Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.

Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can't have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!

It's really interesting that one of the reasons Diablo 3 was a step down was the increase in handcrafted story elements that kept interrupting the procgen flow. Some games just do really well with it.

Fire Emblem Engage, having more fun with it than I thought I would. After Three Houses, I'd kinda written off Fire Emblem as not for me but only a couple hours in I'm already having fun messing around with character builds.

Given SQEX's restructuring and what Kitase's said about how they feel about remakes after FF7, I'm getting the sense this became a "spare time" project like FFT turned out to be. Could be a long while for this one, if it ever does see the light of day.

Two things helped me with this: allergen control (in my case this was moving to a different region and getting better about cleaning) and a septoplasty. I used to get sinus infections three times a year, and now I don't even really think about it. I might even get a humidifier this winter, which is wild to me considering I had chronic congestion practically all my life.

That's the thing, for the big publishers, the end user (consumer) is only part of the puzzle. Investors and business partners (such as licensees) are more important, and have been for years. They bring in the wealth.

End users are neither organized nor informed enough to have a seat at the table. The masses will gravitate towards their big properties and marketing will be shaped to that effect. Acquire said big properties if you don't have them, and make sure all the potential investors know you did.

This reminds me to get on Shogun, I've been meaning to start it.

And oof, it hurts me in my soul to see The Night Of that high up. I've rarely been so disappointed in a show.

DS9 would probably make the list if it were reviewed today. It's the most like prestige TV out of old Trek (at least the later seasons).

Not even just bad, some-of-the-worst-Trek-ever-made bad is sprinkled in there. Season 2 is dire.

Super excited for this, and I wasn't expecting it at all. I loved CP2077 but season 1 of Edgerunners was even better than I was expecting.

David Wise's twitter would have been wild 😂

Man, feels like Demonschool's been in dev forever for a project of that size.

Sadly we now know P4R (along with Stranger than Heaven) won't be out before April.

Sunrise. Saw one over a blanket of clouds on a trans-Pacific flight and it was damn near life changing. I also like cooler air temps.

Sadly I'm not usually awake at that hour.

Damn, you must have a beefy rig. Even setting aside the weird texture issues, FPS was all over the place for me. Knew it was a hard pass pretty quick.

Still amazed how well Wilds sold after that dumpster fire of a demo.

I'd also recommend they open up the co-op more, but common sense multiplayer seems a bridge too far 🙄

They still have plenty of source material. They aren't even halfway through the game yet.

One of my favorite games of the past few years. Really hoping there's a follow-up in the same universe.

I nibbled a bit at Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance this past month but couldn't get into it. I'm going to shelve it for a little bit. Still planning on returning to it. Doesn't exactly count, but I put a lot of time into Final Fantasy booster draft last month on Magic Arena!

I started Fire Emblem Engage this week. Already liking it more than I thought I would. Hoping it goes well for me, I'd kinda written off Fire Emblem as something not for me.

I don't think we get granular info on this stuff, all we know is this latest round of cuts involves sales too as they are moving to outsource some of that work. And that Microsoft's total head count has been mostly level since they added a ton of people with acquisitions and hires in 2022.

Clearly, Xbox has seen a lot of cuts though.

Hard to talk about it without getting into spoilers, but Gustave (Cox's role) was very much a leading face of the game in marketing, and I strongly suspect that was solely because they thought the game would sell better with a male lead.