Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/31/25 at 03:23 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! With harvest season drawing to a close, in our pre-industrial civilizations, November was typically a month to take a moment to give thanks for what blessings the Earth Gods heaped upon us – or, in leaner times, to give thanks that the Earth Gods bothered to give us anything at all, so at no to offend them into making the problem long-term.
The Gaming Gods have not given us a whole lot to be thankful lately, but I suppose we should at least take the time to pick through the overturned-outhouse leavings in the event that they slipped something good in there by mistake.
Thankfully the shovelware is much tamer than last month... But there’s still something in every category of uselessness. In Licensed Swill, there’s a new ‘Spongebob’ game, a new ‘Hello Kitty’ game, and a new ‘Terminator’ game. In the Casual Swill category, there’s “Let’s Sing 2026,” which conveniently abuts to the Annualized Swill …
Unity = Malware Now?!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/25/25 at 05:27 PM CT
Back in 2023, we watched the company behind the Unity Engine – one of the two most popular canned solutions for creating games without having to re-write a bunch of low-level code, alongside Epic Games’ Unreal Engine – attempt to commit non-ritual suicide by changing its licensing paradigm to something so greedy that it was completely at odds with the type of Indie and first-timer games that typically use Unity as a jumping-off point. Unity backpedaled and reneged faster than we’ve seen most other corporations do when they try to implement a stupid idea and receive huge amounts of backlash instead of praise, and it seemed like everything was going to go back to “normal,” whatever that means in the modern Industrial Gaming ecosystem.
Of course, nothing can ever just be “normal” or “nice” or “not on fire” anymore, and it recently came to light that the Unity Engine is at the center of a security nightmare, as a vulnerability was introduced in the 2017 version …
Oh, Dear. Atari is Trying Out Yet Another Retro Console
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/19/25 at 12:46 AM CT
Remember a couple years ago when Atari (delenda est) – the terrible videogame publisher that directly caused the 1983 console gaming crash – decided that the thing the world really needed was a crappy Android-powered Ouya clone shaped like an Atari 2600 console, preloaded with a library of ROMs for games so bad they aren’t even worth the few megabytes of space the entire collection occupies in an Emulator folder? Yeah, that was fun, and the failure of the Atari VCS soon lead the pathetic, shambling corpse of one of Gaming’s worst villains to dabble in creating their own cryptocurrency casino. That was even more fun.
Of course, you can’t keep a good terrible company down, and it looks like Atari (delenda est) is trying the retro-console thing again, only this time they're puppeting the corpse of one of their biggest opponents from way back then (who went on to do literally nothing): Intellivision. Promoting their new endeavor as finally burying the hatchet from the first …
Gamepass Bears its First Fruits: -$300 Million for ‘CoD’ Revenue
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/12/25 at 03:06 PM CT
Oh dear, it looks like Microsoft’s endeavors to become Gaming’s loss-leader with Gamepass have already started to bear rotten fruits. According to a recent Bloomberg report, the Xbox Division managed to leave $300 million dollars on the table by putting Activision-Blizzard’s latest ‘Call of Duty’ game on Gamepass day-one instead of simply selling more retail and digitally licensed copies.
While I personally find it baffling that ‘CoD’ is still popular enough to drive those kinds of sales numbers and potentially bring in that kind of revenue, what is NOT baffling is the concept that giving away an entire library of $60 $70 games for less than $20 a month is probably not sustainable in the long-run...
...Which explains why Microsoft also faced extreme backlash and mass cancellations by Gamepass users in response to the announcement that Gamepass Ultimate will essentially be the only version of the service worth subscribing to AND that the Ultimate tier will …
Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/05/25 at 04:11 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! It looks like we’re getting a late start on the games coming in Spoopy Month, since I was so flabbergasted by last week’s news of EA’s impending doom at the hands of private equity that it interrupted the flow. But now that every retail location is crammed with tacky, plastic skeletons and other Halloween-related junk; while grocery stores are stocked with Pumpkin Spice and Apple Cider... everything, there’s a definite hint of Autumn in the air, even if the weather itself is still insisting that it’s Summer (and it’s not even an Indian Summer, where it gets hot again after a hard freeze, like we’ve always had in the Midwest... It’s just still summer, even though the crops are all done, dried, and (mostly) harvested.
Do the remaining maggots gnawing on the dried-out sinew of the corpse of Industrial Gaming still think it’s Summer – and thus a drought – or have they moved on? Let’s take a look at the variety …
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