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What matters to me in gaming (and what doesn’t), part two

Posted on July 3, 2026 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

Let’s talk more about everything that is wrong with gaming. It’s been a shit week, and it just seems to be getting worse. Plus, the weather is so gross. It’s been in the eighties to ‘feels like’ in the hundreds–which suuuuuuucks. It’s definitely summer, which means sticky slimy. And insects coming out to play. Bah. Let me get back to winter, please. I’m doubly mad that we skipped spring because I hate summer so much.

My brother taught me a really cool trick to help with CPU. I usually have about fifty tabs open–up to a hundred or more. (He has over a hundred). You can group together tabs and then ‘shrink’ the group so all of the tabs are hidden. All you see are the the tab group names. It really celars up space, and then you can click on the group tag to let the tabs come out to play.

I was so excited when my brother taught me this, which made him laugh. It was the coolest thing, and it makes my life so much easier. It brought down my CPU usage by around 30%! I joked with my brother that I would be doing this for the next following hour or two. Onrce you put a bunch of tabs in a group, you can name it and give it a color. It’s seriously the coolest thing I’ve learned in quite some time.

Back to games. We, the consumers, are part of the problem . We are not the cause of the problem, and there isn’t much we can do to stem the problem–but we are definitely part of the problem. Meaning, we’re going to buy the games no matter how expensive they get. There was talk about how expensive Grand Theft Auto VI (Rockstar Games) would have to get before people wouldn’t buy it. $80 for the base game hasn’t stopped it from selling pre-orders like crazy. The fifth game sold roughly 230 million copies world wide. It came out in September of 2013, so that’s nearly 13 years ago.

This is mind-boggling, but, honestly, it’s not as many copies as I thought it would be. A content creator I watch sometimes said to guess how many copies the game had sold. I thought it would be over a billion, quite frankly. But a quarter-billion is still an astounding number.

I’m sure this game will match if not exceed the number. Or maybe do slightly less, but it’sll be around the same number. People are not NOT going to buy the game. I think the only glitch is that there is no physical copy being produced (which, just, sigh). I said in my post yesterday why I personally don’t care about physical copies, but I do think it’s a shame that there won’t be any. Why? Because a lot of people may not be able to afford the game at full price, and without any second-hand copies, they will have to do without.

What I care about (in gaming)–and what I don’t

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

The news has been grim in the gaming world for months now–if not years. The RAM shortage driving up prices is one thing. The constant layoffs is another. It’s been really depressing, especially the latter. As to the former, I had been considering getting a new PC about a year ago. Right before the prices went bonkers (and, yes, tehre’s a specific reason why), and now I rue the decision to wait. Everything is so expensive now. I mean, that’s not just limited to the gaming world, of course.

The layoffs, though, are what really bugs the fuck out of me (in the gaming world). It’s never the muckety-mucks who are laid off–oh no! They have nowt to do with it, do they? All the talk about tightening belts and what not make me furious. My first job out of college, I was working for a nonprofit. I was making eighteen-thou, which was not much money, even over thirty years ago. The director called us all (but the admin assistant–now, one of my two best friends) in and told us we all had to tighten our belts. Meaning no raises. Oh, and this was a United Way-funded nonprofit, which meant we were ~~forced~~ heavily encouraged to donate to United Way. You know, to show our gratitude that they funded us. But, uh, that has nothing to do with the line staff. The same line staff that is barely making a living wage.

Anyway. I twill forever remember and be grateful to the counselor in the other program for asking the director sharply, “What about you? Are you going to tighten your belt? Give up that Miata you drive?”

The director did NOT care for that at all. He shouted how he paid his dues and had put his time into the trenches. Which I have heard isn’t true. It’s more that he’s the son of a prominent person in the field. Even if it were true, though, it didn’t change the fact that the only thing he did as director was sit in his office and play solitaire on his computer. A computer that we could have used for our kids.

When I went to work for the county and mentioned that I used to work for that nonprofit, the head of the accounting department (for the nonprofits the county oversaw) snorted and said the name of the director before calling him something very disaparaging. In other words, everyone knew that this guy wasn’t doing his job.

I feel it’s the same with the bigwigs of publishing companies, except they aren’t even pretending they paid their dues. I mean, they don’t have to, right?

Waring, rant: We can be pissed all we want about prices, layoffs, and whatever else, but let’s face it. People are still going to do the things that lead to the situation we’re in. I’m not saying this is our fault because it most assuredyl isn’t; I’m saying that as long as there is no big consequence for what the companies are doing, they’ll keep doing it.