For what it’s worth, this is the latest among several prominent Microsoft-owned teams to unionize. Bethesda is union, Raven Software is another former-Activision studio that unionized, and even at Blizzard, the World of Warcraft development team has been union for a bit.

There are lots of problems at Microsoft, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve continued Activision’s old union-busting strategies at least.

But Musk owns the ISP he was using.

Still a skill issue no matter how you look at it.

Other than a couple notable exceptions like Genshin, most Chinese games tend to stay in China. Could always change, but the Chinese market has always been very insular.

It was the first video game bubble pop in the 80’s that tanked the Western gaming industry and paved the way for Japanese consoles and publishers to make waves internationally, though, so who’s to say that the same couldn’t happen this time for China? But Japan’s industry is still healthy, so who knows.

Well I can say with relative confidence that the Japanese game industry is the only one doing well right now, so they have a point.

Both are incredibly popular mobile games which represent everything wrong with mobile gaming.

Ocarina of Time. Randomizer.

I don’t think the mere existence of a popular franchise (made primarily for kids at that) which happens to lack sex scenes is related to the trend being acknowledged here, though.

This is where I’ve found myself, too. It’s not that I am prudish or against the inclusion of sex scenes in shows and movies—I think some of them are pretty well done—but we’re at the point where it feels like a lot of media are just adding in sex scenes for the spectacle of it without it serving any particular purpose for narrative development or characterization.

Just want to caution folks on AMD cards that you need to check certain settings to avoid crashes.

I know they just put out a stability patch, hopefully to fix some of the most glaring issues, but one we ran into was a reliably reproduceable crash that would occur when entering the open world for the first time if distant objects quality was set to ultra. Only on AMD cards, and only with that toggle set to ultra. But while searching online for a solution to that issue, I also saw plenty of other users, mainly on AMD hardware, reporting similar instabilities at other parts of the game as well.

Agreed. Nice for those who want them, I won’t fault anyone who chooses to take advantage of the offer. But more than that, I’m just glad this allows people who can’t sign up for a PSN account due to region restrictions to play these games, now.

They removed the requirement in favor of giving perks for it.

To give the developers some credit, they have seen the issue.

There was an interview with IGN Brazil where the director of the series affirmed that they can no longer be platform-exclusive in the modern market.

I just really enjoyed this game. AAA gaming has mostly lost me these days, but Rebirth reminded me of what I used to love about video games in the first place. Glad more people can finally access it.

This should be the legal standard for any game with gatcha/loot box/battle pass microtransactions, in my opinion.

For a game to be authorized to implement random chance into its paid reward structure a la gambling, it should be required to obtain an upfront paid license, complete with a periodic regulatory spot check, and implement age restrictions that comply with local gambling laws.

Agreed. And while there are some days where my “I just want to walk as far as I can” instinct has me wishing for bigger game worlds, at the same time it can be a bad experience when the game tells you that you have to go somewhere and it’s either a slog to get there or you fast travel and skip the world entirely.

I could, it’s not that difficult to imagine. Lots of companies have mandated their own account systems for console games, too.

Same experience here. On the website, the left side never fully matched either shade on the right side to me, appearing closer to the bottom but always somewhere in between most of the time. But when I view the screenshot linked above in my mobile app for Lemmy, it looks a lot closer to the top than the bottom, but varies a bit based on how much I zoom in (almost like moire patterns).

Doesn’t necessarily need to be development staff, though. They could have just as easily set it up as their HR office with just a couple employees.

It’s an Irish site and so they probably want to market this as a success for Ireland and not necessarily that a Belgium-based studio is just using their Ireland branch office for special tax status.

It’s not just a shell company though, as the article highlights they do have their own development staff there.

Microsoft had a lineup of games this year?