2025-05-08 01:20:23
Aftermath:
Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them.
You might remember most of us from Kotaku, where we broke news, covered events, and brought you hard-hitting investigations. You might also have seen us at Motherboard by Vice, The Verge and The Washington Post’s games vertical Launcher. We got back together to start this site not just so we could all blog together again, but to try something new for ourselves and for games journalism.
These days it’s tough for journalism, especially about games. The past few years have seen mass layoffs and site closures, with remaining writers being asked to do more and more with less and less. The ad-supported model is crumbling, social media is a mess, and the businessmen and private equity firms buying up news outlets don’t care about workers, readers, and quality writing, they only care about profits. The five of us saw our sites closed, ourselves and our colleagues laid off, and our workplaces turned hostile in management’s pursuit of growth at all costs. [...]
As workers and owners, we’re beholden to no one but ourselves, and to you, our readers. When you subscribe, you’ll get access to writing that pursues the truth and casts a critical eye on gaming and the internet, that doesn’t need to placate capital or kowtow to PR. You’ll be supporting the kind of journalism our past experience has shown us you like best: honest and irreverent, written for people rather than SEO. You’ll get a site that prioritizes the reader experience, with no invasive popups or ads that burn up your device.
They’re a smart crew, so of course, they’re not launching this on Substack. (They’re using a platform called Lede, upon which the excellent Defector has built itself.) How can you not love a site with this ode to a classic bit of kit: “Bring Back Those Long-Ass Game Show Mics”. An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.
2025-05-08 00:38:03
Kyle Orland, reporting for Ars Technica last week:
Vox Media has sold video game specialist website Polygon to Internet brand aggregator Valnet, the publisher of content-churning sites including Game Rant, OpenCritic, Android Police, and Comic Book Resources. The move comes alongside significant layoffs for veteran journalists at the 13-year-old outlet, including co-founder and editor-in-chief Chris Plante and Senior Writer Michael McWhertor. [...]
Polygon was founded in 2012 when Vox Media spent significant money to poach top journalists from popular gaming blogs like Kotaku, Joystiq, and The Escapist. After initially publishing as the Gaming section of Vox.com for a few months, the Polygon domain launched alongside a series of flashy videos hyping up the staff’s lofty goals for video game journalism. In the years since, Polygon has become a respected source for news and views on the gaming and entertainment industries — one that Ars Technica has cited frequently during my tenure as senior gaming editor. [...]
According to publications like The Wrap and Aftermath, numerous Valnet writers have claimed that they receive low pay for long articles, but Valnet insists that working conditions are good. It even sued The Wrap in federal court, saying that Valnet “relies on its reputation as a supporter of high-quality journalism and of talented writers and editors to staff its ever-growing business and need for engaging and well-written content.”
Just brutal. I’m not huge into games, but Polygon has been one of my go-to sources for game-related news for years. If I wanted to catch up on something like, say, Nintendo’s Switch 2 announcements, I knew I could go to Polygon and they’d have the coverage nailed. Polygon was everything you could want: good writing, good design, no hype, trustworthy coverage and analysis.
There’s very little good news in media these days. The only talented people I see launching new things are doing it on Substack, and I think that’s going to end poorly for all of them.
2025-05-07 09:23:56
Andrew Liszewski, The Verge:
Contrary to prior limitations, there is now a prominent orange “Get book” button on Kindle app’s book listings. [...]
Before today’s updates, buying books wasn’t a feature you’d find in the Kindle mobile app following app store rule changes Apple implemented in 2011 that required developers to remove links or buttons leading to alternate ways to make purchases. You could search for books that offered samples for download, add them to a shopping list, and read titles you already own, but you couldn’t actually buy titles through the Kindle or Amazon app, or even see their prices.
I’d love to just crack a joke here about Amazon, maybe, possibly, finally getting a chance to gain a bit of market share in the e-book market. I’d love to just crack that joke and move on.
But really, this whole situation with e-books has been the best argument against Apple’s App Store policies for at least the last 15 years. Physical printed books are typically sold under a wholesale model. The publishers sells the book to a bookseller for a wholesale price (say, perhaps, half the suggested retail price) and the bookseller is then free to charge whatever actual retail price they want to customers. But e-books are sold under the agency model: the publisher sets the retail price, and the bookseller keeps 30 percent. But Apple’s App Store policies therefore make it impossible for a third-party bookseller to sell e-books and make even a penny of profit. Let’s say there’s an e-book that the publisher decides will sell to customers for $10. When Amazon sells the Kindle edition of that book, the publisher gets $7, and Amazon keeps $3. But if the Kindle iOS app allowed purchases of books through IAP, Apple would take its 30 percent first. Apple would get $3, Amazon would still owe the publisher $7, and there’d be nothing left over — not a cent — for Amazon itself. Effectively they’d lose a bit of money on each sale, and it would be impossible to make even a penny of profit.
You can’t even fix this by raising prices. Double the retail price to $20 and then Apple would take $6, and the publisher would be owed $14. Still not a cent left for Amazon. The App Store model is just fundamentally incompatible with the agency model.
What Apple should have done, 15 years ago, is look at this situation and decide “Well, we have to allow something else. Kindle users should be able to buy books on iOS devices from the Kindle app.” And the solution is incredibly obvious: let apps send users out of the app to the web to make purchases, without Apple taking a cent. That’s what’s happening now, because of Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers’s injunction, but it should have been something Apple permitted 15 years ago because it’s so obviously fair and just. I’ve argued consistently that it’s fine for Apple to insist that in-app purchases for digital content must use Apple’s payment system. But I’ve also argued consistently that Apple should allow from-app purchases to freely go to the web. Tap a button or link, leave the app and go to the web, and make the purchases there. Then go back to the app and the app can sync up what you just purchased. Done. Simple.
Apple’s obstinance on this has created nothing but friction, confusion, and hassle for users for 15 years. It makes no sense for anyone. Until last week, not only were third-party app forbidden from including buttons/links to send users to the web to buy book, they were forbidden from even informing users that they needed to go to the web to buy books. Apple’s rules included a rule that forbade apps from explaining the rules to the users.
I can see, at some level, where executives at Apple are like, “Fuck Amazon. There’s no way for us to even make an Apple Books app for Kindles, let alone sell our own e-books on their devices, so they can go fuck themselves. Why should we let them sell e-books on our devices?” That’s all true. There are no third-party apps on Kindles. There are third-party apps on iPhones and iPads. But at some point Apple should have just considered their own users. If their users are using the Kindle app looking to buy Kindle e-books on iOS devices, Apple should have just let it happen on the web — and used that as motivation to make Apple Books better so that maybe more users would prefer it to the Kindle ecosystem. What’s the word? Oh yeah ... competed.
2025-05-07 07:58:42
Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge:
Representative Kat Cammack (R-FL) introduced a bill Tuesday that would require “large app store operators” like Apple to let users install third-party app stores and set them as their default. The bill, called the App Store Freedom Act, aims to “promote competition and protect consumers and developers in the mobile app marketplace,” according to a press release on Tuesday. [...]
It would also require Apple and Google to offer developers “equal access to interfaces, features, and development tools without cost or discrimination,” as well as allow users to remove or hide pre-installed apps. Violations of the bill would result in penalties from the Federal Trade Commission, along with an additional civil penalty of up to $1 million for each violation.
This is a stunt from the Epic/Spotify-backed Coalition for App Fairness that we’ll probably never hear about again.
2025-05-07 01:10:14
About 16 minutes into the podcast (the whole thing is a great succinct interview):
Kafka: You said Fortnite is going to come back to iOS. You guys were kicked off the platform in 2020 for violating Apple’s rules. There’s nothing in the judge’s ruling that says Apple has to reinstate Fortnite on iOS. Have you talked to Apple? How do you imagine Fortnite will come back to iOS?
Sweeney: Epic has a valid [Apple] developer account in good standing. Our subsidiary Epic Games Sweden opened up an account in order to distribute Fortnite in the European Union. Our dealings with Apple on that account have been managed by their developer relations team, who have been cordial.
Kafka: Do you feel confident that I will be able to play Fortnite on my iPhone later this week?
Sweeney: I believe so. I would be very surprised — well, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we had a bug that took a day or two more to fix — but I would be very surprised if Apple decided to brave the geopolitical storm of blocking a major app from iOS.
We’ve told Apple what we’re doing.
But Apple has, for the last five years, already blocked a major game — Fortnite — from iOS. If Apple were going to allow Fortnite back into the App Store they could have done so at any point in the last four years. And there’s nothing, not a word, in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s decision last week that says Apple needs to reinstate Epic Games. I think Apple just stays the course and Fortnite remains persona non grata as far as the App Store is concerned.
But I could be wrong. Sweeney tweeted over the weekend “Not Monday or Tuesday. Beyond that, we’re working as hard as possible and aren’t certain what day it will be ready.”
Me, I’m not holding my breath.
2025-05-07 01:00:20
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