WTF Happened December 2025
This is the last WTF Happened recap article of 2025! Welcome... to WTF Happened 2026!
Web & Streaming News
We normally start with Business, World, and Health News, but the biggest news we have this month in my opinion is the WTF Happened articles now have a dedicated homepage: wtfhappened.net!
This is the first article to be published on the new site, but we're
linking to past articles on the old syrsly.com website for legacy
content and everything works with our tags system. Going forward, the
articles for news will be posted here instead, and I'll work on search
features as the site grows. The site was coded from stratch, so it takes
time to get this stuff done. We don't just turn on Wordpress features. 
The Gamestop Awards 2025
Gamestop did a funny. Here's the video! They posted their parody of The Game Awards to YouTube which featured many well known influencers. The video was very self-aware, which alone made it worth a watch.
Business, World, and Health News
New Anti-Firearm California State Law
California passed a new state law, AB 1263, which is a firearm safety law that basically says you can't ship firearm pieces or firearm enhancements to consumers who reside in the state because you would be helping the consumer to commit the pre-existing crime of building a firearm. (LegiScan) The law became active on January 1st, 2026. Californians can still purchase pre-built firearms, but this is definitely a step in the right direction if you're in the anti-firearm camp. This law negatively impacts consumers who want to buy gun parts for enthusiast reasons. That said, maybe don't be a gun enthusiast? There are so many other things you can do with your life. There are still firing ranges, and if that's too expensive, consider investing in a good VR setup for having a virtual gun range.
Statue Of Liberty Replica Toppled By Wind
User Empty_Emergency_1084 on Reddit posted a vertical clip of a Statue Of Liberty replica toppling over due to strong winds in Guaiba, Brazil on December 15. I confirmed this really happened and the car it seemed to land on was barely spared. (Pedro Cunha)
Venezuela Oil Ring Caught & Drone Strikes On Drugs
In hindsight, this was leading up to something bigger, but around December 21, the U.S. Coast Guard tried to intercept an oil tanker that U.S. officials said is part of Venezuela's illegal sanctions evasion. (Reuters) These sanction evaders were coined "dark fleet vessels," and we later got follow-up information confirming at least one successfully captured oil tanker that was pretending to be a Russian tanker but was tied to Venezuela. Around a week later, around the end of December, drone strikes were reported on a remote coastal port facility in Venezuelan territory. (CNN) These drone strikes were reportedly against a drug ring. All of this feels eerily similar to the War On Drugs rhetoric I grew up with that turned out to be absolute bullshit.
Maldives Triple-Elimination Of HIV, Syphilis, and Hep. B!
Maldives, a country in South Asia, achieved triple-elimination of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, Syphilis, and Hepatitis B. (Unicef) This may not affect you personally, but it's big news. Maldives is the first country to accomplish this feat and others can look to them as an example.
Celebrity News
FaZe Clan Ditched
For those who aren't in-the-know, FaZe Clan was a big streamer/influencer organization, and they did some rather shady stuff, like require members to give a percentage of their income to the org. Of course, that led to tons of drama about people constantly leaving the org., and you can get caught up on the drama by watching this video by one of my favorite YT general news podcaster type creators, SomeOrdinaryGamers AKA Mutahar.
Weird Al Covered Killing In The Name
On December 3, Weird Al Yankovic spontaneously covered "Killing In The Name" by Rage Against The Machine. It wasn't even a parody song! How lost does the world have to be to have a jokester like Weird Al cover a song about corruption and disobedience so well with absolutely no lyrical changes? That's a rhetorical question, of course. You can watch the clip here. Be sure to read the comments. Comedy gold down there.
'Mortal Kombat' and 'Pearl Harbor' actor, dies at 75
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, best known for his portrayal of Shang Tsung in the 1993 Mortal Kombat adaptation, died from a stroke on December 4 in Santa Barbara. (USA Today) I blame Liu Kang.
Jokes aside, I really liked that guy. Sad to see him gone. Life waits for no one, even a sorcerer who steals souls to stay young. Definitely worth reading the USA Today article if you were a fan. They did him justice.
New Music
I rather liked this mash-up of Mortal Kombat and Snap's Rhythm Is A Dancer posted December 5. Really gets you pumped!
New & Returning Shows & Movies December 2025
At the end of November, we got a new "Best of the Year" compilation video from FailArmy for 2025. Perfect timing for the new year! These compilation videos are very entertaining and worth a watch if you haven't seen them already.
Around the end of December, the trailer for Qazaq Animasia dropped on SkyTube, a Bluesky-powered video platform. The platform is interesting, but the trailer is full of really great animations, too!
The Stranger Things season 5 finale dropped December 31 and was screened in theaters! Absolute cinema. I loved it!
It wasn't perfect by any means, but it was a great send-off for the
series and all its characters. I would have liked to have more
consequences along the way after season 4's ending, but oh well. It's a
very long-winded exposition dump filled season, so be prepared, but in
my opinion, it's worth your time. I don't want to say too much for fear
of spoilers, but some of the characters get very satisfying endings,
even if they aren't totally perfect endings.
60 Minutes accidentally aired a piece on CECOT after saying they wouldn't air it until a future episode moments before airing it anyway in some regions. (WUSA9) Bluesky user @gord.games reposted the segment in 3-minute parts here and gave thanks to @jasonparis.bsky.social for the footage. This is both sad and funny, sad because the events being covered should never happen to people at all and funny because it's the most incompetent censorship possible. On the up side, 60 Minutes got way more news coverage for failing to censor themselves than they would have if they just didn't censor anything at all.
Upcoming TV Series: Point Break
The classic action flick Point Break is reportedly getting a sequel in the form of a television series! (Bleeding Cool) I don't know how to feel about this, because it isn't starring any of the original cast so far and will involve a major time skip.
Final Day Of Filming Avengers: Doomsday
Kevin Fiege got emotional about the latest Avengers film and its final day of filming. (GeekTyrant) Fiege used this moment to congratulate Hot Toys on their 25th anniversary.
Masters Of The Universe Actor Hinted At "Human" He-Man
Nickolas Galitzine, an actor involved in the in-production Masters Of The Universe movie adaptation, hinted that the He-Man of this film would be more down-to-Earth than usual and have more emotion than past iterations. He also hinted that the film would play with themes of femininity and masculinity. (GeekTyrant)
Gaming News
New & Trending Games
ARC Raiders has been out since the end of October, but it didn't really get its full player base until around the beginning of December due to Winter sales. It is keeping its concurrent player stats from release for the most part, and it's what I'd consider an absolute hit. If you at all like MMO shooters, it's the game for you! If you like extraction shooters, you'll likely feel at home with this one.
Like rhythm games? UNBEATABLE (ugh caps) came out December 9. It's featured on the Steam front page nearly a month later, and it's extremely popular with a Very Positive review score. It won't beat slicing blocks in VR, but it looks like a good narrative experience.
Upcoming Games
Mariachi Legends got its LatAm Games Showcase trailer. I must admit I'm impressed and want to play this when it comes out. I'll likely get it for Steam, but if I could get the Switch or Switch 2 version, that could also be nice. Its release date is a loose "2026", so I can't exactly plan for this one yet.
Tomo Endless Blue got a Kickstarter campaign placeholder page and looks very promising as an unofficial next gen Pokemon predecessor. I half expected the campaign to launch already, but it's still in a "launching soon" status. Save this for later and keep an eye on it.
Final Fantasy XIV DDOS'd A Lot
Final fantasy XIV, the widely popular MMORPG by Square-Enix, went down and became mostly inaccessible for nearly a day due to DDOS attacks. (official forum announcement) This was the leaping off point when every few days, the game's North America servers would go down for most of the day. Around the end of December, we saw a massive 2-day downtime of not just all the game servers but also the mobile app which would take up most of the afternoon in my time and then the following night and morning into the new year. These DDOS attacks are still on-going at the time I'm writing this article.
Horses Banned From Epic
Horses, a psychological horror game about, well... horses... sort of... got banned from Steam on November 25 (IGN) and on December 3, Epic followed suit. (GameDeveloper) This was not surprising to me, because Epic is a much more strict platform than Steam even after Steam had its mass exodus of pornographic material. That said, as unsettling as this game is, it should not be banned from grown up stores, where grown-ups play. Censorship is bad. /smacks Epic's nose with paper.
Larian Studios CEO Defends AI For Concept Art and Placeholders
Larian Studios CEO, Swen Vincke promised to host a future Reddit AMA in 2026 after coming under fire for defending generative AI use in game development and admitting to using it in the pre-production phase of his game projects. Other studios were also caught using gen-AI in their final 1.0 releases, like Anno 117: Pax Romana and ARC Raiders (though ARC Raiders only used gen-AI for some dynamic voice stuff and ML bot animations/behaviors), and Larian Studios was recently caught leaving in a few AI generated textures at the release of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It seems generative AI in games is being normalized. I'm OK with some of it, I mean, there are some good use cases for AI, like using machine learning to form virtual brains for NPCs or using gen-AI voices to say lines dynamically instead of having pre-recorded lines. However, I think most of the scenarios involving gen-AI are an abuse of the technology, like generating art from unknown source data. We shouldn't support most of it, but we have to draw the line somewhere, and some people just take the easy route of either being pro-AI in general or being anti-AI in general. We don't live in a world of black and white, so we shouldn't think so absolutely.
Virtual Reality News
A really good Humble Bundle VR bundle...
Around Christmas, we got a new VR bundle from Humble Bundle called the Upload VR Winter 2025 Bundle. It had two tiers, a $10 tier and a $17 tier. For $10, you got After The Fall Deluxe, Guardians: Frontline, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Tourist Edition, and A Fisherman's Tale 2. This tier on its own could have been its own noteworthy bundle, but the second tier for $20 got you 5 more games, including some highly sought after ones, for only $7 more. The bundle ended January 2 at 9pm EST, so if this is your first time hearing about it, sorry, you missed it. I will be giving away my copies of After The Fall and Guardians: Frontline from this bundle to one lucky winner from my Bsky followers at the end of this month! Enter the giveaway here!
A really good Fanatical VR bundle...
We also got a really fantastic bundle from Fanatical with similar game offerings at $3.33 a pop! This bundle also offered After The Fall, Metal Hellsinger VR and Hellsweeper like the Humble bundle, but the Fanatical bundle allowed you to pick your own selections and only pay for what you want, so you could grab both bundles and have no overlap.
I personally think this is the better bundle deal for the time unless you really want Ghosts Of Tabor, which isn't as hyped now as it used to be, or Saints & Sinners. I highly recommend Windlands 2, Metal Hellsinger, and Until You Fall as my top choices.
New VR Releases
Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow released December 4 on Steam, PSVR2 and Meta. The game looks good, but I've already had my fill of VR stealth games like Thief. I'll get it on sale someday, of course.
Men In Black: Most Wanted released exclusively on Meta for Quest 3/3S on December 5. The visual style is cel-shaded and looks pretty good for standalone. I used to be a huge MIB fan, so I'll likely grab this sometime. It seems to be faithful to the old cartoon show.
Cave Crave VR released December 12 on Steam. This game released on Meta standalone way back in June, but it looks a lot better on PC. This is ultimately a climbing game, which is something VR has done well since 2016, but the details here make this a potentially very memorable experience.
Tales of Glory 3 released December 19 on Steam. I loved the first game in this franchise for the medieval warring experience. Each game in the franchise seems to focus on a different setting with the same theme of 'glory'.
Smasher released on Steam and Meta December 24. My curator group got a review copy of this for Steam, so we'll play it soon and may cover it on my YouTube channel if it's good.
Deadly Delivery First Major Update
On December 23 s we saw the first major update for Deadly Delivery. (official bsky post)
PortalVR: A New App For Playing VR On A Screen
The app has been making its rounds for at least 3 months now according to YCombinator, but I learned about it in December. I don't like the name of the product, because it conflicts with the supposed title players gave to Portal in VR, Portal VR. It also doesn't really seem legal, but I assume it gets some leeway being a free app. Check out its website here.
I personally think it's a cool project, but it's not the first software of its kind; It's just the first one to be free that I'm aware of. Some potentially really smart use cases for this app are in art tools where they didn't develop as good of an experience in non-VR desktop mode and in game development where you have to look at your screen a lot and don't want to constantly put on and take off a HMD. Of course, as mixed reality passthrough features become more common, this will become less useful, but it could keep some appeal to VR gamers who just want to be lazy sometimes without giving up the VR experience entirely.
Tech News
BigScreen Adds Dynamic Foveated Rendering For Beyond 2e
BigScreen, the VR media app and hardware company, added dynamic foveated rendering to their BigScreen Beyond app. (BigScreen blog) This feature is currently supported by their own BigScreen Beyond 2e but the same feature set is likely going to be standardized by the Steam Frame in the near future. I wish we could get similar support for the Vive Pro Eye, but it appears HTC hates us. You can technically get similar features in game dev tools for Vive Pro, but there's currently no catch-all solution for gamers to utilize such features to enhance performance on random games. I look forward to Steam Frame standardizing these features. It's been a long time coming.
RAM Prices Through The Roof!
In the beginning of December, we saw RAM stick prices balloon to never before seen highs and they kept rising. By the end of December, I couldn't find DDR4 2x8GB for less than $120 when this was $40-60 hardware just months earlier. According to Will Shanklin on Yahoo!tech/engadget, Samsung has confirmed MSRP increases are coming. Don't buy RAM right now. Wait for the market to normalize.
Consumer GPU Prices Are Skyrocketing Again!
Consumer GPUs are set to increase in price over 2x original price by the end of 2026. (ResetEra) Part of this is due to undeniable inflation. The rest is just greed. Companies tend to use inflation as an excuse to balloon prices of goods whenever competition is scarce.
It's important to note that GPUs saw similar price hikes not too long ago and everyone kept saying it would keep getting worse. It stopped increasing eventually, and prices dropped significantly after a while. Just have patience. You'll either save money by waiting or get better parts in the end due to new standards in the market. You will also likely be better off in the future compared to those who don't wait.
Game Dev & Art Asset News
Unity Month-long Giveaways!
From December 24 to December 31, Unity Asset Store gave away a free asset every day at 8am PT or 11am EST. The first asset was a really good tool I highly recommend, Procedural UI by DTT, not to be confused for Procedural UI Image, which looks very similar but is slightly older. There are a lot of UI assets out there with similar deliverables. I wouldn't call Procedural UI the most useful UI asset for Unity, but it's on the list for sure. Hard to beat free!
For the past few years, Unity has done periodic and then regular weekly publisher of the week freebies which required you to enter a coupon code to get a specific asset for free at checkout. This daily freebie worked the same way, so naturally, this daily freebie broke the weekly freebie for a short while on the first day. Thankfully, we still got a weekly freebie for each of the two weeks of this event. One for this week was Explosive Device C4 & Defuse Kit by Qatmo. Qatmo is well known for the realism they bring to any scene and in particular, I know them for their programmable elevator asset.
W4 Build for Godot Open-Sourced!
W4 Games, a company heavily supporting the Godot game engine, decided to open source their Godot-based app/game porting/building tool, W4 Build, and drop future commercial support for it. (GameFromScratch) Some would say this is a bad thing, but I would say this was the right move. They should have provided a longer timeframe to migrate away from this service, but at least they're giving people a free month of credits before closing the service. This is why it's important not to rely on services for your work. Hopefully, we'll see the community create a self-hosted solution, and in the end, this may save devs money.
Closing story?
The time has come to choose something random to passionately ramble on and on about, and that something is... drumroll please...
MMO Shooters!
At one time, I was heavily invested in a MMORPG. Then, another one. Then, another one until... well, MMORPGs kind of lost their appeal as I got older and took on more real world responsibilities and had less free time and the internet supported faster paced multiplayer experiences. Then, I got into VR and VR MMORPGs became a thing, and then those never really went anywhere... they just all died within a few years of early access state development. During those years, I noticed VR MMORPGs kind of felt like MMO shooters because I was pointing weapons and shooting them a lot, and then I realized that I haven't really seen much in that genre ever. It's just not an over-saturated genre like everything else. Sure, we got the occasional new title, but nothing stuck... other than a couple exceptions, of course.
Then, along came ARC Raiders, and yes, it was an extraction shooter first and foremost, but it was also a social experiment that felt a lot like a MMOG. It gave me all the same mechanics as a MMO shooter except the non-PVP safe zones and minigames and text chat. It also didn't seem to give users a proper username, instead opting for that typical modern Discord-like name-plus-number functionality. The social systems of ARC Raiders is a little rough, which is a shame, because there are plenty of players I've met who I was unable to add as friends.
There have been a lot of really great MMO shooters in the past which felt very cool. Here are a few I played and enjoyed:
- Global Agenda
- PlanetSide 2
- Warframe
I won't describe these games here due to the article already being kind of lengthy, but if you like ARC Raiders, try a couple of the others out. Global Agenda was closed for a while but has since reopened its servers... again, so if you're curious about it, check it out on Steam!
That's all for now! This was Syrsly reporting in, and I'll be back in a few days with more articles to post on the newly formed WTF Happened website. We will continue the monthly recap articles indefinitely, but expect more sporadic small posts as well.
