Latest articles by Austin Wood
"I feel a strong need to prevent Japanese-style game development from being lost": 40-year games veteran argues Japan devs should make "unapologetically Japanese" games
Feature "If we create what only we can create, the world will gladly accept it"
"Why does Valve allow this?": Indie publisher laments losing Overwhelmingly Positive Steam review score to off-topic rant, replies "please never, ever play any of our games"
News "Please go refund the game, and then crawl back into the hole you came from"
After Horses ban, Steam loses gooner monolith BrownDust2 to "the platform's policy requirements": "We encountered an issue that cannot be reasonably resolved"
News Racy gacha RPG BrownDust2 drops Steam
"This still does not compare to the kind of audience we would have on Steam": Horses lead says ban virality helped sales "but we're not out of the woods," and he fears "self-censorship" with future games
News Horses has become a top seller on GOG
Romancing Saga, a Square Enix JRPG released in 1992, remade in 2005, and remastered in 2022, gets yet another re-release: "I had always wanted to make a grand fantasy RPG in the style of The Lord of the Rings"
News You can't keep a good JRPG down
FromSoftware, you appear to have broken Elden Ring Nightreign: the new DLC class Undertaker is an ult-spamming, boss-melting monster
News Forsaken Hollows drops a nuclear bomb on Nightlords
Arc Raiders players exploited the Hidden Bunker so hard that Embark has turned it off entirely
News This is why we can't have nice things
Open-world RPG Wuthering Waves pulls a Breath of the Wild, adds a motorbike in 3.0 expansion
News Lynae and Mornye show off new areas in Lahai-Roi
Stolen Marathon art issue "resolved" with Bungie and Sony "to my satisfaction," original artist says
News Marathon's plagiarism first surfaced in May
AI has an "unbelievable ability to create a lot of slop," says ex-Nexon boss who signed Arc Raiders, predicting the industry will "triple" in size in 7 years due to players "rejecting slop and bad product"
News Owen Mahoney sees a creative edge to AI in games
Banned by Steam, $100,000 in the hole, and facing shutdown, graphic horror game dev now dropped by Epic Games Store "roughly 24 hours before launch"
News This game can't catch a break
REPO is adding cosmetics, and they can only be unlocked by playing the dang game: "If you happen to love microtransactions, I'm going to disappoint you deeply"
News "There will be no microtransactions"
With Baldur's Gate 3 still in Steam's top 20 after 2 years, Larian ends 2025 with love for the best mods keeping the RPG thriving: "Give yourselves a pat on the back, have a shot of whiskey"
News 350 million mod downloads, 10,000 mods uploaded
Elden Ring Nightreign stats reveal FromSoftware survivorship bias, suggesting its "most deadly" world bosses had their numbers padded by bruised loot goblins
News The Bell Bearing Hunter is both surprisingly and unsurprisingly low
I was informed of what seems to be the only game on Steam with this many 100% positive reviews, and I need you to see it with me
News Bask in the unassailable glory
Team Cherry teases Silksong DLC and the return of a character revealed 7 years ago: "We've noticed that people would like an expansion" like Hollow Knight's Pantheon
News "We're excited to reintroduce Sharpe," Ari Gibson says
Police confirm Arc Raiders fan got a visit from officers in real life after a concerned motel guest heard him plead for a revive: "I got shot, please get me up!"
News When Arc Raiders proximity chat gets a little too real
Hytale early access release date set for January 2026 just weeks after it's reacquired by original founders, following 5 years and cancellation at Riot: "If you don’t feel comfortable pre-ordering, please don't"
News Hytale is finally coming out, for real
MMO player endures "heavy chest pains" and struggles "to stay awake" as his girlfriend brings him food during 4-day grind to become first in the world to reach max level
News Get some sleep, Runescape fans
Arc Raiders gear tiers get even messier as one gunsmith finds low-rarity mods are by far the best bang for your buck, and suddenly I don't feel bad about my uncommon blueprints
News Bury me with my Vertical Grip II
Destiny 2 game director says "we don't want to be a dead live game" as Renegades arrives at a low for the MMO, admits "relatively few [new] people come" in and Edge of Fate pivot "didn't work"
News Tyson Green weighs in on the state of Destiny 2
The backbone of Arc Raiders, Scrappy the rooster, is based on a real bird who crashed a dev Zoom meeting and was photoscanned in as something "we'll definitely replace later"
News All hail Scrappy the crafting king
Opposing Steam's AI disclosures, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says game stores should drop "the AI tag" because "it makes no sense" when "AI will be involved in nearly all future production"
News Steam has actually made AI disclosures even more prominent
