TwinIon

I'd like to think this will be the last of the bad Jurassic Park sequels, but they keep making money, and Terminator shows us even that isn't a barrier. Will the next trilogy give us dinos on the moon?

It's very important to note that all the App store policies only apply to the Windows store, and not to the Xbox. Given that the Windows app store hardly matters, it's not exactly a big ask for MS to do these things. They get to do the things regulators want to force them to do without giving up any ground on the places they actually make money. The benefit they could get from an open iOS App store almost certainly dwarf whatever they'd potentially be giving up from Windows. Think about all those mobile IAP dollars they could make if these regulations do take effect. As far as the exclusivity with Activision Blizzard titles, it would be naive to expect they won't play favorites. They can get do all sorts of things besides a being a blanket exclusive release. Exclusive additional content, possibly timed exclusivity, ensuring things work best on Xbox, make all advertising Xbox focused, etc. They give MS a much stronger negotiating position for things like cross play. Then there's also the question of what these studios output look like over time. COD itself is changing with the existence of Warzone and the slowing sales of the yearly releases. We could see them make what we consider the traditional COD games every other year and then switch off with some new Xbox exclusive COD branded games. New franchises from these studios could be made Xbox exclusives. Bottom line: pledging to keep releasing popular titles on Nintendo and Sony platforms does not mean that Activision Blizzard will operate like they did before.

No Zelda, no Metroid Prime. Bummer.

I've been trying to get a 3080 since launch, but I'm close to giving up. If they keep their release cadence up (which is far from a guarantee given covid + chip shortage), they'll release the 4080 in September. At this point maybe I'll just wait for that. Then again, that won't be any easier to get, and if I did manage to snag a 4080 close to launch, odds are the 3080 would still be easy to sell, so maybe I'll keep trying.

Denzel Washington also got a nod for Actor, so yeah, it was definitely eligible.

I was disappointed that Villeneuve didn't get a directing nod. I really loved Dune, but it's not the kind of movie that wins best Picture. Might have had a better shot at director though. I don't think Power of the Dog is nearly as much of a front runner as we've had in past years. I think GoldDerby agrees with that. I still need to catch up on a few of the Best Pic noms (Drive my Car, West Side, Licorice Pizza), but I think as long as Don't Look Up doesn't win, I can be happy. I'm honestly confused as to how Don't Look Up became an "awards movie" at all. I'm guessing it's because "it has an important message" or something like that, but so very few comedies get nominated for awards, it's rather bizarre that it's this one that makes it through.

It's been clear to me for a while now that Nintendo just isn't for me in the same way that it used to be. I never have a need for a portable system, I do value high end production values, and the games that they make largely don't appeal to me anymore. I think the only thing I played on my Switch last year was Dread, and this year it'll probably be Zelda. Obviously Nintendo has found a significant audience that are excited about what they're putting out, and I certainly don't begrudge them their success. I remember not predicting much success for the Switch before its release, and in retrospect I think that has more to do with how Nintendo has diverged from my own gaming interests rather than misjudged the market themselves. Going forward, I think Nintendo is probably more likely to continue to find this success than it did with the Wii. With the WiiU, Nintendo made a lot of mistakes, but I also think it's true that the Wii customer base just wasn't much of a gamer audience and didn't have any interest in a follow up no matter what. With the Switch, that's far less true. They've also carved out their own niche more heavily than ever, so it's unlikely they face any real competition in the portable gaming arena anytime soon. While I may not be impressed by their gaming lineup myself, I don't think they need to do much to continue to find buyers. They can put out a Switch 2 whenever they feel like it, put out a couple big games a year, and it'll probably sell extremely well. Of course, I don't think they feel a ton of pressure to really do that either. They'll do it when sales slow or they find the right time with the right chip. Regardless, whenever they do, I expect that a Switch 2 will find a lot of success.

I wasn't aware of this story, but regulators in the Netherlands decided that Apple was in breach of competition rules specifically for dating apps, and that Apple needed to allow third party payment options. Apple has now put out how they will be complying with the order, and they're not taking it lightly. To summarize, if you have a dating app in the Netherlands and want to use your own payment provider, you: -Must create a new, separate app that is only available in the Netherlands -You cannot support both Apple's in app payments and a third party one in the app -Before linking to the third party payment provider, you have to show a screen warning "This app does not support the App Store’s private and secure payment system" in big bold font, along with a disclaimer telling you about the features you're losing by doing this. -You need to use a single URL for your sign-up page, with no parameters. So you can't pass existing user info or anything else along. That all seems perfectly brutal, but there's an even bigger catch. Even if you don't use Apple's payment system, Apple still expects their cut! Apple is demanding that anyone using a third party payment method log all transactions from iOS devices, and manually pay Apple a 27% commission, after tax. There's not a ton of reporting on this story yet, and not reading the language I can't exactly go through the court ruling and see if Apple is directly violating it and daring the government to come after them, or if they're just pushing their luck as far as possible. Either way, I think Apple has shown their hand in a way that won't be to their advantage. Regardless of how this plays out with dating apps in the Netherlands, you have to imagine the next time the IAP issue comes up in a courtroom and Apple loses, they'll make sure that Apple can't be this restrictive. The whole idea is that Apple is being anti-competitive and creating "unreasonable conditions" by requiring the use of their own IAP system and charging such a high fee. I would have to imagine a court will look at this and argue that this system alleviates none of the concerns that made them rule against Apple in the first place.

Business Insider has a story about how Google is shifting focus from the consumer facing product to becoming a white label tech provider. I would expect that this was always part of the plan, but they'd rather have followed the Amazon strategy of being your own best customer. Moving directly to white label without having made a real impact on the consumer side is certainly a disappointment for Google, but at this point it's not exactly surprising. AT&T streaming Arkham Knight is weird, but they've never really had much of a media strategy (see: Warner). Peleton using Stadia tech makes sense if they want to do games. I doubt Peleton equipment has the horsepower to do much other than stream, so if they want interactive games, they'll need to stream it. Bungie is a more interesting case though. Paul Tassi seems to think it might be primarily for internal use and testing, but even if that's true I can imagine them providing it directly. Maybe grant streaming access to anyone with a season pass, maybe put it in a small monthly fee that also includes everything else, who knows. It's free to play Destiny on Stadia right now, and last I saw there were only ~5k of 860k players using Stadia. So if Bungie wanted to provide it directly under a white label because they're already using it in house, even if they didn't charge extra for it, they wouldn't exactly be breaking the bank. Of course, who knows what the Sony deal would do to this one.

This occurred to me as well. The way I ended up thinking about it is that even though Luke made different choices for himself, he still believes in his old masters and that their way is the correct path for Jedi. So he ends up trying to train his students in the same way he was trained, and it's not until Kylo that he really breaks away from that belief system that he himself once rebuked (to a degree). When Luke was presenting that choice, I thought he accidentally made a good argument for the armor. As Luke himself pointed out, Gogu has a potentially very long life ahead of him. A short while for him is a lifetime for others. So if he's got someone he cares about now, go spend the "short time" with him he's got left. Figure out the Jedi stuff later. Of course, I have an increasingly poor read as to Grogu's maturity. Yeah, we know he's young and will live a very long time, but at this point is he seems like he's somewhere between a toddler and a young teen, but without him speaking it's hard to gauge how much thought he's really putting into a decision like this. Not that I necessarily want him to start talking, but it does make it kinda weird that Luke is presenting this toddler with a life changing choice.

I very much dislike Meta/FB, but I think the market is overreacting here. Their YoY numbers were still up for 2021, it was just the last three months of the year that their daily active users fell by 0.026%. I understand any failure to continue growing is bad, but they're going to remain a wildly profitable company for the foreseeable future, even if they continue to spend billions on a potentially ill fated metaverse play. They had a net income of nearly $40 Billion last year even after spending $10B on reality labs. I'll happily root for their downfall, but I don't think we're nearly there yet.

Something I didn't know about Bungie, and a reason so much of the purchase price includes retention incentives is this (taken from Sony's recent quarterly report)

While I generally agree with you, I do think there is something to setting expectations if you want to keep a player base active. Blizzard wasn't very good at it with WoW back when I played, and they've gotten better over time with Hearthstone, but the best among games I've played is Bungie with Destiny 2. They have weekly blog posts, set timelines both shorter and longer term, and even if they don't make every date, it's still appreciated that we have some idea where things are on the priority list and some idea as to when we'll get them. If 343 doesn't have a timeline they feel comfortable releasing, they shouldn't release it, but if they want Infinite to be a game that people are playing over the long term, they'll need to get better at telling players what is coming and when.

A friend said that this team name sounds like one you'd see in a movie that didn't want to pay for the rights to use an actual NFL team.

Finished the campaign and have collected most things, but not all. Loved the gunplay all the way through, very happy with how the game continuously leaned in to larger combat areas, even during the more linear missions. Definitely the high point for Halo single player gameplay. Even as someone that tends to praise short, well made games, I wish there was more in Infinite. More missions, bigger map, more things to do, co-op, a few areas of polish or a more in depth progression system. This is a game with an enormous dev team, that has been making Halo games for a decade, given their longest timeline yet, but in many ways it doesn't feel like it. The graphics are fine, but never amaze. The open world is cool, but in a world of open world games, it fails to impress. Still, I'll cut them plenty of slack because I think it's the best 343i game to date, and by a wide margin. They finally got the fundamentals right, and if we take them at their word, they've built a base upon which they can continue building solid Halo content for years to come. Lets just hope that future additions to infinite don't take too long.

I think that Epic's efforts to create their own game store would make that a much more difficult acquisition target for Microsoft, from a regulatory point of view.

I could hardly believe they rolled this out in the first place. I wish I could believe they'd learn a lesson from this.

I forgot to mention that I’ve also had some technical issues. As I mentioned, I couldn’t get the game to log me in with PC Gamepass. It seems I still have to delete some random token folder every time I reboot my PC, which is great. I’ve also fallen through the floor a few times, had some crazy graphical glitch (that might have been solved by driver updates?), and even had a pair of complete game crashes. It seems to run smoothly most of the time, but still not the most technically solid game I’ve played lately. It also really wanted to force my Bose headphones into speakerphone mode, despite my having disabled a bunch of settings to prevent that in basically every other program and game. I finally found a fix to disable that in one more place and got it working.

Microsoft has shown they believe very firmly in a multi platform or even platform-less future for gaming. Between their commitment to the PC, the way they’ve handled Minecraft, and their push for XCloud, it’s safe to say they are ready for the business model of gaming platforms to evolve beyond the sale of hardware and game publishing fees. I’m not yet convinced Sony believes in the same future that Microsoft does. It strikes me as a bit surprising that Sony would go from releasing a few PC games years after those games arrived on PlayStation to embracing a multi platform strategy in nearly the same way that MS or Bungie does. Maybe Bungie is a hedge, maybe it’s a long play for a distant future, or maybe it’s something else.

I don't really disagree with your reasoning, but the end game should always be kept in sight. They're consolidating these content creators to get more long term investments in their platforms with the goal of increasing the revenue from those platforms. However, we're so early in this transition period that I don't think we can really predict how that revenue increase will take shape. Yeah, we all know gamepass will get more expensive, but what else? We've often seen other consolidated industries all follow each other into predatory pricing schemes. Wireless ISPs is the easiest example. While at the moment we might see Sony and Microsoft forego some of the less desirable monetization schemes, it's easy to imagine a future where they have much more control of the industry and end up both normalizing the worst possible practices across their entire portfolios. Of course, even with these recent acquisitions, it's likely that games remains far more competitive that ISPs, so hopefully the worst won't happen.

Rooting for the Bengals, though I'm expecting the Rams to win. Not that my expectations should mean anything given how wrong I've been about this post season. I do think seeing LA win would be the ultimate test of how much the city cares about football. I'm guessing it wouldn't change much.

Well, the Chiefs scoring only 3 points after halftime and losing a big lead isn't something I would have expected. Chalk up another one for "reasons I don't bet on sports." I'm pretty happy with the superbowl matchup that we ended up with. I'll be rooting for the Bengals, but won't feel too bad if Stafford takes home a ring. Kinda wild we could go from "no team has ever played a superbowl in their home stadium" to having two teams win in their home stadium twice in a row.

Yeah, but they still own 100% control of Bungie. They could change their mind on that the day the deal closes and I doubt there's much that could stop them. I suspect that they'll continue to support Destiny 2 as a multiplatform game, because it would be insane not to, but whatever new games Bungie makes don't necessarily have to go that way. I think that's a good point. Bungie has an expertise that MS already has and Sony doesn't. Seems like an odd fit for now, but maybe this is another step in the evolution of a new Sony.

I think the trailer looks pretty good. I agree that I wish Cortana was blue, but I don't really have that much attachment to Halo's story. If they need to change things up, that's fine with me. By far the most jarring thing is Master Chief's voice, but that seems like a necessary translation issue from game to screen. As with virtually all video game adaptations, my default assumption is that it will suck until proven otherwise. I'd be happy if this could be the exception.

Also, I'm kinda surprised that Microsoft didn't end up buying them again. MS has a history of being a bit more open-minded about cross platform games and has a history with Bungie (not sure if that's a good or bad thing). Whatever the case, I just hope that I don't end up having to play Destiny on my Playstation. I played D1 on playstation, but have very much enjoyed D2 on the PC. If there ends up being exclusive content again, that would suck.