Not arguing your point, but MS is much larger than “almost twice as big” as Sony. Microsoft’s current market cap is around $2.28 trillion and Sony’s is around $138 billion, so around 16 times larger.

At $5.75B per year, they’d be making of $15 mil per day. At $8.09B, that’s over $22 mil per day. This is the equivalent of about three-quarters of one day’s revenues. 

EA said they were disappointed with the sales at the time, but it’s estimated that it sold around 4 million copies in its first Fall (TF1 has just over 3 mil lifetime sales). Four years on a so many sales later (and with it on GamePass) it’s hard to tell how many copies are out there, but in April of this year it did…

I’m playing it on a gaming laptop with a 2070 and it works great at medium settings. The issue with that game is that it has huge gaps in the equipment needed for each of the higher settings. 

Only tangentially related, but I find that the idea of “finishing” a game is getting harder and harder by the year, especially as the idea of what a game is keeps changing. I have a database in Notion where I track every game I play as “Not Started”, “In Progress”, and “Finished” (or “Abandoned”) but it’s getting…

I do like when a game is made specifically for one console. I like when games use the built in specific features well, and any cross platform game is just going to ignore things like the triggers on the PS5 or the built in music player on the Xbox. But otherwise, not really. 

Well, at least stories of 42-year-old uncles trying to buy Xboxes before learning they’re sold out in their area.

Good point. I was only looking at market caps and they’re small enough that they could be picked up by a company like Apple or Amazon, but government interventions could certainly prevent that. 

Four! Tencent/Epic and Embracer group will likely own big shares of the pie. Nintendo is a maybe, but it’s not impossible for someone to buy them. 

Sea of Thieves isn’t just doing pretty well, it’s quietly one of the most successful games on the market. They hit 15 million players this year, with around 3 million players per month. When the Jack Sparrow DLC launched, the game had nearly it’s highest level of concurrent players. At ~66k concurrent players, that’s…

Tales of Vesperia Definitive is my recommendation. It has one of the best stories/casts in the franchise, a good balance of the later and newer combat systems, and the best voice actors the series has had. Also, it’s on GamePass. 

I’m willing to bet money that by the end of this generation there will be a GamePass app on all sorts of smart devices and Microsoft will no longer be reporting console sales numbers but will instead be reporting the number of devices that have played at least one game.

So I guess Microsoft’s approach from here on out will just be initial teaser, show the game once, then let it hit GamePass? There are lots of games that they seem content to not show again until they pop up on GP. They did that with The Medium and it looks like it will be the same with The Gunk, which only appeared on…

I finished the game yesterday. Glad to see some of these changes. You can press a button to skip through the gibberish, but I often mistimed it and ended up skipping the narrator’s description instead. Of course, by the time you get to the fifth side character, you basically know exactly how every conversation will…

You forgot SquisherZ

I’ve always played Paragon, but I’m playing Renegade for my Legendary replay. It’s incredibly hard stomach some of the garbage Shepard says as a Renegade. So much so that it feels more like watching a TV show than replaying the game. Pretty much every conversation comes down to either “You deserved it” or something…

I saw this as a filthy casual, but I think the solution to making 5v5 not ostracize half of tank players and characters (who would ever play a non-shield now?) is to make on the spots a tank/dps flex role. Teams could flex the spot as needed based on the situation. That would prevent the need for moving ball or hog to…

As of the end of 2020, at least according to Google, there were 471 games on the Epic store. So I’d posit that 436 is likely the number of games that were on the Epic store when the claim was initially filed and they’re looking for sales data on Steam to make comparison arguments. 

For Ys VIII, do some side quests if you have any, or hunt landmarks and collectibles as a way to mitigate the grind. If you see the raptors, just run past them. There are a few areas that you come back to multiple times and have high level monsters. I’m playing Ys IX now and I miss VIII so much. It was a way better…

I’ve been reading your work since you 2009 and your writing had been hugely influential to me. You even made me like Assassin’s Creed 3! I look forward to see where ever your work take you next. Best of luck!