I think "flop" here refers to sales figures, not review scores. In Japan, they'll sell ~600k copies of a Yakuza title. In the US and EU combined, they'll probably sell half that. If the sales figures scaled with the sizes of the markets being entered, yeah, they'd be stupid not to release the games in the West. But…

The only main Yakuza game that hasn't seen a NA release (yet) is 5. Don't get me wrong, I want the game as much as anybody else, but if they can't justify the cost of rolling it out for the West, I don't really blame them. They've tried 4 times now, and it apparently isn't working. Even 5, which received a perfect…

The problem is that a Xenosaga reissue is going to be fairly niche, no matter what. So their choice is to spend time and resources HD'ifying the games, and hope they manage to make money on the reissue, or simply re-release what they've got on PSN—which they can do basically right now—and instantly make money on it.…

You're totally right. The engineers at Lockheed Martin, DARPA, Notre Dame, and the Air Force Research Lab have a lot to learn from you.

I don't have a PS2. That's the problem.

Notch and Mojang got the far better deal here. I'd have sold for $2.5 billion, easy. I'm seriously wondering what the hell Microsoft was thinking, putting themselves that far in the hole on the investment. How will Minecraft ever make enough for a $2.5 billion purchase price to have been worth it?

I'm really not understanding a $2.5 billion purchase. What is Microsoft thinking? Yes, Minecraft is huge. We know this. But it's not will-make-$2.5-billion-and-break-even-on-the-investment huge. And it's not like Mojang has any other lucrative properties to speak of. They also aren't much from an acqui-hire…

Or you could just be an overly entitled gamer who irrationally believes that eventually getting exactly what you want is equivalent to being given the finger.

Yes, and that's what made them awesome.

I don't even need HD. Don't waste your time on that shit. Just bring these fuckers out on PSN so I can play them again in their original glory. There is no reason at all for them to not be available.

I'm torn about early access titles. Most of the ones I've invested in (Minecraft, Prison Architect, Space Engineers) have actually ended up being totally awesome, fruitful projects. We all know what Minecraft became, so the following sentence doesn't really apply to it. But even if Prison Architect and Space Engineers…

Story Progression was already sort of broken in a lot of ways, though. Not only did it introduce huge resource overhead issues, but it behaved very unpredictably to boot. A lot of times it seemed like, even with Story Progression enabled, I'd end up with a pretty sparse world after only a couple generations of my…

I'd like to suggest that the neighborhood/lot system doesn't, in fact, "add" load time to the game. Rather, it simply consolidates (and for many cases, even reduces) the de facto "load time" that existed in The Sims 3, in the form of having to physically travel across the world to get to another place. Take the…

That would be ... disastrous for Mojang. Losing the entire PC audience for a sequel? Not a good look.

You're an idiot.

It could also be a condition set by the players association.

Well any time you're dealing with terms that can be alternately neutral and infused with hatred, it's going to be difficult to introduce a filtering system that allows for the former and prevents the latter. If they didn't have a filter of some sort, then I'm sure we could very well be seeing the flipside, news…

I'm guessing the main reason why this filter was imposed in the first place was to eliminate the possibility of people adding homophobic stuff to the public gallery, not to quash legitimate gay-themed stuff. They have to strike a difficult balance between allowing players to express themselves, and preventing the…

• What were you most excited for, or most worried about, before The Sims 4 came out?

It's not a "downgrade," but okay.