The game released on the 19th September, Nominated games had to be released before the 29th September. Golden Joysticks voting was from the 3rd to the 20th October, and the premium DLC that made everyone angry was confirmed on the 24th and then released on the 27th. The timing could absolutely not have fallen more perfectly for MK1.

It’s not AI-based. Articles like this are generally repeatedly republished with extremely minimal editing every six months or so to keep them ‘fresh’ for the search engine optimisation.

Especially when it released almost immediately after the new Harebrained Schemes game flopped. Paradox was absolutely not in a position to let a tentpole slip, re: investors.

It’s a shoe-in for Merriam Webster’s word of the year, I reckon.

That’s why we praise RollerCoaster Tycoon’s dev, he wrote the entire thing in assembly.

It’s ironic that we always seem to praise RollerCoaster Tycoon specifically, as that’s one’s based on the Transport Tycoon engine, which was also by Josh Sawyer and also in x86 assembly.

My suspicion is that the game would have been delayed had the new Harebrained Schemes game not just flopped.

Ultimately the problem with Perfect Dark as a franchise is that everyone who made it great went off and formed Free Radical and made the TimeSplitters games.

Not Trombone Champ, 2022’s best indie game?

Psychonauts 2.

That’s fair. It’s one of the most minimal abstract puzzle games ever made, so there’s not a lot to grab onto.

I think they published it, but don’t actually own it.

I mean, if we’re gonna namedrop completely unique indie darling difficult puzzles, then Return of the Obra Dinn also deserves a mention.

And it’s even on Game Pass! Oh, wait…

The Wolf Among Us 2 is straight up a cursed game at this point.

GIMP is free and also doubles as a way to express just how much I hate myself!

But wootz! Don’t you see! Fortnite was making inroads into the metaverse, and we all know that whoever cracks the metaverse concept is going to reap infinite profits right? Because that’s certainly not a weird dystopian sci-fi pipe dream or anything! It was going to be all smooth sailing straight into forever profits!

Quality, no. Reception, yes. These two things aren’t necessarily the same.

They wanted to use it to sell music licences for games and media production and the like. But it never really worked out, so they’ve sold it to a company that already actually knows how to do that.

It went to Songtradr, who are mostly a music licencing company. So I’m guessing that at least initially things are going to stay the same but that musicians are going to get nagged into letting Songtradr put their stuff up on their big licencing store. And then enshittification, because that’s how absolutely everything is going.

Give it a few weeks and it’ll be $7.99. Maybe even $5.99 depending on how many sales they got last time it hit $7.99.

They keep it at this price because it allows them to advertise an ‘80% discount’ several times a year, which gives them better visibility in the sales.

Which is a wholly different level of suck. But hey, ho.