TwinIon

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.

Bungie has been hiring and working on a new game for a long while now. I have to assume that much of this acquisition is because of that. Given that it hasn't even been announced, I would bet that it becomes a Playstation exclusive. Then again, while Sony has been dipping its toes into the multiplatform waters lately, maybe buying Bungie is just a way to push those experiments much further. Not sure how you go about leveraging Bungie's expertise in cross platform live service games, but maybe Sony is looking into the far future and not seeing single platform being the way. As someone that has (and continues to) sink untold hours into Destiny 2, I'm hopeful that at the very least this means Bungie gets the resources they need to fulfill their vision for Lightfall and beyond. Also, for some reason I actually believe some of the talk about independence and self publishing a bit more here. Between their experiences with Activision and Microsoft, I have the feeling that Bungie wants to remain as independent as possible, so I'm guessing that either they got the deal they wanted or the money just became too good. Hopefully it was both.

After finally finding a fix that worked for me, I was able to get the campaign working on PC gamepass, and I had a good number of hours to put into it over the weekend. While Combat Evolved will always have a very special place in my heart, I think this is the best single player Halo to date by a wide margin. Halo has always been at it's best when you're given a bigger combat arena to play around in, and Infinite offers so much more of that. Besides simply having more open areas, each open area feels like it offers so many real options. You can often go through some caves, approach from above, storm the front gate, or just do anything you like. I love going into an area and feeling like I can approach it however I want also knowing that there are probably other options if I look around a bit. The combat loop is different from previous games thanks to the equipment, but I think the changes are generally for the better. The game feels really excellent, so it doesn't matter that I'm not killing enemies for XP or loot, because the combat is just fun. Obviously the stand out is the grappling hook. Infinite is far from the first to implement it, but the execution is really wonderful. Between traversal around the map, movement during combat, going in for a melee stun, and taking over vehicles, it's just the best. It was very easy to spend all my upgrades points in it before anything else. I think there are legitimate criticisms that could be made as to how Infinite uses its open world. The story structure doesn't really encourage exploration, the in game benefits for clearing everything on the map often feel limited, and there just isn't all that much to do. Also, while I think the map is well designed, it's not all that big. Overall though, I just enjoy the combat so much that none of that is too much of a probleml. I don't need significant incentives to do much in this game, because I just enjoy doing stuff in it. I do wish I could bind each piece of equipment to a different key. I pretty much never use half of the equipment because swapping between them is annoying and the grapple is so good. I often throw the tracking puck into an area, but other than that it's right back to the grapple. If I could press one button to dodge or throw down cover, I might, but as is I've hardly used them. A few other very minor improvements I think they could make involve the FOBS. I wish FOBs all had ammo boxes (which themselves are a great addition) or automatically refilled your ammo, so I didn't have to go and select my two weapons again if I just want a refill. I also wish that you could set default weapons at the FOBs, so I could show up, have my 4 favorite weapons available, but still select a different one if I wanted. Overall though, I'm enjoying it much more than I expected, even having put a few hours into the multiplayer. I'll definitely be looking to replay this in co-op.

Oh no, they got nudity and profanity in our story of genocide. Even though I very much grew up with it, the puritanical American "values" continue to baffle me. Also, isn't this about cartoon mice? Is the school board unaware of the internet?

I think this is mostly a demonstration as to how desperate they are to find dev talent. Here we have a storied dev studio that very rarely launches a new IP, and while this isn't a full announcement, it's still seems like it should be a big deal. Instead of a Blizzcon announcement we get a careers page.

My wife and I have been together since we were pretty young and neither of us have ever really wanted to have kids. Both of our families would be very happy if we were to have kids, I think we'd make pretty good parents, and we make enough money that it wouldn't be an undue financial burden, but as long as our desire isn't there, none of that really matters. We're now up to six nieces, and that is more than enough interaction with children for me.

It's certainly a start. I'm for anything that increases ISP competition, but so much more needs to be done.

While I enjoyed the Gears games, I'm not sure I have sufficient nostalgia to bother replaying them, even if the MCC style collection came out in a sufficiently playable state.

I think what threw me off on some of the rankings was that this is on IMDB score, which often has an different perspective than I would expect. Like, I was surprised that See was generally favorable when I'd not heard the best things. That's not to say that IMDB score isn't a fine way to do this exercise. A few that I saw on Metacritic that might fit in: Ongoing: The Handmaids Tale Undone (haven't seen, but seems well liked) Russian Doll The Tick Completed: Legion (I guess you said no comic book stuff, but it's not exactly connected universe stuff) Eureka Chuck