The Eiffel Tower is a bad example because France actually tried to sell it for scrap a few times before it became a beloved national monument.

And trust and believe there’s a long history of national monuments being outright sold because of pressing financial needs. Hell, the UK sold the London Bridge to a rich American…

Also, could they not just pilot the yacht to another shipyard and have the masts put on?

Japanese law also makes it really difficult for foreign investors to purchase Japanese companies, so it’s a combination of not taking dumb risks (a few errors such as the Virtual Boy and Wii U notwithstanding) and having a legal and financial paradigm which is built around protecting home-grown industries from too…

Hostile takeovers are notoriously tricky. Not only would it take a lot of money, but given the amount of institutional shareholders that you’d have to individually win over, cultural differences, and the various complications involved with a multinational hostile takeover (because the likely purchaser would either be…

You could compare it to Ghost of Tsushima, but both have very different gameplay and for PLA it’s gameplay supplies enough Pokemon that you’ll never travel more than 2 seconds without finding another one.

You could compare it to Ghost of Tsushima, but both have very different gameplay and for PLA it’s gameplay supplies enough Pokemon that you’ll never travel more than 2 seconds without finding another one.

It’s precisely the argument that was made.

Why would the gameplay of Pokemon matter relative to the gameplay of other games unless the comparison is being made in a simplistic manner that ignores certain facets of all the titles, irrespective of their graphical qualities? What about Pokemon’s gameplay, or the presence…

Counterpoint: there are plenty of games that don’t involve metropolis-like cities that can still feel alive, including BOTW, RDR 1 and 2, Shadow of the Colossus, and plenty of other JRPGS.

So, while the gameplay might be different, it’s a bit of facile argument to say that the gameplay in Pokemon games is so good, that…

The goal is irrelevant if the outcome, given the nature of the system, would be the same either way.

Given that ELO, in this case, is zero sum, and due to the fact that Karjakin ELO rating is lower than Carlsen’s, playing not to lose, playing to a draw, or playing to a win would all have a beneficial effect to…

Or they felt that they’d walk on the hate crime charges and wanted an easy win.

Also, in Georgia, the governor doesn’t have pardoning power, but instead selects members of a pardoning board who then have to be approved by the state Senate.

On top of that, from my reading of the relevant laws, the pardoning board doesn’t…

From my reading, the issue that Merritt and Ahmaud’s mother are having isn’t that they got a deal, it’s that the deal means they’d spend most of the rest of their lives in federal prison, versus state prison in Georgia.

Presumably, if the DoJ’s hate crime case failed, the men would be sent to prison in Georgia…

Thanks for sharing that.

I haven’t had time to really delve into the details since I’m currently at work (hooray insurance industry), but from your post and a few others, it’s making more sense from that perspective than from a purely product-driven one (which is what I, and I’m sure others, were wondering…

For the third-party developers and publishers, accepting these deals often makes a great deal of sense.

For AB, they get a good deal after nearly 2 years of bad press and poor game releases, and by no longer being publicly traded, they don’t have to deal with the whims of public opinion to the degree that it negatively…

I think people overstate the “failure” of Microsoft last gen.

Sony did really well, and MS definitely stumbled out of the gate. However, MS gaming revenue actually grew during the generation, because the main value driver for their gaming division isn’t hardware, but content and services (in fact, from the Xbox One…

Then good for Bungie, since I personally think they’re wildly overpriced. And merely being “courted” isn’t 100% indicative of the quality and future-prospects of the company. Not saying Bungie is trash, or they have nothing on the pipeline, but purchases/mergers don’t always work out, and merely having interest shown…

Microsoft has more than enough money, not just cash on hand, but also access to finance facilities, that this purchase isn’t going to stymie other investments in the more core businesses.

And while those are core businesses, as a percentage of overall revenue, Gaming accounts for around $16bn of revenue for Microsoft a…

I haven’t the faintest idea why Sony wants Bungie, aside from the fact they might be still smarting that their attempts to have a 1st-party FPS (that also functioned as a console-mover) on par with Halo never really took off (even though the Killzone games were rather good).

Also, Bungie seems really overpriced for a…

The thing is that in the gaming sphere, there simply aren’t a lot of companies the size of AB in which to buy.

When looking at the large, third-party publishers, the big three are Take-Two, EA, and AB. Then you have places like Ubisoft and Square-Enix (which are more complicated purchases since they’re foreign-based).…

Microsoft is also 23x the size of Sony, and had more cash-on-hand than Sony’s entire market cap.

When it comes to financial power, Microsoft and Sony aren’t in the same league, which is why Microsoft could gobble up a powerhouse like Activision-Blizzard (with far more profitable IPs than Destiny), while Sony had to…

Sony simply doesn’t have the resources to buy a publisher as large as Activision Blizzard.

Size-wise, Microsoft had more cash-on-hand than Sony’s entire market-cap (roughly $130bn). Market-cap wise, Microsoft is roughly 25x the size of Sony, which is why Activision-Blizzard was only in play for a company as large and…