Yes, I’m sure. It’s also what your numbers say.

I think you might be underestimating how effective this framing is. It might be a transparent effort, but it is still extremely important because Microsoft *is* the smaller player in this market.

Yeah but that assumes Activision would be willing to sell off a division that provides a third of their income. Besides that, Microsoft had the cash on hand to be able to buy the whole kit & kaboodle, why just stop with King.

King is not just a company they “happen to own”, it’s a third of their operating income, double what Blizzard brings in. 

Wish they could have found their balls whenever Disney acquired something as well.

Activision and Blizzard are almost a footnote - King is the actual crown jewel of the acquisition.

The China references are still relevant because you have to take the global picture into account, because regulators are talking about blocking the deal on anti-competition / anti-trust worries. The important part of it is that Tencent has a bigger slice of the overall worldwide games market than Sony, Microsoft or…

A big container ship obviously emits significantly more than a single truck, those things are basically mobile ecological disasters.

After how this game has underperformed, it might be optimistic to phrase it that way - good chance they just can the Luminous Engine and fold the studio back into Squenix at this point.

I also finished it last night and feel pretty similarly. It’s got some great elements to it, the traversal and the exploration are great, the combat is serviceable if a bit frustrating toward the end when it starts throwing stuff at you that likes to smash you from off screen, but that’s a fault of a lot of action…

A good part of the problem was simply that Squenix’s attempts to market the game were utterly inept. Personally everything they showed made it look awful, the only thing that saved my interest was the 1 hour or so deep dive they did late last year on the systems and so on, which when freed from the Marketing Bullshit…

In addition to the fact that there’s been rumors for a while about a second Sony studio picking up Uncharted, don’t forget that there’s precedent for Sony farming out the franchise to another studio - Golden Abyss on the Vita was developed by Bend instead of Naughty Dog. Wasn’t a bad game either, just let down hard by…

I have definitely seen an argument that there is a subset of the evangelical right that believes that we’re in the “end times” and that because “God’s Plan” is to destroy the world in fire, trying to prevent climate change is prolonging the process or interfering with The Plan and instead we should just continue as…

“should the player continue these actions, the world will reflect back knowledge of them.”

I’d never actually stopped to think about it, but I guess that Muramasa really is a Metroidvania. Definitely needs a port if not a deeper remake like Odin Sphere Leifthrasir.

Isn’t this literally the kind of management that people unionize to prevent in the first place?

Fact is, Xbox isn’t really Microsoft’s next-gen platform any more. The next-gen Microsoft platform is Game Pass, and it increasingly doesn’t matter where or what you access Game Pass stuff from. Xbox is nice because it’s low-cost turn-key hardware to allow people to access Game Pass games and run them locally (or…

or·thog·o·nal
/ôrˈTHäɡən(ə)l
adjective

None of these factors mean that crunch is required or inevitable. This sort of development is not sustainable long term and it leads to burnout, inability to recruit and retain good staff and can lead to whole studio implosions (eg look at the hollowed out shell that Bioware has become - magic crunch was literally…