VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
From Baldur's Gate to a surprisingly good Sonic RPG, these 8 BioWare games still hold up decades later
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
Over the Hill, an exploration racing game from the developer behind Art of Rally, is the perfect antidote to Forza Horizon's AAA expanse.
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
The best early weapon and combat ability to choose in the prologue of Control Resonant.
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
Sekiro: No Defeat has a new confirmed streaming date on Crunchyroll, where it will be released as an 8-episode anime — not a movie.
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
The Division 2: Echoes of Central Park launches in November with a new story set in Central Park and the Upper West Side.
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has implemented many changes over the past month. Here's every rumor, change, and game cancellation in our running news roundup.
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
Here's how to repair the projector and solve the slides puzzle in Silent Hill: Townfall.
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VIDEO GAMES
Polygon
Xbox cut Age of Empires studio World's Edge in half and canceled its next game, according to former employees.
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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.