Sony gives Gran Turismo Sport the boot | This Week in Business

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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

January is New Year's Resolution season, a time to reflect on ourselves and our actions, and to take steps to be better people in some small way. Maybe we make a resolution that motivates us to be more disciplined, healthier, or perhaps kinder in some way to those around us.

That sounds like a lot of hassle, so I usually don't bother.

Instead, I like to take the opportunity to make New Year's Resolutions for the industry.

I know that sounds like a jerk move to impose self-improvement on someone else like that, but I try to at least be a little fair about it by setting the bar low – like, arguably subterranean – with resolutions like "Only sell to people who want to buy" and "Let people know what it is they're buying."

If those seem like things the industry obviously already does, then I would encourage you to click through and read those pieces.

To be fair, we've made some progress on things like dark design patterns and loot boxes over the years thanks mostly to government intervention (or the threat thereof), but they still persist, and the antagonistic and anti-consumer mindset behind them still shines through in many of the industry's "best practices."

So with that in mind, let me offer a 2024 New Year's Resolution for the industry that fits right in with the theme: Don't design things to break.

It doesn't sound like something that should be a problem, right? Things do break, yes. That's kind of a fact of life. And games are incredibly complicated things, each one just one