Backlog: The Embiggening – June, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/25/25 at 03:52 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! May was surprisingly Spring-like as it brought the first season of the year to a close. With Spring in the rear-view mirror, it’s time for us to watch the Games Industry go into its annual state of spastic catatonia known as the Summer Games Drought. With our mild Spring, is there any hope for a mild Summer as well? Or are we doomed to be confronted with our existing backlogs instead of coveting something novel that might get us fired up?
Sadly, the scourge of Shovelware will never go away, no matter how hard we ignore it. In June, we’ve got two bits of Licensed Swill coming: A “Smurftastic Collection” based on the 1980s’ favorite tiny, blue, Communists; as well as an anime game based on one of the OLDEST mech shows, “MACROSS: Shooting Insight.” (Does anyone even remember or care about EITHER of those IPs? Enough to fund new game development?!) In Cazual Swill, there’s the “100-in-1 Game Collection” hitting the …
Nintendo’s New Draconian EULA Gives THEM Perpetual Ownership of ALL Switch 2 Handhelds
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/18/25 at 01:08 PM CT
Oh, dear. We’ve gotten used to the status quo of Nintendo living in the past and constantly waging a losing war against Games Preservation of ROMs of games from their ancient and obsolete consoles. Meanwhile, Sony has been on the cutting edge of terrible DRM that can prevent even physical games from working without a persistent Internet connection.
This past week, Nintendo took a page from Sony’s playbook (instead of the usual situation where it’s Sony cribbing off Nintendo’s notes) when they updated the Legalese soup of their blanket End User License Agreement with wording that includes the ability to permanently render Nintendo devices unusable in the event that a user does something that provokes the corporation’s ire.
Sadly, Nintendo is well within their rights to do this kind of thing, after the Japanese government revised their policy on modding electronic devices. This is the type of corporate misconduct that spurred me to leave my original Switch permanently …
You Want Console Price Drops? Have Some Price Hikes Instead!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/11/25 at 04:35 PM CT
Oh dear, it looks like Trump’s idiotic tariffs (import taxes that he still doesn’t understand how they work) and trade war are already hitting gamers in the wallet. Hot on the heels of Sony’s overpriced PS5 Pro announcement and Nintendo announcing an egregious new price point for the Switch 2 and $80 first-party Switch 2 games, this past week, Microsoft rolled out price hikes on… OLD hardware that already exists!
It seems that the Xbox Division doesn’t want to maintain its status as Loss Leader, and with new tariffs on all of their made-in-China junk, they’re jacking up prices across the board, as IGN has helpfully laid-out in list format. We’re seeing jumps of anywhere from $10-20 on controllers and $80-100 on Xboxen themselves as the 9th Generation grinds to a close, whereas we used to see consoles and peripherals DROP by that much in the same general time frame, often accompanied by re-releases of “Greatest Hits” reprints of high-selling physical …
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 …
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