Back in September, more than a few indie developers pushed back their release dates by a few weeks or months to get out of the way of the arrival of Hollow Knight: Silksong, which they feared would suck up all of gamingdom's attention. And maybe that was the right call, but one side effect has been an almost comically packed release schedule on Steam through October and straight into this first week of November.

Case in point: on Tuesday colony builder Generation Exile dropped on Steam to a total of three user reviews, despite a seasoned indie team behind it. Studio founder Nels Anderson was previously the lead designer of masterful stealth game Mark of the Ninja before co-founding Campo Santo to make Firewatch. Generation Exile's team also includes Karla Zimonja, designer on Gone Home and Tacoma, and Niamh Fitzgerald, lead designer of hit traffic sim Mini Motorways. Oh, and a soundtrack from FTL and Into the Breach composer Ben Prunty!?

Maybe the problem is the Steam page doesn't mention that the game's got capybaras in it. Or maybe between heavyweights like Arc Raiders and surprise hits like Dispatch and RV There Yet, a quieter game like Generation Exile dropping in early access doesn't have much chance of catching the algorithm's attention.

It caught our attention, though: last year we interviewed the Sonderlust Studios team for the PC Gaming Show, and the topic of sustainability—both for the games industry and the planet—were front-of-mind. That's kinda what Generation Exile is all about, as you find yourself overseeing a colony ship with limited natural resources on a long interstellar voyage.

"You're still having to provide the basics for your society: Food, shelter, clean water," Nels Anderson said. "But there's this kind of unquestioned assumption that lives in a lot of strategy games, but also in the world around us, where it's like: 'Oh, we need more resources? We can just keep extracting. We can just keep taking more forever. We can just keep growing and growing and growing.' It's simply not possible to keep expanding forever.

"That is both a thematic element of the game, but I think part of that has come from looking at the industry around us. We see the harm that's caused by focusing exclusively on short-term gains, where all the goals are 'what are the returns for the next quarter?' or whatever. That single-minded focus on what's immediately ahead of us—how can we extract as much value in the short term—is just not sustainable. ... We want to anchor a lot of the city building, strategy game stuff in not just getting bigger and consuming more stuff, but finding more ways to be more efficient. More effective. To use only what you have around you, because that's all you've got. And finding ways to grow and thrive, but in a way that is not just endlessly extractive."

We'll be digging into Generation Exile ourselves soon to write about how its ideas for a sustainable city builder come together. Its introductory 10% discount on Steam lasts until November 11, and there's also already a roadmap charting the course for future updates in early access.

Grand Theft Auto 6, once meant to be available on gaming consoles, well, now, has been pushed further down the road from its already delayed target of May to November 2026. Take-Two announced the news in its earnings call on Thursday, but what it didn't announce—and hasn't even hinted at, since confirming the game was in development back in 2022—is when or even if GTA 6 will be released on PC.

We have little reason to doubt the game will come to PC eventually. Based on GTA Online's enduring popularity on Steam, where I'm pretty sure it's maintained a position on Steam's top 100 most-played games chart every single day for the last 10 years, it's a foregone conclusion. That's an extra couple billy in Take-Two's pocket at least.

But when?

So far, every trailer and public statement about GTA 6 says it's coming to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. If Rockstar follows the same playbook it took with its last two games, that means the earliest we're going to see a PC release is November 2027.

And that's the best-case precedent, which would mirror Red Dead Redemption 2. The open world western released on consoles in October 2018 and on the Epic Games Store in November 2019 (it was exclusive for a month before coming to Steam). Whew, that is a long time away.

But it's sooner than we'll see GTA 6 on PC if it follows GTA 5's path. The last Grand Theft Auto was a console exclusive for a full 19 months, first releasing in September of 2013 and finally coming to PC in April 2015. That's why I'm making peace with the possibility that it could be well into 2028 before we can call GTA 6 a computer game.

It could be that those points of comparison aren't very relevant anymore. Game budgets and development timelines have ballooned enormously; perhaps part of why GTA 6 is taking so long is that Rockstar is quietly planning a PC release alongside consoles, or just a few months later.

I doubt it, though. They know a lot of people will double dip on console and PC versions given enough of a gap. And launching the next iteration of GTA Online on consoles will be a herculean effort even before taking the added challenge of PC hackers and cheaters into account.

With the delay, Rockstar's likely not going to be talking about the game for the next six months or so. Maybe the company can use that quiet period to properly explain why it just fired more than 30 developers in what the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain has called "one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry," because its claim that they were all leaking confidential information sure doesn't seem to pass muster.