The short answer is working remotely worked so well for employees they assumed their managers would never be stupid enough to go back.

My company may be doing this at the end of the month and the main problem is the policy document effectively acknowledges that this is entirely a performance with a justification that's thin at best. It's unenforceable, to boot.

To be fair to him, he's a freelancer and even the best game composers aren't exactly kicking back on their royalty checks. He probably didn't dig too deeply, and it also sounds like he got the gig before the invasion. And the studio may not be in a great spot either from the sound of things.

Fundamentally the problem is always going to be PC gaming is a hobby with a high bar to entry, so highly privileged folks like yours truly are going to have more access to it. Not coincidentally, highly privileged folks are more likely to get angry and defensive when the consequences of their actions are pointed out…

So in other words, you don’t want to think about the possible consequences of your actions to others, even once you’ve become unavoidably aware of them?

Blame Rowling. She's the one who decided to double down and keep doubling down on being a raging asshole, to the point where she's said buying the game or engaging with Potter at all means you hate trans people.

Unfortunately this is a common and annoying tactic. There are people where I work who have had lawyers try to copy our entire file system or their entire email inbox arguing that it’s “discoverable.” They literally can’t use some internal systems because opposing counsel would want access to the entire system.

Also totally boring. This is why we need unranked play, or the ability to block players when they’re playing certain cards. I don’t want to play yet another damn Apocodeck. 

Yeah, great, can they fix the RNG? Whenever Lechenguilla comes up I draw four or five rocks in a row from my deck, and the matchmaking, which generally limited you to playing people with similar cards, now flings you into MODOK matches even if you haven’t bought the season pass. Now only boring-ass Apocalypse decks…

Nailed it in one.

$69 billion is an...EXCESSIVE amount of money being offered by a company that has fallen afoul of regulators in the past.

Cannot wait for the pisstweets from the c-suite on this one.

The more desperate Activision execs get, the more I become convinced that they’re trying to unload the company before some form of financial fraud comes to light. 

Probably not on purpose, but it is an enormously bloated number for what Microsoft is going to get if the deal goes through. I’m amazed shareholders aren’t storming Redmond chanting “KILL! KILL! KILL!”

“The important part of it is that Tencent has a bigger slice of the overall worldwide games market than Sony, Microsoft or Activision - the way they get that money is a side note,”

No, it really isn’t. UK and American trade authorities are concerned about American and UK markets, not Chinese ones. And even if it were…

Leaving aside Nintendo, the idea that Japan is dominating the games industry these days would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

Don’t even need to replace Jerry, depending on who you ask.

I feel genuinely bad for the people behind this because clearly they were horrified, but considering the long string of digital bigotry incidents that have plagued public-facing learning projects from the beginning, this was inevitable. It’s the GIGO problem with the added layer of human subjectivity making it…

You’re the exception in my experience. The vast majority of the time when I played if Iceman or Scorpion come out early, it’s a sign of poorly considered strategy. It's also boring to play, which is another reason I want unranked spaces. Let the people who think rank matters in a game that busts you back three every…

Part of my job is managing professional communications. You’re not paying me to outline all the ways that this is incredibly stupid, so I won’t. But trust me when I tell you: There is no metric by which these tweets aren't incredibly stupid.