That misrepresents/oversimplifies a complex situation.

I love Graham Annable’s art! First exposed to it through the Puzzle Agent games. Such a wonderfully kooky and expressive style.

Yeah, but he actually succeeded though.

Star Trek 2009 revived a franchise that had been dead since Nemesis, reviewed well, is still the highest grossing Trek film ever made, and regularly appears near the top of lists of the best films in the franchise.

Cynical take: this will achieve absolutely nothing, but I’m sure the half dozen people who actually boycott (rather that just saying they will) will feel really good about themselves after.

Our generation’s very own ‘Paul is dead’.

The Vlambeer co-founder's workgroup – entitled "We're moving fast and losing what made us good (creativity, craft & the future)" – called for the industry to reject risk-averse decision-making, asserting that the reflexive avoidance of failure has become a greater threat to success than the inherent uncertainty of creative work.

Ultimately, the group concluded that unique products are forged through internal coherence and disciplined validation, rather than "sanding down the edges" to appeal to everyone.

This will never happen in the AAA space. There’s simply too much money involved for true creativity to be given priority, let alone to thrive. Anyone still looking to AAA for that hasn’t been paying attention.

The days of big publishers regularly and reliably releasing great and innovative games are gone and they aren’t coming back - that torch has been irrevocably passed on to indie studios and solo developers, for better and for worse.

The Jets? How long have you got?

Not quite what you’re asking, but I’ve learned that an important thing for personal projects is not to tell anyone about them until they’re basically done.

For me, getting to explain the thing and talk about why I’m doing it is a big part of what keeps me excited. If I tell someone about a project too early, my dumb monkey brain says ‘ok, good chemicals dispensed! That project is now dead to me’, and I lose all motivation to actually finish it.

Knowing I’m doing something cool and no one knows yet actually helps keep me going.

Beyond that? Having a clear plan, with concrete goals that define what ‘finished’ looks like, and clear concrete steps that will get me to that point. Literally a checklist. That way, continuing the work just means working from that list, rather than stressing over what to do next and getting bogged down in tangents and distractions.

Start with big tasks that feed into your project goals (‘add feature x’), and then gradually break them down into smaller individual tasks that can be completed in a single session of work. You don’t have to break the entire project down at once; I start each day by saying ‘what meaningful progress can I achieve today?’ and go from there.

I worked on a game where we added the ability for the player to react to messages from other characters, but was told we had to remove 👍 as a reaction because it’s offensive in some places.

Yeah a two-finger salute (back of hand facing them) is equivalent to giving the middle finger in the UK.

DLSS 5 looks horrendous but let’s not pretend gamers haven’t been able to reshade and mod the everloving shit out of games for decades. Saying it’s not a real game because someone decided they wanted to slap on a cel-shade filter or turn the art director’s carefully crafted dragon into Thomas the Tank Engine isn’t really a defensible position.

Albums as monolithic artistic creations definitely peaked in the 70s-80s, but albums as a simple collection of songs have existed for almost as long as recorded music. Until the late-1960s it was the norm; we’re just experiencing a return to that being the dominant format.