Why the video game industry may be sliding toward its next big crash

A crisis of gaming? The last couple of weeks have served as a capstone to what’s become a bad few years for the video game industry, including recent layoffs at Xbox and Bungie. Now it appears the larger sector is headed directly into some significant crash, as several unsustainable practices all seem to be approaching a crisis point at once, writes GeekWire gaming correspondent Thomas Wilde in a new commentary. Read more.

Bad timing: Which is worse, sailing your yacht through the city where your company just made mass job cuts, or getting named to a U.S. Federal Reserve panel on jobs days after announcing thousands of layoffs? It might not be a full Zuck, but Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is getting lots of attention, and not in a good way, for the latter this week. The gaming press is having a field day.

The WALL-E economy: Our modern app-driven landscape has created an economy reminiscent of the 2008 Pixar movie, where we willingly trade our physical, mental, and environmental well-being for tech-fueled comfort and dopamine hits. Armon Dadgar, a UW computer science alum and former co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, fears the trend will rapidly accelerate with AI. Read the opinion.

A federal judge handed a pre-trial win to Zillow and Redfin, denying the Federal Trade Commission's request to automatically declare their $100 million rental listings partnership "presumptively unlawful" ahead of a bench trial next month. Read more.

Hot Links:

• What do EV owners name their vehicles? Seattle-area startup Recurrent registers drivers through its battery intelligence platform and has the answers. (Recurrent)

• OpenAI and Anthropic employees could hypothetically buy nearly one-third of San Francisco’s homes with their pooled IPO earnings, based on predicted stock values. (Redfin) 

• Tacoma, Wash., joins the growing list of cities rejecting new data centers, saying the facilities aren't explicitly covered as an allowable use under existing code. (Seattle Times)

• Amazon is delivering earthquake relief supplies to Venezuela via weekly flights in partnership with Airlink, the U.S. State Department, and the UN World Food Programme. (Business Wire, Bettina Stix via LinkedIn)

• Wally Funk, the accomplished female pilot who at the time was the oldest person to fly to space when she boarded a Blue Origin rocket in 2021, died this week at age 87. (NYT, Jeff Bezos via X)

• A Blue Origin New Shepard rocket that was the first reusable booster to launch a capsule to suborbital space and then successfully land vertically went on display at the National Air and Space Museum. (Smithsonian Institution)

Thanks for subscribing, and have a great day. — GeekWire editor Todd Bishop, [email protected]; reporter Kurt Schlosser, [email protected]; and reporter Lisa Stiffler, [email protected].