Guides, history and buying advice for people who actually play games
Video Game Sources Editorial Team 
Game reviews disagree because reviewers are not measuring the same thing. Different critics weigh story, controls, difficulty, technical polish and personal taste differently, they play under different conditions, and they often review at different points in a game’s life — before patches, updates or price changes shift the experience entirely. Is there even an objective … Read more
A live service game is one designed to be played, updated and monetized continuously after launch, rather than sold once as a finished product. Instead of ending, it keeps evolving through new seasons, events, cosmetics and balance changes — and it usually needs a constant connection to the developer’s servers to work at all. What … Read more
Free-to-play games make money by selling things players don’t strictly need: cosmetics, convenience, time savers, and chances at rare items. The game itself is free bait to build a huge player base, and a small percentage of that base spends real money, often repeatedly, to keep the experience going or to stand out. What is … Read more
Crunch is the industry term for extended, unpaid or under-compensated overtime that game developers work in the weeks or months before a game ships. It keeps happening because games are hard to estimate, deadlines are often fixed before the work is scoped, and the industry has few structural incentives to change that. What does “crunch” … Read more
Games get delayed because software is unpredictable to finish, and the last stretch of development — fixing bugs, balancing difficulty, passing platform certification, and polishing performance — always takes longer than anyone expects. A delay is usually a studio choosing to protect quality over a date they set months or years earlier. It happens across … Read more
A game producer is the person who keeps a project moving: managing schedules, budgets, communication between teams, and the countless small decisions that determine whether a game actually ships. They don’t usually write code or draw art — they make sure the people who do have what they need to do it. It’s one of … Read more
Video games take so long because modern development means building enormous amounts of content, technology and testing simultaneously, then repeatedly redoing work as ideas change. Bigger teams, higher visual expectations, more platforms to support, and a growing focus on avoiding burnout all add years that older, smaller productions never needed. What actually takes up most … Read more
A port takes a game’s original code and adapts it to run on different hardware. Emulation uses software to imitate the original hardware so the unaltered game thinks it’s running on its native system. A remaster takes the existing game and improves its audio, visuals or performance without rebuilding it from scratch. All three preserve … Read more
Some classic games never come back because the rights are split between multiple companies who can’t agree, the original source code is lost or unusable, the music or likenesses inside it were only ever licensed for a limited time, or nobody currently holding the rights sees enough money in bringing it back. Why can’t a … Read more
When a game’s servers shut down, anything that depended on that server stops working. That can mean losing online multiplayer, matchmaking, leaderboards, cloud saves, or in-game stores. For games built entirely around a server connection, the whole game can become unplayable — even if the disc or download is still sitting on a hard drive. … Read more