This was terrible game design. But I squeezed some lemonade out of it. I'll explain

1/ GameStop is one of the most fun businesses to study for both its success and failure.

Relative to other specialty retailers, it dominated up until the financial crisis, but has since done very poorly.

But unlike Tower Records or Blockbuster, it is still in business

2/ Thanks to the tailwind gaming has provided, its revenues have grown long-term but EBITDA and margins have been terrible as the gaming world has digitized over the past 5 years.

3/ As I learned in @joosterizer book One Up, their early physical retail edge rested on counterpositioning: doing things Walmart and others couldn't:

1. Accessibility
2. Deeply trained expert staff
3. Tailored loyalty program
4. Custom inventory management for used game sales

4/ Accessibility

There are 5,500 GameStop stores, often more than one in the same mall (mostly because of EB acquisition). Can always find one.

They install ramps--not for wheelchairs, but for strollers because parents are the real buyer

5/ Trained Staff

As @joosterizer told me recently, try to go into a GameStop and stump a staff member. They can help you navigate much better than a generic retail employee. Creates loyalty and trust that wouldn't be possible if they didn't just focus so specifically on games.

Thread about THE MOON

So this week I was playing the game 'To The Moon', which is fantastic (later I'll post my review here). The amazing soundtrack was created by @Reives_Freebird and @supershigi.

When the 'Moon' subject shows up, I always think about the mythology of this celestial object, and also about the differences between languages to refer to this object.

To be exact, what I really think is: why the hell "the moon" is a masculine word in German (der Mond)?

On this matter, I also think about the Sun: why is it feminine in German?

Nonetheless, I'll focus on the Moon in this thread.

So I just watched @Polygon ‘s new video on using videogames and VR as a form of therapy, but this scene in particular seemed a bit off.

specifically, what got me thinking was this bit

As someone who has been diagnosed with ADHD and ASD, these kinds of backhand comments about "treating" me are things I’ve had to put up with all my life.

But this time, instead of dismissing it out of hand, I started to think. This sounded kind of suspicious. There’s no way that scientists could possibly think that creating a ~VR classroom~ is a suitable method for treating children with ADHD/ASD?

Was that even a thing? Well, I wasn’t sure. So I set to finding out.

At Christmas, many of us are getting new computer games.

With the season, we also turn to nostalgia & looking back on the past. It's often hard to shake the feeling that games of our youth were simply better than games coming out now. Let's explore why that might be (1/22)

"Well, that's clearly because games in the 80s and 90s didn't have any politics and forced inclusivity"

Nope, that's complete bollocks, and nothing to do with why you remember those games so much more fondly

(maybe I should have started the thread with this, lol) (2/22)

For the purpose of this exercise, I'm going to arbitrarily draw the line between modern and old games at roughly the early 2000s.

For many, the 'golden age' of gaming is the era from the SNES/Genesis to the early years of the PS2, Gamecube, and Dreamcast. (3/22)

There wasn't just one thing that made games from that period feel so great. In my opinion, it came down to 7 interlinking key constraints. As development teams & players looked to overcome them, they had to either mitigate or innovate.

Let's look at each of them in turn (4/22)

First up we have:

'Just enough' hardware performance

Games were finally able to look *amazing*, as long as developers knew the limits of the platform they were working on. You couldn't push for realism, so instead you had to commit to an artstyle. Reply with your favs! (5/22)