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Abner Assington posted:It's because of… I've been saying for years that the mega-wealthy literally just see their bank account number as a high score, and I've yet to see anything but mounds more evidence for it.
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Nov 19, 2021 06:56
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stev posted:Honestly I don't know if peripherals are ever going to be successful again. They just don't jive with the way people play games these days. The only exception I can think of right now is Ring Fit, which sold well but hadn't exactly dry set the world on fire. A big problem is probably a mix of horrible mishandling of the various franchises combined with the console generation cycle meaning that they flood the market with redundant plastic crap that you keep having to rebuy, and an utter crapshoot (but leaning to unlikely) of whether there'll be any meaningful support. On top of the plastic crap being overpriced enough that a lot of people are going to just stop bothering to keep up with it on top of paying for the software. Like, there's a reason basically the last man standing for the toys-to-life/peripheral stuff is Amiibo, and those are specifically supported by multiple games across at least two console generations so far (complete with old save bonuses in the case of Smash Bros ones) and even without that, are good quality figurines at reasonable prices of characters that it's otherwise often hard to get decent merchandise for. (Outside of Nintendo's really big names of course, but even then) Of course, elaborate game peripherals have been a thing literally every generation. Nintendo in particular having them from the very start (with using peripherals to initially sell the NES when game consoles were a hard sell in the American market, infamously) and the perennial steering wheels, pedals and shifter sticks for racing games I still see in stores, lightguns similarly showing up eventually everywhere they can... more that game controllers nowadays have as many gimmicks as can be crammed into them, between touchpads, motion controls, rumble and so on. There's a pretty steady cycle of overreach and scaling back.
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Nov 19, 2021 13:36
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This seems like between the resignations and obvious dysfunctionality at every level of the company, this is pretty much the death of Blizzard for any kind of quality products. There's no way the next thing they release, no matter what it is, isn't going to be even more of a mess.
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Nov 20, 2021 04:07
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mutata posted:A year or so ago I would tell my students that if you were single and relatively unattached that then would be an interesting time to get in at Blizzard as they are in a time of transition and it would be an interesting experience to see first hand what they turned into. I can't imagine that'd be anything but absolute misery and likely with nothing to show for it, and even your resume showing that you tried to join up with the rape factory after everyone knew about it.
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Nov 20, 2021 09:49
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A lot about the executive class makes sense when you realise their job is in effect indistinguishable from feudal nobility being assigned fiefdoms.
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Nov 26, 2021 11:27
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Does remind me that Nintendo is almost unique in the games industry for actually retaining their talent. Like, some years ago in a thread some folks looked up the folks in the credits of Mario 64 and almost all of them still work there, or have retired or died. I think it's more common in Japanese companies, but still- actually retaining talent and not blowing up the company on a regular basis to play the numbers game is rare enough in the industry. Doesn't help that studios kept getting bought out and strip-mined for talent and IP and as a result whenever a good team does get put together there's a race to scatter them to the wind ASAP. And the horrible treatment of employees, harassment and sexism probably doesn't help when it comes to retaining talent- it's rare that the misogynistic cockhead fratboy wannabes have much actual talent after all.
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Nov 27, 2021 12:58
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Eej posted:Japanese corporate lifer culture almost killed Square Enix when the guy who did FF11 made FF14 without looking at any other MMOs that existed on the market and created such a money pit that it almost blew up the company. FF15 began as FF13 Versus, a project started under Tetsuya Nomura (the guy who freakin' loved belts and also was in charge of Kingdom Hearts) in 2006 who hosed around so long that FF14 came out before his side project was even close to done and they had to kick him out in 2012 so they could release FF15 in 2016. It's insane they wasted 10 years to make that game. I didn't say that doesn't have its own downsides, see also Nintendo having its own issues with arbitrary stubbornness and why Paper Mario games aren't allowed to have new characters or big stories anymore. Of course, that's also basically a video game design take on the Not Invented Here problem. Also reminds me of Yuji Naka and Balan Wonderworld, which is its own clusterfuck of a tale. Herstory Begins Now posted:They're apparently offering more money to people now, but they've been in essentially production deadlock for, what, two years now? There's also been, if anything, negative progress at turning around the morale issues that has plaguing them since the major layoff waves started. A lot about Riot would make sense if it was still better than working for Blizzard.
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Nov 30, 2021 18:44
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Apparently they don't want to be redundant with the Mario & Luigi games? But that series is dead, so...
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Dec 1, 2021 02:59
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Joker stole a Smash invite at one.
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Dec 4, 2021 15:38
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Arivia posted:Yeah I’m not really big on attacking people for lovely “to catch a predator” vigilante squad bullshit regardless of who it is or who’s reporting on it. Just don’t dignify it in the first place These things are probably usually just wannabe lynch mobs often targeting and actively grooming LGBT+ and/or mentally disabled people from all I've heard.
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Dec 5, 2021 08:56
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I'm glad City of Heroes ruined MMOs for me.
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Dec 9, 2021 15:20
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Reminded of how people complain about Nintendo doesn't have voice chat and like, is there literally any reason for it other than to have more avenues for 12 year olds to scream racial slurs in your ear? if you want to talk to your friends, get on Discord.
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Dec 17, 2021 08:14
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Endorph posted:no they really, really aren't lol. its weird how much ostensibly 'woke' people immediately turn into gender essentialists. spend five minutes following terf poo poo or whatever on twitter and you'll be able to tell right away women can be exactly as abusive as men if they get the chance to be. They literally have 'woman can't be rapists' being pushed by women rapists
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Dec 19, 2021 12:33
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Endorph posted:the issue is that a lot of women don't apply to play to begin with. not because they arent skilled but because they know what it'll be like. and when women do show up, even if the orgs are completely supportive of them, it's impossible for the orgs to really police fans. like what can you do about youtubers making videos throwing sexist slurs at her or quote tweets calling her a worthless bitch or whatever? it's outside the game and it's outside the league. Didn't one football game get outright shut down because of the audience behaving atrociously? That might be the only real solution, scorched earth approach.
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Jan 8, 2022 09:28
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Moola posted:it is genuinely hilarious how many times SE has self owned Sideshow Bob style, Spirits Within and FFXIV 1.0 being the most obvious examples I mean, that's pretty good business sense? Not putting all your eggs in one basket? If anything it's a refreshing change from how Squeenix had been sending their other IPs out to die with unrealistic sales expectations while treating Final Fantasy as the only thing that matters. Clarste posted:Wait, where our HD Space Invaders remake then? Why is no one asking about this? Pretty sure they've been making Space Invaders games for ages, I had fun with Space Invaders Extreme 2 on the DS.
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Jan 10, 2022 07:52
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loving lol that the Blizzcon announcement of a phone game was even more disastrous internally than externally.
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Jan 13, 2022 12:22
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BoldFace posted:If Microsoft had waited just one more year, they could have bought Activision for half the price. But with even less of the employees and prestige that make it worth buying. First thought was, given what we've heard about Activision's structure, this seems like the only way they're actually getting rid of Kotick. Wouldn't be surprised if him and most to all of the board are getting golden parachutes as dead weight.
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Jan 18, 2022 15:12
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Kanos posted:Blizzard has literally tried to do this in the past(which led to the Warlords of Draenor disaster), so it's something that even Blizzard themselves recognizes would be massively profitable. They've just failed to execute said plan in the past, which I would likely blame on the fact that the company seems to be allergic to producing any sort of product or content in a timely manner(presumably because significant portions of their workforce were too busy drinking at work and going on cube crawls). Kinda funny how Blizzard manages to be as bad as Valve with only a fraction of the eternal profitability. Turns out, a company turning into a good ol' boys' club is bad for actually producing products and overall doing literally anything.
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Jan 18, 2022 16:28
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Craptacular! posted:EA buying Westwood and OSI is that old now, huh? Nintendo getting bought out still seems unlikely- especially by a non-Japanese country. I've heard that it's nearly impossible for a Japanese company to get bought out by anyone from overseas no matter how much cash is splashed around. (Significant given Nintendo typically has large cash reserves) They might not be a behemoth like Sony or Microsoft but they've never really needed to be, or at least seem to have figured out a cosy niche in the industry doing things the big companies can't or won't. Bloody Pom posted:Not sure if it's been brought up before, but one amusing outcome of this merger is that two of the Playstation's most well-known character mascots (Crash and Spyro) are now wholly owned by its chief competitor. Kinda says something about having your prominent games actually owned by you, though Sony never really relied on mascot characters the way that Nintendo and Sega did.
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Jan 19, 2022 04:23
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Either way, you're really selling Embracer Group's amalgamation of various middling publishers short there.
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lih posted:Nintendo would just not be interested in being bought unless they end up in a catastrophic & desperate position where they're looking at having to exit the console market or something. And even then they'd probably more likely pivot into third party games like Sega first. (hopefully without Mario having all the same problems Sonic had) Either way it's purely theoretical as long as Nintendo exclusives are top 10 sellers, despite like two straight decades of Nintendooooooom articles from every news site that wonders why Nintendo stopped sending them review codes.
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Jan 19, 2022 13:22
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Pokemon as a franchise works well in multimedia I think because it's not just about one character or one story, it's a setting. The anime and movies have lots of nods and adaptations of the games, with the same locations and characters by name at least, but they're loose at best and don't feel tethered to the strict game structure for the most part. They all do things differently, some games and stories shake up the formula even further, like Mystery Dungeon where humans don't feature onscreen at all and Pokemon are shown as entirely independent sentient beings, Detective Pikachu making a point of establishing that while the rest of the setting works on how we 'know' Pokemon does with Pokeballs and trainers, the setting does things differently, and even the crossover spinoff with Samurai Warriors where Pokemon do battle under the command of lords and samurai in the Sengoku era. In short, it's a big and flexible enough franchise where even if you think the audience won't like/will be confused by a straight adaptation of the games or anime, you can tell all kinds of other stories in it and still have recognisable creatures and plot devices to keep the fans happy. Although with video game movies it also helps that only recently you've been getting them made by people who can even comprehend what video games are, let alone what they're about. You show em to boomer and older execs and I think they just see static and wonder why they're supposed to care and why this poo poo makes so much money. It's like how it took so long for good non-Superman comic book movies to be made, because you finally had suits who grew up with them and knew and cared what they were.
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Jan 20, 2022 08:42
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The Super Mario Bros movie was an absolutely hellish set environment and general development on top of all its overall clusterfucks. The directing couple apparently had never made a movie before, but had made Max Headroom, and also obviously wanted to get their 'Blade Runner with dinosaurs' movie made by any means and decided the Mario movie was their opportunity. And on top of all that, it released within a week of Jurassic Park.Rarity posted:Every company pays lips service to diversity and inclusion these days. It's by no means a guarantee they'll go any further than lip service Yeah, it's a good question whether they'll actually get anything done. But I imagine Microsoft isn't going to be happy to let Blizzard sit around in gridlock for years. From what I've heard of Microsoft it has its own huge internal issues (mostly that every division of the company is at war with every other division) but at least they haven't been one of the big sexual harassment stories where company pub crawls and organised sexual harassment outright grind progress to a halt. If anything you'd think companies could be sold on that letting prejudice, harassment and bullying go unchecked basically means you're allowing your employees to actively sabotage the company and everything you're doing. Then again, not like the middle to upper management is often doing any real work except looking for excuses to harass people trying to work at the best of times.
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Jan 20, 2022 16:15
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I'd say Microsoft is less likely to be as totally strict on exclusives as you'd see in say, the Nintendo/Sega days, but they're probably going to shift on everything being exclusive to their platforms unless they see a reason for it. Notably they seem to have at least for now backed off on having purely console exclusives given they still make money on Windows releases. Minecraft is both so popular and with a demographic that is less likely to be able to afford or want to get an Xbox just for it, so it's still coming out on literally everything that'll run it, and whatever deal they struck with Nintendo, Banjo-Kazooie is a dead end for them on anything but Nintendo hardware given what they did to Rare.Craptacular! posted:They'll still make good games, but it'll be the difference between id Software of now and the id of olde when John Romero was a drama queen and Paul Steed named a woman 'crackwhore'. A lot of what's plaguing Blizzard right now is a consequence of having never grown up past that 1998 testosterone-driven wannabe Mick Jagger thing. Usually once you make your first billion dollars you grow out of that, but Blizzard's had people throwing cash at their faces non-stop since Cendant bought them from Davidson. I think that would explain a lot. Corporate culture is a tricky thing, but Microsoft at least appears to be more 'professional' for good and bad, while Blizzard's been able to do things their way for years, and that whole late 90s rockstar developer model both ages and scales up extremely poorly. Hell, it sounds like a lesser version of the problems that 3D Realms had, companies that never really left their golden age or associated behaviours despite the industry outgrowing them.
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Jan 21, 2022 12:43
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There's a lot of people for whom Madden is where video games begin and end. Maybe other sports titles, and Call of Duty or Battlefield.
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Jan 23, 2022 08:17
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Arivia posted:I run a Discord community and for some reason this past week people have been very much aggressively suggesting we need a backup plan. No one's caring about discord itself, but they want a lifeboat for when Discord goes down. Which I'm like okay, but there's absolutely no reason to expect Discord's gonna suddenly fold or something. People switched to Discord because the previous options (Skype mainly, and various incarnations of Messenger) actively chased off their audience using them as a casual text chat platform, and had done it several times before as previous services 'update' into unuseability, are bought out and unceremoniously shut down, or otherwise actively drive off the audience that dares to use the software in the way that they want to rather than what the owner wants them to. This may seem strange but people who've been on the internet long enough are very used to platforms becoming actively hostile to their users, removing features and making it harder to use the software the way people are used to, and try to run off their current userbase in hopes of attracting a theoretical more desirable one.
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Feb 3, 2022 06:22
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Stevefin posted:Discord also keeps shooting its self in the foot the last year being openly supportive of crypto and NFT's, something a majority of users do not like. That IS a funny one since it seems like Discord's devs might have learned how precarious their position is and how much goodwill is paramount. It's just basic  because it doesn't matter if you have a steady business model and happy users- you always have to have MORE, and so you are obligated to regularly try cockamamie schemes to extract more money at the expense of literally everything else, then wonder why they blow up in your face because everyone sees exactly what you're trying to do and doesn't want what you have to offer.Also why corporate buyouts are usually death sentences, because the new owner demands it make more money and engage in the above, puts it through nonsensical and arbitrary changes because of corporate reasons, or just gets bored of it and shuts the whole thing down because they aren't interested anymore.
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Feb 4, 2022 09:16
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Gawker did literally everything possible to make themselves deserve to lose that lawsuit to the point where they couldn't have done worse if they actively wanted to.
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Mar 7, 2022 16:01
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Original_Z posted:Apparently MS was aware of it which is why they stopped publishing their games: It's kinda amazing that Microsoft apparently genuinely does care about toxic workplace issues considering their reputation for their own problems. Then again, maybe that's why, learning the problems of having a company at war with itself the hard way.
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Mar 19, 2022 12:02
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Kanos posted:The ABK mess is proof enough that even if you're a soulless capitalist who doesn't care at all about the individual well-being of workers, letting your offices turn into a festering cesspool is a terrible idea because it's both extremely bad press if it goes public and is actively damaging to your ability to output products that make money. It also dramatically accelerates the progress of things you, the company, probably don't want, like unionization efforts. Yeah, and it sounds like in some cases like in ABK it only gets that bad when it goes all the way to to the top. Might also be a culture thing too. Microsoft isn't just making entertainment products, they make all kinds of poo poo that comes under serious business products for serious business people. They can put up with some necessary frippery from the people who make the games, but turning offices into pub crawls isn't something that looks good when you've also got the brand as the definition of boring omnipresent business software that needs to work. When you're already keeping an eye on your employees' behaviour with an often arbitrary standard of professionalism, it's probably not hard to punish discrimination along with that.
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Mar 20, 2022 08:30
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Community manager is a typically thankless job.
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Mar 25, 2022 10:28
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Runa posted:Is that what the kids are calling religion these days Are they wrong?
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Mar 27, 2022 10:16
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The big question is whether she'll actually be allowed to do anything at all.
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Apr 12, 2022 09:19
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Politicians are also just ludicrously easy to bribe, especially when they don't actually want to do good things in the first place.
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Apr 16, 2022 08:49
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Ubisoft among big name publishers is at least still willing to have a diverse product lineup, though they seem to be ground zero for all their remotely action based games turning into the same open-world sandbox collectathon slog. Which I think they kinda invented with Far Cry 3. That said, that might just be 'For some reason people pay money for this poo poo, so I suppose we won't kill it off and take the studio apart to make more Assassin's Creed assets... YET...'
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Apr 27, 2022 04:46
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taichara posted:https://twitter.com/Cheesemeister3k/status/1519667053283532801 The comments bring up some points like that Yuji Naka was basically ousted via mutiny, and apparently was known to be an rear end in a top hat back in the Sonic days. It sounds like Squeenix acted real weird about the game, though. Kind of a trend with them. Wouldn't be surprised if it was the old story about feature creep and developer over-ambition conflicting with the publisher wanting a goddamn game to release.
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Apr 28, 2022 16:41
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Fruits of the sea posted:I have no problem reconciling that a director is a complete rear end in a top hat with Square Enix leadership making baffling choices to release unfinished games and muting feedback. Baffling choices all around is the watchword with Balan Wonderworld. Starting to explain a lot about the history of 3D Sonic games. The story I'm getting a feel for is that Squeenix put a lot of trust in him apparently being the only one who knows how to make platformers or something, and he rapidly pissed it all away, because they don't put up with his poo poo like Sega has for so long.
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Apr 29, 2022 11:41
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Sonic 06 is rather an all round failure given some inherently bad ideas but also getting hosed around bad in development, half the devs reassigned and rushed for Christmas and all.
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Apr 29, 2022 14:37
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It's like that Simpsons bit about clown college, but with blockchain.
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May 2, 2022 09:01
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ErrEff posted:Square-Enix has spent many years building brand new offices for Eidos and Crystal Dynamics and expanding the teams so this is a bizarre change in strategy, especially the sale price. And even stranger is how it’s going to Embracer instead of… almost anyone else. Also marks a change in strategy for them as they’ve mainly focused on soaking up smaller indie studios up until now. Took long enough but licensed games really have died hard. The rising costs of the HD era did it I think, but also apparently realising you can't just poo poo out a tie-in in time for the movie's release and expect it to sell based on grandma buying it for little Timmy anymore.
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May 5, 2022 03:27
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anime was right posted:with big IPs its probably just more lucrative to invest in phone games tbh That too. And they very much do.
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May 5, 2022 04:09
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