External article · Ars Technica
VIDEO GAMES
It's mostly bad news from EA lately, but preservation efforts are nice to see.
Read article →
External article · Ars Technica
VIDEO GAMES
A former Rockstar tech director thinks the developer is facing new time pressures.
Read article →
External article · Ars Technica
VIDEO GAMES
Using a capture card and open source software to run PS5 video through a PC GPU.
Read article →
External article · Ars Technica
VIDEO GAMES
And what that could mean for physical Switch game costs.
Read article →
External article · Ars Technica
VIDEO GAMES
"The flow of time is always cruel."
Read article →
External article · Ars Technica
VIDEO GAMES
Sound designer lets Half Life-related codename slip at a conference.
Read article →
External article · Ars Technica
VIDEO GAMES
"Userland" exploit relies on integer overflow found in "SmileBasic" interpreter.
Read article →
External article · Ars Technica
VIDEO GAMES
We can't have nice things, but at least we can get trailers for them.
Read article →
External article · Ars Technica
VIDEO GAMES
Tile-based color palettes go way beyond the four shades of red on original hardware.
Read article →
External article · Ars Technica
VIDEO GAMES
There are still significant hurdles ahead, both technical and legislative.
Read article →
About Video Games
How the industry is structured
Three groups appear in most video game stories. Platform holders make the consoles and run the storefronts that games are sold through, and they set the technical and commercial rules everyone else works within. Publishers finance and market games, often owning the studios that make them. Developers build them, either inside a publisher, under contract, or independently and self-published. A great deal of the news in this section is really about the relationships between those three, since a studio closure, a storefront policy change and an exclusivity deal are each a story about who holds leverage over whom. Subscription services add a fourth party that pays for inclusion rather than per copy, and the terms of those arrangements quietly shape which kinds of games get funded at all.
How a game reaches players
Development runs on timescales measured in years, which is why announcements arrive long before release and delays are routine rather than exceptional. A game may be shown once and then go quiet for several years. Some launch into early access, meaning players buy an unfinished product and the development continues in public. Many ship and then change substantially through patches, so the version reviewed at launch and the version available later can differ in significant ways. Live service games are built never to be finished at all, which makes them closer to an ongoing subscription than to a single purchase.
Reading the numbers
Sales language in this industry is unusually slippery, and the exact wording matters. Units shipped counts what went to retailers rather than what anyone bought. Players or accounts counts people who launched the game, which includes anyone who got it free or through a subscription. Copies sold is the strictest measure and the one least often quoted. Review scores carry their own conventions, including embargo dates that release all coverage at once, and aggregate scores that average very different pieces of writing into a single number. Concurrent player counts, where a storefront publishes them, measure peak simultaneous use rather than total audience, and they fall away sharply after launch even for games that keep a healthy following.