GYGO Variety Hour: Happy New Year, I Guess It’s Sonic Week

Welcome back to Get Your Game On Variety Hour! I’ve apparently decided I now live in the 90s and early 2000s and have been reading, watching, and playing almost exclusively stuff released before 2010… except for 2024’s Sonic 3 movie and Sonic X Shadow Generations. I know what I like about the present day, and it’s high-fidelity hedgehogs.

I don’t have a funny little anecdote this time, but here’s your weekly reminder to support Palestine in any way you can, and maybe get a little angry at your local politics while you’re at it. Medical Aid for Palestinians is continuing to do what they can on the ground in Gaza, and Operation Olive Branch and our own Zainabb Hull’s Crips for Palestine newsletters offer other ways to help the situation in the Middle East. In US-oriented news, there are Inauguration Day (which is also, gallingly, MLK Day) actions taking place all over the country—a quick google of your area will probably get you where you need to be if you want to participate. Here’s a post about a New York City event to get you started.

The Sonic Section

Sonic 3 released in theaters on December 20! My mini review is: it whips, except for the extremely unpleasant, unavoidable, and extended fat joke that is Jim Carrey’s Eggman in this movie. That part is very bad. The Sonic Adventure 2 parts, however, are very, very good. Also, director Jeff Fowler says that Shadow’s “favorite food is raw coffee beans” which is insane, and makes me feel insane.

If you, too, liked Sonic 3, here are some things you’ll be excited (or horrified) to hear:

• Sonic 4 has already been greenlit and is currently expected to release in Spring 2027.
• Jim Carrey is by all accounts having a blast as Eggman. Did you know he’s credited as “Artistic Consultant” on Sonic 3? Yeah. I saw that in the theater and screamed.
• Lee Majdoub said “toxic yaoi’s the shit” live on the internet. Hey! It’s weird that chronically online people are famous now!

Sonic Galactic, a fanmade Sonic game that Sega doesn’t seem to have any problem with, dropped its second demo last week alongside a partially 2D-animated trailer. The game imagines what a 2D Sonic for the Sega Saturn would have been like and is reportedly incredible—a possible spiritual sequel to Sonic Mania. Sonic Galactic is being developed by Starteam, and you can download the demo for free now.

Some Post-Holiday Deals

The Steam Winter Sale ended on Jan. 2, but you can still get a… fascinating… collection of games for $12 USD with the AGDQ 2025 Humble Bundle. I’m gonna be honest, this collection is exactly what my Steam Sale hauls looked like back when I was using the platform, so I’m delighted. Also, AGDQ is going right now! If you tune in right as this publishes, you’ll be just in time for, to my delight, a short Sonic block. This Humble Bundle will be available until January 17.

In weirder news, on December 9, itch.io was taken down due to a copyright strike by Funko (and AI-powered partner BrandShield). This already stupid story got even dumber on December 10, when apparently the itch.io founder’s mom got a phone call about “accusatory statements on [their] social media account.” Itch was, thankfully, back up within 48 hours, and now a delightfully spiteful group of TTRPG developers has put together a bundle meant to highlight the kind of indie projects that itch helps make possible. The Fuck Funko bundle also runs through January 17.

In other news…

Epic agreed to an FTC settlement for their use of “dark patterns” around microtransactions in Fortnite, and the deadline to file a claim is January 10! So if you or a kid using your credit card dropped accidental money on Fortnite between 2017 and 2022, please help bleed Epic as much as possible. They’ll be fine.

I’ve recently been indulging my impulse to scamper around in a field like a golden retriever and trying to teach myself to run. If you also want to do that, Video Game Run Club may be of help to you.

SachaGoat, the winner of the 2023 Bloggies, has been called upon to run the 2024 TTRPG blog awards, and you can vote now on the finalists! While I admittedly find the structure of the finals difficult to parse, the post also serves as a quick reference for a ton of great TTRPG writing.

Per Raj Patel on Bluesky, as of December 4 there were more game industry layoffs in 2024 than in 2023 and 2022 combined. Note, however, that this study only collects layoffs with publicly announced quantities; fully a third of all layoff announcements in 2024 did not specify the number of people let go. This data also differs with the reporting of the Game Industry Layoffs portal, listing higher numbers of layoffs in 2024 and significantly lower numbers in 2023. While the differences are important—always be healthily skeptical of reporting, even if you want to agree! Make your inner Scully proud!—the gist is the same: the turbulence that has characterized the games industry since time immemorial (or, like, the 2000s) is not only continuing, but getting more volatile as we move through the decade. Jason Schrier contemplated one reason for (and several potential consequences of) 2024’s heavy layoffs back in his February newsletter, and the patterns he observed have only played themselves out further since its publication.

The future of the Game Awards Future Class (tee hee) is in question as the 2024 Game Awards approach and the internet has seen no trace of applications or a call for nominations for the 2024 class. The Future Class was a not-entirely-flattering talking point in advance of 2023’s Game Awards as well: December 2023, members of the Future Class circulated a petition demanding that a statement in explicit support of Palestinian human rights be read at the ceremony; despite this neither Future Class organizer Emily Bouchoc nor any speaker at the ceremony made any mention of Palestine. This report from Game Developer also raises questions about whether or not the Game Awards is actually doing anything meaningful for its Future Class members… which throws the lack of a 2024 class into a particular light, doesn’t it.

Ken Levine recently gave an interview with GamesIndustry.biz in which he revealed he was not, thankfully, drinking the generative AI Kool-Aid. (I actually largely agree with his practices—use AI, or the large language and/or pattern recognition models we’ve been calling AI, to do technical busywork, but keep it out of creativity—if not his somewhat blithe industry outlook.) He also mentioned his retroactive disappointment with the fact that the BioShock games were just “a very, very long corridor,” spurring interesting discussion from Kotaku’s John Walker about the necessity (or lack thereof) of player agency in games.

This one’s what it says on the tin: someone made a CAPTCHA where you play Doom on Nightmare difficulty. Is this news as important as an industry auteur’s development philosophies or literal thousands of layoffs? Who can say. GYGO Variety Hour contains multitudes.

The US courts continue their evisceration of the FCC, with a the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals declaring that “the FCC lacks the statutory authority to impose its desired net-neutrality policies through the ‘telecommunications service’ provision of the Communications Act.” This, naturally, sucks shit, but I did find PC Gamer’s writeup to be a really effective explainer as to what net neutrality actually is, something I’ve always had trouble articulating.

And finally, in lighter news: Sam Winkler says that if the word “skibidi” makes it into Borderlands 4, he’s “gonna cry real tears.” I, however, laughed with delight reading that quote, because for some reason I find nothing as amusing as creative people talking about stupid jokes in a funny-yet-serious way.