91. The Pros and Cons of Microsoft Buying Activision Blizzard

This week, Alanah, Mike, and Austin sat down to chat to Tonda Ros - the director of Blue Prince. Apologies for Tonda's echo!

Alanah and Austin chat Blue Prince, addictive video games, and Satisfactory.

This week, Mike, Alanah, and Austin chat to co-founder of Stoic, the creators of The Banner Saga and, more recently, Towerborne!

This week, Alanah and Mike discuss the Switch 2 presentation! 

This week, Alanah and Mike start out by talking about the lay-offs across WB Games, then jump into talking about Microsoft's newly announced AI "Muse", and then we - finally - get Alanah's thoughts on Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

This week, Austin and Alanah sit down to talk to Mike Laidlaw, the game director of Dragon Age: Origins who most recently started his own studio and make ETERNAL STRANDS. Which Austin also worked on, because of course he did. He cannot be contained.

Apologies for the delay here - the audio file was corrupted! This week, Mike and Alanah are joined by Strange Scaffold's Xalavier Nelson Jr to talk about how the studio makes so many high quality games, and what it really means to be a good game director.

After a break due to the LA fires - which we talk about to begin with here - we chat about a recent 200-page document called "The State of Video Games in 2025" from Matthew Ball. If you'd like links to the charities we mentioned, please check those out on the YouTube version of the podcast!

Happy four years of PWL! Sorry about Mike's audio here, we don't know what happened.

Alanah left her job at Sony, and Mike got in trouble for saying something on Bluesky. We discuss the state of the games industry now that it's December 2024, and the notion that "indies will save" everything.