“It doesn’t seem like much, but a lot of games struggle to pull that much off to this day.”

So true. FF7 has oddly been the game that a large crowd loves to hate on because of its popularity, reducing everything to the most surface level understanding while claiming its shallowness. A game full of broken heroes, some…

No, but until now the US was the only region spared from the mid-gen price hike that most other parts of the world got from both Sony and MS.

I mean, in all fairness, Microsoft has done a much better job at crushing XBox than Sony, historically.

Haha triggered Microsoft Fanbois are hilarious.

It’s a fairly astute assessment of the publisher’s situation, but one that either was not listened to by his bosses or even himself. He says that AAA publishers are in a fragile state because all they can think to do is ride old IPs for as long as they can, but Microsoft’s whole business strategy of the last few years…

“I fail to see how this hurts the industry”

You fail to see how making one single company own the biggest publisher in the entire world, is bad. And then you wax poetic about something about unions.

Heres a tip: It hurts the industry because consolidation of power is bad. Everyone is “ legally prohibited from engaging…

Yeah, ship's gonna get righted into the same cliff the Rare ship dropped.

He didn’t live through the late 90s and early 2000's with Microsoft trying to get rid of every competitor they had and being the only game in town. He should ask WordPerfect and Novell how friendly Microsoft is.

“microsoft is one of the most consumer/union friendly companies”

This is gonna be disastrous for the entire games industry. There is no way one of the biggest companies buying out another of the biggest companies will be a net positive, it’s going to quickly turn anti-competitive and anti-consumer. But because Microsoft knows exactly what to say and what small concessions to make,…

Shouldn’t have fired your assistant.

I will never forgive Redmond for that. The only developer that could crank out titles that consistently hit Nintendo's own quality was a bunch of damp Brits in Twycross, and MS ruined them. 

I would hate for them to buy Nintendo. First of all, "their success lies off their hardware" means they would kill the Switch and move things onto Xbox. Second of all, no I can't argue this anymore it's just too awful to consider 

It’s Microsoft. They’d find a way to fuck it up. Remember Rareware? Yeah.

Holy shit, just when I thought I couldn’t dislike Phil Spencer any more.

Dude’s idea of success is ‘buy all the competition’ rather than, you know, actually investing in his own developers to make better games.  Sure buddy, try to buy the company that has consistently trounced the shit out of you in console sales…

I disagree - I think Skyrim is an amazing game, but its also pretty old and overplayed by literally everyone and it has certainly lost its luster - that being said there are hundreds of new ideas in RPGs since Skyrim, and seeing Starfield I am not sure that Bethesda is really listening to those ideas instead of just…

Remember folks, it's only a crime if you're poor.   Otherwise, this is just smart investment/Capitalism.  

Wait, so are you telling me that when you change a mainline game of a storied franchise from the genre it helped build into a pretty but otherwise mediocre action game, fans who didn’t preorder aren’t interested? 

Another example is with something like the Steam Deck. Switching between different Proton versions for the same game counts of a new "install"

It’s a comfort-food game for many, familiar, safe, for many it was never going to set the world on fire, it’s just another Bethesda game, in space.