Dave Kosak

@thefargo.bsky.social

2929 Followers 3693 Following

Writer, game designer, and creative-at-large. Game development consultant. Previous roles: Co-founder of GameSpy, Narrative and Quest Lead for World of Warcraft and Hearthstone at Blizzard entertainment.

Extreme close-up of a VERY tiny lil praying mantis!
Black and white publicity photo of actor Don Adams playing Agent Smart for the T.V. Show "Get Smart." He is clean-cut, wearing a stylish suit. He has an expression of deliberate earnestness. Nonetheless, he is holding up a black dress shoe to his face and looks ridiculous. The sole of the shoe is flipped open to reveal 60s-era "high tech" gadgetry, in addition to a ludicrous rotary dial.
Three imagine “Happy for you” meme, but with Venti from Genshin impact looking upset. “Congrats.” “Happy for you.” “Nice.”
"Squeakin' into the Weekend" - a two-minute video of a squirrel on a fence set to amplified acoustic guitar music.
Short video showcasing a mellow acoustic guitar track. In the video a frog statue sits in a lotus pose under some leaves, while rain patters all around him. The track is titled "The Start of Something" by Dave Kosak, dated 1-5-2026. At the end the video wishes you a Happy New Year!
A player card from the tabletop game “King of Tokyo,” featuring “The King,” a gigantic part-mechanized ape, cronching his way through the city.
Vintage Cartoon drawing of Steeler mascot “Steely McBeam,” a steelworker in denim overalls and wide-brimmed hard hat, kicking a foot ball on Top of an I-beam.
A beautiful floofy white Birman cat looking slightly irritated.
Hand-drawn Piranesi map by Susannah Clarke.
Extreme close-up of a very fluffy and opinionated Birman cat with a pink nose.
A squirrel clinging to a grapevine with little bitty paws and a very serious expression on his face. The words “Smooth Criminal” are written in meme-text.
A mysterious wooden case from the 1960s. It is labeled “Box of Tubes $25.00.”
A museum display of two drawings. The first is a series of overlapping rings with notes on the tides. The second is a maze-like grid of rooms. The hand-drawn notes are from author Susanna Clarke for her novel "Piranesi." Taken at the Bowers museum in Santa Ana, CA.
Still image from an early 2000s Burger King commercial where the creepy motionless face of The King smiles soullessly at a surprised individual. Caption: “Where is your God now?”
A chart depicting six callouts, arranged in a ring connected by arrows. It reads: “Stagnant Revenues (with Rising Costs) -> Falling Profits with More & Bigger Failures -> Less Investment and Risk Taking -> Fewer Games and Studios -> Fewer Hits & Innovations -> No-to-Low Player or Playtime Growth” with a final arrow circling back to “Stagnant Revenues…” It’s a vicious cycle.
A pie chart of total hours played and which games people were playing in 2023 (excluding India and China.) 60% of the hours played were on legacy “games as a service” titles from before 2019 (Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto V are called out.) Another 15% are “annual” titles from old franchises (like Call of Duty or EA FC.) Games released in 2019, 2020, or 2021 make up 16% of player hours (Apex Legends and Valorant are cited as examples) and games released in 2022 make up less than 3% of playtime, leaving only 6.5% of hours for games released that year(!) A second pie chart cuts up that remaining 6.5% of playtime, pointing out that four new games (Diablo IV, Hogwarts Legacy, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Starfield) grabbed half of that available time, meaning only 3.4% of playtime was “everything else” released that year. Gruesome!
A bar chart comparing the first 49 months of sales for this generation of consoles (PlayStation 5 and Xbox series X/S) as compared to the LAST generation’s sales over their first 49 months. Bars at “0” mean that the consoles sold as well as their previous counterparts, bars above that line mean they sold more, and bars below mean they sold less. The first year of Playstation 5 sales exceeded the first year of Playstation 4 (by about a million consoles per month), but then dropped off - underselling by millions of units in the months since. Xbox fared a little better for the first 24 months, but then follows a similar decline. It’s not that the consoles aren’t selling, it’s just that they’re selling a lot slower than the previous generation.
A bar chart of annual spending on VR/AR devices from 2016 to 2024, as well as lines showing different forecasts for growth. The forecasts from 2016 to 2020 all shoot up exponentially: One 2016 forecast predicts $110M annual spend by 2020. But actual spending has been flat, peaking at $10M in 2021 and shrinking ever since (2024 estimates look like around half that.) Predictions for growth have gradually grown less enthusiastic, going from exponential curves to more linear growth.
A chart of worldwide spending on video game content from 2011 through the end of 2024, broken up by category. During this time, console spending grew $18 billion, PC spending grew $30 billion, but mobile spending grew $83 billion! It was far and away the biggest growing segment of the last decade.
A bar chart showing quarterly investments in video gaming from venture capital, from 2018 until the end of 2024. There’s a pretty big bell curve in the middle of the chart, from around mid-2020 until the middle of 2022, where VC per quarter was as high as $3 billion, and often at least $1.5 billion. But the four quarters of 2024 show investments of less than half a billion for the first couple of quarters, an outlier of just over a billion for the third quarter, and less than a quarter billion for the last quarter. 2023 was similarly low. Not a lot of money is coming in from investors.
Same chart as before, but with actual consumer spending depicted alongside the predictions. Spending shrunk in 2022 and by 2024 had recovered to 2020 levels - no growth at all!
A chart similar to the previous, but with various lines indicating predictions of growth from 2021 to 2024. Most of these lines go up, with ARK predicting continued exponential growth, and most predicting modest growth. Only Ampere predicts the curve flattening out.
Chart of worldwide videogame spending from 1990 to 2021. Line go up! From about $25 billion in 1990 to $200 billion in 2021. Annual growth was 4.5% from 1990 until about 2012, and then it was 9.7% for the next decade. Boom times!
The “conspiracy theory” meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where a character is pointing at a messy wall of notes and photos with arrows drawn on them. Except that the character is Nintendo’s Luigi, wearing his white gloves. I spent entire minutes photoshopping this, so I hope you appreciate it.
A Birman cat lying upside-down on the carpet, looking supes cute.
A screenshot of the videogame "Naiad," with a top-down view of an abstract hand-drawn water sprite swimming gracefully just under the water. She floats near a poem, the letters of which are undulating in the waves: The butterfly flutters Its free beauty Is yours for a moment
Line art of a heart drawn around Bufus’s smiling face. It reads “Forever in our hearts” in a flowery script. This would be a good tattoo. I’m just saying.
Another Sims 2 screenshot of one of Bufus’s parties. A crowd of Sims is all packed together, talking about various things. We can see Bufus’s relationship meter going up with a friend, while two people on the couch are having a conversation… about Bufus. The guy got around!
Image of Matt Brown speaking at GDC in 2018. He’s standing at the podium and talking about a slide that can be seen over his shoulder, depicting “The Little Timmy Story,” a graph tree of nodes that starts with “Stargaze” and then “Own a telescope” and continues to a tree of possibilities including “discover a new planet” or “Join science career.”
Sims 2 Screenshot of Bufus in his pink tuxedo, standing in the middle of his shabby kitchen. Everything is a mess, there’s a smelly plate on the counter, and Bufus is clenching his fists in anguish as he looks up to the sky.
Sims 2 Screenshot of Bufus in his pink tuxedo guzzling water at the bar straight from the bottle.
A close-up compilation of the many faces of Bufus: Angry, sad, happy, etc.
Screenshot of The Sims 2. Bufus is in the same living room as above, where he has throw a paper airplane across the room. He is angrily yelling and gesturing at it, with the thought bubble of the airplane above his head.
Screenshot of the Sims 2. Bufus, wearing a grey tee-shirt and a beanie, is asleep on a couch in a tiny ramshackle home with an old TV and a cinder-block bookcase.
Screenshot of a Sim mad scientist in a library filled with mysterious equipment. He is wearing a smock and thinking of the atomic symbol, with a serious expression on his face. Technically this is a screenshot of The Sims 3, even though I’m talking about Sims 2, but you wouldn’t know that unless you read this alt-text.
Promotional art for The Sims 2, from Maxis and EA Games. It shows a group of over a dozen Sims in emotional or funny poses. Some of them are ordinary people, but if you look closely there’s also an astronaut, an alien, and the Grim Reaper himself. Fun game.
Screenshot of The Sims 2. A mustached gentlemen in a pink tuxedo jacket is having a cocktail on the deck of his shabby house. This is Bufus, the subject of today’s thread.
Title sequence from the 1958 movie “The Blob,” with big animated red swirls around the movie’s title. You gotta listen to the song. “Beware of the blob! It creeps, and leaps, and glides and slides across the floor - right through, the door - and all around the wall! A splotch, a blotch, be careful of THE BLOB…”
Screenshot from Google showing a helpful calculator for determining the volume of a sphere, along with a diagram, in case you’ve forgotten what a sphere looks like. (Round.)
Low-res screen capture of Will Wright giving a talk at GDC 2003. He is holding a slinky and looking like a cat who’s about to get into trouble. You know the look.
A very primitive drawing of a blue cloud, with a network of arrows inside branching out in different directions like a growing snowflake. But ugly. Not pretty, like a snowflake.
Similar diagram depicting more of the sphere. The tiny player on top looks a little overwhelmed! Inside the sphere is labelled “Mechanics” “Simulations” and “Systems,” along with an engine icon. Stick figure courtesy of Freepik.com, engine icon created by Chintuza at the Noun Project.
Abstract diagram of a player standing atop a sphere. The edge of the sphere is labelled “The things that the player can DO.” Stick figure drawing courtesy of Freepik.com.
Cropped photo of the 1958 movie poster for The Blob. Menacing red text reads: “Indescribable… Indestructible! Nothing can stop it! THE BLOB.”
A notebook with handwritten scribblings. It says "Mage Flavor" and then lists a series of spells and characters, like "Arcanomancer Vridiel" "Empower Hammer" "Borrow Artifact" "Hold Artifact Lovingly" "Grant XP - Small."
An illustration from the game “Spelunky 2,” depicting a photograph of some of the main characters all together and smiling. In the photo: Ana Spelunky, Tina Flan, Guy Spelunky himself, and the bug-eyed pug Monty the Dog. They’re all dressed in explorer gear. Except for the dog. He crazy.
An illustration of the Spelunky shopkeeper, armed with a shotgun and looking like he means business. Spoiler: he DOES.
A subset of a Spelunky level showing four generated rooms. The two rooms on the right feature a deep pit filled with snakes at the bottom. But there’s a valuable red gem down there! Oh, so tempting.
Image of a page from the book “Spelunky” published by Boss Fight Books. This page shows a grid of numbers, and a couple sentences about what they mean. “The room itself almost looks like a roguelike level, where each character represents something in the game. The 0’s are empty space, the 1’s are basic walls, the L’s are ladders…” etc.
Screenshot of the original “Legend of Zelda” for the NES. Link stands before the entrance of a foreboding dungeon deep in a forest.
An excerpt of the book “Spelunky” by Derek Yu. The text reads: “Choose an idea for a game that satisfies three requirements: It’s a game you want to make, a game that you are good at making, and a game you will wish you had made.”
Image of a book on a table. The book is “Spelunky,” by Derek Yu, published in 2018 by Boss Fight Books. The cover features an image of an eggplant. Very mysterious!
A Hearthstone card (not from the game, but from the game's credits) featuring a Dwarf reading a giant book and pointing at the viewer. The card is named "Dave Kosak" and it's a super powerful 12 damage/12 health minion that costs 0. However, the card's text reads: "Costs (1) more for each word of text on this card."
Dense handwritten notes on lined paper. It reads: "What if that's what wizardry is? We have the tools and talent to create whatever we dream, but to actually create it is a deep well of banal tasks and esoteric understanding. It is not power that limits a wizard: It is patience."
Screenshot of the victory screen from the game "Balatro." My best hand was 38,480. Most-played hand was "Pair," (42 times!) I was obviously playing a particular kind of weenie-deck strategy.
Image of a World of Warcraft comic created using in-game screenshots. An forsaken priest yells to an orc: “Rok’tar, no - don’t do it! Don’t listen to Barrens chat!” The orc does not appear to be listening; his eyes are glazed over and a thin stream of drool escapes his open mouth.
World of Warcraft screenshot of Bael Modan, a dwarven stronghold, exploding. A small dwarven gyrocopter is caught in the explosion, and is spiraling in for a crash landing. This was super dramatic by 2009 standards.
[Screenshot of a World of Warcraft item, “Bael’Dun Fortress Schematics.” The description reads, “A depiction of the fortress using primitive icons to represent essential structures.”
World of Warcraft screenshot of “Ol’ Durty Pete,” a curmudgeonly old dwarf in a floppy hat who you absolutely must meet sometime.
World of Warcraft screenshot of an Alliance soldier and siege engine guarding a battlefield in Southern Barrens.