Twofold: One, they lost a case in arbitration that basically said arbitration isn’t usable.
Two: Lot of companies do arbitration to avoid court, which works fine and is cheaper if you’re not getting taken to court much. If 75,000 people that could do a class action suit all go to arbitration though, the benefit is lost. Lawyers threatened that. 3 grand a arbitration case x 75,000 people == 225 million dollars on fees alone.
I also feel like we don’t need to have more beautiful games than Last of Us 2
Remember when FarCry was released, and people were compairing the ingame screenshots with real photos? We all thought “Man, this is it. It can’t get any better than this”.
Well I’m not against games becoming more impressive visually per se, but against the fact that because of this games are becoming way more expensive to produce and companies are now risk averse.
But yeah I might have said « this is it » in front of quite a few games 😅
Slay the Spire is fun (but has aged). Luck be a Landlord is great fun too. And of course the Meteorfall series. All have a slightly different gameplay, but they’re all worth their money.
That said, I (just a casual gamer) learned about Balatro yesterday so am just a couple of hours in to it and must agree it is a blast, too!
Luck be a Landlord was my favorite out if all, Balatro might beat that but I need more hours and exploration.
My most played Steam game is Dishonored, at 127 hours. I have replayed it a lot. A rarity for me, but I really liked that game. Dishonored came out in 2012. It’s taken me 12 years to accumulate that many hours.
Dude every company does this shit. The whole “announce something twice as bad as what you wanna do so you look good when you roll it back” schtick is as old as sliced bread. I do it to my wife all the time.
Sometimes the find out nobody really cares and they get to do the even worse thing. It’s a win win.
Actually, it’s pretty clear they are planning on completely gutting this company. They’re taking on debt to buy this deal, which they will put on the company. Their pitch is to eliminate jobs with AI (which they probably know won’t work) which means they’ll cut most of the staff and “replace” it with AI, likely contracts with companies they own so that they can continue to leech off whatever income comes in from game sales. The company will continue to churn out trash and make some money by repeating last year’s sports game this year but now with AI coding until it eventually declares bankruptcy and is either auctioned off to be stripped for what’s left of its parts or simply shutters forever.
I doubt it. The Saudi-Arabian monarchy doesn’t invest in things because they want to make money. They do it for power, image, and influence in the world. They just threw a lot of money into the E-sports world cup in Riyadh. I think they’re buying what’s needed to make Saudi-Arabia a gaming hub. They’re doing the same thing with sports and racing and all sorts of entertainment. For that reason, I doubt they’ll strip EA for parts. All of the competitive games that EA makes will suddenly have tons of prize money and developer-backing for competition and E-sports. And the final big event will always be in SA.
Yea fair there is definitely the sportswashing angle on this, but they are absolutely leveraging debt for this purchase which they will put on the company. Their deck also talks a ton about AI, which is where the AI/stripping angle comes from. As to whether they can just ignore the debt because oil money, that’s I suppose another question entirely.
arstechnica.com
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