VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
Croak is a new platformer on Steam and you can play the demo now before the fall release.
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
Nintendo's N64 version of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is full of terrifying visuals. The Switch 2 remake might not be as cute as it looks.
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
Spooky season starts early this year with Shaun the Sheeps' return. Here's an exclusive preview.
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
The Kelvin trilogy didn't just reboot Star Trek. It helped revive the franchise when its future looked uncertain.
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
The twisted fairy tale steps focuses on Cinderella’s misunderstood stepsister
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
A lot of old NES games have something to offer modern players, but only a select few of them are fun from beginning to end.
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
Jack Sawyer returns in the second sequel to 1984's The Talisman
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
The comic strip Calvin and Hobbes could often be profound in its words. This is the best strip examining the meaning of life
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
The 1964 Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars is availble for free on Youtube. Catch the genre-redefining film that made Clint Eastwood a star
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
For a weekend retro gaming session, one of the best games from the 1980s isn't what some players originally expected at all.
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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.