Bye-Bye Polygon: The Latest Victim of the “New” Media Collapse
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/04/25 at 05:26 PM CT
News broke this past week that the second-worst site for gaming news, reviews, and information, Polygon, had been sold by parent company Vox Media, and faces a 20% staff layoff and potential shuttering in the near future. The new owner is Valnet, an Arab-owned Canadian media conglomerate known widely for its low-quality content and contentious click-bait headlines… so Polygon should fit right in!
As the Big Tech monopolies continue to consolidate their power with the help of AI driven tools, it seems that traditional media, new media, and even social media no longer have a relevant place in the journalism landscape. Where Google used to give small sites the ability to support themselves and even grow into big sites through its reasonable – or even generous – advertising rates, that has changed over the years to the point where the only way for news sites – of any kind, not just gaming-related or nerd-related – to keep the lights on is to charge a subscription or get …
Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/27/25 at 05:14 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! We got quite a few April Showers (and hailstorms, and tornadoes…), but will they bring May Flowers? They always do… but that doesn’t mean the Games Industry will benefit any! Let’s see what the Corporate Suits at the big publishing houses and platform holders have deigned to spurt forth as the last hurrah before the inevitable Summer Game Drought.
Well, the good news is, there’s no Licensed Swill slated for May. There’s only a little bit of Casual Swill that could have gone under “PlayStation Exclusives,” but I don’t want to be that mean: Two “Hidden Object” games with “Hidden Object” in the title. Wow. In Annualized Swill, we’ve got a new entry in the ‘F1’ series. Finally, in Notable Ports, the ‘Super Mario RPG’-inspired “Born of Bread” will be leaving PC exclusivity behind to live on PlayStation and Nintendo (LOL, Xbox).
In multi-platform releases we’ve got half-a-dozen titles to look …
10 Animes that Might Help Reignite the Old Spark
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/21/25 at 12:04 AM CT
Everyone on the MJ Crew (except Nick) used to be avid fans of anime – the Japanese flavor of animation that initially started out as a rip-off of Disney before moving in its own decidedly-bizarre and unmistakably-Japanese direction – but we’ve really fallen out of the habit as of late. I was pondering why this was, and it essentially boils down to a few factors: 1) The rampant success of shonen anime like “One Piece” and “Naruto” absolutely flooded the pipeline with similar fare, 2) The online communities we were part of either stopped recommending good anime, stopped recommending anime altogether, or decided that anime was sexist and bigoted and should be actively fought against, and 3) After a few poor choices in DVD/Blu-Ray purchases that turned out to be duds, we became leery about going into any new series blind.
Recently, however, I’ve been using the free “Roku Fast Channels” on my living room TV to watch streaming programming as if these channels were …
ESA’s Mask Slips, Revealing that the Dire Condition of Games Preservation is Intentional
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/13/25 at 01:03 PM CT
Did you know that 87% of videogames released before 2010 are no longer commercially available? The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) knows, and it turns out they LIKE it that way!
In a 16 minute expose, tech YouTuber, Bellular News, goes into the gory details, revealing just how intentionally-terrible “games preservation” efforts, videogames in the public domain, and modern copyright laws are.
It turns out that videogames are being treated as a “special” case, wherein, despite the fact that games are both art and tech simultaneously, they are excluded from all of the copyright exceptions that protect other forms of media, such as film and books. As a result, it is proving next to impossible for legitimate Games Preservationists – not just wannabes like GOG.com – to build legitimate game lending libraries within the structure of the Law.
And why is it so difficult to work out such a library? Because the Corporate Overlords squatting at the top of …
All is Not Well as GOG Floats Subscriptions in New Survey
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/05/25 at 07:51 PM CT
Oh dear! Last we heard of Steam’s most competent competitor, GOG (formerly known as Good Old Games, but changed the name when they started to add BAD old games and newer Indie games to their catalog), the Polish company was getting into bed with Jeff Bezos via an unwholesome and unwelcome alliance with Amazon.
Amazon’s only real claim to fame within the Gaming hobby is its web services, powering both the Twitch ‘creator’ streaming platform and the Luna gamestreaming service. Conversely, GOG has built up a reputation over several decades as being pro-Gamer, pro-consumer, pro-preservation, anti-DRM, and anti-corporate. Now it seems that our former friends in Poland are going to throw all of that away.
In a new survey (which is already closed) e-mailed out to GOG members last weekend, the platform holder nonchalantly asked members what they would like to see from a subscription-based model to “support” GOG’s games preservation activities. While the survey starts out …
Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/30/25 at 04:54 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April is here, and, naturally, the Fools are out in full force. It won’t be long now until the little darlings who make up the bulk of gaming’s target demographic are out of school for the Summer and the big players in Industrial Gaming decide to turn off the tap again. Let’s see if Mid-Spring has anything for us to get excited about.
Is there shovel-ready crap coming in April? Of course there is! And it’s coming in all three major flavors of Shovelware. In Licensed Swill there’s a new ‘Care Bears’ game… what is this, 1984? In Casual Swill, there’s a new ‘Big Buck Hunter’ title for deer hunting fanatics who would rather bag imaginary trophies during the off season than hunt something else or go to the shooting range, and a “100 in 1 Game Collection” that wouldn’t feel out of place as the pre-installed content on a Chinese bootleg console. Lastly, in Annualized Swill, we’ve got entries in ‘MotoGP’ …
Legitimize Mobile Gaming? Microsoft Doesn’t Think So!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/23/25 at 02:07 PM CT
The last time I took a look at the state of mobile gaming, it was in those halcyon days of 2019, before the COVID pandemic made the entire world a duller, gloomier place to live. Back then, Apple and Google were trying to tame the monster they unleashed upon the world with a muzzle shaped like perpetual subscriptions. Unsurprisingly, very little has changed within the mobile gaming ecosystem, and ad-infested microtransaction engines providing the absolute bare minimum of interest and functionality have continued to clog the app stores, making it next to impossible to find anything legitimately good to play on a mobile device that isn’t already a straight-up port of a PC/console game.
For a while, though, it seemed that Microsoft was going to flex its muscle as the still-dominant OS manufacturer, by creating a way to access Android apps – through the Amazon storefront, NOT Google Play – on Windows 11 devices. To me, it seemed that Microsoft was hoping for two things to …
Former Exec: Microsoft Should Quit Gaming
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/16/25 at 05:28 PM CT
Well, well, looks like it’s time to add another voice to the ever-growing choir of people who think Xbox should just go away. Enter one Bobby Kotick, who looks like a cross between some sort of sheep and a Wizarding World goblin, the former CEO of Activision-Blizzard(-King) before Microsoft initiated the purchase of the massive Industrial Gaming publisher to use it as fertilizer for the ever-struggling Xbox Division back in 2022.
In a recent interview, Kotick, now free from the shackles of Microsoft as a redundant executive unleashed a full salvo of disparaging comments about the Xbox Division. According to Kotick, Xbox was near death before the merger, and Microsoft’s desperation to acquire Activision was spurred by the fact that only the infusion of a massive existing customer base could possibly jump-start Xbox’s flagging life-signs. Prior to the Activision/Xbox deal, Kotick had even advised Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, that purchasing Activision in order to feed it to …
He’s Everywhere IX!: Yu-Gi-Oh! Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/09/25 at 01:24 PM CT
It’s that time of year, again! The coming of March means that MeltedJoystick’s favorite non-Euclidian Elder Thing, Chris, is another year older and another year more madness-inducing. Last year, I opened Chris up to the wonderful world of Name, Image, Likeness Lawsuits that he could level at the Indie Games cottage industry.
This year, since I’ve spend an inordinate amount of time enjoying the Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Game, Duel Monsters, via the “Master Duel” mobile app, I’ve been exposed to tons of bizarre, Japanese monsters drawn from the imagination of the late, great Kazuki Takahashi… and let’s just say that Mr. Takahashi obviously had Chris on the Brain.
10. Big Belly Knight"Starting off this way seems a bit on the nose… but I couldn’t help myself."
9. Il Blud"We know Chris’ internal world is an undead hellscape full of horrors, and Il Blud does a good job of representing that. He also looks like Chris wearing Beetlejuice’s pajamas."
8. …
Review Round-Up: Winter 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/02/25 at 01:28 PM CT
Welcome back to another installment of the MeltedJoystick Review Round-Up. Here’s what our staff has reviewed since last time:
Nelson’s Reviews:
Once again, the entire MJ Crew was pretty much in the doldrums and didn’t do a whole lot of gaming over the gloomy Winter months. But at least I did get started on my Backlog Ablutions, clearing the shortest of my three titles and actually experiencing genuine JOY while gaming for the first time in a while.
“7 Days to Die” – 1.5/5
“Hogwarts Legacy” – 3.5/5
“TinyKin” – 4.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris also got started on his Backlog Ablutions, and has been playing “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” fairly non-stop since the holiday break. Of course, he still has to make time for his day job, two evenings per week (provided Nick hasn’t caught the plague again), and Saturday afternoons for couch coop, so he still hasn’t finished it. But at least he did submit some overdue reviews for our enjoyment… though …
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