At this point, you cannot talk about how amazing 2023 has been for the quality of games released this year without also mentioning how it’s been utterly disastrous for the people who made them. But that’s exactly what Geoff Keighley did during this year’s Game Awards.

The numbers vary, but estimates say anywhere between six and seven thousand workers have lost their jobs just this year. No level of studio size or success has been spared. And those who have been let go are now being forced to contend for an ever-dwindling number of open job postings.

“This has been one of the most volatile periods in the games industry in the last 15 years,” said Jakin Vela, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, in an interview with Polygon.

To be clear, Geoff Keighley isn’t responsible for these layoffs, and layoffs are an unfortunate but regular part of this and many other industries. But with the platform Keighley has, he does have a duty to his audience to recognize the conditions under which the games his events celebrate are made. He’s done it before.

In that same thread, he also recognized the power and visibility of his platform.

“I also realize we have a big platform which can accelerate and inspire change,” he posted. “We are committed to that, but we all need to work together to build a better and a more inclusive environment so everyone feels safe to build the world’s best games.”

Throughout this year’s awards show, Keighley and developers spoke about the impact video games have on our culture and their radical ability to change minds and broaden perspectives. (Inasmuch as the show’s organizers would allow developers to speak before playing them off or, in one case, cutting them off entirely.) Ostensibly, The Game Awards is about celebrating video games and recognizing the achievements of the people who made them.

Video games don’t get made without people, and those people are suffering right now at a heretofore unseen scale. To not memorialize that at all, even after acknowledging the power of his position, is, at best, an abdication of the responsibility of his platform if not outright cowardice. It’s a state all the more disappointing since Keighley has already demonstrated that he does pay attention to the wider video game community beyond hyping up “world premieres” and paling around with his industry besties — and Muppets.

Arkane Lyon is making a game based on Marvel’s Blade franchise, the studio announced at The Game Awards 2023 on Thursday.

The game was revealed in a brief cinematic trailer, so we didn’t get any gameplay of the title or any details about when it might be released. But Arkane Lyon studio director Dinga Bakaba said that it would be an “immersive third-person action adventure,” so we can look forward to that. The trailer’s description also notes that it’s single-player and that it’s set in Paris. A press release notes that Arkane Lyon has “just begun” development, so we might be waiting a long time to see it.

Linux is getting its own version of a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Phoronix reports that the latest release of systemd for Linux systems comes with a systemd-bsod service that’s able to generate a full-screen error message on Linux distributions.

Much like how the Blue Screen of Death originated in Windows, Linux’s version will be used as an emergency tool to log errors. If a Linux system fails to boot, it will generate a full-screen message that displays a QR code to get more information on what’s causing the boot issue. This was reportedly added as part of an Outreachy project, a group that provides internships for people to work on open-source tools.

The systemd-bsod feature is still experimental, and a GitHub changelog notes that it’s still subject to change, but systemd is a core part of most Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Red Hat. So it’s likely that we’ll see this BSOD feature appear in many Linux distributions throughout 2024.

Rest assured there aren’t any major BSOD changes coming to the Windows side at the moment. Microsoft has experimented with a number of changes to its BSOD over the years, including the addition of a sad face to the screen in Windows 8 in 2012 and QR codes in 2016. The BSOD briefly changed to black in Windows 11 before Microsoft reverted that change shortly after the operating system’s release in 2021.