That was the location spend in Hungary alone, which is likely to be around 1/2 to 1/3 of the budget. That does not include the actors’ wages, the wages of the non-Hungarian crewmembers, post-production, music and sound or CGI. The total budget is much more likely in the area of $8-10 million per episode.

She looks very much like a CGI model closely based on Jen Taylor in a mocap suit.

Playing the games or at least reading their plot summaries might help. The Spartans have a fairly involved backstory in the games and spin-off material.

The other way of looking at it is that, post-Halo, they’ve had a 100% hit rate.

There’s quite a lot of interesting stories about the day-to-day existence of Obsidian being a scramble to stay afloat, and how Sega cancelling their Aliens RPG and then Microsoft cancelling Stormlands almost destroyed them. They had to shed employees and do the Pillars of Eternity Kickstarter as a Hail Mary to keep…

A new Destiny game every few years (I believe they’ve ruled out a Destiny 3 before the Destiny 2 programme is completed in 2024, so that’ll be 8 years minimum between full games) is nothing like the annual CoD drop punctuated by a new open-world Bethesda mega-RPG every four years.

Windows is a big thing, of course, but the cloud computing service Azure is an absolute money-maker as well. Even Office 365, annoying as it is, generates significant bank.

I’ve still got to get to See. The premise seemed hokey but I’m usually down with Momoa and Bautista.

Not an American.

You have three shows there which are worth subbing for the free trial period at least (I know here you can sub, then cancel immediately and it will automatically end the period before any money is taken).

Apple TV+ has several absolute bangers, though. Ted Lasso, For All Mankind (now officially the best space show on TV since The Expanse wrapped up) and Mythic Quest are all legit shows.

Alternatively she starts out looking like this and when she’s transferred to Chief’s suit, the more limited resources means she can only be rendered in her traditional blue format.

Well, all of their franchises move to Xbox exclusives and PlayStation and Nintendo gamers lose out once again.

As they’ve already said, they couldn’t justify the immense cost of building Caemlyn in Season 1 for a bunch of scenes that they couldn’t then afford to cast: you might be able to hire Elayne for 1 episode in Season 1 and then all of Season 2, but you can’t hire Morgase, Tallanvor, Elaida, Gareth Bryne etc for 1 scene…

Hard disagree on that one. EotW is okay but only really ranks among the middle of the series in quality, and the stodgy and mismatched pacing is responsible for that, especially the never-ending slog of the Caemlyn Road sequence. By condensing all of that into one village (Episode 3) and one farm afterwards (Episode…

I think this came up and it was ruled eligible pretty much because of the fantasy island and guitar-playing dog content.

Half-Life has fairly minimalistic writing but it does try to achieve total immersion (by 1998 standards) in its pulp SF world, with attention to detail in the visuals, combat, enemy designs etc. On those grounds it would be eligible. Half-Life: Alyx was longlisted this year, but didn’t get very far, presumably because…

Space War for 1962 as well.

I think the games have to have at least nominal science fiction or fantasy content, so Tetris I think would be ruled out, unless it has an epic science fiction backstory I’m unaware of.

There’s many dozens (entire organisations) of people in the books like that: women who can use the Power, were rejected from the Aes Sedai for whatever reason, but kept trucking.