The DeanBeat: Games are on the cusp of great things again

When it comes to games, everybody’s a critic or a skeptic. But today, I feel like being a cheerleader. I just took a trip to Santa Monica, Calif., and I had a wonderful conversation with the creators of Naughty Dog’s fourth and final episode of the Uncharted series: Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. It is perhaps one of the greatest and most beautiful video games ever made, and it shows what can happen when you put a couple of hundred talented people to work for a few years on a giant console game. I’ll write about that thoughtful conversation we had in Naughty Dog’s offices later, but suffice to say that it pumped me up.

I also dropped in on the annual event for the Video Game Bar Association’s gathering of video game lawyers, who talked about the complexities of the industry and international laws as more and more companies head overseas in search of riches. During the week I was traveling, I was astounded at just how many big events were happening in gaming. While I was in Santa Monica and Jeff Grubb was at Casual Connect in Singapore, Jason Wilson and Mike Minotti were driven to exhaustion keeping up with all of the gaming news.