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.

It's exactly because the arcade version was amazing that I can't, lol.

Sometimes I'm ok with visual updates (and I don't even mind the look of Bubble Bobble 4 Friends much), but something's just off here. Bub's just too upright/tall? for one thing.

Roguelite gameplay is a natural fit here but I just can't with this art style. 😔

I don't think he's particularly strident here or anything in Japanese, but the headline here would have been better off sticking with the machine translated "nothing has changed" in the article.

There isn't any optimism in Matsuno's words here. I would have added "as always" to "economic disparity remains the same" and "again" to his comments about armed conflicts. He sounds tired of the cycle.

Tactics Ogre was also partly inspired by the genocidal conflict in the Balkans. I wish Matsuno was getting new projects like this.

New engine, new gameplay style, new [licensed] IP. Lots of variables. Owlcat's exploded in size recently but I can't quite tell yet if this is their big swing like BG3 was for Larian.

I'm also confident the writing will be competent, and Ty and Daniel have have a good track record of being available to assist on adaptations. I just hope I like the player characters more this time around. I didn't quite click with anyone in the Pathfinder games (haven't tried Rogue Trader yet).