Reconnect Recap - w/e 18th January

Reviewing the week that's been over on Reconnect

Jan 20, 2026

Kia Ora folks!

It’s a new year and a new recap! Apologies for the delay on publishing this one, I was having too much fun on my holiday and extended my trip, leaving me no time to meet the deadline I had advertised for well over a month. Looks like I’m starting off my year with broken promises.

If you’re new here, this is the Reconnect Recap, a companion newsletter for my website Reconnect, a discovery platform just for games writing. It features hundred of blogs, tens of thousands of articles and updates multiple times a day ensuring it’s always up to date.

This week we’re covering funding games, closing stores, games analytics, a bit of game dev, and much much more.

Let’s dig in.

If you missed an issue or just can’t wait until next week, feel free to dive into the archive. I also occasionally write my own thoughts on the industry which you can find here,

If you’re interested in seeing my other work, like my management blog, or following Reconnect on Bluesky, check out everything else that I do on my linktree.

Great Write Ups

End of an Era: For those of us in kiwi-land we’re saying goodbye to EB Games, our version of GameStop, who is closing their doors after 25 years. Yeah Nah gaming has a little goodbye letter to them, pictured is the store down the road from my house.
Scream Time: Emily Marler writes about being a new parent struggling to figure out the balance of screen time.
Celebrating Ten years: Seasoned gaming reflects on ten years of games journalism. Quite a feat considering what the industry has been going through.
Souls-like by the numbers: Dmitriy Byshonkov looks into the numbers around the soles-like genre. How the genre has boomed and who's the top seller.
Getting Funded: a16z speedrun walks through the process they follow on choosing which games to fund.
Returning to Castlevania: Scanlines wanted to return to where the genre began, and dives into the 1986 NES original, Castlevania.
Handling the tail: The GameDiscoverCo newsletter looks into the companies who manage long-tail revenue services for games. The strategies they use to ensure games that are no longer evergreen are still making a profit.
Occlusion Highlighting: Practice Flip has just learned about Occlusion Hightlighting and had a go at implementing it.
10 Cozy Recommendations: Love a Cozy Game, Her Cozy Gaming loved Winter Burrow and has made ten recommendations for us to try. So I now have 11 games to play.
Waiting for it: Pause Menu reflects on that feeling when your waiting for the I tetronimo to show up and your making space for it.