For the past year, my wife and I have known that we were going to move from Fayetteville, Arkansas to the Dallas area. It took us a few starts and stops and some frustrating stuff along the way, but we’re now closed on that house (in Arlington, specifically) and in the process of selling our old house and moving it to The Metroplex.
In the previous three weeks as of this writing, I’ve been busier than I’ve been since launching a video game in 2014. I have a day job and I’m also moving. Moving is a black hole that erases all memories of the previous move because of trauma, I guess. I haven’t had my PC or major consoles. I’ve just been with my Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch. Overall, I’m doing great.
But, I’ve been making a list! I’ve been making a list of the big crunchy AAA video games I’ve been mostly neglecting outside of College Football and Madden 25. Star Wars Outlaws? Yes! Can’t wait! Space Marine 2? I hear it’s rad as hell! Concord? Well. Well!!!!
Barring something extremely strange happening at Ubisoft and Saber, getting my equipment back around the middle of the month is no big deal for Outlaws and Space Marine 2, they’re both games with strong single-player components and a clear business model. They’ll be there when I’m ready. I’m shit out of luck with Concord.
Big bright competitive shooters are games that live in a rotation for me. Publishers probably hate me. I’m not a whale but one of those parasites that live on whales and I bounce to other whales when the current moves me. A few weeks with Apex Legends, a week dipping back into Destiny, trying to recapture those halcyon first few months of Overwatch‘s existence, getting turbo mad at VALORANT, and checking out Deadlock. I didn’t love Deadlock, but you know what? It’s going to be there when I settle into my new house.
I’m almost forty. I’m in a media class with other entrenched almost-forty year olds (and older) as well as the unwise young hangers-on who are braver than I’ll ever be for being here. With so many commitments and so many games, the expectation that I jump onto the most recent Big Game within the first two weeks lest I miss out on it forever is not one I’m at all prepared to entertain. Despite what Sony or the next major publisher to do this (or David Zaslav or Bob Iger — this all extends to film and television, too) might think, this urgency isn’t fun. It may speak to a younger set with fewer responsibilities — I can’t really speak to that — but I do know it removes me from this specific coil.
Others have written more eloquently than I could about how this model doesn’t sustain itself. How could it? But part of that equation is this phenomenon. If you can’t jump in on day one and be a frothing evangelist, the entire thing might not exist in two weeks. So then who has time for that? Who has the fucking energy for that? I don’t! You probably don’t!
I just wanted to know what the fuss was about, but it’ll just be weird memory by the time I get my PC hooked up.
