5 Video Game Things I Learned | 2026 June 27 - July 3
This was a busy week that started off strong in the news department. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get this post out at the usual time of the week. I’m currently writing this portion of the post last while on a vacation in which I have limited access to the internet.
We have some updates from legal disputes, including an old one between Krafton and Unknown Worlds over Subnautica 2 and a fresh one in the form of a class action lawsuit over prices for DRAM memory components. In my personal experience, Steam had a big week, during which I learned more about the developer approach to the new Personal Calendar feature that I love and a feature of Steam that never works on other software. However, this week could not escape the constant bad news coming from the industry on a regular basis. We saw Sony and PlayStation announce what is likely the beginning of the end of physical video games, prompting a lot of questions about consumer rights. There was also a depressingly uninformed set of takes from the Entertainment Software Association regarding community game servers and the Stop Killing Games movement.
DRAM Class Action Lawsuit
Just after my post last week talking about Micron’s forecast that DRAM supply constrictions would last well into the latter half of the decade, news surfaced about Bathaee Dunne LLP filing a class action lawsuit against the “Big Three” DRAM manufacturers (Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix) for anticompetitive practices. Hardware prices, particularly in the gaming sector, are blowing the roof off the building, driven by these DRAM manufacturers shifting their business focuses away from consumer-facing products and toward AI and datacenters.
The lawsuit is filed in the Northern District of California and additionally accuses these three companies of taking part in price fixing dating back to 2022. It also references a scandal from 1998 to 2002 in which these same companies were investigated for price fixing. At that time, penalties did end up getting dolled out. It will be interesting to see what further developments come from this. Unfortunately, Mircon’s previous estimates for when prices can be expected to gradually improve may hit before we see a resolution to this lawsuit.
The Steam Personal Calendar Meta
I posted a bit about this a few weeks back, but I got around to reading a HowToMarketAGame.com blog post that goes a little deeper into it and is written by someone who actually has data that he analyzes for a living.
The main takeaway from the post is that the meta hasn’t actually changed for releasing an indie game on Steam. If anything the Personal Calendar simply reinforces what already works and potentially makes it work even better. According to Chris Zukowski, owner of HowToMarketAGame.com, “The meta for launching a game isn’t meaningly different in a post-Personal-Calendar world.” He goes on to say that it’s still extremely important to use extended marketing campaigns, an early demo, and lots of runway to build wishlists ahead of your launch date. The biggest difference is that “Now Personal Calendar replaced [the Popular Upcoming page] as the first step of the visibility ladder.”
The part of the post that grabbed me the most was the importance of the two months ahead of a certain release date. While it was already important to have a solid release date in advance, the Personal Calendar makes it a must for indie games. The Personal Calendar provides incredible visibility with high-value interactions from players who already enjoy your game’s genres and themes. However, the Calendar focuses on games that are releasing in the next two months or have released in the last month. That means it’s integral that indie game developers have a solid release date at least two months in advance.
Zukowski stresses that “THIS IS A HUGE MISSED OPPORTUNITY,” on the part of most indie developers who are often “flying by the seat of their pants so they only know that they are 100%-ready-to-launch about 2-3 weeks before.“ I agree, and always have agreed, with Zukowski’s take that one of the only options to take full advantage of this is to “set a 2 month promotional window“ after the game is “100% complete.” While I don’t think any game is truly ever “100% complete,” I’ve always thought it’s important to aim to produce a release build of the game complete with all intended functionality well before the actual release date. My biggest belief in this comes from hating when games I’m excited for get pushed back. Here, I stick with the principle for the purposes of increasing exposure. The only other option, as Zukowski points out, is to “get better at game production where you feel confident about your launch potential 2 months in advance.“ If it were that easy, then everybody would do it. Of course everybody wants to be that good at planning and production. However, the former option is more of a change in strategy that I believe just about any developer is capable of.
ESA Is Out of Touch and/or Manipulative
On June 29, 2026, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) made themselves look like fools in front of California state legislators in an effort to sway the vote of bill AB-1921, colloquially known as the Protect Our Games Act. The disheartening thing is that despite a clearly out-of-touch perspective, the ESA got what they wanted with the bill failing on the senate floor after a majority of aye votes was not gathered. The final results were four ayes, three nays, and four NVR (no vote recorded). If you don’t know about the Protect Our Games Act, I covered it in a post a few weeks back. It’s a bill attempting to accomplish the goals of the Stop Killing Games movement. Stop Killing Games has a ton of information on their website to help anyone get caught up on the situation. The bill is up for reconsideration.
To be clear, I have nothing against the representative of ESA who appeared at the June 29 meeting. I don’t know her, I’ve never met her, I know nothing about her. All of my frustration comes from the words that she reads on behalf of the ESA, clearly outlining a perspective containing flawed arguments and misinformation. I’ve seen arguments that these words have been made deliberately misleading to manipulate and take advantage of a legislature that knows very little about video games or the industry. I fall a bit into that camp. However, I think the reality is that it has to be one or the other: either the ESA is just this out of touch with the sole industry they straddle or they intentionally crafted a message to California legislators that misrepresents video games with its audience in mind.
The ESA begins by outlining two supposed flaws in the argument: 1) there is no precedent for this type of bill across the rest of media, and 2) this is essentially a non-issue because the cited examples were games that were available to purchase and play for periods of five to 10 years after release and gave advanced notice to players that the services required to play that game would be shut down.
Okay, let’s take these two ridiculous prongs one at a time. First, you’re correct, ESA. Other forms of media do not have to comply with this; digital books, movies, television shows, etc. do not have to comply to these types of laws. However, where do you think precedent comes from? If you disagree with the precedent being set, so be it. Don’t insult the intelligence of the legislators, others in the room, or other people watching this unfold by trying this argument. If this argument were valid across any sector of government, no progress would ever be made on anything because we would refuse to set precedent. We have to start somewhere. Sorry that video game companies’ behaviors have been so reckless that video games are where the precedent has to be set.
The second prong is really where I start to think that this could be a manipulative statement by the association. Do you really want to go there ESA? Because we can go there. If you have a problem with the examples that were given, we’re happy to give more. Concord and The Crew were the ones supposedly cited in the bill analysis. What about Highguard? That’s one of the most recent. Spellcasters Chronicles is another. Want one that’s older? This one’s not the same mold as the others: Telltale’s The Walking Dead: The Final Season. That’s a game that people paid full price for only to not receive the full game because Telltale shuttered its doors before it could be finished. Thankfully Skybound came in and made consumers whole. How many more examples are needed? We could go all day.
Now comes the biggest part of the news that made the ESA look ridiculous. Apparently, Minecraft and Call of Duty private servers—methods of interacting with these games for well over a decade—are “illegal.” Yes, I did put that in quotes. That is a quote. They are illegal. This is where the representative deserves a little bit of shade. This was not part of the ESA’s written statement; rather, this was an answer to a follow up question from one of the senators.
Unequivocally, that is a fabrication that almost certainly misled the legislators. Mojang, and eventual parent Microsoft, have supported community servers for as long as they’ve been around. Today, Mojang even has guides for players who want to host their own, private servers. If having a private Minecraft server is illegal, then we have much bigger problems in the gaming industry. If Microsoft is allowed to put forth terms making private servers illegal, directly encourage consumers to break those terms, and then turn around re-call the servers illegal, things are far worse than we though. To be clear, that is obviously not the case. However, that’s the fantasy that the ESA is apparently trying to spin as reality.
And to cap it all off, a senator inquires further, “Is it like the black market of video games?“ To that, the ESA representative responds, “Yes. In fact, we consider it piracy.” She then goes on to describe that there are two pending lawsuits against Minecraft community servers at the moment.
What an irresponsible take from the ESA. The message completely misrepresents video games to a person and group of people who may know very little about video games or the industry. Private servers are not only illegal, they are piracy. I don’t understand how private servers can be piracy if the people playing on those servers purchased the game. Where’s the piracy? They’re even the equivalent of the “black market” of video games, apparently. Even when the company who owns the intellectual property encourages such servers to exist and aids in their creation. This feels tantamount to perjury. Now that is illegal.
I’ll close this entry by highlighting something even stupider about this entire stance from that the ESA apparently has. What if community servers are illegal? What if private servers of games are piracy? Does that change the fact that such things are possible? I don’t see how this view from the ESA is relevant. It’s still a proven case where without the ongoing support for a game from its creators, their games can be enjoyed.
The Death of Physical Games
Sony announced this week that starting in 2028, PlayStation will no longer produce physical copies of any games made for their platforms. This news comes the week following the announcement that the most-anticipated game of 2026 (and potentially ever in the history of video games), Grant Theft Auto VI, will not have any physical discs on store shelves; while “physical copies” are purchasable, the cases will simply have a download code inside.
These are the first two steps toward a world in which physical copies of games don’t exist. And the implications are worrisome. Above, I mentioned the Stop Killing Games movement, a movement that is tightly coupled to the idea of digital gaming. Frustratingly, in a video game industry that continues to gravitate in an all-digital direction, a lot of questions exist regarding ownership of digital media and consumer rights. In the past, physical media has always come with a supposed promise: if you have the media and a device that allows you to consume that media, you can do so forevermore and as many times as you desire.
I want to preface this next part by saying that I’m not a lawyer, and there’s a lot I don’t know about consumer rights and legal matters involving copyright and software licensing. Nonetheless, here’s my understanding of the matter.
To find out a little more about End-User Licensing Agreements (EULAs), I grabbed some physical copies of media that I have lying around and did a bit of online research. It seems that the types of terms in these EULAs have existed for a long time, and that’s not news to a lot of people online. I had heard that as well, but this is the first time I’ve confirmed it for myself. For example, in 2010’s Red Dead Redemption, the physical manual for the game comes with a licensing agreement. It states that the agreement “is effective until terminated by you, by the Licensor, or automatically upon your failure to comply with its terms and conditions. Upon any termination, you must destroy or return the physical copy of Software to the Licensor…” There are also court cases related to “shrinkwrap” licenses, the precursor to “click-wrap” licenses that we “agree” to all the time on the internet, dating back to at least the 1990s in which companies try to argue their point that a license has been given to the purchaser as opposed to ownership of the software itself.
Conceivably, since the invention of the shrinkwrap license, the battle between the license and the Doctrine of First Sale have been at odds. On one hand, the license says that the software belongs to the licensor (developer, publisher, etc.). On the other, the Doctrine of First Sale states that the physical copy of copyrighted material that a consumer holds in their hand, assuming it was legally purchased, belongs to them and is for them to do with what they please. Looking at the aforementioned licensing terms for Red Dead Redemption, how enforceable is the license’s termination clause? If the Doctrine of First Sale gives the consumer the right to do with their copy of media what they wish, how does the company also have the right to strip away the license (presumably for any reason), and force the consumer to return the property or destroy it?
Now, in a lot of ways, this question is practically moot. Have you ever purchased a video game and had someone from the company come knocking on your door to demand that you return it to them? Yeah, me neither. So for physical copies of games, we’re talking about something that, as far as I know, hasn’t happened before with mass-produced software. Or if it has, it’s extremely rare, to the point of it being a non-issue.
With digital media, the Doctrine of First Sale doesn’t apply. So where is the consumer protection? I would argue it hasn’t been litigated yet to the degree that it needs to be in order to provide consumer rights and protections that are required by modern media consumption. All we’re left with is a license that the licensor is permitted to strip away from consumers whenever they want, according to just about any modern EULA. This becomes more problematic without the existence of a physical good. Before, if a company wanted all copies of their IP destroyed, they would have a hell of a time enforcing that. Now, it’s enforceable with the flip of a switch for millions and millions of players.
As we barrel toward this new world of all-digital games, how will laws keep up to help protect consumers from the whims of companies that are solely focused on money?
Subnautica 2 CEO Steps Down
After a fascinating saga between Krafton and its subsidiary, Subnautica 2 developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Subnautica 2 managed to launch into early access, and Krafton was required to pay out more than $250 million to the Unknown Worlds co-creators and CEO.
The CEO, Ted Gill, has now announced his separation from the company, a move that should surprise few who knew about the situation going on behind the scenes. Now that Gill has had a falling out with the leadership of Krafton, successfully seen the launch of Subnautica 2 through, and been granted his personal large bonus payout worth millions of dollars, it’s hard to imagine why he would stay. He should now be promised all of the money he could possibly need to live out the rest of his life or take on any ventures he wants to, so there‘s no incentive for him to stay with a company that ousted him to avoid giving him his contractually obligated and well-deserved payday.
A big takeaway for anybody in the development world should be that Krafton is not a company anyone should want to do business with while the current leadership remains. Their tactics to avoid paying out their $250 million obligations to Unknown Worlds shows at least one of two things: Krafton’s accounting and estimations are dangerously unreliable to a point that they put themselves in such a position to need to find an illegal way out of such a large promised bonus, and Krafton’s underhanded ways of handling the situation reveal their true colors in the world of business that cast an untrustworthy shadow on any dealings they do going forward. Krafton famously owns PUBG Studios and Tango Gameworks in addition to Unknown Worlds and a whole host of other subsidiaries.
1-Up: Steam’s Working Cancel Button
This one works perfectly as a 1-Up. I have a severe pet peeve of buttons that have an ‘X’ or say, “Cancel,” but don’t actually cancel anything. I see this on almost every single application I use. It feels as though cancel buttons exist for the sole purpose of making the user think they have a choice in how their software behaves, even though that’s complete bull crap. When you press the wrong thing or computers are taking longer to complete a task than you expected, the natural inclination is to press the cancel button so that you can select what you meant to, retry, or simply move on with your life. However, these cancel buttons never work. In fact, a lot of times, they’re a trap. Pressing cancel on a number of programs can actually just freeze up the program, forcing you to kill the process via task management.
Well, as it turns out, Steam’s cancel buttons actually work!!!! It’s a miracle! Earlier this week, I was about to sit down for a gaming session, so I double clicked the desktop icon for the game, and saw the Steam loading window appear. It was then that I realized that I actually had to take care of something first that I had nearly forgotten about entirely. I pressed the ‘X’ on the loading window and prepared, inevitably, for my game to load up anyway… but it never happened… I couldn’t believe it. For a second, I sat there. I was a bit stunned. I realized that it had been so long since I had pressed a cancel button that actually worked as advertised. Thank you, Steam, for once again setting and being the