They have zero interest, yet are spending the time and money to patent just such a thing?

Interesting that you omit Activision from your numbers. If Microsoft caught up to Sony with Bethesda, then acquiring Activision is completely unnecessary and absolute overkill. (Not that I agree with OP, but there really was zero reason for Microsoft to acquire Activision other than corporate greed)

Even that read boils down to “You know that bullshit currency from F2P games that everyone hates? What if it was used by even more games??”

I’d say the only odd thing is the muted color palette. They should have gone for a much brighter world, akin to Horizon.

I heard that Microsoft just went back to the drawing board on said device?

Same thing rather hilariously happens in Kingdom Hearts.

All this chart really shows, to me, is that CDs were way too expensive.

One thing to note: You speak to this as though the value equaled a game purchase, when in reality it equaled a rental. Let’s hope that you never want to replay any of those Game Pass games after they leave the service!

Personally, I’d prefer a different kind of systems-heavy game for the sequel. In many ways Death Stranding was itself a unique take on the systems-heavy MGSV formula. And I feel like Kojima pretty fully explored everything you could do with the porter system in DS1.

Morbius, Vampire: Swansong and V Rising all just released. And Blade will be in Midnight Suns. Vampires are back, baby!

With the one truly weird exception that they love to crank out Mana games no matter how poorly they do.

Nah, starting over with a new zero-to-antihero was the smart move.

And BotW is so different from other recent Zelda games, that in many ways it’s been over a decade since we’ve seen a new entry!

I find the kneejerk reaction to game similarities quite fascinating.  A game with completely different art but identical gameplay, a la Angry Birds? That’s fine. But a game that plays completely differently, with a similar visual style to another game? SUE SUE SUE!

If you’ve purchased digital versions of classics from the PS1 and PSP era, you needn’t subscribe to PS Plus to play them, Sony says. You can just pop onto the PlayStation Store and redownload as they become available.

I got the 75% figure from 2020 sales data.

You are indeed correct from a general perspective, but not a legal one. From Wikipedia:

I’m afraid you have this very backwards.

Isn’t that the entire concept behind abuse of Monopoly? That users have a reason they prefer Steam has absolutely nothing to do with whether Steam was abusing that Monopoly.

Right, but that difference is having a larger impact right now due to the chip shortage. TSMC only has so much capacity at any given node, so Nintendo using one with much lower demand means they have far less supply issues. Note that those issues are likely to go away before the end of the next fiscal year and are at…