Brendan Sinclair @BrendanSinclair@mastodon.social

#introduction

I'm the managing editor for GamesIndustry.biz, a trade site about the video game industry. Before this, I was senior news editor for GameSpot.

I've been incredibly fortunate with my career in games and journalism, but don't know if I would suggest anybody get into either industry.

I try to be kind. I try to use what little power I have to leave the world better than I found it.

I'd like to make leaving Twitter more convenient for anyone inclined to jump, and I've noticed one of the things that keeps me there is it's where a bunch of media outlets post and they don't run accounts here.

So I'm starting up a GamesIndustry.biz account that will toot out stories for people who want to keep up with industry news:

https://mastodon.social/@GIbiz

"It's important for the managers and executives who will make decisions on these issues to understand that there is no clean, neutral option, because silence is itself an inherently political position."

Rob Fahey with another great editorial this week

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-05-20-theres-no-hiding-from-the-culture-wars-opinion

This was supposed to be part of a This Week in Business column but it got out of hand and wound up long enough that we just ran it as a stand-alone editorial

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-05-19-whatever-happened-to-the-power-of-the-cloud-opinion

As eager as I am to proclaim the blockchain and crypto fad dead and gone, and as much as the bad news around them in the past few weeks has been staggering, I'm hesitant to believe this wildly volatile swing is the one that puts it away for good when any of the others also should have been that already.

In light of the recent crypto slide, I figured I'd check in on another irrational pandemic-era investment trend.

Every pro sport: We really want to expand our fanbase and appeal to new audiences.

Every pro sport's ads: You are a worthless cuck if you do not like gambling, crypto, and pick-up trucks.

It's super weird that hospitals advertise, right? And not just in the US.

The draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade specifically threatens a host of other rights, some of which Republicans have already talked about undoing.

Bungie was right to speak up about this, and more companies need to follow suit.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-05-06-bungie-speaks-up-this-week-in-business

Really enjoying this writer alignment chart because it seems there's such an obvious one right way to be (my way), but pretty much everyone on the
GamesIndustry.biz team is a different alignment.

PSA: Playoff overtime hockey is the best and the Rangers and Penguins are going into triple overtime. Please enjoy.

Quite enjoying that the schemers looking to profit off artificial scarcity neglected to make their things artificially scarce.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nft-sales-are-flatlining-11651552616

I went into this idea a bit more here:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-05-03-square-enix-sale-of-western-studios-marks-the-end-of-an-existential-crisis-opinion

I feel like Square Enix selling off Eidos is the last domino falling for the late-'00s Japanese publisher existential crisis that had so many of them suddenly pushing for Western-made content.

The latest Games from the Black Hole pays tribute to my favorite health bar in games, from the old PC Spider-Man game.

https://gamesfromtheblackhole.wordpress.com/2022/05/01/the-amazing-spider-man/

Was reading a story on a sports website, paused the sidebar video ad that was playing because it's such an irritating distraction, and then it instantly spawned the same ad in the middle of the text, bumping the story off-screen so I could see the same ad I just paused.

Is it just me, or is ad-supported media of all kinds increasingly adversarial as time passes?

I give Google a lot of flack, but hats off to these very excellent "People also ask" questions when you search for Wayne Coyne.

(For the record, The Flaming Lips are excellent.)