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Opinion

Tokyo Game Show: Flashy booths mask economic and industry anxiety | Opinion

by admin October 3, 2025

Although Japanese games are finding increasing presence in the global gaming marketplace, something felt off when visiting Makuhari Messe for this year’s Tokyo Game Show (TGS).

Many of the big companies in Japanese console and PC gaming held relatively light showcases, limited to already released titles or games set to release within the coming weeks and months.

Sega’s biggest games on display were Sonic Racing: Crossworlds, which was released on day one of TGS, and Like a Dragon 3: Kiwami, the newly announced remake of the early PS3 title. Konami had the Japan-only latest entry in the Momotaru Densetsu series, a sequel to the best-selling third-party title in Japan and set for release in just six weeks’ time, along with Silent Hill f, another title that had already been released by the time the show kicked off.

Silent Hill f | Image credit: Konami

Level-5 were present at the event to showcase Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road and Professor Layton and the New World of Steam, set for release in November and 2026, respectively. But the company had already showcased these two games at last year’s event, where Level-5 also had Fantasy Life i on show. Other titles on their slate – such as Decapolice, showcased with a public demo at TGS in 2023 but delayed to 2026 to address feedback – were nowhere to be seen.

Similar summaries can be given for Sony, Square Enix, and Bandai Namco: the latter’s showcase was limited to new entries releasing this autumn in the Digimon, Little Nightmares, and Katamari series.

Rather than offering a glimpse into the future of next year or beyond, the show felt absent of anything exciting for those playing on console or PC. Indeed, aside from Capcom – whose booth was by far the most popular as it shared the first domestic glance of their 2026 lineup, including Resident Evil: Requiem (with a global-debut preview of the Switch 2 version) and Pragmata – Japanese publishers and developers were not the draw for many fans attending TGS.

Why were Japanese developers lacking in new titles, and what was capturing the imagination of fans instead? To understand that, it may be worth first leaving the showfloor and looking elsewhere.

Akihabara may have lost some of its lustre as Japan’s otaku capital on the cutting-edge of Japanese anime and gaming culture, but it’s still a strong indicator of what hardcore audiences of these mediums are engaging with most. Visit the city recently, however, and you’ll notice something has changed. Billboards that were once plastered with promotions for major upcoming anime and games are near-permanently rotated between an array of promotions for in-game events for ongoing free-to-play titles from East Asian studios based outside Japan, like Genshin Impact.

Animate Akihabara, Japan’s biggest anime retailer, currently promotes the Nikke collaboration with Resident Evil at its entrance. The central exit of Akihabara Station has even been renamed after Yostar, the Shanghai-based developer and publisher of Azur Lane and Blue Archive.

While the mobile free-to-play boom of the 2010s may have reached its apex with a strong recovery of traditional gaming propelled by the Nintendo Switch, that’s not to say these games don’t remain a dominant part of the Japanese gaming landscape. In-app purchases for mobile games reached $11 billion in 2024 according to Sensor Tower, and considering the growing trend of these free-to-play titles finding an audience on console and PC alongside the minimal appetite for premium titles, it’s likely the true spend on free-to-play games in Japan is higher than these reported numbers.

What differentiates the free-to-play market today in Japan compared with ten or even five years ago is how much more difficult it is to launch a successful new title against established favourites in the sector. Without brand recognition at the developer or IP level, you need to do something to get your game in front of as many people willing to spend money as possible.

Anything that can help a title to stand out and increase brand awareness can make a difference, and TGS is a high-profile way to make an impression. That said, it’s a risk – while a 3m x 3m booth can cost as little as 385,000 yen, a large-scale booth can cost millions of yen before staffing and construction.

In a preview of the 2025 CESA Video Game Industry Report handed to the press attending TGS, one thing stood out: while the Japanese games industry did grow by 3.4% last year to 2,396 billion yen, this growth can mostly be attributed to the mobile gaming market. Indeed, the console market has shrunk from 395 billion yen to 383 billion yen since 2020. The market for non-mobile gaming has only grown overall in this period thanks to the more than 100% growth in the PC market, from 122 billion yen to 265 billion yen in the same period.

For every demographic between 5 and 60 years old, mobile player counts among Japanese players either remain in line with players on console or, for those aged 15 years or older, exceed it.

While the most common primary or secondary platform for console or mobile players is Nintendo Switch, even the Nintendo DS and 3DS era of consoles is more popular than both the PS4 and, below that, PS5 in the eyes of the general population, where much of the high-budget headline-grabbing major games are being developed. With a PS5 costing 80,000 yen, compared with the 50,000 yen for a Switch 2, it’s simply too pricey for many players (something that’s also a factor in terms of the player base for the console skewing older).

The big money is in mobile gaming, and getting even a small slice of that pie can lead to big returns. The risk is worth taking.

Every year at TGS, alongside the typical line-up of major Japanese publishers and select international partners, a few free-to-play titles take to the show floor. By spending big on a flashy booth with even flashier female models handing out fliers and freebies, they hope to generate word of mouth on their upcoming or already launched free-to-play games. This year, it felt overwhelming seeing how many of these booths littered the show floor, and to what extreme lengths they would go to provoke attention from the hordes of players attending the event.

Lots of the buzz on the show floor centred around Ananta

They filled the void left by a lack of eye-catching games to command long lines from major studios. Instead, in terms of already released titles, fans flocked to booths for Love and Deepspace, Infinity Nikki, Nikke, and more in order to take photos with their favourite characters, snag exclusive merchandise, and interact with other fans. Among the unreleased games vying for the attention and anticipation of attending fans, lots of the buzz on the show floor centred around Ananta, the new free-to-play open-world action game developed by Naked Rain and published by NetEase, targeting PC, PS5, and mobile.

The game consistently enjoyed long lines throughout the event, with large backpacks designed after the game’s main character ever present on the show floor throughout. While online reactions have noted the game’s many similarities to the likes of Insomniac’s Spider-Man titles, Like a Dragon, Uncharted, Grand Theft Auto, and more, reaction from those playing the demo was relatively positive. For all that it aped these popular games from other studios (personally, I felt it also wasn’t fully able to mesh these ideas or refine them enough to be enjoyable in their own right or feel cohesive in the same project), many relished the idea of enjoying these mechanics within a more appealing anime aesthetic tailored to the Asian and Japanese markets.

Among the other free-to-play games enjoying long lines at the show were Smilegate’s Miresi: Invisible Future and another NetEase title, Sword of Justice.

Players at Tokyo Game Show 2025 | Image credit: Alicia Haddick

There are other reasons these games are once again growing in the post-COVID Japanese market, years after the initial mobile boom came to an end. Though the huge player numbers and overall market spend are eye-catching figures for studio executives, the spend per user on mobile games is significantly lower than those who are primarily console or PC players. High revenue is offset by high spenders, a point emphasized by a recent survey noting 18.8% of respondents admitted prioritizing gacha spending over essentials including rent.

While Japanese players are more willing to spend money on free-to-play games – Sensor Tower research noted that although 80% of Japanese mobile game downloads came from overseas, revenue for these titles came 70% from domestic players – there remains a significant portion of the Japanese player base for these games that engages with these titles without spending anything.

With the trend for more high-budget free-to-play titles, like Hoyoverse’s Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail alongside many of the titles on display at this year’s TGS, these games offer cash-strapped players a chance to still enjoy high-budget, flashy action and graphics without needing to buy a new device beyond the essential phone they already own, at a time where many Japanese people are cash-strapped in economically strained times.

Some who choose against in-game spending will instead spend money on merchandise

After decades of relative price and wage stagnation, inflation without similar increases in the average wage (the cost of rice has increased by 100% in just 12 months to above 4,000 yen for a 5 kg bag) has left many Japanese people struggling to spend money on luxuries such as gaming. Coupled with the fact that the most successful free-to-play games enjoy a vast multimedia empire peppered with pop-up stores and merchandising, cafe collaborations, and more, these games offer a chance for players to embrace not just a game, but a lifestyle.

Some who choose against in-game spending will instead spend money on merchandise centring their favourite characters, allowing people to show off their hobbies to friends without the initial high cost of entry. They can meet and participate in in-person activities that merge their hobbies with socializing. It’s luxury on a budget – a chance to go out eating and do fun events with friends, without sacrificing other hobbies in order to do so.

In such a market, the key to success comes in encouraging the most intense players to part with their money, something that translates to more extreme public showcases. Sex sells, and in a flashback to the 2000s, a number of sexually demeaning booths sought to attract the eyes of hardcore players with raunchy displays and fan service.

Nikke’s booth, for the second year running, offered a “human gacha,” where players could simulate the roll for new characters in-game by pressing a button to reveal suggestive cosplayers in boxes reminiscent of the in-game character reward screen.

Nikke’s booth at Tokyo Game Show 2025 | Image credit: Alicia Haddick

Miresi: Invisible Future – found on the show floor directly next to the family-friendly offerings of Sonic proudly showcasing its Minecraft collaboration – grabbed attention by showcasing “the artistic vision of AD Kim Hyung-seop (Hyulla)” on a 5.5 metre LED cube. This mostly resulted in the rather scantily clad main character’s butt and chest jiggling endlessly and unavoidably for all to see.

It felt demeaning, but if these can attract the players who will spend the excesses of money needed to pull these characters in-game and keep the game afloat, this will be viewed as a success regardless.

In an attempt to earn maximum money and cut budgets in a time when game spending is tight, it should be no surprise that the same 2025 games industry report found that 51% of Japanese developers stated they are embracing generative AI in development. Indeed, there was a full pavilion on the TGS show floor dedicated to the technology: a pavilion that pushed the actual artistic output of a curated selection of indie games away from the main show floor and into the corridors above the convention floor itself, demeaning it to a sideshow outside the view of most attendees.

The rise of AI, the exploitative nature of the manner in which these free-to-play titles were being showcased, alongside the lack of major titles from Japanese publishers and developers, made this an uncomfortable TGS to visit on both business and public days.

It’s no secret that as the industry undergoes a post-COVID realignment of expectations, companies are slashing budgets and cancelling games. While firms like Square Enix are publicly acknowledging the fact they are adjusting their approach to games development and cancelling titles, the true scale of cancellations is likely to be far larger, with many titles that have never been publicly announced getting the chop.

It’s hard not to view TGS in 2025 as representing the anxieties of the industry and its players

Layoffs in Japan are not as prevalent as has been seen internationally (in part due to local labour laws), thus helping studios to retain institutional knowledge that is being lost elsewhere. But many developers I’ve spoken to acknowledge that they are choosing not to renew the contracts of temporary workers instead of letting full-time employees go.

However, it would be naive to pin this year’s shift in balance on a temporary course correction rather than a decade-long trend of economic uncertainty, which has forced players to reconsider their spend on new games and instead find experiences within the rising free-to-play market. Far from needing a full trade show to expose it, the popularity of free-to-play mobile titles has been easy to spot online and by glancing at the phones of people playing on the train. To ignore this trend would be to ignore the more existential concerns facing the future of gaming both inside and outside Japan.

While respect for Japanese games and media is growing, it’s hard not to view TGS in 2025 as representing the anxieties of the industry and its players, rather than its virtues. The worries of developers about budgets and the need to scale back, the worries of players about how to afford new consoles and games, and how to keep enjoying a hobby they love. Solving these issues will require economic intervention that goes far beyond gaming.

In the meantime, how will the games industry adjust to this financial and social realignment? I’m not sure TGS 2025 had the answers, but it sure staked a claim at the future.

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October 3, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Retailers were always going to drop Xbox over Game Pass | Opinion

by admin September 26, 2025

The decision by Costco to drop Xbox hardware from its stores may feel like a milestone, but the road on which that milestone is located is one we’ve been travelling for quite some time.

Bricks-and-mortar retailers have been gradually shrinking the shelf space devoted to Xbox for several years, and in many countries, it’s increasingly rare to find Xbox products even on online retailers.

Specialist retailers still stock Xbox products, of course, but generalist retailers are tapping out. It’s not a stretch to imagine that within the next year or so, Xbox products will be almost exclusively the preserve of specialist outlets and Microsoft’s own online store.

A decade ago, retail giving up on Xbox in this way would have been a serious warning sign, interpreted as an indicator that Microsoft was on the way out of the console business entirely.

Now, though, the signals are a bit more mixed. Only this week we saw data suggesting that Xbox owners are more actively engaged than gamers on other platforms (at least in terms of the number of games they play), and Microsoft and Asus opened preorders for the high-end Xbox-branded gaming handhelds they have co-created. By some metrics, Microsoft’s games business is certainly active, and even healthy.

Regardless, it would take an incredible amount of spin – and a very credulous audience – to claim that being dropped by mass-market retail is actually a good sign for Xbox. If the hardware were truly competitive with PlayStation and Switch in the market, this wouldn’t be happening. The significant price hikes earlier this year for consoles already being outsold by their competitors were just another nail in the coffin.

You can, however, frame these events a little more sympathetically in the context of Microsoft’s broader strategic shift. At every turn in recent years, Microsoft has doubled and tripled down on Game Pass. That is the absolute core of its gaming strategy, and the company has made clear that every other aspect of the business is secondary to the ambition of building the Game Pass pillar.

Doom: The Dark Ages from Microsoft-owned Bethesda Softworks was available day one on Game Pass | Image credit: Bethesda Softworks

Sales of the company’s first-party games, for example, almost certainly suffer because of launch day availability on Game Pass, but that’s seemingly judged to be an acceptable cost if it increases subscriber numbers and retention.

Retail sales are a sacrifice on the same altar. The success of Game Pass and of Microsoft’s digital distribution strategy more broadly has sidelined physical software sales to a greater extent on Xbox than on any other platform.

According to data provided to GamesIndustry.biz by Dorian Bloch at NielsenIQ/GfK Entertainment, Microsoft’s console accounted for just 11% of physical game sales in the UK in 2022, with Nintendo on 48% and Sony on 40%. The predicted numbers for 2025 are far lower, with Microsoft at just 6%, compared with 52% for Nintendo and 42% for Sony.

It’s a similar story in the US, where Mat Piscatella from Circana has confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz that Xbox is by far the most digital-forward platform, with sales of physical software on the platform trailing behind the numbers for Nintendo and Sony.

From the perspective of retailers, that makes it hard to justify supporting Xbox in a meaningful way. Sales of the hardware aren’t great to begin with (Bloch says that Microsoft claimed a 31% share of UK console sales in 2022, but that number is predicted to fall to just 13% in 2025), so with physical software sales dwindling to a trickle, Xbox just isn’t a good use of their bandwidth. Their decision to drop or de-emphasise the consoles in their stores and online platforms is perfectly logical given their own business incentives.

Does this still matter to any great extent, though? A decade ago, certainly, being dropped by major retailers would have been interpreted as a death knell – but today, Microsoft is in the Game Pass business, and Xbox consoles are just one way to access that multiplatform service.

Microsoft launched the “This is an Xbox” campaign in November 2024 | Image credit: Microsoft

The company understood perfectly well what it was doing when it launched the “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign. Effectively telling consumers that they don’t need an Xbox because they already own a device capable of playing Xbox games was always going to come at a cost to hardware sales.

Losing mainstream retail channels will be another blow to those sales, but if consumers are still engaging with Xbox and Game Pass on other devices, Microsoft will be satisfied with the trade-off.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that retail pulling back won’t hurt, however. That’s the nature of trade-offs; you may judge the transaction worthwhile overall, but that doesn’t mean that one side of the balance doesn’t hurt. The focus on Game Pass and the multiplatform strategy makes losing retail support far less impactful than it would have been in the past, but it does still matter.

Lacking physical retail presence for Xbox will rob it of certain opportunities to reach new consumers and market the platform. That is a particularly damaging prospect given that Sony and Nintendo still have healthy amounts of shelf space at retail. It will hurt more at specific points – in the pre-holiday sales season, for example, Xbox will now lack a presence in many of the venues where people are gift shopping.

It’s worth noting, though, that while Microsoft remains unique in the extent of its commitment to the subscription model for gaming, the shift to digital distribution is very much a factor for Sony and Nintendo as well. Their own digital transitions are also proceeding apace, and they may land them in a similar situation with mainstream retailers in the coming years.

Microsoft remains unique in the extent of its commitment to the subscription model for gaming

(Piscatella notes that spending on physical software in the US has fallen to just $1.6 billion for the 12-month period ending July 2025 – an all-time low since tracking began in 1995. By contrast, total spending on video-game content in the US amounted to $50.8 billion for the same period, according to data from Circana Games Market Dynamics and Sensor Tower.)

While Microsoft may be willing to accept disengagement from retail as a cost of its Game Pass strategy, that doesn’t mean it should ignore the need for damage control. Getting your products out in front of people in the real world remains an important part of the consumer sales process no matter what line of business you’re in.

As we turn to winter and the gift buying season approaches in many markets, the company would do well to explore alternative ideas for how to get Xbox and Game Pass in front of consumers. It may be able to afford dropping out of retail, but it certainly can’t risk dropping out of consumers’ headspace.

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September 26, 2025 0 comments

Esports

The industry can’t afford to overlook low-spec PCs | Opinion

by admin September 19, 2025

It is with a heavy heart and a note of regret that I inform you (those of you who have blessedly managed to avoid this knowledge thus far, at least) that Randy Pitchford is at it again.

I’ll spare you the specifics of the Gearbox boss’s latest social media escapades (if you’re interested, Nathan Brown had a very entertaining write-up in Hit Points this week), but the gist is simple. The company’s new game, Borderlands 4, has launched with some fairly significant performance issues, and Pitchford chose to address these in part by telling consumers that this is their own fault for not knowing how to use their PCs properly.

Not great! As it turns out, some of the performance issues also extend to consoles – for now, the suggested solution for what appears to be a memory leak causing performance to get worse and worse over time is to periodically reboot your console.

Gearbox is being much more constructive about fixing the issues than Pitchfork’s ill-tempered posting would suggest, too, quickly issuing a patch that fixed a few of the issues, and the studio is presumably working hard on further improvements. (The game itself, by all accounts, is very good once you get past the performance problems.)

Borderlands 4 has reviewed well, but users have reported PC performance issues | Image credit: Gearbox Software/2K

A company boss ill-advisedly lashing out at his own consumers is deserving of rolled eyes, but not of too much attention – any discussion focusing on that aspect is inevitably going to be far more heat than light.

This whole affair doesn’t live in isolation, though; it’s just the latest chapter in the ongoing narrative of not one, but two of the biggest bugbears consumers have with the games business.

The first of those is something of a closed case, even if it remains a source of intense annoyance for many consumers. I refer to the whole question of the validity of shipping games that are clearly broken in some key technical ways, with the intention of quickly patching them after launch.

The perception of games as an expensive hobby is arguably the single biggest threat facing the industry right now

That’s a debate and a source of frustration that’s as old as the ability to patch games itself. I have some sympathy for the old-school view that we were all better off back when console games lived on a read-only disc or cartridge and couldn’t be patched, given the extent to which that capacity is now abused.

The argument overall was lost many years ago, though, and if anything platform holders have become increasingly permissive about the technical state of software releases and the use of day-one patches. PC, of course, has always been the Wild West in this regard anyway.

What is much more pressing, and far more active, is the discussion over game pricing and the cost of gaming as a hobby. Pitchford waded into that a while back by arguing that real fans of Borderlands would pay $80 for the game, though it did eventually launch at $70. Whether he intended to or not, his latest comments also jab directly on that exposed nerve.

The perception of games as an expensive hobby is arguably the single biggest threat facing the industry right now. The facts about inflation and development costs are much less important than the perception and emotions around this topic. Consumers shifting to a belief that games are expensive and overpriced undermines one of the key pillars of the medium’s appeal, namely its excellent value in terms of entertainment received for money paid.

“Why am I going to spend $80 for this game when Fortnite is here?” asked Circana’s Mat Piscatella in a recent analysis of game pricing | Image credit: Epic Games

We’ve talked a lot in the past few months about console pricing, and AAA game pricing, and even the potential re-engagement with “whale” strategies as a recession countermeasure for some games. Alongside these, it’s also worth discussing the occasionally staggering increases in the cost of PC hardware, especially since PC gaming is often presented as a refuge from the rising prices of console hardware and software.

Rising PC hardware costs are nothing new. The cost of many key components, especially of GPUs, has been climbing for years, and the incremental benefits of upgrades have not always been impressive. The run on GPUs for cryptocurrency mining priced many gamers out of that market in particular.

The rise of AI hasn’t had quite the same effect (not least since Nvidia has pushed out chips and devices that are more optimised for AI tasks than consumer GPUs), but it has helped to ensure that prices didn’t get a chance to drift back downwards after the crypto rush. New GPUs now can cost comfortably double or triple the price of a PS5 or Switch 2, even for relatively mid-range cards.

That wouldn’t be a huge problem if PC games addressed a wide range of specs, including being optimised for lower-spec machines running older hardware. That’s not an entirely unreasonable ask, given the prevalence of devices like laptops and Steam Decks. Notably, it’s precisely what Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney called for recently, noting that many developers create games for the highest-spec systems and then don’t put sufficient time and resources into optimising for lower-spec hardware.

Tencent Games’ Yong-yi Zhu has emphasised the importance of targeting low-spec PCs | Image credit: Tencent Games

In fact, the situation is arguably worse than Sweeney suggests in some key regards. A lot of new games are going in quite the opposite direction – leaning so heavily on upscaling technologies like DLSS and frame generation for performance as to be practically unplayable on a lot of systems without those technologies enabled.

That’s a problem, because those generative-AI-based technologies mostly require new hardware – GPUs from the last couple of generations, for example, are required for the best versions of both the relatively uncontroversial DLSS and the much more questionable (by which I mean that even to my untrained and myopic eye it looks like absolute rubbish in many games) frame generation tech.

High-end PCs will always be around and will always be a desirable status symbol for gamers. However, PCs can and should also be the industry’s strongest pitch for the affordability argument. They’re capable gaming devices that many, many people already own. You can play games on them through affordable storefronts without buying any expensive new hardware.

It’s a huge risk for the industry if we lose that possibility for PCs to function as entry points

That ought to be incredibly powerful positioning for the platform, but it means embracing low-spec systems, laptops, and yes, even Macs – which are pretty solid gaming devices in their own right now, and incredibly ubiquitous among college-age consumers who are a key demographic for the industry.

The ability to swim upstream and spend thousands on expensive GPUs, VRR capable monitors, and enough RGB lights to send your Christmas tree into early retirement has to be an option for the devoted few, not table stakes for getting involved in PC gaming.

It’s a huge risk for the industry as a whole if we lose that possibility for PCs to function as entry points for new consumers and good-value-for-money devices for those with lower spending power. That’s exactly what’s at risk if a failure to optimise for lower end systems becomes too widespread – leaving consumers with a bad taste in their mouth and a sense that they have to upgrade to play recent games.

Needless to say, it’s Tim Sweeney’s solution that’s by far the more workable approach; getting on social media to blame the gamers themselves for that situation helps nobody.

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September 19, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

MindsEye actor feared he may never work in games again following disastrous launch, but admits players are entitled to their opinion

by admin September 16, 2025

Alex Hernandez, the actor behind MindsEye protagonist Jacob Diaz, feared he may never work again following the game’s disastrous reception.

Build A Rocket Boy’s game launched to major criticism due to its glitches and bugs, not to mention shallow gameplay. Yet with his face on the game’s cover art, Hernandez is intrinsically linked to the game.

“It’s a difficult thing to spend two-and-a-half years on a project that you’re really proud of and you’re proud of your contribution to it,” said Hernandez on the latest FRVR Podcast. “And I only had positive experiences working on it. The people I was working with, I was proud for them, of them, I wanted it to be a success for them just as much for myself.”

MindsEye Review – Ridiculous, Inconsistent And Utterly AtrociousWatch on YouTube

He continued: “Just the response… I was like, ‘I might never work in a game again’. Because one of the caveats of being the face on the box is that people, rightly or wrongly, will associate all of their opinions and, more importantly their emotions, about this game with my face,” he said.

Still, Hernandez admits players are entitled to their opinions on the game, despite being on the receiving end of extreme vitriol.

“Gamers are a unique species, and I am one of them, where the attachment to the experience and the product is so strong, the feelings are so strong,” he said, “and the internet is an anonymous place where people will share things they would never share to your face, ever, even if they actually hated it… they just wouldn’t look you in the face and say, ‘everyone who worked on this game deserved to die. This is f**king awful, these guys are idiots’. No one would ever say that to your face. And, I think, at the same time, you’re entitled to that.”

Previously, Hernandez provided the voice and likeness for Lincoln Clay in Mafia 3, another game with a poor reception at launch.

“I’m not a superstitious man, but I can’t help but have some kind of Spidey Sense, like, ‘Is it just me?’ Do I have like the opposite of the golden touch, like the sh*t-brown touch, everything I touch turns to poop?” he joked.

Build A Rocket Boy has continued to update the game since, and promised it’s “committed” to enhancing the gameplay experience.

Still, the disastrous launch has put the future of publisher IOI Partners into question. “So, IO Interactive will publish our own games internally,” said IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak. “IOI Partners? That remains to be seen.”

“Although it shows some early promise, MindsEye is sunk by a ridiculous story, inconsistent writing, poorly designed mission scenarios, and utterly atrocious combat,” reads our MindsEye review.

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September 16, 2025 0 comments

Esports

How much impact will AI have on development? | Opinion

by admin September 12, 2025

The question of whether, where, and how to use generative AI in game development is one of the most controversial issues of recent years.

Engaging with the topic has the feeling of pressing your hands against a stove you already know to be scalding hot. There’s no position you can take that won’t attract the ire of those who consider AI to be an ethnically and morally bankrupt scam, those who are burning with FOMO terror of being left behind by a genuine technical revolution, or both of the above.

Lewis Packwood, of this parish, noted after Gamescom that the use of AI in various aspects of development is already widespread across the industry, albeit often kept quiet to avoid a furious consumer backlash. As he pointed out, however – and Bryant Francis at Game Developer explored in more depth this week – the question of whether AI actually speeds up development, and to what extent, remains up in the air.

The morality of AI and the immense amount of stolen work on which it is trained is both a personal question for each individual, and a much larger question for courts and legislators. The practical question of whether it even works as claimed, though, is an important one for those running businesses, especially those feeling those FOMO pangs keeping them awake at night.

In an environment where many studios really don’t want to risk their use of AI becoming public knowledge, however, there’s a stark lack of comparative case studies or emerging best practices – an information blackout in which, I fear, some snake oil salesmen are gleefully setting up shop.

The problem AI purports to assist with is, after all, a truly existential issue for many studios. Lots of companies are struggling with development cycles that are growing out of control – an immense problem given that the industry’s business model generally means you don’t make any money until you launch (Early Access models aside). That’s a hell of a tough thing to handle financially if your development cycles are growing past the five-year mark (and in some cases heading towards the decade line).

Seven years on from the formation of The Initiative, the Perfect Dark reboot was cancelled and the studio closed after the game became stuck in development hell

Finding any way to wrangle those timeframes back under control is a key focus for a lot of studio heads. It’s only natural for them to be receptive to a technology promising to massively boost productivity across the board for everything a studio does – code, art, animation, sound, you name it, AI companies claim they can speed it up.

The problem is that while it’s clear that AI can be very useful in limited, narrow use cases, as a tool supervised by a human expert, those cases are a long way from the ideal being sold by the AI companies themselves, of autonomous agent tools delivering gigantic productivity boosts.

Consider the programming side of things. Code is arguably the ideal field for generative AI, since while it’s a very highly skilled and knowledge-driven industry, many of the tasks involved are inherently repetitive. Much of a coder’s time is spent either repeating patterns from their own prior work or seeking out solutions to problems other people have already tackled before them.

It’s not reliable enough to be let loose to do things on its own

It’s unsurprising that generative AI, which is essentially a huge pattern matching system that figures out what’s likely to come next based on what it sees before, has many genuine uses here.

A skilled programmer who’s already expert in their field can absolutely use AI judiciously to speed up their output, essentially treating it as a glorified autocomplete that’s just smart enough to be able to save a lot of repetition and boilerplate typing, as well as generating reasonably good function documentation, among other things.

This is how most skilled developers are using AI today. It’s not reliable enough to be let loose to do things on its own, but it can save time and let you iterate faster (especially in the prototype phase, in which some bugs or inefficiencies aren’t a total showstopper), as long as a skilled coder carefully supervises its output.

That’s clearly a useful thing. But it’s on an entirely different planet from the promises being made by AI companies to try to convince studios to make AI central to their workflows. Agentic AI being given free rein over entire codebases and completing tasks that used to need a human in the loop does not seem like a realistic paradigm for game development (or, honestly, for any kind of development beyond hobbyist projects, which are the only field in which this kind of “vibe coding” has any actual value).

So, while skilled coders might increase their productivity by a moderate amount (how much is debatable; some recent research suggests that while coders feel their output increasing, their measurable productivity gains are actually negative due to the amount of time spent squabbling with the AI’s weirder and less helpful impulses), the actual bottleneck many studios face remains in place – they still need to hire skilled, experienced coders, who are always expensive and often not easy to find.

The same essentially holds true for artwork and any other field. Generative AI might find some uses in terms of prototyping, and speed up that part of the process, which is where most studios seem to be experimenting with it now – churning out rough, AI-generated assets for prototypes and placeholders.

11-Bit Studios recently came under fire for placeholder AI-generated text in The Alters

This isn’t nothing, since a lot of projects sit in a development hell loop of endless prototyping for years, and being able to jazz up the quality of your demos and prototypes can help a lot in seeking funding or partnerships. However, the consensus seems to be that the assets produced by AI just aren’t consistent enough or of a high enough quality to be included in shipped games.

Again, hobbyists (“vibe artists”, I guess?) are making things a bit more confusing. They turn out individual pieces of high-quality-looking art, which is enough to convince non-experts that AI is capable of replacing actual 2D and 3D artists.

But for a studio trying to ship a high-quality game, it’s just not acceptable if your character’s number of fingers or teeth fluctuates wildly from image to image, if a generated animation oops-forgets the existence of arm bones for a couple of frames in a walk cycle, or if your generated 3D model collapses into a mess as soon as you try to apply level-of-detail calculations to its weird, janky mesh.

As with the code situation, the productivity benefits here are really debatable, not least because of the impact of trying to turn your artists into emergency fixers for broken AI-generated art instead of, well, actual artists. That’s understandably a task they’re far less motivated and interested in than they are in actually making things by themselves.

Studios still need to hire and pay skilled artists, because fixing broken assets is hard

Generative AI doesn’t fix labour shortages here either – studios still need to hire and pay skilled artists, because fixing broken assets is hard, and often harder than making the asset from scratch.

The problem that studios want to fix is simple – the skills required to make modern games are extremely valuable, and it’s hard to hire for these roles.

Skills shortages have been part and parcel of the industry for at least as long as I’ve been around; initiatives to try to solve skills gaps in the UK games industry were one of the first topics I wrote about when I started working on a trade paper all the way back in 2001. Even after the thousands of layoffs across the industry in recent years, skills shortages are still being felt keenly in many areas, often due to mismatches between the skills and locations of those on the job market, and the needs and locations of the companies hiring.

That’s what makes the GenAI pitch so appealing to studios. It glibly promises to solve the skills problem at last, and non-experts can even see it working on a small scale – autocompleting a code template, or turning out an impressive looking bit of concept art.

Combine that with the expansive yet dubious promises of companies whose entire existence is predicated on showing enough growth to attract fresh billions in funding, with little consideration to customer satisfaction in the medium or long term, and it’s enough to convince many people.

Failure to understand how poorly this technology scales to larger, more complex problems requiring high levels of consistency and understanding will, I fear, prove fatal for some early adopters – sinking some projects, and possibly even some studios.

AI will be more limited and of lower impact than its evangelists wish to claim

Consumer backlash is the lesser of the risk factors in these cases, because if you’re determined to believe in the alleged miracles AI is promising (just one more data centre bro, I swear, just one more petabyte of stolen intellectual property, we’ll get working agents for sure bro), there’s a good chance you’ll be very deep into the rabbit hole before it becomes clear that you need to bring in expensive, hard-to-hire experts to fix the mess that’s been made of your codebase and asset catalogue.

The genie isn’t going back into the bottle, and AI is going to find a place in development – but it will be more limited and of lower impact than its evangelists wish to claim, and some studios are going to have to learn that the very, very hard way.

After decades of wrestling with skill shortages, I can sympathise with those who don’t want to look this gift horse in the mouth – but they’d do well to remember that there’s another saying about things that seem too good to be true, and how those generally turn out.

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September 12, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Porting your mobile game to web browsers is a low-effort way to gain a fresh revenue stream | Opinion

by admin September 6, 2025

Pavel Polovinka is head of publishing at Playgama, a platform for the distribution and monetization of HTML5 games.

What happens when you hop from the mobile gaming market into the web one? Can you compare the two? Is there any point to this?

The short answers to these questions are: ‘almost effortless user acquisition’, ‘to some extent’, and ‘undoubtedly’.

The web game market is relatively tiny compared with mobile. But it’s also a growing market.

More to the point, it can be relatively easy to port your mobile title to HTML5 and distribute it to the various web platforms. The potential revenue might be much smaller than on mobile – but by ignoring the web market, you’re leaving money on the table.

Case study

Here’s an example of how Playgama enabled a pair of mobile games to find a new audience and revenue stream.

StoreRider, an all-in-one distributor of Android games on alternative stores, decided to venture into the web game market, and asked Playgama to help them. Most of the time, we provide our services to studios or web-oriented publishers, so StoreRider was a new type of client to work with.

StoreRider is a unique enterprise in many ways. It helps developers earn more from existing mobile games by distributing them outside the usual platforms, such as the App Store and Google Play. Instead, StoreRider explores alternative channels such as the Epic Games Store, One Store, telecom subscriptions, in-flight entertainment, US facilities, and web exports.

StoreRider initially uploaded two games – Gangsta Island: Crime City and Vikings: an Archer’s Journey, originally developed by Pinpin Team – to platforms including Playgama and Crazy Games. But after reaching around 500,000 play sessions, the company soon recognised the market potential and decided to cast a larger net.

Complications

StoreRider’s expertise lies in mobile, and the company didn’t have the time to optimize the source code for all of the different web platforms – let alone connect with the key publishers and drudge through compliance.

Take, for example, Facebook’s guide for Instant Games. One must spend hours reading through checklists, then days trying to adjust the game to fit the requirements. On top of that, there is the registration process, SDK integration, and support.

Multiply every step by the number of platforms one wants to be presented on, then again by the number of games, and the gargantuan amount of jobs to do starts to block the sun.

Initially, we didn’t plan to add any new features to the two StoreRider games. The idea was to obtain the source code for both of them and then integrate our SDK, which enables compatibility with any web platform.

Gangsta Island: Crime City | Image credit: Store Rider

However, we decided to go a little further. We optimized both games so that they would work flawlessly on mobile browsers within the WebGL context, and we increased the max memory usage capacity to guarantee smooth gameplay (thus reducing loading times and lowering the churn rate).

We also localized Vikings: An Archer’s Journey to 15 languages, and Gangsta Island: Crime City to three, and we added asynchronous saves and engagement tools, such as ‘Share with friends’, to plug into Facebook’s social mechanics.

Finally, we published both games on Playgama, MSN Games, Facebook, Yandex Games, VK, Game Distribution, Lagged, and Y8.

The results, although modest by the standards of big publishers, were inspiring. Over three months, the games achieved over one million play sessions, a 20% day one retention rate, and number one position in the MSN top ten for several consecutive weeks.

There’s little sense in comparing these figures to the vastly larger mobile market. But the key takeaway is this: a mobile distributor was able to find a new revenue stream with close to no contribution on their part.

Right now, we’re publishing the polished versions of StoreRider’s games to even more platforms. Overall, the WebGL optimization service seems promising, as we expect more mobile devs and distributors to hedge their bets with web gaming.

A slice of the pie

Let’s backtrack to the questions we posed in the beginning. Currently, the web gaming market is considered a Plan B for the mobile crowd – and rightfully so.

The mobile market dwarfs the web market in terms of volume: the former was worth $106.5 billion in 2024, whereas the latter came in at just $16.77 billion in the same year. As such, the potential revenue is far lower.

If you don’t succeed on mobile, it costs close to nothing to win something back on the web

Still, it is crucial to keep in mind that the web market is far more accessible in terms of marketing spending and user acquisition. If you don’t succeed on mobile, it costs close to nothing to win something back on the web.

As a closer, here’s some food for thought. The number of web browser games has increased by 4.9 times over the past two years, and the HTML5 games market is projected to grow to $31.9 billion by 2030.

If you hunger for a piece of this pie, it’s better to get your metaphorical fork out now. Entering this niche has never been easier, even for mobile studios and distributors.

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September 6, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Console pricing has gone terribly wrong | Opinion

by admin September 5, 2025

Monster Hunter Wilds is one of the best-selling games of the year – which makes it all the more notable that Capcom president Tsujimoto Haruhiro sees the market position of the PS5 as a significant barrier to the game’s success.

In an interview with Nikkei, Tsujimoto said that the company has found the high price of the PS5 to be a major hurdle for consumers, which has turned out to be a serious obstacle to trying to build out a mass-market franchise like Monster Hunter.

Tsujimoto’s sentiments aren’t uncommon – I’ve heard plenty of industry executives voice concerns about high costs raising the barriers for entry in the console market in recent years.

What’s somewhat remarkable, though, is for such a direct criticism of Sony’s hardware and services pricing strategies to be made openly in a media interview – not least an interview with Nikkei, which is guaranteed to be seen by senior leadership at Sony.

Gaming hardware has never been cheap, per se, and you can certainly make an argument that once you adjust for inflation, launch prices for new consoles are actually quite low these days compared to the eye-watering price points new systems used to launch at. The original PlayStation’s inflation adjusted launch price was over $650; the PS2’s works out at $560.

However, within a matter of a few years those consoles were markedly cheaper thanks to a combination of price cutting and new lower-cost hardware revisions. The PS2 launched at $299 in 2000, but within two years it cost just $199, dropping to $149 – half its original price – after only four years in the market.

The PS5, by contrast, is now more expensive than it was at launch.

It arrived at $499 in 2020; five years later, the RRP is $549. A hardware revision to a slimmer version of the console was not accompanied by a price cut. The digital edition PS5 has had an even more dramatic price bump, rising from $399 at launch to $499 now, with reports suggesting that Sony is also about to try a sneaky “shrinkflation” move by cutting the capacity of the digital edition’s built-in storage.

This change hasn’t happened overnight – the PS4 also didn’t get anything like the extent of the price cutting seen in prior generations, though it did at least get a bit more affordable over its lifespan.

Its impact, though, is very significant, because it radically changes the entire promise of the console ecosystem to developers, publishers, and consumers – and it arguably makes entire classes of game completely commercially unworkable on console platforms.

When Tsujimoto calls out Sony’s pricing as a barrier to Monster Hunter’s success, he’s speaking from a position of keen awareness of precisely how that franchise was built to its current status.

Image credit: Capcom

Monster Hunter is a hugely mass-market game in Japan (and it’s getting there overseas as well, especially thanks to the success of World and now Wilds), and it got there essentially by appealing strongly to teenage players who had aged out of Pokémon and leapt on the PSP versions of the game as something to play co-operatively with their friends.

Around the tail end of the 2000s, the phenomenon of Monster Hunter was unavoidable in Japan; every mall food court in the country had at least one table of teenage boys taking down monsters together on their PSPs.

The game now has a significant adult contingent of players, of course (as does Pokémon, for that matter), but those were its roots – and the affordability and accessibility of the PSP platform in the latter years of its lifecycle were fertile soil in which those roots were planted.

That soil now risks becoming entirely barren.

Game consoles holding their pricing year after year, even sometimes seeing price bumps late in their lifespans, is a deeply unsettling trend for a lot of publishers. It means that game consoles (and to some extent PCs, whose hardware costs have soared even more) are being held out of the hands of consumers who lack significant purchasing power, especially children and teens.

These were never the biggest spenders, often being major consumers of second-hand software for cheap late-lifespan console revisions, but that was the industry’s on-ramp.

This was how the next generation of consumers was cultivated and developed, precisely so that years down the line you could have an opportunity to develop and build out a franchise like Monster Hunter for a whole wave of much higher-spending adults with money in their pockets and nostalgia in their hearts.

Kids and teens now turn to smartphones for their gaming needs, because those are the ubiquitous devices they have access to – and the clear risk for the console business is that if that’s where they start engaging, that’s where they’ll stay.

Just as the existence of the “family computer” which could be a reasonably competent gaming machine in its own right was a barrier to consoles in the 1990s, the fact that kids and teens all have a smartphone that’s a pretty competent gaming device in their pockets is a major barrier that’s significantly exacerbated by consoles having such an insanely high cost of entry.

The declining ubiquity of televisions is also a factor here – many teens having a small TV in their bedroom that they could hook up a cheap console to was once a given, but is now rare due to the proliferation of smart devices and collapsing TV viewership among that demographic, which is one of the things that has fuelled the success of the Switch.

Tsujimoto’s praise for the Switch 2 in the same interview is a nod to the fact that out of all of the platform holders, Nintendo is arguably the only one that acts like it’s genuinely concerned about pricing.

“A reconsideration of the value of cheaper, older hardware is one of the most obvious solutions to this problem”

It can’t change the reality of hardware costs, supply and demand, or tariffs, but it’s notable that the company has made a clear decision to subsidise the Switch 2’s Japanese model in order to ensure it remains affordable in that market despite the slide in the value of the Yen.

Nintendo is still pushing for higher software prices, but for all that consumers may wince at the price tag on the new Mario Kart, it makes more sense commercially to try to keep the console affordable – thus keeping the barriers to entry low – and recoup that subsidy from software profits.

For the industry more broadly, a reconsideration of how we think about the value of cheaper, older hardware is one of the most obvious solutions to this problem.

It’s what Nintendo has embraced with Switch, of course, and there’s a strong argument that the existence of the Xbox Series S is the single best strategic move Microsoft made with its hardware in this generation for similar reasons.

Sony’s lack of a similarly cost-competitive PS5 edition hasn’t harmed sales of the console in the first half of its lifecycle, but how it’s going to reach less engaged consumers in the back half of the lifecycle without price cutting is a very serious open question.

Another interesting place to look at older hardware is in the PC market. Comments about the Battlefield 6 beta this week suggested that a large number of players were running the game on PCs below the minimum spec requirements, which should give everyone pause about exactly how we’re thinking about minimum specs in the first place.

As modern hardware prices soar, the value of making games that run on outdated systems is only going to increase.

That could mean focusing on PC games that work well on older hardware (the Steam Deck, incidentally, is serving as a pretty excellent common denominator in the PC market for this reason) – but in the console market, it may also mean maintaining support for previous generations of hardware for much, much longer than used to be the case.

This is especially important for more mass-market games; it’s really notable that entire genres of casual, fun games like dancing, party, and music titles have basically disappeared as console hardware has priced itself out of casual markets.

“If today’s kids and teens aren’t engaging with PlayStation, it’s very unlikely they’ll start doing so as twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings”

Ultimately, though, there’s only so much publishers and creators can do – the solution to this has to come from the platform holder side. This is an existential threat for Sony in the long run – if today’s kids and teens aren’t engaging with PlayStation, it’s very unlikely they’ll start doing so as twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings.

It may be that the entire hardware philosophy of the company needs to shift to focus on affordability – or at least try to strike more of a balance with that requirement, because for all that PS5 has been a commercial success thus far, pricing is one area where the strategy is clearly very wrong both for PlayStation and for many publishers and developers.

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September 5, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Why are Switch 2 dev kits so hard to get? | Opinion

by admin August 29, 2025

Nintendo’s Switch 2 has leapt out of the gates at a stunning pace.

Circana’s latest figures show that it’s running 75% ahead of the sales of the original Switch – itself no slouch – at the same point in its lifespan. Those are US numbers, but most estimates from other markets suggest that the success is global.

Pent-up demand for a Switch successor and impressively good inventory and supply chain management on Nintendo’s part has created a runaway hit. If the company can stay on top of the supply chain and keep shelves well-stocked through the winter, it’ll almost certainly chalk up the strongest opening year of any console in history.

All the reporting of that soaraway success is probably only rubbing salt into the wound, however, if you’re one of the developers that hasn’t been able to get their hands on a Switch 2 dev kit.

Hard numbers on this are impossible to gauge, but much of the industry chatter around Switch 2 coming out of Gamescom has been about how many studios, including some with significant releases under their belts, are still waiting to receive development hardware.

Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the highest profile third-party titles at the Switch 2 launch

Most developers are extremely tight-lipped about anything to do with Nintendo, which is notoriously touchy about anything related to its behind-the-scenes business ending up in the press. Hence, even if it’s off-the-record, it is nonetheless noteworthy how many people seem willing to vent privately to journalists over the lack of access to dev kits, as Digital Foundry and others reported this week.

Of course, this being such an opaque situation, it could just be that there’s a big shipment of dev kits on the way, and everyone will be happy as can be in a few weeks. But that doesn’t entirely ring true, especially given that some studios are reportedly being told to focus their efforts on Switch 1 development and rely on backwards compatibility to reach Switch 2 players.

Conspiracy theories have swirled around the reports of the dev kit shortage, with many comments online speculating that it’s an attempt to control access to the hardware in order to protect its security from would-be hackers.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense in practical terms – it’s largely just a reflection of consumers’ ongoing focus on Nintendo’s heavy-handed efforts to crack down on unauthorised uses of the system.

A more believable explanation would be that the company is trying to exert some kind of quality control over early third-party Switch titles by prioritising dev kit access for teams that have passed some kind of internal vetting process.

That might be true, but it’s using some highly unusual criteria if so. Quite a few small studios with very limited track records have dev kits in hand, while some much more well-established teams have seemingly been left out in the cold.

Perhaps more compelling, then, is the notion that Nintendo is trying – a little chaotically – to control the transition between Switch and Switch 2, and to ensure that the early success of Switch 2 doesn’t result in a complete drought of third-party software for the original Switch (which still has a huge active userbase).

Given that it’s entirely possible to develop Switch titles that benefit from the higher specs of Switch 2 to deliver an enhanced experience, it’s credible that the company would want to push developers down that path for the first year or so, especially given that Switch sales were relatively strong right up to the launch window of its successor.

The thing is, though, that all of these explanations rest on an assumption that may be entirely unfounded – namely, that there’s actually a strategy in play here. It is equally likely that this is just Nintendo falling back on old habits.

Worries about third-party support swirled around the Wii U

Supporting third-party developers, especially smaller and independent studios, has not historically been the company’s strong point, and you only need go back to coverage in the trade press around the launch of Nintendo systems prior to the Switch to find complaints that are eerily similar to those now being heard.

Unlike Sony and Microsoft, which built their console business around encouraging and providing for third-party developers prior to developing their own strong studio line-ups, Nintendo has historically been primarily focused on developing first-party software for its own platforms, with third-party releases being, if not quite an afterthought, then certainly a distant second place.

That prioritisation is understandable when you look at the breakdown of software sales on Nintendo consoles, where first-party games absolutely dominate. With much of the remaining minority of third-party sales being accounted for by large publishers’ franchises, support for smaller partners is well down the list of the company’s priorities in the early stages of its consoles’ lifespans.

This has often resulted in limited access to development hardware, and some developers complain of weak support even for those studios that have the kits.

Nintendo has historically been primarily focused on developing first-party software for its own platforms

Even if looking at it from Nintendo’s point of view makes the under-resourcing of third-party developer relations make some commercial sense, that’s little comfort to studios that are unable to start working on Switch 2 titles even as the console sells by the millions. The solid commercial prospects for releasing on Switch 2 make it very hard to ignore for developers choosing target platforms – but for now at least, the path to bring software to market on the device seems to be a deeply frustrating and uneven one for many studios.

The light at the end of the tunnel, at least, is that on previous Nintendo platforms, these issues have largely been resolved over time, with access to dev kits becoming more plentiful and less haphazard as the months wore on. Although that’s cold comfort to those studios with games that are well-suited to Switch 2, but that are currently watching the days tick away without the hardware they need to start development in earnest for the system.

Nintendo will always march to the beat of its own drum. We can only hope that the coming months see that drumbeat start to move things along in its handling of third-party developers.

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August 29, 2025 0 comments

GameFi Guides

Inside Ripple-Gemini Developments: Community Opinion

by admin August 23, 2025

Gemini borrows $75 million from Ripple ahead of IPO, RLUSD stablecoin involved
Gemini plans to go public despite massive losses in H1, 2025

Prominent XRP community enthusiast who goes by @WKahneman unveils how MasterCard’s XRP card announcement and its SEC filing can be connected through a nine-digit credit line opened by Ripple. Also, this development might be a showcase for Ripple USD (RLUSD) as an institutional-grade asset.

Gemini borrows $75 million from Ripple ahead of IPO, RLUSD stablecoin involved

Gemini, one of the biggest cryptocurrency ecosystems in the U.S., mentioned a $75 million credit line opened by Ripple in its IPO filings with the SEC. The program can be expanded to $150 million, while additional draws might be completed with the usage of the Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin.

Unpacking the #Ripple/Gemini news. What exactly is going on? The whole may be greater than the sum of it’s parts. (It gets weird in #5) This week has brought interesting news to ponder if this is more than just a loan ⤵️
1/8 pic.twitter.com/QwkliF0I5u

— WrathofKahneman (@WKahneman) August 23, 2025

These facts were noticed by pseudonymous Ripple and XRP observer who goes by @WKahneman. The expert shared them in a thread with his 84,000 followers on X.

While borrowing money pre-IPO looks regular to the observer, the potential utilization of RLUSD, the first major regulated stablecoin, is pretty unusual. In the future, this could contribute massively to the recognition and distribution of RLUSD.

Then, both Gemini and Ripple are simultaneously gearing toward regulatory compliance in the EU. While Gemini has just received a MiCA license in Malta, Ripple, via its new Luxembourg unit, applied for a MiCA EMI license in July.

Last but not least, the newly-announced XRP bank card by WebBank is backed by $75 million liquidity. The launch slogan hints at Aug. 25 as the day of the product’s release.

Gemini plans to go public despite massive losses in H1, 2025

As such, Ripple might be a huge beneficiary of the deal with Gemini and the upcoming IPO. The retail XRP card and the unique use case for RLUSD might be only the beginning of the story.

As covered by U.Today previously, Gemini is preparing for an IPO on NASDAQ. The platform is joining the club of crypto companies going public despite heavy losses in H1, 2025.

A Return to the Culture Wars? | Opinion

by admin August 22, 2025

It’s almost a quarter of a century since Grand Theft Auto 3 launched, in the process
effectively heralding the beginning of a decade in which video games were thrust into the
heart of a bitterly fought culture war.

For those too young to remember that era clearly, it’s hard to explain just how serious and
concerted efforts to censor, ban, or otherwise regulate the content of video games were. Socially conservative politicians, commentators, and opportunists on both sides of the
Atlantic rushed to make videogames a scapegoat for youth violence.

This wasn’t a new strategy – it was the same type of attack that had in previous decades
targeted music genres like rap and metal, or horror movies and other “video nasties”. There
was prior art in targeting video games, too: conservative commentators famously tried to
implicate Doom in the Columbine High School massacre in the late nineties.

GTA 3, however, was a turning point.

Attacks on video games had largely been
occasional pot-shots when there wasn’t much else in the news; right-wing newspapers could
reliably knock up some pearl-clutching about a video game when there wasn’t much else to
fill space with.

Now they have become the absolute core issue for conservative culture warriors.

GTA 3’s commercial success, piggybacking on the broader success of PlayStation in turning
games into a mainstream medium in that era, was part of the reason for that. The other part
of the reason was that GTA 3 included not just a lot a lot of violence but also allusions to sex
and prostitution.

It wasn’t the first game to include sexual content by any means, but it was this aspect that
sent many conservatives into a frenzy.

It’s no accident that arguably the biggest blow these
cultural warriors were able to strike against the GTA series was over the “Hot Coffee”
incident, in which it transpired that code and assets for a minigame in which the protagonist
had sex with his girlfriend had been left on the discs for GTA San Andreas, although it wasn’t
accessible to players without using mods.

In a game in which you could gleefully murder
people by their hundreds, it was an inaccessible animation of some fully-clothed humping that got the game re-rated Adults-Only by the ESRB, and earned Rockstar a warning from
the FTC.

Ultimately, though, this is an argument that conservatives lost pretty comprehensively.

Image credit: Rockstar Games

Games were repeatedly confirmed to be protected speech in the United States and came to
be generally accepted as a creative medium deserving of free expression in most other
western jurisdictions.

The argument that violent games were responsible for violent crime
among young people, meanwhile, was debunked over and over again by statistical analyses
and psychological studies.

Most people probably treat this whole era as a historical curiosity – a growing pain for the
medium, similar to the backlash experienced by many other types of media in the past. Something that needed to be fought, and resisted, but which is now over and done with.

You might ask librarians and authors – at pretty much any point in the past century and a
half – how well letting your guard down in these situations, assuming a battle won to be an
issue settled forever, tends to work out.

With cultural conservatism now back in the ascendency in many countries, there are plenty
of groups on that side who absolutely have not forgotten how they lost the battle over
video games – and are aching to relitigate it from their newfound positions of sociocultural
power, using the smarter and sharper approaches that they’ve been honing for a decade.

Make no mistake – what you can see sliding into the medium’s most vulnerable faultlines
right now is the thin end of a very thick wedge. Conservative groups have weaponised
payment processors, as they have in many other cases in recent years, to demand the
removal of “adult” content from digital storefronts like Steam and itch.io.

It’s such a small demand; it almost seems so reasonable. Pornographic games make lots of
people a bit uncomfortable, especially if they’re being listed right next to your nice
wholesome games on a storefront.

The temptation to argue for appeasement is strong when
privately you’re thinking to yourself, “good riddance” – especially given that some (a small
minority) of the games involved are pretty unpleasant by most reasonable standards.

Not to trivialise Niemöller’s famous poem, but the whole reason they came for the
communists first was because they knew lots of ordinary people would quietly think, “good
riddance”. He’s speaking to a very specific and dark moment in history, but outlining a much
more universal strategy and the tragedy of how we fall for it again and again.

The whole
point of coming for the most objectionable group first is to open a fracture – to insert a lever
that you can then use to drive it wider and wider.

We already know how the wedge starts to widen. Even in this first round, games with LGBTQ+
themes – not necessarily explicit in nature! – were being caught up in the sweep and treated
as “adult” content.

This mirrors the strategy seen in book banning efforts in the United
States. Campaigners create a framework to ban “pornographic” content, and then expand
the definition of “pornography” to include anything related to the lives and existence of
minority groups they dislike, and ultimately any kind of content that makes them
uncomfortable.

There is no reason to believe that this is where those efforts would stop. Some people in the
industry may be willing to throw LGBTQ+ creators and consumers under the bus to appease
the conservative movement, but it won’t work – throwing out chum in the water only attracts
more sharks.

Conservatives who have carried a chip on their shoulder about the failure of
their campaigns against video games for decades are circling, emboldened by the realisation
that they can sidestep all those problematic free speech legalities by weaponizing
commercial financial infrastructure instead of courts and legislation.

Moreover, the defences that won this battle last time may no longer work. The modern
conservative obsession with redefining what is “healthy” (childhood vaccinations are out, raw
milk is in) based on political rather than scientific or evidence-based standards will equally
be applied to media consumption.

Scientific studies and analyses exonerating games of any
connection to youth violence mean little and less in an era when science is dismissed and
vibes, not evidence, drive public discourses and even government policy.

A movement with the taste of blood in its mouth from banning pornographic or LGBTQ+ themed
games will quickly find new targets in the long, long list of Things That Make Them A Bit
Uncomfortable – a list they’ve been carefully curating since the 1990s.

“Some people in the industry may be willing to throw LGBTQ+ creators and consumers under the bus to appease the conservative movement, but it won’t work – throwing out chum in the water only attracts more sharks”

This is a slippery slope argument, but the key figures in this movement – from Project 2025
author and Trump cabinet member Russ Vought all the way down to the small campaign
groups spearheading these censorship movements – have been quite open about their
strategy being to launch headlong down that slippery slope.

Pornography is the wedge issue; LGBTQ+ themes are prying the gap open further.

By the time
the mechanisms being used to target pornographic games or LGBTQ+ themed games are
turned on games for featuring any kind of sexualised content, or same-sex romance options,
or depictions of violence against conservative in-groups (expect loud outrage at any game in
which players can shoot at police officers, though blasting away at brown people in military
shooters will no doubt remain just fine), it’ll be a bit too late to start lobbying your political
leaders.

If you’re not even in the United States, you might never have that option at all – though you’ll still be caught in the global splash damage of US payment processors’
domestic decisions.

In six months or a year when some ambitious conservatives start thinking they can take
down GTA 6 and land a hammer-blow on a medium they’ve hated since Jack Thompson’s
heyday, the moment for the industry to really take a united stand in defence of its creative
freedoms will already have passed.

It’s now, when the games being targeted are relatively
small and perhaps even a little uncomfortable to get behind, that red lines over free
expression truly need to be drawn – and payment processors, perhaps, sharply reminded
exactly whose hand is feeding them.

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August 22, 2025 0 comments