1. I don’t know the details of how hands-on or hands-off Microsoft has been or should have been with studios, but even at the time of the AB acquisition the reputation for results was bad. I found an article from 2018 looking at the studios Microsoft had purchased up until then. Mohjang is really the only success story- Bungie never got back to where they were with HALO and got spun off, Rare has never reached their N64 peak again, and several other studios just closed.

2. Things have not been close to “okay” since these acquisitions. Microsoft laid off almost 2,000 people from Activision-Blizzard in January 2024. Then in May they closed 3 Zenimax-owned studios- Tango, Arkane Austin, and Alpha Dog. They then announced another 650 layoffs in September, with more expected in 2025. Microsoft is throwing money at buying up IP and then firing the employees and closing down.

3. What don’t you like about Sony releasing their games on PC? Almost all of Microsoft’s games have been (at least most of the ones worth playing) throughout the history of Xbox. I think timed exclusivity is reasonable and I can be patient. Some of the ports had better or worse launch experiences but it’s been a while since I can remember a bad one. If anything I wish Nintendo would get with the program and release games on PC too, though that probably will never happen.

The PS5 is leading the Xbox, but neither are anywhere close to the Switch. Microsoft absolutely dwarfs Sony as a parent company- Sony never would have stood any chance at buying Zenimax, let alone AB. I do agree that this isn’t necessary to remain competitive and would be and for the industry, but this isn’t anywhere close to the scale of those deals. I will note that the Activision-Blizzard merger is still pretty recent, and Phil Spencer has mentioned wanting to continue acquisitions (like King, the maker of Candy Crush), so this could also be Sony trying to respond to that.

The estimated I see have all of Kadokawa values at ~$2.7 billion. My uneducated guess is that FromSoft is probably a couple hundred million of that, just knowing how many other assets Kadokawa owns (and remember- Sony has non-gaming-related interest in Kadokawa too). Activision-Blizzard was sold for ~$69 billion.

Also it’s worth pointing out that Sony are already partial owners of FromSoft. And Sony, while not perfect, had a much better record of managing their acquired studios than Microsoft. Look at Naughty Dog and Insomniac for examples. I’d have to go back and do research to confirm, but I think the only studios Sony has closed have been ones they started. London studios (which was mostly focused on toe-in titles for hardware gimmicks like the Move and Wonderbook) and Japan Studios, which for years was more of a support studio and an incubator for talent they would move to other studios later- like Team Icon and Team Asobi.

I don’t mean to come across as a PlayStation fanboy- Sony has made a ton of mistakes of their own over the years. But most of their mistakes have just been side projects like VR, Move, the EyeToy. You can argue whether the PSP and Vita were successful or not. On comparison, Xbox has consistently sold less and has still not been profitable in close in 25 years, while Nintendo has been wildly volatile with huge hits like the Wii and Switch and huge misses like the WiiU.

I got into a lot of discussions with people who seemed to believe that Microsoft would “save” Activision-Blizzard. Clean up the culture, create a better work environment, shift the focus away from live-services and micro-transactions. People were expecting a lot of their older games to make their way to GamePass… Which is a whole other kind of predatory pricing.

Lo and behold- AB went ahead and laid off almost 2,000 redundant positions after the acquisition and don’t seem to have changed their business structure much.

It’s so funny to me how vigorously the internet defended Microsoft, a much much larger company than Sony, buying Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard, each much larger companies than Kadokawa.

Consolidation is bad for everyone except owners and I hope this doesn’t happen.

Silver linings: at the very least this would probably result in the Bloodborne re-release people have been begging for. If it were Microsoft purchasing them I would expect a ton of immediate layoffs and maybe studio closure after a few years. While Sony has closed a couple of studios (mostly their own home-grown ones that were re-structured into other things) they seem more focused on actually using their acquisitions than just gobbling the IP and eliminating competition.

I’ll admit I’m using it loosely here because it’s fun

Say the line Bart!

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

What the fuck are “modding values”? Women with ridiculous anime proportions and almost non-existent armor? Adding Shrek and Thomas the Tank to Skyrim? Gatekeeping mods to a small community of individuals who play on PC and have the technical skills to do that? Slaving away while the rent and bills like up out of some sense of obligation to a community? Hoping people donate? Putting all the time and effort into creating something and taking on all of the risk? Being. Subject to the whims of Bethesda’s management and hoping management doesn’t change their tune to be more like Nintendo?

How can you calin that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about modders getting paid, when they pioneered the first real legitimate attempt at paying modders? That’s some serious cognitive dissonance. And perhaps the most important piece of the equation is the financial security it provides. The Creation Club paying modders up-front greatly mitigates the business risks of investing that much time and effort. It is not the best fit for everyone, but that allows a lot of mods to be made that never would have been possible otherwise. And it doesn’t remove any of the mods that already existed or prevent anyone from making free non-CC mods.

As for donations to modders- those companies like Patreon are taking their own cut as well. And that’s a legal grey area because modders are profitting off of Bethesda’s platform. Then you have the issue where Bethesda updates their game and provides an improvement for literally millions of people while a couple hundred PC players flame them on Twitter for breaking the mod they paid or donated for.

Personally, I’ve never donated or paid for any mods because I don’t use them. I’ve messed around with mods and the vast, vast majority of them suck. They feel completely out of place and ruin the vibe of the game. It’s not worth all of the hassle of installing a mod manager and working through all of the issues just to add memes to the game. The ones that add more quest lines are usually just way worse versions of the radiant quests that already exist. Maybe if I had a more powerful computer back in like 2012 or 2013 then graphics mods might have made sense, but with the updates in the Special and Anniversary editions there’s not much point. If I wanted to go back to Fallout 3 then maybe there’s an argument there, but I’m not really interested in going back there in general.

The “best” mods can be created In a variety of ways. I’d argue that the Hearthfire, Dawngard, and Dragonborn DLC’s are better than any free mod I’ve ever seen. The vast, vast majority of free mods are shitposts or school projects that no one cares about.

I mean… It’s hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn’t published them, but we know that Prey’s opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2’s was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.

It got great critical reviews. People who identify as “gamers” seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.

So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can’t automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.

You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG’s and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.

And it’s not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can’t just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.

I still don’t understand why people have so much hate for Bethesda for… Paying independent creators to make better mods for their games and charging for those mods.

I can understand criticizing the execution: the quality and price of each mod, the grey legal area where these weren’t included in Season Passes that were supposed to include all DLC, etc. And I certainly wouldn’t call the results a success.

But nothing about it ever seemed particularly greedy or “unfair” to me. It solved a lot of problems that the modding community has. It protected the creators from having. Their content stolen and re-used or re-distributed. Mods (especially for-profit) were always kind of a grey area legally because… It’s Bethesda’s platform and IP. Bethesda may not be as great with modders as other companies, but they’re a lot better than the worst offenders like Nintendo. The Creation Club has better quality control. And it’s better for the end users- easier to install, usable on consoles, no need to go to sketchy 3rd party websites or mess with the installation. I know people complain on the Internet anytime Bethesda updates one of their games because it breaks their mods- I could be wrong but I’ve never heard of that happening with CC mods.

Seems to me like most of the hate for CC comes from people just wanting more content without paying for it.

My thought is that it’s revealing the construction and weak points of the death star. It may have been constructed in two hemispheres that were joined together, and that seam might have been the failure point where gassed were released when the internal pressure got too high.

Except then we should see the two hemispheres blow out from each other a bit, which they don’t.

It’s neither as simple as the article states nor what I see in the comments here.

It’s not just about staying on Trump’s good size to avoid his wrath, getting lucrative government contracts, or getting personal tax breaks. It’s also about stopping or rolling back regulations that would hurt profits.

Keeping the minimum wage down. Eroding worker’s rights, allowing the union busting tactics that Amazon is famous for. Removing consumer protections. Allowing mergers and acquisitions without all those pesky antitrust lawsuits. Rolling back environmentally regulations, staying on fossil fuels. Foreign policy that allows these companies to exploit cheap global labor and sell to the wealthy. Heck, Musk at least seems rather cozy with Putin- i would not be surprised to see these billionaires try to roll back Russian sanctions.

Scarlet and Violet may only run at 10FPS and there are plenty of other flaws, but it’s still a ton of fun. And those are sequels, not remakes. The gameplay is a dramatic shift from everything the mainline series has done before.

Legends Arceus has performance issues too, but was was critically acclaimed.

As for the remakes, they’re generally pretty good upgrades. Gen 1 has really aged poorly, but FRLG are fantastic. I never liked Diamond or Pearl, but BDSP were really solid and fixed almost everything they could without making fundamental changes to the game. I’m really hoping they re-make Gen 5 because those are my favorite and they are stuck on the DS- my adult hands can’t handle holding something that small for hours on end.

Or… Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of “intellectual property” has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?

Depends on how you define important"

The HD Zelda remakes would be nice to have on a real console.

It’s notable that there is still a Kirby game stuck on the WiiU.

I’ve heard good things about Nintendoland but I’ve never played it. Still, that’s kind of the soul of the WiiU so might not be likely to get ported.

Paper Mario Color Splash is notable, though I don’t think it sold well. If they ever do a compilation of the second wave of Paper Mario games it’ll probably get included.

I liked Pushmo World. I wouldn’t mind a new entry in the series, though as a puzzle game the line between sequel and remake is kind of blurry and irrelevant.

Sega loves to do Sonic compilations so I would guess Rise of Lyric would get re-released at some point.

There’s the infamous Star Fox games. Nintendo has been known to re-release old games that were obscure, sold poorly, or were just plain bad before. But I wouldn’t expect that for a decade or two. Either as part of a compilation or hidden away with a bunch of other games on a digital storefront.

Devil’s Third may end up as lost media someday. The spinoffs probably do too. Pokemon Rumble, plus the “party” and “sports” games.

But would sovcits even register? Or would they just show up to the polls to harass workers with a bunch of made-up pseudo-legalize documents they found on the Internet?

That’s a good point. I’ve decided I’m not going to vote for Obama.

Tragic that someone so old still has to work a drive through to make ends meet

Yeah it sounds like something mainstream media would accuse TST of doing. Like, I strongly suspect that most of the “movements” to include pedophiles in diversity conversations are really just bigots astroturfing because that just makes more sense.

And I still think it’s worth supporting TST just for the legal work they do alone.

I’ll admit I’ve never been a member of either organization, but I have friends who were TST members and last year a good chunk of that congregation split off to join GoS. And they’ve since helped others so the same. So this is basically how they’ve described it to me.

From Wikipedia, it looks like GoS started in 2018 as a UK split-off for various concerns. Wikipedia focused on specific issues the UK branch had, but I was also told a huge factor was the logistics and goals. TST is a very US-focused organization that puts a lot of resources into US legal battles. They also had strict controls over branding, policies, and structures that just didn’t suit them.

The main reason for the schism in my local chapter was more specific. TST regularly streams online services and last year had a leader from a chapter who advocated for welcoming, accepting, and celebrating people regardless of sexual preference. Which sounds great…, except he also explicitly called for the inclusion of pedophiles as part of LQBTQ+. Despite pedophilia being in direct opposition to tenents 1 and 3. The local chapter (and several other chapter) complained to their national representatives and the response was… Nothing. No statement from the national organization, no consequences for that leader. Just swept under the rug.

Also of significance was allegedly there was some sort of documentary released in 2023 called “The Lies of the Satanic Temple” by Dead Domain that claims to expose fraud and abuse from TST leadership. I have not watched it (although coincidentally I have watched a couple of her videos on videogames- she had a really interesting interview with the creators of Paradise Killer), but I heard that it caused several other congregations across the country to split off of TST.

GOS is much less centralized. It’s more of a collection of guidelines, resources, and suggestions. Some chapters keep their own branding, like the House of Heretics in Seattle.

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems to me like GOS is more focused on replacing the role of the church in an individual’s life with a secular alternative. They do charity work like adopt-a-highway, food drives, clothing drives, etc. A lot of the members are young, queer, alternative people, and if their families disowned them they don’t have a support system. They have support for things like non-religious sobriety programs. I almost get the impression it’s like a religious rehab for people who grew up in very restrictive or abusive churches. At Pride this year the local chapter was doing “un-baptisms”. They have potlucks and parties and other social events. I think some of these things they might have carried over from TST.

They keep a much lower profile than TST. They don’t engage in the legal battles that TST does, and a lot of the people I know who left TST still respect the organization for fighting that fight. Personally… I’m really confused as to why GOS still keeps the “satanic” imagery of TST because I thought the point of that was to serve as a counterpoint to Christians in those legal battles.

Personally I’m just introverted and not interested in all that “community” and “networking”. But I’ve donated to both organizations for the work they do.

Edit: in the interest of fairness I’ve seen claims that the Dead Domain documentary has been debunked.

Oh yes of course there’s very good reasons for the different organizations. Personally I’ve been a bit turned off by some of the stuff TST has been doing and more interested in the Global Order of Satan (GOS).

I just think it’s funny how Christians don’t seem to have any problems separating (and feuding against) the hundreds of thousands of different denominations, many of which have nearly identical names. But two different organizations with 0 words in their name in common is apparently too confusing for them to handle.

But it’s really weird and sinister to even bring up the Church of Satan. The Church of Satan purposefully does not publish numbers, but the best estimates I can find have them peaking at 300 members. They haven’t been relevant since the 80’s when LaVey got in front of the media during Satanic Panic. TST might have more congregations than CoS has members.

It would be like saying “the Roman Catholic Church, which is different from Christian Scientists”.

Despite its name, TST is not affiliated with the Church of Satan

I find it really funny that they need to call this out given the thousands of different Christian churches that all have varying degrees of affiliation or animosity with each other and often nearly indistinguishable names.