Latest articles by Austin Wood
"It might be porn games now, but they won't stop there": Game devs join players and artists rallying against credit card companies after mass NSFW game delisting
News Meanwhile, Itch posts and hastily deletes an endorsement of AI-generated messaging
Leaked Battlefield 6 release date semi-confirmed in standard and Phantom Edition post, and it looks like the threat of $80 games persists
News $80 games persist, but so do I
He made a viral horror game in 2 months – it sold 6 million copies, and now he can make whatever he wants for the rest of his life: "My final theory is that gambling is very fun"
News Buckshot Roulette creator Mike Klubnika has a new horror game out today
MMO history has been made after 21 years: all the blank spaces in the Old School RuneScape map have been filled in for the first time, right as the game hits player count highs
News "Enough to make a grown man cry"
Microsoft caved to pressure over $80 games in less than 3 months, but I don't think the fight for sensibly priced games ends here
Feature $80 games simply do not make sense
Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight, and a strange strategy game from 2023: the now wildly successful dev behind idle farming sim hit Rusty's Retirement says he learned from the greats, and literally called his latest game "Idle Valley" internally
News Not to mention a clever strategy game from 2023
"The meme is over": Borderlands 4 fans sigh in relief as Gearbox puts out a trailer that isn't for Vex, showing off series throwback Rafa, who might be the best melee Vault Hunter ever made
News Vexlands has ended, return to melee
"My savings had run out": In a few months, a Sonic 3 animator made an N64-style game based on an iconic Animal Crossing mechanic and chucked it onto Steam because "I needed to pay rent," and it worked
News Merchant 64 is a fascinating slice of game dev and a cute little sim
11 years later, Gears of War mastermind Cliffy B is "still bitter about the internet finding it hilarious that my studio folded" and now "happy consulting" instead of returning to game dev
News Boss Key Productions closed after the flop of LawBreakers and Radical Heights
With Steam players down over 90%, Splitgate 2 dev un-releases the game, lays off more staff, and plans to shut down OG servers as fans fear another live service death: "We understand it's our last chance"
News "Some people may never come back, and that's on us"
Assassin's Creed Shadows passed 5 million players, 2 billion stealth kills, and most importantly 38 million animals petted, which to Ubisoft has "delivered on expectations"
News A win is a win
Genshin Impact reveals 10 new Nod-Krai characters all at once, including some who players have waited 5 years for like Alice and Varka
News The 6.X patch character lineup is massive, and filled with lore bombs
"Anything related to Silksong releasing would be the doom of the project," lead on gorgeous Hollow Knight fan game once worried, but after 2 years of work it looks like it will launch this year
News "Anything related to Silksong releasing would be the doom of the project"
12 years later, Pokemon Legends Z-A brings back a "forgotten, uninteresting character" from Pokemon X and Y and puts her in charge of one of the coolest new features
News Pokemon research lead Mable is back
Gold is not enough: MMO community declares "Platinum Age" as Old School RuneScape hits 200k players amid WoW migration, dev says "we've expanded our live infrastructure to match"
News "We are immensely grateful for all of the support we're being shown"
Valve icon Gabe Newell says "AI is going to be a cheat code" and doubles down on new tech: "Figure out how to use AI to do anything better" across "pretty much every single business"
News "That all seems super obvious," says the Steam billionaire
After a disastrous weekend for Destiny 2, Bungie suggests the MMO's latest raid "requires far more than expected" and says it's investigating issues making bosses impossibly tanky
The world-first Contest race for Edge of Fate raid The Desert Perpetual has been a clown fiesta
By some miracle one of my favorite niche novel series has an amazing anime adaptation competing with My Dress-Up Darling, Gachiakuta, and Kaiju No. 8 for best summer 2025 anime
News Secrets of the Silent Witch is unmissable
"3,660 hours" in, Zelda's strongest soldier is farming max stacks of everything in Tears of the Kingdom by hand for a world-first: "You'll find me to be a man of my word"
News Bobby Blue Holliday is a force of nature
Bungie says "we never intend to ship 'stealth nerfs' in Destiny 2" as Edge of Fate players find unmentioned changes: "We would be completely out of our minds if we thought we could slip something under the rug without players noticing"
News A lot of unannounced nerfs, and seemingly some buffs, have been spotted in Edge of Fate
Elden Ring Nightreign threatens players with an Everdark version of its most infamous boss, but if FromSoftware finds a way to make the actual worst boss fun to fight I'll call it even
News Our time has come, Everdark Equilibrious Beast approaches
Elden Ring Nightreign players posted so hard that even the game's publisher has succumbed to Revenant
News La Creatura has breached containment
I always like gunplay builds in RPGs like Fallout or The Outer Worlds, but Destiny 2's new "Weapons" stat feels wrong for an MMO, and I'm not the only one who seems to hate it
News Weapons is arguably one of the strongest and worst stats you can invest in
He spent years making the single-player MMO he dreamt of for decades – it blew his "expectations and sales goals out of the water," and of course fans added multiplayer to it
Erenshor has been a massive hit for a very specific type of MMO fan
Valve's Gabe Newell predicts AI will lead to a "funny situation" where "people who don't know how to program" could be "more effective" than people "who've been programming for a decade"
News From his Steam throne, Valve billionaire says businesses should just "listen to your customers and focus on them"
