a.k.a. "Todd's Sweet Little Lies"

From the studio that brought you Skyrim, Skyrim: Legendary Edition, Skyrim: Special Edition, Skyrim VR, Skyrim for Nintendo Switch, Skyrim: Very Special Edition for Amazon Alexa, Skyrim: Anniversary Edition, and Skyrim for Switch 2...

We bring you a special episode tracing Bethesda's full arc from the golden age of Morrowind through the Fallout 76 dumpster fire, Starfield's 97.6% player decline, and the belated PS5 relaunch with the Free Lanes update that should have shipped in 2023. We dig into the Creation Engine debate, Todd Howard's pattern of overpromising, Microsoft's layoffs gutting ZeniMax, and TES VI sitting at 14+ years post-Skyrim with no release date. Meanwhile, Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 proved the audience Bethesda built isn't gone. It just has better options now.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 – Intro
• 1:47 – The Golden Age (1)
• 9:47 – The Cracks Appear (2)
• 18:07 – The Dumpster Fire (3)
• 32:37 – Starfield (4)
• 45:21 – Let Creation Engine Die… PLEASE (5)
• 55:37 – The Culture Problem (6)
• 1:04:22 – Can They Come Back? (7)
• 1:17:28 – Outro + Housekeeping

Show notes, links, and more available here: https://squaredcast.com/episode-5/

Uncensored episodes and bonus content available via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SquaredCast

Recently, two juries hit Meta with back-to-back verdicts in 24 hours: $375 million in New Mexico for child exploitation, and $6 million in Los Angeles for engineering addictive products that harmed a minor. While those verdicts landed, a researcher published findings on GitHub tracing Meta's lobbying operation across 45 states, with over $25 million directly confirmed and estimates running as high as $2 billion, all designed to shift age verification responsibility onto Apple and Google. Then Apple released iOS 26.4, and UK iPhone users got a new prompt: "Confirm You Are 18+." California's law goes further, requiring every operating system to collect user age data, Linux included. GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused alternative to Android, told regulators to pound sand. Elsewhere: Nvidia unveiled DLSS 5 and the internet called it an AI beauty filter. A federal judge blocked the Pentagon's attempt to blacklist Anthropic as a national security threat. Microsoft admitted Windows 11 has a bloat problem. And the FCC banned all new foreign-made routers from the U.S. market, which covers basically every brand on store shelves.

Show notes, links, and more available here: https://squaredcast.com/episode-4/

Uncensored episodes and bonus content available via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SquaredCast

PLEASE NOTE: The audio for this episode was recorded on March 13, 2026. Some stories covered here have developed since then. Updated sourcing and corrections are in the full show notes at squaredcast.com.

Recently, the lines between smart devices and corporate surveillance got harder to ignore. Hisense TVs started showing unskippable full-screen ads when owners switched HDMI inputs, pushed silently through a firmware update, after the sale, with remote per-device control that nobody disclosed at the register. New York's attorney general sued Valve for running what she called a gambling operation, and a class action followed days later. The world's biggest gaming conference lost a third of its attendees, dropping to 20,000, the smallest turnout since 2011. International developers stayed home over U.S. border fears, and the Iran war shut down Middle Eastern airspace two weeks before the show opened. And YouTube, freshly crowned the world's largest media company, celebrated by rolling out 30-second unskippable ads on every TV it can reach. In the Deep Dive, we go long on the Stryker hack: a Fortune 500 medical device company with 56,000 employees had thousands of devices wiped in a single night. No malware. No zero-day. Just stolen admin credentials, a button that was already there, and a kill switch built into the tools companies use to manage their own infrastructure. Plus, there's a billion-record identity data leak that may or may not be real.

Show notes, links, and more available here: https://squaredcast.com/episode-3/

Uncensored episodes and bonus content available via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SquaredCast