Not surprised, but they’ve been trying to do this for a decade. While AI is creating AI slop all over the internet they’ve been all too distracted to build anything meaningful and real robotics for a while. I’m sure they’re getting really close at doing a few things, but humans are complex things. I’ll believe they’re close to doing this when they release self driving cars out of beta.

Legit what changed? It looks exactly the same. FO4’s issues weren’t because it looked bad. I mean, it seems like I might as well just pick up my existing copy of FO4 and play that again.

I agree with this. I also agree that exclusives need to go, but it is very interesting that team “We tried buying our way into exclusives and then made them shittier at every step” is now crying that “it’s because people don’t want exclusives anymore”

Which, yeah, but also your exclusives you made absolute shite. Look what you did to my poor Halo. A near perfect gaming experience 15 years ago with one of the most epic sci-fi stories I’ve played, now to a boring bland corporate ripoff with absolutely no heart. Gears of war the same, a gritty action game based on the survival of humanity to… I don’t even remember the last two installments. Them exiting exclusives isn’t because they (rightfully) think we’re done with exclusives, it’s because they trashed their own IP.

I’m taking it as it was mostly completed by the time Microsoft bought them, the story and everything had already been decided, so hopefully an easy win for Obsidian. Future titles started under Microsoft though… idk

Honestly I’m surprised they’re still thinking about that. The last major release they had was RDR2 in 2018. That was 7 years ago now. In that time not only have handhelds and more PC devices exploded but also PCs as a whole thanks to COVID. It’s just more popular than it ever was. If they go forward with console only they better have a massive kickback from Sony now that Xbox isn’t playing as much, otherwise they’re missing out on tons of sales.

Edit: Actually writing that out, I bet the PC port is planned a year behind and always was, but GTA 6 was planned years ago before the boom. I wonder if we’ll see RDR3’s PC come at the same time.

Problem isn’t that, since the handheld is just running windows it can only run games with a PC release. If the game was never ported to PC they currently have no way to play it. They really thought through the whole release real well.

I can kind of see this as a positive, where tracking health is useful…

But I’d have to let go of literally every corporation who has tried to be altruistic and then burned me later. 150 a year (let’s be real too, per user probably), is too much for a monitoring service like this. Not to mention, you notice blood in your stools. Unless you just ignore weird feelings and just never turn around when flushing you’re gonna notice. You don’t need a service for that, just go to the doc immediately.

Oh man we’re getting… A Minecraft generator or something equally lame.

It’s why Indie games are doing so well, people are obviously tired of bland corporate slop over and over again.

I’ll agree RDR1 didn’t do much (except the Mexico plight). RDR2 was much better. I can honestly say that I’ve never felt as much joy than punching klansman and just absolutely destroying racists

I assume the idea came from Red Dead Redemption, where it does done very well. Of course, you have to have the courage to make a game like that, and I doubt Ubisoft/new ownership will ever be on board with anything that takes courage. Better to make another bland boring empty world.

The investors are betting that AI-based cost cuts will significantly boost EA’s profits in the coming years, people involved in the transition told the Financial Times

As an engineer who uses AI regularly, have built models, and knows the subject deeply - LOL. This is huge Bro energy with little understanding of AI and they are fully on the hype train.

I did a long comment on my experience working for private equity, and just love how it’s going to destroy EA: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/comment/5086464

Have fun! It’s a learning curve, but a very accomplishable learning curve, and at the end you get to say that you don’t use microsoft

PopOS vote from me. Very easy to get set up, especially if you have an Nvidia card. Flatpak is integrated to their store, it just works out of the box.

Ah the “wait don’t cancel yet” gimmick here. Don’t worry, you’re grandfathered in, you’ll get to keep your price.

They said the same with Xbox Live Gold plans, and office subscriptions. They just wait a few months to a year until anger has died down and then they say you’re paying the same as everyone else .

Microsoft is patient. They’ll get your money. They want you thinking that you got a deal so you’ll stay within their ecosystem, and the longer you stay the less likely you are to leave. The only exit is to cancel, sooner than later.

Even though I personally never used it I was astonished at how quickly so many people blindly trusted it. What I’m more astonished with is how quickly Microsoft has managed to destroy that brand trust.

It’s something we don’t take lightly, and we’re listening to the feedback of players and the community to try to provide them with more of what they’re asking for.

God they will never understand that we see right through their bullshit corpo-speak answers will they. Everything they just said is nothing. They don’t take it lightly. They are listening. They will try. There is nothing concrete in that wet paper towel of an answer.

Thanks for letting me know, I’ve been paying just for some spare OneDrive space but I think I’ll cut it if they’re raising the price

You got a love how out of touch these marketers are. They really do think that they understand gamers while sitting in meetings at the Redmond campus.

Oh we had mass cancellations yesterday! War room, what do we do?

Full page ad?

Brilliant! Gamers will obviously see the value and be grateful for it. Maybe now we won’t all be laid off by papa Satya

Yeah breaking down $360/year, that’s 6 $60 dollar games per year. So it only makes sense if you would spend more than that on games (all included in gamepass, remember no outsider games) in that time. That comparison also treats it like you’ll never ever play that game again, which the 6 $60 dollar games you still get to play the next year*.

The only people who “should” be subscribing now are parents who are too financially illiterate to see what a scam it is, or who are such inattentive parents that they don’t care.

Here’s how Microsoft’s Co-pilot worded it:

This Game Pass overhaul is a masterclass in anti-consumer design. First, they removed the $1 trial and now they’re pushing a $29.99/month Ultimate tier that bundles third-party services like Fortnite Crew and Ubisoft+—whether you want them or not. You’re paying for extras you might never use. Second, cloud gaming is now locked behind Premium and Ultimate, meaning if you’re on the cheaper Essential tier, you lose one of the core features that made Game Pass revolutionary. Third, the loyalty rewards system is just gamified spending—play more, spend more, get points to spend more. It’s behavioral manipulation dressed up as perks. And let’s not forget: none of this gives you ownership. You’re renting access to games that can disappear at any time. Microsoft is turning Game Pass into a monetization funnel, not a player-first service.

It’s such a well known play now, I keep wondering who would possibly think buying from private equity is a good thing

We have no official name, the bloggers and media are calling it Mass Effect 5, it’s the fifth Mass Effect game, this is just pedantics now. Until there’s a title, Mass Effect five is perfectly fine.

ME4 was Andromeda.

If Bioware wasn’t already dead from the corporate bullshit that was Dragon Age 4 (and that comes from me who still found enjoyment in DA4), then this is. I doubt that Mass Effect 5 game will ever see the light of day.

Oh man, this is hilarious from the outside because I’ve worked for private equity before. They are the biggest hype bros that exist. They are in their own reality every time. They can see something as small as a random tweet and think that it’s the truth. There’s no way this goes well for them.

2 examples. Long story but if you want to hear how smart “Private equity” is in tech, here are my two anecdotal experiences:

First, I was an engineer on a project that we were wrapping up a major “V2” rewrite of. We were weeks from finishing this now year long project. They came and asked “How long until released” and I said a month until clients can start using the beta. (Padding a week or so just in case). They didn’t just come back and say “You have a 2-3 weeks”, they came back and said “You have 1 week because we have signed contracts saying that it’ll be ready by then”. What. I was the head engineer. On whose authority did they do that? Who told them it would be ready? Of course no one, they just said it should be done, engineers lazy, they super smart. The project isn’t done in time of course, clients pissed, and they fired the dev team. I hear a year later the entire org had shuttered. They pissed away the entire investment.

Second, again working leading up a major project, a whole new idea in the fintech space. Team is jazzed. We push for 9 months and we release - zero bugs, not a cent lost, we test scaling and we should be able to handle millions of users - we’re ready. We release to… zero fanfare. None. We had no idea what was happening, we’re engineers so we’re used to it but no one cared. Turns out we were being acquired! Hooray said the investors! So much money! The other company claims to be doing what we are already… interesting since we had a novel idea. So we merge, and we decide to do a bakeoff (test each product against each others). Ours of course passes. Theirs tips over after 100 users. Ruby on Rails monolith, they’ve never had more than 100 users. Turns out they just slapped some stuff on a postgres database and called it a fintech product. Business investors at the top high five, show off how much money they’re going to make. Same thing, our loyal customers who were excited for our product got pissed and left. They lied to everyone else about the product just like the other place, the lies eventually caught up, and the stock tanked. Now they have two worthless companies. From what I heard they didn’t make a single sale in Q1 or Q2 of this year, and are shuttering the offices and moving engineering to India. Typical big brain business move.

Never work for private equity. If you ever get bought by private equity immediately start planning your exit. This is a card game to them, they’re sitting at the table in Vegas and are doing anything they can to make it look like the company is valuable just long enough to con someone else into buying it. If they make any profit it will go to them, the company will not see a dime of it. Your budgets will be less than shoestring, you will not have bonuses or dinners out, everything goes to them. You immediately are replaceable, with any, and I mean any developer or AI bullshit being able to replace you. Everyone at EA should be looking for new jobs right now.

I feel every word of this, friend. Everything would have been great if they had just let the writers wrote the damn story. Too busy trying not to offend anyone that instead we got the most boring bland vanilla game out there.

It makes total sense to me, having being a corporate drone for over a decade now. It should be obvious to them but they’re too far up their own asses to see it. Any good idea is going to have some middle manager squash it because they don’t like it. You can have the most interesting feature or idea ever, and even if you push it for months - make presentations, evangelize it, get people on your side, you will still have some jerkass too many levels above you that you’ve maybe sat in one meeting with before say “Nah, I don’t think we have the capacity for that”. So yeah, I don’t see how corporations can think they can make meaningful games.

In a small company, or even a garage you know how things get “approved”? They say “Hey maybe we should do this” and the other person says “Oh holy shit that’s an amazing idea, yes do that!”.

The market for new video games isn’t just oversaturated — it’s nearly impenetrable. Teams of hundreds of people are spending years of their lives developing games that are destined to get lost in the sea of new releases.

Yeah, let’s take one that didn’t get lost. Dragon Age 4. A game that I personally had been watching and waiting for a release for 7 years since it was first teased, 11 years since the last installment. According to “traditional” ways to make games it had everything going for it. A ton of development time, marketing galore, a major studio behind it, releasing on all major platforms - aaaand it flopped. Why did it flop? According to businessmen who pretend to know gamers it should have been a wonderful success!

Except they obviously killed every creative idea that could have gone into that game. We got the most boring, bland experience out of any of the Dragon Age franchise. We got flat characters with no personality, we got no choices in the game, no real consequences to our actions, and what things they did stick the stake in the ground they browbeat you with zero nuance at all. Every line of dialogue was obviously decided by corporate committee and spoke like what I would expect to hear in an all-hands meeting instead of from someone who was supposedly my companion.

The games that did do well in the franchise? They were risque. They had choices. You could fuck up the entire world if you made bad choices. You’d have characters in your own group leave because they didn’t like what you were doing. Entire groups of people could be in peril because you made a bad choice. Saying yes to one group would undoubtedly piss off another group. Those installments didn’t care if they offended someone because “What if someone goes down this path and chooses this then gets a bad ending” - they did it because it’d make a great game.

Maybe the suits at the top need to finally realize that businesses don’t make great games - creative people do, and just get the fuck out of their way and let them make games.

Thank you for letting me vent, this came out much longer than I expected, you can tell I’m really done with suits making games and acting all shocked that they aren’t doing well

I don’t know a single gamer who would say “Yup, too much, I am not looking forward to any sequel or new game on the horizon”. It’s that they keep releasing corporate committee-approved boring drivel that doesn’t even function on release, then getting pissy that no one likes purchasing their 1000 subscriptions and addons.

Okay but if there isn’t a guy living out of a car with three doors, one hauling shopping carts, and an assistant trailer park supervisor/cheeseburger prostitute then I don’t even care.

No, I disagree with that. It’s always been perfectly normal to have ultra graphics a bit out of reach so that the game will look great on future graphics cards, and 120fps is a ridiculously high number that should never be expected even with top of the line graphics cards for a brand new release. (Assuming 2 or 4k)

However, a 1 generation out of date graphics card should be able to easily play most things on High settings at a decent framerate (aiming for 60) on 4k settings, which Borderlands failed at horribly. Medium to low settings on a 4000 series card sounds like a gutpunch to me.

They’ve released some updates, I’m not surprised if it’s gotten better

Don’t you know that gamers demand hyper realistic graphics? Even when there is a defined art style it doesn’t matter. Realism.

It’s famously why comic books failed to captivate anyone, and cartoons are never successful.

I’ve read reports that people can’t get more than 30fps on low settings on 4000 series cards. I’m definitely not one to expect sweet 120fps on ultra on launch day, but a 4000 card not even getting low settings? They failed. Hard.

This is a company that will sue you if you even watch this press release incorrectly, but they’re still coming at the bit

All these companies saw steamdeck and just said “I know how to make that but shittier!”.

Seriously people don’t let friends do this. A few months of the data and subscription and you could have just gotten a steam deck. And a steam deck can go other places a car can’t. Many other places in fact.

Seriously how many people are going to be sitting in a parking lot playing this? Or if you have kids or if you are in a car a lot and aren’t the driver… Why not just get a steam deck. It’s a dumb idea.

I’m aware, we aren’t going to make a massive dent. However, for this 2 million dollar settlement, how many people would need to be swayed to not buy a switch 2 to make the settlement more expensive? In other words, how many sales would need to be lost because of us not buying the console to make the settlement moot?

In the case of 2 million, that’s about 4,500 switch 2s, not counting the loss in games bought or accessories.

If just 4500 people were convinced not to buy one because of this settlement, then the cost to their brand being tarnished is worse than the loss of potential sales due to the chip.

There’s a dozen other factors too, legal costs, what drives these potential sales, etc. what I’m trying to say is that if they’re willing to be this litigious over a few thousand console sales, then that means that even small groups like us not buying consoles can actually be noticed. It may be a simple dip in sales on a chart, but they’ll notice. To a greedy corporation willing to go after a single guy in a garage, they’ll notice a couple thousand people not buying consoles.

I continue to not buy Nintendo devices or software because of their continuing nonsensical litigation like this. Whatever value they think they lost because of these chips I say compare that to their continued tarnishing of their name.

If your drm can be altered with a chip some guy made in his garage then it’s your drm that’s at fault. Financially ruining the guy only hurts the Nintendo brand.

A game plagued by too many cooks in the kitchen. You could tell there were just too many ideas, and everything was solved in committee. There was no laser focus on any one thing and so it was just kind of everywhere. I enjoyed it on its own, but it just can’t live up to civ 5 in my book