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.
Glad to see Tribes get a mention. I spent a hell of a lot of time in that game. learning how to ski was mini game in itself. It was a great feeling when you mailed it When you nailed it.
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.
That’s why the OG Switch is possibly the last console I’m getting. Which is really unfortunate since Nintendo is finally now releasing an Air Ride sequel. 😭
I feel you, but there’s some good news! There’s an indie games team working on a game that’s Air Ride combined with the Chao Garden from Sonic Adventure.
I fucking love the thought of paying Big Corporate in ‘exposure’ 😂
Also my basic experience — nobody lost anything (Linux ISOs, obviously), because the alternative was not me buying something.
Edit: As an adult, I’ve spent more money on vinyl records in the last decade than I have buying music for the first three quarters of my life. And much of the music in the first three quarters was also on vinyl.
And then Spotify subscription fees since launch. What is that, 20 years? 😳 And now I’m trying to move to self-hosted because all of Spotify’s buying stock in weapon manufacturers and giving head to Dumbph & Friends is making me retch 🤢
I never quite got the idea of music streaming. Maybe I’m just too old (yells at cloud), but I listened to radio shows (online) to discover new music, then downloaded it. In the era of mobile data, this seems to have been a solid choice.
I struggle to hit my 5GB data limit by a large margin … adding a streaming service and then having to upgrade my plan because of it sounds like throwing money away when I spend less a month on new tracks than Spotify costs.
There’s been some weird conditioning going on over the years with younger generations that it totally makes sense to just throw a lot of money every month at things that have cheaper, easily accessible one-time solutions. Just because you can’t buy a house doesn’t mean you should rent everything else.
Hell … I was born in the '70s, and the last time I had cable was when I lived with my parents. “Let me get this straight … you want me to pay usurious prices because there’s no way to avoid ESPN being bundled in and then trump it with ads?”
As a rule, if it has ads, I won’t pay for it (I was fine with it back in print days, as they were paying my salary on the other side of the hairline). That’s what the advertisers should be doing. You’re charging the customers too much and the advertisers too little if this is the equilibrium that makes line go up while taking money that customers could have had to spend on the advertised products.
Let’s say cable prices dropped to $20 per month. I’d imagine you’d get those ads in front of far more eyeballs, so increased ad rates would actually be beneficial. But let’s not bring logic into capitalism.
The console market ever since the PS3 and xbox 360 has been a leech on the PC platform market. They turn up every X years apart to buy a cheap GPU and CPU on a chip and demand rock bottom prices for volume and pay for none of the research and development in the intervening years.
I respectfully disagree. AMD basically said that they survived the Bulldozer debacle because of Sony and Microsoft ordering their APUs. The custom designs also have trickled down with AMD making iGPU that are desktop levels now (8060S).
But that’s what they’ve always done. The NES used a 6502 processor that no one used anymore, and the Sega a Z80 after CP/M went the way of dinosaurs. The Xbox and PS2 used out of date Pentium processors.
arstechnica.com
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