The Good News and Bad News for Tech, Games, and Media
Plus, hands-on with two killer Nvidia 50-series laptops.
If you like tech and games, and possibly reading tech and games media, this has been a whiplash-inducing couple of months. Tech and game companies seem addicted to layoffs, while tech and game media outlets have been so decimated over the past several years that some brands are being practically given away -- which is so dire it actually kinda counts as good news.
EA recently cut around 300 jobs, while Microsoft is planning to cut 3% of its total workforce, which could add up to more than 6,000 people. Intel is likewise planning deep cuts, up to 20% of its total staff. On the media side, Polygon, one of the last freestanding game news-and-reviews websites from a major publisher, was sold to barrel-scraper Valnet, resulting in the majority of its staff being kicked to the curb. The LA Times, public radio's Marketplace, and other outlets are also continuing the slow trickle of cuts that have been happening non-stop for years.
Perhaps it's better to say these cuts, layoffs, and fire sales have always been happening -- it's only occasionally that we get a break from it, maybe a few years out of each decade.
The most recent example was during the initial 1-2 years of the Covid era. So many people had to outfit home offices with new gear, and that led to reading lots of online articles about webcams, laptops, office chairs, and more. From that, publishers got a welcome boost to both traffic and affiliate revenue (from when you would read about a product in a "Best X for Y" listicle and click through to a retailer to buy it).
Like a gambler convinced the lucky streak would never end, I saw absolutely zero planning for how to replace that traffic or affiliate revenue when people went back to their offices.
But like a gambler convinced the lucky streak would never end, I saw absolutely zero planning being done on the corporate side for how to replace that traffic when people went back to their offices, or to replace that affiliate revenue once everyone had a new home office laptop/monitor/webcam/etc.
But there's some good news, too -- or at least a few silver linings. Giant Bomb, my former CBS Interactive stablemate, finally annoyed its latest owner, Fandom, so much that it sold the brand back to a couple of longtime employees. Game Informer got a similar lifeline when game developer Gunzilla Games (co-founded by director Neill Blomkamp!) bought the brand and resurrected its website and archives.
These kinds of deals, where a media brand is "rescued" by an unlikely source, were once viewed as the best case scenario for some publications, although the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and LA Times have done much recently to disabuse us of that notion.
Still, fingers crossed. I love what the latest version of The Onion has been doing, for example (Fun fact -- during the very brief time myself, Gizmodo, and The Onion were all under the G/O umbrella, I was asked to weigh in on a couple of allegedly overly offensive Onion jokes. I just said they were great and upper management should keep their noses out of it).
If there's a great business model for either corporate or independent media, I certainly don't know what it is yet. It's probably not waves of indie journalists all starting individual paid subscription newsletters, because even if wildly successful, that might lead to -- at best -- dozens of decently paying media jobs around the country. And even then, who's going to do your HR, taxes, health insurance, etc.?
Late-breaking addendum: I've heard from a couple of people that Digital Trends has just cut all or nearly all of its freelance staff, some of whom had been writing for the outlet for over a decade. For a publication with such a small full-time staff, that seems like it would count as a major retrenchment.
But, there’s some good news out there, really!
Good stuff, for less!
Much has been made recently of how AAA games (an insidery term I dislike) that cost hundreds of millions of dollars have been eclipsed by critical and fan favorites that are either from indie developers or are lower-stakes, lower budget games that don’t cost $70 or $80 each.
In 2025, that includes Blue Prince ($30), Expedition 33 ($50), and the Oblivion Remaster (clearly as far from indie as you can get, but $50, vs. $70 or $80). Avowed has an indie vibe with a big budget price, but is still a great riff on the open-world RPG genre.
All of these are also included in Xbox Game Pass, including PC versions, which is a reminder that Game Pass remains one of the best overall deals in gaming. In fact, if a new game isn't on Game Pass, what are the chances of it entering the gaming discourse?
I don't think I've ever been as bullish on original game ideas, especially as the latest Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, Far Cry, etc. games almost always feel safer and blander than their predecessors. That said, just as I was writing this, Doom: The Dark Ages hit, and I thought it was pretty great.
Is everything better on PC?
It might well be. Every game I've been into lately -- Avowed, Expedition 33, Indiana Jones, Doom: The Dark Ages, the Oblivion Remaster, and others, have all been available on PC. And every one of them looks and plays better on PC.
It's not hard to figure out why. A $500 plastic box from 4-5 years ago can't compete with a $2,000 laptop that just rolled off the production line. And one of the nice things about being a professional laptop reviewer is that I always have a steady stream of new gaming laptops to test new games with.
Here's a look at some actual gameplay on two new Nvidia 50-series laptops -- the 18-inch Asus Strix Scar and the 16-inch Lenovo Legion Pro 7i. Both have the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, while the Asus has an Nvidia 5090 laptop GPU and the Lenovo has the Nvidia 5080 laptop GPU. I'll add spec charts below, and lately I like just putting some gameplay on video so you can see not just the performance, but how the laptop itself looks and feels.
Expedition 33 on an RTX 5090 (Asus Strix Scar 18)
Doom: The Dark Ages on an RTX 5080 (Lenovo Legion Pro 7i)
More about these laptops:
Asus ROG Strix SCAR 18 G835LX-XS98
Processor: Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX
Operating System: Windows 11 Pro
RAM: 64GB DDR5-5600
Storage: 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090
Price (as tested): $5,499
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i
Processor: Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX
Operating System: Windows 11 Home
RAM: 32 GB DDR5
Storage: 2 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4
Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 5080 16GB GDDR7
Price (as tested): $3,599
Here's my full hands-on with the Asus Strix Scar from MC News: https://www.microcenter.com/site/mc-news/article/asus-strix-scar-18-g835lx-5090-review.aspx
And that exact config, with a whopping 64GB of RAM is here: https://www.microcenter.com/product/691209/asus-rog-strix-scar-18-g835lx-xs98-18-gaming-laptop-computer-platinum-collection-off-black
Next up, I'm going to swing the gaming pendulum back the other way and talk about a box I recently dug up containing a bunch of old Game Boy, DS, and PSP handhelds, and what I've been doing to coax these retro systems back to life.
Here's a sneak peek:
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