But when government does stuff, that’s socialism. And the news tells me that is scary.

It’s funny how people flip flop between game pass causing bad sales, and game pass being a gigantic flop that no one pays for, depending on the point they want to prove.

I mean, both can be true. Microsoft would be counting on certain first party titles being pillars of Game Pass to pull in new subscribers and retain current ones. If they see relatively few Game Pass subscribers engaging with the title and subscriptions continue to drop, then it wasn’t the draw they anticipated.

And sure, Game Pass cannibalizes individual game sales, so I’m hoping they weren’t being held to that specific metric as punishment for Microsoft’s own failure in that regard. But we can also assume that not all engagement with GamePass would have translated directly into sales either, so low sales plus low Game Pass use would still indicate a flop.

It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t sort of situation.

The games industry has a lot of shitty business practices in general. Job security is almost nonexistent unless you manage to get a key position at a successful studio. Otherwise, you’re more likely to be hired for one project and then let go just before release, so you don’t get to collect the sales bonus. Some contracted employees are even omitted from the credits, so you don’t even get much of a portfolio boost out of it.

Larger companies like Microsoft are shitty in their own ways, but they don’t tend to do the hire-fire cycle of game dev as much as other studios may. So it was seen as stable work for a lot of these studios that were acquired. Especially for the former Activision studios that were falling apart at the seams while being rocked by a sequential train of scandals.

And by all accounts it truly was good times for a lot of developers at Xbox, where they were given resources to develop whatever they wanted with relatively little corporate oversight. But then these teams that were previously given carte blanche on their projects suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them by new management. They suddenly care about results, and that’s apparently now the developers’ fault for just doing what they were told was okay before.

Honestly I am surprised they didn’t do this years ago. It makes sense to let the studio that made the best Fallout game continue making Fallout games while the other studio works on the long-neglected Elder Scrolls 6. Otherwise we’d just be looking at decade-long droughts between Elder Scrolls and Fallout games at the pace BGS develops.

And it doesn’t need to be anything crazy either. When I used to work from home at a previous job, I would just put on one of the company jackets I was issued. Mostly out of convenience for “cameras on” meetings, but it meant I could just wear whatever I wanted underneath. End of day, I take it off, no need to change into any other clothes or do extra laundry.

You mean other than being an anti-“woke” libertarian chud?

And this is basically how former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe was assassinated

That’s probably partly why they’re being sold off, unfortunately.

I admittedly have not played any of the State of Decay games, but is anyone expecting the third one to be a smash hit? That’s a long time to spend money on a studio to produce a game that might only sell modest numbers.

Really interesting chart.

Would probably take a lot of effort, but it’d be neat to illustrate which IP also came in with the various studios that were acquired as well. Or show homegrown IP in addition to homegrown studios.

I wouldn’t rate Phil Spencer too highly either, though. He was the face behind these massive buyouts in the first place. He set the strategy for Xbox’s very lackluster console offering this generation. And he went all in on “You’ll own nothing and like it” with GamePass.

The studios that Xbox spent so much money on don’t appear to have really paid for themselves yet. With games being made at a glacial pace, you have not only the large sum of cash spent on the buyouts to worry about, but years of additional salaries, infrastructure, and services to pay before profit starts coming in. GamePass also appears to have been a major investment that hasn’t quite paid off, what with them now denying new contracts to third party studios while they reevaluate its business model.

This.

I will say it’s not enough to sway me to get a PS5, but I have to admit that God of War, Wolverine, the upcoming Naughty Dog game, Ghost of Yotei, etc. are still something I’ll feel bad not having a chance to play.

I’m still devastated that the Demon’s Souls remake won’t be coming to PC, and that’s on top of the salt in the wound we’ve had for over a decade now with Bloodborne (though thankfully fan ports of that one are actually getting to a very stable and playable state).

For the most part I think the new English voice acting is good, but it’s Fox’s in particular who feels more phoned in, which is unfortunate when he’s the main character.

Falco’s VA on the other hand I think captured the character’s personality perfectly.

So regarding the second part of my comment, how do you get around the geofence?

Depends on how much you’d want to use it, to be honest.

People balked at its price tag at launch, but it’s currently the cheapest entry point to gaming. It delivers better performance than the Steam Deck at nearly half the price, but the tradeoff is the closed ecosystem.

If there are key games you want to play on Switch 2 that are easy to get for less than MSRP, I’d say it’s worth it. If you are only interested in games that are also available on every other platform, and you have other options to play them, I’d skip the Switch 2 and save your money. It’s probably not worth it for just 1 or 2 big exclusive titles right now. But it’s only been around for a little over a year, so there will also certainly be more to look forward to down the road.

The only other factor is that hardware is continuing to get more expensive over time. Short of a major changes to global production/the AI bubble bursting, I wouldn’t count on that changing for a while yet. So there may also never be a cheaper time to get a Switch 2 than right now, especially when we know the price of the console will go up in just a couple months.

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/release/en/2026/260508.html

At the same time, my friends and I lend our Switch games out to one another, which we don’t have the ability to do with Steam. I’m currently borrowing Star Fox and enjoying it, while friend A is borrowing my copy of Donkey Kong Bananza and friend B is borrowing Tears of the Kingdom. I bought maybe 2 Switch games last year, but played 10.

Before anyone mentions family sharing on Steam, we tried that, but Valve quickly caught on to the fact that we didn’t live in the same household and cut us off.

But the Venn diagram of “People critical of the government” and “People who can afford a lawsuit” is almost two completely separated circles.