While I’m not sure that what you’ve concluded about MS ingratiating themselves to the gaming public with gamepass, or setting themselves up as the hero for gamers is merited, it is a reasoned analysis of what MS is up to with its subscription model.

You’ve been waiting to type that comment for years. Get it all out. 

A master of his craft, I look forward to his next project. 

Nice catch, that was a good read. It makes sense that digital storefronts are facilitating this and elevating indie developers. To the gamer, if they can provide a compelling experience it doesn’t matter if they are a big publisher or not. I’ve enjoyed just as many hits from smaller devs as big ones recently.

He’s not saying anything about MS being a hero, and he’s not calling the retail stores bad, he’s saying that AAA publishers were overly reliant on the moat they built of dominating game sales by dominating shelf space in retail stores (which is something game companies pay for), and didn’t figure out how to keep that…

I mean Pokemon was a huge hit back when it was an entirely new IP, that’s the thing. Smash Brothers maybe wouldn’t have been the franchise that it is, but the concept the designer was working on was pretty solid. Devs have been playing around more with the whole platform fighter concept in recent years. (Multiversus…

The care and effort put into those IPs is the reason they are valuable though. Mario and Zelda are IPs to the everyman consumer, but to the more knowledgeable base they are also a mark of quality. Any gamer given the choice between Great Value 3D Platformer and a Mario game with no further context would take the…

Valve is a private company so there’s literally nothing MS or any other company could do to force a hostile takeover. On top of that, regulators would never approve the acquisition/merger because it would clearly lead to a horizontal monopoly in the PC space.

It’s not covered in this article but Phil points out that one of the ‘problems’ in trying to acquire Nintendo (in 2020) is that their board and shareholders haven’t been pressing for the market-share expansion of typical modern public corporations. You know, that concept that’s been causing so many companies to…

So the company making bank with the most successful gaming platform in history short of their own prior product (the Game Boy) is “a wash-out”?

“Spencer then added that being elected God-Emperor of Earth would be yet another ‘career moment’, as would a successful military conquest of the moon by an army of trained hamsters”

Boy, would that suck for the consumers, employees, and everyone else NOT in that email thread.

What I take from this obsession with buying Nintendo is that Microsoft/Phil Spencer don’t actually care that much about giving people the kind of products Nintendo is producing but rather they just want to own the IP. They want Mario.

Microsoft acquiring Nintendo would set back console gaming decades.

won’t release any of their titles outside their platform

I would hate for them to buy Nintendo. First of all, "their success lies off their hardware" means they would kill the Switch and move things onto Xbox. Second of all, no I can't argue this anymore it's just too awful to consider 

It’s just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time…. :-)

“I hope you’re never in the fucking position I’m in.”

That position being, refusing to protect yourself and others from a deadly pandemic, at the expense of your career, and then acting like YOU’RE the victim?

Thankfully, I will never be in the fucking position you’re in.

I love how out of touch these CEOs and execs are.

How would that lead to less churn? I've had Max since it's inception cause I'm a DC fan. It was awesome during the pandemic and has been getting shittier and shittier ever since it ended. All these streaming services hiking prices, can't even watch older shows half the time without ads cuz they're only on a ad…