ampersandrew

You can see the writing on the wall for FairGame$ and Marathon from a mile away, and this can't possibly instill confidence in the people still working there.

Also noteworthy that not only are PS5 sales behind PS4, but the PlayStation's competition has almost entirely disappeared, and that hasn't resulted in more PlayStations sold.

Just announced on twitch.tv/pax, live from PAX East. The reaction was so negative to what happened with Giant Bomb that Fandom sold to Jeff Grubb and Jeff Bakalar. It sounds like this deal closed yesterday. Along with those two, Dan Ryckert and Jan Ochoa are now co-owners. Mike Minotti was informed of this deal this morning, and he will be the fifth co-owner when he comes back from Disney World. Blight Club and Grubb's morning news show sound like they are returning this coming week. This PAX panel is officially episode #889 of the Giant Bombcast.

“We think there’s a large audience for compelling stories that don’t require massive time commitments,” 2K president David Ismailer said in a statement. “We’re excited to offer a game like Mafia: The Old Country in our portfolio, and to provide a linear highly-polished narrative experience that can easily complement the other more persistent games our players also love and engage with on a more consistent basis.”

So wait, is this that thing where AAA publishers think shorter, linear action games are inherently worth less than shitty bloated open world games? Like how Hi-Fi Rush was $30 and Redfall was $70? I mean, I'm not complaining about it costing less, but it's so weird, if so. Going by the store page, it seems like you do have to travel places, implying open world in some capacity, but maybe just a small open world? Cynically, is this them pricing a game lower than usual that they know is bad?

EDIT: Confirmed via FAQ, this is a linear action game and not open world. Optimistically: great! Most open world games don't make great use of it, and I'm here for the crime story anyway. Pessimistically: there's a good chance they salvaged a bad open world game into a wonky feeling linear game with open world vestiges, like Ride to Hell: Retribution, and the low price is to just get any kind of return on a project that produced a bad video game. I hope it's the former!

May 26, 2026

Xbox first party titles expected to hit $80 USD this holiday; Game Pass pricing currently unchanged.

Other than what they explicitly call out as a change to address criticisms of Borderlands 3, I don't know what this does differently from Borderlands 3, but I really like what I see. This looks great.

I've been playing through the Borderlands games for the first time lately and really enjoying them. I should be through the Pre-Sequel and 3 by then. Also, there's probably something we can infer about the GTA 6 release date from this, given the leak that Mafia: The Old Country comes out August 8th.

1. Larian is working on two games right now and restructuring the company around making both of those projects flow.
2. They've got a new narrative team meant to improve the work processes of detecting issues with player reactivity in complex RPGs.
3. Vincke has a lot to say about machine learning, and it's somehow both vague and nuanced. He sees it as a way to speed up development on certain tasks, particularly prototyping and detecting problems that come up from iteration and changes, without replacing the need for handcrafted content.
4. For some reason, we're still talking about "single player games are dead" discourse, even though Larian made the Best Multiplayer Game of 2023 and single player games are demonstrably, all the time, not dead.
5. At least #4 led to an interesting discussion about how to lead a sustainable game business, including how to manage your "S" growth curve with more innovation. Mostly, Vincke summarizes it as "happy player, happy business", which you might have surmised from his Game Awards speech.
6. Then there's some pretty low-hanging fruit when it comes to interacting with a game's community that's difficult to argue with, like "embrace mods that put your characters in other games".
7. Vincke says the team finds DLC boring to make, so they don't really want to make it anymore.
8. As far as what Larian's actually doing next, with the interviewer Tamoor Hussain keeping it to things that Vincke will actually answer, Vincke is hoping to make a pipeline over the next 5 years where they can get multiple RPGs in development at the same time smoothly. About as close as we'll get to a timeline on their next game is that Vincke says his wife will divorce him if their next game isn't out 5 years from now.

Prices for accessories will be increasing to compensate for tariffs.

#StopKillingGames

A bit poetic for it to coincide with the next big Monster Hunter, as I liked it better than Monster Hunter.