PANACHES Media

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Articles, analysis and creative monitoring: PANACHES Media explores practices, tools and digital culture to help you understand, learn and move forward.

13 articles in Video Game

Illustration for Video Game Careers: Who Really Makes a Game?
Video Game Article

Video Game Careers: Who Really Makes a Game?

A video game involves far more than programmers and artists. Game designers, level designers, concept artists, character designers, animators, technical artists, sound designers, writers, producers, QA specialists, and many other professionals collaborate throughout production. Understanding their roles reveals how a game is actually made and where the different career paths in the industry fit.

Illustration for How Do Video Games Make Money?
Video Game Article

How Do Video Games Make Money?

The video game business model has changed profoundly: boxed sales, shareware, expansions, DLC, digital distribution, free-to-play, microtransactions, subscriptions, battle passes, and games operated as services now coexist. Understanding these models reveals how revenue actually flows between players, studios, publishers, and platforms such as Steam, PlayStation, or Xbox.

Illustration for AAA, AA and Indie Games: How Are Video Games Really Produced?
Video Game Article

AAA, AA and Indie Games: How Are Video Games Really Produced?

AAA, AA, indie, solo, mobile, or open source do not simply describe the size of a game. These terms refer to very different budgets, team structures, funding models, levels of control, and production constraints. Alongside these categories are other forms of creation, from game jams to ports, remakes, and remasters.

Illustration for How Does the Video Game Industry Work?
Video Game Article

How Does the Video Game Industry Work?

Between a game’s first idea and its arrival in the hands of players lies an entire ecosystem: studios, developers, publishers, platform holders, distributors, service providers, and investors. Each intervenes at a different stage in financing, production, marketing, distribution, or long-term operation. Understanding this chain also reveals why these roles increasingly overlap in the age of digital distribution.

Illustration for Artificial Intelligence in Video Games: How Do Characters Really Think?
Video Game Article

Artificial Intelligence in Video Games: How Do Characters Really Think?

In video games, artificial intelligence does not refer only to machine learning or generative models. For decades, it has included navigation, decision-making, perception, and adaptation techniques that allow characters and systems to react to the player. From early programmed behaviors to agents able to converse and act, the history of game AI is above all one of increasingly sophisticated rules.

Illustration for Game Engines: The Technology Behind Virtual Worlds
Video Game Article

Game Engines: The Technology Behind Virtual Worlds

A game engine does much more than display graphics. It coordinates rendering, physics, audio, animation, scripting, artificial intelligence, editing tools, and part of the production pipeline. Understanding its role reveals what lies behind Unreal Engine, Unity, Godot, and the internal engines used by major studios.

Illustration for From Pixels to Ray Tracing: The Evolution of Video Game Graphics
Video Game Article

From Pixels to Ray Tracing: The Evolution of Video Game Graphics

In a little over fifty years, video games have gone from elementary shapes drawn on a screen to 3D worlds lit in real time, capable of combining rasterization, ray tracing, and image reconstruction. Yet this evolution is not simply a race toward realism: above all, it shows how artists and engineers learned to produce increasingly rich images while working with the limits of hardware.

Illustration for How Is a Video Game Made? The Complete Production Pipeline
Video Game Article

How Is a Video Game Made? The Complete Production Pipeline

A video game does not go directly from an idea to a playable version. In between, teams have to design, prototype, program, produce images and sounds, build levels, test, optimize, localize, publish, and then maintain the project. This pipeline is not a rigid chain: it is an iterative process in which every discipline gradually transforms an intention into a playable experience.

Illustration for All Video Game Genres: Understanding the Major Gameplay Families
Video Game Reference

All Video Game Genres: Understanding the Major Gameplay Families

Action, adventure, RPG, strategy, simulation, FPS, roguelike, Metroidvania, Soulslike, MOBA, battle royale… Video game vocabulary can sometimes feel like a forest of genres and subgenres. Yet behind these labels lies a fairly simple logic: describing what the player does, the rules they follow, and the way the game structures the experience.

Illustration for From Arcades to the Cloud: The History of the Major Gaming Platforms
Video Game Article

From Arcades to the Cloud: The History of the Major Gaming Platforms

Video games have lived in arcades, under our televisions, on computers, in our pockets, across the Internet, and even inside virtual reality headsets. Each platform changed far more than the hardware: it transformed places, gestures, genres, audiences, and ways of creating. Here is how video games gradually learned to live everywhere.

Illustration for The History of Video Game Consoles: Nine Generations That Changed Our Living Rooms
Video Game Article

The History of Video Game Consoles: Nine Generations That Changed Our Living Rooms

From the Magnavox Odyssey to the PlayStation 5, from Atari cartridges to modern SSDs, consoles have crossed nine generations shaped by commercial wars, technical innovations, and bets that were sometimes brilliant, sometimes catastrophic. A history in which Nintendo, Sega, Atari, Sony, and Microsoft each took turns redefining what a gaming machine could be.

Illustration for The great history of video games: from laboratories to virtual worlds
Video Game Article

The great history of video games: from laboratories to virtual worlds

Video games were not born with Pong or a console. From the first electronic experiments to contemporary connected worlds, its history is made up of innovations, crises, machines and new ways of playing. A journey through five major periods and twenty-three benchmarks to understand how video games have become one of the great media of our time.