Hit Points by Nathan Brown

Good god but this is good.

Thank you for this! Have noticed similar, albeit at a much (much!) smaller scale.

Best indie game in the preshow. In 2025. Fucking hell.

Again, apologizing to all videogame environment artists who knocked up satirical posters for their games, I should not have rolled my eyes, yes, even you Cyberpunk billboard team, I am sorry

At about $60K that's about 128 million graduate team indie games, at $150K about 500,000 small indie games, at $300K about 250,000 mid-size debut indie games, or at around $950K about 110,000 indie games by a team of more experienced devs.

There are a total of 110,000 indie games on Steam.

Take the Dwemer Bowls, Lydia. Yes all 79. What do you mean “then what,” then we sell them, then we go back for the cups. And one day you’ll be a Thane and you can have YOUR housecarl return every dwarven bowl to every dwarven ruin and I HOPE you never feel pressured to defend that activity

My Perfect Console of the Year (2025): Semi-Final | My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Get more from My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin on Patreon

Which guest built the most popular console of 2025?

It's the semi-finals, with congressional candidate @katmabu.bsky.social vs. former Edge magazine editor @hitpoints.bsky.social, and folk musician @basiabulat.bsky.social facing down Charlie Rosen of the
@the8bitbigband.bsky.social

Vote here:

today instead of buying barely discounted crap, get a paid subscription to an independent media outlet! a little $ goes a long way towards supporting a free press. 🗞️

drop links to your own or your faves in the replies so ppl can easily sign up (bonus if you add a couple words about why it’s good!):

A rare Pokémon appears: Mark Cerny, on the show, next week.

That fiver off Gopuff is tempting though.

A thousand thanks to the consulting client earlier this year who insisted their game needed 64GB of RAM. (It really didn't.) Had no idea prices had gone this insane. Fuckin AI!

Credits for Brent Porter (3D art lead) and Catherine Menabde (2D art lead) are shown here. There's a lengthy description of what they did, with a pastiche of various Demonschool characters underneath, messing around with a computer.

We did something different with the credits for Demonschool. We used this format: name, title, lengthy description of what they did. Often you see credits in games where you don't know what the credited developer was actually responsible for. We wanted to give people proper, actual credit.

Tell him he’s dreaming!

So powerfully embarrassing I’m considering a career change

game design 101

“Our talented team with its own human hands and brains and souls decided that all this shitty art made by a computer was good enough to go in our game” is not a good defense of using AI tools to generate assets.

I made a joke in my main Discord server about DOOM E1M1 being in a major key and @abigbagofkeys.sickonedude.com actually made it. Jesus fucking Christ listen to this hahahaha

Hey Buddy! That door will only open when you shoot at with the phase beam upgrade. You should return here after you have collected that. By the way, Metroid is the name of the monster not the--

you can't just bring back austin powers. the franchise wrote itself into a corner after he volunteered to stay behind forever in the shagadelic dimension to save foxxy and vanessa. they already brought him back once without explaining how he escaped from fembot island, the audience won't buy it

Hey Microsoft, TikTok Is Not an Xbox - Bonus Hit Points Microsoft has been saying the biggest competition for its Xbox gaming business is TikTok. Nathan Brown isn't sure they know what that means.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty have been in the media recently, saying that the biggest competition for Xbox is TikTok.

Nathan Brown of @hitpoints.bsky.social isn't quite sure they know what that means...

thisweekinvideogames.com/feature/bonu... [PAYWALLED]

Lovely stuff as ever!

The man who cancelled Football Manager: ‘I needed a hug, not a kicking’ Miles Jacobson has World Cup winners on WhatsApp, dozens of football clubs who pay for his scouting network and 20 million players who all swear by Football Manager. Until last year, when the series' ...

I spent an afternoon with Miles Jacobson to talk about building (and cancelling) Football Manager over a more than 30 year career. www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/foot...

Smiled at some scenery, figured out the controls, died three times in like six minutes, also uninstalled. Fine!

It's cool how we keep proving over and over and over again that there's a significant market for narrative-heavy, character-driven, single-player experiences in video games and publishers just categorically refuse to believe us

Dick Cheney Departs The World He Made | Defector At its heart, American conservatism is a fantasy. It’s a vision of a world too evil to be saved or cared about, and fearsome enough to justify any and every impulse toward cruelty and violence that a ...

a send-off: defector.com/dick-cheney-...

american indie developer deciding on a setting: in a cozy mountain town surrounded by wholesome yokai, ghibli inspired cooperative sustainable cherry blossoms and you can pet the dog french indie developer deciding on a setting: in a world where the gestalt misery of colonisation's victims has manifested into a sort of misery elemental, three church-like religious organisations hav[nine more paragraphs that leave you feeling like you know less than you knew before you started reading] polish indie developer deciding on a setting: warsaw👍🇵🇱 it is very bad

30 Years of Worms with Team 17's Ashley Day Explore the journey of Worms as it marks 30 years. Hear from Ashley Day about its creation and lasting legacy in gaming.

If you live in or around Wakefield, UK and you're interested in the history of games, I'm giving a talk on the history of Worms and Team17 at Wakefield Museum on Saturday 22nd November.

Tickets are super limited; reserve one here: experiencewakefield.co.uk/event/30-yea...

The perfect dad-joke doesnt exi-

Alan Wake 2