J is the least used letter in Wordle words so you are kind of wasting a guess there.

That is probably enough fire hazard to burn down a forest or two.

Or GriFTs.

No, ‘bullshit’ is too many letters

As if a Pokemon game is ever going to go on sale

Game Freak has burned me way too much the past few years to get Arceus on Day 1. I’ll wait for reviews, and if it’s considered good (and by good, I mean significantly better than the last few mainline games), I’ll wait until it goes on sale for $30.

It’s not even that dire. Xbox Game Studios have released 60 projects in the last 5 years alone, 27 of those in the last 2 years. Not all are exclusive, some are ports and remasters. But the studios are busy and productive, its really not a big worry.

I disagree. Microsoft shows no inclination nor has any real motivation for exclusives. I think they'd be perfectly happy selling everything to everyone. The money isn't in exclusives, and it never has been. Microsoft would put gamepass on Sony if they'd allow it. 

that’s not true though. Microsoft games division has always been quite a nice place for developers to be. Less pressure than under other ownership, and a somewhat stringent (guidelines, not that much frat bullshit), yet relaxed athmosphere (also because of the guidelines which don’t let every shit fly).
Their problem…

“The thing around this whole acquisition though that still strikes me is that Microsoft have spent the last, what, four years now just buying up everything under the sun and what exactly do they have to show for it?”

There are a couple understandable ones; InXile, Obsidian, DoubleFine, and Undead Labs were all already deep into production or in the process of releasing games when their acquisitions were announced. Obsidian’s next two games are known (Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed), as are Undead Labs’ and Ninja Theory’s, so the rest…

I agree that I prefer Sony’s strategy of working to grow devs and building those working relationships, but let’s not pretend that Sony is some family business. They are not doing anything that isn’t 1,000% financially motivated, and until very recently, they’ve been stingy about any of their exclusives being…

You could have made this exact same statement about Netflix back when they made the pivot from disc rentals to streaming. Technology advances. No doubt this is a much harder problem than video streaming was, but several very large companies are betting very large amounts of money on the idea that it can be solved, and…

My concern here is that Microsoft may want to get out of the console business entirely after this generation and shunt people over to PC.

As long as the console keeps selling, they’ll keep making them. And thus far, the Series generation is outselling the One.

They still have strong competitors in Sony and Nintendo.

There was never a situation where Kotick wasn't going to get a huge payday, regardless of this buyout. 

Guess you weren’t old enough for the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD Disc War?

You can rightly argue that less competition will result in a general negative impact on the market over time, but this will almost certainly result in a net positive for the industry at least in the short term, if only because Xbox under Phil Spencer has been one of the most consumer friendly game companies out there…

that doesn’t really mean anything, takeovers like this usually keep most of the C staff until the deal has completed then phase them out after restructuring