The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for more Gene Wolfe. I’ve finished Shadow Of The Torturer now, and I think Claw Of The Conciliator might be even better so far? Before I become ever more enamoured with Severian’s self-mythologising antics, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

This is an older piece, but pertinent since the ridiculous “strong men/hard times” meme has been doing the rounds again recently. Historian Bret Devereaux breaks it down for A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.

The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’ conditions, associated with complex societies, wealth and book-reading weenies (read: literacy) make for morally inferior people who are consequently worse at fighting. Because we all know that moral purity makes you better at fighting, right?

The relativity of ‘Fremeness’ is actually one reason why I’m using the term Fremen in place of tradition or more common terms you’ll see: ‘uncivilized people’ ‘barbarians’ or ‘savages.’ Of course, it lets me neatly dash around the offensive components of those terms, but more to the point, it creates a term to describe the myth without creating a term that might purport to describe the reality. Which is to say I can say that a society is perceived as being Fremen, without actually tagging them with ‘barbarian’ or ‘savage,’ because those terms have all of the intellectual usefulness of a raincoat in the desert. It is rapidly going to become apparent that the popular idea of who does and do not count as Fremen – or its inverse, ‘decadent’ – is such an absurdly moving target as to be practically meaningless (there are a few constants, but only a few), with some societies whip-lashing between the two so fast that it makes me dizzy seeing it.

Mike Rose of Not Tonight and Hypnospace Outlaw publishers No More Robots spoke to Game Developer about the current struggles indie publishers face. Some interesting Steam insights here I hadn’t considered. For a more optimistic chaser, here's a thread by Raw Fury's founder.

For starters, he says it's time to admit that platform holders are no longer serving the interests of smaller publishers. "The problem with the new situation is that everything that I did when No More Robots started—you know, getting cheeky [Xbox Game Pass] deals and making it onto the Stream front page—isn't available any more," he says. "None of that is available anymore. When the Steam Summer Sale happens, it's absolutely triple-A all the way down that have paid for those slots. It used to be the Summer Sale would make us a year of burn rate, and now it's a nice little spike."

Rose says indies have been sidelined on Steam after Microsoft, Sony, EA and other major players chose to bring titles that might previously have been console exclusives onto PC. "Steam is making more money," he says, "but like 50 percent of that revenue is being generated by 1 percent of the games."

Aftermath gave Game Informer's recent and former staff a space to give proper eulogies to the site - something they were denied when the magazine and website was shuttered last week. Laying off so many people with little warning is bad enough, but there's a special ball pit full of snakes and foot-lego in hell for the sweaty robot that decided to also nuke all the work they'd done.

I got the text about Game Informer’s abrupt shutdown on Friday morning, and it took me most of the weekend to really process my thoughts on it. It ended exactly the way we always knew it would – a cold, impersonal, and unceremonious pulling of the plug from its incompetent parent company GameStop – but it’s still hard to imagine a games media landscape without Game Informer.

Critical Distance’s roundup last week wrote about Game Informer’s closure, then listed a great roundup of independent games writing sites. I’ll add to this that Critical Distance itself is a vital publication run by extremely hard working people. Like all these sites, it’s driven by a genuine interest in highlighting interesting work. As CD put it, they’re all effectively passing the same $20 back and forth.

Here's a good Half Life meme. Read James’s foray into Asda Tech peripherals it’s brilliant. Then read Edwin's Crush House review even if you don't care about Crush House. Can't believe I get to work alongside writers this good. It's weird and very special. I actually started reading Gene Wolfe because it came up in comments about FromSoft-style storytelling, and this older Waypoint article made a great companion piece. Music this week is 86Sentra by NxWorries. Have a great weekend!