I’ll save you a click - he can do whatever the fuck he is willing to do and get the people to back him in doing.

If there’s anything to take away from politics during the Trump era, it’s that there are no rules for those who decide they are going to do whatever they can to get what they want.

The Supreme Court threatened to quell FDR’s most popular federal programs, and so he told them he’d pack their court until they backed off.

He will either be a bullshitting neoliberal wolf in progressive sheep’s clothing like Sinema or Obama, too nice to wield his power, or the rich / corrupt will try to literally murder him as he shows everyone how government actually CAN make all our lives better.

True that no matter what - Phil IS a CEO, which means he's not a good dude... but I guess I just look at it as shades of gray.

I think Microsoft decided it doesn't want to do ANY kind of hardware, because of how poorly they did both in the X era, and in international markets like Japan...

And like you said - if Xbox becomes a brand rather than an actual piece of hardware, then there's no reason to buy an Xbox. I had a 360 starting right before Halo 3 came out in 2007, but with every single one of their games being fully multi-platform with ZERO exclusives I never had a reason to get any of their systems after my original Elite.

Don Mattrick left Xbox in 2013. It was more than a decade ago. He may have ruined the XOne launch, but Spencer has had all the time and money in the world to rectify his mistakes and, so far, has only worsened them to the point that most doubt that a new Xbox will exist at all.

Xbox's brand was one that gained all of its clout basically as a result of Halo for the original console, and then pretty much almost the entirety of the 360 era. Damaging a brand is easy to do, and the consequences are long-standing. True that plenty of time has passed... but I still think that the main issue is that Microsoft is still pulling the strings that damage the Xbox brand.

Nintendo was on the brink of disaster after the Wii U, and managed to turn their fates around in half the time and with a fraction of the money. Why couldn’t Spencer?

Because Nintendo is completely independent, and is controlled wholly by their own CEO... they are not a division of a larger shitty company interested in Copilot and Window 11 subscriptions.

In all these years, Spencer’s legacy has been of failed deals, shutting down/letting go multiple studios, and moronic attempts at building AAA and GAAS games on the back of seasonal contractors. We should stop blaming Mattrick for things that happened a decade after he left the company.

I'm not blaming Mattrick DIRECTLY for anything that's happened in the last 10 years... but I AM blaming Microsoft as a whole probably forcing Phil's hands, based on the interviews I watched with both Mattrick and Phil back in the day.

I really do think Phil likes games and is basically having to fly a plane that Microsoft keeps taking away parts from. I don't think someone who actually worked on games like Phil did early in his career wanted to close the studio that made HiFi Rush.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd love to see some evidence showing Phil coming across as even half as bad as ANY interview or stage presentation with Mattrick.

Classic neo-liberalism - privatize the benefits, socialize the costs.

Corporations : "We should get to gobble all power with our projects... and you should have the personal responsibility to reduce power usage even though it would - at best - only improve things at the very edges of the margins... and then we can get away with whatever we want."

Just like with paper straws. You get crappy straws and they hope you feel like you're helping the environment (even though the plastic straws account for like 0.00002% of plastic waste generated) ... meanwhile 80% of the actual pollution and waste being generated by like 12 corporations gets to continue.

Because the world shifted to the right a bunch more regarding sexual content… fucking websites now want you to show your ID in some states to view porn.

I think acclaimed director Paul Verhoeven put it best when he called our country a land full of gleefully violent prudes when people freaked out about his use of sexuality, nudity and people being comfortable naked around members of the opposite sex.

At this point, I treat Adobe like malware on my personal systems.

Enshittification seems to be accelerating.

That’s the Steam Deck.

Said this in another thread :

First off - yes Sony is in the wrong.

Second - Helldivers ain’t Flappy Bird. Making an online multiplayer game that needs the ability to do reliable matchmaking across multiple platforms with hundreds of thousands of players out there needs MASSIVE network and infrastructure support…

So you may say “don’t take money from the mob,” but this is more a situation of where if they HADN’T taken Sony’s support, they likely wouldn’t have been able to have the resources to have done all that themselves which could have made the difference between their great success and failure.

Remember that the first helldivers game was also a Sony published title where everything worked out fine for everyone then… but mostly because it wasn’t near as big a success story and making headlines but was instead a far more niche title lost mostly in the noise of smaller dev Sony titles.

I’m sure arrowhead has learned its lesson now and it will likely able probably to flex its muscles in the future thanks to its success financially - as I’m sure lots of publishers will be now coming at them with much more lucrative and favorable contract deals going forward, but they probably would not have been able to do what they wanted to do at the scale that they have been able to had Sony not been there to help provide that initial capital and infrastructure support.

This is Sony’s fault fully. The guys at Arrowhead are just wanting to have the means to make good games. They needed the resources to launch successfully and pretending it would have been feasible otherwise without said resources is sadly… naive.

Shitty framing.

They don’t want to pay for the luxury of being able to have an engineer on call 24/7 by paying 3 people to cover a full 24-hr spread of time.

They want to pay one guy a shit salary without overtime and be able to work them 24/7/365.

To be fair, that probably is a REALLY nice broadcast-grade CRT like a SONY BVM-20F1U or something… which most people did NOT have access to back in the day.

Hell, my wealthy buddy’s family had a “flat screen” (meaning the CRT didn’t have a curved face) SONY WEGA CRT in the mid-90s and I know it had S-Video, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t even have a component connection, let alone the quality aperture grille/shadow masking, or the contrast ratio that the BVMs did (because those things were at local TV news stations running 24/7).

In reality, there’s a bunch of differences with connection types providing various levels of quality and CRT display technology , but the accessibility that new TVs give us all to astoundingly good picture quality at a pretty reasonable price means we are living in a golden era for retro gaming if you know what you’re doing.

I’ll take my gigantic 4K OLED hooked up to a MiSTer with some great shaders rendering the sub-pixel effects a real CRT has to emulate this visual effect with run-ahead to minimize the latency + input lag over anything except a BVM-20F1U in near mint condition almost any other day of the week.

TL;DR - you can emulate those sub-pixel CRT era display technology display artifacts with a decent shader on a good 4K OLED, and probably spend less than you’d need to get almost the exact same visual effect with pretty much none of the pitfalls you get with old CRTs like massive electricity use, having to carry a 150-250lb CRT, hope it has no burn-in, decent remaining bulb life, etc.