So it's the last day of the year and I'm sitting here with a Steam library I haven't touched since October because Epic Games has been giving away free games every single day since December 19th and I cannot stop claiming them. Today's the twelfth one or something, I lost count around Christmas. You just show up to the Epic Games Store, click "get," and it's yours forever, no strings, no email harvesting beyond what they already have on you. Day one was Subnautica, which I'd already bought during a Steam sale two years ago and never finished (that game gives me actual anxiety, the ocean is not a place I want to be even in pixel form), but a bunch of the later ones I didn't own and now do. Fifteen days of this, running through January 2nd.
I know a lot of people still refuse to install the Epic launcher on principle and I get it, the client is rough, no cloud saves for half your library, no shopping cart, the whole thing feels like it was built in a weekend by people who were told "just make something that opens exe files." But free is free and I'm not proud. My Epic library is quietly becoming bigger than games I've actually paid for on Steam, which is a weird sentence to type but here we are at the end of 2019.
The Baby Yoda Situation
Meanwhile the actual physical retail world has been a disaster in a completely different way, and it's the funniest tech-adjacent story of the month to me. Disney did not have Baby Yoda toys ready for the holidays. The Mandalorian premiered back in November, the character (they still won't officially name him, it's just "the Child" in credits) became the meme of the entire fall, and then there was nothing to buy. No plush, no figure, nothing on shelves. So the internet did what the internet does: Etsy filled up with hundreds of handmade Baby Yoda dolls and crochet versions and resin figurines, some of them genuinely better sculpted than anything a licensed toy company would put out in six months. My sister-in-law has been trying to get one for my nephew since Thanksgiving and ended up buying a 3D-printed one off Etsy for something like $45, which is absurd for a chunk of printed plastic, but she said it was that or nothing.
I don't think this gets talked about enough as a supply chain and licensing story rather than just a cute meme thing. Disney clearly did not expect the character to blow up the way it did, or they underestimated how fast people would want merchandise, and now there's a multi-month gap where independent sellers on Etsy and Amazon are just... filling a hole in the market that a trillion-dollar media company left open. Some of those sellers have gotten cease-and-desist notices, which, fair, that's how IP law works, but it doesn't change the fact that if you wanted an actual Baby Yoda under your tree this year your options were pretty much: draw your own, print your own, or wait until spring when the "official" merch finally ships.
It's a small thing in the scheme of the year but it's stuck with me more than most of the bigger headlines from December. Everyone's been writing about Star Wars box office numbers (Rise of Skywalker had a noticeably softer opening than the last two, which, sure, that movie was a mess and I have opinions about it I won't get into here because I'd need another thousand words) and CES previews for whatever foldable nonsense gets announced in a week. But the toy shortage is the one that actually says something about how fast internet culture can outrun a company's own production timelines now. A character existed as a meme before it existed as a product you could buy in a store, and the gap between those two things was months long.
Anyway. I've got two more days of free Epic games to grab before the giveaway ends, my backlog is now embarrassing in two different launchers instead of one, and somewhere out there my nephew is going to unwrap a slightly lumpy 3D-printed frog-eating puppet and have no idea any of this happened behind the scenes. That's probably how it should be. See you in 2020, assuming nothing catches fire between now and then.