Catering to hardcode players to the detriment of casual players is a losing business strategy over the long term, at least insofar as those words actually mean “skilled vs unskilled”, as they seem to here. The hardcore player base is going to, by its nature, actually shrink over time once you reach some critical mass.…

Except that bubble burst a week ago. If they’d done this a few months ago you might have a point, but the old prices are the market value now.

I think they’re trying to simplify their product names, and in doing so they’re making them more complicated. The 4090 is really expensive - but its performance comparison is multiple times higher than a 3090 Ti - in essence, the 4090 is the Ti card. The 4080 with 12gb is just a fundamentally different card than the…

Honest question - did your editor pick the number “13" before you actually started pulling together the list? Because most of these are huge stretches.

It is on Game Pass, for those who have access to that. I think it might be on PS Plus as well but I’m not as well versed in the catalog there.

Ghostwire’s exclusivity deal ends in March. This seems like a strong indicator that they’ll be quick to launch it on Game Pass soon after it becomes contractually allowable.

Social media does that because that’s how console manufacturers market it.

At a high level the idea behind an immersive sim is that you don’t script anything, instead you simulate it all. For example, if such-and-such character is going to be standing out at their balcony having a meeting at time X, that happens at time X no matter where in the game world the player is - rather than in…

What is their plan here? They’re not going to be able to retain people like this. All those jobs that went up to $15 or more are not coming back down. People will perpetually have better options in most markets. Are they massively overestimating how much people are willing to put up with for a video-game related job?…

What would be the point? They hold no real power. 

Because there are so few Harry Potter games, haven’t been any that even so much as approach “AAA” in over a decade, and this looks...fine. Rough around the edges? Sure. Impossible for it to live up to the hype? Absolutely. But passable open worlds aren’t that hard to achieve these days, all things considered, and this…

It is a better Assassin’s Creed: Origins/Odyssey style game in Japan. But if they’re really moving back to their roots with the new game, and continue that in Red, then the net result is going to be a very different game than Ghost of Tsushima.

They promised they’d never again decide not to include split-screen co-op after Halo 5, so this has to have been an always-planned feature and not an originally unintended feature shoehorned in.

They already have a “tether” in the co-op mode (two players can’t get more than Xm apart), so I don’t think that’s it. I’ve given them a lot of benefit of the doubt but at this point I think they just have some serious internal issues that make things just move at a snails pace.

Replacement paddles are cheap and easily available (here’s just one set - there are even cheaper ones too), and since the controller itself is the same, it’s still compatible with paddles. So if all you want is the paddles, this can save you a decent amount of money.

Seems like a fine deal to me. I suspect there are a lot of elite controller owners who find that they never had to mess with the default components, and now they can save money on stuff they don’t use (different thumbsticks/dpad/back paddle feature). And for those that do want it all, you can save $10 by buying a…

Anything that threatens BR dominance is going to be met by complaints from “pro” Halo players. We saw that with the launch of Halo Infinite, we’ve seen it before that, and we’ll continue to see it again and again.

I don’t think that’s really true, at least for a game like Madden that has traditionally been very animation-based (i.e. not actually all that intense of a simulation). What can happen in any given moment is really constrained by what they actually have animations for. This year they actually claim to have begun to…

They are stuck halfway between two models - they still sell at full price as an annualized title, but then are also live service games. They really need to just switch to more of a Destiny-like model where each new actual football season is itself a new season to purchase, getting you new rosters and new cards for…

Everything about it is at best the same as last year, and in some cases worse (thankful for the EA Play free trial) - except for skill based passing, which I’ve come to really really love. But it isn’t anywhere near worth $70 or even $10 to add when Madden 22 is right there and is included in Game Pass.