I normally hate turning to Youtube when there’s a text resource available, but I’ve definitely found there are some situations where explaining a trick or a location in text is massively harder than just watching someone do it in a video.

And why on earth would he admit it later??

Effective journalism. Someone asked him the right question in the right way, and he wound up volunteering something he might not have otherwise chosen to say.

That said, I think some of this is just reasonable openness and accountability. Given the game was effectively a full year ago and the issues with VAR from that game are still a somewhat spicy topic, it’s obviously something he’s been questioned on rather a lot - and given that PGMOL also released a statement, and he mentions that he spoke to on-field ref after the game … it seems like he’s already owned that mistake professionally and personally, so making the same acknowledgement of error publicly isn’t that huge a step beyond that.

It was definitely a mistake that the fans deserved an accounting of, considering it’s the exact sort of problem that VAR exists to address - and that it should have been a call, of some sort at least, was absolutely undebatable to anyone who’d seen it.

I feel like there is space for talking about games besides actually playing them, similar to sports.

To refine further, I think there exists demand for a “middle ground” of games discourse that is talking about games as a whole, or as entries into their genre, in detail and with consideration - but without being a hyper-focused discussion of one specific game by it’s die-hards. We have both poles - there is lots of relatively superficial discussion of games, or game reviews, that aren’t giving a particularly detailed discussion of each game … and there’s lots of posts in a specific games’ space with ultra-specific and supremely detailed discourse from a highly-invested players’ perspective.

But there’s not been a successful venue or single leading voice that’s really filling that niche. TB did for ages, and I don’t think anyone has come close to filling those shoes since.

I personally want the kind of insights that come from putting a week into a game and playing a lot of other similar games, but not necessarily being a hardcore fan or hater of the game or the genre. Like, I’ll get a week into a game and start noticing that the core gameplay is good, but the economy seems off, or that gunplay is just a little jank when playing near obstacles - deeper than “better/worse than GAME1, while slower not as twitchy as COMPETITOR”.

In similar sense, talking about games as a media and as offering within a media landscape - in that sense you talk about asking “what is fun”; looking at game systems and mechanics from a lens of media critique and systems design. How does this work, how do competitors solve this problem, what other problems does it introduce - how does the sum picture mesh and how cohesive is the end product.

Yup. It’s still “LCG Entertainment” operating as Telltale Games, same folks who bought up the IP firesale when Telltale Incorporated went under.

Aw lawd hold me back; I’ve been battling that temptation for months now while it was at normal retail pricing - a discount is added temptation I absolutely did not need.

For sure. It’s easier and more accessible to put out titles in genres that have relatively little development overhead, while it’s also a much lower risked investment for titles with particularly unusual mechanics or gimmicks.

I swear this was something they announced as an April Fool’s joke like a decade ago, but can’t readily find any articles.