Oracle is down ~19.7% over the past 5 trading days. The market is treating Oracle as a partial proxy for OpenAI risk. Oracle signed an AI infrastructure deal commonly cited at roughly $300B over approximately 5 years, with the contract period beginning in 2027. That figure reflects contracted capacity and commitments (approximately $60B annually), not a single upfront cheque. Still, it implies massive capex and financing pressure—Oracle has already secured $18B in new debt with an additional $38B in negotiations pending—with debt and cash flow timing doing the real work. There is no clause saying Oracle must recoup the spend in 5 years. But the economics are front-loaded. Oracle reported negative free cash flow of approximately $10B in its most recent quarter and increased full-year capex guidance from $35B to $50B in December 2025. If utilization ramps slower than expected, margins disappoint, or OpenAI's revenue projections falter (the company projects $200B+ annual revenues by 2030 while currently generating ~$13B), the balance sheet takes the hit long before the upside shows up. That is what investors are reacting to. The credit default swap spreads on Oracle debt have surged to five-year highs, reflecting market anxiety about servicing ~$100B in total debt while burning billions annually through 2027, when contract revenues begin. This is not a verdict on whether AI is real. It is about execution risk and capital intensity. Even if AI demand explodes, Oracle is competing in a market dominated by hyperscalers. Google, AWS, and Microsoft do not need Oracle to stumble for Oracle's risk profile to matter. More critically, OpenAI's single $300B contract represents approximately 66% of Oracle's entire $455B remaining performance obligations backlog, creating severe concentration risk. OpenAI itself faces competitive pressure from Google Gemini, which has captured approximately 13.7% market share (up from near-zero in 2024), forcing OpenAI to divert resources from revenue growth back to core product improvement precisely when it needs maximum cash generation.

Atari is getting into hotels. More precisely, Atari is licensing its name to a real estate developer betting that retro gamers want to stay in an Asteroids-themed resort. If this were closer to a Chuck E. Cheese on steroids, with a serious arcade, events space, and a real convention centre, I would be interested as a guest. As an investment, no. The Atari brand still has cultural weight, but not enough to reliably get the average person to book a stay. I would like to be wrong.

Retro Dodo

Atari Launches Hotel Chain & Invites Gamers To Invest In 'The Future Of Hospitality'

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Damn. There’s no way for the video game industry to spin this. Console hardware sales are at their lowest level since 1995. November unit sales for 2025 came in at 1.6M. Barely above where the market sat three decades ago. The difference is context. In 1995, the PlayStation, Saturn, and Nintendo 64 were about to reset the entire industry. In 2025, there is no cavalry coming. This was a launch year for the Switch 2. Combined sales of Switch 2 and the original Switch are still below Switch sales last year. That should not happen in a healthy market. Elsewhere looks worse. PlayStation hardware sales are down 40%. Xbox is down 70%. That is not a cycle. That is structural damage. One problem is that the previous generation is good enough. PS4, Switch, and Xbox One still run most games fine. Visual gains are incremental. Performance gains are niche. That is why new games keep shipping on old hardware. If performance does matter, PC is the obvious upgrade path. A GPU costs more than a console. But console pricing has not fallen in 5 years. It has risen. The value proposition has flipped. Consoles also face pressure from handheld PCs. The Switch 2 has respectable hardware. It does not meaningfully outclass the Steam Deck OLED. Against Legion Go or ROG Ally models, it loses outright. These devices sell fewer units, but they extract more money per unit and serve a broader use case. Then there is the PC ecosystem itself. Games are cheaper. Online is free. Storefronts compete. Steam alone will see roughly 20,000 releases this year. That scale makes console libraries look constrained and curated by comparison. A new Steam Machine is also expected next year. Pricing is unknown. But it will not be framed as a console. It will be a PC with a console interface. At $1,000, that is defensible because it is a general-purpose computer. Documents, media, creative work, keyboard and mouse support. Consoles cannot justify that comparison. Low-end pressure is just as real. Smart TVs now handle gaming natively. Pair a controller to an Apple TV and you are done. Many LG TVs ship with Xbox, GeForce Now, and Luna built in. No external hardware required. Below that, Android devices and Raspberry Pi systems cover emulation. This is not only piracy. There is active homebrew. New releases for obsolete systems. Fantasy consoles like PICO-8. With tools like FEX, running PC software on ARM hardware is no longer a barrier. Console prices are rising while being attacked from both ends. High-end PCs above. Old consoles, smart TVs, mobile devices, and hobbyist hardware below. The final problem is collectibility. Consoles used to mean shelves. Boxes. Physical proof of taste. Digital-only strategies erase that entirely. When ownership stops being visible, emotional attachment drops. If you are not buying a console out of habit, there is little reason to buy one at all. The sales numbers reflect that. And the trajectory is not improving.

IGN

Video Game Physical Software and Hardware Sales Just Had the Worst November in the U.S. Since 1995 - IGN

Last month, November, was a shockingly terrible month for video game sales in the U.S. While we traditionally think of November as a huge sales mon...

Alien Storm is SEGA asking a simple question: what if Golden Axe, but with xenomorphs? That tracks. SEGA loved aliens. Enough to make Alien Syndrome, Alien Soldier, and Alien Storm. This was a recurring obsession. As SEGA beat ’em ups go, it’s solid. It just lacks the cult weight of Streets of Rage 2. That bar is unreal and still untouched. The game mixes in first-person, on-rails shooting between stages. Similar idea to Shinobi. It works and breaks up the pacing. You can tell it’s an early Genesis title. The color palette is muted. In 1990, this looked impressive. The NES could not do this. Hence the whole “Genesis does” era. If you were there, you know. If you like Golden Axe, Alien Storm will land. Not essential, but worth playing.

Empire of the Gods is a game I bought about 10 years ago and never played. Until now. I skipped it for one simple reason. It was a card game. The screenshots looked flat. I bought it during my potato-laptop phase, when I was scraping Steam for anything that would run. A few months later I upgraded my hardware, that constraint disappeared, and Empire of the Gods got abandoned. That was a mistake. I finally booted it up today and it is genuinely good. The tutorial is awful. It is not a tutorial so much as a dense wall of text. Poorly structured. Actively confusing. You will not understand the game from it. I didn’t. I learned by brute force. The core idea is simple. You play cards to raise attributes like Power, Faith, Wealth, and Life. Each stage sets target values. Hit them and you win. The tension comes from tradeoffs. Raising one attribute requires sacrificing another. You are constantly bleeding something you might need later. Every decision is a small act of damage control. When you finally clear a stage, it feels earned. The visuals are fine. This is a card game, not a spectacle. The Egyptian theme is consistent and readable. The music leans into a restrained, quasi-mystical tone and does its job without getting in the way. It also runs natively on Linux, which is a nice bonus. It should, given that it launched in 2008. If your machine has 1GB of RAM, you are covered. This sat untouched in my library for a decade. It shouldn’t have.

30 years ago, Shining Force on the SEGA Genesis set the bar for me. Deep systems, clean pacing, real tactical weight. It made me a lifelong strategy RPG fan. Plenty of good games followed. Persona included. None of them ever felt like Shining Force. Until Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga. This is the closest thing to a modern Shining Force. It is not a grind-first RPG. Positioning matters. Formation matters. You decide whether to press forward or bait the enemy into a bad engagement. The map actually matters. The art style lands exactly where it should. Clearly 16-bit inspired, but far more detailed. Strong character portraits. Strong battlefield readability. The music does its job without getting in the way. It runs flawlessly on the Steam Deck. Low overhead. Long battery life. Perfect for short sessions in a coffee shop or long stretches on the couch. It feels designed for handheld play, even if it was not. A genuinely great strategy RPG. One of the best in the genre.

Markets are drifting out of “fear” and back toward neutral. Yes, even as equity prices pull back. Price is not the signal here. Flows are. First, capital is rotating out of the Magnificent 7 and into the rest of the market. This is being framed as “AI bubble fear,” but the behavior matters more than the narrative. Money is not leaving equities. It is reallocating within them. Second, call volume is starting to outweigh puts. Traders are positioning for upside despite recent declines. That tells you sentiment is already decoupling from price. Third, and most important, money is moving out of bonds and back into stocks. Credit risk is creeping up. If a credit crunch is even a possibility, long-duration bonds look worse, not safer. Capital still needs a home. It is not going into crypto. By default, it flows into equities. Context matters. In 2025, we saw roughly 50 days of sustained fear sentiment. During that same period, the NASDAQ Composite rose about 20%. That is not explosive growth. But growth during persistent fear is a tell. Fear is unstable. It exhausts itself. Neutral is the midpoint, not the destination. Greed follows.

My Steam Replay for 2025 is out. I played 431 games. These were my favourites. 1. The Gunk 2. Sparklite 3. Control 4. RoboCop: Rogue City 5. Shadowgrounds **The Gunk** landed at the top, easily. A game about cleaning a planet with a vacuum sounds like a gimmick. It is not. There is nothing else quite like it. The visuals are gorgeous. I played a lot of it on the TV with my daughter, who was genuinely transfixed. So was I. This is a major departure from the SteamWorld team, and it paid off. **Sparklite** surprised me. I did not expect to sink that much time into it. It is a roguelike RPG that clearly channels old Zelda, wrapped in clean pixel art. Simple loop. Very sticky. **Control** benefited massively from this year’s update. Improved HDR and ray tracing changed the entire presentation. The world finally looks the way it always wanted to. Strange, confident, surreal. One of the best protagonists in modern games, doing impossible things without explanation. **RoboCop: Rogue City** is one of the best FPS games I have played in years. It works because it actually feels like a RoboCop film. Peter Weller’s voice matters more than it should, and it makes the whole thing click. For fun, I docked my Steam Deck to a CRT. That somehow made it even better. **Shadowgrounds** took me 10 years to finish. Worth it. A proper top-down shooter. Right up there with Alien Breed on the Amiga. Great weapons. Great monsters. The combat just flows. One more stat matters. 51% of my playtime was on the Steam Deck. Nearly four years in, I use it more than both of my desktops. Those desktops have serious GPUs. People keep calling the Deck “long in the tooth.” It still plays most of my Steam library without complaint.

trottier.wong

Check out my 2025 Steam Replay

There’s a reason I’m not stressed about Netflix or Paramount buying Warner Bros. Discovery. When it comes to video games, almost anything would be an upgrade over the current situation. WBD is the caretaker of a staggeringly large video game archive. In terms of historical depth, it arguably rivals or exceeds Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. You would never guess that, because they do nothing with it. Through the Midway Games acquisition alone, they control franchises like: * Mortal Kombat * NBA Jam * Gauntlet * Paperboy * Primal Rage * Hard Drivin’ In 2009, WBD acquired the Atari Games library and most of Midway’s assets for $33 million. That lineage runs straight through the golden age of arcades. This is the company that owns Atari Games, Midway, and Monolith Productions. A core pillar of arcade history going back to the 1970s. Not a side catalogue. Not a footnote. Foundational material. What do they do with it? Almost nothing. They do not preserve it. They do not reissue it. They barely even acknowledge it exists. There is no serious effort to monetize, contextualize, or maintain it. This is not stewardship. It is hoarding. Take *Hydra* as a concrete example. Arcade release in 1990. Home computer ports followed in 1991 for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and ZX Spectrum. The Atari Lynx version arrived in 1992. And today? There is still no straightforward, legal way to play it on modern, reliable hardware. Not because the rights are unclear. Not because the tech is hard. Because WBD does not care. These games deserve legal access, proper preservation, and basic respect as cultural artifacts. Instead, they are left to decay while the rights holder shrugs. So yes. If someone buys WBD and actually does something with this video game legacy, good. Indifference is the worst possible owner.

Typically, I make coffee with an Aeropress or a pour over. Today I used a French press. But not the standard method. Low water. Short steep. 250 mL of boiling water. 1 tbsp of grounds. Steeped for 1 minute. Poured straight into a mug. This works because acids extract first. You get brightness and sourness before bitterness has time to show up. The short contact time keeps the harsher compounds out. The body comes from the French press itself. Oils and fines pass through, so even though the coffee is under-extracted, it still feels dense and round. I like it because it’s sharp without being harsh. Bright, concentrated, and clean enough to drink black. It keeps what I want and skips what I don’t.