If you want to sell your apps on the Windows Store, Microsoft absolutely takes a cut and has restrictions on things like payment methods.

Yeah, pretty much all of the legal scholarship on the topic I’ve read has pretty clearly come down on the side of “it’s totally within Apple’s rights to do this, and isn’t anti-competitive (in the legal sense) at all.”

It’s easy to hate on Apple’s walled garden but I honestly don’t see any problem with this

It mentions a ton of votes though (millions), so my best guess would be that investors are a majority of regular people, hence more affected by disproportioned salaries than by gaining a few more bucks from their investment.

I’ve seen this time and time again. New exec comes, the first thing they do is “restructure” because the old way was simply not working.

In 2014, Satya Nadella ordered 18,000 people to be laid off. Mostly from Nokia (which kind of made sense, but as opposed to re-purposing them or changing their role, they got laid off). So let’s say the average was $100,000 a year. That’s 1.8 billion dollars in a year. Following year, Nadella made $18.3mil, that’s 183…

Spot on. I’ve seen this time and time again. New exec comes, the first thing they do is “restructure” because the old way was simply not working. Midst the chaos, knowledge is lost, layoffs (“making the company lean”), any dip is then explained by workers “adjusting to their new roles” which weren’t an issue before.…

I wonder how the total salaries of the workers that got laid off compares to the salary+bonuses of the execs that made the order.

“While recognising the need to retain top executives”

This isn’t a need. It’s the biggest lie in the corporate universe, in fact.

The difference between a “top executive” and “other executives” is literally a lottery pull. The vast majority of them are staggeringly incompetent or ineffectual people that just ride…

Sony has both PS+ (Games with Gold except Sony did it about 3 years before Microsoft) and PlayStation Now (GamePass except Sony started it also 3 years sooner than Microsoft) which, just like Xbox, supports PC streaming unless I’m missing something Sony has effectively the same offerings.

I’m not necessarily saying they need to just drop it forever, but after Reach MS should have let it hibernate for a while, drop Chief completely, cultivate a bunch of new ideas, take pitches from other teams, and really try and reinvent what Halo could be going forward instead of just trying to recreate what Bungie…

Halo is Microsoft's flagship franchise. There is absolutely no way they would have let Halo just dissapear. I'm not happy with what Halo 4 and 5 were, but just letting a huge franchise like Halo go away is stupid

Sony delayed all of their major launches by at least a couple months this year, and thats for games that only had to spend the last 2 months of their development cycle in Covid. They absolutely slipped timelines because of this. My guess is that Ratchet and Clank was probably originally lined up to be a launch title…

I think yes and I also think no. It’s undeniable that the pandemic has impacted practically every industry negatively, but I do think Halo Infinite’s development has been suffering from other internal factors. Regardless, I’ve never been so happy to see a game delayed.

Listen, I don’t want to come off as an asshole here. There’s no doubt in my mind that there are a ton of wonderful, immensely talented people at 343and I wish them nothing but the absolute best...but there’s no real nice way of saying this, so I’ll just say it...

343 was a mistake and MS should have let Halo go after…

Sony hasn’t stopped delivering games so I’m thinking they’re on schedule. Xbox has had a mostly dry season that started 2 years before COVID-19.

also, the creative director left midway through. Besides COVID, I guess things weren’t great for 343, seeing this was the launch game of the new Xbox.

They’re not.  Both of them should have count their losses and just pushed their consoles back until 2021.  Because if the second wave of Corona is just as bad as the first, well no one is going to be worried about video games.

Well, Covid and the overwhelmingly negative response to the graphics in the gameplay demo. From statements that came out of 343i after the showing I think they were under the impression people would be far more impressed than they actually were.

ah the POP-IN, i forgot to even mention it. it’s BAD. Like, on the in-game benchmarking thing it’s comically bad, entire sections of buildings popping in late, then their shadows even later after that.