Photos by (from L to R) Colin Young-Wolff and Shannon Cottrell, courtesy of Riot Games. Illustrated elements by Sonny Ross.

Riot Games is revamping the Valorant competitive circuit in 2027 — and they answered some of my questions about the big changes they’re making.

For the past few years, Valorant esports has been defined by its “partnership” system, wherein a set of teams largely chosen in 2022 compete in the game’s high profile main circuit, the Valorant Champions Tour. Other aspirants were relegated to tier 2, a morass of small tournaments and also-ran organizations that, once a year, would burp out a few teams to try their luck in tier 1.

On Wednesday, Riot announced a major shakeup of the format, with an aim to transform the closed ecosystem into an open one. The headline change is that teams previously forced to slug it out in tier 2 will soon be able to fight for a spot at major events in the circuit through open qualifiers, encouraging real competition and (hopefully) shaking the incumbent teams out of complacency. So far, the reaction from participants in the scene has been positive — though stick around to the end for a more skeptical take.

The night before the announcement, I sent Riot a list of questions about the new format. They sent back the following answers, attributed to Leo Faria, the Global Head of Valorant Esports and Commissioner of the Valorant Champions Tour.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

ReaderGrev: There’s a reference to non-partnered teams and Championship points in the announcement. Will non-partner teams be able to qualify to global events through Champs points alone?

Leo Faria: We’re still finalizing the exact competitive format, but our intent is clear: we want a system that treats performance consistently across both partnered and non-partnered teams. That means ensuring that qualification paths, whether through Championship Points or other mechanisms, are fair, merit-based, and aligned with how teams perform over the season. The goal is to create meaningful opportunities for top-performing teams regardless of partnership status, while maintaining competitive integrity across the ecosystem.

Is there a number of partner teams Riot is aiming for in 2027? Will the number be the same across all regions?

We haven’t locked a final number yet, as we want to make that call after reviewing the initial wave of applications and evaluating what’s best for sport.

Does the partnership applications process mean all current partners will have to reapply?

Yes. All current partner teams will need to reapply as part of this process. This is an intentional reset point for the ecosystem, it gives us an opportunity to evaluate all teams against the same criteria moving forward, while also allowing organizations to demonstrate how they’ve evolved and how they plan to contribute to the next phase of VALORANT esports.

There’s a passage in the announcement that says: “Finally, a portion of the funds will be dedicated to Game Changers each year.” What is “the funds” referring to here?

This refers to a portion of the overall revenue pool tied to the competitive ecosystem. Our goal is to further incentivize investment in Game Changers by directly rewarding organizations that field teams and successfully qualify to the Game Changers Championship. These rewards would sit on top of existing prize pools, reinforcing our commitment to growing that ecosystem in a sustainable way.

Will teams participating in open qualifiers be subject to some of the same restrictions that partner teams face? I’m imagining a scenario in which a small team backed by a gambling/betting sponsor makes it to a Cup or Masters event, for example.

At the highest level, we aim to have one single set of policies and rules that apply to all teams in the VCT, partners and non-partners. That said, opening up the ecosystem introduces new scenarios that we need to account for, including around sponsorships and competitive standards. We’re actively working through those details now, and we expect to share more concrete guidelines later this year. The goal will be to strike the right balance, preserving competitive openness while ensuring consistency with the standards we’ve established for the broader VCT ecosystem.

What does the new Cup format mean for the requirement that teams have a presence/house their players in Los Angeles, Berlin, Seoul, etc.?

Teams will no longer be required to reside in hub cities. That said, they will be required to declare a home region where they’ll compete at and play open qualifiers from. From there, we expect all teams to travel for cups, similar to how they travel for global events today. We’ll continue to use our studios strategically for early stages of Cups, but our goal is to travel as much as possible and bring the VCT to more fans around the world. We’re also hoping this change will bring back energy and excitement to these home regions, creating a more healthy balance between regional, international, and global competition.

More generally, I’m also curious about when the process began to revamp the VCT format, and what those first meetings/conversations were like. How quickly did it take to land on the format we’re on now? What is this restructure solving for?

This direction is grounded in several years of learnings, and it’s something the team has been actively developing over the past year. We’ve taken insights from what’s worked, the strong response to VCT CN roadshows and the consistent feedback from the community, particularly around the excitement about the open path to Champions.

That said, the format is not finalized. It’s one of the areas we’re spending the most time pressure-testing internally, because getting it right matters. Right now, the focus is on ensuring the system can adapt to the unique dynamics of each region, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all model.

At a high level, the ambition is to rebuild that sense of possibility across the ecosystem, to re-ignite the dream for players everywhere, while also expanding the footprint of the sport beyond centralized studios and into more cities and regions around the world.

Two opposite reactions from folks in the scene

When Riot’s announcement was published Wednesday morning, I reached out to a few people whose opinions I trust on the state of the competitive scene. The first is Marco Mereu, the founder of the esports organization M80, a poster child for prospective tier 2 success — and also for the scene’s pitfalls. The organization narrowly missed qualifying for tier 1 two years in a row.

“I think the announcement is an absolute home run for Valorant esports,” Mereu told me via Twitter DM. “More competition, higher stakes, regional teams and a more open ecosystem will all lead to a bigger and better esport. For teams the operational changes are also welcome. Not being tied to a specific city will help with operational costs and allow us to focus more resources on players. Valorant has always had the potential to be one of the biggest esports worldwide and with these changes I think it will reach it's potential.”

The poster child thing is no joke, by the way. In a video announcing the new format, Anna Donlon, the studio head at Riot Games leading Valorant, can briefly be seen wearing an M80 jersey. (Check the 1:17 mark.)

“Riot asked us a for a jersey a few weeks ago but we had no idea what for,” Mereu told me. That’s funny, I said. “Yea I literally shat my pants,” Mereu answered. (He said I could quote him on that.)

I think Mereu’s view is representative of the consensus on these changes, at least from what I can see on social media. But another person I spoke to — an experienced VCT coach who requested anonymity to speak candidly — took a more skeptical tone. With the obvious caveat that some of this is up in the air because the details surrounding the changes haven’t been formalized, I thought this person’s perspective might be valuable to readers. (These answers came via text conversation; I’ve edited the responses for clarity and length.)

ReaderGrev: What’s your gut reaction to these changes?

I think the first year of this is going to be really rough. The "every game matters" stuff is a fairly cheap marketing slogan, especially coming off of a format that had very, very few ‘dead’ games anyway. I don't think people have really understood what the calendar looks like yet.

It’s pretty clear that Riot is trying to cut costs and longer-term liabilities and this is the driving force behind the move. They can pay less per partnered team in terms of stipend. There's also consistent rumors that they're going to reduce the total number of partnered teams per region. They're trying to put more of the money they have to pay out into things where it's a conditional liability, e.g. skin money. It creates fewer long term entanglements for them, basically. I also expect the events to be much shorter than the league seasons were, so they probably pay out less overall on that front.

I'm also not convinced that this is going to be as good for salaries, contracts, etc. as everyone thinks. I think you'll see shorter term contracts, quicker cuts on players and coaches, so even if headline numbers are bigger, conditions for most pros are going to be worse overall. But I might be too pessimistic on that; it depends on how much money they unlock with this move. This lets them loosen up on oversight on teams, which they kind of have to do as part of the push to get gambling sponsors/money into the ecosystem.

Basically, you’re retreating from full professionalism for large chunks of the tier 1 teams. This model works in Counter-Strike because there are so many LANs and gambling money, but it makes for a rough player and coach experience in most tier 2 esports with few third-party partners, etc. The closest analog here is Apex Legends, and Apex esports has always been in a horrible spot.

What do you mean by retreat from full professionalism?

It will mean contracts going from being considered on a seasonal basis to being a transaction to get X team to the next LAN. It becomes a lot harder to find a long term partner on the team side, and expectations/responsibilities from the team side are lower. Unless you see a massive appreciation in the overall pool, it becomes like Apex, where orgs become less like sports teams and more like a dude bankrolling a poker player: They're giving you a tiny bit of convenience in exchange for a shot at the prize pool. Unless the pot is huge, it turns into a part-time pastime in that sense; semi-professionalism supplemented by other stuff. You can argue the merits of that all day, but it's a huge retreat from what Riot have always prioritized.

A circuit like this will likely mean the same for the sort of guy who was on the 9th best team in a VCT region as it does in Apex, where that sort of player gets to LANs but is un-orged or barely orged. You're no longer a full-time professional just from the game like you would be in football or whatever. You can argue of course whether that's good or bad. For Riot it's clearly good because it encourages that player to make content, grow the game, whatever. But I would argue that the game isn't quite big enough that there's room for everyone doing that, and I think it's harder to make it a vocation, especially for coaches.

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Hey everyone,

I’ve got a new essay in the A.V. Club today about recent layoffs at Fortnite-maker Epic Games in the context of the company’s metaverse ambitions. Fortnite is one of the most successful video games of all time. So why has the company that makes it undergone two layoffs in three years, shedding nearly 2,000 jobs? The answer, as I see it, is Tim Sweeney, the company’s CEO and founder.¹

Here’s a snippet from around the halfway point in my A.V. Club essay that lays the groundwork for the main point of the piece.

🔗 You should read the rest before my commentary below. A huge thanks to Garrett Martin, games editor at the A.V. Club, for the opportunity. (As an aside, I still intend for ReaderGrev to be the main place I publish, but sometimes pitch, timing, availability and outlet all align and a story will land someplace else. Earlier this month, for example, the kind folks at Aftermath agreed to republish my essay about Marathon as satire on their site. Expect to see my work in a few new places in the near future! Ok, back to the essay.)

Truthfully, I am probably more ideologically aligned with Sweeney than not. I think he represents a kind of old internet anti walled-garden perspective which I mostly admire. One of the tensions in the piece is that I think Epic’s lawsuits against Apple and Google were directionally “good,” and I vaguely buy into the idea of the metaverse in an academic way. (As I write in the A.V. Club essay: “Is an internet oriented around text and multimedia uploads the end-state of only human interconnectivity? Probably not.”) I always threaten to read more Walter Ong to build out this point and then I never do, for better or worse.

But you have to live in the world as it exists, not as we might imagine it under the best circumstances. Within that frame, it’s pretty clear to me that Sweeney 1) hasn’t built the metaverse, not even close and 2) decided at some point that he could afford to finance lawsuits against the biggest companies on the planet in service of his ideological agenda, but not to pay some 2,000 employees. The first is a leadership failure, and the second is a choice — and in its own way, a different kind of failure of leadership.

I have a personal angle on this. I was recently laid off from The Washington Post, an ordeal I detailed in these pages. The media business, like the video game business, is extremely challenging. But many of The Post’s currently struggles can be traced to its owner. On the eve of the presidential election, Jeff Bezos decided to kill an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, leading to an exodus of hundreds of thousands paid subscribers. You can make a good faith case that the editorial board shouldn’t be making endorsements. (I’m not sure I agree, but I’ve heard the argument before and get it. Regardless, it’s not obvious to me that Bezos was acting as a thoughtful and informed skeptic of the institution of journalistic opinion-making.) Whatever you think about the choice, the owner’s interventions cost the company ~250,000 subscribers that it probably couldn’t spare. People lost their jobs. So too, it feels, with Sweeney.

As always, I welcome folks’ thoughts and feedback. Appreciate you all reading. More from me soon. Cheers!

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

Finally: I wrote the A.V. Club essay while listening to the soundtrack to the 2024 epic, The Brutalist. I particularly enjoyed Library and Overture (Bus).

Key images courtesy of Bungie; illustrated elements by Sonny Ross

There are no people on Tau Ceti IV. There are birds and dragonflies, alien ticks and turrets, Commanders, Ghosts, Grenadiers, Troopers and Scouts (all robots, mind you) — and even consciousnesses — but no people. Which is perfectly alright for all concerned. The absence of humans turns Tau Ceti, the site of some anomalous, unexplained colony-wiping disaster, into a logistics problem: How do the corporations that invested in the colony’s foundation some 400 years prior recoup their investments?

The New Cascadia colony on Tau Ceti IV, the setting of the new Marathon game, was an experiment, a prospective “new home for humanity” organized and funded by the UESC (a “United Nations with teeth,” per the game, characterized by a remorseless inclination toward lethal force) and a consortium of mega-corporations that echo brands we might recognize today: CyberAcme, an Amazon Web Services analogue on which seemingly everything runs; NuCaloric, a sort of agri-pharma business resembling, at turns, McDonalds and Eli Lilly; and Traxus, a mining and shipping conglomerate with an unlikely background in off-planet governance. But humanity’s hopes for the colony were dashed when contact with the colonists was lost, prompting fear and unrest on Earth and Mars, the site of another human settlement. Roughly 100 years later, a cryptic message was beamed to Earth from Tau Ceti: “Somewhere in the heavens, they are waiting.” But the colony itself lays dormant, its inhabitants missing, their fates unknown.

By the time of Marathon, set in that post-message-in-a-bottle period of investigation and re-exploration, the question of what happened to the citizens of New Cascadia feels peripheral, a mostly academic inquiry in service of preventing future doomed investments. The real goal is — you guessed it — extraction. The corporate stakeholders in the Tau Ceti expedition, launched some 400 years in the past, demand restitution, and believe in their legal right to proprietary equipment and data abandoned on the colony, as well as the fruits of the colonists’ short-lived planet-side exploration and exploitation efforts. Standing in their way is the monopoly on violence. The UESC, or Unified Earth Space Council, are the de facto authorities on Tau Ceti. Their security robots patrol New Cascadia, seeking to bar entry to or, in extreme cases, exit from the remaining facilities dotting the alien landscape.

Into the legal murk steps the player, who takes on the role of a runner: a consciousness in the cloud that’s uploaded over and over into synthetic bodies printed by Sekiguchi Genetics, and sharing that body with a mandatory onboard artificial intelligence implanted by CyberAcme. Runners are, in a literal sense, contractors. They take on “contracts” from the corporations and factions seeking blood or treasure on Tau Ceti, throwing one disposable body after another into the alien maw. But truthfully, runners are closer to indentured servants, working off an insurmountable debt for the privilege of living in perpetuity. Completion of contracts and the value of knick knacks pilfered from Tau Ceti nominally enrich the player, but the bill always comes due.

What plays out across the abandoned facilities of New Cascadia is an abstraction and a logical endpoint, drone warfare by way of TaskRabbit. Debtors in replaceable android bodies fight each other and the government over property and salvage rights, a custody battle playing out at virtually no cost to its corporate stakeholders. So what if one shell gets wiped out? Or even 100,000? These are relatively small numbers in a galaxy-spanning ledger. The corporations have no legal obligations with respect to these contractors, which is just how they like it. You are a bug — barely even human — smashed flat between the palms of a 400-year old handshake agreement with no living survivors, one that everyone involved interprets differently and nobody intends to honor.

At one point, the representative for Sekiguchi shares an allegorical short story in which, to protect a small village from Death incarnate, a woman assembles an effigy to sate the spirit’s appetite. The sacrifice — death carries the dummy away — horrifies and hurts the woman, who begins assembling a new effigy. The implication: your death, over and over and over again, hurts me more than it hurts you. Sekiguchi is a family, and that includes its products. The strain imposed by repeated uploads and downloads of a virtual psyche is implied but never exactly quantified.

I’ve had one friendly encounter in Marathon, on Perimeter, the game’s “starter” map. My team and I crested a hill and heard another team just in front of us. Evidently, they heard us too, and shouted out from the building they’d entered. We agreed to let a good thing be; we’d pass and they’d let us. Actually, I’ve had dozens of friendly encounters, with all the other runners arbitrarily sorted into my squad. I could conceivably befriend anyone else in the lobby. There’s no inherent quality that marks one runner as friend and another as foe. We all owe money to CyberAcme. In all likelihood, we’re stored on the same server rack. But from the fog of Tau Ceti emerges one near-certainty: there’s no solidarity on a right-to-work planet. So I tend to shoot on sight.

If the battle royale genre was about ingenuity and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps — you know, winning out over everyone else on a more or less even playing field — Marathon is about speculation. How much do I wager on this run? Play a weak kit, odds are you win nothing at all, or less than you could have otherwise. Play a strong hand, and the odds are better, but there’s still a chance the universe conspires against you. Oh, you won big? Time to load in again and lose everything. Oh, you lost it all? Well, get back in there. The numbers are all that matter in Marathon. The factions demand agricultural data or hard drives or shipping logs from the colony; runners are drones designed to move memos and spreadsheets and slide decks from one place to another. Remind you of anyone? In the meantime, you’re constantly keeping tallies of your own: How many people have I killed? How many more are likely still running around out there? You are a debtor with a company mandated gambling compulsion whose job is property damage against the government. You are slowly going crazy and you don’t exist. You are a bloodied shell, drawn to the exfil beacon like a moth to a flame.

The system is at once illogical and totally unquestionable. Who are you selling these items to? Who is buying “temporal fragments”? How are the prices set for glittering geometric anomalies? Who in management is authorizing these purchases? The longer you work, the less these questions bother you. Your point of contact with each stakeholder is one face of a thousand-sided shape. You don’t know what CyberAcme is, not really, not in any meaningful way. You just can’t internalize the size of it, not from where you’re stored. These are institutions, and you’re talking to someone in the middle of the org chart. There is no conspiracy, just bloat. You are all victims of decisions made centuries prior — 400 years of orders issued, carried out, ignored or bungled separating you from the launch of the doomed colony ship.

Will you take a job with the black bloc terror group MIDA? Yup. Will you follow that up with a contract for Space Walmart? Sure. It’s just a fucking job, man. What do you want from me?¹

One last thing…

If you’re a new reader, here’s some of my previous Marathon writing:

• My interview with Joseph Cross, Marathon's former franchise art director

• What are online shooters like Marathon really about? | This is almost a sister piece to the essay above, about the thematic vocabulary on display in some of Marathon’s pre-release marketing.

• Kill the CEO in your head | My thoughts on Steam-charts-and-sales-figure mania.

And here’s some stuff I liked this week, in no particular order.

• Marathon, Reprise — Days and Wonder

• Games Should Save Us from the Daily Grind (C. Thi Nguyen) — Post Games | This one is locked behind a paywall but should be on the free Post Games feed sometime Monday

• What do "which is A.I.?" quizzes tell us? — Read Max

• How Jeff Bezos Upended The Washington Post — The New York Times

• I’ve been listening to the Marathon soundtrack on repeat while working. “Code Race” and “Rhythm of Writhing Constellations” are great entry points.

• Finally, a friend recommended the album Fun Bug Songs (Hell) by Thomas Flynn to me, which is seemingly a concept album about being a bug? I really like the first track, “I’m a Bug Now.”

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

Logo courtesy of the New York Times; Background photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In the span of about five years, The New York Times games team has fielded roughly 120 pitches for prospective new games. Only four have made the cut.

The very latest, Crossplay, formally released on Jan. 21. In the works for nearly a year and a half — and on the back-burner as an idea for even longer — it is the paper’s first multiplayer title, and the first with a built-in social element: players can chat with one another.

I won’t belabor the explanation: Crossplay is the Old Gray Lady’s spin on Words with Friends. It is very nearly digital Scrabble, presented with the polish and quality-of-life refinements Times games are known for, including a super compelling data-driven postgame review dubbed Cross Bot, which shows you your best and worst plays and offers recommendations and better word choices, designed in collaboration with the team that helped birth The Needle.

“We were looking for something that would be interesting to our audience, but also be interesting to other people and that would sidestep where we are in the puzzle space,” Zoe Bell, executive producer of Games at the Times, told me. “And it felt like a two player word game was the place for us to be.”

Let’s zoom out. The smart media take these days is that the Times is no longer just a media company. Instead, it’s a lifestyle product bundler. There was a viral-in-media-circles graphic circulating recently showing the number of Times subscribers who just get the news product. It’s a dwindling bunch. Per the graph (embedded below) the Times has vastly more bundle subscribers than news-only subscribers; news-only even loses out to other non-news single product subs.¹ Those other subscriptions include a cooking vertical, Wirecutter, The Athletic and games.

Graph courtesy of this tweet

There’s no public data on how the games section is performing, but there’s some compelling information on which we can base an educated guess. A Times spokesperson noted in a press release that “in 2025, players around the world solved more than 11 billion puzzles across New York Times Games.” And in our conversation, Bell noted that Wordle scores were being shared at an average rate of 46 per second in 2025. (I did the math: that’s just shy of 4 million Wordle scores shared each day.) Anecdotally — based on the bevy of friends I see playing the Times’ games regularly, and my experience seeing The Washington Post’s traffic dashboard, where less well-known games nevertheless dominate — the section is holding its own.

I spoke earlier this year with Bell and Rohit Crasta, lead game designer at the Times, about the risks inherent to launching a multiplayer game, the strategic benefits of playing words like QIS and JO, and the nerdy tech undergirding Crossplay and its postgame helper daemon, Cross Bot.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.²

ReaderGrev: Why multiplayer, and why now? What gap does this fill in the Times’ portfolio?

Zoe Bell: We know that our players are social. Not everybody, some people want to be in their own world, but many players are social. They're sharing their Wordle scores every day — 46 times a second last year on average. So we know that people are in these chats, playing together with friends and family.

We also know that social makes games very, very fun, and makes you want to come back and interact more every day. So for us, it felt like a natural segue to add a word game that was more social than our existing word games.

I have no idea what it takes to build a game or even start thinking about what it takes to build a game. Can you take me into the first couple of weeks of working on Crossplay? What did that process look like?

Bell: Normally, for any new game we make a prototype. For Crossplay it was a little bit different, because we needed to build a whole separate app. That was very, very basic and unrelated to gameplay. We had to spend a lot of time just standing up the app.

And then, you know, we start adding in and you get your first game board in and it's gray and black and white, and all the bonus tiles are almost the same color because it's gray and black and white for now. And then you get color and you start playing around with iterating on the board design and iterating on the tile bag, and suddenly it starts feeling like a real game.

But the first few weeks are really boring because literally, the app doesn't work.

In a lot of the Crossplay sessions I've played, there's a late stage where a lot of the spaces are filled and you're trying to squeeze in a three letter word out of the remnants of your tray. I'm curious if either of you have go-to BS words. I played QIS against a friend recently, and he was very upset, but it's a big scorer. What are your favorite words or strategies?

Rohit Crasta: I generally try to go longer, and I like to also play new words because it's fun for me. But yes, sometimes I have to have those as fallbacks — QI being one of them, or QAT, or JO. Knowing all your two letter words is important because that helps you do parallel plays.

Bell: We have this feature [that] really walks you through where you could have played better. Every time I only play a three letter word or something, it's always like: Well, you could have done better that time. The Upshot, which is our team of data visualization journalists, they came in and helped us. They're the same people who did Wordle Bot, but also they're the same people who do the election results and other things. The data and the strategy that goes into that is incredibly interesting.

So every time I put in a three letter word at the end of the game, I'm like: Oh, Cross Bot's going to tell me I could've done something better — which is great, because it's making me get better at playing the game.

Cross Bot is fantastic. Tell me a bit more about how that all came together.

Crasta: It's evolved, and it'll keep evolving, actually. The cool thing about it is that it's very data driven.

We started with some assumptions about, like, what do we think makes a good player, and that was based on our playtesting with small groups of people. But that was kind of limited because it was based on our own experience, and we were making assumptions about spatial reasoning and hooks and resources management and all the elements of strategy we believed were important. But then we started getting lots of data. We did a soft launch in New Zealand and in Australia, and we started getting lots of real players playing, and that made all the difference because what you could see is data from these completed games, and you got to see trends of what tended to work, what tended to make the difference.

In many ways, we're actually now learning from Cross Bot about how the game works on the deepest level, because we’re learning that sometimes a certain move, unintuitively, can help you win, or help you get better at the game. No two moments or movements are exactly alike, but [Cross Bot] can kind of generalize and be like: Okay, we can play out scenarios and actually model predictions based on what [players] can do next and what's left in the bag and actually try to predict what could happen based on this move choice you make. That's when you get those moments that are like: Okay, maybe you're not scoring the most points with this one move, but you're setting yourself up positionally for a much better scenario down the road.

How you are ranking players? What systems are you using to match players against one another?

Crasta: We have a Elo-like system behind the scenes, which is measuring people in terms of their performance, and it's essentially adjusting as you complete games against real people. It's trying to rubber band you to the right skill level. So the more you play, the more you should be guided toward players at your skill level. But it is ultimately an approximation and people have good days and bad days, and there's a little bit of luck in there too.

One thing I do want to call out is that we're transparent. We are matching you with real people. That sounds simple, but actually we're really proud of it: When you go to our matchmaking system, you're always being matched with a real person who's playing back with you. We're trying to foster a connection between real people, so we don't do any kind of faking bots thing.

Have you considered showing people how they rank or what their Elo is?

Crasta: I think it's risky because it can actually really demotivate someone. Not everyone wants to see that kind of thing.

Bell: The games team recently looked up my Elo and it was lower than I thought it should be, and I was offended.

What are your expectations around chat in Crossplay? Chats often require moderation, and sometimes people are cruel to one another online. I'm curious how you thought about that as you implemented and built that system.

Bell: We thought very, very deeply about chat, about the concerns that players might have. There are a few different things that we're doing. One is that any player can report another player, whether from their profile or from the chat in a game itself, and that'll send a report to our trust and safety team. I think that's going to be what we think is the foremost way to catch bad actors, because we do accept that that is a risk when you have chat. It's the internet, unfortunately. We also have some automated moderation as well.

We have a lovely community on the New York Times games right now — the Spelling Bee community, the forums are just absolutely delightful — and I would love to believe that that's what it'll be here, but we also have some backstops as well.

If there anything that you think is essential to know about your team, your work, Crossplay, anything like that that just hasn't come up so far?³

Crasta: This is our first game to really dive deep into strategy. We have elements of that in our other games, but our other games are puzzles in a purer sense. This is puzzle-like thinking but applied in a more abstract way: You need to manage trade-offs, think about spatial reasoning. It's still a puzzley-like thinking in the moment, but it's applied in a more stretchy kind of way across a long game. It's really, really fun. And so you get to stretch your brain as you dive deeper into the strategy. To some degree, you are getting better at the game not to get better at the game, but to kind of better yourself, which feels really good.

The other side is the connection side. You could definitely come to this game and play our computer. You're welcome to do that. But I think the game really sings with people, and it's a chance to play something with someone you love, which I think is a great way to connect with them in a different kind of way. Maybe you're not always talking all the time, or maybe you don't have much to say to them, but through playing, it might generate conversation. I was just telling a friend that we're launching this game and she told me: My 10-year-old is making plans with my mother to play this game, and they're so excited to finally be able to play a game together like this from far away.

Bell: Though I will note, we’re 13 plus, you’ve got to be [age] 13 plus. [laughs] But you can play with your teenagers, it'll be really fun.

Post scriptum: Your great feedback on my plans for ReaderGrev

Last week, I dedicated a segment of my send to thinking out loud about ReaderGrev’s future and outlining some potential pricing options for a paid version of the newsletter, were such a thing to exist. The feedback I got was super helpful — even if, at times, it complicated my thinking.

Let’s start with the actionable feedback, the most important of which was that people wanted to know more about my post frequency and content plans. I’ve taken a first stab at this at the top of the newsletter, where I’ve outlined some likely upcoming sends (barring major breaking news). More broadly, my goal is to strike a roughly 40:60 balance of “take” (meaning essays, reviews, etc.) to “report” (meaning newsletters in which I break news or publish new information) in this newsletter. I don’t think every send will be for every reader; my tastes aren’t exactly esoteric, but they’re a little all over the place, and that’s one quality of this newsletter I don’t want to sand down. Broadly, I think as a reader you can expect searching, in-depth interviews with people I find interesting, scoops about the video games and esports industries, personal-ish essays on goings-on in the media and hopefully more weird unclassifiable stuff all side by side.

Another more complicated piece of feedback I got was that a number of you read this newsletter for the viewpoint and voice. That’s extremely flattering! (In my mind, I view the comps for this newsletter as one part Read Max and one part Game File.) But breaking news really is the primary driver of new subscriptions; I can trace every major jump in my subscriber count to a reg-walled scoop. My instinct is to pay- or reg-wall all reporting (you may have noticed that this newsletter, which includes reporting, is for subscribers only) or to put up a paywall any time I run more than one newsletter per week. But these are all just early thoughts. Truthfully, my gut instinct wasn’t strategic at all: I sort of pictured the paywall as a way of generating revenue from dedicated subscribers who just want to throw me a few bucks now and again. I’d welcome folks’ feedback on all this.

I’m reproducing the poll I ran in last week’s newsletter below for people who may have missed it. I believe it’ll retain the same answers from before, and any new responses will be additive. (This is only true in the backend data that’s visible to me.) If you’ve already responded and want to see updates to the poll, just choose again whatever you previously selected.

Also: Last week, I wrote about two big stories I was working on, and the challenges of figuring out where those stories might live. I’m closer to an answer now — and I’m going to be fully transparent about how things are looking in the interest of giving you all a peek behind the “business of journalism” curtain. One of those pitches has been picked up by a major outlet. I can’t speak to when it’ll run or what it’ll end up looking like, but I’m very excited to have institutional backing for this one, and I’ll be sharing a link whenever that piece goes live. (I also don’t want to overstate things: an accepted pitch is not a total guarantee that a piece will run, so read this all in the conditional mood.) The second story will likely run in this newsletter, and will almost certainly cost in the low four figure range to publish. The expected freelance rate for the first story should help offset costs, but probably not even by half. This will all make more sense when that second story hits your inboxes, but in this case, beyond just being accurate and fair, I’d also like to be legally buttoned up.

One last thing…

I wanted to link to some good stuff I read recently in an effort to make this feel more like a full-service newsletter — but also to maybe start rebuilding something of a cross-linking community of newsletters and outlets. Maybe, just maybe, the games writing space can start to feel like, well, a space again. (I’ll also be including some non-games nods).

• The Secretive Company Filling Video Game Sites With Gambling And AI — Aftermath | Probably the most essential thing I read this week, a sneak peek into the nightmare of games publishing and low-tier freelance labor.

• Perfect Tides at Four — Meredith Gran | Chris Plante shared this short blog post on Bluesky. It’s delightful: “If a game is slow to find its audience in the weeks following release, there is the sense that it’s dead and buried, a casualty of the landscape. Why do we allow ourselves to think and focus our discussions in these terms? If and when (and I do think it’s ‘when’) a game of any uniqueness finds its audience, it will be loved. Explored voraciously. Obsessed over.”

• Critical Distance, the games writing roundup site, announced on social media that it was seeking a boost on Patreon to be “truly sustainable.” They’ve already cleared that goal, but I want to boost their post just to point people in their direction. They do great work and are worth supporting. I’m a long-time patron!

• One key chart showing the game industry's struggle — Game File | A heaping of bad news about the video game industry, and a sprinkle of good.

• Reporters Seek Comment. What Happens Next May Surprise You. — The New York Times | Love these behind the scenes looks!

• How Anonymous Bettors Cashed In on the Iran Strike, Just Hours Before It Happened — The New York Times | Yeah, yeah, a lot of the Times in this newsletter. I just can’t get over this report, which feels like it would have been a bombshell under any other administration.

• I also just finished Very Good, Jeeves, a collection of short stories about the titular valet and his master Bertie Wooster. Probably the funniest thing I’ve read in ages. P. G. Wodehouse drops some unbelievable turns of phrase, such as this one, used to describe a character caught in an embarrassing moment: “I saw my Aunt Agatha for what she was — not, as I had long imagined, a sort of man-eating fish at the very mention of whose name strong men quivered like aspens, but a poor goop who had just dropped a very serious brick.” It will have a permanent effect on my vocabulary.

That’s all from me today. As always, appreciate you reading. Cheers.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky, on Twitter or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

Images courtesy of Bungie, Wildlight Entertainment and Sony

Sometimes a company or product fails so spectacularly that it becomes a metonym for the failures and vanities of its broader industry. Theranos. FTX. Blockbuster. Enron. Lehman. Concord, Sony’s 2024 live service hero shooter megaflop, has become one such class representative.

Concord, a $40 online-only first person shooter, went offline on Sept. 6, 2024 — just two weeks after its release — having scraped together seemingly no more than a few thousand players against a reported budget of $200- to $400 million. The studio that developed the game was shuttered soon after. Ask ten people why the game failed and you’ll get ten answers: the character designs were uninspiring; the gameplay had no hook; audiences are sick of hero shooters; the live service market is oversaturated; the game’s price tag was too great a barrier to entry; the game’s development was marred by “toxic positivity”; the online outrage ecosystem never gave it a fair shake; etc. Whatever your view, the game’s launch was an undeniable and historic failure — and the first hint of impending reputational turbulence for the game’s publisher, Sony Interactive Entertainment, which had invested heavily in spinning up dozens of now-seemingly-ill-fated live service multiplayer titles. There was no shortage of schadenfreude. Much of that was snotty “The Out-of-Touch Devs are being punished for doing Wokeness by the Righteous Gamers!” stuff from the benighted engagement farming set. But also, it was a little thrilling to see a called shot fall so short of its mark, to rubberneck at the slow motion pratfall.

Since then, Concord has been the standard against which many new games — mostly but not exclusively multiplayer shooters — are measured. For most people, this comparison begins and ends with “game flopped”; the title has become shorthand for thing bad. But there’s also an activist short seller tendency here. I’ve written before how games discourse can devolve into business augury, and one of the safest moves on the vibe market (lock it in as ReaderGrev’s 2026 Stock Pick of the Year™️) is to write off any new release with a whiff of downward potential as Concord 2.0, the next sure-fire flop. (Not to overcook the metaphor but: Engagement farmers with a short position on some new title have little incentive to recalibrate their take barring major sentiment shifts because often their whole approach is New Game Doomerism. If they do change their mind — “I used to hate X, but now I’m hype for it” — the conversion becomes an engagement play of its own. The stakes are obviously lower in the metaphorical “engagement” market than in some real financial market, but for people with monetized audiences, the money is actually quite real.)

And yet, Concord is an imperfect point of comparison. The biggest, most obvious targets have been Highguard and Marathon — both manifestly different games from Concord, released or slated for release under very different circumstances than Sony’s ill-fated 2024 shooter. Highguard, for all of its flaws (I’ve written about some of them here) was downloaded and demoed by a lot of people, and launched with a unique core mechanic as its primary selling point. Neither of these things are really true of Concord, which fundamentally was just not played by very many people. Bungie’s Marathon, meanwhile, has generated visible demand and excitement, as reservations about its visuals and past controversies have slowly faded in the run up to release. Again: not true of Concord. These are cases of over-interpretation, where certain patterns — “hero shooter” or “colorful” or “developer said something I didn’t like on social media” — are taken as evidence of 1:1 correlation.

But I’m not just trying to be a pedant about surface-level distinctions, or the merits of this or that assessment of some new game’s market viability. More than that, what’s interesting to me is that one of the primary lenses through which video games are discussed today is a game that — famously! — nobody played. More bluntly: The bulk of Concord comparisons stand up games that haven’t been released back to back with a game virtually nobody experienced firsthand. In media and criticism circles, there’s this basic idea that the stories we tell and metaphors we use reveal broader cultural preoccupations: we metabolize our fear of “the other” through monster movies, concern over capitalism and barbarism through zombie movies, and so on. So what does Concord-as-metaphor reveal about the state of games today?

I want to preface this by acknowledging that it’s possible your algorithm is completely different from mine — that you don’t see the same vapid and annoying posts I do. It can be tough to write about conversations happening online (or, with scare quotes: “conversations” “happening”) because there’s virtually no way to comfortably quantify the scale of the discussion, or even to be sure of the sentience of the participants. I recently saw this headline in Kotaku: “PlayStation Fans Mad About Bluepoint Are Boycotting Marathon.” On the one hand, I believe this unreservedly. Of course somebody is mad on the internet. On the other: What does “PlayStation Fans” mean? Who? How many? Where? There is nothing faker on the internet than a media boycott.¹ It’s hard to give a shape to stuff supposedly “happening” on social media, which is by its nature unserious and vaporous and slippery. And yet I have to imagine you know what I’m talking about, that we all sort of accept that, yeah, at any given point, there’s some group of people being annoying about something in a stupid way, people we would have once ridiculed as “trolls” and relegated to the metaphorical underside of the bridge, but who have somehow over the years ensconced themselves into the virtual subdivision and been elected somehow to the figurative school board.

A year and a half after its collapse, the prominence of Concord as a cautionary example represents a retreat from talking about games in favor of talking about business and marketing — a sort of rot in the culture. Has a developer successfully sold me on XYZ new game? Did the trailer rollout make sense? What’s the view count on somesuch marketing material? And how will all this redound on player counts and units moved? These aren’t my favorite subjects, and I look a bit askance at people who really care about this sort of thing, but I’m resigned to the fact that even in saying so, I’m trying to hold back a river with just my hands. Still, no matter how you feel about sales figures, it does feel like those subjects have squeezed out discussion of games themselves in most of the places “gamers” congregate or pay attention to. To put on my best YouTube video essay voice: We don’t talk about games anymore. We just talk about Concord.² (See disclaimer above about the “unserious and vaporous and slippery” nature of defining the “we” here).

But all that talk of a Concord 2.0 or 3.0 is also indicative of a pervasive feeling of suspicion and disaffection toward video game industry leaders — a category I tend to understand as “the collective c-suites of major publishing houses” but which I think has grown to encompass “developers” more generally in the popular discourse. I tend to believe that more often than is obvious, developers working on failed games are earnestly excited and committed to the thing they’re working on (with some caveats³ ). But also, games release from out of a black box into an ecosystem marked by intense parasociality and paranoia. Who wouldn’t be a little on guard? One common line about Concord was that “nobody asked for this.” That’s a flawed way to approach the arts; I think if you had asked anyone two years ago if they wanted a French role playing game made by former Ubisoft devs they would have looked at you funny. But the overarching idea that snob developer elites aren’t listening to the normal gamer masses strikes me as the beating heart of every unflattering comparison to Concord. If you don’t have a sense of solidarity that allows you to distinguish between rank and file devs and the c-suite, or if you’ve written off the modern games industry workforce as irredeemably “woke,” then it is perhaps pleasing to imagine something you don’t recognize as catering to you specifically as comparable to one of the worst flops in video game history.

Post scriptum: What’s next?

I want to think out loud here about how I’m looking at the possibilities around ReaderGrev’s future.

Writing this newsletter for the past three (!!!) years has been tremendously fulfilling. It has granted me the opportunity to publish news-cycle leading scoops (see: here and here), sharp takes (like this, this and this one), interviews with interesting folks (I’m quite pleased with this recent post) and some stuff I’d struggle to classify that probably couldn’t have run anywhere else.

Still, ReaderGrev slipped the leash on punctuality basically as soon as I started it. Over the next three months, I’d like to refocus my efforts on this project and publish on a more consistent basis. No promises on an exact schedule, but I’m aiming for 1-2 sends per week. I’ve got a nice backlog of material and am always seeking out new leads. (I’m also working on some cosmetic tweaks to the website; WIP here.) Call it a test run.

With that in mind, I wanted to gauge folks’ willingness to pay for my journalism. Candidly, I’m a long way out from ReaderGrev being a full-time or sustainable gig. But after being unceremoniously dumped by The Washington Post, I’d like to get at least a rough estimate of how many readers would be willing to pay a small monthly subscription fee (I’m thinking $5 — the cost of a some-frills-attached coffee in Washington D.C., where I live) to have a clearer picture of whether this is a moonshot or a manageable mid- to longterm project. Beehiiv, the newsletter platform that I use, runs an ad network that would allow me to put ads into the newsletter to generate revenue, but beyond generally despising ads, I have not seen a single compelling offer in the network that wouldn’t make me want to write a disclaimer somewhere in my post: “Clicking the ad makes me a few cents, so please click, but under no circumstances should you use this product or imagine that I endorse its use.” I suspect that kind of disclaimer would break some sort of ads TOS.

The poll below assumes that 1) I fulfill my obligations with respect to regularly publishing content and 2) that you’re interested in supporting my work. The question is mostly: What’s the right amount? I don’t expect to offer yearly subscriptions; mostly, I’m hedging against the possibility that I take a job that makes it difficult for me to commit indefinitely to a regular publishing schedule (though I will gladly accept large one-time donations from wealthy benefactors, if I can figure out how to do so). That money will help broaden the ambit of this newsletter, allowing me to take bigger swings and cover expenses relating to my work. (One such recent expense: prepublication review of an article by a lawyer trained in media law.)

None of the options below are binding, obviously.

One wrinkle: I have a couple of really big stories on my plate. Frankly, at this stage, I’m trying to discern whether they’re worth publishing here (assuming certain legal and security risks in the process) or if I should seek outlets with teams of experts and support staff who might help oversee their publication. I’m still thinking about it. The priority is really to just get the stories out there.

I’d welcome any and all feedback from readers. How do you see the value proposition of ReaderGrev? What draws you to the newsletter, and what do you think are its strengths? These qualitative insights — the stuff I’m not already getting from open/click rate or pageview data — will be super helpful in the days and weeks to come. As always, appreciate you all reading. Cheers.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky, on Twitter or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

This feels like a full circle moment. I started this newsletter in 2023 to continue writing about games after I was laid off from Launcher, The Washington Post’s video game section. But before my time at The Post formally ended, some kind and thoughtful people in the newsroom intervened on my behalf to move me into a role on the international desk, where I became evening editor. Now, three years later, I’ve been laid off from that role too, along with hundreds of my coworkers who were swept up in a major restructuring at the newspaper. I haven’t seen any concrete data, but The New York Times has the tally at 300 journalists cut from a staff of roughly 800. “Devastating” would be an understatement.

I’m going to save recriminations and rage for another day (I am still technically employed by The Post for a few more weeks; in the interest of receiving my severance I will tread carefully here) but for now I want to reflect on my time at the paper, explain what I did there, and briefly defend “the media” — an entity with an ever-shrinking pool of supporters. (What can I say: I’m feeling a bit sensitive right now. I hope you can forgive a bit of rambling.) For folks in the industry, a lot of what I’m going to say will seem self-evident. But I imagine that a healthy portion of my readership (read: gamers) doesn’t care at all about/is suspicious of the media, or else understandably finds the idea of newspapers more than a little old-fashioned. This is for them.

I lucked into both of my jobs at The Post. My role as an editor on Launcher materialized after a casual conversation with my eventual editor, Mike Hume, at a holiday party hosted by a different media company. (I joke sometimes that I don’t remember that pivotal first conversation because the party had an open bar. I’m glad I still managed to make an impression!) During the day-long final interview process for that role, a senior executive quizzed me on what I might want to do after Launcher. I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Was that supposed to be a trick question? Eventually, the interviewer understood my hesitation. “We’re looking for lifers,” she said. Might I be interested in becoming a foreign correspondent, she asked, should I ever tire of the video game beat?

I never quite got there, but I’m beyond grateful that I got to work alongside The Post’s correspondents and the rest of the staff on the international desk (notwithstanding the circumstances that precipitated that move). My colleagues — in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa, Venezuela, Seoul, London, Australia and so many other places, as well as those in Washington, D.C. — are all, without exception, impressive journalists.¹ I have received drafts written from war zones, and paragraphs filed just minutes after the threat of rocket fire had passed. I’ve watched my coworkers pore over satellite footage and shipping data or, on occasion, distressing photos, video and audio. I’ve seen them compile extensive lists of prospective sources, diligently dialing every one in hopes of getting a foothold in a story. In that same vein, I once witnessed an intern (!) get three quotes from three expert sources in as many minutes. And I’ve participated in those just-a-few-minute-long scrums in which every word of a two sentence breaking news push notification is combed over once and again and ten more time after that in a race against the clock — and against our competitors. The quiet, day-to-day work was just as admirable.²

The inner workings of a media company can seem arcane, but for the vast majority of people it is just a job, with peaks and valleys and, yes, meetings. The typical day for me at Launcher started with a meeting — what are the big news stories of the day, what are we looking out for, what is the status of such and such draft, etc. — and then largely came down to editing work that was filed to me with an eye toward these criteria: Are the sentences legible? Are the paragraphs in the right order? Is there some obvious thing we’re missing or don’t have enough of in the article? Did we talk to enough people? And so on. My typical day as an evening editor was basically the same thing in reverse, ending with a Zoom call to The Post’s office in Seoul to explain to my colleagues there what had happened on the D.C. shift, what stories we were monitoring, the state of such and such draft, etc. And because I know people will ask: There were occasional editorial judgments I disagreed with, but they always came from within the team. I never experienced any influence or pressure from on high³ , and certainly not from Jeff Bezos, who just categorically never intervened in news coverage. (Although you can certainly make the case that layoffs are an intervention in their own right; I won’t disagree with you there. It would also not be unfair to say that Bezos’s meddling in the opinion section, which cost the paper hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, had major downstream implications for the news product: some sources grew wary of speaking with Post reporters, and the revenue losses precipitated cuts to newsroom budgets and staff — a long way around, bumbling intervention of sorts.)

This is all so obvious that I’m ambivalent about keeping it in, but I will in the naive hope of persuading one or two of you that “the media” is not a scary or malicious entity but by and large just an infrastructure of people doing uncontroversial work at a laptop job to the best of their ability — with the unusual complication of millions of people watching for them to slip up. I can picture someone reading this now and thinking: Well, sure, that’s all great, but I really can’t forgive XYZ outlet for ABC mistake they made.⁴ I am not here to tell you that you’re wrong for feeling that way.⁵ I am not here to convince you to subscribe or resubscribe or, god forbid, unsubscribe⁶ from this or that publication. I am asking that you extend some grace to people working in an increasingly precarious industry,⁷ and exercise discernment over whether your problems with “the media” have to do with people you see blathering on on TV or in the opinion pages.

The internet has convinced a great many people that good information from anywhere around the world is easy to find. I disagree. Two recent Post stories from the international desk, both published within the past few weeks, come to mind. The first, about Kenyan job seekers being lured to Russia and forcibly enlisted to fight in Ukraine, involved finding and speaking with men who survived the practice, as well as the family members of those who didn’t — and earning their trust. The second, a detailed account of a massacre by Iranian forces of protesters fleeing a burning market, is bylined by five journalists, a mix of reporters specializing in the Middle East and visual forensics staff who “analyzed more than 40 photos and videos and collected six witness and resident testimonies” amid a shutdown of internet and telephone service in Iran. I didn’t work on either of these stories in any capacity. I bring them up because of how improbable it would be for any random person, even someone very invested in learning the information within those stories, to come about their findings independently. This work is expensive. It requires tons of attention and support from editors and lawyers and fact checkers and design staff. It is also good, in the moral sense. The Post’s recent cuts make it very difficult — virtually impossible, I’d say — to continue that kind of work, seemingly by design.

Would welcome people’s questions and input (and job offers). More thoughts TK, eventually.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky, on Twitter or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

Screenshot courtesy of Wildlight Entertainment

There was blood in the water around Highguard from the jump.

The game, which launched on Monday, was revealed at December’s Game Awards ceremony, appearing as the “one more thing…” at the end of the show. Geoff Keighley, the award ceremony’s organizer and host, pitched its development as a sort of indie Manhattan Project aimed squarely at “[pushing] the shooter genre forward.” But that first trailer was weird — not compelling weird but just “huh?” weird — prompting a lot of questions about what exactly the game was supposed to be and why it merited the coveted end of show slot. In the weeks between that reveal and launch, the developers imposed a total media blackout, opting to eventually let the game speak for itself, and in doing so, inadvertently created a vacuum that was filled by Steam Chart doomsaying and debate over marketing strategy.

It is virtual orthodoxy in gamer circles that new hero shooters are dead on arrival; that players are tired of live service games and unwilling to migrate from one to another; that being the third (or god forbid, fourth) entrant to a genre that already has a dominant market-leading title is a recipe for studio closure. Then there’s the shadow of Concord, probably the largest and most high-profile flop in recent video game history, looming over any video game with less than certain chances of success. All of this, coupled with the developers’ silence, made shorting Highguard on the vibes market the safest bet around. The negativity surrounding the game was so pronounced that it prompted a plea from IGN in the form of an editorial titled: “Can We Stop Dunking on Highguard Before It's Even Out, Please?”

It would feel like a small betrayal of my whole project here if I did not pause to engage with the text — to say what I think of Highguard myself, having played it for ~6 hours this week. Highguard is… alright! It’s fine. The gunplay is crackly and frenetic (one of the smgs seems slightly overtuned but whatever), the horseback riding is smooth and floaty but in a strangely delightful way, the rhythm of mining for resources tickles the pleasure centers in the brain and the whole package makes sense after you’ve played a few matches, which go by mercifully quickly if you’re hopelessly outmatched. There’s no widely accepted name for this kind of game (the developers call it a “raid shooter”) but the idea is simple enough: Fortify your base, go out into the open world in search of resources to bolster your arsenal, fight over the opportunity to initiate a raid at your opponents’ base, and then, based on the outcome of that fight, try to plant a bomb in the enemy fortress or repel their efforts to do the same to you. I can envision with perfect ease players plumbing the strategic depths of Highguard and surfacing with genuine treasures. Eventually.

Crucially, Highguard is neither the disaster people seemed to hope it would be, nor the next Apex Legends. It does a few interesting and novel things without even a whiff of panache. When I streamed the game to some friends, they burst out laughing when they saw the siege tower, which kicks off the raid portion of the match by slamming a battering ram in the shape of a panther’s head into a bubble shield. The worst insult I can honestly muster about Highguard is that it is totally affectless. It resembles a default-looking video game you might see someone playing in a movie — say, the gormless slob boyfriend of the love interest, doomed to be abandoned in favor of the protagonist. Playing Highguard is just more evidence of his deficiency.

I think it would be uncontroversial to say that the conversation surrounding Highguard’s marketing was maybe a little mean-spirited. The thing that makes me nervous is trying to define who or what might be at fault — and if “fault” is even the right way of thinking about it. Who makes discourse? It would be easy to pin the blame on gaming YouTubers and streamers or content creators more broadly. Pick an Online Gaming Personality at random and you are more than likely to have found someone with an analytical framework that is starkly black and white. Things are either The Best Ever or A Disaster. To question the sincerity of these pronouncements is to miss the point. They are driven by the momentum of online content creation, which, barring genuine insight or wit, requires a constant stream of things to have intense feelings about.¹ These people talk about games in a mode that is not normal; they are in a constant race to out-overstate their peers. But I don’t really believe that gamers are in total thrall to the content they see online. I’m sure plenty of people came to their own negative conclusions about Highguard in a benign and unobjectionable way: They watched the trailer and decided, “That’s not for me.” Still, it does feel a little bit like we’re all breathing polluted air, as regards the discursive ecosystem surrounding video games.

What is the role of professional criticism in all this? (I’m referring here to people, often writers, who take a critical lens to the world and works of art, not to “critics” as a catchall term for people who gin up outrage or engage in impish bomb-throwing.² A good critic, as I’ve written before, can offer people a second admission to a work through an interesting observation or compelling reading.) The subject arose last week in the context of the aforementioned IGN article, the thesis sentence of which is: “I’m here to state what I thought would be obvious: we should actually play games before we definitively decide if they’re good or bad.”

I don’t know what reception the article got in the broader games-press-reading world, but it was received quite poorly in at least one corner of the internet: the Bluesky games crit corner.³

“This is not criticism. This is not even journalism. This is marketing. You are a (unpaid) marketer,” wrote critic Yussef Cole of the IGN article on Bluesky. And in a blistering response, the critic Autumn Wright assailed the piece as “an argument for poptimism, for a press that balances vitriol with enthusiasm — for the status quo of games media as a whole.” (I directionally agree.)

Still, I find myself in a bit of a bind here. I think the IGN article stumbles in its particulars. It is a strong headline in search of an argument, and that argument just doesn’t fully materialize. Wright correctly identifies that “if we’re not getting excited about games, what are we even doing here?” is, from a professional standpoint, a questionable first principle for a member of the games press. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that in its broad strokes, the point the article makes is more or less unobjectionable. I don’t know if the author of the IGN piece would call himself a critic, but “play game first, analyze after” feels like a lesson from Day One At The Criticism Academy, not an implicit threat to critical appraisal. It is probably a good instinct to not judge a game by its marketing. I don’t mean this in a “don’t judge a book by its cover” sense, though I suppose I mean that too. Mostly, I don’t think anyone is particularly well served or enriched by speculation or even earnest analysis deriving from marketing material.⁴  

That said, while I believe in the sort of monastic professional crit credo of ~analysis comes from serious open-minded engagement with the work~ there needs to be a way to speak honestly about the fact that some games — and Highguard in particular, in this case — look terrible, and that reasonable aesthetic pre-judgments can be made in good faith. Sometimes the mean-spirited opinion of the crowd turns out to be correct. Sometimes the safe bet is a safe bet for a reason. Is there a responsible way to say “I’m pretty sure this thing will suck” without betraying the idea of good stewardship of the craft of criticism?

I publish infrequently and am often late to the punch. I do not feel that I share a space professionally with reactionaries and rage-baiters on YouTube. But I do feel some anxiety over the fact that by acting in ways that align with my view of what good-faith criticism is — waiting, taking a beat, engaging thoughtfully, etc. — I am absolutely, without fail, ceding ground to those people. And I am not sure that we can “wait and see” our way to a more thoughtful internet.

Just thinking out loud here. If you have thoughts, give me a shout.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky, on Twitter or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

Pixelated selfie courtesy of Joseph Cross

Welcome to the seventh edition of Exit Interview, a series in which I interview people in the video game and esports industries who have experienced some kind of major career change. The conversations are shaggy and digressive — on purpose, I promise.

I’m going to keep this preamble short, because this might just be the longest Exit Interview I’ve ever done. For this edition, I spoke with Joseph Cross, a former artist at Bungie who was most recently franchise art director on Marathon, the studio’s upcoming futuristic extraction shooter. (I’ve written about the game before: here and here). In 2023, the game was revealed to heaps of praise over its visuals; two years later, it was panned over a lackluster closed alpha, then caught up in a scandal relating to the unauthorized use of an outside artist’s work. Now, it seems to have rebounded, vaulting up the top sellers charts on some online marketplaces in the lead up to its March 5 release date.

Over the span of nearly two hours, Cross and I discussed Marathon’s striking visual style, his decision to leave Bungie just weeks before the game’s release, and the risks inherent in spending years upon years toiling in secrecy on a high-stakes tentpole release.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.¹

ReaderGrev: I wanted to ask about a 2013 interview you did that appeared on Bungie’s website. Responding to a question about how you “keep your game sharp,” you said that one of the most important things for you is staying 18 years old, mentally. I'm curious if you feel like you've managed that 13 years on from that interview, and whether you still think that's sound advice.

Joseph Cross: Clearly I've gotten older and my role has changed and I've had to onboard a bunch of qualities that I know my 18 year old self didn't have, or wasn't capable of manifesting. But I think of all that stuff as essentially complimentary. I'm still the same kid. I still feel like an 18 year old in terms of my interest in what I do and the subject matter, and my fiendish, compulsive obsession with art and design and animation. I still feel like that.

The first thing that comes to mind for me with that stuff is that I still collect art — whether it's building just terabytes of inspiration or hunting down original animation cells or comic book pages or finding a new amazing genius artist that I'm just discovering for the first time and obsessing and being jealous and trying to understand. All those qualities still exist.

Do you have any recent exciting examples of something you've collected that has inspired you, or that you've been chasing after for a while?

Cross: I'm always looking for cells from animes that I grew up loving, and they're finally starting to explode in cost, but as of a few years ago you could still buy an original cell from Akira, for example, for a hundred bucks — or a few hundred bucks. And I always geek out over the — you know, not the money shots — like, some random shot of an angle of a motorcycle or something like that. I just picked up a few of those. I also obsess over Japanese woodblock prints, which I think are also undervalued in general.

One of my favorite artists of all time is this artist named Barry McGee, who was a graffiti artist turned fine artist and has become an incredibly successful contemporary fine artist. You can find on eBay original tags of his, and I just bought one of those. When he was doing graffiti, he called himself Twist, and so the same way I obsessed over Mike Mignola's original art or an original cell from Katsuhiro Otomo, I would obsess over a Barry McGee scrawled piece of text — and that stuff is all still relatively accessible. That kind of thing feeds my inner 18 year-old.

I have no context whatsoever for the collection of original graffiti, or work like that. What format does that come in?

Cross: Graffiti specifically, there is no real precedent there. I did graffiti myself, and part of the tradecraft, at least some segment of it, is carrying around a camera and finding the art on the wall of your favorite artists. You knew who they were, you don't know exactly where they did it necessarily because it's illegal, or sometimes there's legal walls. So you would develop a photo library, a scrapbook of images. You can buy prints. Occasionally you can get original sketches.

It almost feels like production art. I love production art. I love art that wasn't necessarily meant to be seen or celebrated. You know, it'd be amazing to have a Ralph McQuarrie sketch of a Star Wars costume concept, or something like that. I always loved that stuff. Posters, prints, proofs, that sort of thing.

Tell me a little bit about what you did at Bungie and what the job actually entailed on a day-to-day basis.

Cross: My most recent role was — for maybe a total of like five years or four years — I was called franchise art director on Marathon. When I joined the project I was not called franchise art director, I was just art director. I was probably the 10th or 12th person on that team.

Every project and every art director is different. At Bungie, there are multiple art directors on multiple projects and each one of them has their own qualities and strengths, and they vary widely. I think of it like a video game when you're choosing a character and everyone has these different stats and you have to decide: Oh, do I want to run fast or have heavier shields? That's how it ends up feeling, in some ways. I index very highly on vision. I come from the concept art field, so that's my background — it's very much about art and design and detail and taste, and less experience around the nuts and bolts of production and the nuts and bolts of asset creation. I ended up needing that kind of support around me early on.

It would be almost impossible to describe an average day, certainly in the span of the six years that I spent working on the project. They varied incredibly, from really getting in the weeds of defining style guides, working with individual artists, doing quick paint-overs or reference gathering, to working with the senior leadership team, pulling your weight from an art production point of view, managing various people, communicating to studio leadership and working on ways to communicate your vision and build confidence in the project. The evolution of your day-to-day varies incredibly with the evolution of the project and then the evolution of yourself as a role player within the context of a team that grew from 12 to several hundred. I could throw a dart at a day and try to remember what that might be like, but it would not reflect that same day six months prior or post.

Of all the tasks you described, probably the least exciting, I would assume, is selling your vision to senior leadership. I'm curious about what that process looks like.

Cross: It's one of those things where this was my first time in the role, and so I always felt this sort of Hobbit metaphor or whatever when Sam said every step he takes he's one step further than he's ever been from the Shire. You feel like that every day. It's all new, you have no experience to draw on, and you're basically just acting on instinct. That's how I felt. And my instincts, in terms of that challenge, took me toward a very production art focused place.

Within a year we had pivoted from a slightly more realistic style to a more stylized style. And I believed immediately in the simplified style — but the simplified style was the risk. This look that we went for and that you see an evolution of today in the game, it clicked for me right away. I was like: This is the horse I’m betting on. And I know it's challenging. That's a big part of the point. I knew very early on, it should make people nervous. Anything new like this, at this scale, by definition almost, should be a little bit nerve-racking to fund.

My instinctive way of approaching that challenge was to really approach the art side of it like production art — like we were doing product design, whether it was a weapon or a loot box or a character’s helmet. Product design, by nature, lends itself to production, regardless of the industry, where you're thinking about how stuff works and fits together, and shape language and color and all this stuff. We didn't spend a lot of time trying to sell the fantasy, if that makes sense, and at least early on, we didn't invest a lot of time in creating illustrations, for example. In hindsight, I would have commissioned more illustration work. Famously, that's what George Lucas did to get Star Wars sold, is these Ralph McQuarrie illustrations.

There's a big asterisk here for me personally, where I think that the kind of art director I was — the person they hired me to be — they knew I was a vision holder. I wasn't gonna come in and do something generic or basic. That's not why you would hire me. But that comes with risk. I think I had a certain amount of slack that was cut to me because of who I am and because the sort of impact I had on Destiny was significant within one slice of the visual world of that game. So I had a credit, I think.

It sounds like a big part of your pitch was the inherent risk of the design. Was making that pitch easy or difficult?

Cross: It was easy in a way for me, creatively and professionally, because I believed in it so much. I still believe in it. I was like, if we can pull this off, we're gonna be on the right side of history. Best case scenario, it becomes a big hit and helps usher in a new sort of stylistic aesthetic in the industry. Worst case scenario, it's a cult classic that people who are interested appreciate.

The difficult part was fostering consensus that it was in fact a good idea. I had at the time, probably for the majority of pre-production and production, I sort of had angels on my shoulder within the studio that believed in me, that interacted and interfaced with folks on a level that I didn't necessarily have to, and essentially stood up for me and vouched for me. And you need that when you're doing something new.

There's also something about the design of the game, where at a certain point I really did believe that art had potentially more of a responsibility for creating interest than it would if we were working on a different kind of game. The game design, nobody's reinventing the wheel here. We're putting compelling spins on established mechanics. The narrative is also not reinventing the wheel. It's an abandoned space colony where something mysterious happened. We've seen this a lot. It's about how you spin it, and at some point, for better or for worse, I told myself that this is an opportunity for art to sort of step up and provide a level of newness to this world.

I'm curious about when the game — like the actual stuff that you play — entered the equation for you, and how did the work you were doing change when it finally did?

Cross: This is probably a category of feelings or answers that I get a little bit nervous about, just politically. I don't know if there's a way to answer questions like that the way I would like to answer them without it seeming like I'm going to introduce a controversial opinion. But I can tell you, the game right away made a huge amount of sense to me. I really did love the sort of bashing or sampling of an extraction shooter, sort of battle royale style, cinematic, tense experience — Which, when I joined the project, I was just figuring out that Tarkov was incredibly compelling. I really did feel like this is it, this is the next thing, this is the future. I'm too terrified to play it and I suck at shooters, but this is incredibly compelling to watch. — and the idea of merging that with sci-fi and an abandoned colony, what Marathon has done and what ARC Raiders also has done, essentially, I really believed in that formula and I believed that the world kind of created itself in a way. Even from the very first playtests, I could see it. I didn't need convincing.

I think the controversial side of things is — or, I don’t know how controversial this is — it became clear that if we were going to work in the Tiger engine, which is Bungie's proprietary engine, I wasn't comfortable with the risk that I felt sort of manifested itself in the visual direction that we had designed on paper,⁵ translating into the Tiger engine and not ending up feeling like a first cousin of Destiny. To be fair, I didn't really put it through its rigors and there are a ton of amazing graphics engineers and tech artists that I'm sure we could have got there with but I made a sort of a pretty quick decision to pivot to something that I was sure was not going to look like Destiny. And I think I said this in another interview too, that if we were working in the Unreal Engine, I don't think the game would look how it looks now. For better or for worse, who knows?

The other big one was the game design itself having a pretty profound evolution midway through, and that changed the visual psychology a fair amount.

Can I ask what you mean by that?

Cross: Yeah, I mean the visual psychology you have to onboard going from a purely modular character fantasy — you are a runner, you are a modular cyborg, one of a hundred or a thousand, a kit of parts — to a psychology where you're now designing a capital-C character with a backstory and a name and everything that comes with it. You’re going from designing one vehicle in a fleet of a thousand to now you're designing the Millennium Falcon. The psychology changes. I think that gets back to your original question, which is like, art relating to gameplay and at what point do those collide? And that certainly was a big one. In the case of this production it was a fairly significant event, and had to happen incredibly quickly, too.

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When Fortnite came out, there were critics and observers who noted the themes behind the battle royale genre — even the name “battle royale” — derive from a satire, a critique of hyper-competition. And the extraction genre, I think, is open to a similar political reading: You drop in, you get yours, you are ruthlessly competing with everybody else, and you try and get out richer than you came in. Those themes — what you are doing when you are playing an extraction shooter, the kind of competition that it is — were you thinking about that as you were designing the visuals of the world?

Cross: I'm not a game designer. I am an artist first and a game developer second. I'm a commercial artist. I'm here to solve visual challenges. But to the extent that you need to immerse yourself and be tuned into the fantasy and experience, part of the reason I was drawn to extraction — and battle royale to some extent — is just how intuitively real it feels as a video game experience. It feels almost like, when you boil it down, kind of the most realistic experience. You go to a place, there must be something there you want, there's risk, if you're killed or you're injured you lose your stuff. It just feels like such a natural, evolution of a gameplay experience — as opposed to an arena shooter or something, which feels incredibly manufactured in a way, a much less relatable experience to me.

It also tapped into sci-fi that I really love. It felt like that's what happened in Alien. The Alien franchise is essentially an extraction shooter. There was a movie called Prospect, which was a huge influence on us very early, which is an amazing film if anybody hasn't seen it — kind of a proto extraction shooter movie with Pedro Pascal. So the experience, the fantasy of it was very natural, and there was a lot of low-hanging fruit for us to draw on visually, thematically.

One of the things I advocated for just through art direction, something I probably said in a few meetings but didn't really die on the hill for, was that there was a component of the extraction shooter and in the Marathon universe that I think still persists even in the release version, the idea that there's these corporations competing for this stuff and that runners are contractors. I love that whole side of things. I love anytime there's an excuse to sort of create a product out of something like this. I love branding stuff and I love putting text on stuff and that whole side of things. A little bit of The Most Dangerous Game or Running Man. There was a crossover with sport, ultimately, that I really liked, and it complemented the fantasy that you weren't in fact a human — you're a shell — so death was kind of taken out of the picture, and it let you get away with a bit more of a cynical take on this sort of combat. I like the idea that as a runner you want to be seen doing runs so you can get sponsored and get better contracts and maybe better gear. And obviously, you kind of hit a wall there with a key part of the narrative which is that this is illegal work and this is an abandoned colony. You're a grifter, you're a criminal, you’re trespassing, and you don't wanna advertise that, companies don't want to advertise that necessarily. That was one of the fantasies that fueled a lot of the visual development of this in my head.

I want to go back a little bit and ask about the beginning of a project like this. I have no conception of what it means to go into the office and be tasked with beginning work on a new visual identity for a new game. Can you tell me a little bit about the first weeks or months?

Cross: There's no formula here. There are certain truths, game development 101 goals and deliverables that exist universally, such as creating some sort of art bible, creating a style guide, starting to lock in and define how you make content. A big thing for me is form language — like, why does stuff look the way it looks? That's one of my personal motivations, just period, in the industry. When you have this kind of blank check to design stuff in the future, whether it's a hundred years or 2000 years, stuff isn't gonna look the way it looks now. So much sci-fi design can be repetitive and cyclical, this cycle of influence where if you're going to design a crate and you want to make it look futuristic, you add a bunch of bevels and seams and 45 degree angles and glowing LED screens, that kind of thing. I'm really excited about not doing that stuff, even on principle. One of my mentors and peers at Bungie — I don’t know if he coined this, but — at one point we were talking about cosmetics and he was like: What are we doing different or what are we doing better? We should be doing one of those two things all the time.

So I spent a lot of time working with artists individually, developing style guides — you know, a this, not that, kind of thing — and you get to a point where those things start to feel real and you're presenting them more often. It's incredibly difficult to do, and one of those things I wasn't sure we were going to be able to pull off, especially because the style came from just a couple of us initially and you have to scale that. That starts with: Oh, we got five more artists on the team and they're seniors and they're juniors; and then: Oh, now we have to outsource stuff; and we also have to keep control of what we're calling the art style of the game, or the art direction of the game. If you imagine that, early on, a lot of the day-to-day is kind of intuitively working out how to best foster a development process so that you can scale the style effectively.

Do you have any examples of stuff from Marathon that you remember being either different from or better than something that already existed?

Cross:² Weapons are a good example. We tried to land in this spot with weapon design that felt like it had this hopefully compelling and different combination of industrial design qualities. They're simplified. They’re modular. There's something intuitively functional about how they're put together because the artists are very tuned in to form and function and product design. But then we also go this [other] way with color and graphic design into sort of a more playful space, a place that feels a little counterintuitive sometimes for a weapon — and we do risk those comparisons to LEGOs or Roblox, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. I had IKEA in our style guide because of their incredibly well-designed functional modular furniture, and I think that's a cool thing. We intentionally don't have screws and bolts holding things together. We don't have rust, really, in our game. There's very little metal. Those are the kinds of things where I just feel like: That's different. I can't say it's better because it's subjective, but it's a different approach.

Some stuff I will say I think is better is the character — I'm not sure what we’ll end up calling her, but Glitch, our speedster, punk character³ — I love her footwear. I'm a sneaker head, and I love the way we've designed those shoes. I would hold those up to any other game's sneaker design or footwear design and say those are legitimately compelling designs. So much so I believe a senior designer at Nike or something like that would appreciate those designs. And that's ultimately the goal. I don't want this stuff to be good for a video game. I want it to be good from a design perspective.

At the same time, I have to say: It's for the interested. None of this stuff should in any way detract from the gameplay experience because it's a polarizing design or something like this. This stuff should all be fun and intuitive to interact with. If you happen to appreciate the time we spent on the novelty of the design, great. If not, doesn't matter. It's just part of the game.

All of this seems like exciting, interesting work. It seems like you enjoyed doing it. Why did you step away?

Cross: It ended up being a confluence of things. It wasn’t one thing. I worked on this project for six years. I still consider myself essentially a commercial artist, and I have an identity as an artist, as an individual. And understanding game development culture, at some point I understood how I relate to all of this. You know, I'm not a founder of Bungie. This is not my company. And I'm conscious of the number of projects I get to work on in my life. I'm not getting any younger. I've spent what will ultimately be 15 years, essentially, on two projects for Bungie: Destiny and Marathon, with film work in between. So after six years, leaving a week or two before release lock, I felt an incredible amount of satisfaction in what we'd done. And the natural cadence of the kind of work that happens post-launch in a live service game, I also understood what that was looking like.

It's also true that at the level of seniority that I had, there are challenges there that don't necessarily exist as an artist, and getting to this phase of a project like this at that level had its own challenges that contributed also. But I’d say primarily it was just feeling like that's a good amount of time to work on a thing. I talked to a lot of artists and peers about it, and ultimately it comes down to your identity: who are you as an artist, as a creative? That was a decision I felt like I needed to make. And also, there is definitely a compulsive component to it. It's never easy making a decision to leave a project like this; I second guess myself all the time. I'm not some sort of guru type when it comes to stuff like this.

There was this month or two-month long span when the conversation around Marathon seemed to be preoccupied with the question of: Will this fail? Is this like Concord in some way? I'm curious how that felt for you, that stretch where the discourse around the game was not super flattering but also maybe not entirely about the game itself.

Cross: That kind of stuff hits everyone differently. We had both spells, where there was a lot of positivity and then there was lot of negativity. Personally, I'm able to compartmentalize a lot of that. And a big part of the reason I'm able to do that is just because, getting back to my own identity as an artist, the art is really the most important thing to me here. It's difficult for me to take any of that stuff personally because I believe in the art, because I believe in what we've done. I think we did something really cool, and I think it will pan out. I can't control the way the game plays. I'm not a designer. I'm not the game director. I can only control what I can control, and what I could control, I feel really good about. And you can't take that away from me, as much as the haters try online or wherever, and whether someone doesn't happen to like the art direction personally, whether they don't agree with some political thing Bungie did, or whatever the animosity du jour is, you can't take the thing I care about the most away. There's a part of me definitely that feels bummed, but sort of in the same way you feel bummed like you got unlucky. It’s like when you drop the toast and it goes face down. It's like: Damn, I wish it would have gone face up when I dropped the toast. It feels like losing a lottery ticket or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that stuff never feels personal, you know?

I will say also that as a leader, you have a responsibility to the team to weather that stuff — and that's a challenge. Especially working remote, you have no idea how folks are processing all of that. In my position, it's not enough to just process it internally. You have to advocate for and be there for the team and for the project and that's a whole other can of soup.

Something that sort of weighed on me, not super heavily, but something I've been aware of: You mentioned Concord.⁴  Marathon is such a massive project. The studio took such a risk on this. You know, often times we felt like we were sort of getting away with something. And I think about that in the big picture, the idea of studios funding unproven, unknown projects for six or eight years, for hundreds of millions of dollars, sort of on spec. How much longer are things like this going to exist? I’ve been part of a couple of them now.

How often were you thinking about that? Was it a daily occurrence, something you were very nervous about, or just a background thought?

Cross: Probably some combination of those things. It's just really easy to lose sight that you're being bankrolled by someone. You're making a product with a ticking clock that needs to launch into the world and make profound amounts of money. Once you're year four or five in, it's really easy to feel like: Oh, my job is to make pre-production or production content for a small team. And the profundity of releasing this stuff into the wild really can be kind of a mind fuck. Especially so in contrast to working on films, where everything is always on fire, you're always three days behind schedule, you have about a six month window total to shoot, and it's so finite and so quick compared to working in games.

It's not always intuitive to remember that above all of this is this product that's being funded and every day that goes by is a day you're going further into the red. You're not making money. The studio is not making any money. And so anyway, that's a big one, especially when you're really trying to channel creativity and get to the point where you feel like you can't impose anything that feels like a risk. I mean, what a mind fuck that is, right? That's where you have to sort of put on the armor of art and have faith in your perspective and experience as an artist. All great art, commercial art anyways, it’s doubted and there’s a level of skepticism — until there’s not.

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Screenshot courtesy of Embark Studios, Nexon | Illustrated logo by Sonny Ross

Well after most of my peers published their Best of 2025 lists in the middle of last month — as though they’d been slighted somehow by Decembers 20 through 31 — I spent the year’s waning moments monitoring all channels, storefronts, radio waves, catalogues, lists, charts, manifests, social media platforms, black markets, auctions, points of entry, checkpoints, shipping lanes and so on for the final Great Works of 2025, squeaking in under the wire for consideration for this list. It’s tough being the most scrupulous video game journalist working today, but I’ll always be open to sacrificing my time and energy for you, the reader. That’s the ReaderGrev promise.

The list below doesn’t necessarily represent the best Games & Stuff of 2025. In fact, some of the items below would be tough to recommend unreservedly. Instead, I’ve tried to compile a short selection of the stuff that stuck with me in 2025, pruned of obvious selections that have already been covered elsewhere. (Yes, Taxes by Geese was my most listened to song of 2025. No, I’m not going to subject you to a blurb about it.)

Without further ado…

Wildgate

Courtesy of Moonshot Games

In trying to sell friends of mine on Wildgate (which I do often; the game is free on the Epic Games Store through Jan. 8, by the way) I have described it as Sea of Thieves in space, though it might be more accurate to call it a PvTvPvE game: Player versus Team versus Player versus Environment. I have never been able to gather a four-stack to play Wildgate, so my buddy Eric and I have had to suffer randoms rounding out our team in virtually every game we’ve played: guys who pilot the ship along inscrutable vectors or float off to do their own thing as we’re being boarded. Even still, under these imperfect conditions, I’ve had a lot of fun playing Wildgate.

Let me try my hand at a real pitch: Wildgate is about managing a queue of fires and spinning plates, sort of in the style of Overcooked, as your crew competes against hostile ships to capture an artifact (read: the flag) and fly it through the wildgate (read: the zone where you bring the flag to score; okay, it’s just one-flag CTF unfolding in slow motion). Ships are heavy and cumbersome. You’re not dogfighting so much as steering zeppelins so your turrets are facing the enemy. The game plays slowly until it doesn’t. Points of interest dotting the environment contain loot that’ll make your ship or crew faster and stronger, and you can board enemy ships with an eye to disable its shields or send it on a collision course with an asteroid belt or steal loot or kill other players. Other players will be trying to do the same to you.

I’ve run the artifact into the wildgate without incident maybe once. In most matches, the final minutes devolve into brutal all-cannons-firing brawls between multiple ships. That’s not to say there’s no room for creative problem solving. Once, a player using an invisibility cloak followed my team into the point of interest where we completed a challenge to reveal the artifact, then stole it right from under our noses after we did all the heavy lifting. On balance, more matches result in an interesting outcome than not.

The game is great fun. The devs are still publishing updates, and the communication around them has been world class. I hope more people give Wildgate a shot.

The Legend of Ochi

Courtesy of A24

The Legend of Ochi is, in the most literal sense of the phrase, a “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore” type of movie. It is the sort of movie I might have dreamt up if, as a kid, I was suddenly gifted a ton of money to spin up a production. In the best ways possible, this is a very George Lucas movie.

The story is a little thin (more generously, it’s a tale for all ages) but does it really matter? The movie’s charm hinges on its in-your-face craftfulness — puppetry, performers in ape suits, overstuffed sets and matte paintings — and it is faultless on those terms. The creatures steal the show, but there’s a brief sequence in Emily Watson’s character’s basement, a warren of maps and diagrams, misplaced notes, vials and tools, that is so meticulously crafted that I wanted to shake the set designers’ hands. If you’re a The Dark Crystal kid, or if you know the names of the background monsters in Jabba’s palace (Gamorrean guard hive, snouts up!) you’ll want to check this one out.

Twitter tweet

Also: My fiancée and I spent most of the movie’s runtime turning to each other whenever baby Ochi did something cute and whispering “It’s Milly” because it reminded us so much of our dog. If you have a four-legged pet you will probably also delight in baby Ochi.

This profile of musician Dave Longstreth in The New Yorker

Dirty Projectors Creates a Symphony for a Burning World

Between brutal fire seasons in Los Angeles, David Longstreth wrote “Song of the Earth,” an album that captures the beauty, and the peril, of nature.

If you don’t know Dirty Projectors, you probably know Dave Longstreth as the guy who wrote the organ bridge of Rihanna, Kanye and Paul McCartney’s “FourFiveSeconds” (or, you do now; you can hear him, pitch-shifted, harmonizing after Rihanna sings “But I just can’t apologize”). In 2025, Longstreth released the album Song of the Earth, a climate lament backed by an orchestral collective (I really like this record, but also acknowledge that it is kind of impossible to recommend; one of the songs is a verbatim recitation of the first few paragraphs of journalist David Wallace-Wells’ climate change polemic The Uninhabitable Earth) and the press cycle included a shockingly unguarded profile of the musician in The New Yorker: Dirty Projectors Creates a Symphony for a Burning World. I say “unguarded” because the piece includes more than a handful of Longstreth’s former collaborators and friends reflecting openly on his prickly and demanding personality, and also because Longstreth cries (!) several times (!!!) in front of Anna Wiener, the story’s author.

Here’s what a named friend (!) of Longstreth’s — presumably offered up by Longstreth and his reps to The New Yorker as a character witness — told the magazine: “If you had his admiration, it could launch a thousand ships. … But he also had the capacity to lethally wound people — to injure people in a deep, deep place. If we were to try to connect it to the artistry, I would say he really feels the full range of emotions. Some of his songs are exquisitely beautiful. It’s very plaintive, and it gets excruciating.”

Cards on the table: I think Longstreth is a genius, and I’ve admired him for years. My fascination with him began with a self-titled record he put out in 2017, a devastating and often cringe inducing breakup album that he wrote behind the back of his former girlfriend/bandmate, the release of which effectively blew up the band. I have been waiting for the reckoning ever since, and this profile serves it up.

“It was horrible,” Longstreth said. “At the time, I felt misunderstood. But it was näive and incurious of me, building these emotional worlds in song, not to imagine the actual emotional worlds of other people. Particularly the ones I love.”

“I got confused about the border between art and life,” he added.

Longstreth ultimately comes off as a neurotic and extremely weird guy, which is not really the norm for glossy big-picture profiles of musicians coinciding with album releases, which is also why I love this piece so much. If you’re interested in his 2025 output, the closing salvos of tracks seven and eight of Song of the Earth, “Opposable Thumb” and “More Mania,” are probably my favorite musical turns of phrase in recent memory. He also wrote “Through the Long and Lonely Night” for The Legend of Ochi, which is probably his most straightforwardly beautiful and song-y work in years.

Blue Prince

Enough has been said about Blue Prince already but I just want to thank the developers for making a game that (mostly) kept me off of Google as I played. I experience too many moments these days where I just think “I have no clue how to advance ABC objective in XYZ game.” Arc Raiders, the next game on this list, is a great example of this. Baldur’s Gate 3 was too. I’ve seen the traffic that goes to guides online. I know this isn’t just a me problem.

There were, of course, Blue Prince guides online, and I consulted more than one. But for a meaningful early stretch of hours I really committed to the idea — made obvious in-game but also spread by the title’s early evangelists on social media — that the answers would reveal themselves to me on-screen if I just kept playing. And mostly, they did! The rare occasions in which I turned to the internet were largely validated after the fact by the feeling that whatever the answer was, I wouldn’t have figured it out independently (maybe I just didn’t know some European turn of phrase, for example).

I don’t know that there’s a fix for this, but games do not often have ways to respond to confusion or reward lateral thinking, which often results in weird dead ends that necessitate looking up next steps. In that way, Blue Prince felt quite different. Confusion does not block progress. You can work to overcome it.

Arc Raiders

Courtesy of the Epic Games Store

The historians, anthropologists, ethicists and jurists of the future will no doubt wonder how it was permitted for game developers to loose massive social experiments on the general population — and ARC Raiders will merit a particularly close look.

I am an avowed yapper, so I’ve spent a lot of time in ARC trying to talk down other raiders or negotiate a clean exit out of a nasty situation. This, to me, is the stuff of ARC Raiders. I am not good at the game on its own terms. I’m a bad shot and a worse decision-maker under pressure. I once dove, with an unthinking Looney-Tunes like verve, into a dark cellar from which just moments before another player had emerged; my friends and I swiss cheesed him. When I dropped in, his teammates were waiting for me, and promptly avenged their ally. (I got an earful, concurrently, from my own friends.)

I’m better at playing the fiction of ARC Raiders, role-playing (and earnestly feeling) the tensions inherent to the extraction genre: I want to get in, sneak around, get stuff, and get out. I am abundantly sensitive to sounds I can’t place. I crouch-walk a lot. I announce myself before I enter buildings or if I see another player from afar: “Hey, I’m here, I’m peaceful. Let’s be cool.” I play as though the apocalypse is a High Trust environment, and I complain happily when that trust is violated because I know that though I was naive, I was in the right: We could have all made it out unharmed!

THE COUNT by Frog

2025 was the year of Geese, but won’t you spare a thought for Frog?

Imagine if your buddy from high school — you know the one: he’d get high at parties and freestyle, semi-convincingly, to the delight of the people around him (surely we all had one of these) — never left town, retreating instead to a near-monastic life to hone his craft, and you found him a decade-plus later performing delightful observational verse — alternatively horny and weepy and boastful — about the lives of the townspeople like some sort of kindly musical Marty Mauser, and you might understand the appeal of THE COUNT.

THE COUNT probably isn’t even Frog’s best album this year (1000 Variations on the Same Song is more, um, feature complete) but its unhurried, unfinished quality works in its favor, giving it sharper edges and helping it land blunter, heavier, hairier hits. A straightforward description of the album — it sounds like a couple guys huffing their own fumes in a basement practice space with a piano and a drum kit — makes for a tough sell, but the songs are above all self-aware (“Girl, they can't afford me / I'm pushing forty,” songwriter Daniel Bateman rhymes, clearly off the cuff, at one point; “Places, people, take your seats, folks / A man's about to whine about things lost in time,” he sings elsewhere). People talk a lot about bad-good media, something that’s so awful it swings around to being fun, but THE COUNT is somehow the exact opposite: a stroke of genius that might not sound the part at first.

Drop Duchy

Courtesy of The Arcade Crew

I don’t know how to recommend Drop Duchy other than to say that in playing it, I felt like I was microdosing Balatro — the lesser intensity being a welcome relief and not a watering down.

Drop Duchy is a Tetris-like deck builder with rock-paper-scissors combat mechanics. The tiles you place on the board correspond to tracts of land. If you have a Castle tile (I’m making up tiles here for the sake of simplicity) in your deck, the rules of that tile might dictate that you gain one swordsman for every adjacent Forest tile, incentivizing you to build your Tetris board to maximize the benefits of the Castle tile. You’re also often placing Enemy tiles, which you can sabotage by ignoring the conditions that would boost those tiles. Once the board is complete, your unit counts are tallied up against the enemy’s.

Balatro had an inescapable gravitational pull. One more run. One more run. There’s something about Drop Duchy (maybe it’s the music, maybe it’s the art style, maybe it’s the slower pace) that subverts that feeling entirely. I think all of my hours playing Drop Duchy were well spent and intentional, committed knowingly and without losing my mooring in time. Somehow, that didn’t hamper my enjoyment of its puzzles.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

Electronic Arts. Cristiano Ronaldo. Nikola “NiKo” Kovač. Esports as an industry. The company behind Pokémon GO. Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. and even Bill Burr. What do these things all have in common? If you answered They’ve all been bought or invested in or paid huge sums by entities in Saudi Arabia, you’re right! But also… weren’t all of these things just plainly better¹ two, five, 10, even 20 years ago?

When Electronic Arts announced that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund et al. were seeking to acquire the company for $55 billion, I could feel a theory forming: that Saudi Arabia seems drawn to shiny objects that are maybe just past their sell-by date. I ran that theory past some smart people and wrote about it for The Washington Post, where I work. There are some new details in there too, if you squint. (I don’t think anyone has reported the plans for Saudi Arabia’s “Anime World” in Qiddiya, though they’re not exactly private, you just have to know where to look.)

🔗 You can read my piece here. My deep thanks to the folks who agreed to talk to me for this story.

(I’d also like to shout out the WorldView newsletter where the piece ran. It features a thrice-weekly column from global affairs writer Ishaan Tharoor and links to other international news stories from The Post. On weekdays I help put the newsletter together. You should subscribe!)

Here, I’d like to share a few quotes that were left on the cutting room floor and some tweet-length observations that don’t make sense in the context of a general interest column in The Post.

1: Not everyone agreed with my theory.

One of my first bits of outreach was to Niko Partners, the video game market research firm with a global practice that counts EA among its clients.

The PIF’s “long-term plan includes succeeding in the future convergence of esports, real world sports, and video game sports, among other things,” Lisa Hanson, CEO of Niko Partners, told me. The theory, which the firm outlined in a blog post of its own, is that the deal slots in perfectly with Saudi Arabia’s ongoing investments in sports and entertainment.

“EA is great at sports games, such as EA FC, EA College Football, and more,” Hanson said. “The Saudi PIF has invested in real world sports, esports, and video games. Examples of these are golf (LIV Golf), F1 racing, professional football (soccer), and esports (Esports World Cup, Esports Nations Cup).” It’s a natural fit.

2: I have reservations about EA’s reputation.

EA makes for an awkward crown jewel.² I think the following description from Nathan Brown, a consultant and long-time video game journalist, is spot on.

“EA today,” wrote Brown, “is a house of aggressively monetised, live-service, content-treadmill sports-game stuff. The occasional breakout hits — games that have managed to amass large, loyal followings of mostly decent people, like Apex, Split Fiction and The Sims 4 — have felt more about luck than judgement, the exceptions that prove the rule.”

3: The idea that Saudi Arabia’s image around the world might materially improve from financing games is still just a hypothesis.

This was one of my first questions about this whole thing. If the point of this is reputation laundering (more on this below) it’s not obvious that the money spent here achieves that.

“The people that are playing MONOPOLY GO! probably have no idea,” said Stephen Totilo of Game File. “They see they Go to Jail, Do Not Pass Go, and ... they’re not thinking that any of this has anything to do with Saudi Arabia. Why would they?”

But Totilo also offered the example of a mysterious, possibly (?) Saudi-linked expansion to 2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage set in 9th century Al-Ula, an ancient Arabian city in what is now Saudi Arabia. Ubisoft has kept uncharacteristically mum about the expansion, as Totilo has reported, telling him that the update “was made possible thanks to the support of local and international organizations.”

“Whether people see a logo that says this was brought to you by Saudi Arabia or not almost doesn't matter,” Totilo told me. “What is more likely is that people will appreciate that they got an expansion to a game they love for free. That will make them feel good. … If you feel, as a kingdom, that you are in some way a disfavored or even a pariah state internationally, this is the kind of thing that erodes that resistance to your kingdom. This is the kind of thing that makes people potentially just feel like you're a normal country.”

4: Maybe reputation laundering isn’t the best lens through which to view this

One mistake I’ve made before in thinking about Saudi acquisitions is overestimating how important “sportswashing” is as a frame.

“There is an element of reputation laundering, of brand management,” said Karim Zidan, the sports and dictators fellow at the New York-based Human Rights Foundation who spoke with me for my Post story. “But … they don't care about the rights abuses. They'll continue to commit rights abuses. As a matter of fact, the rights abuses have only increased in the years that MBS has been in power, de facto in power in Saudi Arabia. There are more executions. The police force is far more powerful. … To me these are not signs of a country that is really attempting reputation laundering.”

Also, in most of the ways that matter to Saudi Arabia, the country’s place on the global stage has already been restored.

“In a combative session with reporters, Trump, sitting alongside Mohammed, praised Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and dismissed Khashoggi’s killing,” wrote my colleague Ishaan in November, on the occasion of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman’s visit to Washington. “‘Things happen,’ [Trump] shrugged, insisting that he didn’t hold the prince responsible despite a U.S. intelligence report assessing the opposite. Mohammed was received with great pomp and ceremony, including a military flyover and what amounted to a de facto state dinner for the youthful scion, attended by a coterie of top tech and business leaders. The summit marked a continuation of former president Joe Biden’s embrace of the Saudis, whom successive U.S. administrations have come to view as essential to U.S. interests in the region[.]”

5: I am keeping an open mind about the funniest possible outcomes

A running joke of mine is that everyone in games and esports who does business with Saudi Arabia is defrauding the Saudi royal family. Both industries are in pretty rough shape, so anyone who gets the Saudi sovereign wealth fund to overpay for a distressed asset in a flailing industry is doing leftist direct action against the kingdom as far as I’m concerned. (This is a joke. I’m joking.)

Fate has a funny sense of humor, so we should expect any of the following things to happen now: Gen Z turns against sports, making that part of EA’s portfolio worthless. MBS tanks EA and the Kingdom’s reputation by commissioning a terrible vanity JRPG that everyone hates. The Sims radicalizes some lesser Saudi princes in favor of libertine Western cultural norms. Maybe Saudi Arabia really does create the next Minecraft, and its diversification from oil and gas succeeds, improbably, on the back of an out-of-nowhere viral success by, of all companies, Electronic Arts. Or maybe the deal fails! I’m just spitballing.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

Photo by Robert Paul/Riot Games; some illustrated elements by Sonny Ross

Welcome to the sixth edition of Exit Interview, a series in which I interview people in the video game and esports industries who have experienced some kind of major career change. The conversations are shaggy, digressive, and usually only just a little bit about video games.

In early September, I interviewed Arten 'Ballatw' Esa, a Valorant caster and analyst whose insight and easy manner I’d grown to appreciate in my years following the game. In mid 2024, Esa abruptly announced that he was quitting esports altogether — earning tributes from dozens upon dozens of coaches, players, broadcast staff and fans. (Seriously, look at these replies.)

Chatting for over an hour, he and I discussed the sometimes-loosey-goosey feel of a career in esports, negotiations over better rates for casters, and — a subject of embarrassing relevance to me, personally — unhealthy relationships with video games.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.¹

ReaderGrev: Hey Balla! I have a question…² Why did you leave esports?

Arten 'Ballatw' Esa: I think the primary reason is I was looking for stability in my life, given that I have a now four-year old girl at home and my wife works full time. So that's the first and foremost reason: I wanted to be there for my daughter. I don't want to be traveling every single weekend out to Los Angeles, or to various different places in the world for three weeks at a time.

The other major one would be that I just was losing my passion for it. And the reasons for that may be different things within the esports world at large, things like the impending Saudi money coming in and taking over. There's a lot of things like that, that I just don't necessarily want to be involved in. The games are not going in the direction that I was hoping for. Any competitive game that I was looking at, I'm just not as interested in the direction — not necessarily from a gameplay perspective, but where the devs are taking it in terms of esports, and the tools and things that they're giving to the esports community. All that stuff leads to decreased passion.

And there's more too, like the politics of what I was actually doing. The ever-increasing needs to create a brand for yourself and grow that brand while trying to push your craft of casting to the highest level possible. It's just a balance that's really hard to strike when you are trying to raise a family. I think I made the right choice to step back after a year of reflection.

Can you tell me a little about what you saw in the direction Valorant was going that contributed to you losing your passion? 

Ballatw: Just before this, I stepped on Twitter for probably the first time in two months, and I saw that the replay system³ is finally getting released. That's a big one that we should have had with the game's launch. Right around the time I quit is when they finally said: Hey, it's coming. But that sort of thing is just way too late, and it's one of those social things that I think adds a lot to my enjoyment of competitive games and just the feeling of being able to improve at something or show off something or make content about the game. It’s so important, and it’s lacking. That's not the only thing. I was a huge champion of Premier in Valorant⁴ and I thought, not to bring it back to Fortnite again, but like, they had a version of Premier in Fortnite. That was kind of how they ran their entire competitive ecosystem. So I was really excited about it coming to Valorant and I think it fell really flat. I think Riot Games pushed it out, launched it, said they were really excited for it, and then they just kind of haven't really touched it.

Those sorts of things, I think, are really, really important to actually introduce people to playing the game in an organized fashion. And I've said this many, many, many times across all sorts of different platforms: When you have a competitive game, especially team-based games, you don't get the best of it by playing pugs, or queuing for matchmaking. You get the best out of it by having some sort of organized structure, where you can do the fun combinations and learn how to play as a team, set up crossfires, that sort of thing.

For me, growing up playing Counter-Strike, playing that game very seriously when I was in high school, that stuff was just built into the game. It was inherently social because there was no matchmaking up until ESEA came around. You had to go find scrims on your own, and that was the primary way we played the game. Obviously there were deathmatch servers, there were public servers and stuff like that. But like, when you finally got your friends on, you didn't just duo queue, or go, Oh, you want to five stack? You went and scrimmed. And you got better together.

The reliance on matchmaking that makes it addictive, makes you chase a number — it's just not fun. The last year of actually participating in the game, I was so addicted to playing ranked, for no reason. I knew I hated it and I just kept doing it because it was the only way to really consume and play the game. Don't get me wrong. I did enjoy the game. I love tac FPS. I loved Valorant in general. It's the systems that it's built on that take a toll after a time.

I remember the first time someone pointed that last bit out to me.⁵ When I played games as a kid, I was selecting into specific servers, or hosting them myself for friends. There was a server browser. I could find like-minded people and do specific things. Now, matchmaking is the only way to engage with the vast majority of games.

Ballatw: You're probably right around the same age as me, right? I'm 34 now. [Ed. note: I’m 31.] The difference back then was just crazy. StarCraft, you wouldn't queue, you'd select the map that you wanna play, and there's people who wanna play the custom game that you're playing. I thought that Riot was going to put a lot of effort into making the casual experience a little bit better and independent from the competitive aspect of the game.

You left esports when your daughter was three. If the primary reason was that you wanted to spend more time with her, there were three years during which you could have made that decision previously, but you didn't.

Ballatw: Hey, that's crazy. You wanted me to leave earlier? 

No, no, no. That’s not what I'm implying! I'm just curious if you think you could have left earlier — by which I sort of mean, were you previously more attached to esports in a way that would have made it harder to step back?

Ballatw: I think within the first three years of her being born, that was a time of transition. But you're absolutely right. At the height of my Valorant career — when I first started doing Champs, and when I first really started pushing my brand, I started doing Plat Chat⁶ — those sorts of things were places where I saw potential. I think that kind of drove my entire esports career from the beginning, [this feeling of] Wow, I think this has the potential to really be something exciting, something that I'd be casting for the majority of my life from here on out. Not that that was ever a goal, but I saw that as a possibility, both with Fortnite and with Valorant. I think that the longer I actually participated in both of those scenes, the harder it was for me to see that potential ever get realized.

I think last year, I definitely could have quit at the beginning of the year. But, like I said, I just was addicted to various different aspects of the scene. It was very difficult to break that cycle. It was definitely an unhealthy relationship that entire year. That was the year that I didn't do any casting, really. I stepped back from casting, I stepped back from international events. I wanted to see how much I would miss it, and how much of an impact it would have at home, too.

Can I ask what you mean when you say it was an unhealthy relationship?

Ballatw: It definitely was an addiction in 2024. Gaming addiction, while you're not consuming drugs or something like that, you still have that same need to do something to get that dopamine. And that results in neglect in various different other places. I neglected content. I neglected my home life, my relationship, my daughter — despite, you know, taking the time specifically to be home with her. That sort of stuff definitely manifested because of an addiction to Valorant and other various games. And it leaves you with a sense of loneliness, of anxiety, of all sorts of different mental conditions that suck. Part of the thing about ranked systems in general is that that literally, I think, is designed into it, and that's why I have such a disdain for it at this point.

Cutting it away from my life completely, I think, has been very, very beneficial. And honestly, at this point in my life — maybe because I'm older, or maybe it's just because I did have such an unhealthy relationship to it — I'm not gaming at all. I barely have logged onto the computer, this computer that I'm using to talk to you right now. This is all the way down in the basement, and I don't come down here anymore.

Had you achieved what you wanted when you stepped back?

Ballatw: I would say no, but I'm not disappointed with what I achieved. I think this gets into the politics of talent work in general, but I would have loved to see myself casting some of the bigger moments in the game. I think in terms of pure growth in my ability and my skill, by the end of my actual casting career I think I was at the top of my game. I'm not gonna say I was the best. I felt like I was close to being the best and I don't think that that got recognized with the moments [I was given], which felt a little unfair. But at the end of the day, I didn't truly care about that. Obviously I'm talking about it, but it was never a primary goal for me. I just wanted to create the best kind of environment in general for the broadcasting group, and I think we definitely achieved something great in terms of Valorant broadcasting.

I think it's also just soured by the end for me: I got COVID on my last Champs; I didn't get to do playoffs because of that. Some of those games that I was lined up for were very good and I had to watch from my hotel room, ignored and forgotten, which sucked.

I found a Reddit comment of yours from six years ago, in which you said you wanted to “become one of the best esports casters, not just in Fortnite. I want people in other games to know who I am, whether that is by breaking in and doing their games too or just being so good at Fortnite that people know me.“

Ballatw: [laughs]

Of course, you moved on from Fortnite, but I was going to ask like how you felt about that now.

Ballatw: Listening back to that comment is pretty funny. A little cringy. I don't care about that answer anymore.

Do you feel like you achieved that stability at home that you were seeking when you stepped back from esports?

Ballatw: For sure. And it was obviously a rough transition, given the fact that I was still dealing with addiction and not even realizing that that was a real problem until a decent time after stepping back from esports. But I have a very supportive partner in my wife, and my daughter's amazing, and I'm so happy I get to spend more time with them. But also, I work a full-time job now. I have more responsibility. I know what it takes to try to love something else, and try to love the grind of all that, to come home at the same time every day. And I think that's working very, very well for us right now. We're really, really happy. So yeah, I've achieved everything I wanted with that transition.

When I was preparing for this interview, I spoke with someone who mentioned that you were a demon on the basketball court among the broadcast staff at Riot. I think most jobs — and probably the job you're doing now — don't involve opportunities to cross-up your coworkers. I'm curious if you miss that, if you miss what seems to me to have been a pretty freewheeling, loose work environment where you got the chance to play basketball on the job.

Ballatw: I wouldn't call myself the demon. There are some demons on the Plat Chat team.

Yeah, the freewheeling aspect of esports was very, very good. I had a fantastic friend group that made those events incredibly fun, who were down for anything, who were very much a family while you're out at these events — because you kind of have to be. We kept ourselves grounded. And I definitely miss that. But it kind of wasn't worth the instability. I have no local friends because I was never home. I was never able to settle in my community. And these are incredibly important for mental health. So, yeah, I miss it, but now I get the chance to spread my roots.

But let me tell you about that Josh Wilkinson guy and that Bren guy! These guys — just ruthless on the basketball court, man! They just will not let up. I never knew they could move that fast.

Do you guys still keep in touch?

Ballatw: Um, not really. It's just hard. We don't have the same schedules at all. Even when I was in esports, when I was home, it was hard to get me to queue five stacks, because after 8 p.m. I need to spend time with my wife who just worked all day and is going to sleep in two hours. When am I going to see her if I'm five-stacking with the boys? So we haven't really kept up too much. Every once in a while when they're doing something fun I pop into one of their streams and we chat, but not in any sort of real, lasting level.

I was listening to an interview you did with Pedro Romero in which he asked about you spending more time with your family, and you responded that you wanted to stay healthy for your daughter. That was, if I remember correctly, the first thing you mentioned and the most emphatic part of your answer. It could be that I misread the moment, but I am curious about why that was your most immediate answer, the thing you felt so strongly about.

Ballatw: I don't know where I was in terms of that journey when I talked to Pedro, but I do vividly remember coming back from [Valorant Champions in] Turkey [in 2022] and having an absolutely ruined back. And that was the year that my daughter started walking. She was totally into it at that point: wants to go on walks daily, do her loop, stuff like that. And with my back, it was a rough time. That's a constant theme, I think, for dads who are starting to grow into their dad bod. It's super important to me to be able to keep up with her throughout her childhood and beyond. I want to be healthy well into my old age.

I've always been active. I've been athletic. But I've never actually been healthy. When I was a kid I was incredibly skinny, and now I'm overweight and not able to move the way I used to, while still being able to sprint and jump and play basketball and whatever. I have arthritis in both my knees, so I gotta make sure that they don't completely degrade by the time I'm in my old age and by the time my daughter is playing sports — maybe playing basketball — on her own. I want to be able to actually hoop with her.

Perpendicular to all that: As I was preparing for this interview, one of the things that somebody mentioned was that you were frequently fighting for better standards for casters. That was something that they pointed out about you that people might not know from the outside looking in. Does that characterization ring true to you?

Ballatw: I think I always had the motivation to fight for better conditions or what have you. I don't think that I achieved anything in that aspect. I was definitely more of a talker than anything. I do think my decision to step back was partly due to kind of poor conditions. I was constantly fighting on my rate, and I think part of the reason why I eventually left Fortnite was specifically that kind of battle.

The Valorant Champions Tour knows their dates a year and a half in advance. And oftentimes we'd get contracts very late — weeks before events start, if not the week of — and it just was not a very fun negotiating experience. Negotiations are never fun at all, but like, I always fought to change that and make it less of a fight all the time.

In terms of rates, we were not keeping up with a regular increase year to year. We work on day rates, and it's very rare to ever get a situation where like, they offer you a specific amount and you come back and say: No, I'll do it for this. Every single time they say no — because we will do it and other people will do it. It’s very difficult to actually bargain because of the environment within the talent community itself. We're struggling. I don’t know how it is right now. But it's constantly a fight, from what I'm seeing, and it doesn't look like it's turning around.

Don't get me wrong, Riot pay top of the line. It's not like they're underpaying people, but I just don't think it really matches what talent are giving them.

If you had stayed — if you didn't have the issues that you have with esports, if your priorities were the same as they were two or three years ago — do you think a career as a caster would have been sustainable for you, as someone with a family, a young child?

Ballatw: Straight up no. And the answer is because they were eventually going to ask us to move to Los Angeles. That hasn't happened yet, as far as I know, but even without that, it's still no. The way things are going — not to get political here! — your income has to grow to keep up with inflation.

I think I'm very fortunate in that I would have been fine. It would have be sustainable for me. But if, for whatever reason, my wife wanted to move into a different career where she's not making as much money, then it would not have been feasible.

I’m curious about your time in Fortnite. Specifically, there was this moment in 2020 when you wrote a blog post about the Fortnite viewing experience. And then, you stopped working on the Epic casting team. The terms of that separation are a little unclear. Can we get the clean take on what exactly happened between you and Epic in terms of you casting Fortnite?

Ballatw: My memory is going to be a little foggy at this point, but Epic had stopped broadcasting their Fortnite Champion Series for, I believe two full seasons. They just stopped broadcasting. I don't know why that was; they never really even talked about it. They just didn't do it. So I did it. I literally put on the broadcast on my own channels. Somebody who's getting into the Valorant scene right now, Shayan "ShyoWager" Shehryar, was my wingman in all this. And we — literally for six months straight of pure silence from Epic after having worked with them for a year and a half — we did our own thing for FNCS squads and FNCS duos and it was really successful. That was obviously during COVID. And we pulled off a remote broadcast that was very very good in two modes that were very good for the viewing experience, and Epic just missed on that.

Epic brought back the broadcast after significant push by us — public pressure and internal pressure. And yeah, I just was not happy that they were doing a worse job broadcasting it than I was when I did it alone. FNCS solos [Ed. note: a game mode in which players compete as individuals, and not in teams] came back — and I just did not like solos as a mode in Fortnite. You can go read the blog post if you want the actual reasons. It was constructive criticism. I was harsh on the mode; I was not harsh on Epic’s decisions to run it. But they did not like the fact that I was doing that as a community leader in Fortnite while I was also working the broadcast for them. They didn't hire me back because of that.

It's funny because in my conversations with them after the fact, they obviously relayed the feedback that I shouldn't have done that in the middle of a competition — but also that internally it was a very well-received criticism. They switched to my preferred mode of trios for an entire year after that blog post. The competitive team received it very well. But there were some people who just did not really get who I was or what I was getting at and received it in a different light. And so those people were able to pressure the people who make the actual broadcast decisions to not include me. They didn't think that I was the right fit for their broadcast.

Do you miss content creation?

Ballatw: It's funny, I was up after an early workout, going back through my notebook and I was like, damn, I had such good ideas in Valorant that I just never did. Partly because it was very hard to pull off in Valorant. Partly because I was actively working full time and having to watch three or however many regions there are in this damn game. And then also just dealing with addiction and not being able to actually motivate myself to do any of the work for it.

I do miss it in the sense that you get to expose people to the things that you're seeing that you don't necessarily get to talk about on broadcast or that people just don't listen to on broadcast. But I was totally not invested in content creation in Valorant because it was so hard. No replay system makes things crazy. I'm no stranger to going through streams and videos and obviously that's a big thing in any competitive game. But in this game, the amount of utility that you have to track and be able to see go off without seeing it at all, and be able to figure out where and why and what actual effect it had is so difficult without a replay system. You have to go back and watch the same game from multiple perspectives to actually get a full view of things.

I think the biggest aspect is just the time. I just never ever had the time. So yeah, I miss it a lot. I think I could have done a lot better.

I’m curious, and I think a lot of other folks are curious too, about whether you might ever consider coming back to esports. Or does that door seem like it’s closed?

Ballatw: I think it's closed for any permanent involvement or any serious time investments.

I have one more question that is so far afield from anything we've talked about that I don't know if it'll make sense in the context of this interview. In a previous interview you did, you were asked about your parents’ feelings about you playing video games, and you said basically that they didn't care so long as you were more or less normal. But you also mentioned that your mom was a diplomat, and I think you said something along the lines of: I'm sure that's gonna prompt a follow up question. And then there just wasn't one. So I'm curious about what work she did and how that might have influenced your upbringing, if at all.

Ballatw: She was a diplomat in the sense that she helped negotiate economic agreements between the various places she was stationed in. I always regret not knowing more specifics about what she did. But yeah, we went to many different places and that influenced my life in many, many different ways — very positively, I always think, but I'm the middle child and my older brother and younger brother would think very differently. I don't regret at all the way that I was brought up.

I guess probably it kind of pushed me toward games in general because you need something to latch on to when you're moving as much as I was. I was moving every four years or so. That was the max time that I would spend in a specific place.

My dad is Somali, and I spent some time traveling there and we lived in a neighboring country, in Djibouti. And so when I was younger, I had a lot more ties to Somali culture. That lost itself a little bit as we lived in the States, but one thing that I’m always reminded of is, one of the ways I got really interested in Counter-Strike was the first time I discovered HLTV.org and downloaded a demo and found out: Oh, there's pro players. And then finding out that one of the best pro players at the time, back in 2005, his name was Spawn and he was Somali, I was like: Oh, shit, that's me. I could be Spawn.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

I edited this interview while listening to the incredible new Geese record (and also the astonishingly horny new Frog album). I am a committed Full Album Listener, but if I had to recommend individual tracks, I’d suggest Au Pays du Cocaine from the former and SAX-A-MA-PHONE VAR. XII from the latter.

Photo courtesy of Chris Plante; some illustrated elements by Sonny Ross

Welcome to the fifth edition of Exit Interview — a series in which I talk to people in the video game and esports industries who are experiencing some kind of major career change.

On May 1, when Vox Media announced that it had sold the video game and nerd culture website Polygon to Valnet, Chris Plante suddenly found himself out of work. Plante, who co-founded the site in 2012 and later became its editor in chief, told me he hasn’t paused to process the change.

“I'm sure in like two or three years, I'll just have a total meltdown,” he said.

Instead, Plante sprinted for two months to build Post Games, a weekly scripted podcast that has tackled heady questions such as: “Are video games okay?” and (a personal favorite of mine) “What’s the deal with games and artificial intelligence?”

I, in turn, wanted to ask him some questions about his nearly-two decade career in games journalism. Though Plante politely declined to discuss the sale of Polygon to Valnet¹ , we still managed a wide-ranging conversation touching on popular misconceptions around the business of running a publication, The New York Times’ coverage of artificial intelligence, and Parker Posey’s dog.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.²

ReaderGrev: Can you give readers the elevator version of your games journalism career so far?

Chris Plante: Jeez, um, elevator version! How do I even start this? [Laughs] I'll try to make this as short as possible.

In college I freelanced at a place called Game Set Watch that is now defunct, which is a theme about everywhere I wrote. I then ended up getting a job in 2008 after graduating into the recession at a place called UGO, largely because I just needed a job. I ended up getting laid off from UGO like a year and a half or so later — which, again, part of the story — and dove into freelance. I was freelancing for all of the names that are no longer around, places that still technically owe me money, like GamePro. Best Buy had a magazine, I think it was called @GAMER. I also freelanced for a place called The Daily, which is not the New York Times podcast, it is the iPad-only News Corp daily paper. That was a great opportunity in that it paid really well — it paid like a good newspaper — and it gave me reps where I was writing probably 3,000 to 5,000 words a week while also getting pretty decent pay. It allowed me to put together some really strong samples and really cut my teeth on capital-J journalism. And those samples got me the opportunities to get a full-time job again. At the time I was talking with Kotaku, I was talking with The Onion and The A.V. Club. And I was also talking with Vox Media about the thing that would become Polygon. And I ended up deciding on that one.

I think I read in an old interview of yours that you also worked very briefly on a TV show that was canceled. I'm curious if you remember what that show was.

Plante: Oh, absolutely. The Return of Jezebel James — I think that's the name of the show. It was an Amy Sherman-Palladino show. I started out as an intern on it, and then, as you do, because they needed more hands, became a [production assistant]. I cleaned up Parker Posey's dog’s poo for days on end. That was a lot of my job. I also helped build a ping-pong table for her and Lauren Ambrose. It was great.

That was a multi-camera sitcom, so we shot in front of a live studio audience in Astoria, Queens. The job many nights, when there was a shoot, was helping to get people to their seats and basically making sure people can't get up to leave during it. You’re telling people they can't go piss and handing out pizza when you’re going so late that you need to actually start feeding these people.

I don't want to knock this show — that is already down and has been down for over a decade — but could you tell while watching the filming that it was not going to make it?

Plante: No, not at all. There wasn't any reason to think that until the vibes started to shift around the office. I mean, the creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, I think her previous show was Gilmore Girls. So I thought: Hey, maybe this is a path. Maybe I'm going to be on here, and I'll be an intern, and then I'll be a PA, and I’ll be a writer's PA, and I'll be a writers assistant — and someday I'll be writing TV! A very just-out-of-college way of looking at things.

I want to move now to Polygon. Can you walk me through what the role of editor in chief entailed on a day-to-day basis?

Plante: It's hard to even talk about the day to day because it is so different and crowded every day. In short, it's a lot of meetings and a lot of representing the site on behalf of its countless needs. So internally, that could be: Hey, I am meeting with people who are overseeing our entertainment programming or our guides programming or our games culture programming and helping them develop whatever their editorial agenda is. But then you move up a layer and that is: I'm meeting with our brand licensing people to talk through some arcade cabinet that they would like to have the Polygon logo on as a partnership, and if we could sell that in Target or whatever. There was never that, but that’s an example of things that came across my desk pretty regularly. There would be meetings with book publishers. We published a variety of books during my time there and there were always conversations about doing more. It could be meeting with our sales team and teaching them what a video game is and how it works and how to sell it to people. Meeting with the heads of our analytics and data and research departments to put together a survey on anime, and then to form a partnership with Crunchyroll.

It could be so many different things because at that scale of a business, you're not just like: Hey, we publish and then we do Google Ads and we make money. I think there's a lot of assumptions on the internet about how these businesses operate. They're like: Oh, well, guides. Guides is the entire business. You make a lot of traffic and that pays all your bills. That's certainly a piece of it, but there are so many components of how a business works.

Then there’s the entire editorial side, which is, you know, actually helping with stories.³ When a really important or serious story comes up, I'm the person who's gonna have to see it to make sure that we are doing it justice, to make sure that it's gonna go through legal⁴ in a healthy way, to make that we're developing it in a way that doesn't waste the writer's time. It's kind of just a constant running from one thing to the next.

You talked a little about the misconceptions around Polygon's business. I want to offer you an opportunity to correct the record. When you were there, how did Polygon actually run?

Plante: Because it has changed and also because I don't want to go too in the weeds of Vox Media's stuff, I will say this is how all of these sites operate — Polygon, IGN, GameSpot. They're all quite similar and all commonly misunderstood. Which is to say that they are businesses with multiple revenue pathways.

I think there is a tendency for the least generous readings on the internet to say: Oh, a games publication is funded by just direct traffic and whatever ads Google serves. Or to say: It's payola and a games publication is paid by Microsoft and they get an Xbox thing and now they're all Xbots, right? And the reality is there's many [ways the business makes money] and they're constantly changing. Businesses have to evolve and this isn't exclusive to Polygon, it's not exclusive to the media, it's just the nature of how business works.

So again, if you look at a place like IGN as an example — as I clearly and not so subtly shift focus — their business has been, yes, traffic, but it has also been direct sales, it has been sponsorships, it has been events, they have acquired game distribution platforms, they have acquired countless sites over the years to create an ad network effect. There are so many different ways that they are making money at any given time, because one: Any one of them could fall apart at any moment. That's just being safe and practical and realistic. And two: As things get bigger and bigger, you have to find ways to pay those people, right? You want to make sure that if you’re IGN and your game distribution business goes under, there's still going to be another business that's going to help you meet payroll. These things have so many appendages, and to discount all of them in favor of one, I think that's a mistake.

Hiya! I’d like to take a moment here to shout out an interview series I think you might enjoy from Pete Volk, Polygon’s former senior curation editor. Volk has been running an exit interview series focused solely on former Polygon staff, which I would encourage you to check out. I also loved their interview with Jason Mantzoukas regarding his stint on Taskmaster, a British comedy series I adore.

In my head — and maybe this is wrong, so please correct me — there are three big eras of Polygon. In the years after the site launched, Polygon is a major news site trying to compete in some ways with the IGNs of the world. The second era is more personality-driven: A lot of entertainment products coming out of Polygon, be that McElroy stuff or kind of wonky video series — it’s not the only thing Polygon is doing in that moment, but a big part of its presence online is readers connecting with the folks who staff the site. And then the third era to me is the expansion into broader entertainment: Covering comic books, movies, TV, board games, etc. I'm curious, first of all, whether that taxonomy scans for you, but also: How intentional was all of that? Was that planned by the folks leading Polygon or did the site just change organically over time?

Plante: All of the above. I think that's a fair reading of the epochs, but the one tweak I would make is that all of them are happening at the same time. Those are just the things that are dominant at that time. So while we were in the beginning serious journalism phase, we were still making silly-ass videos. In fact, I think we launched with a weird super-cut video that did like a million views or something, which at the time felt impossible. And then we’ve obviously kept doing big, meaty, important journalism through all of that. It just was not our main focus, but we still had Matt Leone [and] Nicole Carpenter. That stuff was still happening.

But yes, you're right, there definitely are these different periods. For each of them, I think it is responding to the moment. When we launched, the goal was to make something that we weren't seeing elsewhere. It was like a video game publication that you could read at work and not just not be ashamed, but that would get past your work's blocked list. I think it's hard for people to remember just how trashy many game websites were at the time. I'm not throwing shade at IGN or the big ones, there was a lot of junk on the internet.

The second era — that's adapting to what you have, right? You see that some things get more attention than others, and you look around and you say: What do we have? Who is already on our staff and what can we do with them? And I would say that Chris Grant, the co-founder and original editor in chief, was smart in that he saw that he had the McElroy brothers — who would go on to become these mega-successful podcasters — and said: Hey, everybody here should just do what they're best at. So that meant the McElroys doing what they were doing on YouTube, and eventually people like Brian David Gilbert doing the same, and our full video team later on. That would also mean, at the time, different people who are on the editorial side doing whatever they were best at. I think maybe the editorial part of that is less visible just because the McElroy star was in complete ascension at the time but I think it was a site-wide thing. The way that we're going to get through this is by all of us doing whatever we do best, even if it is, at times, maybe a little editorially inconsistent.

And then the last period is really just recognizing what our audience was telling us in terms of the expansion into things like comics and anime. What we saw around that time was that readership was just increasing a lot whenever we did those stories and that we were bringing in a new type of reader who then would stick around for games. At the same time, games readership was, I would say, stable at best. It felt like a good way to diversify what we do, to create a business that was going to be able to get us through some tricky times, that was going to get the readers what they were clearly telling us they wanted, and that felt like a natural progression for the publication.

When I got laid off from Launcher, I think I just commuted into work, got canned, went home and played video games for the rest of the day. To the extent that you can tell me, what did your day look like after splitting with Polygon?

Plante: I'll be honest, I don't remember much about that week. This isn't me being cagey or anything. You know what I did? I think on my final day I went to Disneyland. I think that evening — I think that was the same day — there was like a Star Wars night. My buddy Andrew who still works at Vox Media and I had plans to go and I remember it just being a very nice night. I was really glad to have something to do, and really glad to be with somebody who really cared about me and was happy to just load me up with extremely unhealthy Star Wars themed cakes and hot dogs.

I really am bad at processing things — for a long period of time. I've had family members pass away and it will be years before I really start to process it. Probably part of why I launched a new thing immediately and then sprinted and crunched for two months to make it work was that that was an easy way for me to not have to think too much about it. This is not a statement on anybody else's feelings. I think what everybody else who is not with Polygon anymore is doing is very healthy. I think processing is a good idea! But it's just not natural for me, and it's not how I tend to go about things. But I'm sure in like two or three years, I'll just have a total meltdown.

I hope you don't! I hope maybe you have a moment of serenity instead of a meltdown.

Plante: I'll just add, too, I think the other thing there is like — not to undercut all the people who are out of jobs, because that is terrible, that's just so unbelievably hard, and I know everybody is going through it — I also know that there are still people who are creating this thing every day and it's still this publication that I love and there are a lot of people that I love who work there. So I think part of my not processing it is that I want that part to play out. I want everyone else to go get jobs, I want that to play out, and I want the people who are still at Polygon to have a chance to figure out what they're doing.

Can you tell me a little bit about your ambitions for Post Games? What kinds of stories are you trying to tell, and how does that differ from the work you were doing at Polygon?

Plante: My ambitions are small. Like, if you're able to do this when you publish, underline it, like, three times — make it italicized, bold, maybe a block quote. I cannot take off my asshole editor hat, I realize, as I'm telling you how to do your job.

It really is, at least compared to what I was doing. Polygon was a large, large publication and its ambitions were large. And the way that you kept a publication like that alive was by a lot of people seeing it. And at least right now, I do not have that in me. It was a blast, but I'm finding as I'm away from it that I have a lot of stories that I maybe wasn't going to tell because they're just meant for a different audience.

The other thing is just that I'm getting old. I did an interview with MinnMax and was asked to send a photo of myself for the YouTube thing and I took it in my backyard and I looked at myself and I was like, Jesus Christ. I looked like the crypt keeper. And yeah, running a youth publication, you know that you have a shelf life. The thing that I'm doing now, its inspirations are not subtle. It's NPR. It is the BBC’s weekly audio magazines. The age demo for that is significantly older than what Polygon was.

Some of the Post Games episodes you’ve done feel like they’re answering naive questions about games that, if you're steeped in the scene, you don't even think to answer. Why couldn’t these stories have been Polygon stories?

Plante: I think the reality is they were Polygon stories, just with slightly different packaging. The difference is just the slightest tweak in framing, and how much I assume of the listener on Post Games. When we get into lewd games on Post Games, I'm probably spending a little more time explaining how Steam works, how its history of monetization and NSFW games works — assuming that the listener probably knows next to nothing about it. At Polygon, there was a pretty safe assumption that they knew the foundation of the story before they started reading it.

Can I ask a bit about how you arrived at that view of the Post Games audience? My assumption was that many of the people who come through the door at Post Games are there because they are familiar with Chris Plante, former editor in chief of Polygon.

Plante: I would say that that's probably wrong. [Laughs] I think that is a very small portion of it. I think most of the people who are coming into Post Games are Besties podcast listeners. That audience is older, they have often been with us for a long time and even if they haven't, they are often either new to games or have a kind of, I don't know, average relationship with them. They are not fanatical. Maybe they listen to our show because that is how they experience games; they don't play many of them but they really like the idea of games.

When I set out to make Post Games, on a pretty reasonable business level, I thought: Who are my early adopters? Who are the people that are going to be my core audience? And I assumed it would be people who are already showing that they're willing to subscribe to The Besties on Patreon. So I really tried to keep that group front of mind when designing the show.

You mentioned earlier that producing Post Games has been a sprint. Can you tell me a little bit about the logistics of that sprint? What does it take to spin up a podcast like this — that to me feels pretty meticulously produced?

Plante: I'm glad to hear that it comes across that way, because behind the scenes, it is me just completely exhausted. That Peanuts character that's just surrounded by a cloud of dust — I feel like that is me.

There's so much you have to do, whether that is small things like making sure my business has its bank account set up right and that the taxes are going to be okay and I'm not gonna be surprised at the end of the year. Learning how to edit. I had never edited a podcast before doing this. I'd never edited audio in any form. There are just so many little things that need to be done. Finding a podcast hosting provider and getting all of that kind of busy work out of the way while also deciding what the structure of the show is and getting it booked and produced. It's just so much stuff.

The first month of ramping up Post Games, it feels sort of like after I had my son, where like, you just don't remember that period. It is forever lost. You have vaguely positive memories of it, when in reality you know that it was probably extremely difficult and tiring and exhausting.

In one episode of Post Games, you kind of disparage your own voice a little bit. I think it's done as a joke. But I'm curious: How do you feel about your voice?

Plante: Horrible! I am very self-conscious of my voice. I was born with a cleft lip and a cleft palate so that meant a lot of speech therapy as a kid. I have, I think, a slight lisp. For most of my life I had a hole in my palate that meant my mouth and my nasal cavity were… there was no hard palate there. So it was especially nasally. I had a very, very, very severe underbite until my jaw was broken. So I was just very aware of how I sounded.

At the same time, I did theater all through high school. I performed Richard III as Richard III. So I'm not unfamiliar with being on stage or talking in front of people. You work with the instrument that you're given. So I can both think the instrument I play sounds really funny and also be perfectly okay with what I have.

I wanted to ask about two episodes you put out about AI. There's a lot of hostility toward AI in the game space, and it doesn't seem like you feel that same level of hostility. There's a little bit of hedging in those episodes, like you’re working out the correct way to talk about AI. So I'm curious what your opinion on the tech is.

Plante: I think my thoughts change on a day to day basis, or an hour to hour basis. I am deeply skeptical and often afraid of it — and more importantly, the people who create it and fund it and power it and the people in our government who choose not to regulate it. But I also just recognize how technology works and how people work, and that just because you don't like something, it won't cease to exist. And very clearly a lot of people do like using this stuff. I think that's undeniable when you see the numbers and when you actually talk to people in the world. And I want to know why — in the same way that I want to know why and how people in our country vote for Donald Trump. Is that the only part of the story I want to know? No, not at all. But I think it's neglectful to not understand how a thing works.

I think especially if you're somebody who is really against AI, being able to explain what it's doing and where it's failing and being able to show people where their actions with AI are not helping them is really important. If I were to go to my parents and they were using AI — they don't; they don t give a shit about AI; this is a fictional scenario — I don’t think it would be helpful for me to tell them: You shouldn’t use it because it’s evil.

I'm curious if you had any thoughts at all before those episodes came out about what the reaction to them might be like — which I ask because Casey Newton was on episode zero of Post Games, and very close to the launch of those episodes, Newton and Kevin Roose of The New York Times published a conversation about AI that was received very poorly by a lot of people in the games space, people who I would consider to be your peers, journalistically. Did you have any thoughts while producing those episodes about how your listeners might react to them?

Plante: I did, in the sense that just talking about AI makes people depressed, and I got that feedback from some people. I assumed I would lose some listeners, but I also believed that it was a story worth telling and that I thought most people would understand that and would go on that trip with me — and that ended up being the case. I also have very different opinions than Casey and Kevin, and I think that’s pretty clear.

I hope that we are at a point where it's useful for people to see the conversation that they had, because that story is valuable. It is reflective of a conversation that is happening in Silicon Valley, that is happening amongst the people who are deciding how these tools operate. And I would rather see it than not see it. I think there's a tricky part with The New York Times where everything can feel like the opinion board. Retweets are not endorsements in the same way that everything that they cover is not what the publication itself believes — but that's hard, because it's so powerful. And this is, I think, the downside of the sheer scale of The New York Times. It makes it so that whenever it says anything, it needs to be everything to everyone. Because if it's not, you worry: Oh, what if this is the one thing that somebody from the outside who doesn't care much about AI sees about AI, and now their opinion is shaped by this? And that's a pretty reasonable fear to have. But I think that has a lot more to do with the ecosystem than it does with, like, should any one story exist?

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Image courtesy of Team Liquid

The Saudi version of a new streaming video series meant to promote the Saudi-run Esports World Cup censors a portion of one episode that touches on LGBTQ+ subject matter and briefly mentions criticisms of the event.

Esports World Cup: Level Up, a series on the Amazon Prime Video streaming platform, follows the teams and individuals that participated in the 2024 Esports World Cup tournament in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Across five episodes, Level Up profiles a handful of athletes and notable figures in esports, centering on their performance at the tournament.

The second episode follows the esports organization Team Liquid and its 2024 League of Legends and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang rosters. The version of the episode that is available to viewers in the U.S. includes a two-minute section just before the five-minute mark, in which:

• Team Liquid co-CEO Steve Arhancet describes the organization’s values: “Our core belief at Liquid is that gaming is for everyone, regardless of gender, race or sexuality.”

• Arhancet adds that he is gay, and describes gaming and esports as a refuge. He also says that as a gay man he found it “difficult to participate” in an event in Saudi Arabia. (He does not say why, nor do the video’s creators elaborate on this remark.)

• Arhancet says that the fan reaction to Team Liquid participating in the Esports World Cup has been negative. Screenshots that display on screen show messages from social media users including: “You’ve chosen money over morals” and “Be ashamed of yourselves. You used to stand for righteousness.”

• Arhancet concludes by showing off a variant of the Team Liquid jersey he and the team would wear to the Esports World Cup, which includes a little rainbow motif in the team’s logo. “Little did they know, we already decided to do something about it,” Arhancet says, referring to fans who were upset with Team Liquid. “To wear this is a statement to all of the gamers in the world. This is what Liquid believes in. This is what I believe in. And I think that’s extremely powerful.”

This section does not appear in the version of the episode that is being streamed to viewers in Saudi Arabia, according to two Prime Video users in the country who described the content of the episode to ReaderGrev.

The rainbow elements on the Team Liquid jerseys are also blurred out in the Saudi version.

One example of the blurred Pride logo in ‘Esports World Cup: Level Up.’

It was not immediately clear which party was responsible for the cuts to the video series. Neither the Esports World Cup Foundation, nor Amazon Prime Video, nor This Machine, the production company behind the documentary, responded to a request for comment.

The organizers behind the Esports World Cup have heavily promoted Level Up in their marketing for the event, and Team Liquid has shared social content relating to the series — including one video that highlights the passage that was removed from the Saudi version of episode two.

“We are disappointed to learn, upon your request for comment, that the Saudi broadcast of Esports World Cup: Level Up has been altered to remove images of our Pride jersey, as well as important parts of our Co-CEO Steve Arhancet's story as a gay man in esports,” Team Liquid wrote in a statement to ReaderGrev. “While we understand that streaming services may change content to comply with local regulations or content policies, we disagree with this kind of censorship and we have reached out to the Level Up production team and Amazon to look into the matter. Progress doesn't happen overnight, but we are hopeful in our conversations around the topic, and we will continue to wear our jersey with pride across the globe, including at the Esports World Cup.”

An example of a rainbow motif blurred on the back of a jersey in ‘Esports World Cup: Level Up.’

It was also not immediately apparent whether the same content had been cut for viewers in other regions with laws against LGBTQ+ expression. Prime Video notes on its website that it may restrict access to titles “where the sale or distribution of that content would violate that country's or region's laws, cultural norms, or sensitivities or for any other reason at our discretion.”

The Esports World Cup is an annual tournament series, now in its second year, that features dozens of esports teams competing across a wide range of games for a prize pool exceeding $70 million. The nearly two-month long event is backed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which is controlled by Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Public Investment Fund has made major investments into the video game and esports industries as part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, a national strategy around the diversification of the Saudi economy.

As I’ve written before: Saudi Arabia is considered hostile to LGBTQ+ people by reputable human rights groups and the U.S. government. The State Department travel guide for Saudi Arabia notes that same-sex sexual activity is criminalized in the country, adding that “violations of Saudi laws governing perceived expressions of, or support for, same-sex sexual relations, including on social media, may be subject to severe punishment. Potential penalties include fines, jail time, or death.” Nontraditional gender expression is also criminalized in the kingdom.

The Esports World Cup, a Saudi sportswashing effort, has drawn criticism from some esports fans — and even from organizations participating in the event, including Team Liquid.

“Saudi Arabia's human rights record is undeniably troubling,” Arhancet wrote on X in June 2024, in a lengthy post explaining Liquid’s participation in the event. “I know my struggles pale compared to what LGBT Saudis face daily,” he added.

In another lengthy June 2024 statement via video, Arhancet’s co-CEO, Victor Goossens, said the organization was urged by activists and human rights groups not to boycott the event, and instead to participate and “speak up.”

Some members of the esports community have opted to ignore or counter-program the matches at the Esports World Cup, and a handful of popular streamers have openly declined to co-stream the event, citing Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! I’ve also written more about esportswashing and Saudi Arabia here and here, if you’re interested.

Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

The man in the dark shirt and hat is Mac Reynolds, co-founder of Night Street Games | Photos by Tom Stratton for Night Street Games; Screenshot courtesy of Night Street Games

I wasn’t even sure if I should ask the question.

I was on the phone with Mac Reynolds, the brother of Imagine Dragons lead singer Dan Reynolds and also the band’s manager. He was on his way to Los Angeles for Summer Game Fest¹ , where the game development studio he founded with Dan, Night Street Games, would reveal its first game: the zany third-person capture-the-flag shooter Last Flag.

Before the game was announced, I had the opportunity to play a few rounds of Last Flag in a demo environment with a mix of devs, press, influencers and friends of the studio. Even in this early state, the game is a blast, calling to mind at times the original Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) and elsewhere, in some of its characters and visuals, Team Fortress 2. After choosing from a roster of heroes — the stars of Last Flag’s debut SGF trailer — players hide a flag in a nook on their side of the map. Once the flags are hidden, fighting begins over three radio towers dotting the map’s dividing line. Control over these towers gives players respawn options and also provides some kind of additional intel (though I wasn’t attentive enough to notice how exactly this played out during my time with the game). All the while, one or two of the more nimble characters bloodhound across enemy territory, darting in and out of nooks looking for the flag. (Incidentally, everyone is also harvesting minor harmless NPCs around the map for money to upgrade their abilities, though this felt uncoupled from the core action of the game in a way that feels maybe a bit unintentional.)

Screenshot of Last Flag courtesy of Night Street Games

The Battlefront comparison is particularly instructive here, I think. My memories of that game include the intense thrill of meat grind-y action, of me and a dozen guys blitzing down a hallway or across a more or less open field toward a jumble of opponents — but also the almost-wistful stretches of downtime: sprinting toward some barren corner of the map to cap a command point nobody else would care to contest, backed by some of John Williams’s more sedate Star Wars compositions. A little unstructured. Both over- and under-designed.

I mean this in a complimentary way: Last Flag also frequently toggles between these modes of high and low action. Skirmishes at or between the three radio towers are usually frenetic — Looney Tunes style fight clouds zipping back and forth across the map’s equator. The hunt for the flag, though, straddles the line between bureaucratic box-checking (I’ve checked this part of the map, and this one, and looked here, also here, etc.) and the tension of a too-long quiet stretch in a good battle royale. The variety feels nice, enabled by maps that are pockmarked with points of interest, elevation changes and sprawling tunnels.

Things flagged for me (pun intended) toward the endgame. Once the flag has been captured and brought back to one side of the map or the other, the game is basically over. Despite a minute-long grace period, I don’t think I ever witnessed a team retake its flag from the enemy base. The arcade-y, febrile energy that makes fights thrilling in the mid-game — when everyone’s just kind of bopping and bouncing around the map — works to the detriment of the team trying to dig an opponent out of an entrenched position.²

Screenshot of Last Flag courtesy of Night Street Games

But wait! Back to that question I mentioned.

While preparing for my interview with Mac, I saw, via his Instagram account, that he had traveled to Ukraine in 2023 — and posted at length about his trip and support for the Ukrainian people. I was also ambiently aware of his brother’s history of supporting LGBTQ+ people (particularly Mormon and ex-Mormon queer people), and Dan’s headline-grabbing decision to wave a Palestinian flag at a recent concert. These aren’t particularly outré positions. Still, I wanted to know: Where did the two brothers’ inclination toward advocacy comes from?

“Our mom always told us to speak up for what you think is right,” Mac said. “But I do also want to draw a line of distinction. Imagine Dragons is Imagine Dragons. At Night Street Games, I would never want to do something to undersell the importance of all the people in that team. With anything that can get political, you can end up getting divisive instead of uniting, and none of us speak for them. So I also want to be careful. The things I believe and stand up for, whatever I do, and Dan as well — that's us. I don't ever want it to reflect positively or negatively on this wonderful group of people who are building a game. … So I know I'm kind of sidestepping a little bit the question, but I think it is important to kind of point out what we see as our responsibility as artists, versus our responsibility as co-founders[.]”

The whole exchange was a bit orthogonal to the point of the call — to discuss Night Street’s new game — but in retrospect, I’m glad it came up. The subject of political statements blowing back on a studio was a live one at Summer Game Fest. On Friday, during the main presentation, Ian Proulx, game director for Splitgate 2, walked out on stage in a black “Make FPS Great Again” cap. Everyone disliked that. (I’m being a bit tart but truly, even the most generous interpretations of the hat stunt were along the lines of “It’s stupid but the game is good.”) For several days, Proulx insisted it wasn’t a big deal and didn’t mean anything and that he wasn’t going to apologize, until on Tuesday he apologized. (He also spent the weekend apologizing for the studio’s criticisms of the Call of Duty franchise and over a Splitgate 2 microtransaction controversy.)

Normally I would feel bad dragging one studio’s controversies into a write-up of a completely different game — except there is a connection! The SGF Splitgate 2 trailer featured a song by Imagine Dragons, which inevitably made the band a target for jokes and criticism alongside Proulx and Splitgate 2. And yet, before Summer Game Fest even began, Mac, who was at the show to promote an entirely different game, gave a perfectly reasonable answer to a question about advocacy and the impacts it might have on his coworkers and subordinates. So it felt like a cruelly ironic twist that Imagine Dragons would spend the weekend catching strays after the show.

Below is the rest of my conversation with Mac. As you’ll see, it frequently returned to the subject of Mac’s coworkers and the people who work in games more broadly, for whom he had lots and lots of praise.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.³

ReaderGrev: Can you tell me a bit about how the studio went from idea to reality?

Mac Reynolds: This wasn't such a big leap for Dan and I. We grew up — like a lot of other people — playing a ton of games. For me, Sierra Online, LucasArts, Delphine, these studios were a huge part of my youth. Dan and I come from a family with a bunch of brothers, we spent a lot of time playing games together. And Dan does a lot coding, in C# mostly. I grew up doing 3D modeling and animating. And we talked for years about making video games. It was always on the mind. And a few years ago, I think it just felt like: Why do we keep talking about it? Why don't we just do something?

I've got to give the credit to Dan here. He really took the first serious initiative in that he started going on random outsourcing websites, finding people that we could work with. We had limited coding and art experience, but we needed some professionals to work with. And he started interviewing people — and did not tell them who he was. And then when he narrowed it down to his favorite four, that's about the time that I kind of jumped in full-time with him. We started interviewing people together and it was kind of a funny experience. We ended up working with this company, Argentics, and it was funny when they were like: Wait a second, you look kind of like that guy from Imagine Dragons.

Fast forward a bit. We took this idea and it had a lot of iterations over the years. It started with Dan doing his animations and music and all kinds of different things, and us kind of fighting and jousting over: Should there be fog of war? Should there not? Should it be isometric view versus third person versus whatever? And we worked with [Argentics], put together a prototype that felt fun. Then we kind of did it like any other studio. We went out and tried to raise money. And when we raised a little bit of money, we were able to start putting together a team of folks who worked on some of our favorite games, you know folks from Blizzard, Ubisoft and a lot of other just great studios who had been really inspiring to us. Getting to rub shoulders with them and watch this germ of an idea become a Night Street Games idea was really, really special.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you and Dan settled on the characters, the setting, the style?

Mac: It was a natural evolution. We started with capture the flag. We love capture the flag game modes. We've played so many over the years: Quake, Unreal Tournament, whatever. But none of them really scratched that itch of when we were kids in Boy Scouts playing capture the flag in the woods at night. Namely, they didn't have hiding and finding. So we started from game loop, and we always try to take it back to game loop. Everything you're doing — the art and music, all these worlds, those things are so important, and add so much flavor and depth. But at the end of the day, it's got to come back to how much fun you have playing.

We kind of fell into this, like, ‘70s-ish feels like a really interesting time for this thing, because it's just unique. The ‘70s can mean a lot of things to different people. For us, we use it very loosely. It's really about big personalities and expressiveness. That just seemed like a fun space for Tarantino-esque, larger-than-life, tongue-in-cheek humor. You know, we would think like, LucasArts did a great job on Day of the Tentacle or Monkey Island — you know, these games where you feel like you're in on the joke with them. And so that stuff all kind of infused really early on into some of the animation, music, sound, sketches that we were working on.

It kind of happened piece by piece. I would say game loop came first, art came second, and the world just took shape from there. And soon it was like, you almost don't even need to think about it. You're just going on instinct because you already feel like you're living in that world. It's been a little bit of a fun snowball.

Are there any little flourishes or features that you’re really happy made their way into the game, that feel like they came directly from your input?

Mac: You're asking me the question I hate to answer. I'm a manager. Managers love to stay behind the scenes.

You know, I fought really hard for this idea of the respawn. [ed. note: In Last Flag, after you die you’re brought back to a “green room“ with tubes that shoot you out at a handful of destinations. A clear wall separates your team’s green room from the enemy’s, so you can see them before the match starts, or also if you happen to die at the same time as one of your opponents.] Respawn is kind of boring in shooters. It’s not the funnest moment. And I had this idea of like… We used to have this kind of clunky system for how you get to the radar towers. You’d just basically select them during the game and when you respawn, you just respawn there. But the green room idea was like: Hey, what if you go back to a central location, and you have these tubes teleport you there? And you know what, it'd be fun if the tubes are shared, and you can see the enemy green room. And like, that can make for some fun shenanigans pre-match, but also mid-match where it's like — Wait, I see the other guy running to Tube A; What's happening out there? Is that where their flag is? Are they defending heavily there? A lot of kind of fun things came out of that. So I'm proud of that one.

Man, I'm like, so worried on any of these. I'm like, was that just me? It was such a collaborative process, right?

Has anything surprised you about working in the video game industry?

Mac: In music it's often about the artist, first and foremost. And in gaming, it really is about the art, because it's so collaborative. You're bringing together so many people to make something come alive, and because of it, I think I'm surprised by just how generous the spirit is. People share things with each other, are very kind to each other, very collaborative. And that to me has just been really awesome. That’s maybe my favorite happy surprise, if you will.

Online culture can be really challenging. It can be very linear and very, you know, this side or that side, and that can spill over into the way people talk about games.⁴ I would just say, what I find is that most developers are really passionate people. It's like, a ton of artists. And I say, even if you’re an engineer, you’re an artist. It's a ton of people working on their craft with a lot of heart, because they want to be there. And so, you never celebrate any other company going through hard times — whether it's publicity or sales or whatever else — because you just know at the end of the day, man, these are a lot of great people really, really trying to make something special.

Have there been any difficult moments? Do you have any least favorite parts of making a game?

Mac: Fundraising. [laughs] It’s really hard to raise money for a game.

It's been heart-wrenching to see so many great studios around us struggle and sometimes fail over the last little while. I know some of it's cyclical, but that has been really, really rough to see. It just highlights that that's a tough part of the business. You've got to be able to keep the lights on for all the folks who are making a game together. And that could be hard in 2025.

The other things are all kind of fun challenges: Figuring out how to work as a group, learning to grow your muscles as a team together. You know, from the outside, you might kind of feel like: Man, how did that game cost that much or take that long [to make]? And then you build a game and you’re like: That’s why! It's really hard! It's a lot of work!

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

1. Yes, it would make more sense for it to be Summer Games (plural) Fest. I’m not the only one who thinks this.

2. No obvious place to put this but: The music — credited to Dan Reynolds, musician/producer JT Daly, and composer Dave Lowmiller — is great. Basically every tune in the game has that “hear it once and you’ll never forget it” quality.

3. For transparency’s sake, my changes are largely focused on cleaning up “ums,” “likes” and “ahs,” whittling down my questions to let you get to the answers faster, and cutting certain parts of answers (or entire exchanges) that are redundant or irrelevant or which make sense over audio but not over text. My goal is never to change the meaning of what’s been said to me.

4. Don’t I know it!

“A skeleton wearing a hat, holding newspapers and running,” by José Guadalupe Posada; courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

I have a bad habit, one I’ve been trying to break. (No luck so far.) When I interview people, I get too in my head about sounding awkward, so I overelaborate. I prompt my subject: Here’s the question, now here’s a menu of possible answers. Is it more ABC, or is it XYZ?

Consider this example from the previous edition of this newsletter, in which I interviewed former esports pro Anthony “vanity” Malaspina. I asked him (regarding his latest career ambitions): How did you get into finance and cybersecurity? Are those things you’re passionate about? Or is it just kind of like, this is what's going to put food on the table?¹

In the published interview, I whittle this down to just one sentence because, let’s face it, the actual question could have been just one sentence. The additional promptings are me sputtering — and worse, giving the subject an easy off-ramp. I’m preempting an unexpected answer with a binary of my own, setting up the respondent to choose one or the other option (in lieu of him taking the proverbial ball and running in some third, unforeseen direction).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor, personal quirk. But amid numerous discourses regarding uses and abuses of artificial intelligence — its discrediting of the perfectly honorable em-dash; its use by students to cheat on exams, essays and job interviews; its hallucinations regarding books that don’t exist — I noticed that there were some parallels between the weaknesses in my craft (the stuff I’d been laboring to excise) and the supposed workflows enabled by AI in creative fields.

I enjoy writing. (That feels too simple.)

I like the craft of putting together a sentence. (I already used “craft” in the previous paragraph; also “craft” in this context has a woody, dwarven vibe that doesn’t feel deserved.)

I like the work of putting together a sentence. (Not doing a very good job of it, am I? This somehow feels dumber than the simple version.)

I enjoy writing! The above paragraphs, regrettably, reflect my process. There’s a vision, hazy and unclear, of how the words ought to be arranged. I write and rewrite. A sentence reads well one moment, then stumbles over itself in the next. I fiddle with the knobs some more. The real thing is cobbled together, slowly, from false starts and dead ends. Meaning is excavated in the process. It works half of the time.

I could prompt an LLM to quickly generate an equally legible version² of this same newsletter³ , settling on a curated collection of sentences, read and validated by me as correct-sounding. But I think that workflow shares the same flaws I can see in my too-eager questions. The AI prompting me back (do you prefer generated option A or generated option B?) makes it less likely that I might stumble upon the odd “option 𐌔” — the option I would have chosen independently, if not prompted, or, more likely, the option I might have discovered through the work of sludging through a sentence, over and over again. I value this third option much more than the prompted responses.

Another example. Years ago, while reporting out a story somewhat outside of my normal beat⁴ , I spoke with visual effects workers: the people who help put together the vast majority of contemporary big-budget movies. The story was broadly a negative one, centering on the increasingly poor conditions VFX workers toil under, but there was one movie that I can recall an interview subject speaking fondly of. I won’t name it here, but the artist described it as a breezy assignment. The director had a very specific vision, one he articulated with ease and clarity, which made the production of the computer-generated graphics easy.

By contrast, the vast majority of other productions I heard about were disasters. A director would gesture vaguely at the visuals they wanted, artists would deliver some version of that, the director would get upset because it didn’t match what they were seeing in their head, the artists would start over, and on and on like that until the movie was finished. In one particularly egregious case, production (and rendering) time ballooned because the director couldn’t decide what size he wanted his characters to be. Do you like many of the big-budget movies you see these days? Does it seem like the process I’ve described above is good for art? Do you want to see that replicated in the future, while also putting a bunch of artists out of work?

AI offers an opportunity to cut the labor out of the equation without changing the underlying dynamic — to eventually deliver satisfying-enough sentences and visuals and songs. But I am doubtful of AI’s capacity to deliver on vision, and more than worried about the likelihood that it wipes out vision categorically.

Now and again, I like to respond to reader questions in my newsletter. (See: here and here.) If you’ve got questions for me — about video games, esports, criticism, etc. — drop me a line! My contact info is at the bottom of this newsletter. I’d love to hear from you.

Also: Some thoughts on post-sale Polygon

“Things are bad in games media” has unfortunately been a recurring theme of this newsletter — which I launched on the occasion of The Washington Post shutting down its video game vertical and laying me off. (I’m fine now; I was absorbed into a different team.) I just never expected to have to write something like this about Polygon.

If you’re not familiar: Last month, Vox Media sold Polygon to Valnet (an entity characterized by Kotaku, which broke the news, as a “click-farm powerhouse”). Many, many employees were laid off, with some writing duties farmed out to freelancers. The Wrap, which published an extensive exposé on Valnet and its owner, characterized the company’s whole shtick like so: “Employees are replaced by contractors, compensation plummets and writers who complain land on a blacklist that blocks them from working for Valnet sites altogether.” Valnet and its CEO are suing The Wrap for defamation in response. (Not the sort of behavior you might hope for from a steward of websites nominally engaged in publishing news.)

Polygon still exists, and there are some folks who remain employed there who I trust to do good work despite the circumstances, but the change in ownership can already be felt. The website, just recently redesigned, has been spackled over with video and banner ads. There’s been an uptick in conspicuously amateurish writing under unrecognizable bylines. (Sorry!) Oh, and Polygon’s Twitter account is live again. (“At the end of last year, Polygon exited Twitter. … We didn't need it. It was not a reliable source of traffic by any means, or engagement. It was just people being really upset, and visibly so, on the regular,” one of the site’s executive editors, Matt Patches, told me last year. Predictably, Polygon’s first tweet under new ownership garnered a bunch of replies about how it was good that games journalists had lost their jobs.)

In 2023, writing about a different click-farm powerhouse, GAMURS Group, I posed the question: What’s the point of click-farming?⁵

This, in fact, seems to be Valnet’s exact editorial strategy!

There were many different “eras” of Polygon⁶ , but each had a point beyond just churn. There are, after all, already dozens (hundreds?) of websites that clumsily paraphrase tweets and press releases. So who is served by throwing Polygon into the industrial vat of internet slop? (Perhaps a more apt phrasing: Who is enriched by it? No prize for guessing right.)

Last year, I cited a passage from a Substack essay by the journalist Matt Pearce about how journalism fits into the broader content ecosystem. Pearce wrote:

The last paragraph zooms out to social media, but there are less-than-scrupulous actors downstream of those platforms who, in light of the trends articulated by Pearce, view the production of good and original work as a wasted effort. We’re getting fucked by the platforms, so why bother? If a great article takes three days to write, that’s three days of missed ad revenue. You could publish three dozen ad-bearing pages in that time with minimal effort. Get the bag while there’s still a bag to get.

I think that’s shortsighted and a tragedy — particularly as it comes at the expense of a roster of journalists who did all sorts of weird, hairy, compelling, difficult work (not to mention the folks who did the exceedingly normal grunt work, but at a higher standard than is usual for an entertainment site). There aren’t enough life boats for all of them.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

As a fun bonus: I was listening to Wolf Parade’s At Mount Zoomer on repeat while writing this newsletter. Here’s the album closer, Kissing The Beehive, for your listening pleasure.

1. This isn’t a perfect example, because the question I settled on in my edit was the second one, which was ultimately the more interesting one. But I didn’t know that when I was asking the question — I just sort of stumbled into it. I think I would’ve gotten there eventually, though, after the question I meant to ask: How did you get into …?

2. Easy dunk here: More legible! Getting that one out of the way before someone else tries it.

3. If I’m being honest, the “An AI Wrote This Article. You Won’t Believe What It Said.” genre of post is really losing its shine. You won’t catch me pulling that kind of stunt.

4. More on this in a future newsletter.

5. There are parts of this piece I sort of don’t care for anymore (iykyk) but it doesn’t terribly matter.

6. I’ve cherished Polygon across all of its weird and sometimes incoherent eras. The McElroy era made me a fan. But even before that, as a media nerd, Polygon stood out as the only place with the resources to publish something like this interactive on the work of the artist Roger Dean. (The live iteration of the page has broken a lot of the delightful scrolly-telling elements, but the Wayback Machine version, linked above, should get the idea across. Seriously, give it a scroll! It is the closest thing to Snow Fall I can think of in games journalism.) Around 2014, I applied for an internship at Polygon. (I beefed the interview, badly.) A few years later, I lucked into one of my first bylines ever thanks to the site’s former EIC Chris Plante. Eventually I joined another publication and — in a span of three years that included some of the biggest video game news stories of the decade: Covid-19, the launch of the latest console generation, Cyberpunk 2077’s troubled release, Activision sued by state and federal regulators, etc. — competed with Polygon’s crack editorial team.

Photo by Lance Skundrich/Riot Games; some illustrated elements by Sonny Ross

When I started watching Valorant esports in 2021, Anthony “vanity” Malaspina was a near-immediate standout. He had a mischievous charm, quick to jump out of his seat to jeer at an opponent. Every team he led seemed within spitting distance of greatness. Oh, and also, he wore cat ears on stage.

In 2023, vanity was poised to lead a super-team. Cloud9, the organization he played for, had picked up a pro widely considered to be among the best in the world: Jaccob "yay" Whiteaker. It fell apart as quickly as it came together. In March, after just one international event, both yay and vanity were unceremoniously dropped from the team. Cloud9’s public explanation for the moves — “role issues” — was viewed with suspicion.

Vanity soldiered on, finding a spot in tier 2 with Shopify Rebellion. Later, in 2024, he was invited back to Cloud9. But the spark was gone. In February, he announced he would be stepping away from esports to finish his degree. In early May, we spoke about that decision — and about the bombshell roster move that irreversibly changed the trajectory of his career.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.¹

Vanity: I think a lot of people in esports have to come from a pretty supportive background, especially now.

ReaderGrev: Why do you say that?

Vanity: At least in America, you need to have the time and the capabilities — like a PC-stable internet and things like that — to make it possible. There’s work, there's school, and there's competing. I don't think you can do all three. And I think to be able to survive as a human, you have to have someone that's willing to help you with one of the three.

You mentioned once that your uncles and your stepdad competed in Counter-Strike early on.

Vanity: They played 1.6. They played on like a CAL open team, if you even know what that is. CAL-IM, something like that, like the original Counter-Strike competitive circuit.

Was that your gateway into esports?

Vanity: That played a factor, I guess. I played scrims and stuff when I was really young, just for fun. And then I stopped gaming. I switched to console games for a long time.

And then I was on the internet and I saw Call of Duty and [James "Clayster" Eubank]. He was the first pro I remember being a fan of. I saw COD competitive so I started doing that, and I competed for like a year. I almost placed pro, I placed top 28 I think, and then the next year they added an age restriction, so I ended up switching to Counter-Strike. I really didn't take it serious for a long time. Honestly, I probably quit like 35 times, maybe more. I’m not even exaggerating. I quit so much.

Why were you quitting all the time?

Vanity: I was just a teenager. Mentally unstable.

I took a six month break after high school to pursue [esports] to see if I actually liked it and thought it was something I would want to do. I have to be thankful for my parents, obviously. That kind of ties back to what I was talking about: You have to have a support structure. Most people wouldn't have the opportunity to do that. [In those six months] I think I beat a few pro teams.

Then I went back to school full time. I was taking like 20 credits. We made Pro League relegation and I had to drop out [of school] because my professor wouldn't let me take my final early. That was really awesome. I wasted like $2,000. But it's fine. I knew I was going pro. There was no doubt in my mind.

I was doing some research into your earlier career and I found this photo of you. You had just won some local Call of Duty event in Washington.

Vanity: Oh yeah! I think I was… [muttering the Google search:] Black Ops III release… I was sixteen.

You’re holding a big check.

Vanity: Yeah, the check is for like $750, I think.

On the check, you're named as Shane Malaspina, not Anthony. Why did you go from Shane to Anthony?

Vanity: Shane's my legal first name. Anthony's my middle name. And I've always gone by Anthony. I don't know my dad and I was named after my dad. My mom's always called me Anthony. And I guess the older I get the less I… I don't really care. It's whatever. I'm not gonna correct someone anymore. I used to be pretty anal about it, but the older I've gotten the less I've cared.

You were anal about being called Anthony?

Vanity: Yeah.

Because of your dad?

Vanity: Yeah, I mean, I've met the guy like two times. He left my mom and she was like 16. So can't really have much respect for him.

That’s brutal. That’s really tough.

Vanity: It is what it is. My mom did the best she could. I've had a good life.

Can you tell me why you're leaving esports?

Vanity: Honestly, I've never been fully encompassed in it. Pretty much every year of my career since 2019 I've considered just stopping. It's just so inconsistent. Not much of it is in your control. And it's not fun living like that.

I played last year just to see if I could regain my desire to want to compete. But after the 2023 Cloud9 situation, I have had quite literally zero interest in playing. Like, I kept trying things to see if it would bring it back. The Shopify thing, I think, was just a mistake on my part. I wasn't ready to play on a team. And then I went back to C9. I had no… I wanted to care. I wanted to try, but… Like, I still tried. It just wasn't what I know I'm capable of.

And then after that, I was like: Maybe I just don't like Valorant. Maybe I just hate the format. And then I played Counter-Strike for like three months. I dunno, it doesn't... I think esports in general, because there's so much money in it now, people tend to be a lot more selfish, which, I can't blame [them]. There's no spots. Especially in Valorant, there's like 30 spots. And there's not much money in tier 2. So if you want a living, you have to be selfish to get to the higher levels.

I went pro playing with four of my best friends and none of us really cared about what we looked like on paper. We just wanted to win as a team. And I don't think that's really a thing anymore. Or it's very, very hard to find. And yeah, that was the biggest reason. Like the camaraderie aspect, I feel like it's just not the same.

What did it feel like losing your passion for the game?

Vanity: I mean, it sucked. I spent three years trying to get a roster together — a core of players — and I get to play with them for one event and then I'm cut. Definitely wasn't fun. And now they're all doing… I mean [Jordan "Zellsis" Montemurro] has won an event. [Nathan "leaf" Orf] should probably win an event. Erick "Xeppaa" Bach is Xeppaa; he’s still good, but he's stuck in a loop.

I've always been pretty level-headed when it comes to how I look at things. I know I'll be okay regardless. It was never something that weighed on me super hard, if that makes sense. I feel like if you're able to do something at such a high level, as long as you can apply yourself to something else you'll be okay. And maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm stupid. But I think it'll be fine. It was never like, a big moment for me. It's just, I kind of realized over time that I didn't have much interest anymore.

I did want to ask about what happened with Cloud9 in 2023. It seems to me that there was never a full accounting of what exactly happened there.

Vanity: I have no clue. I don't even know why I got cut. The only thing that I can assume is… This is no ill will toward [2023 C9 head coach Matthew "mCe" Elmore], I still like mCe, I would still consider him a friend. I just think he didn't want me anymore. It's fine. It's understandable. I just wish it was communicated better.

I genuinely to this day still don't know what happened. Like I actually have zero clue, which sucks. But I mean, it is what it is. You're not going to get answers to everything in life.

Tell me a little bit about how you were dropped. What was that meeting like? What were you told?

Vanity: First off, I was fully cut. Me and Jaccob "yay" Whiteaker were both fully gone. And the players were like: Why are we cutting him? Then mCe agreed to trial me and other in-game leaders. I think I played like two days, and I played with — no shade to Hasan "BlackHeart" Hammad — but one of my days was with BlackHeart who was like a tier 3 player at the time. Don't really know if that's completely fair, but it is what it is. I could have done better, of course, always can do better. [The scrims] went okay, nothing great, nothing bad.

One day they asked to talk to me. I mean, they didn't even have to say anything. I'm not stupid. You're not going to ask to talk to me if I'm not cut, you're just going to tell me I’m on the team. And I was like, all right, so I'm gone. That was really it. Maybe I didn't give them room to talk. But I feel like they still could have talked.

That's really, really unusual. I assumed there would be more finality, or maybe they would tell you more about their decision-making process.

Vanity: I think it was uncomfortable because me and mCe were close. We've been friends for a long time. So I imagine it's uncomfortable. Like, I can't blame him at all. It sucks for my career, but like, I have no hard feelings, I guess.

C9 brought you back in 2024. What was that like?

Vanity: Horrible. Not because of them. Genuinely, I had trauma. I go quiet when I get upset, and it was really, really bad on that team.

I just felt so on edge at all times. Like, my assumption for why I got cut is like, I would get annoyed at people sometimes — but I’ve played with leaf, Xeppaa and Zellsis for so long that I know that I'm not gonna push them over the edge by asking them what happened or telling them they're wrong. Like, they'll do the same to me. It's a respect thing. We know each other, our limits. And that's how I've always communicated: very blunt, straightforward. And I'm assuming that probably played a part in it. Like, I'm a bit of an asshole, I guess, but it's how I've had success. And then last year, instead of vocalizing what I think we should be doing, I would just let it happen and go quiet. I think it's because I didn't want to be cut for what I presumed was the reason I got cut the year before, if that makes sense. I didn't realize that until a couple of months ago.

I don't regret playing, don't get me wrong. I have zero regrets about playing. I just wish I would have realized why I had the communication issues earlier.

After Valorant, you had a brief period playing Counter-Strike 2, and there were reports that TSM was interested in the roster you were putting together. What happened there?

Vanity: I'm not sure why reporters made it seem like it was a done deal or something. I was talking to them; they were talking to a lot of teams.

I was talking to a bunch of different orgs, but after like two or three months I told [my Counter-Strike teammate] Edgar "MarKE" Maldonado — who was one of my favorite teammates I've ever had — I was like, I don't think I can do this anymore. And as soon as he said it was fine, I'm like, yeah, it's not worth it. I play because I like competing, and if I can't put my full effort in there's no reason for me to compete.

Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like looking for organizations or sponsors in Counter-Strike? I've heard pretty grim things about the state of North American Counter-Strike.

Vanity: I think these players are absurdly unrealistic with their asks. I'm not going to say numbers or anything, but I'm close with some of the management that I've talked to, and they gave me rough ballparks of what teams were asking and it's outrageous. Like, these people are asking for way more money than they have ever proved to be worth.

There's orgs out there, but you have to lower your expectations. You're not going to be getting paid full-time money if you guys don't deserve it — you haven't proven it. The money doesn't come before the results anymore. It used to, but not that's how esports is anymore.

Do you know where these expectations are coming from?

Vanity: Delusion is the only thing I could guess. I genuinely don't know.

You were a prolific trash-talker in Valorant. I feel like a lot of players these days, they trash talk to their teammates: It's all on the internal comms, it's not directed at the other team. And you were always up out of your seat, a big presence on the stage. Why did you do it?

Vanity: It makes people interested in your games, more than just being good at a video game. It gives them a reason to click. I also come from Call of Duty; in console esports in general, people tend to be like that.

As to why I think a lot of people keep it to their team, it's because I don't think they have self-confidence. They have zero confidence in themselves, it's like imposter syndrome. They don't have confidence to talk about other people because [they’re like]: Oh, if I lose, oh my god, what are they gonna think of me?

At the end of the day, it's an entertainment industry. You are an entertainer. Obviously, competing matters, getting results matters, but like — you're going to get paid more money if people watch your games more. That's just how it works. It makes viewers like or hate you; they build a relationship with you. Either way, if they support you or don't like you, they're going to watch your games.

Did you like the fact that there were so many fans who seemed to have really extreme opinions about you?

Vanity: I think it’s hilarious. It's a lot worse in Valorant; the fans act like they have any clue how the pros are as human beings. It's the weirdest thing ever, in my opinion. Half of the people that they probably think are the nicest people ever, probably aren't. I feel like an easy example is [Joshua "steel" Nissan]. Everyone hates steel. He is one of the nicest people I've ever met in my entire life.² Same thing with Zellsis. Some of the most caring human beings I've met. But publicly, they're either loved or hated. There's no in-between.

It feels as though that bubble gets popped every now and again. People feel very surprised when they learn new information about a player that goes against what they expected.

Vanity: I completely agree with you. I think that kind of ties back into what I was saying earlier, that a lot of [players] have some form of imposter syndrome, or whatever you want to call it. They're just not confident in who they are as people. And I think that makes it so they tend to hide everything [about themselves from] their fans. And that's something that I've never wanted to be like. I don't want fans because I’m pretending to be something I'm not. I want you to like me for who I am, not for some random little snippet you get to see of me every six months.

Now that you’re leaving esports, what’s next for you?

Vanity: I'm studying for my finance degree and I'm doing some cyber security certifications on the side to see if I like it more. I'm not rushed because I have money to survive for a good amount of time while I figure out what I want to do.

Are those things you’re passionate about?

Vanity: No. I really don't care what I do for my job, I'll be completely honest with you. It's just a job. I am completely aware I'll probably never find anything that I get to do that I enjoy as much as I did competing, but it's not really a worry for me. As long as I don't have to work 80 hours a week, I'll be fine. I want to work 40, 50 hours a week and then just be done. It would be nice for a change.

I'm guessing that wasn’t possible when you were competing.

Vanity: I think it can be. But when I was super active, I would do one hour before [practice] with my coach, and then we would do seven or eight hours of practice on team stuff. Then I would try to stream four hours every day, roughly. So I would probably [work] 12 hours a day, six days a week. I would say that's pretty accurate for what I did for like a year and a half to two years in Valorant.

That shit's miserable, bro, I'm not gonna lie. But I mean obviously — fortunately — I was playing a video game and wasn't doing anything hard, like physically, but it was still mentally difficult.

Are you happy that you spent those two or so years that way?

Vanity: Yeah, of course. I have no regrets. Genuinely none.

Totally fine if you don't answer this, but can you tell me a little bit about how well you were paid at C9? I have no sense whatsoever — and I think most people who follow esports have no sense whatsoever — of the kind of money a pro makes.

Vanity: Low six figures That's the most I'll share.

Did you feel you were living comfortably in Los Angeles on that money? [ed. note: the North American Valorant league is based in LA.]

Vanity: I had to pay for my own apartment, which was a nice little $4,200 a month for rent, bills, car insurance — and I could pay that. The only downside is I couldn't save much money. Every other year in esports I would save 70% of my paychecks. So that was a little not nice, but I can't complain.

That’s fair! The question wasn’t even super about complaints. I think that people just really do not know anything about how esports works, how pros live — good or bad.

Vanity: I think it varies a lot between the orgs. I also think that the standard of living probably went down a fair amount after the esports bubble popped. I would assume if you're looking at the League of Legends pros that lived in LA from like, 2018 to 2022, which was probably the prime of the bubble, they were living unbelievably. The money that those people were making was just fucking absurd. That's just not the reality of it anymore.

But most teams still make good money and housing is typically paid for. C9 was always really good about how they treated us. Like, I know they fucked me, but I have nothing bad to say about the org.

Post scriptum: Valorant subreddit limits threads on Saudi-run Esports World Cup

The moderators’ announcement in the r/ValorantCompetitive subreddit

A week ago, the mods of r/ValorantCompetitive — the main subreddit for Valorant esports — announced that they would be limiting posts about the Saudi-run Esports World Cup, which will feature Valorant for the first time this year. The mods justified it on the grounds that the Esports World Cup is a Saudi sportswashing effort, and cited two of my stories in their decision: this (e)sportswashing reading list and my reporting on the dismay felt by broadcast talent that works with Riot over the developer’s three-year partnership with the Esports World Cup. (I also sort of broke the news that Valorant was finally coming to the EWC. Sort of.)

I wanted to weigh in… very briefly.

I was a Columbia student in the early ‘10s, when the campus was riven by questions relating to affirmative consent, the concept of “rape culture” and protest actions over supposedly unjust university policies relating to sexual assault on campus. In those years, there were two major protest groups focused on these issues: one that lobbied the administration and university senate and various student council, that filed forms and sought permits and hosted teach-ins; and a louder, more radical group with louder iconography, that opted for controversial actions that included handing out fliers about the aforementioned issues to prospective students visiting campus.

There was a lot of hand-wringing in those years about which group was “doing it right” — concern trolling about what kind of protest was helpful versus harmful. (I did it too.) But in truth, the groups worked in tandem, a kind of balanced ecosystem of activism. The moderate group was able to more effectively lobby the university because it was seen as a less-extreme alternative to the louder group, while the radical group was viewed by some victims and their advocates as a more genuine and urgent expression of student anguish and frustration with the university.

I don’t really have it in me, temperamentally, to care about good or bad optics. Similarly to what I wrote about in the previous edition of this newsletter, I do not imagine whether protests are negatively polarizing some other person. I tend to have a pretty good idea of where I stand on most issues. Will some-such protest move the proverbial needle? Beats me. Is “internet activism” counterproductive and/or ineffective and/or mere virtue signaling? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I am not super interested in these questions these days; It is a convenient way to talk around the issue.

Is limiting posts about a blatant Saudi sportswashing operation lazy activism? So far, it’s the only activism on the issue. Think the mods’ new rules are insufficiently effective? Up the ante. Chain yourself to the doors of the Riot Games Arena.

In 2016, a group of Columbia students occupied an administrative building in a bid to induce the University to seriously negotiate with them over a proposal that would see the school divest from fossil fuel companies. In retrospect, their insistence and approach were obviously noble. But at the time, they were threatened with suspensions and scolded by administrators who told them there were better ways to do activism. They were the subjects of nasty, condescending write-ups in right-wing publications. Of course, just a few years later, Columbia did, in fact, divest from fossil fuels. (I’m a bit rusty on the details, but if I remember correctly, the sit-in did in fact speed up negotiations). Somehow, contemporaneously, activism is never right. It’s only right in retrospect.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

1. Editing an interview always feels a little weird, but for transparency’s sake, my changes are largely focused on cleaning up “ums,” “likes” and “ahs,” whittling down questions to let you get to the answers faster, and cutting certain parts of answers (or entire exchanges) that are redundant or irrelevant or which make sense over audio but not over text. My goal is never to change the meaning of what’s been said to me.

2. Speaking of steel, here’s an all-timer Counter-Strike shit-talk clip (featuring steel killing vanity in-game). Don’t play this on speaker in a public place.

Some background elements by Sonny Ross

How do you like to think about video games? It’s a clunker of a question, but personally: When a game makes me feel some particular way, I enjoy trying to parse how and why it did that. Writing is an extension of that process.

Games seldom fail to make me feel. I am easily obsessed¹ and frequently frustrated, but I play for that cresting over the hill feeling when a game begins to reveal itself to me. I play for mastery too, and the totally irrational but nevertheless bone-deep satisfaction that comes from scratching off a virtual to-do list item. And if I’m being honest, sometimes I play because it’s easier to do than most other things. (If we’re talking about feelings, admitting this last detail doesn’t feel so good.)

But rarely, if ever, has playing a game made me wonder — or, god forbid, feel anything — about sales. I don’t like to think about games in terms of Steam charts or audience or units sold, and although I have thought about games in those terms, it does not come naturally to me. The impulse to write in that mode, I think, is driven more by social media than by the specifics of how any individual game plays. I assume (or hope, rather) that this is true for you too.

So why did business augury become one of the primary ways in which people talk about games online? Look around and you’ll see it everywhere, from people with no obvious reason to pocket-watch. (Surely they’re not investors in these companies!) Handwringing over sales; Upcoming games discussed in terms of whether they’ll find and retain an audience; Barely disguised glee over shrinking concurrent user counts. When did getting an MBA become a prerequisite to talking about games?²

My least favorite manifestation of this trend by far is when a writer or content creator says: Well, I liked such and such product, but will everyone else? It’s an unanswerable question masquerading as insight. This has been particularly prevalent around the reveal of the Nintendo Switch 2 and Bungie’s Marathon. I’m hype for the Switch 2, but will fans be willing to pay for it? Will people care enough about the new features? I tested Marathon and enjoyed it, but will enough people like it? Will it do well enough to satisfy Sony?

Skill Up’s Marathon impressions video is a good example of what I’m talking about.³ (I’m not singling him out to be mean, I promise. I just think the framing he chooses for his video is instructive.) His impressions begin with two minutes of throat clearing about whether Marathon will be “enough” for Sony, Bungie, and fans. He arrives at the conclusion that … [drumroll] … there’s no way to tell at this point. Only after that do we get the answer to the question of whether he actually enjoyed his time playing Marathon. (Spoiler alert: He liked it, but there are some parts he’s iffy about.)

This instinct to zoom out, to guess the direction of the market, is a bad habit, I think. It is a defensive crouch, a crutch, and it calls to mind some of the worst tendencies of the political press: Well, I thought the politician’s speech was thoughtful and detail-oriented, but how will it play with voters in Terre Haute? These framing devices say very little but attempt to imply quite a bit, foisting the creator’s opinion — or sometimes a totally orthogonal opinion — on some imagined future consumer.⁴  

Why indulge this speculation? If you’re a writer or video producer, tell me how you felt about the thing you’re talking about. You experienced it; I didn’t. Don’t guess what I’ll think six months from now. Do you have reservations about the price of the Switch 2? Think Marathon isn’t feature-complete, and you won’t pick it up when it goes live?⁵ Say it with your chest. Is it enough for you?

When did the termite of boardroom argot bore its way into the fleshy lumber of our speech? In a 2022 review in Bookforum, Max Read (summarizing the work of the author Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou) writes that “we find ourselves assuming — sometimes by choice, sometimes by default — the attitude of speculators in everyday life. If the world in the years before the global financial crisis was defined by the business-minded rationality of the entrepreneur — save and invest now, reap and profit later — activity in the years since is better characterized by the creative imagination of the financial speculator, who embraces, seeks to profit from, and perhaps even attempts to intensify volatility.”

I’d venture that social media, where attention is generated along the axis of this is the best/worst thing ever, abets this mode of thinking, and Read seems to agree. He writes later in his review, about Twitter: “[The platform] isn’t a deliberative space, where citizens gather to debate politics and lead society — it’s a speculative market, where traders stake out discursive positions against the value of their brands, and fans and partisans gather to imagine unlikely but not impossible new futures.”

Is a game’s “line” going up or down? Given the broad dysfunction of the video game industry — and many adjacent industries, for that matter — as well as the enormous failures of several tentpole releases in the past year (most notably Sony’s Concord) doomsaying can feel like the safest bet in town. For fans, saying a game sucks and will fail is akin to gambling with house money (as if they needed the psychological reassurance). For content creators and journalists, “I like this but it might fail” is a way to win playing both sides — a kind of camouflage that’s useful in a discursive arena where supposedly “wrong” headlines and opinions are likely to be weaponized (though I wouldn’t accuse anyone in those groups of thinking in such nakedly cynical terms).

But if the reward for participation in this market is maybe a bit nebulous, the costs are quite real. The “[Game] is TRASH?” YouTube thumbnails; the “[Game] is sinking in the Steam charts” headlines; the exhausting one-upmanship of My favorite publisher made more money than yours; and of course, the real world consequences that are necessarily downstream of any bet on any game or studio, which are so often brushed off as externalities in the speculative market. Doesn’t this all feel pretty awful?

I want games to be interesting and for consoles and peripherals to be inexpensive — goals that are, by and large, unattainable from my position at the periphery. (Again, I will boldly assume this is true of you, the reader, as well). I hold no shares in these companies. The state of their business is largely no business of mine. So why would I trade my interest in art for the vulgar jargon of the corporate executive?

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

As a fun bonus, here’s the song I had looping while I wrote: Through the Long and Lonely Night, a new Dirty Projectors track written for The Legend of Ochi.

1. “Immersion” is a popular word for this, but one that also does not fully capture what it means to, in my experience.

2. The implied answer is that even if you take a very dim view of the type of person who gets an MBA, you might still imagine them turning up their noses at the pretend-MBAs discoursing about games on social media.

3. To be clear, I think his full video is generally quite thoughtful. Here’s another example, if you please.

4. Would it surprise you to learn that, more often than not, this imagined consumer has a coarser, less-forgiving view than the original creator?

5. Set aside the fact that if one were really interested in other people’s views on these things, they could report it out. Talk to people! The resulting story would be totally anecdotal, but even that would be better than just vague gesturing.

Background image courtesy of Chris Eason/Wikimedia Commons

Earlier this month, The Atlantic introduced its readers to Bracket City, a word puzzle that tasks players with solving nested clues — embedded in the titular brackets. I’m trying to think of whether the magazine made any other big news around that time. Nope. Just the Bracket City launch.

The puzzle is tough, especially on the first few tries. But Bracket City quickly entered my rotation of daily puzzles, alongside a handful of other word games also run by major publications. (You know the ones.)

I spoke with Ben Gross, the puzzle’s creator, and Caleb Madison, director of games at The Atlantic, about the game's origins, how it came to the attention of a 168-year old magazine, and the future of The Atlantic’s game offerings.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

ReaderGrev: Tell me a little bit about the origins of Bracket City. How did it get started?

Ben Gross: The full story is that I co-own a diner in Brooklyn Heights called Montague Diner, and at the diner I co-host a puzzle night where we do sort of diner specific puzzles. I co-host it, actually, with Wyna Liu¹ who makes the Connections puzzles for The New York Times. We do site-specific puzzles for the diner that are sort of about the diner, and they live on a placemat, and people come, and it's really fun. The closest analog is like an escape room, but you don't have to get up from your booth to play.

So we're always having to come up with puzzles, and I came up with this format of these nested clues and brackets and we actually printed it on the placemat. It was a paper version, it was much simpler than a typical Bracket City is today, and it resolved to a single number for a combination of a lock on a pouch on the table. And then people liked it and they thought it was fun, so over Christmas break I resolved to turn it into an actual game. I spent a lot of time at my wife's family's house in Arkansas not talking to them and instead programming Bracket City. And I got it to a condition where it could be up publicly around the beginning of the year.

Caleb, can you tell me how Bracket City got onto The Atlantic's radar?

Caleb Madison: An editor at The Atlantic, who's actually a friend of Ben's, Juliet Lapidos, sent it to me as my wife and I were driving to pick up groceries. I solved it immediately and was like: turn the car around — because it was the best puzzle I had ever encountered. And so I told The Atlantic that, and the rest is history. The rest is inscribed in the Bracket City annals.

What was the process like of getting this in front of your bosses, management, the editors, and saying: Let's make this a part of The Atlantic?²

Caleb: Honestly, the puzzle kind of spoke for itself. When my bosses were in a room with 10 people, all of whom were addicted to the puzzle already, it became a pretty clear choice that this was a puzzle that had amazing potential to reach and retain a lot of puzzle solvers. So truly the work spoke for itself.

I don’t know the right word to use for this: Can you tell me about the terms of the sale(?) or transaction(?). What would you call this, and what can you tell me about the details?

Caleb: It's not an acquisition. It's a license, with a burning desire to buy. But the goal is that our collaboration can yield something greater than the sum of its parts and make Bracket City into the center of the digital puzzle empire that it's destined to be. I think it's an amazing fit with The Atlantic, and Ben and I have already had a lot of fun thinking about how the puzzle could grow. The goal is that we build this together.

Ben: From the literal terms, I don't think that we can say anything else. That’s just how it goes with these kinds of deals.

Now that this is in front of The Atlantic's audience, is there anything you’ve thought to change about the puzzle? 

Caleb: There's a slight thing that I've pushed for: Just to make it overall a little bit easier, because we're bringing a new audience in and we want them to have as little barrier to entry as possible in terms of learning the mechanics of the game so that we can really turn the heat up on them and make them sweat eventually.

Ben: Yeah, there are some really weird clue formats that I've experimented with. And Caleb was like: let's hang on to a couple of those till people know how this game works. Because one of the trickiest things about the game is that I think it's actually not an incredibly difficult puzzle, but it's an intimidating visual when you first load it. It's such a chaotic looking starting place. And so I think It's good to ease people into it a little bit. I'm really on board with that. … But there's been no heavy hand telling me to make it anything really other than what I want to be.

How does Bracket City fit into The Atlantic’s portfolio?

Caleb: I think it walks a great line between intellectual and fun. It has one foot in the fun room, and the other foot in the smart room, and that's my favorite threshold to straddle. I love that it resolves to a fun fact from today in history, because I also think no matter what your experience of solving the puzzle is, you learn a little bit of something, but it doesn't feel like homework. It feels like you're learning something that is more of a story than a fact. And I think that's really fun.

I can't say too much, but there are more games to come in The Atlantic in the year, and they all kind of fall within that framework of bringing a sense of play and joy and delight to The Atlantic's history of intellectual rigor.

When can people expect to see that?

Caleb: All I can say is that it is going to be soon, and the world will never be the same.

Ben, can you walk me through the creation of a puzzle? Where do you start?

Ben: So the first step is you start with the solution and you work backwards. I actually spend an inordinate amount of time picking the solutions. Like, sometimes it takes as long to pick the solution as it does to make the puzzle. I want something that's interesting and often something that you might not know, but it's kind of fun and not too dark or weird, but is a delightful thing to be revealed.

I have a tool that I made that lets me build the puzzles. I can highlight any word or part of a word and replace it with a bracketed clue, and that interface makes it — compared to the beginning when I was sort of doing it in a more manual way — a pleasure. I just sort of look for words, and now, increasingly, partials of words that are like surprising words that are hidden within other words, that I think, even if I don't know what the clue is, that I imagine that there's a fun universe of clues that I could write for it.

I always say the spirit of Bracket City is like a solver using a parent bracket or even more than one parent bracket in an extreme case, but like using the parent bracket to figure out and disambiguate a clue that they don't know the answer to. A lot of people play the game and don't do this yet. As people get more familiar with the format, this will become a more popular thing to do. But that's what I love: when I see people solve, and they know it's one or two things, or they're not sure what it is and then they look at when that bracket is solved and that clue is resolved, how it fits into the next clue, and they know the answer to that clue so they're able to sort of a reverse engineer the solution. I really try to facilitate that kind of experience through the way the clues fit together. Caleb points this out to me a lot when he's reviewing the puzzles. A hard clue with a parent bracket that doesn't give you anything is really not ideal.

I basically aim for like 16 to 20 clues, generally speaking. It sort of just has felt like a satisfying duration. And then I show it to Caleb and he says, this is terrible or he says it's good and then we do it.

Are there any solutions you've wanted to use and then thought: this is too out there, or we can't do this?

Ben: Not yet. A great source of solutions is the Wikipedia page for a day, like, every day has a Wikipedia page. You can go to, like, the Wiki page for April 14th. And what you'll find on most Wikipedia pages for a day is a lot of plane crashes and battles and death and slave rebellions. Like, I'm looking at it right now. The Four Dead in Five Seconds Gunfight occurs in El Paso.³ Muslims in the Ottoman Empire massacre Armenians. Bombay explosion.

Today, actually, is like the pushing the edge of darkness. [ed. note: This interview happened on April 13.] Today’s solution is oxygen tanks explode on Apollo 13. Caleb and I talked about this. It's kind of a happy story. Everybody survived, and it was an amazing moment of engineering ingenuity. So we probably won't push it too much darker than that. Probably.

Caleb: I feel like danger is okay, death is not okay. We like a little danger.

Ben: Yeah, we try to avoid any true tragedies.⁴

Caleb, after Ben files a puzzle to you, what is your role in getting it to the page?

Caleb: I have a kind of puzzles and games lab that I'm not– I don't think it would be wise for me to disclose. I run it through a series of high-tech tests to figure out how durable it is, and the Enjoyability Factor™️. There's several chemical concoctions that I've devised that are really useful in testing the fun levels of a puzzle.

But then after that, I usually just play it and try to be aware of my experience: where I have drag, where I speed up. I try to think about, like with every puzzle or game or experience, in terms of kind of a narrative arc, where I like when it begins, and it's easy to enter, and then it kind of gets a little bit hard in the second act, and then there's a race to finish that feels exhilarating and exciting.

I'm curious about where the city theming came from. Why is it Bracket City?

Ben: I think probably subconsciously, I'm a creature of cities. I grew up here in New York. I’ve done a lot of city work in my past lives and stuff. I just love cities in general.⁵

I also really love the idea of… once I had the game, I almost immediately knew I wanted to do ranks. [ed. note: When you finish the puzzle, you are ranked based on how many errors you made.] I was very drawn to the idea of really trying to show how the true machine works in Bracket City. Like, the mayor is not the top [rank], you know?

And then I think a final piece of the puzzle was when I built it, I was trying to decide what to call it and what the URL would be. I just was looking at URLs and I didn't even, I don't think I knew that .city was a top level domain. And then I saw like, oh, bracket dot city is available. That's pretty good.

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1. I asked Ben about the apparent puzzle community around his diner (a thing I do not traditionally associate with diners). He said: “I opened the diner with some friends from high school, and I actually went to high school with Wyna also, and so we've been into puzzles and doing projects together for a long time. Once we had the diner, all of us, the group of us that own it together, now we have a fun place to do things we want to do and like: I'm into puzzles, so I’m going to do a puzzle night with Wyna.”

2. When I worked for The Washington Post’s video game vertical, Launcher, my editor floated the idea that maybe we might want to partner with or acquire Wordle — well before we had any inkling that The New York Times was considering the same exact thing. I don’t want to overstate things: I can’t say for a fact that this idea was ever seriously discussed internally. But I’m generally aware that getting the ball rolling on something like this in a big organization can take a lot of pushing.

3. Both Caleb and Ben agreed that this sounded like a cool solution, and I will add that it’s a cool name for a gunfight. The Wikipedia page also includes this fun phrase: "You big son of a bitch! You murdered me!" 👍️👍️ 

4. Speaking of dates: Ben advised readers to check out the April 1 puzzle. Caleb warned that upon completion, “your Spotify algorithm will never be the same.”

5. Caleb later acknowledged that he knew the real life location of Bracket City, but said he was “not at liberty to discuss the location.”

Marathon logo, key images courtesy of Bungie; background elements by Sonny Ross

This past weekend, the game developer Bungie gave fans a wide-ranging look at their upcoming game, Marathon, a futuristic first-person team-based extraction shooter. The gameplay reveal coincided with press coverage and influencer impressions — as well as a tone-setting cinematic short.

I highly recommend you watch the short. It is gooooood.

The video tracks two competing “runners” — the competitors players will inhabit when Marathon goes live in September. In the aftermath of a mysterious disaster that we see wipe out farmers and maintenance workers (grunts, to borrow a word from the Bungie lexicon), these runners scavenge what’s left behind, fulfilling lucrative contracts. They loot, fight, run, hide, banter and die. Also, they listen to Bach.

In parallel, both runners engage in some kind of calibration (?) exercise reminiscent of the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, as b-roll shows silkworms stamped with ID numbers 3D printing a human body.

I’m describing this all a bit poorly (again, you should just watch the video; it’s a fun way to spend eight minutes, and I’m not sure this post will make sense if you don’t) but what happens matters a bit less, I think, than how it all looks and sounds.

You probably don’t need me to tell you this but Marathon is exceedingly stylish. That much is obvious at a glance. I’ve seen the game’s aesthetic described (by journalists, citing Bungie) as "cyber simplicity" and "future less." It is defined by high-gloss plastics and metals, sans serifs, big blocks of color — often in stark, harshly-contrasting combinations — and materials speckled with the kinds of straight-from-the-factory hexes and hatchings you might use to calibrate a printer or a camera. Things in this universe appear fabricated rather than built.

Joseph Cross, the game’s art director, has said the style is described internally as “graphic realism.” He pointed to “Mirrors Edge, Aeon Flux, Ghost in the Shell, Otomo, Koji Morimoto, The Designers Republic [and] Chris Cunningham,” among others, as points of inspiration.

Some cool key art shared on Twitter by Cross, Marathon’s art director.

But there’s also a striking thematic vocabulary in the tone-setting short film. At risk of over-interpreting¹ what’s on display, the short seems to me to gesture at imagery and styles from the late aughts and early teens.

There are sequences staged to look as though they’re being shot by a selfie camera or GoPro — and a handful of shots that look like police body cam footage. The camera behaves in certain moments as though it is attached to a person, but produces non-diegetic light; it’s there, but it’s not clear where it’s coming from. That vantage feels commonplace now (a staple of lurid YouTube Shorts) but would’ve had an unmistakable political valence as recently as five years ago.

At the same time, those sequences, bleached under a harsh white light, call to mind the overexposed American Apparel advertisements we now see as a touchstone of “indie sleaze” (or, maybe more true to Marathon’s whole vibe, the Richard Turley era of Bloomberg Businessweek covers).

It all feels very familiar. 2014’s “Internet Ugly” if it were pumped out of a factory. The line outside Berghain. Unfinished homes in 2008 covered in Tyvek home wrap. Even Ozymandias, the Shelley poem recited in parts throughout the video, is now closely associated with Breaking Bad, the quintessence of early-2010s mass culture. And the 2010s, you might recall, ended quite poorly.

In the last decade, we’ve watched the techno optimism of the Obama era curdle into something else entirely, and the end point of that process is manifest in the cinematic: the workers killed off, contractors fighting for scraps in their wake. Bungie may as well have called the runners dashers.

“You ever wonder what happened to these people?” one runner asks a teammate, referring to the former inhabitants of Tau Ceti, the game’s setting.

“It’s not my business,” the teammate responds, coolly.

There are plenty of games that chase compelling imagery to no actual end, or that lack the discipline to follow through on an interesting idea. Valorant, of course, comes to mind to me here.

When Valorant launched, most of the maps shared a visual metaphor. Many of them were split down the middle, with one half representing a thoughtful, lovingly-crafted imitation of a real place (Japan, Morocco, Italy, etc.) and the other serving as a corrupted, degraded version: sleeker in places, but also peppered with industrial elements and construction equipment. Picture a half-built Apple Store intruding on a historic neighborhood. To wit, one of the heroes has a voiceline triggered when loading into one of those maps: “What has Kingdom done to this town? However pretty their lies are, they're just sucking my city dry!” (Kingdom is the nominal “villain” of Valorant, an evil corporation that does… something.)

You can read from those design choices a skepticism toward gentrification or megacorporations, or a love of old world, culturally significant spaces. It’s not terribly sophisticated, but it is kind of interesting! It is design with purpose and clarity of thought. But Riot’s fidelity to that visual metaphor has wavered over the years, and most of Valorant’s recent output has seemed to lean on striking imagery as an end in itself.

Now, do I know that Bungie — or Riot, for that matter — are thinking about their worlds in the same ways I am? No, not necessarily. And for a lot of people, it won’t terribly matter. “Visual metaphor” will not be how the vast majority of people engage with these games.

But Bungie, I think, is better than many other developers at wringing compelling bits of story out of multiplayer video game formats that generally defy straightforward storytelling. Now, in a major part of their outward presentation² , they’ve struck upon themes and storylines that cry out for articulation. I hope that Bungie follows through.

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1. One of my favorite classes as an undergrad was a Roman art and architecture class. In his introductory lecture, the professor announced that a lot of Roman art was both derivative and ugly — but also, that the works offered tremendous insight into Roman civil and civic life. The ways in which an emperor might style his hair in portraits stamped into coins might tell you something about how he wanted to be viewed, and the lineage he was placing himself into, for example. The details are hazy to me now, years later, but the central lesson has stuck with me, serving as something of a lodestar when talking about a <airquote>vulgar</airquote> art like video games.

2. The word I’m looking for is “marketing,” but it feels crude to acknowledge that I’ve just spent 1,000 words writing about marketing. This whole essay is a call for Bungie to transcend their own marketing!

Photo courtesy of Donald Boyce; minor illustrated elements by Sonny Ross

Welcome to the third edition of Exit Interview — a series in which I talk to people in the video game and esports industries who are experiencing some kind of major career change.

Last Saturday I spoke with Donald Boyce, an esports professional whose resumé is a list of some of the most recognizable brands in esports: TSM, Cloud9, G2, etc. And yet, in his telling, he’s “always kind of been trying to leave esports.”

In our conversation, we talked about just that — and also about some of his former bosses, venture capital body horror (it’ll make sense, in context) and human suffering. Forgive the long first exchange; it’s important for setting up the rest of the conversation, so I cut very little.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.¹

ReaderGrev: Tell me a little bit about who you are and what you did in esports.

Donald Boyce: I got involved in esports through reaching out to Steve Arhancet on LinkedIn. This was probably, I don't know, almost 11 years ago now. I was in grad school for philosophy and I wanted to be an academic, and then my wife and I got married and I realized that would never pay off student loans.

I started off as a project manager. I got the job, I think, because of my responsiveness. I reached out to Steve, he messaged me back in like five minutes, and then I messaged him back in like two minutes, and so it was clear that I'd be responsive and I was going to work hard for him. After a couple of weeks, he was like: Take whatever title you want, I just need help. He treated me as a partner in basically running Team Curse at the time. If you search, “Curse energems,” all that stuff would be me. We also visited the Boys & Girls Club with Team Curse, which was really fun. I think that was one of the earliest projects to get teams involved in community service. I still think there's a huge need for that, for the emotional, spiritual, psychological health of the players.

Then, I went and worked at TBWA\Chiat\Day for a year, because I always wanted to go to work in an ad agency. I saw a documentary about [TBWA chairman] Lee Clow and TBWA\Chiat\Day in undergrad called Art & Copy. They were all about pirate culture. They had a basketball court in their offices. They had a boardroom that was a bunch of surfboards. And so I thought, oh, it's gonna be really cool. But I was doing paid media analysis, and I'll never forget getting the data from these big, big spends and realizing: Oh, man, this is not great. How do we make these numbers look good? That's something that happens, but people aren't really vocal about it. We spent this huge sum of money and we had two people come in to test drive vehicles, and it was like, okay, how do we make this look a little better? So I did that for a year. It wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

So I went back into esports. [TSM CEO and co-founder] Andy Dinh hired me to run his streamer network. But as soon as I got in, it became really apparent that they needed someone to manage the partnerships. So I did that for Andy.

After TSM, I was trying to swear off esports. Like: I'm going to go back to seminary, I'm going to go get my PhD. And Andy, ever intuitive, knew that I was running from something by leaving. My wife, with our first daughter, it was a really traumatic delivery. The doctor wasn't in the room and the nurse was barely able to deliver the baby. And I was like, you know, life's too short. I want to go and get my PhD. So we went to Belgium for me to try to finish my PhD in philosophy.

The Cloud9 hire happened like this: I had worked with [Cloud9 CEO] Jack Etienne’s dad, Bob, a bit during previous partnerships and we loved each other.² Jack had [Cloud9’s then-president] Dan Fiden talk to me to bring me on and bring me back from Belgium. Financially it was appealing enough to make me pause my PhD in Belgium and return to Los Angeles. I always was scared to ask for what it would take for me to stop pursuing academia, and when I did I was always really surprised they said yes.

I moved around quite a bit at Cloud9. I think where I was most effective was in fielding sales ambition and trying to make it happen. Basically: fulfilling the hopes and dreams of big promises. Eventually I was SVP of Sales, Marketing and Partnerships. At the tail end of my time at Cloud9, I got in the crypto weeds during the crypto gold rush. I did the Polygon deal. We had a Tezos deal that would have been a lot, a lot better. But we ended up going with Polygon. Then we did Blockchain.com, which — I'm not sure how much of this is public — ended roughly but positively, I think, for Cloud9.

And then G2. Not to put too much of a pessimistic spin on it, but at that time things were really drying up. I did the Stride partnership, which I thought was a good, purposeful partnership. Basically, Stride does online education for kids. They were the title partner of our Rocket League team. That was one I'm proud of. And then one that I wasn't as proud of is CSGORoll. I don't know how much I want to share about that, but let’s just say it was a necessary partnership. G2 was like: Don, we need this much money by this time. Go find it. So that was a partnership that we did basically to keep things rolling, and I had negotiated it well, so that if it did go south, it would go south in a really clear and beneficial way for G2. That was the Blockchain.com learning.³

There's one common thread that I feel I can tease out in some of these work experiences you talked about. When you were working at the agency, the data work seemed to have this overpromising and under-delivering thing going on.

Boyce: Yes.

And later, in esports, you talked about “sales ambition” and “big promises,” which I imagine was another case of having to match promises made to a client.

Boyce: Yes.

It feels very house-of-cards-like, where things could go very badly, very quickly. Can you tell me a bit more about that? I have very little insight into how partnerships work. On paper, there's an exchange of money between parties, but what's actually delivered is not super clear to me.

Boyce: What I kind of learned over time — and this is an unfortunate reality, I think, of partnerships — is that there's a good deal of partnerships that are just people building their personal resumé. They're collecting artifacts of things that they've done so that they can show it to their next employer and cash out on that next employer. I don’t want to say that that's all that it is, but I think a lot of the time that's what it boils down to.

The partnerships that never turn out well are the ones that expect ROI — like, immediate ROI. And sometimes you'll get someone who partners with you because they’re like: We care about brand positioning. We care about all these intangibles. And then halfway through the partnership or during the renewal, there's someone from finance that opens a spreadsheet and is like: Uh, why are we doing this?

The justification for spend, for ROI, is so tortured and bad wherever you spend money in advertising. It's not like there's greener grass someplace else when it comes to these things.

You mentioned a lot of recognizable names in your first answer. Listen, I’m a journalist. When people reach out to me to talk about esports orgs or their owners, they're not telling me nice things. I’m curious about Andy, who I've written about before.⁴  What was your experience working with him like?

Boyce: It's very weird to say this, but he is one of the most caring, loving people that I know. Albeit, there are maturity issues that he's had to work on in very public ways. And I think — I mean, I don't even just think at this point — after learning more about my own neurodivergency, I know him to be basically having to wrestle with that without much help.

Were you surprised when you started seeing reports about what other people who worked with him thought about his style and affect?

Boyce: No. I was in the room when he would get heated about stuff. I was there, in the thick of it. I actually told Parth [Naidu, former TSM League of Legends GM], when I left for Belgium, I was like: You should probably think about getting out of here. I don't think it was good. Andy would lose his temper. He would — as someone who is neurodivergent, probably undiagnosed — fixate on certain things.

I hate saying this, but most of the time he's right about things. He would get overly fixated on some things, and it was like: Okay, we need to back up and reverse a little bit. But like, he's right. I'm not trying to dismiss the intensity with which he was inappropriate in the workplace. But I do think, being on the ground in the heat of those conversations — and it was heat — that he just ultimately cared about the truth too much.

I feel very lucky: I think I got a lot of that heat out of my system in college. I worked for the college paper, and I just hated some of the other people I was on staff with. And we would get into fights and would call each other mean names. I got it out of my system in what was essentially a fake work environment.

Boyce: I don't know if there's a way to put this in a less direct way. There is no doubt in my mind that the help that he needs is not purely professional. It's not like something that would get out of his system if he had cut his teeth on a different job.

And it’s not excusable. It's not okay to yell at people because you're fixated on the truth. But my point is that the help that he needs, it's not just a career coach or a CEO coach.

Have you raised this with him?

Boyce: No, but I've had it on my mind and heart to do it for a long time. But it's like, how do you do that?

You mentioned earlier that you needed to pay off your student loans. Has esports helped you chip away at them?

Boyce: My wife, when we got married, I didn't know how much she had [in student loans]. I logged into her account, and there were student loans that were like eight and 9% [interest] Federal student loans. And by the time she would graduate — hers was a three year doctorate — it would be over $200,000.

You know, Andy, Jack, all of these founders that I have kind of interesting or mixed relationships with, they really did take care of me financially. I participated in — I don’t want to say [esports] “gold rush,” it wasn’t necessarily a gold rush — but I participated in the benefits.

So we paid off the student loans. We own the house that we’re in. We were trying to sell the house and had moved in with our in-laws [ed. note: Donald and I rescheduled our conversation in January after his in-laws’ house burnt down in the Palisades fire, which is what he’s referring to here] and so we lost everything, but we still own our house, which is like… To own a house is wild, right? And part of it came from a bonus that I got from Cloud9 for a very large Blockchain.com deal.

I don't know very much about Jack. When you say interesting and complicated, what does that mean in terms of Jack and Cloud9?

Boyce: Yeah, well… I got let go from Cloud9.

My boss was Dan Fiden, who is the angel investor in Cloud9. And so Dan's end — or telos, if you're into Aristotle — was just: how do we increase the top line revenue? Your job in venture is just more top line revenue. So I was doing that. I was doing everything I could to do that. And then Dan wanted to sell the company, because that's venture, that’s how you get an exit. And Jack didn't. And I, you know, even in something like picking Polygon over Tezos — because I had both deals done and ready to sign — I had sided with Dan. And so after Dan left, Jack and I couldn't really recover from the decisions I had made to fall in line with Dan and and basically build the company for top line revenue — for selling it, ultimately.

By the way, I hate venture capital with a passion, after this. I had a dream that I had an ingrown hair in my neck during this time, and it was so big. And I finally pulled it out and there was a bloody hole in my neck.

Was this a recurring dream?

Boyce: It just happened once, but I felt like I was going to vomit after seeing the hole in my neck. And what I realized, after thinking about the dream more, and in therapy, was that the ingrown hair was like the venture philosophy that I had that was inside me. And then when I ripped it out, I had no voice anymore. There was nothing left.

When you say venture philosophy, you mean pumping up the value of-

Boyce: Yeah, growth.

When people talk about exits from esports, they talk about it in very ambient terms. Was there a buyer lined up, interested in Cloud9?

Boyce: [Laughs] Yes. I can’t say more than that but yes. Lots.

Lots of buyers?

Boyce: If you remember, this was during the the space race, if you will. This was during the height of things. This is when crypto was booming. There were lots of people interested in owning it. I had heard one CEO say: You know, some people own yachts. Some people own sports teams. I think it would be cool to own an esports team. And Andy — who was always way ahead of his time — he was like: This is just a piece of art for someone.

When we were first scheduling this chat, you said that you had read my interview with Ryan Fairchild, and that you had some thoughts on the team side of the equation. [tl;dr: I asked Ryan about the ideal elements of contracts he might negotiate on behalf of esports athletes. He told me: “It's more what isn’t in there. It's more just getting rid of the kitchen sink approach wherein teams control your sponsors, teams control everything you can do and use, and all of the legal liability is going to be just totally lumped on you. And of course teams would come back and say: Well, we're taking all the monetary risk. And, you know, that's your choice, dude!”]

Boyce: There’s no way to enforce contracts to monetize the invested resources in players. There are people who would say, to this day: TSM helped get me where I am today. I think Myth is a good example of that from Fortnite. When we signed him — when [former TSM president] Leena Xu found him — he had like 2,000 Instagram followers. And TSM signed him and put him on the front page, basically, of everything.

The question is: How does the team make that back, when players want to get out of their contract, and also don't want to do the deliverables that are in their contract? We were always trying to solve for that. You could fine players, and some people would. But when you're — you know, just as an example — when you're at the top of your game, like G2 Counter-Strike when I was there, if they say no, they're like: okay, fine me.

Yeah, they’re star players. What are you going to do?

Boyce: There’s no team leverage in those situations.

Why are you leaving esports?

Boyce: It's really weird, but I've always kind of been trying to leave esports. For a long time. And it just kept growing, is what happened. So when people are like: Oh, you're going to get your PhD, you're going to be a teacher, you can teach philosophy — what changed your mind? It's like: No, I always wanted to do that. I went into esports for my wife, for her loan, and to take care of my family as well as I could. And now I feel like we have our feet underneath us, with three girls, and we're not struggling to feed them or struggling to have housing, so I feel like it’s okay for me to make this change now.

It's been about three months since the Palisades fire. How have you been since then?

Boyce: It was shock at first. I had two pairs of pants and three shirts we left with. I was worried about the smoke, and so I was like: I need to get out of here, I'm going to go get our girls, we need to evacuate. We didn't think that all of our stuff would be gone when we went back.

I had probably almost a thousand books that I had collected over the years. Like, the complete works of Augustine, which is like $4,000. I lost all my books. And when it first happened, I was like: Thank God, I don't have to carry those things around anymore. They were like my armor for my insecurity. They were like, how I felt smart, you know? But now that that's worn off, I'm sad. I used to read to my kids from Copleston’s History of Philosophy and I thought: I want to read to them from this book, and I just don't have it anymore. So I'm sad. It's interesting how long it takes for us to feel sad about things like that.

Looking back, is there one thing you would have saved if you had the opportunity?

Boyce: What's so hard is there's so many layers of things that someone else would tell me I should save. You know what I mean? The first thing that came to mind is my grandpa's suit coats. He was a really successful businessperson. They're super nice suit coats, but I needed to tailor them. I needed to spend a lot of money to fix them up to fit me. I never did it. But that's something that I feel like someone else would tell me to save. Oh man, I'm getting emotional now. I had a Cartier watch that my dad gave me that was meaningful. But that's, again, something that he would want me to save.

The thing that I would save is my shoes from my wedding. There’s something about shoes, and the fact that they kind of hold everywhere that you’ve been in them. They're shoes that, every time I put them on, I thought of getting to wear them in my wedding, which was the the best day of my life.

Before we spoke, you sent me some things you had written, including a chapter you wrote about the work of the philosopher and theologian Emmanuel Falque. What do you find interesting about him, and how did you get introduced to him?

Boyce: I was introduced to him as an undergrad. When I first read him, I had no idea what was going on. I still barely know what's going on in his work. But it was really healing for me. I grew up thinking that Jesus knew he was going to come back to life, right? He's God. He knows. But Falque says that Christ undergoes death, and not only does he undergo death, but the power of Christ is that he shows us how to die.

I was evangelical growing up. I grew up kind of fundamentalist. I took so much pride in saying: I'm not going to die, I'm going to live forever. To stop and take death seriously and suffering seriously is something that I had to learn, because I kind of neurotically denied it or theologized it away. What Falque says is: Yes, we all will die, and Christ shows us how to do it. There's other kinds of things that were impactful reading from him, but in general, it was his emphasis on suffering and the ways that we flee suffering.

Why did that feel so relevant to you?

Boyce: In college, I was really suffering. But I didn’t know that I was, if that makes sense. Like Augustine says — and this is so right — about God: I was outside myself, but you were within me. We're masters of going outside of ourselves. I think of my gaming, especially in college: I would just go and play World of Warcraft instead of sitting with my suffering. But what happened is that as soon as I stopped and was like, No, I'm suffering. What is going on? Why am I jealous? Why do I hate alcohol? and I started attending to it, I started remembering things that I had forgotten about my family and my past. My mom, when I was young — and I think my siblings know this by now, so if they don’t, sorry! — had an affair, and was an alcoholic. My dad was an alcoholic. And they would just fight, a lot.

And I remember I was reading the Bible and Jesus turns water into wine as his first miracle. I read it and was like: Are you kidding me? He's bringing out more wine? And it made me so angry I grabbed my pen and I slammed it into my Bible. That was me suffering. And as soon as I thought about: Why am I so mad? Why does that make me so angry? It was a clue, or a track, or a trace of some impression on my body that I had forgotten. [The philosopher Baruch] Spinoza calls it a mutilated memory or mutilated impression. And how you heal that is, you bring it to wholeness.

[The philosopher] Porphyry, who's a Platonist, writes a letter to his wife where he says: If you would only ascend into yourself and bring to unity the things that the body has fragmented and fractured. That is what happened to me. I had this pain, and I needed to attend to it in order to bring it to wholeness. And as soon as I brought it to wholeness — in speech — I wouldn’t say I was healed, but I could at least grapple with it.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky, by email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com, or on Signal at mikhailklimentov.01.

By the way: In my previous newsletter I promised an “eye-popping scoop” as my next story, but I got beaten to the punch by Nicole Carpenter at Polygon. I even had a headline picked out: “Amazon and Twitch sue Russian 29 year old to avoid paying fine of more money than exists on Earth.” Alas! I’m confident that I was the first to get my hands on the suit, but I was on vacation and had some rough luck getting Russian legal experts on the line for what I thought would be useful additional context. It happens! Hats off to Nicole; go read her story.

1. Editing an interview off of a transcript — a record of words said in a specific order — is always super weird, but for transparency’s sake, my edits are largely about cleaning up “ums,” “likes” and “ahs,” whittling down questions to let you get to the answers faster, and cutting certain parts of the answers (or entire exchanges) here and there that are redundant or irrelevant or which make sense over audio but not over text. My goal is never to change the meaning of what’s been said to me.

2. There wasn’t an obvious place to put this but, elsewhere in our conversation, Donald referred to Bob Etienne as “an awesome lawyer [and] an awesome man.” He said they would occasionally jump on calls to talk about philosophy. I thought that was sweet.

3. Donald also told me that he was proud of his work on Team Soda Mid, a playful TSM x Dr. Pepper ad, and Cloud9’s Kaiser Permanente Presence of Mind partnership. I made some cuts to this answer because 1) it was already so very long and 2) there’s a lot more conversation to get to. But, I don’t want to shortchange Donald, so I’ve moved some of his notable work here.

4. In 2022, I spent months interviewing employees at TSM, the esports team founded by and run by Andy Dinh, Don’s former boss and the subject of this part of our conversation. The result was this report into Dinh’s toxic workplace conduct. Here’s a representative snippet: “Some workers at TSM and Blitz told The [Washington] Post they made a policy of not speaking in meetings with Dinh for fear of angering him. On several occasions, the targets of Dinh’s outbursts — which often included high-ranking staff at the company — were fired or departed shortly thereafter, throwing projects and entire teams into flux, according to numerous former TSM and Blitz employees.”