October is traditionally the spooky month, and this particular blog update will be addressing the scariest thing of them all, corporate greed. But no worries, as I have other interesting stuff to share of course! Lots of gaming news this month thanks to my fantastic YouTube community members. Also the traditional real spooky stuff and lewd spooky stuff because that’s what is expected in October right?

Let me begin this section of the blog with a very specific disclaimer. I am going to be talking about the Unity situation that unfolded in September. I am not however going to be recapping the entire history of what happened and why or how it’s going to affect developers and games past or present. It is better that you get the thoughts of actual game developers on the topic and thus I linked the videos above that do that. So please watch it if you want a summary of the incident as well as a good perspective from a credible source. If you watched both videos in full, you would then have a pretty complete picture of what went on during the initial phases of the Unity debacle leading into where we are today a few weeks later.

This is the one paragraph that brought me into the entire Unity situation, and I’ve screenshotted that from a Bloomberg article linked above written by Jason Schreier. In my own experience dealing with countless faceless corporations in my lifetime, the most egregious of them always used statistics to justify their reasoning or position. I’m talking about the massive ones including ISPs, Energy, Telecom, etc. Every single time a blanket statistic is used to chiefly reason why a decision is both made “logical” and “rational”. I can’t tell you how many times this particular set of data is always obfuscated, misinterpreted, and just plain shady to reach such a claim.

For example, most Telecom companies (the folks who run your cell phone service) might institute data caps on what you can use a month before throttling down bandwidth. The reasoning behind this move is always similar to “90% of the userbase won’t be affected by this change” when we (consumers) have absolutely no idea where that statistic is coming from on the basis of what data. I can tell you from experience digging into such research that a lot of claims such as this are horrendously misleading on what counts as a “user” or “current user”. In other words, that 90% statistic could have been derived from accounts no longer active in the last 2 years, accounts that were on a trial basis, accounts that are tied to commercial enterprises, and accounts globally in many developing infrastructure deficient countries. If you took all of these accounts out of the original hypothetical equation, you’ll more realistically come up with a 30% impact rate on current users than 10%; which is A LOT more people than projected. If you really want a lot more details on this issue, feel free to listen to the audio blog as I have a lot more to say on it. But at the end of the day, I never trust anyone who hides behind statistics for their chief reasoning for doing something.

Moving onto more pleasant topics, let’s discuss the wealth of games in this month’s update. Thanks to the contributions of my YouTube community members, a lot of great stuff was suggested for me to check out and for that I’m eternally grateful. There’s a mix of gacha (mobile) games as well as Steam games to look at, so I invite you to take a look at all of them if you have the time to do so. I won’t be making any serious commentary on any of them at the moment since by the time you read this, I will be more than likely trying them out or they aren’t fully released yet until the end of the month. Here are this month’s list of things to check out in no particular order. (I can’t directly link to some games due to Squarespace policy. Simply Google the game name or website associated with them to find out more information.)

• Star Lusts (EroLabs)

• Taimanin RPGX Ecstasy (Nutaku / Johren)

• Tamer Vale (Steam)

• Grey Haven (Steam)

I’m surprised it took this long for me both to discover MrBallen, but to also recommend him on my site. At first glance, it’s very easy to dismiss him as another tragedy click-bait tuber. But I can assure you that is far from the case, as he’s a fantastic story teller and a genuine nice guy. I do believe I have already suggested everyone check out his podcast in a previous update, but for some reason I never mentioned the (more famous) YouTube channel where you can find the vast majority of his content. Bonus points for MrBallen is that you can enjoy his content without even needing to watch his episodes (audio is good enough) but the visuals do add an extra layer of exposition. A fitting recommendation for October!

Artist for the month is 柾見ちえ (masamichie)! Probably one of the best interpretations of witch around, and I think you’ll agree! I hope you all enjoyed this month’s rather content rich update. It’s rare when things pick up like this, so enjoy the content while it lasts. Next month might be another slow one, or another jam packed one; only time will tell. Stay safe out there and I hope you all have a good (and safe) Halloween.