Depending on how you do accounting, they may or may not have paid off the $70B. They’re firing people and cancelling projects, according to reporting, because they want to free up $80B of capital across the organization to invest in AI. Whatever money these other sectors are making, the money AI could make is seen as being way higher.

The movie industry is plenty capable of killing itself.

They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.

I wouldn’t be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there’s a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that’s at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that’s revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they’ve built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.

It has plateaued some time ago now. That’s not failure, but it’s not about to become Netflix either.

It’s not online only, but this Thursday night get-together is online-only.

I can find a community for a fighting game from 2012 to get together every Thursday night for a 30-person tournament via Discord. 100 people in a battle royale could work much the same.

“Our Board”:

Epic Games, Take Two, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Bandai Namco, etc.

Do you ever hunt around Facebook Marketplace? When electronics drop in value enough, often times, people will just give them away. I have. It’s (sometimes) less hassle than trying to haggle with people over a few dollars for severely outdated hardware, and my goal at that point is to get it into someone’s hands who will use it rather than have the stuff go to a landfill. Even a very outdated PC will still play tons and tons of great games for cheap or free. They frequently won’t be the latest and greatest, but there’s less and less correlation these days with high game quality and high system requirements.

About my lowest threshold for success is that this at least makes disclosures about what you’re buying more prominent and restricts the ability for software licenses to just alter the deal and pray that they don’t alter them further. Even better disclosures would make the raw deal you’re getting become more poisonous before the point of sale. Especially as an American, I’m going to have wait a few years after any legislation goes through before I can trust online multiplayer games again.

I’m not parroting anything. I’ve looked. Sure, sometimes you get a port of XCOM or Slay the Spire, but then it’s not going to carry over progress back to my PC, where I’m more comfortable playing at home, and my reluctance to buy a version of the game like that explains why there isn’t enough money in trying to port the kinds of games that I like to mobile. Sometimes a game has a port, but it fell out of compatibility with modern Android and never got updated; and let me tell you, that’s a great way to convince me to stop looking. Even crazier is when something like Fire Emblem Heroes happens, because it’s adapting a traditional handheld/console game into an interface that makes way more sense for controlling the game, but it’s not a proper version of that series; it’s a gacha game. If I have any kind of extended anticipated desire to game on the go, my Steam Deck is just a better answer than trying to find the few games I would like that also got Android versions, because I’m going to spend more time playing them at home anyway.

I’m not sure why you’re on a crusade to convince people to like mobile games. I’ve always got my phone on me, and I frequently find myself on a subway ride that’s too short to bother with a Steam Deck. Mobile games would fit in great there. My options are pretty terrible. For the kinds of games I like to play, the only ones that actually have mobile versions are basically digital versions of board games and a small handful of roguelikes. I tend to just read on the subway instead. It’s not for lack of trying. The library just sucks, and it offers less value than other places I can buy games. Your daughter is playing games designed to keep you “engaged” and addicted with all of the greatest tricks of the gambling industry; you can find the GDC talks with a quick search on your favorite search engine.

Warner Bros. and Bastion was a bit different. Microsoft used to have a set number of “slots” per publisher to put up a certain number of games on Xbox Live Arcade per year. WB didn’t have anything to fill the slot, so Supergiant basically negotiated with them to use that slot themselves, is how I understand the situation.

Other than GOTY edition of the first game, this entire series has LAN (so far), which is commendable and stupidly rare! I hope the GOTY edition doesn’t show that they’re nixing this for BL4 as well.

Customers already told them this by not buying on Epic and waiting 6 months to a year to buy on Steam.

It’s a weird dynamic, but it also makes sense that a success like that isn’t as correlated to future work as TV or movies. You got <insert big actor here…I don’t know…Tom Cruise> in all sorts of movies because they put asses in seats. The performance is comparatively much more of the appeal in a movie than it is in a game, even a story-driven one. So even if you give an award-winning performance, how important to a game’s success is an award-winning performer? For plenty of games, probably not very. And even if it is important for a particular game’s success, maybe the award winner is more expensive, and you can get a good performance out of someone who’s a great actor but hasn’t had that exposure and is willing to do it for less money.

You can download Game Pass games and play them on SteamOS? News to me, even after a quick web search to verify it. Streaming is a poor substitute.

The good thing about GOG is that you don’t have to trust them, since there’s no ecosystem lock-in like other stores have. If you continue to shop there, it’s only in your favor, and they’ve got a better shot at sticking around. They’re currently leaning into the concerns that more and more of us have about preservation, so that appears to be a market worth money, and hopefully they’re right. Microsoft is not in the business of loss leading right now, so I’m not super concerned about that kind of threat, and if they were going to try to squeeze out a competitor, they’d be going after Steam, not GOG.

What about GOG concerns you?

Streaming has plateaued, and I don’t see anyone overcoming that plateau. The console market is coming to an end, but the transition is to PC gaming, not streaming, and we can measure that.

It’s too expensive to make those kinds of exclusives anymore, which means they take longer to make, which means there are fewer of them. Sony can’t make enough PlayStation exclusives to justify me buying a PlayStation anymore, so I don’t buy one, so they put them on PC too, so there’s even less reason for me to have a PlayStation. Console exclusives are on their way out of fashion.