Quite the contrary, there’s no “lone” juggernaut and now we have a much healthier genre with multiple major titles and a huge mix of mid-sized/smaller/niche titles that all coexist. It’s not just WoW dominating and setting the bar for everyone to try to copy/meet anymore, and that’s honestly wonderful. No games are…

I mean, all these things are mistakes from Microsoft. Not planning well enough to have software ready (gamedev is hard! but reportedly Microsoft was a source of many of the delays and problems for Halo) or deciding to make a lower-spec machine that developers need to also release games on which adds additional work…

I’m sure it’s hardly perfect, but I can say that I’ve never seen any since the policy change nor heard of it being on there. Some likely slips through the cracks briefly, but nothing that would make his story make a lick of sense given the specificity and that he’s claiming he clicked an ad.

Blaming a porn site with a very explicit policy against deepfakes that apparently even extends to their advertisement for why you ended up on a site with deepfake porn of people you know and are friends with is uh...well...something.

Eh, I have no problem attributing the title (and most of the other problems) to Microsoft based on the reporting and public comments from former devs.

So I was wrong elsewhere, but the “10 year plan” Bungie talked about sure seems to be them talking about their engine supporting multithreading and how they were expecting it to remain relevant/useful for the 10 year contract they signed with Activision. Not that there was any actual “plan”, even vaguely sketched out…

I think Turn 10 are the only internal Microsoft studio who use an internal engine at this point. Well, them plus Bethesda with Creation Engine (gross) and idTech but I don’t exactly count those as they came with Bethesda and seem to so far only be used for Bethesda projects.

Depends on if you’re in the MMO sphere or if you’re a largely non-MMO gamer looking in from the outside. From that perspective it’s more fragmented and there’s no clear juggernaut a la what WoW was for the better part of 10-15 years.

Sorta kinda. It had strong sales at 2 million or so in the first month, but retention was awful and players were dropping quick. Which is normal to a point, but the rate at which they were leaving and the associated problems were too large - for context BioWare thought it would take players 3 to 5 months to reach max…

I’m not expecting Bethesda to pump out titles, but they had Starfield and Redfall well into production at that point so those were obviously factors in the deal as their release would be fairly soon after the acquisition.

Halo Finite. I feel like the “10 year plan” is a curse, and almost every developer that’s talked about it has either seen their game tank hard or otherwise underperform, with occasional exceptions like Destiny 2 where they just radically change directions. But this goes back to MMO’s even, I remember SWTOR and The…

Sony was in for one generation + 1 year, for a total of 7 years, prior to Microsoft. That’s realistically not a lot of time, especially given how radically the PS3/360 generation changed the gaming landscape compared to previous generations and how Microsoft was one of the major drivers behind those changes (push for…

For me, Bethesda was about as “big” of an acquisition as I can stomach. It’s still a bit too big for my taste (even if Sony or Nintendo bought it), but outside of them I thought most of the other studios both of them picked up last generation were great. Lots of good smaller/mid-sized developers where that’s kinda the…

Sort of but not really. Microsoft dominated the 360/PS3 era right up until the end when Sony caught back up after a fairly disastrous launch (like the Xbox One). And I was really hoping we’d see Microsoft repeat that after the Xbox One faceplanted under Matrick. But really, they’ve largely repeated many of the same…

Sony had one generation head-start, essentially. This is Microsoft’s fourth generation at this point, if you’ve been doing something for 20 years at that point (OG Xbox released in 2001), you shouldn’t still be trying to figure it out. Because remember, they had it figured out in the 360 days where they crushed it for…

So...if Spencer doesn’t have Game Pass continuing to set record numbers to justify his running the Xbox Division and his promotion there...why’s he still running a division that is once again struggling to release software and well behind their competitor in terms of hardware sales as it was at the start of the last…

“Ok” depends on how much you play/are into it/care about it.

I want to meet the people who come up with systems like this. Seriously.

Rofl, those quotes were so obviously taken out of context. I wonder if Squeenix even bothered asking for approval to use them before they slapped those suckers in there. Given how hilariously out of context they are, I’m assuming they didn’t bother with that basic level of professionalism.

I’m talking about this generation, dude. Not last-gen, this gen. I wrote off last-gen after the X1 faceplanted and Don Matrick seemingly did everything humanly possible to alienate gamers and Xbox fans. Not to say Microsoft didn’t show up, to your point they did have some great games after recovering and had some…