What is proving to be successful in games

What is proving to be successful in games

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“Anyone can make that next hit game and find success. There’s always gonna be the player base and people who want an amazing game, right? That’s not going away. What is going away is opportunities: publishing, funding, mid-sized studios and small studios who can sustain that.”

Kaman also said that developers should be willing to take a risk in releasing something that is not polished, but rather is focused on fun.

Nick Kaman

He makes the point that there is still opportunities – but those opportunities are changing. For example, viral, low-quality games like Meccha Chameleon pulled in $10 million and was made by 2 guys in just 2 months. Yet multi-million dollar ‘safer bet’ games are getting poor results and closing studios in just months.

Leading through a cultural change

Leading through a cultural change

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How do you uphold your principles while executing a major strategy change?

I saw this at Intel recently. One could tell for a few years the company was becoming more and more out of step with the marketplace. Values that Andy Grove and his direct successors used to make the company successful were slowly eroded.

With the hiring of a new CEO, there was the announcement of ongoing, sweeping reorganizations and layoffs. Old cultural norms, leaders, and teams were discarded weekly. Organizations were collapsed and layoffs swift. Leadership also went through this same squash-and-fire rounds. It put people in very ugly places of having to fire tremendous amounts of people. Numbers show it to be around 40% in just 2 years.

Did it work? The market has responded with a 3x stock jump that hadn’t happened in over 10 years. But analysis are very cautious. The momentum looks good, but can they pull the actual manufacturing off after almost 10 years of failures?

What about those that work there during all this turmoil? It’s noted that fewer than one-third of transformation initiatives achieve their goals, largely depending on whether employees feel included. So if this happens, what do you do as a leader?

  1. Stabilize Yourself – don’t race straight to the logistics while carrying around unprocessed frustration or guilt. Emotionally stabilize yourself, realize you are not in control of the decision and then act with professionalism and character for the parts you do control.
  2. Prioritize Where You Can Make an Impact – When everything feels uncertain, prioritization becomes the act of leadership. Reframe pushback as inquiry. Stay in solution-building rather than resistance: ‘How do you propose we do this in a way that preserves moral?’ Prioritize time and attention to maintain credibility.
  3. Lead the Team Through Transition – Leaders who engage employees early, clarify accountability, and maintain consistency in messages are up to seven times more likely to succeed. You can’t stop the reorganization, but you can shape how it unfolded and how her people experienced it.
  4. Preserve Trust – during transformative events/misalignment, trust becomes a leader’s most valuable currency. Shared what you can, acknowledged what was unknown, and maintained a consistent tone and presence. Hold one-on-one check-ins, offered resume support, and partner with colleagues across the company to help displaced employees find new roles. 
Nearly half of organisations falling victim to ransomware pay up

Nearly half of organisations falling victim to ransomware pay up

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Cybersecurity provider Sophos has released a report entitled “The State of Ransomware 2026,” with pulled together responses from 2,158 survey participants. It reveals that ransom demands themselves are actually decreasing; but also revealed a shocking 48% of organisations whose data was encrypted paid their attackers.

The median ransom payment is now said to be $769,000, down from a neat $1 million from the previous year’s study, with the median demand dropping to $698,000. Interestingly, 51% of organisations that paid a ransom coughed up less than the demanded amount, which the report says is due to victims “often [being] successful in negotiating a lower amount than originally demanded.”

The lowest category was retail, with a 32% payment rate. 72% of local and state government organisations surveyed paid at least some of the demands. 56% of attacks succeeded in encrypting data, up 11% YOY.

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Old Server Hardware? Don’t do it

Old Server Hardware? Don’t do it

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Even mini PCs, which I’m using in a separate testing environment with a few nodes, often perform tasks better than these older servers.

While it might seem tempting to pick up some old server hardware that have advanced features like ECC and SAS drives and all at heavy discounts, Rich Edmonds went down the rabbit hole and warns you against it. Proprietary parts for almost all connections and bays, finding spare parts for dated systems, high power utilization, poor single threaded performance from dated CPUs, noise, and all the other factors outweigh any perceived benefits.

Why Postmortems fail – Learning from failure instead of just explaining it

Why Postmortems fail – Learning from failure instead of just explaining it

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Explanation keeps your systems intact while appearing to extract value from failure. Examination forces you to see that your systems aren’t working as designed – they’re producing predictable failures you’ve been calling unforeseeable circumstances.

Your launch failed. You did the post-mortem. You found marketing realized some features the marketplace wanted were changing, engineering said the timeline was aggressive and caused some delays, sales knew pricing was getting more competitive. Your postmortem can explain the failure. But nothing changes.

Instead, what should change are the hard questions about how decisions are made and leadership:

  • Why did we greenlight a launch without intelligence that should have known the pricing?
  • Why does our culture interpret technical pushback as resistance instead of expertise?
  • Why did marketing know there were feature gaps but push forward?
  • How do we change this without grinding decision-making to a halt?

Beyond obvious performance issues, failures are diagnostic data about the decision-making system your organization is using.

Testing AI – by building Minesweeper

Testing AI – by building Minesweeper

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People are trying it evaluate how good AI agents are by giving them a variety of tasks. Ars Technica decided to test different agents by telling them to make Minesweeper.

While now dated, how people are testing AI solutions is an ongoing problem. I do remember these early tests being a clear demonstration that AI was now capable of making working solutions from just vibe-coded slop.

Water systems attacked in at least 12 states

Water systems attacked in at least 12 states

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In what is highly suspected as actions of Iran, hackers have targeted water and wastewater utilities in at least 12 states. This includes Oregon.

The New York Times article is very good. It tells the story all too common with many municipalities. Ever-increasingly expensive infrastructure projects that are not well equipped to deal with the problems of cyber-attacks that can come from outside your borders.

Codex Micro AI keyboard

Codex Micro AI keyboard

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Most keypad additions are largely gimmicks – but the Codex Micro AI keyboard has some interesting features (though I’m not sure it’s worth the $199 price tag).

The lighting portion is probably the most interesting. As you link AI agents to individual keys, each agent key has a multicolor LED that indicates the status as it works on your tasks. Blue is for thinking, green is for a completed task, amber is for items needing additional input or feedback, red is for errors, and solid white is for an idle agent.

There’s even a microphone button for voice prompts. The catch is the macro pad doesn’t actually have a microphone, so it triggers your current system default mic.

The clear polycarbonate border of the macro pad lights up to signal voice/mic status, with a sea-green color to show that the mic is live and recording, a white snaking effect to show that Codex is processing your voice prompt, or a simple solid-white glow to show that the prompt has processed fully.

Read more about it here.

Glass storage media

Glass storage media

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I have a special place in my heart for physical media technology. While Sony is moving to completely digital distribution and getting rid of all physical media – how are we supposed to avoid the upcoming Digital Dark Age we appear to be creating? How will our knowledge actually survive if civilization fails?

Perhaps with technology like this. SPhotonix claims to have developed glass storage ‘memory crystals’ that can store 360 terabytes into 5-inch glass disc by etching it with a femtosecond laser. They claim the storage could last 13 billion years – a claim that’s hard to prove since that’s roughly the age of the universe so far.

Seems to be a lot like the Cerabyte ceramic storage media.