Kojima has never really been prescient so much as he’s been observant. He wrote MGS2 during the dual Y2K scare and dot com bubble burst at a time when Wall Street had gotten heavily invested in automating trades to maximize profits.

Probably because I want to give him some credit for his ambitious projects from back then. The climax of MGS2's sociological messages and how tech/AI plays a role is an effective way of “pulling a The Simpsons”. But, as I said, his ego has been bloated long after his prime. He comes off more like a privileged creep…

You can learn a lot about a person through their crafts and projects. If MGS5 and Death Stranding are the most recent indicators: Kojima can be a celebrity-chasing creep, overthinks sociological/philosophical messaging in his storytelling, and a tad insecure, with his writing feeling like something a College senior…

I get it, things get more expensive over time. I guess I expected a steeper hike than this, so I’m not too upset. It is still frustrating whenever these things happen. You kind of feel like, as a person who has been subscribed, you should get grandfathered in at the lower price—maybe at least for a little while.

Translation: “We see an opportunity to make more money and we’re going for it.”

Well, games cost $70 now. There’s that now.

I think one of the things that this company and even Amazon are missing with LOTR and it’s various spin-offs are that it’s a lightning in a bottle kind of thing.  Tolkien’s original books are beloved for a reason.  But adaptations like the late 20th century animated version (hahaha!) are fairly solid evidence that…

we need to be exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion

Super super cool how they acquired a bunch of (seemingly) stable and successful developers and now are gonna lay off a bunch of people and shut down those same studios because they got greedy and bought more than they could afford.

Have you watched the video?  This is 100% a bit to regain the lost popularity.

So people bought a game that will not work past 2024?

Nobody’s getting their money back on that one, Chris isn’t going to sell the yacht his backers bought him.

I would at the very least Matt McMuscles does a What Happened

I would love to read a postmortem on Bloodlines 2. Something must have gone very, very wrong for Paradox to fire the entire dev team after years of development and millions of dollars spent. Based on the fact that Mitsoda hasn’t worked on anything other than Bloodlines 2 in years, I imagine he’s semi-retired and might…

Do Not Preorder Games.

Proc-gen and “AI” are not the same thing. You’re confusing the two and setting them as if they are created or developed the exact same way.

Worth noting that everything you said about launchers is also true about slideshows.

I came here expecting an actual examination of all these launchers, with what they did “right”, what they did wrong and whether any of them were even vaguely worth their existence.

Finally, a review I agree with from start to finish.