Dean Takahashi wears the Fallout 76 Power Armor Helmet.

Happy Thanksgiving — See you in West Virginia

Happy Thanksgiving. It’s a good time to reflect on all that we at GamesBeat and VentureBeat have to be thankful for. We are glad you have been reading GamesBeat and VentureBeat, and we’ve been happy to serve both to you for more than a decade.

We hope that you can enjoy the holiday, and spice it up with a little gaming. I received this bit of pictured swag — the Power Armor Helmet from Fallout 76 — from Bethesda, just in time for the launch of Fallout 76, the post-apocalyptic multiplayer game set in the beautiful re-growing landscape and mountains of West Virginia.

Thank you for supporting our continuing effort to bring real journalism, unlike my unboxing video, to the larger video game industry. We try to explain the trends of games, and convey why it matters to our core readers. We cover the important news of the industry for executives and developers, with the expectation that this will also be fun to read for larger consumer audiences as well. We do that most days of the year, except on days like today when we’re taking it easy and playing games.

I’ll be playing some Battlefield V on the Xbox One, playing Pokemon Go and Ingress Prime on an Apple iPhone XR, and showing my extended family what it’s like to play Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders on the Magic Leap One Creator Edition augmented reality glasses. And maybe I’ll visit West Virginia with my helmet on. I hope you can get everything on your wishlist on Black Friday, or soon after.

I’ve already played Call of Duty: Blackout, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. But I’ve still got some games on my to-play list. I hope to get through at least a taste of the year’s important games.

Anyway, like I said, this post doesn’t contain any real journalism. I would like to make a short commercial announcement. I hope you can all attend our GamesBeat Summit event at Two Bit Circus in downtown Los Angeles on April 23-24, 2019. It will be good.

And I would like to take the opportunity to thank the GamesBeat team for their tireless work. Let me extend my heartfelt thanks to Jason Wilson, Jeff Grubb, Mike Minotti, and Rowan Kaiser, as well as many other writers who have contributed to GamesBeat over the years. Thanks also to our VentureBeat writing team, our fantastic business and events team, and our boss Matt Marshall.

Thank you for being part of our community and reading all of the posts that we’ve been bringing you every day for the past decade-plus. I realize we’re lucky to be surviving and thriving in the media business, and we wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t for you.

And we’ll find a place to donate this helmet. Cheers.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.