The State of Gaming in 2026

 Via slashdot, Microsoft has hired a really influential analyist Mathew Ball (who I had never head of personally) to get their X-Box division out of its slump.  They certainly need to do something, because the X-box is clearly getting its rear end handed to it on a plate by the PS5 and Switch 2.  However, that's not what I found interesting enough to put up one of my rare posts.  

The article links out to his slide presentation on the state of gaming in 2026.  I highly recommend it if you haven't seen it yet, it's absolutely fascinating.  Among other things, it explains why layoffs are happening all over the US gaming development sector despite gaming revenue being at an all time high globally.  

My major takehomes from it:

1. US developers are getting crippled by their myopia. Developing games only for peaple with the very highest end hardware in the Mobile and PC space, or that can afford a modern console,  is really short sighted because it cuts you almost entirely out of the markets that are growing the fastest (hint, it aint here in the US).  There are also entire popular genres of game (like the erotic dating sim/ shooter) doing really well I personally have never even heard of, and I am pretty sure are not being developed here.

2. Many peaple enjoy setting piles of money on fire.  A lot of the money that peaple used to spend on games is now getting farted away in various kinds of gambling sites, such as prediction markets, sports betting and straight up internet gambling.  I guess it's the same concept as gacha games, just with the game in the middle cut out . . .

3. Invest in Roblox! 

Edit: But not right now!

https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/filing-national-pension-service-sells-791197-shares-of-roblox-corporation-rblx-2026-05-31/

Also, I promise I will be posting about MMOs again at some point :-)

Project Genie: Make your own world with a prompt?

Via slashdot, this is the first time I have heard of Google's project Genie.  Apparently it will let you create an interactive world with a series of prompts.  Stocks of AAA video game companies are dipping based on the news. However, it's clearly just a tech demo at this point.

I watched some video demos, and it certainly looks interesting.  You enter a text prompt to create a world, and then another one for the character you wish to create. There is a check box for first or third person camera view, and then you get to explore the world using either arrow keys or classic WASD controls. You can also refine the world as you go.  The whole video honestly gave me slight Star Trek Holodeck vibes. 

It's certainly not seemingly up to the task of making a full featured game right now.  For one thing, as far as I can tell there is no way to do more than walk around the environments, for the most part.  One demo does show someone painting a wall.  But the limits of object interaction are really unclear, and I doubt you can (for example) set up rules for some kind of character advancement or combat.  Give it a year or two, and the ability to save and distribute links to the worlds you generate, and yeah it might be in the running for letting plebs like me design games without having to learn a 3D engine or the like.

I would love to play around with it, but right now it's locked behind a Google AI Ultra plan, which has currently been "generously" discounted to only $124 per month.  I don't get enough value out of any AI platform I have played around with to want to pony up even $15 a month, much less more than I generaly spend on some utilities.  Still, I will be quite interested to see where this goes.  

In a completely unrelated topic, Project Gorgon is finally live, as anyone reading this is almost certainly already aware.  I definitely plan to purchase it over the weekend just to support the peaple behind it.  But I probably won't stick my head in until the second fresh start server goes up.  Apparently they also managed to break peak concurrency of 1000 today.  I really hope the game prospers, I have been rooting for them for a while.