I was disappointed to hear allegations of toxic work environments in Moon Studios, the people who made indie darling Ori and the Blind Forest. So while abusive employers are certainly an important issue, it doesn’t appear to be one that’s specific to large companies. Furthermore, it was never going to get solved under the supervision of Bobby Kotick - a man who was never going to leave unless something like the Microsoft deal happened.
There’s lots of horrible companies in the world, and I salute anyone’s efforts to boycott the ones doing horrible shit. Part of the reason I’m ambivalent about the merger is, I don’t even buy (or care about the success of) Activision games. But I don’t see that as a topic directly relevant to corporate merging/growth. Two publishers merge, that hasn’t added to the amount of employee abuse going on in each of their studios.
I can understand this comment for something like an abusive mineral miner in Africa selling electronics parts, or a food corporation that makes shared ingredients. Video games, though, are much more of a finished product, and easy to find competition for.
Steam Deck has put a small thorn in their OS side. It used to be ridiculous to have a Linux gaming computer, but it’s become much more viable thanks to the Deck’s existence.
Basically to say Microsoft wouldn’t be able to pull a massive move like requiring Windows subscription prices without a lot of gamers going to Linux.
It’s definitely nicer if there’s far less visual emphasis to it, like having the score be in small font rather than slammed in the middle of the result screen.
Since there’s no functional upgrades from collecting gold, this kind of works out. A lot of time, I collected tons of gold and just never spent it.
I also wonder if matchmaking will go better. Solo queueing seems to find a lot of people instantly leaving parties, and I suspect they’re trying to find a particular “sea” with their friends to perform group invasions.
All true - and yet somehow, it still released to positive reviews. The consumer outcry came after release, the reviewers having gotten a tightly curated experience.
Yeah, it’s strange. Our game has ballooned in popularity on stores - but as far as our reporting tools are showing, not a single person has installed it, ever.
The funniest thing about Apollo was, I hated his game - because of everyone apart from the man himself. Then, his name was disassociated from the two following games, but I really enjoyed his storyline in each.
There are accusations that new backstory for him was forcibly shoved into Spirit of Justice, but I disagree; when you’re playing a game in isolation, I think it just doesn’t work well to have too many lingering plot points to be resolved in future - it made sense to only feature story beats that will reach some resolution.
The Series S and Game Pass have shown that people like discounts; so either competing console is going to run into issues attracting customers if they never offer them in any form. That’s currently an issue for the Nintendo eShop.