Game Industry

Mayhem, Madness, and Games: Farewell to 2023

A freelance consultant’s days are busy but unpredictable. For any given week, I might have work for multiple clients, or I might be tinkering with my own game, or I might be seeking out new contracts for a future quarter. Most likely it’s a mix of all three. Consulting doesn’t have anywhere near the security …

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East Bound and Down: A Love Letter to Euro Truck Simulator 2

The story has to start with The Wheel. I am not a gamer who buys a lot of hardware and peripherals. I eventually get around to getting a console or two every generation, but I’m never first in line and I wait for the price cuts. I’m primarily a PC gamer, but I’ll go five …

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What’s Old is New: Games and the Nostalgia Factor

My fourteen-year-old son likes games. I guess it’d be hard for him not to; most of the time, if his old man isn’t working on games, he’s playing them.  He grew up in a house filled with toys – Lego, board games, Warhammer miniatures, and D&D books. He’s seen both his dad and his mom …

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Dangerous Roads: Carnage in the Game Industry

So first, a quick refresher on recent events: In late spring of 2023, a major funding deal between the Swedish company Embracer Group and Savvy Games – a group backed by money from the Saudi government – spectacularly collapsed.  The deal was supposedly worth two billion dollars in development funding over six years and had …

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Monkey Business: Who’s To Blame for Skull Island: Rise of Kong?

At several places I’ve worked, I developed a reputation as a “fun farmer.” I was the guy who’d play almost any game, regardless of the review scores, and try to find the nuggets of goodness in them. I could usually find something that made the effort worthwhile – a single feature, a great cinematic moment, …

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The Price of Redemption: When Bad Games Go Good

Phantom Liberty, the recently released DLC for Cyberpunk 2077, is great. The story is compelling and lengthy, a masterclass in how to seamlessly add post-ship content into the middle of an existing narrative. The 2.0 patch for the game, which launched shortly before the DLC, overhauls and improves many of the game’s core systems, including …

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