Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/31/25 at 03:23 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! With harvest season drawing to a close, in our pre-industrial civilizations, November was typically a month to take a moment to give thanks for what blessings the Earth Gods heaped upon us – or, in leaner times, to give thanks that the Earth Gods bothered to give us anything at all, so at no to offend them into making the problem long-term.
The Gaming Gods have not given us a whole lot to be thankful lately, but I suppose we should at least take the time to pick through the overturned-outhouse leavings in the event that they slipped something good in there by mistake.
Thankfully the shovelware is much tamer than last month... But there’s still something in every category of uselessness. In Licensed Swill, there’s a new ‘Spongebob’ game, a new ‘Hello Kitty’ game, and a new ‘Terminator’ game. In the Casual Swill category, there’s “Let’s Sing 2026,” which conveniently abuts to the Annualized Swill …
Unity = Malware Now?!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/25/25 at 05:27 PM CT
Back in 2023, we watched the company behind the Unity Engine – one of the two most popular canned solutions for creating games without having to re-write a bunch of low-level code, alongside Epic Games’ Unreal Engine – attempt to commit non-ritual suicide by changing its licensing paradigm to something so greedy that it was completely at odds with the type of Indie and first-timer games that typically use Unity as a jumping-off point. Unity backpedaled and reneged faster than we’ve seen most other corporations do when they try to implement a stupid idea and receive huge amounts of backlash instead of praise, and it seemed like everything was going to go back to “normal,” whatever that means in the modern Industrial Gaming ecosystem.
Of course, nothing can ever just be “normal” or “nice” or “not on fire” anymore, and it recently came to light that the Unity Engine is at the center of a security nightmare, as a vulnerability was introduced in the 2017 version …
Oh, Dear. Atari is Trying Out Yet Another Retro Console
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/19/25 at 12:46 AM CT
Remember a couple years ago when Atari (delenda est) – the terrible videogame publisher that directly caused the 1983 console gaming crash – decided that the thing the world really needed was a crappy Android-powered Ouya clone shaped like an Atari 2600 console, preloaded with a library of ROMs for games so bad they aren’t even worth the few megabytes of space the entire collection occupies in an Emulator folder? Yeah, that was fun, and the failure of the Atari VCS soon lead the pathetic, shambling corpse of one of Gaming’s worst villains to dabble in creating their own cryptocurrency casino. That was even more fun.
Of course, you can’t keep a good terrible company down, and it looks like Atari (delenda est) is trying the retro-console thing again, only this time they're puppeting the corpse of one of their biggest opponents from way back then (who went on to do literally nothing): Intellivision. Promoting their new endeavor as finally burying the hatchet from the first …
Gamepass Bears its First Fruits: -$300 Million for ‘CoD’ Revenue
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/12/25 at 03:06 PM CT
Oh dear, it looks like Microsoft’s endeavors to become Gaming’s loss-leader with Gamepass have already started to bear rotten fruits. According to a recent Bloomberg report, the Xbox Division managed to leave $300 million dollars on the table by putting Activision-Blizzard’s latest ‘Call of Duty’ game on Gamepass day-one instead of simply selling more retail and digitally licensed copies.
While I personally find it baffling that ‘CoD’ is still popular enough to drive those kinds of sales numbers and potentially bring in that kind of revenue, what is NOT baffling is the concept that giving away an entire library of $60 $70 games for less than $20 a month is probably not sustainable in the long-run...
...Which explains why Microsoft also faced extreme backlash and mass cancellations by Gamepass users in response to the announcement that Gamepass Ultimate will essentially be the only version of the service worth subscribing to AND that the Ultimate tier will …
Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/05/25 at 04:11 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! It looks like we’re getting a late start on the games coming in Spoopy Month, since I was so flabbergasted by last week’s news of EA’s impending doom at the hands of private equity that it interrupted the flow. But now that every retail location is crammed with tacky, plastic skeletons and other Halloween-related junk; while grocery stores are stocked with Pumpkin Spice and Apple Cider... everything, there’s a definite hint of Autumn in the air, even if the weather itself is still insisting that it’s Summer (and it’s not even an Indian Summer, where it gets hot again after a hard freeze, like we’ve always had in the Midwest... It’s just still summer, even though the crops are all done, dried, and (mostly) harvested.
Do the remaining maggots gnawing on the dried-out sinew of the corpse of Industrial Gaming still think it’s Summer – and thus a drought – or have they moved on? Let’s take a look at the variety …
The Big 3 Have Fallen! – EA to Sell-Out to Private Equity and Saudi Prince
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/28/25 at 03:06 PM CT
Industrial Gaming has been in the hands of three major players in the Triumvirate of Evil for longer than most young-adult Gamers have even been alive. Yet, starting with the Microsoft buyout of Activision to feed the floundering Xbox Division, these big players have fallen by the wayside, one-by-one.
Not long ago, Ubisoft was the next to fall, after finding itself in such a dismal state that no legitimate *scoff* players in Big Gaming even wanted to buy them, and ended up splitting the company in half, while giving custody of their most lucrative IPs to Chinese Communist Party apparatus, Tencent.
Now Electronic Arts is circling the drain as well, with the announcement last Friday that they were in talks to be bought-out by two private equity firms and Saudi Prince, Mohammed bin Salman to the tune of $50 billion.
Activision becoming part of Xbox, Ubisoft feeding itself to the Communists, and EA going private: It feels like the end of an era. Of course, with the dismal state …
Nintendo Courts Diversity Hires: It’s Not What You Think
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/21/25 at 01:11 PM CT
It seems like Nintendo is the only Big Gaming company making headlines this year, what with both Microsoft and Sony appearing to lie down and die while the gaming landscape changes around them. Earlier on this past Summer, Shigeru Miyamoto – the father of Mario, Link, and basically every Nintendo IP that actually matters – mentioned in an interview that he was urging Nintendo to bring more diversity to its board of directors.
Naturally, whenever a Gamer sees that hateful word, “diversity,” he will immediately assume that it means the same thing it has come to mean in the West over the course of the last 8 years of insane political activism. However, in Japan, and at Nintendo, at least, it seems that “diversity” actually falls more in-line with what most sane people would consider to be “good” diversity, and not the tainted spawn of Identity Politics.
Rather than encouraging Nintendo to create mandatory quotas for hiring Blacks, women, and Lesbians, Miyamoto has …
Nintendo Completes Transformation into Evil Corporation with Bullsh!t Patent
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/14/25 at 03:38 PM CT
Oh dear, it seems that the little toy company that saved gaming from itself after the Crash of 1983 has finally come full-circle and completed its transformation into just another Evil Corporate Person out to take advantage of every situation and exploit every legal loophole in order to entrench and enrich itself.
We’ve grown used to the constant noise from Nintendo’s legal team attempting to squash legal emulation and issuing Cease and Desist letters to long-time fans who just want to create Indie homages to the Nintendo games that proved to be such big influences on them, and on gaming as a whole. Nintendo’s transformation into a draconian, totalitarian control freak has been on full display in other ways, as well, with them putting the kibosh on allowing Nintendo console owners to backup their own save and game data locally after modders exploited that capability to run homebrew code on the Wii almost 20 years ago.
Sadly, Nintendo’s efforts to exert control over …
Sony to Bow-Out of Hardware in Favor of Community
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/06/25 at 11:48 PM CT
During its Summer financial briefing, Sony’s Senior Vice President announced that the company will be gradually changing the PlayStation division’s entire business model. “We are moving away from a hardware-centric business model more to a platform business that expands the community and increases engagement,” he said.
Based on this statement from one of the top men at Sony Corporate, it seems like PlayStation’s days may be numbered, at least when it comes to being a physical box connected to a TV. Following in Microsoft’s footsteps with the Xbox Division, Sony began to dabble in releasing its (very expensive to make) first-party titles on platforms besides PlayStation consoles in 2021, when it began publishing games on Steam. Now, the one-time Console Warrior even seems interested in pushing its software onto competing consoles, as this Summer it also posted a job listing for a “Multiplatform and Account Management Senior Director,” who would be responsible for …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/31/25 at 02:23 PM CT
Welcome back to another installment of the MeltedJoystick Review Round-Up. Here’s what our staff has reviewed since last time:
Nelson’s Reviews:
Matt and I decided to dump “Iron Harvest” after the first couple stages in the third campaigns absolutely sucked, so I went ahead and reviewed it so you, dear readers, can learn WHY it sucked. Aside from that, my Summer gaming was actually pretty good, with three other games earning a 4/5 Star rating or higher. Unfortunately, I got wrapped up in house-cleaning and redecorating my office, and kind of dropped-off for the... ENTIRETY of August. Maybe my motivation to start a new game will return in the Fall (or not).
Ghost of Tsushima – 4.5/5
Hatchwell – 4/5
Iron Harvest – 2/5
Pokemon Legends: Arceus – 4/5
Chris’ Review:
Chris finally completed his first Backlog Ablution title... then went ahead and completed the SECOND one as a ‘palate cleanser’ before starting the third one, which is also a gigantic Sandbox …
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