NEW YORK – Much like a storied sports franchise, Rockstar Games intends on taking home hardware for Grand Theft Auto VI until they can’t anymore.
“It’s just so easy,” says President of Rockstar Games Sam Houser. “Think about it. You can only win ‘Game of the Year’ in the year that your game releases. But people anticipate a game year after year. They anticipated last year when we won, they are still anticipating now, and they will keep anticipating for years to come. Yes, I said years. If we want to be the most successful game of all-time, as our modest projections predict, a head start won’t hurt.”
Many gamers shared the same sentiment when hearing this news from Rockstar. If they only want the game to be anticipated, will it ever release?
“I get where they’re coming from,” said local gamer Frank Peterson. “Everybody loves to win. But ‘Game of the Year’ is the big cheese, the cream of the crop. Winning “Most Anticipated” every year would be like continuously beating a four year old in Street Fighter. Yeah, you’re winning. But c’mon, at least give the little guy a few.”
Following the outcry from fans, Geoff Keighley also stepped up to share his thoughts on the matter.
“I personally hope the game never comes out,” Keighley said. “It would really kill my favorite joke, ‘we got blank before we got GTA VI’. Am I supposed to start saying ‘we really got chips and queso before we got Beyond Good and Evil 2’? No, it just doesn’t roll off the tongue the same. Plus, if I get one of their trailers for my show, it’s going to set the world on fire.”
At press time, Silksong creators Team Cherry were reportedly planning to delist their game and compete in the “Most Anticipated” category again next year.
FORT DODGE, Iowa — In the midst of giving a usual list of recommendations, one local dentist switched things up at a recent appointment to plug his personal game of the year—Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
“So you’re definitely going to want to get an electric toothbrush,” Dr. Neal, DDS was heard saying. “That will help mitigate the risk of those receding gums. You’ll want to start flossing more regularly too, as that will reduce the bleeding during these appointments. Also, you’ll want to check out Clair Obscur: Expedition 33when you get time. It’s available on PlayStation 5, Steam, and Xbox Series X and S. It comes with a subscription to Xbox Game Pass. I know they just raised the price, but if you beat the game fast enough it’s still a great value you’re getting. Otherwise it’s still only $49.99, much lower than the price of your average triple-A game.”
Patients were confused by the change to the usual rigamarole.
“I’m sure it’s great and all,” patient Ted Sampson said, following the appointment. “It just caught me off-guard. I’m not usually expecting to hear what the hottest new game on Game Pass while getting my teeth cleaned. I try not to even mention that I play video games outside of my friend group. Did she just clock me as a gamer by the way I look? Maybe I need a new wardrobe.”
Reactions from other office staff have confirmed that this straying from the path is not a one-time thing.
“It’s all she’s talking about anymore,” one employee, who asked to remain anonymous out of concerns of retribution from their employer, said. “She’s doing voicelines from the game all the time, too. The other day, she said ‘let’s carve a path’ while she was filling a patient’s cavity. And every day when she leaves, she stops by my office and says ‘tomorrow comes.’ Recommending it for a while after you play it is one thing, but it’s essentially been her personality for the whole year.”
At press time, Dr. Neal was seen replacing all the waiting room’s Highlights magazines with Prima strategy guides.
I don't know if I've laughed more at a headline this year than when I sat down with a coffee this morning and saw "Meta Plans to Shift Spending Away From the Metaverse".
It's from aWall Street Journal story, which reports that Meta is going to make some big budget changes in 2026, slashing spending on its metaverse efforts and redirecting that cash towards the company's AI and AI-powered wearable divisions instead.
In 2021, just four years ago, Zuckerberg was so into the idea of the metaverse that he changed his company's name from Facebook, one of the most recognisable brands on the planet, to Meta. He said within the next decade--so by 2031--one billion people would be hanging out in these virtual spaces, which were a key selling point for Quest headsets.
And investors and shareholders believed him! He said something that had no basis in reality, which was never going to happen and--surprise--has not happened, and sunk billions of dollars into a quixotic quest. Now he's stuck with a company named after something he's making a humiliating retreat from.
In 2022, he was so into the idea of NFTs thathe spoke openly about a vision that one day soon users of his metaverse would be able to buy clothing items as NFTs, and announced plans to bring them to both Facebook and Instagram. This received widespread news coverage! Because he was CEO of Meta, he must know about this tech stuff!
Just one year later,those plans were cancelled as the ass fell out of the NFT market, with regular human people proving they did not want or care about that bullshit.
And yet! This man, whose only true success is in building a pervy website in the early 2000s then tricking the world into thinking it was a viable social media platform, is repeatedly allowed to say whatever bullshit comes to mind into a microphone and millions of people will not just lap it up, they will give him billions of dollars to keep doing it, then give him billions more when whatever he's working on is a bust and he decides to do something else.
Example: Meta shares were up 4% today. Investors looked at a man who had spent billions chasing something nobody wanted and, instead of punishing his repeated hubris and failures, simply made the line go up again. It’s the definition of insanity.
I'm wrong all the time, why won't anyone give me billions to invest in something. At least I'd build something cool.
I do wonder why tech journalists continue to parrot the complete nonsense that people like Zuckerberg and Musk say as if it has any shred of credibility. In this case, the headline is accurate. He made a successful social network in the early 2000's and has done nothing well since then. At some point, you just have to acknowledge the obvious fact that he was a lucky right-place/right-time developer and not a savant with his pulse on the future of technology or society.
ROCKVILLE, Md. — Last week, local gamer Sulaiman Dean played the highly regarded 2020 roguelike Hades for the first time and was reportedly astonished to have an enjoyable experience.
“Hades is an absolute masterpiece,” said Dean. “How has nobody talked about this? I was absolutely blown away by how fun it was, it’s honestly a bit of a hidden gem. I knew I was treading new ground when I read some listicles of underrated games from the past few years and it wasn’t on a single one.”
Lindsay Pham, a close friend of Dean’s, gave him a copy of Hades as a birthday gift after years of trying to persuade him to give it a chance.
“Our Discord server was constantly raving about Hades after it was released, but Sulaiman still refused to play it,” recalled Pham. “He mainly heard about it from Twitter, so he kept telling us that he ‘doesn’t care that we want to have sex with Thanatos’ and that he’s instead looking for ‘a satisfying hack-and-slash dungeon crawler set on a beautifully-illustrated and voice-acted interpretation of classic characters’. I finally just coughed up six dollars during a Steam sale event to buy it for him so that we could shut him up in time for Hades II.”
Janet Miller, another member of Dean’s friend group, revealed that his rejection of current trends extended beyond video games.
“Sulaiman has always been a little behind on the times,” explained Miller. “I can play along and have fun when he’s pushing a year-old friendslop game on us every once in a while, or maybe sending an unironic Impact font meme here and there. But it sucks that we can’t go out to eat as a group without him complaining that there’s no app that lets you easily pay people directly from your bank account.”
At press time, Dean was seen reposting the Hades II announcement in r/Hades, a subreddit dedicated to Hellenic paganism.
SUNYSHORE CITY — Gym Leader Volkner gave a public statement that a recent gym battle where his entire team was curbstomped by a level 16 Diglett was “The greatest battle” he had ever had.
“That battle was absolutely electrifying! It was the exact jolt I needed to get me out of my depressive funk,” Volkner, who is mandated by the Sinnoh Pokémon League to include an electric pun every other sentence, said of the battle where all five of his fully trained Pokémon were taken out by a Diglett that only used Magnitude. “I’ve been on and off Zoloft which didn’t help, but this battle was what I need to rewire my brain. This kid had more skill than I’ve ever seen in 23 years of being a Pokémon trainer.”
When reached for comment, Pokémon Trainer Purple said that his secret strategy to defeating Volkner was to “Just catch a Diglett in a nearby cave like two miles outside the city.”
The battle came on the heels of a twenty-six month period where Volkner remained undefeated, which brought the Gym Leader into a well-documented depressive spiral. The leader was often seen standing outside the cliffs staring Bryonically out towards the sea. Some speculated this led to helping him maintain his streak, as he was never around to actually accept any new challengers.
“Y’know I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad that Volkner lost. He really needed that kick in the rear to start managing the gym again.” said Sunnyshore City resident Julia. “He spent last year completely rewiring the city’s solar panels to power his gym’s elaborate gear and Tesla coil puzzles. We tried to tell him that it was a waste of money and power. Over in Vermillion City, Lt. Surge just scattered some trash cans around a big room and called it a day, but Volkner wouldn’t hear it. Like, you know that thing runs 24/7 and goes through 5 million gallons of water a day, right?”
At press time, Dragon-Type Gym Leader Clair criticized Volkner for his lack of preparation for unfavorable type matchups while taking questions outside Ice Path.
It’s an all too common story in the video game industry: A developer spends months or years working on a game, the game comes out, and despite all the sleepless nights and stressful days, their name doesn’t even make the credits. Sometimes it’s the result of petty political squabbles; other times, companies are trying to quietly incentivize workers to stick around until a project’s completion, even though they might be dissatisfied with pay, crunch, or other conditions. Consider Demonschool, the newly released Persona-inspired tactics RPG from Necrosoft, a course correction.
Despite a relatively small core dev team, Demonschool lists all 145 people who contributed to it in any capacity over the course of its multi-year development cycle. Not only that, its credits explain, in an uncommon amount of detail, what each developer’s respective work on the project entailed. For example, the credits describe Brent Porter, the game’s 3D art lead, as having done “most of the 3D modeling and rigging as well as creating most backgrounds. Also developed the lighting scheme and the visual style used in tiling and texture work. Created a number of the 2D battle and NPC sprites and visual effects, as well as preproduction concept art, including determining the final proportions of battle characters.”
Demonschool director Brandon Sheffield told Aftermath that he’s been chewing on how to solve the crediting issue since the completion of Necrosoft’s last game, Hyper Gunsport.
“We worked [on Hyper Gunsport] with a localization company that refused to give the names of the people that actually did the work; they just wanted to have their company name in there,” Sheffield said. “They say they do that because ‘It's the standard’ and ‘to avoid poaching’ or whatever, but I hate that and think it's total BS. … I've also seen a lot of folks complain about how they weren't credited on a game because they'd left the studio before the game they worked on was finished. And indeed, our lead 3D artist left two years ago. But he's still the first artist credited because he set the style and visual tone for a lot of the game. Not working on the game to the very end doesn't negate the work he did.”
"Our lead 3D artist left two years ago. But he's still the first artist credited because he set the style and visual tone for a lot of the game."
The more Sheffield thought about how to meet the needs of so many different types of contributors – and discussed the matter on social media – the more a comprehensive, detail-oriented approach to crediting started to make sense.
“That had all been percolating in the back of my mind as we got close to finishing, and then it just sort of hit me as it came time for me to write the credits,” he said. “I discussed this approach with the team and everyone was fine with it, so we just went for it. We always want to credit everyone that touched the game, so even though the core team was 7 or 8 people at any given time, we credited around 145 people in Demonschool. Who cares if it's a lot of people? Who cares if it's long? They all did something and they deserve credit. And you basically can tell who the core team was by reading the descriptions. None of us are precious about that anyway.”
This resulted in some developers getting credited on an individual basis for the first time in their careers: “We made sure to ask every partner we worked with to give us every name of everybody who touched the game,” said Sheffield. “In the case of Bit Egg out of Thailand, they told me this was going to be the first actual credit for some of their staff.”
Sheffield hopes that providing greater detail than a simple title helps both players and prospective employers understand exactly what goes into a game’s development.
"We wanted to do this for a few reasons: One is that you don't usually know what a title means by itself,” he said. “Take ‘Artist.’ OK, what kind of art? What part of the game was that art in? It's useful for players to know that if they're interested in game development. But also say one of these people wants to get hired somewhere and is using Demonschool on their resume. Now everything they did is in the credits clear as day. ‘I created several of the enemy sprites and animations’ is more descriptive and useful than ‘I did some pixel art.’ And now what you've done is supported directly by the credits."
“Take ‘Artist.’ OK, what kind of art? What part of the game was that art in? It's useful for players to know that if they're interested in game development."
Sheffield is unsure if Necrosoft is the first studio to approach credits this way. He hopes someone else has at least done something similar. Regardless, he doesn’t think there’s anything stopping other studios from following in Demonschool’s footsteps – even if they wind up needing to credit substantially more people.
“I know in a Ubisoft game, something like this would be unwieldy, but maybe [if you did it] just for the core team of 300 or so?” Sheffield said. “If we can do this for 145 people to varying degrees of detail, a team with 100x the resources can do it for their core team of 300.”
So far, said Sheffield, the response to Demonschool’s credits has been exceedingly positive.
“I've mostly gotten responses from game developers saying they like how the credits are done, but I've seen a few things from players too – like ‘So that's what a game director does’ or generally just feeling like they're getting a look behind the scenes when they read this stuff,” said Sheffield. “A few people have asked questions in our Discord or Bluesky like ‘Who did all the art of the demon fish [in the fishing minigame]?’And other players can just answer them right away: ‘Oh, it's in the credits, that was Gustav Samuelson.’ I just think that's neat.”
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