few hours.”

When I confessed I spent the first few dozen hours not beating the game but just accidentally meandering through most rooms in the mansion, Ros said I was playing the game correctly. That’s a sign of someone who would do well with his game, he said, something he observed while watching dozens of playthroughs. Although I eventually did beat the game, I spent all those extra hours learning more about how the world works, he noted, which would go a long way towards figuring out the later mysteries of the game. And later mysteries there certainly are! I’m still peeling the damn onion to this day, and Expedition 33 and Oblivion are already challenging Blue Prince’s time slot on the game queue.

What I’m consuming

• White Lotus Season 3 has me mesmerized. I’ve started taking an online screenwriting class on the weekends just to brush up on an old hobby, and I’m developing an idea based on the infamous monologue in season 3, in which a man declares he just really wanted to become an Asian woman. Walton Goggins watches on, and his uncomfortable, outright shocked and puzzled reactions add everything to the scene. Things are already off to a hilarious start.

• Mark Zuckerberg thought about deleting friends lists to boost engagement. I’ve been reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, which chronicles the early days of Facebook and how its leaders did not originally make a plan to engage with world politics, and failed to prepare for the impending conflicts that inevitably broke out.

• Is games journalism enjoying a comeback? Game Informer is back, GamesBeat has spun off and become independent, Nintendo allowed journalists to see its new Switch 2 wares first, before the celebrities or influencers could. Rule of threes, anyone?

• I played the Nintendo Switch 2 with my pants. ‘Nuff said. At Inverse, we profiled Josef Fares, and the producer of Yakuza.

And happy April! I just confirmed I’ll be in Los Angeles in early June for the industry’s former E3 week now turned Summer Game Fest. Hope to see some of you there!

Happy Friday. Expect a more curated newsletter today and a substantial update later in March.

Instead of diving into one story deeply this week, I’d like to highlight a few rapid-fire bullet points.

In social issues:

• Marvel Rivals sent the internet panicking last week at the unusual decision to lay off six North American employees despite the game reaching more than 20 million players. Some speculate it’s due to the rising tensions between the U.S. and China under the new administration, and developer Netease preferring to focus on operations in China.

• This week, Activision employees held a rally to protest what they call the unjust termination of a union activist and former Activision employee, Allen Junge, who was fired on December 9. He was fired after posting a Slack message about firearm training, but the union is claiming the termination is retaliation against Junge’s past activism, and says in a statement, “The irony of the company that publishes the world's biggest war video game terminating an employee for discussing second amendment rights and safety is not lost on Allen's co-workers.”

  

In unexpected team-ups:

• Make-up artist Pat McGrath did a collab with none other than King’s Candy Crush, and I interviewed her for Inverse about this growing intersection we’re seeing between beauty and gaming. No more stereotypes of gamers in their mothers’ basements, please.

• Earlier in the month, I attended an Adidas x Fortnite event, emphasis on the Adidas Fashion Week portion of it all. I played Fortnite with Miami Dolphins receiver Tyreek Hill, who carried me to first place and also broke down which games he prefers to play (Fortnite definitely and Apex). Later that same week, I turned on Netflix’s W.A.G.s to Riches reality show, and saw Hill on there as well. Small world.

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• Ardent supporters of Luigi Mangione, the individual charged with the United Healthcare CEO assassination, have taken to wearing green, sometimes even the green hat of Luigi, the Super Mario Bros. character. (The case has even been documented in an HBO film, which notes the public’s frustration with the insurance industry yet adds that killing a CEO does nothing to solve the healthcare crisis.) It’s truly an example of how video game symbols are making it far beyond their source material and original creators’ intents.

Additionally…

It might be of interest to note for my readers who have followed me from The Washington Post that I still keep up to date with news about my old outlet.

Jeff Bezos this week publicly sent out a memo to The Post’s opinion section and said The Post should dedicate itself to covering opinions in support of free markets and civil liberties. The Opinion Editor resigned in response.

When I was with The Post, I read Amazon Unbound by Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone voraciously to see what sort of effects the billionaire ownership could have on the paper. Bezos sounded supposedly hands-off about the operation at the time — perhaps now no longer.

As WaPo chief economic reporter Jeff Stein puts it, “I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side of coverage, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.”

What I’m playing now:

I’ve been playing some secret stuff we can talk about later, but beyond that, I also tried out more Balatro on mobile, Hello Kitty Island Adventure because of course, and playing as Benjamin Franklin attempting to crush a Civilization 7 run set in Mongolia. As all this gaming might make one tired, I’m also reading Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Bill Gifford and Peter Attia, and boy is it a good reminder to exercise in moderation, and eat well.

I’m gearing up for the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco from March 17-21, where I’m sure to stumble upon tons of newsletter-worthy anecdotes.

In Taiwan, Huang is in every bookstore’s featured section, alongside Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing co-founder Morris Chang, a man with his own impressive résumé. In Las Vegas, those same journalists swarmed Huang and tried to get a selfie with him. Two of them even asked for autographs. Below, you’ll see my reaction to such shenanigans.

Sidebar

Sex tech was on full display at CES, although you had to trek to the Venetian Expo (15 min or worse by car from the convention center) to get a view. I wrote about sex tech back in 2019 finally getting approved to join CES and this was my first year coming back to the show floor to actually see these booths in action. This year, one of the biggest draws for visitors was going to the Handy booth to spin for a chance to win a vibrator. Next door, its competitors, like Lovense, were demonstrating similar products, but ones that can move at the same tempo as video games, or songs. Fluffer, for example, sells an attachment for your PS5 (or other console) controller that can connect and time the vibes to when the cars in Rocket League flip over. It’s the future of gaming right here, folks.

Remember when Nvidia used to be a small, unassuming company? A nerdy company that made chips for gaming, and was very responsive to email inquiries.

That was before the stock price jump, where Nvidia beat Apple out on being the world’s most valuable company. Now the geeky GPU company has its super fans. And journalists and the general public alike had to wait hours in line to enter Huang’s keynote. A crowd packed Michelob Ultra Arena in Vegas, a 12,000-seat stadium. At one point, Huang joked he needed to drink a Michelob Ultra, the tech he was holding was too heavy.

But despite all the stardom and hype, some fans in the crowd still left the keynote early, after an hour of hearing about technical specs and open-source coding. Huang even got a heckler, shouting at him that he was switching to Linux. (A Linux heckler, of all things.)

Read more

This year’s Twitchcon took on more of a political bent with Hasan Piker hosting Debatelords, a three-hour live comedy special with streamers satirizing Hillary Clinton and George Bush. The show was peak camp, with Piker at one point joking that a cracker was ‘a man in Ohio.’ Onlookers were promised Piker would be permanently branded with a face tattoo if they hit a charity milestone; the tattoo turned out to be Mike Tyson-like temporary ink carefully placed on Piker’s beard by Twitch community manager Mary Kish.1

It was that sort of kitschy, online vibe that pervaded the weekend.2 But it was coupled with an amorphous sense of injustice and the need to take political action. Just outside of the San Diego Convention Center, a group of activists gathered on a Friday evening, protesting the convention’s sponsorship by Chevron, which operates in Israel. (Debatelords did make a few jabs at Chevron, to its credit.)

Several streamers, buoyed by Piker’s presence, have made a livelihood off of speaking about politics to viewers on Twitch in recent years. With the election looming overhead, how they plan to talk about current affairs to viewers has more impact than before. Last year, I interviewed Caroline Kwan, who did the aforementioned Clinton impression, about her foray into streaming and how covering politics on the platform has been.

Kwan noted that although she had only been streaming for just under a year at that point,3 she had received a lot of harassment in comparison to her partner, Will Neff, a popular streamer who was also featured on Debatelords.

“I have definitely faced a lot of harassment, a lot of threats. My partner who has been streaming for four years has never ever received the volume or intensity of harassment that I receive. And that of course, in large part is due to the fact that I do political content, and he's the funny guy on Twitch.”

Kwan is part of a growing movement of streamers who cover politics, including frogan and Denims.

“Hasan was the reason why I even got into streaming,” frogan said to me at last year’s Twitchcon. “I started watching his political content in 2016. I really wasn’t political before that.”

I asked frogan how she plans to cover the 2024 election:

Frogan described how she collaborates with other streamers to encourage others to go out to vote, and how she uses her background in public health to educate viewers. Being politically outspoken, however, has led to online harassment for all three streamers Updater spoke to.

“I’m going to be unapologetically Arab, unapologetically pro-Palestinian,” frogan said. “People have been threatening everything but I’m not going to let that deter me from my main message... I’m just going to cover it in a way that I feel is completely honest.”

Twitch and a 90-10 revenue split

Twitch has changed a lot in a few years. Executives are now out partying alongside streamers, and improvements have been made to the mobile app, where 70% of users flock to. While Twitch’s rival Kick was not present during the San Diego festivities (its cofounders told me they were in Melbourne), it still may have made its impact. Unlike years earlier, when former Faze Clan CEO Lee Trink was telling me that Twitch was running “the risk of being complacent” and streamers complained of arbitrarily enforced rules, the platform appeared a lot less willing to rest on its laurels this time around. Instead, it was eager to start an open dialogue. It did not comment on the Dr. Disrespect ban being lifted.

One of the highlights from some of my conversations I had two weekends ago involved asking whether Twitch would ever try to match the kind of 90-10 revenue split that Kick offers its streamers.

Updater: How feasible is it to get Twitch to give 90% of revenue to streamers and keep ten percent?

Twitch chief monetization officer Mike Minton: We've acknowledged that Twitch, for the service to work, we have to think long term, right? We want to make sure that we're here. Creators, when they see those things, they understand that it's not sustainable. In the short term, maybe it provides a bump. But when I think about Twitch, because of the combination of products we have, which do include Bits which have quite a preferential rev share to streamers, that we have a system that works for us and for them and will work long term.

Vice president of community products Jeremy Forrester: It depends a little bit on the type of content they're offering. There are some platforms that aren't live streaming that have higher rev shares, they have much lower tech costs. When it comes to live streaming, it is just an expensive business.

B-side: League of Legends strike

Last Tuesday, SAG-AFTRA announced that it was striking League of Legends. I briefly spoke to a SAG-AFTRA spokesperson about what that bold announcement actually means.

What does the action mean to League of Legends?

League of Legends has a sweeping presence in the video game industry and therefor the companies involved in its production employ many SAG-AFTRA members. Formosa, as a provider of VO services for League of Legends and the game's signatory, will no longer have access to the union talent they are contractually bound to use on this game. 

How can people help support the cause?

Community Members/Fans, voice your concern over this strike, encourage the video game industry to sign the Interactive Media Agreement, do this by directly contacting the companies being struck, start a conversation online via X, Reddit or other digital platforms. 

Industry, press the video game industry to do the right thing; sign the Interactive Media Agreement, this agreement is similar in scope to SAG-AFTRA’s TV / Theatrical agreement. Though this action against Formosa is not about AI, it is an action focusing on the respect and rules for union member actors.

What is the status of other studios and the strike?

We have over 90 games signed to our Interim or Tiered-Budget Interactive Agreements and we're fast approaching 100 games signed. The status?  The bargaining group that includes Formosa has yet to agree to a fair deal that includes critical A.I. protections. In the interim, what we are seeing and what we're hearing is that there are plenty of game devs and producers who want to work with our talent and are happy to agree to our terms. 

And what’s next

If you have been wondering why I’ve been fairly quiet recently, it’s because I have been heads down finishing up Black Myth: Wukong. 120 hours, and dozens of strangers harassing me later, I’ve finally beaten the game. I’ll be sure to share more soon.

In San Diego, I spoke to a Parkland shooting victim’s mother about a video game she helped create that lets you role-play as a student attempting to escape a school shooting. She and her team were showing the game off at Twitchcon, and I’ll have a story on Inverse later this week on this.

Since the last update, several gaming outlets have shut down, many have been laid off, some people did manage to find employment, and some companies found new buyers. It’s been a turbulent time in games media and in gaming. Game Informer’s closure also took down the stories those journalists put together. I’m heartened to see some of them continue their work with the Indie Informer. 

Concord shuts down

PlayStation’s live service, hero shooter, Concord, will be taken down, only two weeks after the game was released. The developer said in a blog post, “we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended.”

The game is set to shut down on September 6, and gamers who bought a PS5 or PC copy will be offered refunds. Those who bought the game via Steam or Epic Games store will have to go through those companies for a refund.

While many live service games eventually shut down, the news of Concord collapsing seems have unfolded in a particularly fast manner.

Asking a veteran game developer when he thinks layoffs will end

Earlier this year, I sat down with Obsidian studio design director Josh Sawyer to chat about the former Xbox exclusive Pentiment coming to the Nintendo Switch and the industry’s general state of malaise. Sawyer was able to share his thoughts on how well the game has been received so far. 

“As long as the people paying the bills are happy with what we’re doing, I’m happy about it,” he added. “The metrics for success are different. We do have sales figures for people who have bought the game, and I have numbers on Game Pass of people who have played the game. There it becomes more complicated because then it’s about retention, because a lot of people will play a game for five minutes, but will they play it for two hours? Will they play the full game? We’re still figuring out what success looks like.”

Sawyer adds that for him, it’s simply about the game finding its audience, as niche as it is. He was also glad that his employees did not have to work too much overtime, saying, “We didn’t cause undue damage along the way, which is very important.”

Sawyer says that he’s currently helping out on Avowed, Outer Worlds, and that his next studio project is a while off. Meanwhile, he’s bracing for more layoffs, given the current state of the industry.

“We will recover from this. But if you had to ask me for a prediction, it’s going to happen again. I’ve seen people say, this can’t keep going on. It can. What’s going to stop it? I know that’s a grim way to look at it. But the things that led to this can certainly happen again,” Sawyer says.1 “I do think we will recover. But it’s a very rough time for a lot of people. I’m afraid that it will probably happen again and it will probably take 10 to 15 years.”

Across the internet:

• Raven, which helps make Call of Duty, filed an unfair labor complaint against Microsoft, which Stephen Totilo broke in his Game File newsletter.

• On Thursday, Inverse launched its Game Changers series, where we’ll profile the technicians and tastemakers behind your favorite games. Hayes Madsen kicked us off with a profile of the creator of Final Fantasy, which you can read here. We’ll aim to publish these every month and feature a wide range of folks.

• Earlier in August, Game Informer announced it was shutting down after 33 years. It’s a bleak outcome in the worst timeline. I managed to write two articles for Game Informer before it shut down. One on Dungeons and Dragons’ influence in nearly every video game and one on how generative AI was already affecting the industry.

• This summer, I also wrote a feature on the ex-Riot Games, ex-Bungie shooter-mobile online battle arena hybrid, Supervive, where I likened video game criticism to eating a burger.

• Disney will go to court over a wrongful death case in October, after a doctor ate at a resort restaurant and died from nut and dairy allergies. The suit, filed by her spouse, alleges the restaurant staff assured the doctor her meal would be allergen-free. Now the twist, and the reason this is a tech story, is that Disney asked the Florida court to send the case to arbitration, saying that the plaintiff waived his rights to sue when he signed up for a Disney+ free trial in 2019. If this sort of argument held water in court, you can imagine the precedent it would set, especially considering how Disney+ has more than 150 million subscribers who have likewise waived their rights to suing Disney. After a public outcry, Disney filed a notice on August 20 to withdraw its request for arbitration. Regardless of the outcome, this case highlights an intriguing and dystopian question: Can terms such as the Disney+ free trial ones prevent people from suing for matters unrelated to the streaming service, like wrongful death cases?

  If you’d like to read frequent updates, please consider subscribing! Now that we’re out of the summer doldrums, Updater is back.

• The New York Times has been delivering lots of stunning gaming stories lately, including this profile of indie developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. who’s had a really great year, and this look into the Harvard-trained psychiatrist and Twitch streamer Dr. Alok Kanojia and his involvement with Reckful, who committed suicide months after the two streamed together about depression and mental health. The Times spoke to Reckful’s brother, who described the stream as “sort of dangerous stuff.”

• In other news, this Black Myth: Wukong hot take by me has ruffled plenty of feathers. But I stand by what I said. Gamergaters and Chinese nationalists are some of what’s behind the game’s recent success.

And with that, we’re in September, aka feast season for video games. I’ll see you back here again with much more to come. Thank you for all the support!

Disco Elysium seemed to have everything going for it. Clever political satire. A deft portrayal of the police force during a time when such commentary was apt and necessary. Rich voice-acting and a hypnotic soundtrack. Hell, it even had queer Asian representation.

Disco also revived an Estonian novelist’s story, which had previously sold a measly 1,000 copies, and gave it new eyes, racking up awards across the gamut. Now the publisher has laid off 24 employees, the novelist was accused of a toxic management style, and the sequel has been canceled. And the fan base has swiftly turned on developer ZA/UM, even telling each other not to buy merch from the store, lest they support bad actors.

So many people had told me to play Disco Elysium, but I didn’t get around to it until two weeks ago. By the time I finished the game, I was ready to buy Kim Kitsuragi’s bomber jacket. But then, reminded by Reddit of the studio’s many woes, I abstained.

Disco Elysium is a disorienting experience. I played the first few hours on my Twitch stream back when I worked at The Washington Post, and found it too difficult to read all the dialogue to viewers while also trying to figure out where to go in an efficient manner. The second time around, this year, was a lot simpler, as I merely recorded a few videos on demand, which you can view on my YouTube channel. The fact that the main character can’t remember anything makes the introduction into the game extremely confusing, but after investing about ten hours into it, I found a real groove with Disco, and I was loving it.

There’s a moment when I faced an obstacle that had a 3% chance of success, and managed to pass it without save-scumming (the controversial practice of rewinding your game to try again). I was truly shocked, and so was my cop sidekick, Kim. I got to rub my victory in his face, which was the icing on the cake. At another point, I helped a bunch of children make an incredible rave beat in church, a song I later found on Spotify and played at a friend’s birthday party in real life.

And the writing is, for the most part, besides some sexist and racist parts, fairly incredible. Obviously, that’s a huge caveat. There are some synergies between the protagonist, Harry, and his more disturbing remarks and the more recent updates to what has befallen the sequel.

I’ve played so many games at this point that I can tell where developers rushed and cut corners, or where they weren’t able to fill out the scenery with much content. The back-half of Hades 2 is like this, but that’s tantalizing, because you just know SuperGiant is going to fill out the next few levels with unique characters and landscapes. Not so with Disco Elysium, which teases out the island of Jamrock, and mentions various things you can do there, only to wrap up the finale on a barren land, mostly empty space, and a rather short dialogue. In Act 2, I felt the instinct to put the game down — the experience felt more pure if I simply stopped right there, leaving the possibilities endless and infinite. As it turns out, my intuition was right. Many online have complained about the ending being a letdown, while a few defend this choice as intentional.

And now it looks like we’re not going to get more. An excerpt from PC Gamer’s investigation in June:

"In February 2022, I left my job as an academic physicist and space mission scientist in order to work on Y12, the sequel to a masterpiece, Disco Elysium," former lead writer Dora Klindžić said of this time. "Upon my arrival, I was told all the leads were gone and replaced, but this was framed as a good thing, a healthy thing. Four months later the project was shelved overnight. I began raising concerns, as I felt I had just abandoned my entire life and career only to end up in a studio where the people I had come to work with were fired, and the project I was meant to work on shelved with no reason given."

London-based musician Lenval Brown, who narrated over 300,000 lines of dialogue in Disco Elysium, told Updater, “Unfortunately, the sequel got canceled... there was a split in the ZA/UM camp! It would have been amazing... they missed a trick!”

Brown added that while Disco was his first time voice acting in a game, he’s open to doing it again. “I've done a few bits and pieces of voice work here and there since. I'm working on trying to get more voice gigs.”

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There is always hope, though. Just with any other property, like the fanmade, non-Disney-related versions of Club Penguin, the fans can always take over. In 2022, for instance, fans released a Chinese game, White Mourning: Museum in Pale.

For the past seven years, I’ve been talking to game developers and their studio heads. The mood in 2024 feels somber. Look no further than LinkedIn to read of the general malaise across the industry. And yet 2025 will be an even bigger year for video games, as the annual not-E3 conference just showed us. 

How are people squaring this strange discrepancy? I’ve spoken to many developers about this, and they highlight different ways they’re weathering the storm. We might revisit and get into more of them later this year. 

I’ll be explicit. One of the reasons I haven’t updated this newsletter as frequently is not just that I took a full-time job at Inverse, but also because one of my stories has actually led to me burning professional bridges. That’s par for the course as an investigative journalist, and some even wear that as a badge of honor. But given the tenuous state of games journalism, it’s increasingly a threat to survival.

That being said, I’m pushing past those hesitations, and committing to writing more of these. Newsletters give you the unique ability to speak directly to your audience, without any Google search engine meltdowns to get in the way. That’s invaluable. And let’s be honest, I never got into this to maintain the status quo.

It’s been the biggest few weeks in gaming, so let’s get into it. First, I traveled to San Francisco for GDC, gathered so many interviews, and now of course, I’ve been inundated with Summer Game Fest news. On the bright side, what this means is you get a double issue packed with only the biggest highlights, cutting out all the noise.

It’s been gratifying to commission the finest writers across the industry. Here are some of my favorites so far: 

No thoughts, only Balatro

Renata Price graced our site with this hypnotic essay about a similarly decadent game about poker hands. As onlookers noted, Balatro is not anything like the poker that you know. But I did find it strangely, achingly familiar and couldn’t place why until I read Marcus Stewart’s interview with the developer LocalThunk here, where he says, “Well, the concept came from – it's a game called Big Two. It's a Cantonese game. If you've ever played a game called Presidents or Cheat or Janitor or A**hole, it's the same type of game where you have a hand of cards, and you select some of the cards and play them down. So it's actually based on a game like that. It's not based on poker. And I used to play this game, Big Two, all the time with my friends when I was in high school and growing up. I wanted to make an online version of that game to play with them during the pandemic.”

On Galaxy’s Edge

We got the rare chance to visit Take-Two’s offices in May and talk to the Star Wars developers. I immediately noticed the hero shooter resembles the Disneyland amusement parks I’ve visited. The developers say that was on purpose. They wanted the instant recognition of Disney, while keeping the game easy to understand for new players. They even threw a football and esports metaphor in there. You can read more here.

Isaiah Colbert’s Delicious in Dungeon dive

An excellent dive into all the gaming references in Netflix’s hit Dungeons and Dragons-inspired show. To edit this piece, I also watched the anime and read the whole manga. The Netflix season one finale gets you caught up to chapter 52 of the manga. Once I discovered the manga was complete, I binge-read it over a weekend.

Honkai Star Rail and Disney from Rui Zhong

“Welcome to the land of dreams!” the nasally-voiced cartoon chirps. With a bright-eyed smile and a pep in his step, he serves as a retro-designed tour guide through a commercial wonderland of fast food, movies, and dreams.

It’s not Disney World, but it is reminiscent of just that.

Read more from former U.S.-China think tank scholar Rui Zhong about how Chinese mobile game Honkai Star Rail, from the developer of Genshin Impact, satirizes American culture.

“No one expects their copy of Kane & Lynch is going to have a dime bag in it.”

Read about the dire state of console returns at GameStop, from Patricia Hernandez.

• Kicking off an acerbic dialogue on social media, we sought to analyze Stellar Blade and its relation to the male gaze. This excellent piece is from Issy van der Velde, who also penned this insane Bloodborne essay that needs more attention.

• In other news, Valorant is coming to console, which marks Riot Games’ first foray off of PC. It’s a bit interesting that the first-person shooter is making it to consoles before League of Legends does.

• Another in platform news: Apple is still going all-in on gaming. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is coming to Mac for $69.99 this fall, which Apple is using to tout the new Mac capabilities for gaming.

• Hard Drive has this very apt satire on all the layoffs plaguing the tech and gaming industries.
  We Went Undercover at Microsoft but Got Laid Off Before We Could Learn Anything

• Nvidia is now a trillion dollar company and CEO Jensen Huang is wealthier than India’s richest man. They visited New York recently to show off more AI updates. More to come soon.

• Streamer Dr Disrespect has finally explained why he was banned on Twitch four years ago — he was accused of sexting a minor. The case was settled in arbitration (as I confirmed years ago but was unable to report out). He claims he has done nothing illegal and he’ll be back to streaming after taking a vacation.

Thank you for reading! I’ll catch you next time.

Huge apologies for missing a week last week! I’ve had my hands full with a number of projects and I’ll be excited to share more soon. One big note is that the Scientific American podcast about the neuroscience of video games is still happening this spring. And I’ll be going to San Francisco next month for Game Developers Conference.

Last week, I reported on an internal Xbox town hall between employees and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, Xbox President Sarah Bond, and other top leadership. I also appeared on Destin’s YouTube channel here to discuss the full news, if you’d prefer a video recap.

You can read the full story on Inverse dot com. Robin writes what was said on the Xbox podcast. After Xbox announced four games were coming to other platforms, employees within the company didn’t have much of a reaction to the relatively small news.

Nvidia is one to watch

Nvidia’s revenue from the most recent quarter tripled year over year to $22.1 billion, according to a Wednesday earnings report. The GPU maker forecasts that this quarter’s revenue will hit $24 billion, maintaining that rapid growth and exceeding analysts’ prediction of $22 billion.

Nvidia reportedly has a new business unit dedicated to graphics cards, and it plans to make a custom chip for the Nintendo Switch 2, Reuters reported on Feb. 9. The current Switch uses an older Nvidia chip circa pre-2016 with a lower graphics resolution and performance than an Xbox One or PlayStation 4, so a new chip would be a welcome addition to the next console generation. I’m reminded of when I was playing the online version of Mario Golf and saw a mass pixels lagging, which is partially internet connectivity but also GPU-related.

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Street Fighter 6’s new character theme is German rap

Street Fighter 6 is getting a new character, Ed, in late February, and I briefly chatted with the folks behind the character’s theme song.

“Keep fighting, my heart, my way, the self-doubter in me; my constant leader, but I live on, quitting is not an option, fight my own demons and take the throne,” German artist Blumio raps.

Street Fighter 6 executive music producer and music director Koyo Sonae tells me in an email interview that producer GRP first came up with the “powerfully victorious beat for Blumio to rap over, which he delivered with great fighting spirit.” GRP says he went with a strong rhythm, guitar chords, combining major and minor chords to mark “darkness and hope.”

Blumio explains in an email the thought process behind the lyrics and tells us what he and Ed have in common:

“I tried to combine my own experience as a rapper where I had to fight to get recognition — with the life story of Ed. I think there are big similarities. The self doubt, a sort of  identity crisis if you will but also the strong desire to become the best. I also tried to get as ‘technical’ as possible with my flow and my rhyme schemes because Ed is also very skillful and powerful in his fights.”

I read a book so you don’t have to

I’m also including photos of these excerpts that I mentally highlighted while reading “Atomic Habits.”

The essence of “Atomic Habits” boils down to:

1) Make good habits likely and visible

2) Make bad habits unlikely and invisible.

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I’ve applied this principle to things as simple as hiding my TV remote, placing a PlayStation 5 controller on my table in an obvious place, and adding a block of creative writing time on top of a habit I already practice every week, which is visiting my grandma.

I also want to share some insights I learned from poring over too many YouTube video essays. Since last week, I’ve been trying this productivity hack and it’s been giving me some minor returns.

Basically, figure out what your domino habit is in the morning, and then work backwards and set yourself a series of alarms (no more than six) that would help you achieve that habit the next day.

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So for myself, I decided to wake up at 8AM and begin writing, which meant I had to sleep by midnight, eat dinner at 6:30 and lunch at noon, and workout at 9AM.

Honestly, I may have just discovered a trendy way to create a schedule. For some reason, I’ve gained real momentum in my days. We’ll see how long it sticks!

Bonus links

• In The Industry Is Divided On How To Write Video Game Romance, Kenneth Shepard over at Kotaku writes about the artistic decision in Bioware’s Dragon Age II to make its romantic conquests bisexual and extrapolates that to how the industry handles these issues in their stories.

• On this subject, 17 percent of players surveyed by GLAAD identify as LGBTQ, while only two percent of games on digital storefronts have queer characters. Robin has the story for Inverse.

• It’s been a review-heavy month for me. I reviewed Mario vs. Donkey Kong and gave it an 8/10. I also got to try Figure Skater Peach in Princess Peach: Showtime!, which harkened back to Michelle Kwan’s glory days, for me. On the subject of gaming recommendations, we also rounded up the best games to play after a break-up.

• Natalie Schriefer has the story about how nostalgic music works with your brain and what neuroscience has to say about video game music. It’s a subject that fascinates me and I’ll be following up on this a lot this year.

• Hayes’ take on how Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is simply absurd is a take that is holding up super well. Stay close to Inverse these next few days as we’ll have much more to come.

• Over at The Verge, Adi Robertson has the story on how Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis. The accompanying images are truly something.

IGN employees announced on Tuesday that they want to form a union. About 80 editorial and creative employees wish to join NewsGuild-CWA, with the majority of them signing union authorization cards.

“At least some part of why it happened now has to do with the current instability in games, entertainment, tech, and media alongside larger waves of unionization across them,” IGN senior reporter Rebekah Valentine told Updater when asked why employees were organizing now. She added that while generative AI isn’t the reason IGN began to unionize, it is a hot topic of discussion amongst her colleagues and it’s “something we all want protection from.”

Online media has become “less and less financially viable to staffers, many of which must live in some of the most expensive cities in the world to do their jobs,” IGN wrote in a press release.

The gaming and entertainment website had 479 million monthly readers in December, it stated in a press release, quoting third-party analytics site SEMRush. As IGN puts it, “there are countless irons in countless fires” at the publication.

Will Xbox exclusives migrate to the PS5?

Amid rumors swirling about Xbox exclusive Starfield making its way over to the PlayStation 5, Xbox chief Phil Spencer posted on Monday, “We're listening and we hear you. We've been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.”

The company held an internal Tuesday townhall where Spencer told employees that there were no plans to stop making consoles, and that Xboxes would continue to be part of a strategy that involves multiple kinds of devices. Xbox did not immediately return a request for comment.

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A metaverse in everything but the word

Disney is buying a $1.5 billion stake in Fortnite maker Epic Games. CEO Bob Iger told shareholders on a Wednesday earnings call that Spider-Man has been Disney’s licensed games biggest success so far.

When an analyst on the call asked about Disney’s spotty record with video games in the past, Iger elaborated a little further on what he thinks Epic can do with Disney. He envisioned the companies creating a “world that could live next to Fortnite and be completely interconnected with it.”

In short, it sounds like a metaverse, the buzzword of yesteryear, but you’ll note that language is conspicuously missing from Disney’s press materials and earnings remarks. Iger goes on to describe what potentially sounds like a version of Disney+ or TikTok: “You could imagine the creation of short form videos, or maybe we may even use the platform to actually distribute some of our content.”

“IP-holders like Disney are wise to move slowly into novel spaces,” said Joost van Dreunen, a lecturer on the business of games at the NYU Stern School of Business, “Following the success of the [Epic] LEGO collaboration, Disney has its proofpoint to re-enter the games industry in a big way and have some skin in the game. Previously, Disney fell short of delivering on expectations when it built its own online multiplayer universe Disney Infinity. A collaboration with Epic Games addresses a lot of the concerns that previously emerged when Disney tried to go it alone.”

Last December, when I interviewed Epic Games’ Fortnite ecosystem executive vice president Saxs Persson, he did drop the ‘M’ word.

“Can we make the Lego metaverse?” he asked rhetorically, while visiting New York at a Epic x Lego partnership event. He described Lego fans being able to play interchangeably in Fortnite spaces. “Digital play is fundamental to Epic. Fortnite Creative, that’s our sandbox. We understand the value of that and what it’s meant to our community.”

Bonus links

• This week, PlayStation held a Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth State of Play that attracted just over a million viewers on YouTube. Hayes Madsen has the story on how Square Enix is going in a new direction with its demo

• If you haven’t already, you should read this excellent essay about Persona 3 Reload’s queer character representation by Robin Bea

• Speaking of, Inverse is hiring a new part-time video games writer! Apply here to work with me, alongside the impeccable Hayes and Robin

• Layoffs are still happening across the video game industry, impacting smaller studios this past week.

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• On Wednesday, SAG-AFTRA announced a new video game agreement for indie studios to get access to union talent. I spoke with union reps yesterday to get a better sense of what the deal means for indies. In short, it gives smaller studios what SAG-AFTRA describes as a slightly more affordable way to hire union voiceover actors, stunt actors, and more. Since the definition of ‘indie’ has been contested, this agreement specifically covers games with production budgets of $250,000 to $15 million. 

• U.K.-based freelance writer Aamir Mehar attended a BAFTA masterclass from Final Fantasy director Yoshinori Kitase about how to craft video games. This sounded like an intriguing experience, so I commissioned him for a story. Mehar writes:

  I’m sitting right at the back of a packed screening room, eyes locked on a giant two-handed sword with sharp obsidian edges and an unwieldy shape that make it look more like an obelisk than a weapon. Set against the black background on an illuminated stage, it looks as though it was plucked straight from a fictional universe — which is exactly the intent. This replica is Cloud Strife’s “buster sword,” the impossibly huge weapon carried by the series’ protagonist that has come to visually define Final Fantasy VII. I wonder how many people in the audience wished – as I wished – they could hold and lift it, to pretend for just a moment that they’re the hero of a tale that changed video games.

I’m always looking for more scene reports like this, so if you’d like to pitch Inverse a freelance story, please email me at shannon@inverse.com.

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• Former Kotaku and Inverse writer Ashley Bardhan has this beautiful piece on Alisa, a lo-fi horror game come to the Switch and other places. Her words, as always, are delectable: “Alisa's boobs does not operate by earthly physics, but by horny imagination,” Bardhan writes. “But I can look past all that since Alisa, voiced by Croes' real-life girlfriend, always seems amusingly sleepy as she roughs up her Wonderland.”

• And now for your weekly dose of gaming business news: Chinese conglomerate Tencent is taking a hard look at its mobile game offerings. It’s reportedly working on a mobile version of Elden Ring, according to Reuters, and is axing a Nier game, possibly due to hefty fees.

That’s all folks! Happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrate, and I’ll catch you in the next issue.

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Hey all! With all the cobwebs cleared out, it’s time to make announcements.

As of November 1, I became deputy gaming editor over at Inverse dot com. For those of you who may not know what Inverse is, think of it as a video game blog that focuses on the art and craft of making video games. It is one of the few places that wrote about the Washington Post and Launcher games journalism layoffs last year, and for that, it has a fond place in my heart.

As an editor at Inverse, I’m now open to receiving freelance pitches and commissioning pieces of investigative games journalism and craft features. I’m also writing, including this interview with Pokimane about what’s next for her, and a few Baldur’s Gate 3 stories digging into its romantic narrative design. And of course, the labor beat lives on in staff writers Robin Bea and Hayes Madsen’s work.

So what does this mean for Updater going forward? Can this newsletter survive the turmoil and ever-persisting headwinds of the industry? The answer is a resounding yes. And I couldn’t have done it without all of your support.

Previously, I refrained from committing to a certain publishing cadence as I didn’t want to burn myself out pursuing investigative leads. I now feel comfortable saying that I’d like to publish about once a week on this newsletter.

The content will remain largely the same. But now, as Inverse gaming editor, I read a lot more gaming news. I stay on top of major and minor releases and spend more of each day thinking about the art and craft of making video games, alongside the business and tech aspects I always used to focus on.

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And remember how I started all of this saying Updater has no editors? Great news, this newsletter just got one.

Nobody can cover all of the news. That’s why it’s important to keep trying. I think I’d like to do an assortment of news items, and mix it up with special editions here and there. I really do love the community we’ve built here on Substack and the wonderful readers who have joined along the way. Now that I’ve gotten a handle on the day-to-day operations at Inverse, I’m happy to restart Updater, with an eclectic collection of news.

Since I last blogged here, Stephen Totilo left Axios and started up a Substack called Game File. It already has 8,000 subscribers. If you aren’t one of them yet, join here.

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Miscellaneous thoughts:

• To recap 2023: Last year was an absolute whirlwind for this industry, and for me, personally. I spent March to October freelancing and writing blogs on this Substack. I learned a ton, spoke to tons of editors, got bylines at Vice, Vulture, the New York Times, Esquire, Popular Science, Conde Nast’s own Substack Mixed Feelings, Game Informer, and my own haunts, The Verge and CNN. I was on The 2010’s documentary for CNN, talking about Taiwanese American TV, Fresh off the Boat. I spoke at a New York comedy club about games journalism, interviewed Microsoft AI researchers about the use of AI in video games, and moderated a panel with Pepsi about marketing to gamers. I appeared on a segment of Georgian TV, more than one episode of Giant Bomb, and one episode of Kinda Funny and Tim Rogers’ Insert Credit show. I also, in my spare time, got my driver’s license finally, my passport renewed, met with an agent to begin my talks of writing a book, recorded various questionable TikToks, got some personal training and tried, for the most part succeeding, at improving my mental health.

• I’ve been covering video games full-time for five years now across The Verge, CNN, The Washington Post, this newsletter, and now Inverse. That’s long enough to see the death of E3, the announcement of Riot Forge’s creation and shutdown, the downfall of Mixer, various multiplayer games (remember Crucible? Hyperscape? Knockout City?) being hyped up and then closing down, tens of thousands of layoffs, massive mergers closing, and much, much more.

• I didn’t get to do a tweet thread of my best 2023 stories but my personal favorite was writing about silkpunk for the New York Times. In this one piece, I got to talk about Asian American fiction, Chinese video games, queer Asian American culture, the Asian diaspora, and their intersections. Because it is writing non-fiction about fiction, I also got to have more fun with it

• It was good to see a bunch of you at the New York Game Awards this month. Will have more details on my travel plans to California this year soon

• I used Convai (pronounced “convey”) and Nvidia-powered generative A.I. to make the angriest possible NPC, aptly named Regina. You can chat with her here: https://convai.com/shared-character/?id=ee3600fc-bfb0-11ee-9c28-42010a40000f

• This month, I’m reviewing Mario vs. Donkey Kong for Inverse. Here’s my preview, where I write that Nintendo repeats a winning formula in this Switch remake, polishing up cute toy mini-Marios that waddle across levels to follow big Mario around

• One big story this week: I’m particularly proud of editing this Persona 3 Reload review by freelancer Josh Broadwell. As he writes, “Persona 3 Reload is one of the weakest video game remakes I’ve seen in the last few years.”

• What’s next? Investigative games journalism remains the most expensive and least profitable thing to produce in this economy of the services that we have on offer. Of course, that means we should lean into it more than ever. But it’s clear that this model of the internet isn’t very sustainable and paywalled subscriptions bear their own issues. This is only a band-aid. Nobody’s very happy about the current state of things, but we’re still figuring it out.