Physical has the secondary market, wherein prices are outside the publisher’s control and drop with market value.

That’s been kind of a hallmark of the 3D POP games. The Sands of Time trilogy solved that issue with their rewind ability; since the review mentions “time-bending powers” I’m guessing there will be something similar here.

This is kind of first-world-problems compared to other issues (eg. abuses, toxic workplace culture), but if your reaction to a company being criticised is to rally and support the company, you’re gonna be pretty susceptible to the sort of reactionary-bait marketing that games like Hatred trade on.

Her motivations for becoming evil were poorly written

I think the problem isn't that it might be true, more that execs are making decisions based on that conceit. The past couple seasons of The Witcher noticeably suffered from this.

I think people genuinely have a hard time decoupling things the characters say with things the show/film is saying.

Are you saying the characters can’t be fallible and have to always say/do the right thing? She was their friend and colleague who saved the world a couple of times. Of course people are uncomfortable holding her to account and eager to move on and forget about it.

“Wanda facing absolutely no consequences for literally torturing a whole town will forever leave a bad taste”

The Engineers and David both created their Xenos from latent genes that could also express naturally in the right environment?

When people complain about characters making poor decisions, it’s not because they expect them to be infallible; it's because those decisions make no sense and feel like contrivances to get the plot where it needs to be.

HP is just a scummy company. I remember when that solder issue hit a few years back that affected the 360, PS3 and every laptop brand, HP’s “fix” was a bios update that ran the fans harder to try and edge out warranties.

CEX is still going in Ireland, right?

It feels like game trade-ins work better alongside other media like DVDs and CDs. Same business model, but a bit of diversity in the stock so it’s less beholden to a single industry.

Certain Nintendo releases get hit pretty hard by scalping, which drives the market price up. And even when that doesn’t happen, Nintendo games in general don’t really depreciate - I guess they don’t get traded in much, they have smaller releases, or they go on sale less.

This is more of a broad statement than a comment on GAME’s prices specifically (mainly as I haven’t even seen a GAME in ages), but the big savings on second hand games are in older titles. As in, wait a year or two and the price is halved or quartered. It makes console gaming a really cheap hobby if you're patient.

“Americans cheer and applaud in cinemas” is the only stereotype I’ve seen be consistently met with, “wait, you don’t?”

I think with stuff like this it’s less likely that QA missed it, and more that it was flagged but not a high priority to fix compared to bugs that would impact certification/release.

Everyone’s gonna be talking about AI probably, but for stuff like this to get through there must’ve been some pretty nasty deadlines.

Bit of a segue, but you might enjoy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars. It’s a short watch (about 2h in total), and it doesn’t suffer from kids’ cartoon tropes the way Filoni’s follow-up did.