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Video game features: in-depth analysis, retrospectives and investigations on the gaming industry and its culture. When we dig deeper than the review.
A 1999 game, 40,000 active players, the same ten names at the top for ten years. How AoE2 resurrected a competitive scene that nobody was funding.
Paradox integrates three major DLCs into the base game for Stellaris's 10th anniversary. It's generous. It's also, reading between the lines, an admission of guilt.
We've seen this kind of game fail before. Trailers full of promises, a strong concept, and a launch that collapses under the weight of its own ambitions. ARC Raiders works. Understanding why means understanding what the genre spent years learning.
Black Flag is back. And behind the good news sits a question Ubisoft still hasn't answered: why has nobody taken the helm since 2013?
It took ten years, thousands of patches, a rebrand and a massive update for Siege to finally become the game Ubisoft promised in 2015. That's a long time. It's also, somehow, a little beautiful.
Launched in 2013 to near-universal indifference, Warframe is still running. Not because it made noise. Because it built something solid without ever needing you to talk about it.
A few years ago, you launched a game to have fun. Today, you launch a game to check boxes, fill a bar, keep your streak alive, collect your daily login reward, and finish the battle pass before it expires. When was the last time you played a game just for the fun of it?
AAA games keep getting bigger, more expensive, more technically impressive. But less and less interesting. Meanwhile, independent games are taking a different direction riskier, more personal, and more often genuinely memorable.
There are the Star Wars games we played. And then there are the ones we'll never play. Sometimes it's precisely those games that leave the deepest mark. Because they promised something different.