Site Updates In 2026

As hinted at in the past few Playback.dem, some changes are coming. We need to do a lot of prep and building this year.

Here’s things that we ourselves are making happen this year:

• Counter-Strike its arcade version will go live, using FreeCS (soon known as Tactical-Retreat) as its base, without the need for Half-Life content
• RetroCS, an alternative version for people who want some variety from v1.5 era CS
• Team Fortress Classic its arcade version will also go live. It’ll most likely stay limited to the free RealMedia version because we cannot distribute patch/game data from Half-Life. This game however had a fully freeware version available, which is the RealMedia version.

When will those come? Perhaps sooner than you think. We’re already building the bridge to connect to the island, so to speak.

Just Happened

We have lots of new TV broadcasts documented (+70!). Such as when you go on the Deus Ex page you can get some developer insight in the SDK video. Tbere’s also downloads documented for Crysis Wars as well as videos for Crysis 2.

You can also play Freedoom on the Arcade. It however has no multiplayer. If someone, someday, ports odamex to WebAssembly and makes it talk to our RTC broker - let us know in the Chat.

New Feature: Anti-Cheat

Want to know our stance on Anti-Cheat? Want to see us spell out the things we could do better? We’ve compiled our reasoning into one big feature all about it.

You can read the Anti-Cheat feature here and wonder about other disproportionate exchanges all around us.

New Feature: Emulation

Ever curious about games for abandoned platforms? Sure you are. We’re certain you’ve played an emulated game already. Did you know that playing those over the Internet is actually feasible these days? Even if you’re across a continent? It’s true, and we discuss that and all more on our Emulation feature right here.

One night, we were up til 4 AM playing NBA Jam Tournament Edition on SEGA Saturn emulation in mednafen. You can do that too! Please do get proper rest, as this is not healthy.

If you don’t mind playing alone, you can also emulate your own supplied ROM files at the Virtual-Console of arcade.frag-net.com!

Games Industry Woes

There’s pressing issues in the games industry. Too many to list frankly. If we could name 1 big thing it’s probably consolidation of properties within foreign entities. Foreign entities being such that they do not originate or care about games exclusively. There was a time where the C-Suite was composed more of people who played and made games.

Nowadays, even the big film-studios are often run by big entities that do millions of other things besides make hollywood movies. See MGM being owned by Amazon. And many of these entities don’t want to understand that players want handcrafted games.

Big entities will generally not listen if their focus isn’t just videogames, the math doesn’t make sense to them.

It’s probably best for everyone if they left the games industry.

Given the state of Microsoft and its Xbox Game Studios now at the mercy of people who don’t really understand gaming, and their audience having largely moved onto other platforms, we hope that their fellow sub-studios pull a Bungie and buy themselves independence before their buck stops.

Yes, we hear great promises from friends like Matt Booty, but we heard some of these bullet points years before already. Of course there’s people in there that care, especially about their livelyhoods, but their focus needs to shift elsewhere for this to work out for them. You need to do a real bold move that will gain you a lot of goodwill. Talk won’t help here. Good luck.

What the big entities will soon realize is that their well dries up, as players don’t have loyalties anymore that they once had. You saw the first sign with their live-service bets not paying off (we lost some great development houses in that purge). Remember why the SEGA Dreamcast failed with consumers: There was little trust and confidence left in that company, despite that machine and the first party line-up being incredible.

Because Valve has been consistent in their Steam service, in respecting consumers’ old purchases, never taking away people their games unless they legally had to, keeping their game-servers running - that is how they got consumers to trust them. They always knew they could not afford to screw up. Meanwhile during the past 25 years, all other major console entities - doesn’t matter if Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft - have consistently disappointed people whenever they shut down storefronts and retired platforms that people still play to this day. It’s why few invest heavily in their live service offerings. The company that won’t respect your purchase ‘forever’ should not attempt to make ‘forever games’.

We have a feeling that there’s gonna be even more restructuring, layoffs and pain ahead of us. Please support the developers you do care about. Put pressure on the big guys, have compassion for the smaller devs. Some are barely getting by right now. GDC 2026’s State of the Games Industry offers some insights into the overall pessimism.

You all know what you like, and what you want to support, so go do it!

If we can offer a word of advice: this is going to be a long winter. Patience will be rewarded, this applies to both studios struggling as well as players.

Future Of Playback.dem

We’re not going to do them like that anymore, we already said as such. It was difficult to describe the state of things without progressively getting more angry, so they’re retired for now. Go back and enjoy our past commentary.

From this point on we will focus on updates to literally every other part of the site, without the pressure of putting something out there every month. This site is meant to be a shrine for things of good, afterall.