Destructoid Checkpoint: The Victory Lap of Doom

A pretty common theme of philosophically minded literature is the idea of knowledge being a burden, whether we are chasing it or possessing it. Ecclesiastes learned the folly of wisdom, much as Faust was driven to the brink just to feel just a hint of satisfaction.

Me? I just know that when I am at my most pessimistic, when I feel the industry cannot let me down any more, it shall manage to surprise me. Let’s take a victory lap of times I was correct and wish that I wasn’t.

The Crossover Generation

Just two weeks ago, I bemoaned crossover culture: how dreaded IP holders couldn’t leave well enough alone and kept trying to FOMO us by having the thing they own show up in the things they didn’t own, hoping we would buy outside of our comfort zones, and they would earn some sweet, sweet licensing money.

I brought up Magic: The Gathering, run by the Pinkerton-loving Wizards of the Coast, as a prime example, with their terrible Universes Beyond series—a constant flow of cards designed to appeal to your every possible interest, even when they have nothing to do with the traditional style, art, or vibes of the original game.

Well, after making a boatload of money with the Universes Beyond strategy, WotC has decided to roll the same process out to Dungeons and Dragons. D&D is not my favorite system, but it is one I have played often over the last 30 years, and it’s one I still play because I have lots of friends who only seem interested in it. 

We can now look forward to World of Warcraft and Star Wars making their way to Dungeons and Dragons. Will dragons have Sith powers? Will Sylvanas Windrunner be a character your Bard can fail to chat up in Neverwinter? I have no idea, but I struggle to find a way that they will do this that won’t just be awful. Awkward, playable bolt-ons need care and consideration, and should be handled like the wonderful Dungeons and Destiny project. 

There are good ways to do things, which, given WotC’s recent form, I assume won’t happen here.

The Steam Cube

Back in May, when discussing the Steam Deck price hike, I spoke about the potential pricing of the Steam Cube, a piece that was something of a follow-up to a newsletter about how it was likely gonna be a very bad time to try and launch the Steam Cube that I wrote in December of 2025. I wrote about why the original push for the Steam Machine failed, and how this would have a hard time getting rolling due to Valve not being big enough to overcome the pricing problems. 

Sure enough, the weird dreams people had about a small form factor PC that would somehow outperform consoles while also being cheaper than them were first delayed, and then died completely. Worse, all predictions currently point to continued increases in price in the component space, so it seems likely that the cheapest you will be able to buy just about anything for a while is today, as it might just get more expensive tomorrow.

When everyone was trying to predict the cost of the Steam, IGN guessed anywhere from $600 to $800, but the real range is $1000 to $1359. Alinea’s Rhy Elliot described the “sweet spot” price at just $400, while F-Squared's Michael Futer and DFC’s David Cole felt closer to $800 for a 1TB and $1000 for a 2TB model could be possible.

I do not bring up these numbers to say that people were wrong, but rather to point out the broad range of guesses, and hammer home just how much the market has changed over time. These were not outlandish predictions at the time. Some leaned toward optimism, some toward pessimism, and even the most hedged bets were still wrong. 

The real secret is that it’s actually really easy to sit around and make predictions and just caveat everything with the idea that we don’t really know what these companies really think, or how they will act, or how they will respond to the same problems that we ourselves face day to day, such as rising costs and a crushing economy. 

The Yearly Face-off

Back when Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Battlefield 6 were battling it out for the teenage dollar and promising the world, I happily declared that Battlefield 6 was just another mid Battlefield game. It launched to rave reviews, ecstatic YouTubers, and a playerbase who finally felt heard, seen, and loved. Less than a year later, everyone is mad at the game and thinks it’s bad.

I bring this up not to say I am some kind of super genius, just to point out a new prediction that will most assuredly come through. The cycle of dissatisfaction and public spats around what is good and what is bad is only going to accelerate more and more. 

Allow us to extend our beady eye out beyond the fields of gaming, to the woods and forests of mainstream culture. No longer monocultural, social media has turned the former river of entertainment into thousands of tributaries.

There will never be another Bogart, Beatles or Britney. Like and dislike will burn intensely for short bursts, peddled by algorithms that dance to the tune of billionaires, then sputter and die because the human mind is not built to feel rage endlessly, from dawn till dusk.

The clearest recent example is Nolan’s The Odyssey, portrayed by chittering Muskian ne’er-do-wells as a betrayal of all that is good in the world; we were bombarded with a torrent of reasons as to why it was bad, and why it would fail, and then it made a billion dollars at the box office. This failure to negatively impact the bottom line of the thing they didn’t like is an interesting litmus test for folks who peddle anger over everything else, and it lets them know they are not quite as good at this game as they think.

As such, you can expect a redoubling of efforts. More yammering, dribbling dorks desperate for your attention. The culture war is going to get a whole lot worse, unless we work to make it better.

What's happening, Destructoid?

Kyle Ferreira is making a bold call about GTA 6’s story. - “New games launch every week, but the period leading up to a GTA game is always something special, isn’t it? Wild rumors always spark up, and most are actually worth talking about, if you can sift past the star-chart readings and phases of the moon. There’s one speculative rumor, however, that I brushed off almost immediately because it is, of course, nonsense. The rumor? Lucia will die at the end of GTA VI.”

Number one Spider-Fan Scott Duwe talks about Tom Holland’s latest outing as your friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man has finally seen him snatch the crown as the best to ever do it. - “I’ve been consuming Spider-Man media my entire life. Some of my earliest memories include Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage on Sega Genesis, along with the comic book arc of the same name. It continued on with The Animated Series in the 90s, and then the Tobey Maguire/Sam Raimi trilogy, the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, Andrew Garfield’s Amazing movies, the Insomniac video games, and everything else in between. But now, more than ever, I can say from the bottom of my whole heart that Tom Holland is the definitive Spider-Man. And he is also the definitive Peter Parker.”

And that’s it for this week!