paultimate14

I love this sort of harmless pettiness. So much of the internet has become corporate and sterile afraid of offending anyone.

And before anyone assumes- I'm not talking about political correctness. This kind of thing should be reserved for controllable trivialities. Star Trek vs Star Wars fandom. Sports rivalries. Deep Dish vs Thin Crust (both are wrong though).

I can tell you don't play Pokemon .

I agree. Throughout the whole years if I want something, I buy it. If I don't want something, I don't.

But all of a sudden around November or December I need to hold off for a bit because someone else wants to buy it for me instead. And it's usually not quite the same thing that I wanted- I don't want to be rude, but I would have rather just done the research on my own and made my own purchase.

Or worse, I get gifted stuff I have absolutely no interest in. So I need to make space in my house for it and remember to pretend like I use it on occasions when I see that person for a couple of years until we are past the statue of limitations on getting rid of it.

Just more plastic and emissions. More money going to big corporations. It's an inefficient purchasing process propped up for the sake of the emotions of irrational people. And corporations like Hallmark seem to exist specifically to amplify these traditions for the benefit of modern shareholders.

I remember back in 2013 I built a PC for my wife, and in 2014 one for myself. At that point, buying something online still felt a bit odd. It was reserved for specialty items, shipping would often take at least 2 weeks, or even 6 weeks depending on where it was coming from. I was no stranger to purchasing online, but brick-and-mortar stores with real stock still existed and could get me what I purchased much more quickly.

I remember being so impressed with Newegg's website. It made it so easy to build a computer and make sure everything was compatible. It was really easy to compare different options. The filter system was intuitive and comprehensive. I remember thinking "wow this is a perfect shopping experience. The future has arrived".

I went to build my next PC in 2019, and dear Satan was it so much worse. I had heard about Newegg getting bought out by a larger company in 2016, and it showed. They opened it up to 3rd party sellers. The filters got clogged with garbage and don't seem to work properly anymore. The sort function became a joke. The UI got rearranged to be less intuitive. I think they purposefylly wanted to make a worse shopping experience to make people frustrated, to get them to give up on looking for deals and pay a bit extra just to be done with it. I ended up having to go to a 3rd party website (PCPartPicker) to figure out what I needed and where to get it. And some of those parts I had to order on eBay (some even from Newegg's eBay account which is just.... Why are we doing this?), some on Amazon or Best Buy. And it's only gotten worse since.

This same experience has happened everywhere. Just this morning my wife was checking out Culture Hustle to see if they have any interesting new paints and commented on how much worse the website was now than when we last used it a few years ago.

This may make me sound like an old curmudgeon yelling at clouds, but I think the Internet peaked a while ago. There are arguments over exactly when, but sometime between 2008-2016. I remember in 2012 in talking to my fellow students about how Google search results were getting worse.

Trick question: none of the stations are worth listening to.

I plead the 5th

Just trying to get the cops to stop harassing innocent and unrelated people is all.

separated from his wife for years

Remember that according to the FBI more than half of murderers know their victims personally, and about a quarter are family relations.

I think the police really need to drop this whole "assassination" false flag and investigate the more probable angles. Could be that he was closeted and killed by a jilted lover, or the husband of the secretary he was banging, or a hitman hired by the estranged wife. No sense in harassing every man with a green jacket over this.

This has got to be from The Onion... Right?

1. I don't know the details of how hands-on or hands-off Microsoft has been or should have been with studios, but even at the time of the AB acquisition the reputation for results was bad. I found an article from 2018 looking at the studios Microsoft had purchased up until then. Mohjang is really the only success story- Bungie never got back to where they were with HALO and got spun off, Rare has never reached their N64 peak again, and several other studios just closed.

2. Things have not been close to "okay" since these acquisitions. Microsoft laid off almost 2,000 people from Activision-Blizzard in January 2024. Then in May they closed 3 Zenimax-owned studios- Tango, Arkane Austin, and Alpha Dog. They then announced another 650 layoffs in September, with more expected in 2025. Microsoft is throwing money at buying up IP and then firing the employees and closing down.

3. What don't you like about Sony releasing their games on PC? Almost all of Microsoft's games have been (at least most of the ones worth playing) throughout the history of Xbox. I think timed exclusivity is reasonable and I can be patient. Some of the ports had better or worse launch experiences but it's been a while since I can remember a bad one. If anything I wish Nintendo would get with the program and release games on PC too, though that probably will never happen.

The PS5 is leading the Xbox, but neither are anywhere close to the Switch. Microsoft absolutely dwarfs Sony as a parent company- Sony never would have stood any chance at buying Zenimax, let alone AB. I do agree that this isn't necessary to remain competitive and would be and for the industry, but this isn't anywhere close to the scale of those deals. I will note that the Activision-Blizzard merger is still pretty recent, and Phil Spencer has mentioned wanting to continue acquisitions (like King, the maker of Candy Crush), so this could also be Sony trying to respond to that.

The estimated I see have all of Kadokawa values at ~$2.7 billion. My uneducated guess is that FromSoft is probably a couple hundred million of that, just knowing how many other assets Kadokawa owns (and remember- Sony has non-gaming-related interest in Kadokawa too). Activision-Blizzard was sold for ~$69 billion.

Also it's worth pointing out that Sony are already partial owners of FromSoft. And Sony, while not perfect, had a much better record of managing their acquired studios than Microsoft. Look at Naughty Dog and Insomniac for examples. I'd have to go back and do research to confirm, but I think the only studios Sony has closed have been ones they started. London studios (which was mostly focused on toe-in titles for hardware gimmicks like the Move and Wonderbook) and Japan Studios, which for years was more of a support studio and an incubator for talent they would move to other studios later- like Team Icon and Team Asobi.

I don't mean to come across as a PlayStation fanboy- Sony has made a ton of mistakes of their own over the years. But most of their mistakes have just been side projects like VR, Move, the EyeToy. You can argue whether the PSP and Vita were successful or not. On comparison, Xbox has consistently sold less and has still not been profitable in close in 25 years, while Nintendo has been wildly volatile with huge hits like the Wii and Switch and huge misses like the WiiU.