Howdy! This month's newsletter is weirdly enough actually filled with news! I'd like to start by mentioning some changes to Incremental Social. I discussed these in the last newsletter but they are now implemented: The Matrix chat and MBin services have been shut down. I additionally removed Zitadel, the auth service, as the version we were using is no longer being supported. The only remaining service actually using Zitadel for auth was the Incremental Social Code Forge, so I've gone ahead and promoted the accounts there as the new canonical Incremental Social accounts. New users can now register there and in the future use that account for new Incremental Social services. Existing accounts have already received an email about resetting their password as part of the migration process. Oh, and as part of this migration I also got static site hosting back up and running again! If you'd like to host your static games whose code is on the Incremental Social code forge, follow these instructions!
Next bit of news: The new annual survey is coming up soon! If there's any new questions you think would be worth including, please let me know! I'm really excited to see how the responses will change this year, especially surrounding AI sentiments.
Speaking of AI, I also wanted to note the increase in game releases. As we're all aware, AI has massively increased the rate of new games being released. But the rate has kept going up and up even more - Itch.io reported their daily uploads doubled (from the already massively increased rate) in just the last 2 months! They're addressing the increase with more ways to filter out AI projects and cleaning up some of the AI slop on the site. The most recent Steam Next Fest also had a record number of demos, a record that keeps getting beaten with every SNF. Valve seems very reluctant to add any ways for users to filter out games made with AI though, much to gamers' chagrin. I wonder just how bad the situation has to get before they follow suit.
I myself have continued changing the curation flow for this newsletter, as the increasing rate of games continues to make curation more difficult. I'm hoping I've found a formula that keeps the time needed reasonable, while trying to ensure notable releases aren't missed or ignored by blanket rules. Please reach out if you're interesting in helping out or have ideas on curation.