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Somehow, it is already time for another one of these. If you’ve been with us for a bit, you’ll remember that we’ve aimed to obliterate each year by spelling out our subscriber goals in excruciating detail, and 2026 is no different. This already-horrible year has to die, and you’re gonna help us kill it.If you’re visiting Aftermath for the first time, welcome! Aftermath is a worker-owned, reader-supported site about games, the internet, and everything that comes after. We hope you stick around. If you’ve been around for a minute, you’re probably well aware that we’re (for the moment) an entirely reader-funded operation. So, we must continually bang that drum because subscriptions really and truly do keep us alive. The upside of all this is that we’re not beholden to any execs, investors, or other companies. As a result, we can publish whatever we see fit.In the past year, our readers—to whom we are eternally grateful—have allowed us to write about the struggles faced by laid-off game developers trying to find new work in a rapidly contracting industry, how unions are trying to help, the grim realities of major events like GDC and Summer Game Fest in a country being assailed by its own government, how an organization fronted by some of the biggest streamers in the world fell apart, what it means to work in games media during a BDS blackout of Microsoft, how to buy a Nintendo Switch 2 entirely with Citi Bike points, a secretive company that’s filled beloved video game websites with AI and gambling, what happened after a Ghost of Yotei developer was fired for making a joke about Charlie Kirk, why controversial banned art game Horses is actually tame, how AI is making it hard to tell if a journalist is real, what happened when a beloved member of the fighting game community was taken by ICE, how unconventional publishers are trying to unfuck the video game industry, how to read Moby Dick in a day, how the Mayor’s Office has been quietly supporting NYC’s video game scene for years, why Chainsaw Man is better than the Bible, how the left doesn’t hate technology (but does hate being exploited), and what the Epstein files reveal about how powerful people see video games. [Conteúdo truncado para controle de custo.]