I’m glad to be back in an office myself (not everyone finds remote working “glorious”) but it’s pretty shitty that these corporations are trying to force people back.

That’s fair, compared to an actual investment, it’s poor.  Compared to traditional in-game microtransactions it’s far better.  It’s not like people have never spent eye-popping amounts on counterstrike skins, and if counterstrike went under they’d just be shit out of luck.

Hold on now, at the end of the article they describe exactly how they’re giving things to people in still-running games. That actually IS huge.

If I drop money on a +1000 sword of ultimate power in a mobile game, and the game shuts down, that sword is gone, forever, I get nothing. In this case you get ALL OF: a car…

Kotaku must be one of the most toxic and horrible places to work. You all have been trained and conditioned by an advertising algorithm to bitch and moan about everything. It’s no secret that ad algorithms reward negativity. On top of that Kotaku has droves of mindless drones who nod their heads in agreement with…

I am really going to miss the solid week of game announcements. It was a perfect time to kick back, maybe even take a few days off, watch the conferences / gameplay demos and snark about everything with friends.

as an old person i’ll miss ‘the idea’ of e3 (a huge festival where you get to see every new videogame! free stuff! celebrating gaming!) but i mean, time comes for us all.

I see you actually read the whole piece with a critical eye and comprehension. Kotaku wasn't counting on anyone actually doing that, they assumed you'd just react to the headline.

Reading through all this and the quotes I’m somewhat confused as to the order of events as it’s seemingly reading like:
- It was a reasonable place to work
- Microsoft bought it and left the old manner of working in place thinking “it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
- CEO who got paid stopped giving a shit and brought in a…

So that’s a lot of generalizations.

Shutting the companies down doesn’t do anyone any favors, usually.

I generally try to refrain from overt judgement on this sort of subject for exactly that reason. If you’re high profile and your family lives under the thrall of a totalitarian leader, they’ve got a lot of pressure they can put on you and it can be easy to buckle. People like pretending they’d be big and tough if…

Is it possible that he feels like he has to say this or he has been told he has to say this?

Feels like more an opportunity to rag on Musk by moaning about a game than anything. It’s a shame since it seems like a fun game with really good reviews but this piece (you couldn’t call it a review) makes it into a victim of the author’s rant. Go rant about his labour law violations or something real!

It annoys me that if you just go off a description of them, Dark Souls characters are indistinguishable from Axe Cop ones, and no one notices or cares.

I actually think the Mondstat storyline is quite a bit worse than Liyue’s. Dvalin is a weird “antagonist” and I didn’t really feel connected to the story until after that. Plus Childe and Zhongli are such compelling characters as compared to most of the Mondstat cast (barring Venti, who is stellar). So unfortunately…

Agreed. People like to say MW2 was the best, and maybe from a multiplayer perspective, that’s true, but the overall package worked so well with CoD4. I actually cared about the characters, the story, and it felt so grounded. While MW2 continued the story, it went from being grounded to... “Remember, no Russian”.

Hi! Relax!

“Why this occurred to them now, and not ten years ago when games like Ghosts had already begun to disappoint, eludes me but whatever”

That’s why I have an issue with the “burn it all down mentality” that you see so often here. We have this tendency to treat these corporations as a monolith and want to punish them accordingly. The problem is, there are so many component parts to any corporation and genuinely good people who are passionate about…

You are aware you don’t have to be “rich” to own stocks, right? Lots of hard working middle income people own stocks either directly, through ETF’s, retirement savings funds, etc. in corporations as a way of hopefully saving up for retirement. I’m getting tired of the idea that only corporate elitist fat cats own…