Are gangsters and street thugs still cool? Like, I'm a millenial. White kids in my suburban elementary school were flashing the "blood" sign on the playground to be cool and edgy.

Is that still the case with today's edgy 12 year olds? Is it still a power fantasy to steal a car and shoot a hooker and sell drugs?

Like genuinely, stuff like Elder Scrolls works because it's still a culturally common fantasy to be slinging magical spells or swinging a sword in a medieval-coded "high fantasy" world. Being a badass space marine is still a culturally common fantasy, being an OP anime shonen protag is, being a Mad Max postapocalypse raider is, etc. Is "Miami gangster" still mythologized like that?

And what percent of the "games that barely make anything" are asset flips and zero-effort slop? Like, "percent of new games that are trash" is going to be very high when the barrier to entry is "pay Valve $100 once". This is a total junk statistic.

Like, store A where you can buy 100 good games and 1000 asset flips will score 10x better on this un-metric than store B where you can buy 10000 good games and a million asset flips. And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.

And the smallest in volume. The number of games on Steam that cost a million dollars or more to make (owned by shareholder value generators) is much lower than other types. For every one Assassin's Creed there are ten Peaks and Slay the Spires and lower quality "real, good indie games". And for every real, good indie game there's a hundred asset flips and ai slop "games".

This one was f2p, so it doesn't matter how many copies it "sold". It needed dedicated long term players that would shell out for hats.

The casual fighting games market does exist, but it's going to be people that buy the fighting game for an IP they like (say, Dragon Ball Z) and play it for a couple months then put it on the shelf. Maybe they boot it back up (and pay $10 again) when the DLC adds Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta or whatever.

2XKO was never a game that could make money from casuals, because there was no reason for anyone except "fgc mechanics heads" to give a single shit about the game. And those fgc heads saw a 2v2 tag fighter with ten characters and responded with a resounding "lmao". Doesn't help that it's a fighting game with kernel anticheat.

Apple's customers don't get a choice of stores in the first place.

"Real games" (AAA, top tier indie, low tier indie) can easily be as low as 1-2% of "steam releases". 12k games were published on Steam over half of this year. That would mean, if you want to care about this meaningless statistic of "x% of games drive y% of revenue", that there's room for over 240 "worthwhile" games to have released in 2026 without disrupting the scary 1% metric at all. Two hundred forty games this year. AAA releases are what, ten or twenty a year? Less? That's not 1%, it's 0.08%. The other 99.92% of the 1% are free to be indie games or GAAS or whatever else.

Slay the Spire and lower quality but still "real" indie games. That entire gamut. The best games ever made and "uhh it's balatro but with throwing darts". That's all more numerous than AAA stuff and also dwarfed in volume by porn jigsaw puzzles, asset flips, and other actual zero effort slop "games". AAA and "real indie games" are a tiny minority of the games on steam.

Twelve thousand "games" have been released on Steam this year as of July. That would mean the meaningless statistic in the article implies that 240 games from this year drive 85% of this year's spending. 240 games in 2026 "worth spending money on" is not a dire portrait of AAA slurping up the market space. That "1% of games" is presented to look like "the top 1% fat cat games" when 1% absolutely includes not just the AAA and the top shelf indie (like Slay the Spire) but also the flashes in the pan and the trend chasers and the friendslop and the Balatro clones and the forever GAAS.

Those "not truly slop but" uninspired indie games like stardew clone #780 comfortably fit into the "top" 240 Steam games this year. Darkest Dungeon 2 is absolutely a "top percent" game when the overall pool includes so much actual nothing in it.

Well that's what I mean tho. If DBFZ reaches a million players in year 1, Bamco gets sixty million dollars (pre taxes and fees and licensing yadda yadda). If 2XKO reaches a million players, Riot gets zero dollars unless you also got some of that million to buy hats. A guy who buys DBFZ and plays for a week before dropping it got you sixty bucks. Same dude in 2XKO that doesn't buy a $20 hat gets you zilch.

it's Element/Matrix if we're lucky. Revolt is just another Discord - surely this single company will last! With Element/Matrix being an open protocol, it won't be a "platform" you have to leave when it goes corporate.

Doesn't matter how easy it is when step zero is "spend $500+ on a new phone because you're currently using a Samsung or other device with a locked bootloader"

Remember, even cheaper phones (that actually work with your carrier) get marked up. Taxes, shipping, accessories like a case. Being able to afford a new device is nice and Lineage/Graphene make a good case for which new device you should buy, but someone's five year old phone still works.

Oh wow, /r/nintendo stayed down through a Nintendo Direct that announced a new Mario game? That's a lot more chutzpah than I'd expect from a subreddit focused on a game console.

Sony isn't even cooked, man. Piracy is a non issue to the bottom line. The Switch had this plus fully functional pirate installers in like, month 2 and Nintendo still sold a morbillion copies of TOTK despite all the hackable consoles on the market (and the maturity of emulators)

"it's so good it could be an official Sonic game" is... not very indicative of quality.

Discord is worse than Reddit (even post enshittification reddit) for anything other than chatting. You can't view a Discord without an account, Discords aren't indexed by search engines or protected by google cache / archive.org, Discord's API usage policy is even more restrictive than Reddit's new one (it's completely against the TOS to create third party discord clients at all)...

Being able to look at the historical threads on a subreddit like hardwareswap is really important for learning the value of what you have. A format where every offer gets its own collapsible conversation thread is much better than every negotiator popping up in sequence.

That ten minute boot time is not normal. Something's very wrong with your PC, especially if other games or programs have minutes-long launch times.

Child sexual abuse material - underage porn. For obvious reasons, you don't want this to be something you're hosting automatically out of your basement server.

No way in hell they're gonna still be supporting the Series S in five years.

Early Access games should never have a battle pass or cash item shop.

I'd take an Apple loss over an Epic one any day here. Apple's walled garden philosophy has permanently damaged the tech literacy of an entire generation, and the fact that ~half of all people that want to use a smartphone to do things simply can't just install a FOSS application downloaded from Github to do the thing is an atrocity. Apple getting away with it also emboldens Google to make their phones/tablets into "gadgets" instead of "computers" with stuff like file permissions policies (that became so restrictive that the devs for Syncthing simply gave up on Android as a platform).

Meanwhile, Epic's greatest evil that affects me is that I don't play some video games because they're exclusive to Epic's store, and also some video games are worse because it "just makes too much financial sense" for AAA devs to release UE5 slop. Operating systems and programs are more important than video games, and video games as a medium are more restricted by stuff like what Apple's doing than what the AAA devs do to generate shareholder value.

Your hypothetical strapped 495 people to train tracks, you absolute monster! Statically, about forty of those 495 have serious chronic back pain, too. You obviously don't care about the disabled. Be more careful next time when changing the number of doors in a Monty Hall problem!