About Video Game Spinoffs

There's a special mindset that is needed for a video game IP to be able to branch out successfully into spin-offs, and unfortunately some of the best video game IP holders don't seem to have it, so I'm gonna lend them mine. 

The primary thing major studios seem to lack is a willingness to fail; you need to be willing to fail. Not all spinoffs are successful, and that's okay. It's hard to gauge the overlap between your IP's core fanbase and fans of the genre you're trying to get it into. And sometimes, that means you have to admit defeat. 

One of the reasons this ends up being such a pain for many modern game dev companies is because they generally produce live service games, so when they admit the game is a failure, the minority of fans that got into the game suddenly have it removed, so the live service resources could be reallocated elsewhere. This is why I think building an offline-only, or at least self-hosted, version of such games is a good idea, because then you can keep it up on marketplaces to hopefully make back your investment over time, and the people who do enjoy it can keep enjoying it. Live service games don't allow for this, and although many are profitable, many, many more are not. At this point, I think major developers need to swallow the bitter pill that live service games are not going to continue to be an endless well of profit, and reconsider building games that might actually have staying power beyond a few years instead. And yes, I am aware that there are live service games that have been profitable for decades; it's still a limited market, no one can get majority market share, and there's a bottom to that well, especially when the economy is getting more and more difficult to work in and therefore people want things they can pay for once and keep enjoying as opposed to things they need to regularly pay more for in order to continue using them. 

Another issue is that game development is an investment, and when you develop something truly new, that's a higher risk investment than developing another in a series that always sells millions of copies on release day. I completely understand that, I do, but the best games, the ones that are enjoyed for decades, touch people's lives in ways that matter, or keep people coming back over and over and over again were not games that were safe investments. Doom (as in the original 90's game, not the equally excellent more recent games) is still incredibly loved, but the idea of an FPS was completely foreign at the time. Undertale touched so many lives because of its complex storytelling, lovable characters, and interesting game mechanics. Stardew Valley was a single indie dev deciding to make the game they wanted to play, in a genre that was so heavily dominated by AAA studios that similar games from indie developers never took off. I can keep going, but you get the point. 

So, in hopes of inspiring some major devs, let me share a few ideas for spinoffs of beloved gaming IPs that I think would go over well. Just as an example, I'm going to use Bethesda Softworks IPs for this.  

The Elder Scrolls: 

Honestly, an offline mobile game similar to blades would probably be great, though it wouldn't sell a lot of copies. If you make a viable port to PC as well, it could make some money, but I would recommend using the coding and assets from blades as a jumping off point to save yourself some development time, and thus some costs. The actual mechanics were good, it was the fact that it could only be played online and required either continued monetary investment from the player and/or arbitrary waiting periods. I'd gladly pay $20 for a standalone with those mechanics, probably more than once so I can have it on PC and mobile. If you wanna make it more gimmicky (which, say what you want, can increase sales), lean in on procedural generation of the dungeons. 

A gimmicky genre of games that's become popular recently are the tidy-up style games, where you have a set space (usually a shop of some kind) and a bunch of object that have been thrown around and need to be put back together. One of the more popular ones is actually about a library. If you wanna make bank off of a lot of your neuro-spicy player base, make one of those but with the actual elder scrolls books. You can just use the book assets ported over from Skyrim and that would give us a lot to work with, and if you add in modding support to add more books, including adding text, as well as the ability to expand the library in some way (through mods or through an in-game building system), you could easily charge a good amount for it. If you wanna be able to bump it up to at least $20, add more assets from Skyrim to be put away: weapons, armor, even junk items. Give them the whole of Whiterun's shopping district to organize, or perhaps otherwise hidden levels of the College of Winterhold. Or, for once, use the Bard's college for bard things, like musical instruments, sheet music, and musical theory texts. Though, honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if someone is already working on a mod for Skyrim or Oblivion Remastered with this concept in mind. 

Games based on NPC jobs. One that I know would be heavily embraced by the fans would be a material gathering game, where you go out and get crafting materials, document them, prepare them if necessary, and sell them. So many really successful offline-only games have been built on this premise, with examples including Potioncraft, TCG Card Shop, Schedule I, and those mechanics are found in other hit games like Subnautica, No Man's Sky, and Stardew Valley. Blacksmith simulators have a decent popularity too. 

Fallout: 

Your minigames. Seriously, the hacking minigame, all of the holotape games, even the lockpicking minigame can be addicting. Throw those in a smaller format for cheap, especially if you can make it mobile, and people will gladly buy it as many times as we bought Skyrim, I promise. 

Weapons maintenance and modification. You'd be surprised how many people would just love to take apart the weapons from Fallout 4 and/or Fallout 76, clean them virtually, replace out broken parts, switch out modifications, etc. If you want to make the gameplay loop a bit more meaningful, have them sell fixed weapons to be able to buy lots of broken ones. If you want to tie it into the recent increase in focus on New Vegas, just make them Gun Runners, maybe even let them repair, upgrade, and modify that robot that sells the guns in the game. 

Starfield: 

Variable Gravity Shooting Gallery. Seriously. Imagine the sheer chaos of trying to hit targets that float and bounce around after the first time you hit them. 

Oh, and Poncle's survivor's-like collaborations are gonna make bank. If you have an IP that has lots of enemies and unique weapons that you can draw from, you might wanna see if you can collaborate with them. Every single survivors game and DLC they've put out has been incredibly fun and pretty popular from all I've seen. 

So, hope this helps. 

God Bless if you'll let Him, and have an otherwise great day. 

They're Moving Forward On Moving Backward Regarding The Rights Of Americans With Disabilities

Bellow you will find a few links. The first is to an article about a lawsuit through which Republicans are asking the Supreme Court to overturn precedent and agree that children with disabilities can be involuntarily institutionalized. They phrase it more nicely, something like that the federal law doesn't actually mandate integration of disabled kids in their community and schools, but without that integration, there is only one legal possibility: institutionalization. They can't go without schooling, that's against compulsory school attendance laws which they are not seeking to change as far as I can tell (my guess is because it gives them more control over poor families' kids, allowing them to accost, arrest, and brutalize minors for not being in a school building). If your choice is between you becoming a criminal or you surrendering your child to an institution, then it is forced institutionalization. 

The second is a link from a press release jointly from Veterans Affairs and the Department of Justice. They act like it's to improve care, but what it really does is allows the VA to send the DoJ a list of veterans who are homeless and have any history of disability, the DoJ can round them up, and then the DoJ will seek guardianship over the veterans to be handed to the government. Not to a family member; not to a social worker; not to a VSO; the government, who is the reason these veterans are disabled and homeless in the first place. Once that takes place, the veterans in question will lose all of their rights. Not just some of them, all of them. Their speech can be controlled, they are not allowed to join a well regulated militia or keep and bear arms, they are not allowed to control their own money, they are not allowed to deny medical care they don't want. All of this amounts to the same problem, especially when you consider the only places the government has to house these individuals are the shiny new detention centers they've been building all over the US: forced institutionalization of disabled veterans. 

The third is a link to a proposal from a currently sitting member of Congress to push towards federal designation of "extreme negative reactions to President Donald J. Trump" as a mental illness. Again, it's phrased more diplomatically, they want the NIH to "research" it, but they know that the hand picked leaders of the NIH would gladly declare it, as another sitting member of Congress put it, "an epidemic on the Left." And through that, since "extreme" is as vague and arbitrary as possible, they can declare anyone who isn't sufficiently loyal to Trump to be mentally ill, possibly even disabled as a result. 

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why I put all of these links together, because they're not separate. They've broadcast it for a decade now: the plan is to declare those likely to vote for their political opponents as mentally ill and take away their rights. And it's not something that's merely in the future. There's a fourth link, and it's to an article about an executive order being allowed to proceed to enforcement for this fall's election. What it does is it allows the USPS to decide who gets to vote by mail and who doesn't, with support of the DoJ. They claim its about affirming citizenship, but that has to be proven during the registration process to begin with. It's about the fact that the majority of people who vote using mail-in-ballots in swing states vote against Republicans, so they want to be able to stop those votes for being counted. And what's the #1 reason why someone votes using mail-in-ballots? Disability. 

They're coming first for the disabled, and then for those they have decided are disabled, and then for whoever else they want to. This is naked authoritarianism, and we're allowing it because they're doing so much so fast that we can't keep up. THe term for this purposeful technique is "flooding the zone," and yes, it's been openly admitted to by right-wing leaders and talking heads. 

I don't know what to tell you to do, other than vote this November. If you truly support taking away the rights of disabled children, disabled veterans, and more, then vote for the GOP candidate for each office. If you support maintaining those rights, including Constitutional rights, vote against them, and by that I mean vote for the democratic candidate. Yes, I know, I don't like either party, but one is actively trying to throw me and mine into a new version of insane asylums, and the other is just generally ineffective and corrupt. I can work with the latter. 

God bless if you'll let Him, and have an otherwise great day. 

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/20/nx-s1-5891791/disability-rights-community-living-integration-trump

https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-doj-sign-agreement-to-improve-care-for-nations-most-vulnerable-veterans/

https://davidson.house.gov/2025/5/rep-warren-davidson-introduces-the-trump-derangement-syndrome-tds-research-act-of-2025

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/08/supreme-court-allows-trump-administration-to-move-forward-with-order-imposing-restrictions-on-ma/

Going Back To The Days Of Asylums By Killing Kids Slowly

Reporting suggests that, since there is no real evidence linking vaccines to autism, there will be a decree from on high (executive order) declaring the link to be true. Let me explain why this is a problem, along with a few other things. 

First, let's look at why that narrative is so compelling: autism is not well known, and the unknown is terrifying to the closed mind, and scary even to those who look forward to exploring it. It's so terrifying, apparently, that parents are more willing to watch their children die a slow, painful, and fully preventable death rather than risk maybe them being autistic. 

I am autistic. I have many loved ones who are autistic. I'm not going to lie and say it's easy being autistic in a world made for and by allistic people (allistic is merely a term referring to the portion of the population that is not on the autism spectrum, just to clarify). It sucks sometimes, just like living as a disabled veteran sucks when I have to live in a nation built by and for able bodied civilians with billions of dollars in wealth and those who can make them money (who, incidentally, are also able bodied civilians). I am reminded regularly that I am not truly welcome in the country I sacrificed everything for, everything I knew I could and then some. 

Children are dying of measles for the first time in decades, with, prior to the Texas outbreak, there not even being cases recorded in the US for nearly ten years. Why is that happening? Because the MMR vaccine, which resulted in the near extinction of measles as a disease throughout multiple countries, was once erroneously linked to autism by a man who was seeking to patent a competing vaccine. He just wanted a reason to fearmonger against the MMR vaccine so his vaccine would get more support. And don't take my word for it, look it up. 

The head of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already made statements that he believes that autism is fully environmentally caused (the genetic component is well documented, so no, not fully environmentally caused), has advocated for forced inpatient treatment for people with a variety of psychological conditions including autism, and has even gone so far as to propose camps for us. Not fun summer camps, the kind we were put in alongside a few other groups back when a scientist named Asperger decided which of us could be useful to society and which were just dead weight to be discarded. 

On top of this, the VA and DoJ have begun the work of rebuilding the old insane asylum system. They've already signed agreements to start picking up disabled veterans off the streets, drag them into court, have a judge sign all of their rights away to the government (this would be considered a guardianship), and incarcerate us for the crime of homelessness and psychological abnormality. Not illness, not disease, abnormality. Because believe it or not, that's how psychological conditions are actually decided on (something that is regularly discussed in the psychological community and may see change in our lifetime). 

This administration has made it very, very clear that they intend to revoke the rights of anyone who is not useful to them as much as they can. They have revoked the right to due process repeatedly; they revoked Miranda rights; they revoked the right to free speech; they revoked the inalienable rights found in the Declaration of Independence; granted, most of these were on a case-by-case basis, but once it's done for one person, it can be done to any. That's why the phrase "injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere" keeps coming up throughout history. Every time we give the government the authority to revoke the rights of any individual, we give it the authority to revoke ours as well. 

So, back to the point at hand, why is this reported executive order such a problem? Because it becomes legal fact, and since autism is officially recognized only in a negative light and is officially treated as a curable disease rather than a lifelong condition, it means they can seek to prosecute parents and doctors for vaccinating children. More children will die. More families will be broken. More parents will never be able to be whole again. More marriages will be destroyed. 

And all because some people think that their child turning out like me, or Anthony Hopkins, or Greta Thunburg, etc. is more terrifying to them than the possibility of watching their child die of measles, or worse, forcing other families to watch as their children die because vaccination works best in groups, not on the individual level. 

We spent decades after the end of the asylum system last time just trying to reduce the stigma against talking about behavioral health issues, let alone getting diagnosis and treatment. And this addlepated feckless moron and his equally deranged cronies want to drag us all the way back to the days of frontal lobotomies as treatment for psychosis. 

If you love anyone who might possibly have a mind that is outside the norm, you really should be contacting your congresspersons about this, and speaking out about it. Because soon, those of us who have these conditions are likely to have our rights taken away, and even as it stands, most people don't listen to us anyway. It has to come from those that seem normal, because they just think we're "crazy" and write us off entirely. 

God bless if you'll let Him, and have an otherwise great day.