GOG to Reboot? Purchase by Original Co-Founder Signals a Return to Mission.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/24/26 at 04:21 PM CT
Originally announced right before the end of 2025 during the Holiday Rush, GOG looks like it will be undergoing some big changes in the near future. According to the DRM-free game platform’s site and various Gaming news outlets, one of GOG’s original co-founders, a Polack named Michal Kicinski, will be taking GOG off CD Projekt’s hands and taking the platform fully private once again.
I can’t help but be somewhat excited about this move, as all of the blog-worthy headlines we’ve had out of GOG for the last... half-decade at least, has been about how the company is betraying its founding principles, going Woke, getting into bed with Amazon, begging for donations, etc. Anyone who has been paying attention and can follow basic pattern recognition and logic understands that a huge part of the reason why Steam is so dominant in the digital game sales space is the fact that it’s an entirely private company, with no shareholders or Venture Capital firms that it must please. …
Sony De-Lists 1000+ Shovelware Games! Is this Good or Bad?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/17/26 at 03:04 PM CT
This week, eagle-eyed industry watchers noticed that something was going on deep in the bowels of the PlayStation Network. ThiGamesDE – a Germany-based developer of Trophy-Farming shovelware games, who had the 4th most games available for purchase on PSN – just had all of its games de-listed from the PlayStation Store, rendering them unpurchasable. That comes to a sum total of OVER 1000 titles that have just vanished into the void!
On one hand, this is good news for the concept of Game Curation, which has been a major sticking point since the advent of digital distribution removed the financial blockers that typically allowed only games with a publisher and a moderate amount of effort behind them to find themselves generally available for purchase in the broader market. Ever since the rise of smartphones in 2007, and their accompanying App Store ecosystems, the low barrier to entry has seen exploitation by scammers and low-effort coders throwing all of their sh!t at the …
4~ish Games to (Try to) Get Excited About in 2026
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/10/26 at 10:22 PM CT
Welcome back to MeltedJoystick’s mostly-annual feature where we take a look at the most exciting titles slated to be released over the course of the coming year. While these titles frequently don’t come out when expected thanks to delays, when they do, they either horribly disappoint OR find their way into the MeltedJoystick Games of the Year list. Let’s take a look at the most promising titles coming in 2026!
1. Solasta 2
While the glorious hype for “Baldur’s Gate 3” is well behind us, and the hype for Larian’s next ‘Divinity’ game should be saved until we see more than a cinematic trailer, there’s another classic-style RPG coming this year to keep us waiting with ‘bated breath. “Solasta 2” is the sequel to “Solasta: Crown of the Magister,” a not-officially-licensed cRPG based loosely on the Open Game License content from D&D 5th Edition – so don’t expect to see any copyrighted critters like beholders or illithids. The MJ Crew has the original …
New Year’s Backlog Ablutions 2026
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/04/26 at 02:54 PM CT
The results of the last year’s New Year’s Backlog Ablutions are in! While it came down to the wire, with Erstwhile Matt submitting his third and final review within 24 hours of the final deadline, all of us succeeded at wiping away our obligations to our bloated backlogs for 2025.
That means we’ve got a new winning streak started, so we’ll have to see if we can keep it going in 2026! Since nobody lost and everybody won, no Penalty Games were purchased, and since no Penalty Games were in the mix, we all got to choose all of the games we plan to tackle in 2026.
To reiterate the rules: We all have one year to play three specific backlogged games that we’ve chosen for ourselves in advance. Included within those three games must be whatever we received from failing competitors from the previous year. We must be ‘done’ with these games – as in, not planning to play them anymore, as neither finishing a game that turns out to be terrible nor getting 100% completion or …
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