The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. What's the point of a lie-in when your bed is on the ground? I am, as this post is published, waking up - if indeed I slept at all - at a campsite, where I have been experiencing all the discomforts of the outdoors with a large contingent of children and animals. For that reason, I'm going to keep things brief this week, and hope that you enjoy your links from a comfier bed than my own.

Videogame studios aren't monoliths, writes Hayes Madsen, responding to an article that tried to draft fantasy developers for Microsoft IP from the burning remnants of last week's layoffs and divestments.

Xbox's franchise-first approach is bad for a number of reasons, but this kind of coverage is endemic of a major problem that has plagued games media for years, even decades - the idea that studios are monoliths. Studios make games, not the hundreds of people that make up a studio. I'm certainly not going to claim I haven't been guilty of the same thing in the past, but we need to do better.

I hadn't even heard of this game, but Lewis Gordon reviewed D-topia, a scifi puzzle game about AI, for The Guardian.

It arrives at a moment when AI has never been more contentious, lauded by AI company execs as the saviour of the world’s thorniest problems, and lampooned by those of a more sober disposition as a driver of further misery. But Marumittu Games is never alarmist: it is smarter than that, subverting cosy trappings to insidious effect, letting its existential questions hang in the unnervingly scentless D-topia air.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation covered Sony's decision to stop producing physical games, from the perspective of the consumer rights that will be lost in the process.

Physical media comes with a "right of first sale," which means you can lawfully share, resell, alter, or destroy your own copy of a copyrighted work. This right has also helped protect the emergence of alternative community servers, and emulator addition of online play to games from the dial up era.

But courts have held that digital media doesn't carry the same right, meaning no such protection is afforded to digital purchases. Your ability to freely share games with friends or pass them on to family members becomes totally subject to the whims of the distributor.

I think there are situations where clones of games are acceptable, but there are many more when they're not. For 404 Media, Nicole Carpenter explored how AI is making cloning games easier than ever.

It was a promising response for a commercial game developer that quickly turned unsettling. Within days, someone responded to her post with a vibecoded version of Holmér's prototype: "This can be built into a game by tomorrow." Another popped up in mobile app stores. Holmér said she saw up to four vibecoded versions of her prototype. Generative AI has made the work of plagiarizing an idea a lot simpler.

Brendy is Jank's resident Ace Combat pilot, and he sent me this lengthy look at the geopolitics of three of the games in the series. If you're getting ready for Ace Combat 8, due later this year, this is for you.

The player character here - Galm-1, callsign "Cipher", alias "Demon Lord of the Round Table" (hell yeah) - is not part of a state military. Instead, he's one of many mercenaries hired by Ustio after most of their Air Force is wiped out in the first days of the war. Mobius might as well have been the divine sword signifying the mandate of heaven, and Blaze the chosen king leading his army into glorious battle. They fight to prove that heroes will always rise against the darkness, to protect the end of history from the sickness called war. Cipher fights to get paid.

Derek Lieu has made a lot of videogame trailers. In this video, he lays out common mistakes made by developers when making them, and offers a recipe for doing it better. I think this is interesting analysis even if you're not making a trailer yourself.

For noclip2, Jeremy Jayne bought a physical game just to feel something.

Sometimes you spend an entire week trying to get into Hatsune Miku songs only to finally conclude, no, these are just not for me. So here's an old classic by The Pharcyde.

Sleep well, videogames.