Pull for scantily-clad farmhands.

People are very understandably dubious because of the Stadia fiasco, but this is a lot more promising. IMO, this have been what they tried first. There’s a huge market for casual games that people can play on their phones or tablets, and these often don’t suffer from the strict input lag requirements that bedevil cloud gaming.

Knowing Google, though, chances are they’ll fuck up the execution.

I feel like we’ve passed the peak of LOTR as a media phenomenon. As the Hobbit movies and The Rings of Power show, all the stuff surrounding LOTR isn’t as interesting as LOTR itself, and there’s only so many times you can retread the material from those three books. And the Tolkien estate seems to oppose expanding the universe beyond what Tolkien wrote (thank goodness).

I don’t disagree, but given the Xbox team’s track record, VR is probably going to explode in popularity now 😂

A lot of people can’t look past the gacha, and understandably so, but Hoyo’s games really have a remarkable amount of craft going into them, including top notch world design, battle system design (Genshin Impact still has negligible power creep, 3 years and 20+ characters later!), and character design.

The theorycrafting and lorecrafting surrounding Genshin (and to a lesser extent the new Honkai Star Rail) reminds me of Blizzard in its heyday. For that matter, so does the rule34…