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Subscribe via RSSShort, opinionated takes on industry shifts. What happened, why it caught our attention, and what it means for people building games.
2026
The AI Scarlet Letter (2026-07-02) Tim Sweeney calls Steam's AI disclosure tag "really irresponsible," eight days after his own engine wired LLMs into the editor. AI is welcome at the tooling layer and punished at the storefront, and the fix isn't removing the label. Read more →
The fixed-cost trap (2026-05-30) Bungie sunsetting Destiny 2, OpenAI killing Sora, the rolling layoffs. The shared cause isn't AI or bad luck. It's bets so large they have no shock absorbers, and the only real defense is a cheap miss. Read more →
The rubble of the giants (2026-05-29) A dying live-service game releases its audience. Displaced players are motivated, unattached, and arriving in groups, the cheapest audience a small team will ever reach, and the giants can't chase them. Read more →
The browser is a shipping target now (2026-05-24) Clustered lighting, GPU Gaussian splatting, HDR, and WebGPU compatibility mode all landed in eight weeks. The "you can't make a real game in a browser" objection is dead. Only the habit survives. Read more →
The 52/52 split (2026-03-28) Company adoption and developer backlash both sit near half. Many who skip AI trust the pipeline and storefront rules more than the models. That bet is only partly safe. Read more →
Browser rendering just had its best month ever (2026-03-27) While everyone argued about AI at GDC, browser rendering shipped five years of progress in four weeks. Clustered lighting, GPU Gaussian splatting, and WebGPU standardization all landed in March. Read more →
AI-native engines are shipping, and they look nothing like Unity (2026-03-24) Three new game engines shipped in March that are built for AI agents, not humans. No visual editors. YAML scenes. MCP protocols. This isn't Unity with an AI tab bolted on. Read more →
Solo developers are shipping real games, not just prototypes (2026-03-23) Two weeks after vibe coding became the new game jam, solo developers moved from prototyping to selling. 29K lines of C#, 8 parallel Claude agents, and real games on Steam. Read more →
When AI overrides the artist (2026-03-16) DLSS 5's controversy isn't about upscaling. It's about what happens when the rendering pipeline between your art and the player's screen has an AI rewriting your creative decisions. Read more →
Vibe coding is the new game jam (2026-03-13) Collins Dictionary named vibe coding Word of the Year 2025. For game developers, it means the barrier between weird idea and playable prototype has collapsed. Read more →
What 2,200 games at Steam Next Fest tell you about discovery (2026-03-11) Next Fest rewards games that already have an audience. If you're starting from zero, you need a different path. Read more →
Open source has an AI pollution problem (2026-03-06) Godot maintainers are drowning in AI-generated pull requests. The tools meant to make developers more productive are making open-source projects less productive. Read more →
Everyone wants to be the AI game engine now (2026-03-04) Unity, Roblox, Moonlake, Phaser, and a dozen startups all announced AI-first game creation tools in the same month. Two years ago, VCs said this market didn't exist. Read more →