All Popkulturist games coverage, newest first. Reviews from someone who plays them long enough to know whether they're any good — and, now and then, a piece about the industry that makes them, which doesn't require playing anything.
My first Gamescom begins on Monday, 24 August, at gamescom dev, where a keynote asks what the industry’s ‘reset’ has done to the people inside it. The public arrives on Thursday to halls full of people who still love what it makes.
'Denshattack!', the game where Japanese commuter trains do kickflips, launched this week to some of the best reviews of the year. Every publisher who saw it spent a year saying no, which remains the industry's most reliable instinct: rejecting the only ideas anyone remembers.
Yesterday, for the first time, developers marched at six Xbox studios at once. They were protesting the one Microsoft product that never slips its date. On the layoff as an annual release, the accounting that files hits as losses, and the $190 billion going to AI instead.
Twenty-two months into Nintendo's lawsuit, 'Palworld' just hit 858,562 concurrent players on Steam and put the same game in the all-time top 15 for the second time. Meanwhile the patents keep failing their inspections, and the most Nintendo can now win is about $30,000.
Summer Games Done Quick opened on Sunday with a 102% 'Donkey Kong Country 2' and runs until Saturday, a week of round-the-clock speedrunning for Doctors Without Borders. A note on the warmest room on the internet, and why the small-hours runs land in Stockholm over lunch.
It is the most valuable entertainment product of the decade, and it does not exist yet. On anticipation as an asset class, the Polymarket bet, and the week you could finally pre-order a game nobody has played.
Dead by Daylight turned ten and is bigger than ever, the live-service game that lived while the blockbusters died. A note on how a cheap, weird horror game outlasted Bungie and Concord by renting everyone else's monsters.
Nintendo closed its June Direct by announcing an 'Ocarina of Time' remake and calling it "reborn", the word you reach for when you would rather not say what you have built. A note on remaking the one game the whole medium agreed was the best, from a Nintendo kid who has a stake in it.
The games industry replaced E3 with eighteen separate showcases in eight days, all of them running on Los Angeles time. A note on what the new arrangement fixed, and the one thing it quietly broke.
The publisher of 'Balatro' is being sold to Integrated Media Company, the private-equity group that also owns Metacritic, the single most important number in games. A note on what happens when the people who keep the score start owning the games.
Some of my friends play 'EA Sports FC'. None of them has noticed that Electronic Arts is about to be owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. A note on the most-played football game on earth, from someone who doesn't play it.
You learn a games show by its handouts. London Games Festival's Pocket Guide was folded into thirds: a venue map of Level 1, a numbered key to ninety-six games, and the Playlist Rewards card. It fit in a back pocket.
