Eight titles in July. Ninety-eight now.
Valve’s Great on Frame page listed 98 certified titles Thursday morning, up from eight on July 17. Nina counted them herself with Steam’s frame_compatibility filter instead of waiting on somebody else’s tracker, which is the right instinct and a habit worth stealing. The names are the part that got me. Beat Saber. Job Simulator. Pistol Whip, Red Matter 2, Moss II, the entire I Expect You To Die trilogy, and Walkabout Mini Golf, which I have put more hours into than I want printed. That is not a launch list padded out with tech demos. That is the canon.
Nina also found the asterisk, and it is a real one. Valve dropped the certification threshold from 90fps to 72fps in August, so part of that curve is developers doing work and part of it is the bar coming down to meet the games. Both are legitimate. They are not the same thing, and anyone reading “98 certified” as a promise about how a game will feel deserves to know which is which.
Pico cancelled the party it had announced eight days earlier
Last Friday I wrote that scheduling the Space Pro debut three weeks ahead of Connect said something about how much Pico wanted the comparison. It said something. Not that.
The September 2 Beijing event is off, pulled nine days out, and Space Pro now arrives sometime in Q4. Pico points at a software upgrade that <a href="https://comicvibe.com/sony-ceo-on-ps5-we-do-not-need-to-aggressively-sell-the-console/” title=”Sony CEO on PS5: 'We Do Not Need to Aggressively Sell the Console'”>needs more time. Alex has the rest, including how the price, the launch regions and that unconfirmed 270-gram figure all slide along with it. Killing your own launch event nine days before the doors open is not a calendar problem. Somebody looked at a build and said no.
“We don’t put jobs at risk”
Around 14 people lost their jobs at Schell Games on August 21. The Pittsburgh studio has been shipping since 2002 and had never laid anyone off before, and for years Jesse Schell was the founder other founders quoted when they wanted to argue that cuts are a decision rather than weather. Alex went back through what Schell actually told GamesIndustry.biz in 2024. Even the headcount is unofficial: Game Developer assembled it from the LinkedIn posts employees wrote over the weekend, because the studio itself has said nothing at all.
I do not think Schell was lying two years ago. I think he meant every word of it, built a company around it for two decades, and then ran into a market that did not care what he believed. Which is worse.
Supernatural has 102 days
I said my piece on this one earlier in the week, including the part where I quit VR fitness in month four, so the December 3 shutdown is not aimed at me. It is aimed at the people who did not quit, and it turns out there are enough of them to restart a company. Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin took the product back from Meta, all six coaches came along, and 15 people are now rebuilding what nearly 200 used to run. Founding membership costs $180. Favorites are already confirmed gone, and head of fitness Leanne Pedante could not promise that workout history and streaks survive the move. Watching a small team have to ask for $180 up front while that question is still open is genuinely uncomfortable, and I do not have a better idea for how they should have done it.
