The Lie-In
Good morning, videogames. Stretch at the knees, spread your toes, and feel the brushed cotton ensconcing you like a big toasty cinnamon bun... Uh oh. Gotta read some good reads from across the week.
Obsidian released three games last year - an absurd number from a single studio in the modern era. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier visited the studio in the aftermath as it attempts to change its development processes to make games more quickly and cheaply.
Last year the developer released three games—a rare and impressive achievement for a studio of its size—but two of them failed to meet sales forecasts set by Obsidian’s parent company, Microsoft Corp. “They’re not disasters,” Urquhart says. “I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’”
Stardew Valley is ten years old. IGN's Rebekah Valentine spoke to developer ConcernedApe about the game's success and his future.
So I asked you about big positive moments in the last 10 years. What about challenging times? Is there any moment in the last 10 years of Stardew that you recall as being exceptionally difficult or frustrating?
Barone: I think the hardest part is just staying totally high energy about it for 10 years. Like I've said, I've wanted to move on and work on other things and I've struggled with that and with thinking about, "What is my purpose? What is my life purpose? Is it going to be to just work on Stardew Valley forever, for the rest of my life?" That's been a little bit challenging. So I have to keep reminding myself of all the people that are affected by the updates and playing Stardew Valley to try to stay locked in for so long.
It’s no secret that the video game industry is the healthiest it has ever been, as evidenced by Sony’s move to AI-generated video game podcasts. Meanwhile, podcasts are more popular than ever before. Invented in 2018 by Conan O’Brien, podcasts have seeped into every corner of human life. They are even being celebrated like Hollywood movies — as evidenced by the Golden Globes handing out its inaugural Best Podcast award in 2023 to Cum Town.
I don't watch short form video, but I found the opening to John Herman's piece for NY Mag to be deeply relatable. There are often cab drivers parked outside my flat, and this is what I see when I glance through their window: a procession of vertical videos that seem, from a distance at least, entirely bizarre. The rest of the short article goes on to nail the ways in which social media platforms have changed in recent years.
In the mundane course of modern life, you might occasionally find yourself glimpsing the dark abyss — that is, catching a few seconds of a stranger’s phone screen. A peek over a shoulder, through a car window at a dash-mounted phone, or perhaps, pointedly, at the hands of a distracted person whose eyes you’re trying to raise, will likely reveal a version of the same thing: not, in 2026, a wall of text, a feed, or even a slideshow of stories, but an endless scroll of tall videos.
Old but new to me, this YouTube video essay about "for-profit (creative) software", which is an animated and creatively written screed against software subscriptions, particularly those offered by Autodesk and Adobe.
Relatedly, I am constantly infuriated by a world of "Ask Me Later" and "Snooze for now" buttons. I want a big red "fuck off" button that sends OneDrive advertisements, Shorts recommendations and update toaster notifications to the bin forever. I therefore appreciated the conclusion of this long blog post by former Microsoft employee Mike Swanson, which urges developers to 'design for quiet'.
Instead, let’s make software that respects your attention, does its job well, and lets you get on with your life. That’s what good software used to feel like and what it could feel like again. Good software is a tool that you operate, not a channel that operates on you.
Developer Joe Wintergreen posted a real photo and pretended it was UE5. Someone responded by actually recreating the image in UE5.
Music of the week is I Got Heaven by Mannequin Pussy:
I'm on an endless march to nothingness with breath inside my chest, but then, aren't we all?
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