Impotent, Frustrated Rage: The Definitive Review

When the mood strikes to write about something industry rather than discussing a game or whatever, it’s hard to settle on a topic when the news just keeps on rolling in. The past couple of months are the exact case in point. Shitshow after shitshow, harbinger after harbinger, the piling up of really bad news made it tricky to pick just one story to base a piece around. It can’t be denied that in the corporate sphere of platform holders and AAA excess, 2026 has been a banner year for abject horror and ugly, blind capitalist short-sightedness. Even despicable minimisations and abstractions like ‘market correction’ can’t mask the violence and vandalism that the industry has suffered this year, which somehow managed to be worse and more outright offensive than the savagery of the preceding 24 months. The sheer depth of the staff cuts is breathtaking, especially when legendary teams are excised like unwanted cysts, or entire strata of talented and immensely experienced creatives, with hugely successful records, are erased because pre-vis is so much cheaper with AI. This is a year of outright slaughter, with the killing spread across projects and studios as is the annual cull we’ve been conditioned to expect, but also across the other pillars of the industry: retail brands and retail formats. There’s a savage realignment underway, a tectonic shift of consolidation, presumably to hedge these swaggering profit machines against the law of diminishing returns.

Of course, Microsoft is the biggest villain here, with Sony plotting a sensibly devious path around Xbox’s fateful reckoning to deliver its own megatons, having meted out plenty of its own scything to Sony in-house development from 2024 onwards. Where Microsoft callously bludgeons the US game development community to death for the third year running, Sony instead merely kills the videogame disc.1 Rockstar announces a download-only launch for GTA VI. These three events, all coming in the middle of the year, mark out 2026 as particularly awful. Add to that the hitherto impossible prospect of videogame console hardware increasing in price as it ages and it genuinely feels like some bonkers inversion of reality has happened, as if some interdimensional asshole has fucked with the timeline and rewritten history. As we’re barely halfway through the year, I wonder what else could happen. Surely there’s enough commercial pressure for Future to consider shutting one - or more - of its three (3) print videogame magazines, or time for Nintendo to announce its end to physical carts while increasing digital prices on a daily basis because it enjoys a total monopoly over its platform, or maybe Rockstar will force a weekly dynamic-pricing surcharge to steal particular cars. Nothing is off the table, and nothing would seem to be beyond the pale.

I get a perverse thrill from wondering what the behemoths will fuck up next, or how craven their next predatory move will be. Like watching the US administration, the sense of individual powerlessness promotes a certain vibe of surrendering to the chaos of it all. I’m revelling in the laughable mess of outcomes that were entirely predictable, while taking a grimly dark pleasure at the exposure of gross incompetence that necessarily underlies acts like closing a multi-multi-multi-million-dollar game mere weeks after launch, or suddenly having to account for a fucking insane $75 billion gamble that didn’t pay off. 2026 seems to be the year that the results of a profit-obsessed, risk-averse kind of creative stasis born from flawed corporate strategies come home to roost. It’s the time when the churn feels its most churniest. I feel like an epoch is turning - especially with the closure of GAME earlier this year. That Sony announcement about the end of discs literally closes a circle, genuinely ends an era. The fragmentary dismantling of Microsoft’s greatest folly - buying a significant percentage of US game developers to drive Game Pass - feels like boardroom insanity of the true Ballmer vein and in itself, the end of a failed project that surely, run correctly, should have been a colossal success.

If there’s one twinkling star in the darkness to focus on, it’s the rise of audience-funded media and the cathartic thrill of watching truly independent critique going straight for the throat. In the past week, both Nathan Brown and Luke Plunkett have delivered entries ripe with the indignation of veterans watching the industry paying the price for executive hubris and goldrush trends. Nathan has simply had enough of this fucking bullshit and Luke expertly weaves the outrage around the supermassive blackhole of GTA VI’s mere presence as a grotesque figurehead for all of this - all the greed, the profligation, the casual dismissal of thousands of careers. Luke rages about GTA VI and the ire is simply delicious:

Note that I am not mourning this; if cowardice has been the defining trait of AAA gaming’s executive class for the past decade, then obscenity has come a close second. The fact Grand Theft Auto VI’s total spend will be over one billion dollars while everything else collapses around it is an embarrassment to Rockstar, publishers Take-Two and the entire medium of video games.

I get a smug sense of satisfaction out of this, having cast GTA VI as being of a decadent and corrupt billionaire class of its own, and Affectionate Discourse’s long history of attacking the AAA status quo doesn’t need repeating, but really it’s awesome to see my long-held sentiments explode across far more prominent media than my tawdry little rag. Nathan, who also enjoyed a comedically insane, incredibly American Reddit post for his labours, speaks directly to Microsoft, most pointedly landing on perhaps the most ludicrous line of Microsoft’s entire Xbox journey: the goal to have a billion daily players. To me, this line alone cements the ‘new management’ of Sharma et al as utterly ludicrous cartoons, very much in the post-Jobs, Muskian mould.2 The natural reaction to have to that is precisely what Nathan expresses:

What, then, are we to make of all this, beyond the rather self-evident fact that this bunch of sorry clowns are every bit as useless as their predecessors, and are if anything even worse? I genuinely do not get it.

The best bit of Nathan’s 385th newsletter is right at the end, and it would be unfair to spoil it here, so please go and read it, and don’t forget to subscribe. But yes, Nathan, I do not get it either. Personally I can only assume Asha isn’t stupid, so therefore I’m attributing all this to pure malice. I’ll happily subscribe to the idea that Jim Ryan went mental for service games and fucked it all up through the kind of incompetence that springs from unnecessary greed, and likewise I’ll happily believe Asha Sharma’s here as a smiling assassin to give Xbox one last chance to make trillions in profit (as soon as possible) before she quietly sets about euthanising the whole fucking thing within the next five years.

As I write, I’m recording bits for my next podcast episode which is - spoiler alert - all about videogame magazines. But I open up with the notion that when I was born, teenagers couldn’t walk into a shop and buy new games or videogame magazines off the shelf. When my kids are teenagers, there’s a decent chance they’ll be in exactly the same boat. It took half a century, but it’s a cycle that seems near to completion, with the last few years of failing AAA and Sony-Microsoft strategic rationalisations feeling like the slow-motion apocalypse for a particular kind of mainstream videogaming commerce. If the PlayStation 5 generation is to be defined by anything, it’s the sense that a once soaring arc has bent beyond the gentle plateau of the PlayStation 4 era and is curving inward and downward, on a trajectory filled with third-person slashers, HD remakes and exorbitant failed gambits to chase flash-in-the-pan successes. It’s the first generation where I think the consumer is worse off as it ends, and the first generation where things - genres, developers, game series, physical media - came to actually die. A time marked not by flourishing catalogues of exciting new horizons, but of vast corporate acquisitions followed by vast corporate cost-saving exercises caused by vast amounts of corporate meddling into games that would have presumably fared much better without said meddling. It’s what we get for paying these corporations so much money to reduce our choices for us, just because they offered convenience in return.

I felt a disturbance in the force when Sony announced the end of discs3 that, in combination with Nintendo’s relentless profiteering and Microsoft’s sociopathy towards an industry I once worked in (and have loved for half a century), made me consider a radical choice. I think it’s maybe time to abandon the console. I think it’s time to go PC and go PC indie. It’s time to explore and pay for the niche shit I’ve not explored for decades, while supporting the AA keepers of the true faith with every bit of DLC I can buy. As is said so often, but carried out so rarely, the only way to stop corporate brutality is to stop giving corporations your fucking money. Deep in a Reddit thread on the most recent cuts, I saw people making the argument for piracy as a weapon. Obviously I support it for preservation purposes, but it’s increasingly becoming a political tool when it comes to finding something, anything that will directly harm the multi-billion giants that have carved the console space into three hyper-controlled formats that, thanks to the total collapse of independent videogame retail, are now completely under platform holder control. Because of that, and with an the air of utterly contradictory moral superiority, I’ll happily pirate whatever AAA corporate, platform holder shit I fancy. So no, I probably won’t be buying a £1500 PlayStation 6 or a £1450 Xbox Neelix (or whatever godawful name they give it). I’ll be buying a three-year-old PC and having a wild old time, because my genuine feeling, right now, is fuck this shit.

[21]