HeyJaredRecognizing Patterns
Gaming industry pattern recognition from inside the conversations. How one game delay reshapes an entire calendar, why roguelikes are eating everything, and what studios are really doing right now.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 13
- Latest publication
- Sep 27, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest issues
A Free Game Engine Is Taking the Power Back (opens the original)
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TL;DRA game engine is the software every video game is built on: it handles the graphics, physics and sound, and packages the finished game for each platform. Because a studio’s code, art and skills all pile up inside one engine, switching is rare and expensive, so whoever controls your engine has real power over you.Godot, the free open source engine, is winning where games start but not yet where they make money: it powered 47% of entries at the world’s large
Nintendo Does What Everyone Else Can't (opens the original)
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TL;DRThe launch date was never the scarce thing. The scarce thing is the evening, and games compete for it with Netflix, books and sleep, none of which has a release date.Some substitutes are closer than others. Call of Duty and Battlefield should avoid each other, while Zelda and GTA VI can more or less ignore each other.Nintendo has already stress-tested its audience. It shipped a console that sold 13.56 million units, its customers kept buying software for it anyway, and then they bought 156.
Forty Games Avoided GTA VI by Colliding With Each Other (opens the original)
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TL;DR:Last November I called November 2026 a dead zone for everyone except GTA VI and the foolish. Most of the industry agreed and crowded into September and October. Nintendo put its Zelda remake on 5 November anyway.Everybody’s hedge has the same counterparty. Roughly forty release schedules now depend on one date, set by a company that has already moved it twice.The crowding has not been a massacre so far. Two big September games launched a day apart and both passed a million sales within day
Netflix Aired GTA 6 and Closed Its Game Studios (opens the original)
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TL;DR:Netflix ran a game advertisement through its documentaries department and it beat every film and series that week. 31.1 million views in four days.It closed Night School Studio twenty eight days after the co-CEO called its game a top tier performer. The fourth studio it has exited since 2024.Everything that survived plays on a television with your phone as the controller. Its most played game is Solitaire.Amazon and Microsoft reached the same conclusion on the same afternoon.
Sony Killed the PlayStation Disc. Consumer Preference Is Only Half the Story. (opens the original)
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TL;DRSony confirmed on 1 July 2026 that it will stop producing physical discs for new PlayStation games from January 2028, and the backlash arrived within hours: a Change.org petition passed 40,000 signatures in 48 hours and cleared 200,000 within the week.The preference story Sony is telling checks out as far as it goes: PlayStation’s digital software share climbed from 66% in FY2021 to 78% across full year FY2025, hit a record 85% in the
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