Compared to the PAXes or even MAGFests of the world, Awesome Games Done Quick is itsy bitsy. Around 2,000 speedrunners and fans mill about in Pittsburgh’s Wyndham Grand hotel, with a theater where speedruns take place serving as the obvious centerpiece. Other attractions – like an arcade, a game room with consoles and PCs, and a small artist alley – exist, but they feel more like brief breaks from the 24/7 speedrun deluge than fully fledged alternatives. The entire event spans just a handful of rooms across two floors. Some might view this as a downside, but I find it refreshing. 

There’s an intimacy to AGDQ that makes it feel uniquely cozy. If you make a friend, you will run into them again. Runners and hosts are accessible and friendly. Vocal audience participation during runs is common. The vibe is slumber party, with some audience members going so far as to wear pajamas to late-night runs. 

In my few days attending, I’ve also come to appreciate the event’s focus: There’s one main thing pretty much everyone is here for, so we all have a shared destination and set of hyper-specific discussion topics. The standard model of a video game convention (or comic convention, or anime convention) lends itself to sprawl and bloat. They can even be actively unpleasant to attend – squirming seas of people shuffling between halls, attempting to extract amusement from vast selections of activities that rarely rise above the level of Fine. 

AGDQ, in its current state, lacks unnecessary flab. This makes sense, considering that it began as a group of 20 friends in founder Mike Uyama’s mother’s basement. It was not born as a convention, even as it has since bolted on some of the format’s more common trappings. But that was 2010 and this is now; AGDQ attracts tens of thousands of concurrent viewers across Twitch and YouTube, and the organization behind it now employs over 100 people. 

GDQ, meanwhile, is now far more than just one event, with AGDQ joined by Summer Games Done Quick, as well as a series of smaller charity marathons hosted by satellite organizations like Frame Fatales and Black In A Flash. Every non-event week, meanwhile, GDQ hosts regularly scheduled “Hotfix” programming, with two themed shows each weekday as well as weekend specials. There’s more to speedrunning than GDQ, but it has, in many ways, evolved into a one-stop shop for the average person’s speedrunning needs.

What does this growth mean for the event that started it all, though? GDQ director of operations Matt Merkle doesn’t plan to shy away from further expansion and experimentation. 

"We've already actually expanded,” he told Aftermath. “The artist alley is a new addition. We just started that last summer. We have amazing artists supporting the event – the stuff they do for us to advertise the event. We wanted to bring them into the event and let people purchase their works. ... I think it's been fantastic. The community really loves that artist alley, and we'll continue to grow that as we get into bigger hotels that can support it."

But Merkle is cognizant of the fact that he’s in possession of bottled lightning. 

“Obviously speedrunning is gonna be the primary focus of the event for the foreseeable future,” he said. “But we'll always continue to experiment with different things. Over the summer, we had a live concert, which was really cool to do for the first time. ... We definitely continue to experiment so that when people come back to the event year after year, they have something new to experience on top of the stuff that they know and love."

The show’s format, Merkle added, helps it nimbly avoid some of more traditional conventions’ biggest pitfalls.

“The event lasts for seven days rather than three or four, so you have plenty of time to experience the entire event – to go around and enjoy yourself,” he said. “We don't focus on panels as much as other conventions, so people aren't focused on just getting in lines and waiting for the panel they want to see most or something. Because we control the growth and ensure that there's always plenty of space and time to do everything, it makes it so you don't feel rushed, you don't feel cramped. You feel that you have space to do what you want and hang out with your friends."

Even as AGDQ continues to grow and attract more attendees, Merkle wants to preserve the show’s unique vibe.

“Intimacy is a core part of it,” he said.

That intimacy – and a rigorous set of rules – means people feel safe at AGDQ. This comes through whether you’re in attendance or watching along from home. What other video game event, after all, boasts “trans rights” as its rallying cry? Merkle recognizes the importance of maintaining that core component of the event as well. 

“If you’re harassing anybody in our community or making people feel uncomfortable, we don’t want you here,” he said. “I think the community has come to expect that type of vibe at this event, and that’s why we have so many people that feel safe to come to these events. … We take it seriously.” 

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Last week, Warframe’s hotly anticipated Old Peace update launched, kicking off a saga that digs into the very foundations of the nearly 13-year-old game’s lore. Of course, like clockwork, servers immediately took a tumble, resulting in crashes, outages, and chat issues. But why has this pattern become so predictable with online games? Especially when developers are well aware that a storm of their own making is on the horizon?

During a Game Awards-adjacent event celebrating The Old Peace’s launch last week, I asked creative director Rebb Ford.   

"You've gotta spin up capacity,” she told Aftermath, referring to the practice of paying money to a distribution partner for additional servers ahead of or during moments when many players will be trying to access content. “You're allowing so many connections. We're an always-online game, right, so every time a player does something, there's a server call. There's something that needs to be verified server and client side. … Login, mission complete, anything that needs to talk to us to say 'You did this, you did that’ – it happens to us at a volume level that's very hard to account for."

In The Old Peace’s case, Digital Extremes was ready for a stampede the moment it opened the gates, but not quite ready enough.

"We actually didn't fall over as much as I thought we would,” said Ford. “That's when we realized 'Oh, we didn't think this was gonna be bigger than TennoCon [Warframe’s annual convention that often drives record player numbers].' We spun up IRC servers, we spun up things just to deal with volume. But sometimes you just cannot be prepared enough when you didn't predict it to be the third-best day in the history of the game. That was an error on our part, but it's not so much a tech error; it was an anticipation error. We fixed it very quickly."

The ability to quickly rectify server issues is also the result of preparation – in some cases years of preparation.

"One of our most important things to do is make sure people can get the content as fast as possible,” said Ford. “With Warframe, when we have the build or the update, we release it to our distributing partners, and we do something called a pre-heat of our CDN, or content delivery network – which is basically us saying 'People shouldn't all be fetching the game data from one node.' Because that will take forever. It'll get congested. So we distribute it, and this is through years of network partner shopping, working with really good network partners. We have content servers in 16 or 17 central population hubs."

The pre-heat, Ford explained, ensures that the whole network doesn’t hinge on a single point of potential failure.

“So sometimes you'll be going in the Philippines instead of being routed to our deploying headquarters, which is Ontario,” she said. “We pre-heated our server structure across the globe so that people can fetch [new content] quicker, and that takes a lot of load off.”

But that’s only one stair in what Ford characterized as a winding staircase of individual, overlapping needs.

"So that's the first point of failure: Can you download the game at all?” she said. “Second point of failure is: Can you login at all? When that happens, that all comes to us through login capacity. That one, you just have to spin up more capacity. Then you have the question of 'Can people play missions?' So you can kind of see the staircase: Can you download the game? Can you login to the game? Can you play the game? And each one of those is a slightly different sector of stability."

In Warframe’s case, elements can function independently, but if they’re not all working in conjunction, players quickly begin to see the seams.

“A lot of people can be logged into the game, and that's cool, but if you can't play, [then there's a problem],” said Ford. “It's like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Can you chat? You don't need chat to play the game, but chat servers run independently. Those were hit the hardest [on Old Peace launch day], and we fixed it fairly fast by spinning up more capacity." 

Games are complicated, as is the process of distributing them to millions of different computers with as many hardware configurations as there are stars in the sky. You will not be surprised to learn, then, that many other things can also go wrong.

“We have issues where we release new code in this build, and then maybe one piece of code fires every second on a heartbeat,” Ford said. “And sometimes we find these heartbeats, and we're like 'What is pinging the servers every second on the second,' and we're like 'It's the new title system we put in,' for example. ‘It's checking against server-client to issue you a title, but it's doing it in a way where we were unsure because it's checking all this indexed stuff.’"

Warframe has been around for over a decade and regularly pulls in tens – or in Old Peace launch day’s case, hundreds – of thousands of concurrent players. Nonetheless, said Ford, Digital Extremes still frets about The Ramifications as though it were a much smaller company.

"We still feel very young and scrappy, and we're like 'Can we even afford $600 more per month in capacity?'” she said. “That's the kind of question we ask ourselves on launch day. And then we're like 'Just do it! Just do it!'"

Warframe’s servers weren’t quite able to withstand the sheer weight of years’ worth of anticipation on launch day, but Ford was relieved that they didn’t go down for “hours and hours,” which would’ve necessitated a suitably less jubilant speech at the launch event in LA. 

"It's exciting. It's thrilling. Everyone did an amazing job,” she said. “We asked our team to do the impossible with this update, so even though those little hiccups happened, we had two speeches prepared – funeral or the celebration – and we undoubtedly got to do the celebration."

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Today the overwhelming majority of workers at Doom studio id Software – 165 of around 185 total employees – announced that they’re forming a wall-to-wall union in conjunction with Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union that’s aided thousands of game workers across Microsoft in organizing.

"id Software is historically important – one of the more famous American studios that survived a length of time that few others have,” id Software producer Andrew Willis, who was part of the organizing effort from the jump and filed the initial paperwork to CWA, told Aftermath. “So it feels really awesome to get this done for something with such historical and cultural importance."

Workers at id began organizing around a year and a half ago, but things kicked into high gear following Microsoft’s unceremonious closure of several Bethesda studios in 2024.

"With Bethesda unionizing, it was a push for people [at id] to start talking, and that's when it started,” id Software lead services programmer Chris Hays told Aftermath. “But then the big push that got it rolling was the closure of Tango [Gameworks] and layoffs within Microsoft at Arkane Austin. It was a wakeup call for a lot of people. People decided that it was time that we took our future into our own hands."

"The big push that got it rolling was the closure of Tango [Gameworks] and layoffs within Microsoft at Arkane Austin. It was a wakeup call for a lot of people."

id itself, Hays said, has suffered “a few” layoffs “here and there” in recent years, but nothing comparable to the scale of Zenimax Online Studios, which lost hundreds of employees earlier this year amid Microsoft’s latest round of mass layoffs and project cancellations. Now, he believes, is the time to secure workers’ rights – before the scythe swings, as opposed to after.

"Not that we're not scared that [layoffs] will one day come," said Hays. "In fact, avoiding each of the previous rounds has made us more anxious about if the next round will be us. And the most recent round of layoffs happened after several [studios] had already organized. People [at id] can see what it was that they got. We got to see them negotiating where they didn't actually lose their jobs [for a couple months]. They were still on payroll. They still had their health insurance. ... They had the extra time to make sure they could get their lives [in order], and many have actually gotten their jobs back through negotiations on where they could place people in the company." 

CWA has been able to successfully unionize so many studios within Microsoft and Activision Blizzard in large part due to a legally binding neutrality agreement it struck with the company in 2022 when it was facing regulatory scrutiny over its $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard. That deal lapsed earlier this year, but according to Hays, only on the Activision Blizzard side of things.

"For us under Zenimax, there's actually a separate neutrality agreement, and that one is still valid until May [2026]," said Hays. "But that was definitely on our minds when we were looking at when we wanted to think that we had enough support [to unionize]. … We knew that it was really special for us to have the neutrality agreement, to have the freedom to be able to talk to each other more openly and not face the kind of pushback you would have in other unionization campaigns. We wanted to make sure that we took advantage of the benefit while we had it."

While the union plans to conduct a bargaining survey before members go to the table with Microsoft to hammer out a contract, preliminary discussions have focused on a few pillars: benefits, remote work, and AI. 

"There's a lot of blind spots in our benefits, and a lot of us don't know what we have and what we don't and where things are lacking,” said Hays. “When talking with a lot of people, some would say 'Oh, I think we're lacking this particular kind of benefit, or something around child care.' Personally, I'm really motivated to get protections around remote work and responsible use of AI."

"There's definitely a directive from Microsoft to use [AI] more.”

Remote work has been a sticking point at multiple Microsoft studios, with many issuing return-to-office mandates despite teams’ demonstrable success collaborating from across the country – and even the globe – in 2020 and 2021. 

"We actually launched Doom Eternal during covid,” said Hays. “The month of [the launch], we started our work from home. ... We did a launch event, the whole internet fell apart, and we had to learn how to do all of that remote. And then starting a project [Doom: The Dark Ages] from the beginning, all remote, we learned a lot of lessons. On my team, we learned to change how we work, to be more remote friendly. We ended up becoming more productive as a result. So we've done this before. We've learned lessons, and I think we can continue to use that. We shouldn't just throw away all the great wins we got with remote work."

As for AI, Willis was cagey about precisely how it’s being used within id, noting that going into specifics would involve divulging secrets about proprietary tech. But he said that in his view, some of the current applications are “good,” while others are… less so.

"There's definitely a directive from Microsoft to use [AI] more,” Willis said. “In what ways and how careful they're being about implementing it within the studio to actually benefit the creation of a better game or a more efficient process, I personally don't think that's being done in a careful enough way to have it be beneficial.”

Last year, the Zenimax QA union secured AI protections that commit the company to uses of AI that "augment human ingenuity and capacities ... without causing workers harm" and require that Zenimax provides notice to the union in cases where "AI implementation may impact the work of union members and to bargain those impacts upon request." Willis and Hays hope the new union can make something similar happen under id’s roof.

"We are going to be in a fortunate position in that we have a lot of other people who've gone through this,” said Hays, “so we can look at what they have bargained for, especially around AI, and take that as a starting place, which hopefully means that it's going to be easier for us than anyone before."

Microsoft’s support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – which continues despite a supposed ceasefire – is also potentially on the docket.

"It would be difficult to say [if we’ll make Israel a core bargaining issue] without seeing what the bargaining surveys comment on, but I can say for myself personally that, yeah, I want no part in [Israel's] usage of Microsoft tools and the deals between Israel and Microsoft," said Willis.

"The folks that are in charge of a lot of these decision-making processes, it's a lot of Ivy League MBAs, a lot of folks with zero game experience."

More broadly, Willis believes the union will allow for more input from developers, as opposed to execs who have never shipped a game and, indeed, might not play them at all.

"We see the direction the industry is headed,” said Willis. “The folks that are in charge of a lot of these decision-making processes, it's a lot of Ivy League MBAs, a lot of folks with zero game experience – not just from the management standpoint, but zero experience in actually making games. ... I find little evidence of them really enjoying games or playing games personally."

“I think the more video game studios that unionize, and the greater percentage of video game employees that are in a union, it's not just better for them as individuals or folks that are raising families or have mortgages; it keeps talent from shedding,” he added. “You get to keep people in the industry who have experience and the amount of game credits that allow them to do things and create games that a contract-only or much more volatile workforce simply couldn't.”

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Earlier today, Humble followed in the hoofprints of Steam and Epic by yanking bafflingly controversial art game Horses from its digital shelves – in this case after the storefront had already made it available for purchase. Now, mere hours later, Humble has relisted Horses.

IGN’s Rebekah Valentine broke the news, which was immediately met with a collective “Huh.” Aftermath reached out to Humble for more information but did not receive a reply as of this publishing. 

Speaking to Aftermath, Santa Ragione co-founder and director Pietro Righi Riva said that Humble temporarily pulled Horses to reevaluate it, but found no reason to set that decision in stone.

"In short, their team saw the press coverage and temporarily delisted Horses to reevaluate it," Riva said. "After a full review they determined that while the content is heavy, nothing in the game warrants removal from their store."

"We are grateful to Humble for having reconsidered and for taking the time to check out the game, although I wish they had informed us that this process was ongoing!" he added. "We are happy that it has been resolved with the game being back on the store, and we wish Steam and Epic would also reconsider their stance based on the actual game contents."

Horses, which contains censored nudity and adult themes like sexual assault and slavery, remains banned on Steam and Epic. This despite the fact that it is far tamer than many widely distributed films and on level even with some popular games. Santa Ragione, the award-winning indie studio behind Horses, has categorized this sudden lack of access to PC gaming’s largest consumer bases as an existential threat and railed against what it describes as “preemptive censorship.”

Meanwhile, let’s have a quick look at what else Steam is stocking these days (warning: NSFW). Phew, no double standards here.

Horses can be purchased on Itch, GOG, and now, once again, Humble.

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Tortellini, a goldfish that defied pretty much every conceivable odd to beat some of Elden Ring’s toughest bosses, has died. He was three.

YouTuber and streamer Eric “Pointcrow” Morino informed his community of Tortellini’s passing on Twitter late last week.

"Unfortunately, my goldfish Tortellini has passed away," Morino wrote. "He's been unwell for the past couple weeks fighting a systemic bacterial infection and took a turn for the worse last night. I'm doing my best as a goldfish keeper, but fancies are incredibly fragile, and it seems that after 3 years it was his time to go." 

Goldfish can live to be older than ten with proper care and space, but there are many misconceptions around their actual needs and even their supposedly fleeting memories, which studies have shown are much more sophisticated than colloquial myths have led people to believe. As a result, goldfish in captivity often fail to reach their golden years.  

“Rather than wax on all [the] mistakes I've made keeping [a] fancy goldfish, lessons I've learned too late (there is so much to know), and how devastated I am over this loss, I really want to highlight all the accomplishments Tortellini has done,” Morino wrote. 

Tortellini led a distinguished life among video game-playing animals. Breathing – or extracting from water, via gills – the same rarified air as Peanut Butter the speedrunning dog, Tortellini managed feats that have eluded the majority of human beings. Specifically, he toppled a slew of Elden Ring bosses, including Melania, considered to be the base game’s hardest boss, and Consort Radahn, the final boss of the Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC. 

This involved a setup that mapped Tortellini’s tank onto a grid, each portion of which corresponded to a controller input. Repeats on the grid ensured that Tortellini was never doing nothing as long as he kept drifting around, but that didn’t stop him from, for example, repeatedly trying to swig health flasks even when he had none. Attempts took hours, as well as a special build that focused on armor and bleed damage, minimizing the number of times Tortellini – whose memory might be better than assumed, but whose perception of the human world and all its terrors still leaves something to be desired – would have to hit enemies and dodge. 

Tortellini also proved to be a capable Mario Party player.

Videos of his accomplishments have racked up over 10 million views in total, meaning that, as Morino has observed, Tortellini might actually be the most famous goldfish in history.

After Morino announced that Tortellini had gone to the great goldfish tank in the sky, mourners poured into not just his Twitter post, but also years-old videos and even games. 

"Had to come back and watch this absolute legend of a goldfish after hearing the sad news," wrote one video commenter. "I will miss you little fish."

Recent years have seen a growing number of viewers raise questions about the ethics of pets and content creation, whether it’s the storm of bad-faith nonsense surrounding Hasan Piker’s dog or more legitimate concerns like Logan Paul’s pig being found abandoned in a field, disheveled and unhealthy, after she was “irresponsibly rehomed” according to the animal sanctuary that ended up saving her. Aftermath reached out to Morino for more details about his approach to taking care of Tortellini, as well as what he self-admittedly learned over time, but did not receive a response as of this publishing.

"[Tortellini] was there to make us all laugh and bewilder us on how a small fish could do so much,” Morino wrote in his Twitter post. “He's lived a god damn good life. I miss him so much."

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On Monday, we reached all-time-high levels of being 12 years old when several government social media accounts shared a deluge of Trump-themed Halo memes. Unfortunately, today those in the halls of power have raised the bar again, making their past selves look downright 13 in comparison.

Now we’ve got White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai and the Department of Homeland Security weighing in, both of whom provided comments on the memes to freelance journalist and Aftermath pal Alyssa Mercante. Desai centered his response around the supposed end of the console wars, which should only matter to you if you died in the 90s while arguing about who’d win in a fight between Mario and Sonic and now haunt the playground you were crawling around on to this day:

“Yet another war ended under President Trump's watch—only one leader is fully committed to giving power to the players, and that leader is Donald J. Trump. That’s why he’s hugely popular with the American people and American Gamers."

(With loud reactionaries, maybe, but with normal people caught in a tornado of tariffs, almost certainly not.)

The Department of Homeland Security’s media team decided to go the openly racist and xenophobic route, because of course they did:

"We will reach people where they are with content they can relate to and understand, whether that be Halo, Pokemon, Lord of the Rings, or any other medium. DHS remains laser focused on bringing awareness to the flood of crime that criminal illegal aliens have inflicted on our country. We aren't slowing down."

Then we have the crown jewel in today’s gold-embossed propeller hat: Vice President JD Vance casually referencing the dumbest, most disingenuous Twitch drama yet during an appearance on New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast. Speaking about his own dog, Atlas, Vance voiced his opinion on CollarGate:

“I kind of obsessively trained him,” Vance said of Atlas. “You could see this: He sits on command, he stays on command. He has this command, place, which is basically if I snap my finger and point, he will run to that place and lay down."

"You don't have to zap him like Hasan [Piker]?" asked the show’s host, Miranda Devine.

"Not like Hasan Piker?” Vance replied in a voice that anyone should be disqualified from running for public office simply for possessing. “ No. No electrocution of dogs here."

"How disgusting is that? What does that tell you about a person?" said Devine, whose unquenchable appetite for boot needs to be studied.

"Well, I think that tells you that they're bad people,” said Vance, 12, who nonetheless possesses the baby brain of someone who was born yesterday. “If you can actually cause suffering to an innocent animal, you're probably the kind of person who doesn't worry about suffering in people as well. And that's been my experience: If you mistreat dogs, that's almost 100 percent a sign that you're gonna be a really terrible person."

Tell that to the 40 million low-income Americans about to lose SNAP benefits. I’m sure they’ll agree with you that the truest measure of a man is his dog, rather than his proclivity for aiding and abetting mass immiseration. Also, I bet JD Vance’s dog hates him, too.

On the upside, while we’ve never been more 12 years old than we are today, we could not possibly become even more 12 tomorrow. I’m sure this is it, and soon everyone will be grownups again.