After a long delay, this episode looks at some of the more disturbing stuff going on in the videogame industry — and Minecraft. The Gaming Flashback comes back with Lucidity.
Let us know what you think.
The guys discuss a ton of topics off the cuff. They talk about the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct airing on April 2, the PSN crash, lots of negative Civilization 7 reactions, Phasmophobia hitting 22m total sales, PlayStation and Steam quietly removing shovelware, Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D remake selling and Dragon Quest 12 confirmed to still be in development.
Let us know what you think.
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Gamers around the world have noticed a large trend in the video game industry in the last 15 years, massive growth with massive projects and unbelievable costs, goals and sales. We’ve seen the impossible become achievable in epic projects like World of Warcraft and huge sales figures from Halo 3 but we’ve also seen game titles fall down in a burning wreck.
Each studio tries to beat the next studio with crisp realistic graphics, real time physics engines, life-like explosions all with huge costs. Does it all sound familiar? If you’re a movie buff you’ve probably seen movie studios cranking out the same style of movie, high computer graphic effects with talented high priced actors making longer and longer films.
The only big difference? A game studio hires most of their talent for full time positions and then has to figure out what to do with them when the project ends. Perhaps this explains Microsoft’s effort to remove game studios like Ensemble, Bungie and FASA, it’s all too much to handle when a high budget project ships and time frees up in the studio.
This week’s episode is also abbreviated, as Jordan is somewhere in Pennsylvania looking for a gingerbread house while Paul is still trying to pack his entire NES library into a single suitcase. Jonah and Paul still got in enough time to do a Gaming Flashback on Thief: The Dark Project, and the following news items:
All this and Reader Feedback, too, as well as a new Question of the Week, “If you have the opportunity to read or view a highly anticipated game’s story months before it was released, would you do it or would you deliberately turn it away to preserve yourself from spoilers?” Let us know!
