Firewatch Aesthetic 🎮, Steam Failure Stats 📉, WebAssembly Games 👨💻
🎯 Strategy & Survival for 2026 Devs
AI, Fairness, and Cybersecurity: The 2026 Games Law Survival Guide
A veteran games lawyer revisits last year’s predictions and delivers a stark forecast of the 2026 legal battlefield. Expect accelerating AI regulation, stricter rules on dark patterns and virtual currencies, and mounting pressure on loot boxes under broader "digital fairness" and youth protection agendas. Cybersecurity and product safety laws will start to hit even early access and single-player titles. For anyone shipping games into the EU or running live services globally, this is a roadmap of where regulators will aim next.
Stop Blaming the Engine: Real Talk for Indie Devs in 2026
Thomas Brush tackles a common chat comment: “Unity, that’s your problem,” and calls it out as the mindset holding many devs back. Instead of treating engines like religions or scapegoats, he urges developers to accept that problems are part of the craft and to solve them with a smile. Success, he argues, comes from consistency—sticking with an engine, a game idea, and actually finishing. He also warns viewers to judge advice by shipped games, not confidence, and briefly promotes his indie dev course.
📈 Launching & Learning from Market
Steam 2025 by the Numbers: Why Most Games Fail (And Yours Might Not)
Steam saw around 19,600 new games in 2025, with the median release earning only about $318—but that’s only half the story. This analysis explains how hobby projects, first attempts, asset flips, and AI slop heavily skew the numbers. For serious devs, the real competition is a much smaller pool of professional-quality games, where 100+ review successes are actually increasing. The video also spotlights tiny teams and solo devs pulling in multi-million-dollar revenues, showing that focused indies can still win big.
From Zero to First Game: A Realistic Beginner’s Guide to Gamedev
If you’re stuck at “where do I even start?” in game dev, this guide walks you through every major decision. You’ll learn how to pick between Unity, Unreal, and Godot, what languages and visual scripting options you’ll actually use, and why small projects like Pong or Flappy Bird are essential stepping stones. Brandon stresses using pre-made assets, being careful with AI (especially for art), and embracing the frustration of getting stuck as a powerful learning tool. He wraps with a push toward game jams for real growth and feedback.
🛠️ Crafting Beautiful & Performant Games
Recreating Firewatch’s Look in Unity Using Only Free Assets
Learn how to get that iconic Firewatch aesthetic without spending a cent on art. This tutorial breaks down a full Unity environment build: converting asset packs to .blend and .psd for instant iteration, standardizing scale with primitive cubes, stylizing foliage and rocks, and painting custom skybox mountains and pine silhouettes. Simple tricks like random grass heights, tuned fog, and subtle audio push the atmosphere over the top.
From React to WebAssembly: Ben Visness on Handmade, Browsers, and Games
Mozilla engineer and Handmade Network lead Ben Visness traces his path from Lego robots and Geocities sites to building WebAssembly compilers for Firefox. He contrasts ad-hoc “it works, ship it” webdev with real engineering grounded in profiling and measurement, and explains how the Handmade ethos reshaped his thinking. The conversation dives deep into WebAssembly’s current limits—especially memory—and why that still blocks serious games and engines on the web. Along the way, Ben outlines how Handmade Network’s jams and manifesto aim to push better software, not just more of it.