Some Patches Required

This week, Zak and Aaron are back at it with something potentially positive, for a change! Namely, that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is receiving a 12-years-after-the-fact expansion entitled Songs of the Past , bucking industry trends and further solidifying the base game as one of the most important RPGs of the last 20 years. Never content to simply enjoy good news when it comes, Zak and Aaron instea...

This week, Zak and Aaron are back to talk about Bungie again, but not exclusively because of Marathon this time. It would seem that the bell has finally tolled for the long-beleaguered Destiny 2 , as its studio is releasing one final content update before transitioning the title to maintenance mode. Perhaps more damning are the recent reports that a Destiny 3 has yet to be greenlit by Sony, and th...

This week, Zak and Aaron are back at it, talking about indie mega-hit Slay The Spire 2 and its evidently divided player base. You see, while the game has earned rave reviews almost across the board and attracted hundreds of thousands of players, it's also been the target of three separate review bombing campaigns, the largest of which earned the game more than 70 thousand negative reviews on...

This week, Zak and Aaron revisit a topic from earlier this season: the Stop Killing Games Movement! It's been a big couple of months for Ross Scott and the crew which has now grown into an official Non-Governmental Organization in Europe, presented its case in front of Parliament, and even thrown its weight behind proposed legislation in California. What does all of this mean for the movement...

This week, Zak and Aaron take a moment to discuss an online conflict that rears its ugly head with disappointing regularity — the divide between critic and audience review scores when it comes to games and movies. Specifically, our intrepid hosts delve into the cacophonous world of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which is earning rapturous praise from casual viewers and drawing ample derision from c...

This week, Zak and Aaron are back to check in on Marathon , the latest title from Bungie and the latest shot by Sony to make a splash in the wildly oversaturated live service market. Rather than being an unmitigated disaster on the level of Concord or even Highguard, or a runaway success like Arc Raiders, Marathon is something of an in-bounds outlier - performance is perfectly middle-of-the-road....

This week, Zak and Aaron sit down to discuss some pretty massive changes over at Xbox, namely the retirement of long-time CEO Phil Spencer and the quiet disappearance of his heir apparent, Sarah Bond. In their place, we find Asha Sharma, a seasoned executive who most recently led Microsoft's CoreAI team. The why of it all is a bit murky at the moment, but that leaves plenty of room for specul...

This week, Zak and Aaron sit down to chat with Ashley Ruhl, the Narrative Director at Broadsword Online Games, currently in charge of  Star Wars: The Old Republic ! She was kind enough to tell us a little bit about her role working on SWTOR before moving on to the... ahem, meat of the conversation: romance! Specifically, romance in video games, how it can be approached thoughtfully, and where we&a...

This week, Zak and Aaron sit down to discuss yet another curious case of misguided marketing — this time with fewer questionable hats. Highguard, which secured the headlining spot at The Game Awards 2025 thanks to Geoff Keighley's personal fondness for the title, launched last week to overwhelmingly negative reviews on Steam and a rapidly dwindling player count.  How did this happen? Who&apos...

This week, Zak and Aaron sit down to discuss how a series of PR... er, let's call them "miscalculations," arguably torpedoed Splitgate: Arena Reloaded (formerly Splitgate 2) before it even had a chance. This story has it all: politically-charged headware choices, petty Twitter arguments, $100 million investments, off-putting apology videos, and much, much more! Please, enjoy. Source...

This week, Zak and Aaron are back in hell to discuss the pending acquisition of Warner Bros. by Netflix. They touch on what the merger could mean for the future of movie theaters before diving into the main topic at hand: the fate of WB Games and its treasure trove of IP. Spoiler alert: things are looking bleak. Please, enjoy. P.S. Aaron recorded a portion of this episode while holding a sick pupp...

This week, Zak and Aaron sit down to discuss Valve's new, ambitious hardware plans, especially the announcement's headliner: the brand-new Steam Machine. With the form-factor and convenience of a console and the hardware heft of a gaming PC, the cutely nicknamed "Gabe Cube" seems poised to disrupt the market as we know it... but will it? A better question may be, is it even mea...

This week, Zak and Aaron sit down to chat about another (increasingly rare) industry success story: the brand-new Telltale-style adventure Dispatch ! How, despite facing doubt from publishers over the game's fairly niche genre and episodic release structure, did AdHoc Studio's debut title release to rousing numbers and enviable review scores? Only one way to find out... Please, enjoy. Li...

This week, Zak and Aaron finally get around to discussing one of the most significant events in the recent history of the games industry — the $55 billion purchase of Electronic Arts by a consortium of private investors, including the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, among others. In addition to running through the myriad issues tied to such politica...

This week, Zak and Aaron are delighted to present a conversation with Chris Knight, a 2D artist based in Austin, TX. Chris was kind enough to share some insights from his career, some funny (and not-so-funny) stories, and his frank opinion on what it takes to succeed in the games industry – especially in an incredibly crowded field. Please, enjoy. Check Out Chris' ArtStation! Take a Look at P...

This week, Zak and Aaron sit down to talk about Xbox GamePass' recent price increase... again! That's right, the fabled "best value in gaming" just saw a 50% jump in cost, barely a year after the last jump. What's more, there's a compelling argument to be made that the subscription service is actually removing value for players rather than adding it to compensate for...

This week, Zak and Aaron... actually have something positive to talk about for once! Namely, the predictably smashing release of Hollow Knight: Silksong, which, after nearly a decade in development, launched to platform-crashing numbers and fairly rapturous praise. On top of celebrating an indie success story, they discuss the game's refreshingly reasonable $20 price point and highlight the m...

This week, Zak and Aaron kindly beg your attention to a very serious matter: the censorship of thousands of NSFW games across Steam and Itch.io at the behest of payment processors like Mastercard.  Prompted by a grassroots organization with far-right connections called Collective Shout, this incident could have far-reaching implications for free speech, result in LGBTQ+ erasure, and mean that corp...

This week, Zak and Aaron dig into a topic that's as absurd as it is concerning: the CEO of Roblox wants to officially incorporate dating into the platform. Completely ignoring the fact that the game's core audience is mostly children, David Baszucki seems to believe that bringing horny adults into the fold will act as a balm to soothe the "loneliness epidemic" plaguing the mode...

This week, Zak and Aaron delve into the nitty-gritty of the Stop Killing Games movement — an initiative with the simple goal of persuading publishers to, well, stop killing games. From preservation to protecting consumer interests, Stop Killing Games aims to solve a lot of high-level problems, and your hosts have many thoughts to share. Oh, and feel free to jump ahead to Chapter 3 (or the 29-minut...

This week, Zak and Aaron sit down, inexplicably inspired by a meme, to discuss the rise of so-called "FriendSlop" games. These are titles like Repo , Lethal Company , and the recently released  Peak,  all of which are currently laying waste to the Steam charts as we speak.  Why are these games so successful at the moment? What differentiates them from others on the market? What could thi...

It finally happened! A set of entertainment juggernauts — Disney and Universal — are taking the fight to AI in a big way. This week, Zak and Aaron sit down to discuss the new lawsuit against image generator Midjourney, why it's happening, and what it could mean for the future. They also spend some quality time complaining about generative AI in general, because, well, there's a lot to co...

 This week, Zak and Aaron sit down to discuss the absolute onslaught of video game movie adaptations coming down the pike at breakneck speed. From questions of quantity over quality to musings on which projects have the most potential, your intrepid hosts dig into what may be the next Hollywood craze - or an unsustainable bubble building towards an inevitable burst. Please, enjoy. Listen to Beach...

This week, Zak and Aaron take a moment to celebrate the runaway critical and commercial success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33... and then dig into why it won't matter at all to big publishers and the money-making machine behind them. Tragically, the narrative that breakout hits in the singleplayer space can somehow make them appealing to investors again is misguided, and Clair Obscur is just...

This week, Zak and Aaron sit down to discuss Bungie's newest project, Marathon! The dig into everything from the upcoming extraction shooter's aesthetic to its narrative to its choice of genre in service of answering one question — will this finally be the game to make good on Sony's lofty live service ambitions?  Please, enjoy. Listen to Beach Girl on Spotify Check Out MosscatMarke...