5 Video Game Things I Learned | 2026 May 30 - June 12
Wowza! What a time for video games last week! In light of Summer Game Fest and the video game showcases and events surrounding it, I decided to not write a 5 Things post last week so that I could focus more on discussing my favorite announcements from last week. In light of this, I’ve included both last week and this week in one 5 Things post.
Topics include updates on initiatives to hold video game makers accountable for making online-only games unusable despite consumers having purchased them. We also saw some Steam algorithm updates and further bad news on the job front for those working at Xbox. I also learned about some old news involving a certain parable by G.K. Chesterton and the hardships Telltale Games has faced over the years.
The Protect Our Games Act
This one hit me out of nowhere! I knew that the Stop Killing Games initiative—a push by many gamers across the globe to get governments to crack down on video game companies for taking away access to games from paying customers—was making some headway in Europe. However, I did not expect to see the legislation truly coming into form in the United States.
On May 27, 2026, the California State Assembly passed the Protect Our Games Act, sending it to the State Senate for further scrutiny. Unfortunately, the bill still sits in a relatively early stage before it could possibly become 2027 law. Assuming the Senate passes the Protect Our Games Act as well, they still may make changes to it that the Assembly would then have to vote on and pass. If the wording of the legislation can be agreed upon, it will be up to California governor Gavin Newsom to sign the bill into law, veto it, or allow it to become law automatically without a signature. It could end up in the legislature’s hands once again if Newsom vetoes for a potential overruling, two-thirds vote from both the Assembly and Senate. This could take some time, so I’m not holding my breath. I do believe this will eventually become law, though. With this being a Democratic-led bill in a state with a Democratic governor, and a Democratic supermajority in the Assembly and Senate, it feels inevitable.
The Assembly first read the bill on February 12, 2026. Since then, lawmakers have refined it. The biggest wins that can come out of the current version of the bill are a) the requirement of a 60-day notice to customers ahead of a company ceasing service for the game, and b) the requirement of a patch, new version, or flat out refund of the game (company’s choice) after a company stops services for a game to ensure that customers are either compensated or given a way to run the game “independent of services controlled by the operator.”
I hope legislators amend the bill further, though. Currently, the bill discusses this idea of “ordinary use” to define “a purchaser’s ability to use the core features” of a game. However, the bill only utilizes this definition to describe what constitutes a stoppage of service; it fails to define how close to “ordinary use” the game must deliver as an experience to the customer after that stoppage. Destiny 2 is shutting down in the near future. If the current version of the bill was law today, Bungie could push out a patch that turns the game into an incremental/clicker game, and that would seemingly satisfy the requirements the Protect Our Games Act. That doesn’t sound like it’s actually protecting or preserving our games.
Nonetheless, this is a step in the right direction. And if this does become law in California, I feel pretty confident that it will essentially be adopted as national law. I believe the path of least resistance and greatest goodwill with customers is for companies to patch their games, as opposed to distributing new versions or providing refunds. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to patch your game only for those living in California, though. You may as well send it out to everyone in the country. That would cost you nothing and leave you looking much better than leaving out the other 59 states.
Wishlist Velocity
An acquaintance on LinkedIn recently shared information with me about potential changes to the way Steam evaluates upcoming titles and new releases from an algorithmic standpoint. There’s always a race by game makers and analysts to try to decipher how Steam’s algorithms work with the intent of getting games in front of consumers’ eyes in a highly saturated industry.
According to Adrian Kaiser on LinkedIn, Steam seems to have shifted closer toward rewarding what’s referred to as “wishlist velocity.” The concept is pretty straight forward. In the same way normal velocity measures how much ground is covered by something in a particular amount of time, wishlist velocity measures how many times a game has been added to wishlists over time. According to Kaiser, “it is not only about how many wishlists a game has in total, but how many wishlists it gained recently. Maybe in the last seven days. Maybe in the last 24 hours. We do not know exactly yet.” Apparently, this appears to be more front and center on Steam as it relates to the Popular Upcoming page.
I believe this falls pretty well in line with how Steam rewards games with exposure already. In general, there’s a lot of upside for a game that makes infrequent, large marketing/PR pushes, as opposed to games that trickle out their marketing plan over extended periods of time. With an emphasis on wishlist velocity, there’s an even bigger incentive to adhere to the former approach; wishlist velocity oftentimes heavily matches marketing velocity, so short, big pushes in marketing lead to short, big surges in wishlists. That large influx in wishlists in a short period of time is exactly the high wishlist velocity that a game maker wants in order to get on Popular Upcoming now.
I also think this incentivizes game makers to explore when these big marketing pushes occur. Steam’s Popular Upcoming page will never say, “Sorry, there’s nothing interesting coming up.“ It will always present something. Because of that, independent games have tremendous opportunities to make marketing pushes when a lot of other games (especially AAA games) are being quiet in preparation for bigger events. The threshold for wishlist velocity will be much lower during those off-peak marketing times, leading to even better exposure. Now that’s marketing smarter not harder.
A New Telltale
During Summer Game Fest, Telltale finally gave us something to chew on with a new trailer for The Wolf Among Us 2 and The Wolf Among Us Remastered. Accompanying this was a GamesIndustry.biz interview with Telltale CEO Jamie Ottilie. In the interview, Ottilie covers a lot of the struggles and realignments that Telltale has been through in the past decade or so.
Telltale has built itself on creating games for popular IPs as opposed to creating their own. The Telltale name has an extensive portfolio with this business model, including games for:
The Walking Dead
Borderlands
Game of Thrones
CSI
Back to the Future
Jurassic Park
Fables (IP that The Wolf Among Us lives in)
Minecraft
Batman
Guardians of the Galaxy
The Expanse
Throughout the 2010s, Telltale would commit itself to working on and releasing several titles per year. Ottilie describes this period as a time when investors and partners valued growth above all else. Because of this, the company needed to be in the middle of multiple projects and hence releasing multiple projects pretty regularly in order to keep the lights on. The success of these games varied wildly, but they managed to define a style and create several hits.
After a large partner pulled funding from the studio in 2018, though, Telltale began a rapid tailspin that ended in a sudden closure of the studio, leaving hundreds of employees without a job, severance, or proper warning. Just months after the initial closure, LCG Entertainment scooped up Telltale and revived it under Ottilie’s leadership. Since then, “the company has been taking a ‘measured approach’ to build ‘something that's sustainable’ while staying focused on narrative.”
This includes taking their time with The Wolf Among Us 2 which has gone through multiple iterations. Work on it began before the closure of Telltale in 2018. Then it was restarted after the revival with AdHoc Studio (developers behind the recent Telltale-style success Dispatch) as co-developers. After realizing far too late that trying to combine the Telltale Tool technology with Unreal Engine 4 was a nonstarter, Telltale took yet another crack at the project with Unreal Engine 5. Ottilie hasn’t lost heart, though. He seemingly takes pride that “we didn't rush and try to keep a release date, we did it and stepped back and reset, and have done a better job this time around.”
Ottilie also discussed the episodic release approach that the Telltale brand is known for, stating that “Publishing-wise, defending multiple release dates... We would probably approach it like the modern streaming model, where you drop all the episodes at the same time.” Alex Forbes-Calvin, writer of the GamesIndustry.biz article, correctly points out the success of Dispatch in 2025 with an episodic release schedule. It’s hard to imagine a Telltale game not releasing in parts, but there appears to be credibility to each approach in modern gaming, even though the episodic model hasn’t been tread very much in recent years.
Finally, Ottilie looks ahead at where he wants Telltale to be in a few years, and he says he likes the idea of “shipping a premiere Telltale game or two every two to three years and supporting our catalogue in between.” Telltale appears to be taking a more sustainable approach now that allows for higher quality and lower quantity of games.
Chesterton’s Fence
Recently, I find myself making my way through the backlog of videos by Mark Darrah, an executive producer formerly from the teams that worked on Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Anthem at BioWare. In one of his videos about constantly making improvements to games, he mentioned Chesterton’s Fence, and I had never heard of it, so I did some research.
While I had never heard of Chesterton’s Fence before, I certainly have come to understand it deeply and quickly simply by nature of my experience as a software engineer. The principle comes from G.K. Chesterton’s nonfiction book The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic in which he describes the potential unintended consequences of altering laws that you do not understand:
“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”
In summary, the parable reenforces a commonly known (but not always properly followed, including by myself) rule of thumb in software engineering: tearing down or refactoring previously completed work—no matter how small or seemingly insignificant—should only be done when the purpose of what’s there is known. Breaking this rule often leads to bugs and a lot of heartache when destroying someone’s previously built “fence” that was specifically created to prevent such things from happening. Since video games are software, this certainly applies.
However, it applies even more so to games than other software. This principle applies to design decisions, artistic work, audio solutions, writing, and a whole host of other aspects of video games. The bottom line is that someone made a decision on a game for a good reason nine times out of 10. Looking at a past decision made by somebody else—or even yourself—and altering it without thoroughly investigating why the decision was made in the first place leads to janky mechanics, poorly interwoven design, artistic inconsistencies, bugs, and so much more than most game developers should look to avoid.
Xbox Layoffs
Xbox announced an expectation of mass layoffs in the near future. Announcements of layoffs are drops in the bucket at this point post-pandemic, but this one in particular struck me differently. Typically, I join the rest of the industry in a collective groan every time these news stories come to light. For the first time in a while, though, I saw this headline and thought, “Makes sense.”
New head of Xbox Asha Sharma has done more than preach about a new direction for the brand; since her taking on the new role, she’s actually implemented new strategies, initiatives, and directions that back up what she says in the press. She has built a lot of goodwill amongst the gaming community and media. Given this, a series of layoffs would be expected. To completely turn the ship in a new direction with new destinations, a new crew seems logical, if not completely necessary.
This doesn’t mean that the layoffs aren’t also largely influenced by the same conditions that the gaming industry has seen for years now: shrinking revenue, overstaffing, and price hikes. Sharma sent out an email to Xbox staff listing five strictly financial reasons that Xbox needs to let go a large portion of its employees. It’s the same song and dance as other companies in the space. The difference, in my opinion, is the ending of the email: “We won’t succeed… by doing the same thing and expecting different results.” Now with Sharma at the helm, it feels as though Xbox is one of the only companies laying off people and actually attempting to change the way they do business in the wake of it.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t change the fact that hundreds (or possibly even in the thousands) of employees can expect to lose their jobs this year. With so many developers in the industry struggling to support their families, the dismal news continues to mount. Through the first half of 2026, we appear to still be in a state of things getting worse before they get better.