Jank Mail: Everything is expensive

The big Jank news this week is that we officially have formally merged with Total Playtime, which means that (a) we have an official podcast but (b) it’s one that has been here the whole time. A warm welcome to the Total Playtime Patreon backers who have joined us on the site and in the Discord - if you have not moved your Patreon subscription over, you have two weeks to do so.

Graham dedicated this week to iconoclasm, marking the debut of the Steam Machine with a demand that Valve make the Steam Deck smaller, less powerful and cheaper, and the brouhaha over the ability to pre-order GTA 6 to share his core belief that you should not pre-order games. Brendy highlighted some of the hundred-plus new Quake maps that have been created to mark the game’s 30th anniversary, and mourned the death of his unfinished cat game, thanks to Epic’s decision to give up on the Blueprints coding platform. 

On the newly-integrated Total Playtime, Brendy returned from the parenting wilderness to opine on the news of the week, including what was then the most recent Microsoft calamity, AI again, and Nate’s daughters’ take on the Online Safety Act. Our big freelance contribution was from Jeremy Peel, ruminating on the difficulty of letting characters go at the end of a game and how that lead to him creating a retirement plan for his Sunless Skies character.

Outside Jank, AI continues to ruin everything in general and hardware specifically. Valve announced that the Steam Machine is going to be quite expensive and they won’t be able to make enough of them, so basically you have the option to put your name on a list to give them a grand at some point in 2027. Not to be outdone, Microsoft swiftly announced it was slapping $100-150 on the price of Xboxes because “memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027”, and increasingly one wonders if “fall” should be capitalised. 

The closest to “good” news is that it quietly gave Windows 10 another year of life in recognition of the fact that upgrading to a machine that supports Windows 11 now costs more than a decent city break. Even Apple can’t keep up, and Valve describes their memory purchasing process as “if we don’t pay the price they ask, they never speak to us again.” Real great system we got going here, I’m sure nothing will go wrong.

Rockstar confirmed that GTA 6 will be a only be a little bit more expensive than the norm, but with the option of it being a lot more expensive which seemingly a lot of people have gone for despite having never actually seen independent proof the game even exists. There also won’t be any physical copies, but there is the option of buying a box with a download code in it. Real Star Citizen behaviour, but it’s Rockstar so they get away with it. It’s notable they’re taking it to the wire and not even mentioning the online mode yet so we might have some fun launch bugs to look forward to.

A Microsoft researcher made a goat-based LLM in Age of Empires 2 to demonstrate why AI isn’t actually sentient, which is a fine reason but honestly he had me at “goat-based LLM in Age of Empires 2”. The boss at CDPR thinks that some people are still mad about the Cyberpunk 2077 launch. Lots of people definitely really hate game launchers. 

Sony fired basically the entire Destiny 2 team as previously foretold, following years of misguided project development that didn’t even result in a Destiny dating game. Apparently Arkane’s Blade game is going great, which counts as the best news we’ve had out of Xbox lately. There is going to be a Tetris TV show because TV commissioning is even more desperate than games publishing. 

There is some data to suggest that mentioning a game used AI in development makes people dislike it, which is one of the reasons that Tim Sweeney thinks it’s “irresponsible” for Valve to ask for it. Sweeney continues to try and make the metaverse happen. The developer who put AI Tupac in his game does not want people to fixate on the fact the game has Tupac in it, and I have one weird trick for how he could avoid that. At last, we have erotic literature about spending too much money on Warhammer.  

Down in the comments section, Disconcertinglymoist championed the power of stories in Jeremy's ode to goodbyes.

KingFunk dropped some fire verse about why you shouldn't pre-order games.

firefish6 has a solid addition to last week's Lie-in (here is the Kotaku post)

That's all for this week. Go and play some PC games.