We’re a little over two-thirds into 2026: a year in which we at Scanline Media decided to not cover any current triple A game releases. Silence can send a powerful message at times, but it can also be a pretty unclear one. What does your absence mean- is it even deliberate? We made the announcement at the start of the year that we were going to opt out of triple A coverage, but that’s one announcement: I imagine most of our audience didn’t see it.
As the industry turns on itself, it would be easy to imagine we’re pretty pleased with ourselves. We decided to protest the state of the industry, and the industry went on to prove our concerns incredibly justified: developers are fired before their game even comes out, meaning success never mattered; publishers two-facedly explain how their latest release fully embraces LLM AI in all parts of its creation to shareholders, but tell gamers every asset in the game is human-made; companies like EA and Sony set clear paths to their own destruction with suicidally stupid policies and business moves. If we wanted, we’d be more than justified in telling ourselves “god, we picked the exact right moment to step away.”
On the contrary, I mourn. Like with the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, whose guidelines we follow by not covering Microsoft games or Disney+ shows on our work, there’s a cost. For some folks, it’s easy: Microsoft has no games they care about, Disney+ doesn’t show anything interesting to them. That’s not me. I want to play Ninja Gaiden 4 to see if Team Ninja has finally reclaimed that series’ glory. I’m deeply curious about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (though I suspect I’ll find it has buried the original’s charm in a shallow grave). I like Star Wars, I’d watch some Star Wars shows! The list goes on.
None of that’s to say I’m tempted to break the boycott: I’m not. But the boycott is a moral imperative winning out over personal interest and curiosity for me- it’s not like I wouldn’t buy these games if the boycott ended. I feel even more pushed by our year of silence over triple A games, because the sense of purpose is less clear. No one told us to do this, we’re not part of some movement with an obviously just cause. Our own frustrations and consciences drove us to this, and it’s been painful to watch the year go as it has.
Jen and I like Marathon, a lot, and by the time 2026 ends and we allow ourselves to speak about it, that game’s development team might have all been laid off. Star Wars: Zero Company is cool as hell, and its team was furloughed before launch, and presumably is relying on sales and positive buzz to pay those people their wages. I’m chomping at the bit to say something, to try and be an advocate for these people who are going to lose their jobs for no reason if something doesn’t happen. It kills me that 2XKO, a really cool fighting game from a bunch of legendary members of the fighting game community, has been killed by its overlords Riot Games… and I am sitting here silent. The decision will be four months old, minimum, before I can say “this game is really sick and it’s a terrible shame that it’s closing.”
But that’s the cost, right? We can’t make the vicious, apathetic cruelty of late-stage capitalism our personal responsibility. If Kyrie and I had dropped a day-and-date episode of Neutral Game hyping up 2XKO (which, btw, wouldn’t have happened anyway, because it took both of us a while to come around on the game), it wouldn’t have changed the game’s fate. Not just because we’re a small site who can’t really affect things that much, but because there was no world where 2XKO was going to succeed. Riot had set unreachable goals for the game, and its failure was inevitable, because they were asking the impossible. We can’t save Marathon’s Bungie from the hubris of Sony, we can’t save Zero Company’s Bit Reactor from EA, or from its own incompetent leadership. And we knew that this sort of thing was going to happen. It’s why we wanted to send a message in the first place: the way the industry is being run is cruel and untenable. It can’t continue.
2026 will roll on. More big games will come out, and some of the studios that make them will probably be shuttered for the sin of releasing a good game that everyone likes. Hardware prices will continue to soar, more and more companies will turn to AI to fill their games with cheap, ugly garbage. And that’ll happen to small games too, not just the big ones. The industry is very sick, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and the treatment is going to be painful. All we can do is try to do what we think is right, and act in defence of our own morals. Our year of triple A silence will continue. But it’s not a gleeful silence. It is a wake for thousands of artists laid off, millions of artists robbed by AI plagiarism, and a population treated like a con man’s marks instead of an audience.