I argue the opposite. The general public will accept a hell of a lot if they don’t have to pay for it in cash dollars.  No one “likes” ads, but they’ll happily accept them if the alternative is they don’t have to pull out their wallet.

Try putting a monthly fee on Twitter or Facebook in lieu of ads, and watch those…

Kingdom Hearts is an impenetrable series, but most series that try to maintain continuity will get impenetrable given enough time. Video games tend to dodge that phenomenon by either making each game mostly stand alone (like your Yakuza example), or by having no real continuity between games (Final Fantasy comes to…

The problem is that NFTs have effects that you can’t just ignore.  The amount of energy that is consumed on crypto to begin with is something that can have tragic impact on our society, for example.

I... wasn’t aware we were disagreeing on that point.

I never said they were “universally loved.” We were speaking in regards to a relatively narrow band of entertainment, which seems to have a pretty strong attachment to advertising that (for the moment, at least) is accepted as a positive influence.

And it’s not even like they go the extra mile on their hardware offerings, either.

Well, when one of the biggest “casual” draws of the Super Bowl remains the commercials that air during it, that tells me we have a classic case of people’s mouths saying one thing while their wallets say another.

The ad revenue that sports leagues get directly contributes to the money they pay their players (how that gets divvied up is a different argument). More money to players tends to mean you draw in better talent with better means to refine that talent.

For you, perhaps. But for the people involved in those games, ad revenue often represents a massive chunk of their paycheck. And yes, that does contribute to the quality of product on the playing field.

Advertising still has some limited use for companies that are still trying to get people to know they even exist. But beyond that, it becomes increasingly more useless the more your company has achieved that penetration.

For example, who needs to be reminded that Coca-Cola or McDonald’s is still around?

Winnie the Pooh has ALWAYS been public domain. Much like quite a few of their properties.

Which is true for video games in general.  Trying to dive into Kingdom Hearts at this point with no prior experience would be like tossing a toddler into the North Atlantic to teach it how to swim.

Well, it suppose it’s a start when we hear, “Nintendo is doomed... eventually.”

Honestly, getting rid of first party exclusives would probably be the most gamer-friendly thing Sony has done in years, if ever.

So, ya thinkin’ hacker or “this will be my special ad spam account that keeps my new account unaffiliated with my nonsense?”

I still find the loyalty some PC gamers want to show to Steam to be one of the weirdest flexes I can think of.

I suspect at this point, people who are already fans are the only ones they are terribly worried about.  At some point in any series, bringing on new fans is too much of a lift, and you gotta roll with those already on board.

If Kingdom Hearts was a college course, just laying out its syllabus would take up damn near the entire semester.

Ya know, I thought something like that too. But honestly? At this point? I think the fact that the franchise a bit of an apoplectic mess is one of the selling points.

I don’t know if you realize just how many people struggle with English as their first language.