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Gaming is the most social activity online. The only other more social activity is FaceTime, due to its liminal space intrusion into your life when someone calls. Social activity requires platforms that allow users to connect. The entire basis of the Internet is to send and receive from other users in other locations. Twitter has recently rate limited users on a temporary basis, which has greatly slowed the flow of information between communities. There’s a crisis unfolding on the Internet’s most social town square. Twitter’s pathway to monetization continues to be rocky. Decision after decision has left users a gasp at what to do when their normal that had been consistent for so long rapidly changes day after day. The long and short of the current crisis is that new users, regular users and paid users all have different amounts of posts they can view per day. The limit seems…

Dave the Diver Developer: MintRocket MSRP: $19.99 – Steam Dave the Diver captivated me within the first few minutes of playing. After dinner I was on my PC exploring the Blue Hole with Dave and loving every second of it. Dave the Diver is an action 2D/3D mash-up that has you exploring the Blue Hole with Dave while running a seaside Sushi resturant. There’s so much more though jammed into this amazing must play game. Dave the Diver is definitely well put together, the pixel art is striking and the game systems are considerate and have been iterated on efficaciously through the game’s early access. We don’t give any sort of numerical or percentile ranking to games, but if anything about Dave catches your eye then I would definitely say it’s worth the full price admission. It does everything it promises and it does it well and my nights with…

Hi-Rez Studios is removing the mantel of being a game studio and undergoing a transformative business process, to say the least. The community is biting its nails about what this means for the games they love dearly, but the people who are being put in charge know what they’re doing. Let’s break down the announcement and I’ll share some of my expert thoughts on the recent changes. The announcement was posted to LinkedIn. Hi-Rez Studios to Become Hi-Rez Ventures This is just a means of branding themselves away from developing games and being a multi-channel organization that supports games and funds the development of games as well. The branding around “Hi-Rez” as the prominent owner of any particular game will likely disappear in the near future as “Hi-Rez” becomes a “parent company.” The subsidiaries have already existed as modulars within Hi-Rez, but this reorganizes them into clearly defined self-contained entities.…

Starfield is an up-and-coming game that’s really releasing, unlike Star Citizen, except that like Star Citizen it seems the game may only be ethereal: the physical edition will follow games like Fallout 76 and not offer a physical disc. Something fun to mention about Fallout 76 is that I got burned hard, I paid more for a physical copy only to get a code in a disc box that, may I add, was made of the absolute flimsiest plastic. Boo on you Todd Howard. This story starts with a tweet on June 25th 2023 where Bethseda said that the game would include only a code in the box. Following that, they immediately deleted the tweet. Screenshot below: The tweet is now missing. No word yet from Bethesda on whether Starfield will include a physical edition or not. It’s quite clear though that if they don’t include physical media then they…

The following is an editorial submitted by a vetted source posted anonymously. You know what’s a shame? Every ounce of praise that I can give to a game and it’s beautiful creative work as an art-form is corrupted by the foul practices of the exploitative and outright evil video gaming industry. Almost every single studio exploits their employees because “games.” See, video games are a seen by some as a hedonistic form of entertainment and so working on them is seen as “fun” and a “privilege.” There is very few video game jobs out there, you see, so if you get one then you’re “cool” and “hip” and this allows the employer and management to leverage that against you as if you owe them something for the benefit. I know this first hand, I know this from seeing it with my eyes, I know this from countless nights spent with…

Hogwarts Legacy, by Avalanche Software, is one of the more fun RPG games of the year but there is a strong stigma around the game. Within that stigma, there are a specific group of militant extremists who believe anyone who purchases the game deserves some kind of retaliation. Sites have popped up, which we will not promote, encouraging communities to search for streamers and users who are playing the game in order to harass them. The issue is that much of the rhetoric is subjective; objectively the game was developed by a diverse team at Avalanche and WB. Playing the game is a choice that each person decides on their own what it means to them and the ability to make that choice is critical to self-autonomy. If you feel you should boycott the game then you should do so; if you do not feel it morally objectionable to play…

I absolutely love following my favorite Twitch streamers. Right now my favorite streamer is Whiskey Ding0, an energetic vtuber (completely unaffiliated with our site) who has an absolute just power to get his chat to reenact the rave from the second Matrix movie. Just nonstop high energy that let’s you relax at the same time as you melt into the fun and excitement of everything going on. It’s a ton of fun and worth a subscription. Content creators deserve to be paid for the work that they do to entertain us and it’s a humbling thought that we all can contribute what we think is fair to them for our personal enjoyment of their content. While recent leaks have shown that is some big bucks; it’s still fair when we consider it’s distributed across millions of people who gained personal enjoyment off of their work. There does come a line…

We have to store information in this world and we have to do with with electricity, which is quite hard. There’s physical means of storage, but ultimately, we’re using electricity to write it and read it, because computer instructions are just that: electricity. In that way, storing that information is important to everything we do: your bank needs to know how much money you have and your video game needs to know how much gold you have. Traditionally this information would be stored in a database, ultimately looking something like this: “294384,username,482,48982” which would be like your userID, userNAME, GOLD and DIAMONDs. Enter blockchain technology. A revolutionary new way of storing information, leveraging a decentralized list of records where multiple “nodes” process and verify data amongst one another. This gives all kinds of cool advantages, which I’ll let Wikipedia explain blockchain, but it also uses A LOT of power and…

Limited Run Games is a publisher of limited runs of physical games. There are other outlets, like Strictly Limited, that do a similar thing but Limited Run Games is what I would consider the industry leader in this very interesting world of limited video game releases. Their popularity recently has continued to only soar as collectors attempt to collect a wide range of their products, from the games they love to those who just love to collect every release. To be completely candid, I recently was looking at MidBoss’s Japanese release of the 2064 collector’s edition and fell immediately in love with the artwork and everything about it. Obtaining the previous US release led me down a long and wild adventure into a niche market that’s exploding in popularity and has a lot of pieces to untangle. The Principles of False Scarcity & A Limited History of Collector’s Editions If…

So recently across social media you can find the following post from the official Riot and League of Legend’s accounts: Is it a new game? Is it new skins in the game? Does it have something to do with Wild Rift? Well the answer is actually quite simpler than it appears. #leagueoflegendsut is an upcoming clothing collab with a popular clothing brand and the image showcases a likely sample of one of the shirts. What Exactly Does LeagueofLegendsUT mean? Uniqlo is the clothing brand that they’re collaborating with. You can see their logo on the top left of the photo and the shirt is likely a K/D/A collab that’s coming soon with Uniqlo. Previous LoL collabs included fashion house Louis Vuitton. Therefore it’s no surprise that they’re collabing with another major clothing brand for their K/D/A brand. So then the question is what does the UT stand for? Well that’s…