Amanda Kay Oaks

Amanda Kay Oaks focuses on how players live with games, covering news, features, lists, and guides across PC, console, mobile, and tabletop gaming for ComicBook.com. She is a gaming staff writer at ComicBook.com, having joined the outlet in 2024 to write full-time about video games and related media. Her beat combines new releases, live-service performance, nostalgia-driven retrospectives, and coverage of tabletop-adjacent franchises.

Steam, survival games, and player value

Oaks regularly writes about Steam and PC gaming with a focus on value, access, and survival titles.

Her coverage includes deal roundups such as a piece on survival game discounts during a major Steam sale, framing each recommendation around price and practical benefits for players who want to expand their libraries without overspending. She also reports on early access opportunities for anticipated open-world survival games, emphasizing limited-time windows and what players can expect from unfinished builds.

In addition to these guides, she highlights chart performance and affordability, including low-cost cooperative games that reach Steam’s top seller rankings and demonstrate how price-sensitive hits can quickly gain traction.

Live-service and mobile games under pressure

Live-service and mobile titles form another strand of her beat, particularly where player retention and community sentiment are at stake. In her feature on Pokemon TCG Pocket losing players, Oaks examines why the game is hemorrhaging its audience and surfaces solutions coming from committed fans who want the title to stabilize and improve. She follows ongoing meta shakeups and balance changes in mobile games, treating major updates as moments that can either revive interest or accelerate churn. Taken together, these pieces show her interest in the health of ongoing games rather than just their launch moments, and in the feedback loop between developers and active communities.

Tabletop, actual play, and cross-media franchises

Oaks’ gaming coverage extends into tabletop role-playing and actual play franchises, with sustained attention to the Critical Role ecosystem.

She tracks Dispatch-related projects, writing on website rebrands that hint at sequel announcements, updates confirming progress on the next game, and interviews with key cast members about their wishlist for a potential Dispatch 2. Her reporting on new actual play series, including the “Draw Your Weapons” project, highlights how hybrid formats mixing illustration, acting, and tabletop mechanics broaden what counts as a game experience.

Beyond Critical Role, she covers video games that are strong candidates for tabletop adaptations and follows fantasy streaming series tied to Dungeons & Dragons and similar properties, treating these crossovers as part of the same narrative and fandom landscape as traditional games. This strand of her work positions her as a useful contact for stories that sit at the intersection of video games, TTRPGs, and streaming media.

Nostalgia, franchises, and anticipatory coverage

Nostalgia and long-running franchises are recurring themes in Oaks’ features and reviews. In her review of the Yu-Gi-Oh!

Early Days Collection, she situates the compilation within the earliest games in the series, tracing a line from late-1990s and early-2000s titles through to modern entries and showing how returning to Game Boy and Game Boy Advance-era releases reshapes contemporary play. Her feature on a new Nintendo Switch 2 game connects the title to classic Legend of Zelda installments, using those reference points to help readers understand its appeal and design choices.

Her archive includes repeated coverage of Pokemon, Stardew Valley, soulslike games, and board and card games, which points to a strong interest in systems-heavy experiences and the evolution of established series over time. She also writes anticipatory pieces, such as a list of highly anticipated games that might never come out but are not officially cancelled, cataloguing projects still technically in development despite prolonged quiet from their studios.

The combination of retrospectives, franchise tracking, and watchlists gives her work a long view on where games have been and where they might go next.

Format range and prior experience

Across these subjects, Oaks works in multiple formats: straight news about announcements and updates, features that dig into player experience and community dynamics, interviews tied to specific franchises, reviews of classic and modern titles, and practical guides and lists that help readers decide what to play or buy. Before joining ComicBook.com, her bylines appeared at outlets including Book Riot, Gamepur, and The Escapist, reflecting experience with books, games, and broader pop culture coverage. That background informs her current beat, where she frequently frames games within their wider cultural context - whether that is trading-card nostalgia, fantasy streaming universes, or the economics of live-service play.