Microsoft tried before, and as the reps from MS tell the story, Nintendo openly laughed in their faces.

Sony has 16B cash on hand, so they’re good on this one.

“Wit that said, there are many other publishers Sony could easily afford like Capcom, Konami, Square enix who are all around 3-5 billion market cap.”
And Microsoft could easily pay more than Sony can afford. Picking up a smaller companies like one of these isn’t going to hurt them, or their deal getting pass anti-trust…

They aren’t “designed this way”. Fact is the job is difficult and people who are good at it advance quickly and get paid better. Problem is, again, the basic skill set can be taught to high school kids VERY easily but most of them have no desire to do the job as described: they just want to play the games and think…

Problem is if you have 1 QA guy in with a group of devs, his message is muted.
“Hey guys, we’re fighting to have everyone’s pay raised to $20 an hour!”
“We already make $40.”
99% of the things that a QA union is going to fight for, devs already have or better. And if they have to fight for wildly different things, they…

Not really “self-righteous bullshit” as much as its the fact that QA game testers are VERY easy to replace, unless they can code. It’s not that hard to take a fresh out of high school kid who thinks working in video games is the greatest job ever, and have him work on a game for minimum wage as a QA for a few months…

It’s very different. Back then, QA required a basic level of coding for most of the jobs. And to be honest, campaign design/mission creator, with the right tools, doesn’t require any coding skill at all (see RPG Maker as an example.) All the jobs I’ve had in the industry, most QA is just out of high school kids,…

Most of them won’t. QA that’s getting 18.50/hr aren’t coders/developers, they’re play testers. It’s a limited skill set and not a lot of mobility within a software company. Also, once they stop being a QA tester, they have to leave the union.

Except that’s not how it works:
“Hey Brian, Jim, Joe... you guys wanna join the union? Here’s all the benefits we get from it.”
“We’re all developers, not QA, we’re not legally allowed to join your union and get any protection from it.”
That’s why when warehouse workers go on strike, marketing still goes to work. QA are…

Having worked in video game QA, I’ll say it, anyone can be a QA. There’s a big difference between end line QA and something like SDET. There’s also a big difference between people who understand how to do video game QA well and people who just go to play games and get paid for it. The former is much more rare.

Problem with that last idea is Sony just can’t afford anything right now. Microsoft is buying Act/Blizz for $70b in cash. They have $130b on the books. So even after the buy is complete, Microsoft is still sitting on $60b cash on hand. Last quarter, Sony said (because it has to disclose this stuff by law) that it…

Thing is, it’s not even really a loss. MS had $130b cash on hand and is buying ACt/Blizz for cash. That means after the buy they’ll still have $60b cash on hand. Sony as an entire corp has... $13b cash on hand. They can’t afford to buy anything major.
But gamepass just hit 25m subscribers and almost entirely in the US.…

CoD is the best selling game on the Playstation consoles, and has been for a while now. That’s why Sony was paying Act/Bliz for exclusive content and timed exclusives. Losing it will hurt, a lot. And 6-10 first party releases, when 5-8 are smaller indie titles, isn’t going to be a big selling point. They’d have to…

PS5 sold out in Japan every time it went up. It just shows Sony doesn’t care about Japan for console sales anymore. They sold just under 6m in the first 6 months of of 2021, they could have easily diverted more of that to Japan, they didn’t. Population of Japan is just over 1/3 of the US population. They should be…

It just showed Sony doesn’t care about Japan anymore. There was rumors of a US focused sales strategy and this is just evidence. PS5 sold out everywhere it was sold in Japan. Fact that less than a million sold, means Sony sent less than a million to Japan. We know Sony sold just under 6m of them in the first 6 months…

So how about that snow/rain/sun?

Naw, and even if they did, they’d leave that game out for now.

You do realize that Splatoon 2 is one of the best selling Switch games in Japan right? By March of 2021, only 3 games had outsold it. Animal Crossing, Smash and Pokemon Sword/Shield (it’s outsold BotW in Japan, 3,771,338 of Splatoon 2 versus 1,771,235 for BotW). And it’s 5 years old. It was STILL the 17th most bought…

IT ran on the PS3. Only reason it’s not on any other platform is Sony. Their agreement is such that if any other console gets it, either they can’t connect to the PC or PS players, or the other way around. So lots of walled gardens of each console with their own servers. Devs didn’t want that.

I think every video game version of a board game I’ve ever bought was just so I had a “how to play” to learn the game, except Gloomhaven.