Lewis Gordon

Hello everyone. I come with the sad news that as you are no doubt already aware, we're saying goodbye to several of our friends and colleagues here at Eurogamer. Leaving us are Tom Orry, our editorial director; our video team of Ian Higton, Zoe Delahunty-Light, and Alix Attenborough; Alex Donaldson, our editor-at-large; and Will Judd, who worked across Digital Foundry, hardware and deals. I'll start with Tom, who over the past year-plus had made himself a hugely valuable source of advice, expertise, desert-dry humour and world class poker faces (I think we just about made him laugh once, for a moment, on his final day). Tom initially began the role when Tom Phillips was our editor-in-chief here, mostly working away diligently in the background in a two-Tom-tandem doing editorial director things, before taking on a more prominent role on the site itself over the past 11 or 12 months, gracing us with some signature console nostalgia and unjustifiably intense Project Gotham Racing enthusiasm. Tom, Dom, Alex and I, along with the rest of the team, worked together closely on what a 'new Eurogamer' might look like last year, and his experience in running multiple games media sites was consistently our rock to lean on. While he may have initially seemed an outsider of sorts compared to Eurogamer chiefs of old - at least to some on the surface, coming from his 20-plus years across our sister sites VG247 and USGamer, and before that the cult-favourite site he founded in our once-rival VideoGamer - I can't stress enough how much Tom 'got' Eurogamer. His goal was for us to be at the heart of the big stories that mattered most to our readers with original, diligent reporting and on-the-button commentary, and that will absolutely continue. In immaculately on-brand, limelight-dodging Orry style, Tom opted to sneak his farewell into this past weekend's What We've Been Playing column, but I'll be damned if he gets away with it that easily. Sorry Tom. Here's what he had to say…

From myself and the whole team at @eurogamer.bsky.social, a very fond farewell and huge thank you to our friends and colleagues (thread).💙

“I have not seen anything like this before,” Jon Wolfsthal, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama and a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, told 404 Media. “As a citizen, it seems dangerous to enable people in power to place bets anonymously on things that might happen, creating an incentive to act on a basis of personal gain and not the national interest.”

had some interesting conversations about this. Thanks to @jonatomic.bsky.social for sharing some thoughts

Polymarket Pulls Bet on Nuclear Detonation in 2026 ‘How ghoulish.’ The depravity economy moves into the nuclear war business.

super odd. Polymarket was hosting a bet on the possibility of a nuclear detonation in 2026 and it's now "archived" it. You can't view it anymore.

I'm keeping a thread of fiction I'm reading in 2026 since I always enjoy similar kinds of recommendation posts from others and I want to keep up a little pressure on myself to read (and actually articulate thoughts!)

Feel free to chime in, disagree vehemently, or simply ignore.

📖🐛

Whereas fascism is the ideology of no: of negative declarations — inwardness rather than outwardness.

From Hour of the Star: not only is this an insanely audacious way to start a novel, it's also one of the most jubilant affirmations of life I've ever read.

"All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born."

Yes, great!! Will read that one after Near To The Wild Heart, which I immediately went out and bought as soon as I knew Hour of the Star was a banger.

Also ripped through this slender 70-pager. I asked a friend to recommend something in the Elena Ferrante/Natalia Ginzburg mould. She suggested the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, who is more experimental yet just as psychologically rugged and complex. Definitely reading more of her work.

Just wrapped up this beauty: a prismatic, epoch-spanning novel about how we situate ourselves with and against nature (in this case, the only named wind in the UK, Helm). Sounds heady but it's not because Hall's writing is so earthy and character-driven.

holy shit 71 tracks

For months, @jacksonwryan.com has been looking into why so many video games sites have become full of gambling and casino stories, unusual author images, and, most recently, the use of AI. We've connected these sites to Clickout Media. Here's what we've learned.

2025 Critical Distance Status Once again, it’s time to check in on the finances for Critical Distance.   Last year, I said the finances were on the brink of stability. We never actually achieved that stability: we are unli…

CD is 100 dollars or so short of sustainability. Incredibly valuable resource for anyone who cares about games, whether for research or just casual reading. Also like... look lmao, web's as fractured as it's ever been. Having the roundup gather a bunch of cool stuff you'd never see otherwise is good

Big news! 🎉

My second Gaelic horror game Grease Trap ’99 just got funding from Creative Scotland’s Open Fund!

Retro PS1-style horror set in a Scottish chippy. Fully voice-acted in Gaelic. You’re frying fish, making curry sauce, taking orders… while something malevolent grows beneath the surface 👀🐟

100K units sold seems like a phenomenal achievement. Congrats!

It's also entirely deserved -- a true beauty of a game.

Glasgow indie games fest poster - 11th-12th July - tickets on sale now!

Verrrry exciting seeing everything start to come together..

If you have a game you'd like to show, submissions for game entries are opening later this week✧˖°.

Welkom op Unpause! - Unpause Unpause is een gamewebsite. Zo lastig als dat blijkt, zo simpel kan het zijn.

De gamejournalistiek dreigde uit Nederland te verdwijnen Daarom zijn we vandaag met Unpause begonnen.

Een gamesite die van onszelf is, zonder uitgever. Ons verdienmodel is simpel: onze lezers kunnen abonneren.

Kom lezen, en steun als je wil en kan!

www.unpause.nl/verhalen/nie...

ooooh this is sounding great

Fallson On Baby Steps I've been picturing him as he might appear if ever glimpsed from far below. Cresting the tree line, coming into and out of focus through some documentarian's telescopic lens, where the ...

On Baby Steps: www.arcadence.com/fallson/

excited to read this!!

If soulseek isn't immune to slop, nowhere is 🤬

bring back the chronicles of riddick menu cube also www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOcp...

Monolith released F.E.A.R. and Condemned: Criminal Origins in the same year (2005). What a one-two punch.

From Indiepocalypse to Sindiegularity

Even if code & art stop being production "bottlenecks", nothing improves in terms of:

* attention: we're not getting more free time to play
* discoverability: algos and chaotic virality rule
* sustainability: prices fall to zero, only landlords win

From 2008-2018 the video games industry existed for financial interests to incubate what they wanted to become the new economy. Gambling on everything, addiction by design, mediated social spaces, even massive GPU production. They don't need games anymore so they left games behind, wounded.

yeah I mean I play these games in a pretty compartmentalised manner -- not exactly ignoring story but, more often than not, laying down a waypoint in some far flung corner of the map and letting the undulations of the land/my own curiosity take me there

I'll have to check it out!!

Took these 8 years ago 🤯

The wind in Assassin's Creed: Shadows offers more than graphical bluster An exploration of wind, triple-A games' new-found favourite metaphor, from Assassin's Creed: Shadows to Ghost of Tsushima and beyond.

Also, AC: Shadows is worth playing for all of the above. I wrote a little about it here

www.eurogamer.net/the-wind-in-...

Breakpoint enjoyer logging on. This is the mother of all caveats, but if you ignore the story and other guff, it's also stunning. Everything you mention about Wildlands - landscape rendering, scale, weather and light, etc - all bangs in Breakpoint. In fact, I'm off to install it on my PS5 right now

I've got recs for days. Just shout or DM me if you want more/you're vibing with any of these