Microsoft deliberately released the 360 early to steal a march on Sony, their market research at the time said basically if they could get an 8-10m head start they’d dominate the whole cycle.

“What if instead of buying Activision Blizzard, Microsoft just made the Switch 2?”

Assuming it wasn’t an actual deliberate plot to make the Sony versions buggier (which really just doesn’t make sense, is an extremely bad-faith argument and would also presumably run afoul of the feature parity clause in the 10 year agreement that Sony are refusing to accept) and it was just a genuine fuckup that only…

Very clearly wasn’t talking about Wo Long here?

This isn’t really true if you bother digging below the surface and reading the lore. And honestly the characterization for basically everyone is paper thin, male characters included, unless they are a major part of the main plot. Yes, some of them have been expanded, but you’re massively overexaggerating

I would argue…

It would actually be a pretty cool feature for an online subscription service, provided that they trained it entirely on art that was intended and authorized for the purpose rather than just skimming it unethically off various art sites.

It was still going on after 2008, it just pivoted into the “all the games coming out of Japan are shit and JRPGs especially are behind the times” discourse that happened around 2008-2012 or so. During that period where eg Keiji Inafune was out there talking about how behind Japanese development was, the JP publishers…

Doing stuff algorithmically is not the same as having an AI generate in-between frames. Games have been doing interpolation between keyframes, animation blending, inverse kinematics and so on for decades, there isn’t AI involved, it’s generally just fairly complex differential math.

But at the same time, releasing it just for Playstation vs multi-platform does reduce their potential earnings. Maybe not by that much (especially since PC version still happened, albeit later) but obviously Sony had to pony up at least as much as Squenix expected to lose by not having it on Xbox as well.

This. It’s the only Soulslike I’ve had the patience to finish.

I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration, some people are just ignorant of what else is out there or bought into the fad.

Yeah, honestly I felt like the writing was on the wall for them back in 2020 when Squenix reorged literally all their 11 business units into 4 creative units *except* for Luminous, and the nail in the coffin was when it was announced that Yoshida’s Creative Business Unit III was doing FF 16 and it was going to be…

Got to save a feature for the inevitable Hogwarts Legacy 2.

Doubtful, the majority of people buying it don’t have much skin in the race on either side and don’t really care either way. A boycott was never going to work, the thing is a huge part of pop and fantasy culture now. The people equating playing the game to murdering trans people were never going to buy it, and the…

It’s got nearly zero overlap with cricket, if anything it takes inspiration from Australian or Gaelic football. Except for the fact there’s two people playing a completely different game during the whole thing that make the rest of it irrelevant.

It’s in the agreement, my dude:

That makes more sense, not familiar with this person at all so assumed when they said “from UK” that implied “UK citizen”.

I would have thought that the UK in the list of countries that the US allows in with the visa waiver program, so she didn’t need a tourist visa in the first place?

“The argument being made is that it’s inherently anti-consumer to convert a Type 3 into a Type 1, and that Microsoft has thus far made that their central strategy.”

People keep saying this, but so far it hasn’t happened. The handful of Bethesda games that have gone from “Type 3" to “Type 1" have been games that are…

If Microsoft backs out of the deal - and that includes for regulatory issues - they owe Activision $2 billion, rising to $3 billion if they pull out after mid April. Inability to close the deal due to market regulators is not “outside their control” - they either fight for it legally, make compromises to make it…