they license IP to other studios who make games.

They did do a remake of an old MGS game, but that's not a major risk or investment.

They were pretty clear after MGS V. The cost was too high and therefor risk, so they focus on their pachinko business.

So I guess if they want to keep hanging out with Trump much longer they're going to have to go to hell

You do that to control the market, not to gain share through good games.

If anything buying a studio that big starves your company of the funds to make games. Blizard and Activision both haven't put out much of anything lately. Anemic WoW expansions, desperately adding cartoon skins to COD for quick cash, and Diablo 4 is pushing 2 years, expansions can only take you so far.

Moreover those games are multi-platform, they have to be to have a prayer of breaking even, but that doesn't help the Xbox brand.

Starfield should've worked but it was obviously starved for cash trying to make procedural content to save a buck. Again, buyouts don't make games, they kill them.

I mean, look at the studios EA bought up. The only one that survived even a little is the remains of Criteron.

People can cheerfully look the other way at genocide as long as it's not being done on people that look like them.

Even then they can look the other way if they're not doing so hot economically.

I just came across the old Eddie izzard joke about how Hitler got in trouble because he killed other country's people but Pol pot got to die peacefully because he killed his own people. That's not far off.

But a good old-fashioned sex scandal yeah that'll be a problem for world leaders.

It's why Konami got out of it. You can have a bunch of talented people with a ton of money and even a good chunk of time and the end results and still flop.

That means Microsoft hasn't been willing to pony up cash to make big games or even modest games.

And it's those big tent pole games like God of war and horizon zero Dawn and whatnot that bring people to your platform.

What Microsoft wants is somebody else to take all those risks and for them to get a 30% cut of all their sales and all their hard work.

Valve can get away with that because they go out of their way to promote games and they have tons of useful support tools for developers. There's real value to being a developer on steam. A lot of developers literally use steam is their entire marketing budget which given that most developers will spend more on marketing than developing the game is a huge boon.

Microsoft just doesn't treat partners that well and everyone knows they never will. So the 30% cut isn't worth the risk. And because Microsoft refuses to spend money on their own games, giving us nothing but rehashed games from 2008 or before, they can't draw the critical mass of users that will draw more game developers to their platform to splash out cash.

So they'll get the bank releases but that's it. And that's not enough to keep the beast fed.

You know I wonder if we get the Epstein files if Trump will finally stop fucking Putin's dick.

It's pretty obvious Putin has the Epstein files and the implicate trump. If it's all out in the open then the compromat is no longer valuable.

I mean it's not as if the public is going to turn on Trump completely. They grumble a little when the economy goes to shit because Trump can't run a country or anything else for that matter. But they love him so much on a deep personal level, the same level a woman with a black eye has for her husband, that I can't imagine any amount of pedophilia is going to turn them against Trump.

I mean the dude has 28 credible rape accusations eight of which involve children. And he's president twice and might even get a third term unless somebody does something about voter suppression. Which nobody is...

.. it's like 5% of the internet dude. So website lots and lots of people used suddenly became Nazi heaven. No shit those of us who don't like Nazis would like some serious alternatives.

If you don't use the site or you only ever use it to look at the occasional post from a very specific person you might not notice the Nazis but if you read any of the comments they're basically everywhere along with pussy pics and bio bots cuz all the mods got fired and replaced with an AI written by teenagers.

One of the pillars of the internet basically got destroyed. People would like to see it get rebuilt. Personally I'd like to see the journalists the Twitter kicked off able to draw enough of an audience again that they can make a living some journalism besides the corporate slop.

Up until muskrat bought Twitter there was a ton of good journalism going on there. You probably did notice it because other outlets would pick up on it and report on it often without going on your way into properly credit the original source.

People do not understand what they've lost even after they've lost it sometimes

And because billionaires and other members of the elite (and no you're fucking college professor is not a member of the elite) are always authoritarian the authoritarians are extremely powerful and well funded.

They are going to keep trying and more importantly they're going to push your buttons to make you look the other way until they eventually pull it off.

This is why you need to think critically and Google competently. Because they never give up. In America fascism started gaining steam after Barry Goldwater lost his election paid that was 60 years ago. The current regime here is the culmination of 60 years of non-stop work. The people who started it aren't even alive anymore.

It's like, plant a tree whose wood you will use to bludgeoned innocent people to death.

Some actual Linux migrations in order to break the dependency on microsoft. Trump has made America to erratic to trust. So it's not going to be about getting discounts from Microsoft anymore. It's become a matter of national security.

I don't think that will terribly much help us Americans. And long-term I don't think it will help Europe because it's only a matter of time before America invades in order to loot the countries there. That's what all failing empires do.

One of those things. If you're going to sit back and let the Russians destroy America you could do that but you probably should have made sure we didn't still have this absolutely fucking enormous military first... Also you probably should have made sure we want absolutely fucking crazy because as an American I can tell you right now we absolutely are. We don't care if you have nukes. Jebus will protect us. Along with Trump's golden dome.

Everything in my post is pretty easily verifiable with Google and I get that you can't be bothered with that anymore than I can be bothered digging up to Google links for you. Neither one of use is worth it

The problem really is that you and I are living in two different worlds. I live in the real world where ice really is pulling random people, including citizens, off the streets and disappearing them for days at a time. You live in a world where that doesn't happen because the reality is just too much for you to cope with. Which I get. When things get bad enough human beings retreat in the fantasy. I do it with anime though instead of the actual whole last news but it's not entirely your fault since our news media has been completely bought by billionaires who would very much like you to not notice that there are armed thugs who will randomly drag you into a van.

So far if you're a citizen you just disappear for 3 to 5 days before they release you.

I would like to think that all of us know enough about history to understand that isn't going to last and either Trump is going to get removed from office and the authoritarian fascism ends or Trump stays in office and those disappearances become permanent because that's how fascism works and always has.

But again you've got your facts and I've got mine. Good luck with yours. Maybe you can Will a different reality into being. Or maybe you're just white enough and well to do enough that you'll get away with it long enough to die of old age or lack of medical Care...

Oh and I'm just screaming into the void at this point. Guys like you are so destructive and dense you've destroyed everything and I don't think the human race can be saved. Your dedication to willful ignorance has doomed us all and it's only a matter of time before theocratic lunatics get hand at the nuclear launch codes and wipe us all off the map. That one isn't anything more than conjecture but honestly given the history of humanity and it's inability to think critically and Google competently I think it's a pretty reasonable conjecture.

Good luck dying of old age before the apocalypse though. Because that seems to be the American dream now

Got spent on infrastructure that made your life better instead of infrastructure that replaced low-level customer service and white collar workers.

Here in America we just gave 6 trillion dollars to the top 1% as tax cuts. That's money out of your community. Money you earned that should be going back into your community as highly effective investment to better your life and the lives of everyone around you.

Instead we've got a huge push to use tariffs to create a national sales tax to shift all the costs of the AI infrastructure build out on to you.

Mark my words they will never have enough money. They want to be trillionaires all of them. There isn't enough money in the world for those fuckers to be trillionaires. So they're going to come for your property. They are already coming for your 401K with multiple forms of deregulation that open up the floodgates to loot your savings.

We are all collectively agreeing to the fiction that is society. Because we have lived with it for so long the idea of it breaking down doesn't occur to us. In Russia for example right now society has collapsed outside of the two major cities because they have stopped funding law enforcement in order to move that money to the war effort.

In America there are 400,000 police officers. That's for a country of 170 million adults. As the tax base collapses in America the police will basically go away because there's not going to be any money to fund them. A few major cities will still have them but that'll be that.

Folks don't realize just how fragile democracy, the Republic and the rule of law really is.

Probably not given our current Court system. The ruling would be that you are in public and therefore they can do whatever they want. The only time it wouldn't apply is if you're on your property protected by a high fence.

They're mostly pulling random people off the streets so they can do pretty much whatever they want as long as Trump is president.

I don't think folks would realize this but every single institution designed to protect you has broken down. The last and final one was the voters and they decided cheap eggs and sticking it was more important than basic civil rights and a functional economy.

To be fair we had a hell of a lot of voter suppression and a fuck ton of propaganda. I watched a couple dozen journalists get dog walked by corporate media for daring criticize King Trump. It was so bad we invented a new word. Sane washing

And I don't mean facebook. I want to talk about this post and the comments on it.

One of the major problems is that anyone who voted to give away their rights in order to kick out immigrants or just plain be mean to them isn't going to read this thread.

We're all in information silos and there is insane amounts of lies and misinformation and propaganda out there designed to benefit the billionaires who bought the entire American Media over the last 50 years.

But what gets me is people who seek out and enjoy the propaganda. A relatively moderate coworker of mine who has since retired used to be entertained by Fox News and could not explain why. He just like to watch and get for some reason.

It wasn't something I could understand but I knew it meant that although he was a moderate he would eventually be pipelined into extremism or at least voting for extremism.

I don't know what you do with a class of people who intentionally seek out propaganda because they find it entertaining. I don't even know how or why Fox News is entertaining to people I just know it is. Maybe it's the blondes and tight sweaters or seeing oldish men saying things that makes sense to a certain class of person or something else entirely. I can't understand it and I wish I did.

I do know that nobody who gets off watching ice beat the shit out of immigrants and protesters is going to read any of these comments or change their mind in any meaningful fashion despite what they're seeing because they're just not going to see the worst of it except under very specific and curated circumstances. Where they are explicitly being targeted with entertainment.

And it's a fundamental problem with our media.

They aren't going to show up again. Remember all those FEMA death camps that Obama was running? Pepperidge farms remembers.

I'm not going to complain about right-wing hypocrisy because the right wing just does not have enough self-awareness to experience the emotion of hypocrisy.

But it is amazing what the right wingers will trade in order to secure their place in a hierarchy.

It is amazing how how much it infuriates them to show respect to someone who they don't consider to be in their in group.

I can't even imagine what it's like being a right winger and having to take that mandatory corporate sensitivity training every year to tell you to not be a racist and be nice to queer folk.

Not to mention the constant terror that you're going to get a few drinks in you, drop some n-bombs and have it recorded and put all over Facebook costing you your job.

I would like to say that they can just stop being racist and homophobic but that shit gets programmed into you during the critical 4 to 14 time frame.

What they need to do is go through a deconstruction which is a painful process where ideas programmed into your head when you're a kid and you didn't have the critical thinking faculties to resist them get reevaluated and the bad ones get discarded.

Think about how Germany had to go through de-nazification post world war II or how America should have gone through the full reconstruction but we didn't.

If you're an American you know that this is what's called our original sin. But to be honest the trick of using bigotry and homophobia to trick people into giving up the most basic rights in exchange for a place in a hierarchy is something done in every single country by every single ruling elite.

Honestly that's what really frustrates me. We do not teach people how that trick works even though it's used everywhere. I doubt that's an accident. If you tried to teach it you would get shut down fast. At least if you tried to do it anywhere besides a dying web forum.