Jeff is fresh (?) back from Las Vegas with some thoughts about the future of video games. Also: interviews with Greg Kasavin, Amir Rao, Evan Wells, and Chris Kohler recorded moments after their wins at the DICE awards! Then we’ll get into the news, including layoffs for 2XKO and HIghguard, the new God of War game, PlayStation’s latest State of Play, the threat (?) of a new Metal Gear, and more!
SHOW NOTES - I ended up writing a lot of notes for this one to just kind make sure most of what I wanted to cover from DICE made it in. This isn't written-up in the cleanest way, but it helps me get the points out there. Since there's so much of it this week, I figured I'd just paste those notes in here for you to peruse. So, I suppose, keep in mind that these notes didn't get polished up the way they would if I were to write a proper article about this stuff? Anyway, here they are:
PODCAST 193
ROCKET MONEY 11:55
HIMS HAIR 01:10:13
The Jeff Gerstmann Show 193: DICE Summit Interviews & Recap
Jeff is fresh (?) back from Las Vegas with some thoughts about the future of video games. Also: interviews with Greg Kasavin, Amir Rao, Evan Wells, and Chris Kohler recorded moments after their wins at the DICE awards! Then we’ll get into the news, including layoffs for 2XKO and HIghguard, the new God of War game, PlayStation’s latest State of Play, the threat (?) of a new Metal Gear, and more!
God of War: Sons of Sparta
why does this remind me of the CD-i Zelda games?
DICE
Many of the problems facing games are bigger than games right now. Heard multiple hardware people complaining about tariffs as well as component prices. I think we’ll see more price hikes this year on the console side unless something changes soon. The economy obviously isn’t helping, but right now that’s being propped up by this “K-shaped recovery” that seems to be brought up more and more. High earners are still able to afford this stuff and they’re keeping the numbers looking OK-to-good. Meanwhile Sony’s expanded an existing partner program that allows UK players to lease a PS5.
The tech bros and grifters are facing more and more headwinds with traditional games, blockchain games, all that. Mobile is still a minefield where user acquisition is expensive (imagine spending $30 to acquire a single user and having to hope that you make it back in volume) and monetization there is kind of a crap shoot. AI, in some ways, is the last bullet in their grifter gun, now they think they can just have AI generate most of their game and cut out all the expensive parts (salaries). They thought they’d come in and make easy money, and now they’re finding out that this is kind of a hard audience to trick.
A smaller, but realer industry is possible. Brutal layoffs and closures at least partially represent a correction from the days of low-interest money lending and artificially inflated engagement numbers due to COVID WFH conditions. I’m over-simplifying here a bit, obviously there are a zillion factors that contribute to this.
Further thought: How many of today’s failing multiplayer games were conceived or largely produced in an era when a ton of people were working from home? Now that the world has moved on, those players aren’t there anymore, they’re at work. And every predictive model probably broke at some point as those players evaporated.
Still a ton of concern about kids and what they’ll age into, if they actually age out of Roblox. Talked to a lot of developers with kids who don’t want their kids to go anywhere near it for safety reasons.
Didn’t really find a lot of PS6 information, which I suppose is news in and of itself, but just because tools don’t seem to be ready for developers that doesn’t also mean that the console is 100% delayed out of whatever this supposed 2027 window is. Insider Gaming had a story this week talking a bit about specs and RAM, for whatever that’s worth. (Heard absolutely nothing about Xbox plans, while we’re on the subject)
Something to think about: With Nvidia supplying parts for the Switch 2 and Nvidia not caring about anything other than AI right now, what does that mean for any kind of Switch 2 revisions, let alone whatever their next hardware will end up being?
We see breakout indie hits all the time—games that buck the traditional thinking of how to launch and market a game. But it doesn’t really seem like this is predictable, and the people who try to predict it seem to end up chasing trends (”friendslop, VS clones, deckbuilders, etc”) instead of creating anything actually new. Some of those follow-ons still hit, for whatever that’s worth, but I guess that mentality goes all the way back to the days of Pitfall and Jungle Hunt, Pac-Man and Ladybug, or Mr. Do! and Dig Dug.
Didn’t talk to a single person who seemed convinced that AI was going to be a major factor in game development anytime soon. Even people with jobs that force them to know what this stuff is capable of seemed cool on it. That said, I didn’t find too many people who just completely rejected the tech out of hand, either. Seems like everyone is at least open to the idea, if it can actually be of actual service to developers. That seems like a big “if.” AI is probably never going to know what it takes to make a double jump feel just right. A couple people specifically asked “can AI find the fun” and seemed skeptical that it could.
This sentiment of “did we just forget how we used to make games?” came up a couple of times, with some developers thinking that they had it all kinda figured out 15 years ago. The combination of all that easily-borrowed money, the influx of VC and other dirtbags who smelled easy profits and came running, and COVID-era WFH pumping up a lot of the traditional metrics caused a lot of people to take their eye off the ball and chase something else. Can something resembling a back-to-basics approach actually work? No idea, but I’d love to see more people try. Romeo Is A Dead Man at $50 is kind of an interesting release that sorta fits this profile, even if the reasons for its price and all that probably come from a somewhat different place.
Modern AAA is unsustainable for most, if not all studios. Someone asked me if this was something I ever just said bluntly on this show and while I know I’ve talked about it a lot, I don’t know that I’ve ever just come out and said it. But after this last week, that feeling solidified a bit.
I heard a lot of talk focused on problems, how to solve them, and how to share information about common problems in a way that helps push everyone forward. Ultimately, it feels like a lot of people on all ends of the ol’ corporate hierarchy recognize that something’s gone wrong and things need to change.
People seem weary but focused. Tired but hopeful. People seemed generally positive and excited about what they’re working on, though they’re also very aware how brutal things are right now.
Discoverability is the shits, but all the fake hentai garbage on the eshop probably isn’t actually getting in anyone’s way because people are probably hearing about a game elsewhere, then going and searching for it directly on their shop of choice.
Separately, I had a conversation with someone who was at Xbox when the Xbox One got announced and we talked about what a mess that all was. I mentioned that journalists interviewed execs at the reveal event and all got different answers and the person responded by more or less saying that everyone single exec on the team had a different idea about what “always online” even meant or what they wanted it to mean and that’s a big part of why the message was all over the place. Mattrick, as you’ve probably guessed by now, figured that games were a lock so they could afford to get into other stuff. Whoops.
AWARD INTERVIEWS
1 Supergiant
2 Evan Wells
3 Chris Kohler, Digital Eclipse
NEWS
How open do you think the door is for new properties in fighting games? Is this whole thing just running on inertia, where only the big franchises of yesteryear have a real shot to break out and everything else is just a “fans of the genre” sort of situation? Like there’s some set number of people out there who will buy any anime fighter of reasonable quality, but is that number growing or shrinking?
Most of Highguard Studio Has Been Laid Off Says Former Dev, Wildlight Confirms Cuts - IGN
Team was cut about two weeks after launch.
A high player count at the start followed by a huge dropoff says to me that the trailer worked in building awareness and getting people to try out the game… but they didn’t like what they saw. You could argue (as the developer who was laid off from Wildlight did) that some of those players didn’t give it a chance or that they had it out for the game in some way, for whatever reason. But at the end of the day people downloaded the game, tried it out, and didn’t come back. It’s tempting to blame “gamers” or “Geoff Keighley” or some other external force here, but ultimately I just don’t think that game was good enough to compete.
Also: if they’re already cutting players after this launch, what sort of numbers did they actually need to hit to keep moving? They had nearly 100k on Steam alone at launch, plenty of developers would stab someone for that kind of launch.
PlayStation State of Play February 2026: Everything Announced So Far - IGN
Control - grapple points to turn the world around, not freely done
Ulf and Simon still running it
Lego Batman Slashes RAM Requirements On PC As Prices Spike
Will optimization become a new trend if no one can afford to upgrade anymore?
The Six Games Ubisoft Has Canceled Amid Restructuring
Heard Ubi was still in something of a state of disarray following the re-org. Duh, right? Their larger problems don’t get solved overnight.