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ALT AAA gaming is facing a reckoning in 2026. Gaming industry layoffs, studio closures, canceled projects, and restructuring keep making headlines. But in December 2025, Raven and I were already investigating the financial and legal pressures threatening the AAA gaming model. We didn’t just warn about layoffs. We examined investor warnings, rising AAA development costs, five-to-seven-year production cycles, COPPA changes, biometric data privacy risks, insurance exposure, and video game addiction lawsuits. Add those pressures together, and the question becomes unavoidable: how much longer can the AAA business model operate this way? This is our original investigation, published December 3, 2025. Now that publishers are talking about “changing market conditions,” it’s worth revisiting what we uncovered. Gaming isn’t dying. But the AAA model that’s been taking players for granted may be in serious trouble.
ALT Gaming consultants have a remarkable talent for making video games sound boring. And NARRATIFY might have just given us our favorite example yet. Welcome back to Psycho-Babble! 🦇 This week, We react to Mickaël Newton of NARRATIFY and his Games for Change presentation, "From Extraction to Transmission: Building Authentic African Narratives." We've covered NARRATIFY before, particularly its promotion of Relooted, but this time we're sitting through its ideas about authentic storytelling, cultural representation, narrative consulting, and the role consultants should play in video game development. Along the way, we discuss Ubisoft, Resident Evil 5, Sweet Baby Inc., Relooted, cultural consultants becoming decision-makers, and whether these presentations have lost sight of what makes games entertaining in the first place. There's also a strange hypothetical walking simulator, an unfortunate-looking island, an unexpected glue-related mythology lesson, and plenty of increasingly sleep-d
ALT Gaming consultants have a remarkable talent for making video games sound boring. And NARRATIFY might have just given us our favorite example yet. Welcome back to Psycho-Babble! 🦇 This week, We react to Mickaël Newton of NARRATIFY and his Games for Change presentation, "From Extraction to Transmission: Building Authentic African Narratives." We've covered NARRATIFY before, particularly its promotion of Relooted, but this time we're sitting through its ideas about authentic storytelling, cultural representation, narrative consulting, and the role consultants should play in video game development. Along the way, we discuss Ubisoft, Resident Evil 5, Sweet Baby Inc., Relooted, cultural consultants becoming decision-makers, and whether these presentations have lost sight of what makes games entertaining in the first place. There's also a strange hypothetical walking simulator, an unfortunate-looking island, an unexpected glue-related mythology lesson, and plenty of increasingly sleep-d
