I'm hearing a lot about game addiction in the last few days the BBC and British press has been reporting a rise in children with the issue and recognising it as a real mental illness due to games such as PUBG and Fortnite, here's my two cents and it's a long one;
Gaming addiction seems to be reported widely and seems to stem from multiplayer gaming and specifically online gaming and apparently trigger the same brain activity of that of serial gambling. I myself am not an online gamer, over the years, I have found online gaming to be nothing but a novelty and not a necessity, but the industry sees it the other way due to rising trends.
How online gaming addiction can be solved;
Match limiters: Instead of leaving your kids to safety shoot other people around the world in the face match after match after match (which is morally questionable in the first place)...developers need to implement a match limiter system which is activated with either a controller based input (like a long button pressed cheat) or a PIN.
This works two ways. Online gaming cannot be paused, so match after match can happen, hopping lobby to lobby and this is where the addiction happens. Win or lose, gamers jump into another game and another game after a short period of waiting and simply, it's a trap, as they say, time flies when you're having fun. Put an optional limiter on how many matches people can play win or lose as a system of control, this can be used for parents or a kind of alarm system for grown adult players, the timed PIN system or long winded button press system after a certain amount of matches would make it more difficult to keep playing after a match, most people would be impatient and not bother to input it and be automatically kicked by their own system, not the server. The developers need to do their part too and not punish any players kicked out due to the limiter and perhaps cater special servers just for the match limit players.
The wide reports of game addiction seems to be online games and single player games are very rarely reported, single player and online games are not the same. People have more control over leaving a singleplayer game because of saves and being able to pause the game. People can choose to leave a game or just turn it off because they are stuck in a part, tired or have no pressure in choosing to leave a game unfinished at a certain part. Online gaming is missing this kind of 'endgame' point and needs to address it soon as possible before children and adults start showing the same brain activity symptoms as gambling.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
