ZombiePie

@bigsocrates: are you aware that the work hours for the average salaryman are insane? The expected number of hours makes American look like it has EU labour laws. Japan has a forest and a bridge notoriously known as places where burnt out businessmen wander into in order to kill themselves, I don't think that's a stunning indicator of Japanese corporate culture, even if one CEO tried to save face over ten years ago.

Likewise, there should be a level of accountability directed at Spencer. If not now, when? You can't keep moving the goal post on when he deserves scrutiny over repeat studio failures and documented project mismanagement.

Also, yet again, I swear to God, if I see someone else share an Iwata anecdote amidst the industry layoffs, I am going to go insane. Sure, he would smile at the camera and seemed to get the industry, but he was acting IN ACCORDANCE TO NATIONWIDE regulations while operating a monolith. If he had the ability to fire people as freely as companies do in the USA and even most of Europe, he would have. You're a goddamn fool if you think Japanese corporate culture is "kinder" or less brutal or corrupt than what we experience.

Absolutely brutal. This is a murky time to be a non-mobile game developer in Japan. Kids do not give a shit about the PS5 in Japan and if they don't care about the PS5 the Xbox is getting barely a tenth of that attention over there. Nintendo partially investing in mobile games is still doing well. We tend to forget that Pokémon Go is a major money maker, though they don't fully own Pokémon. The Japanese PC Gaming market also exploded and ate the PS5's lunch.

1. Botany Manor

2. Peppa Pig

So... that final episode sure did piss a lot of people off.

@allthedinos: soooo... this Helldivers 2 account linking stuff and the Stellar Drive "censorship" nonsense claims from internet chuds might warrant nominations.

@bigsocrates: I genuinely think this topic warrants its own thread.

So... good news, I guess? After being a bit of a punchline in that everyone in the press and hobby thought it was dead, Ubisoft announced that XDefiant not only IS NOT DEAD, but it will be releasing on the 21st of this month. After the game went radio silent for years, it's finally coming out in about two weeks. After the game was excoriated for its ridiculous title and multiple delays, it's finally happening.

But hold your horses because this is a Ubisoft online multiplayer shooter. As is usually the case with one of these, the game will launch with only a portion of its promised features and content. As reported by Eurogamer, XDefiant will start with a "preseason" that is planned to last about six weeks or about a month and a half. This preseason will have five factions, fourteen maps, and only five multiplayer modes to choose from when you enter its main campaign. The game will also have a traditional "ranked mode" with your standard array of 4v4 competitive match types. It is also critically important to remind everyone that XDefiant is a free-to-play multiplayer shooter and is most definitely going to have every single F2P trapping seen in Ubisoft's prior F2P multiplayer games.

As much as I want to discount this game, Ubisoft always seems to be the developer to find a way to make these "work." After Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and Tom Clancy's The Division 2 had less than smooth launches, both secured stable, though toxic, online communities that have kept those games running and active years after their launches. Is this the time when that winning formula breaks? Maybe, but nonetheless, good on them for finally releasing a game.

At a time when most are scaling back their ambitions in the video game industry, Hasbro has decided to do the opposite. While most major studios are either cancelling projects or laying off staff, Hasbro's head of digital product development, Dan Ayoub, has announced the company plans to spend $1 billion to re-eneter the games market. In an interview to gamesindustry.biz, Ayoub stated:

"The biggest thing to takeaway, which is honestly a little surprise to a lot of people, is that Hasbro is in fact making video games," Ayoub says. "And we have a considerable investment in our studio structure; we've got over $1 billion in games right now being developed."

"Video games is an integral part of Hasbro's strategy going into the next 100 years and we have to make sure that everything that comes out is top quality, is authentic, and is something we can build upon, because we're talking about a couple studios and a couple games right now, but we have much larger ambitions for that."

As part of these ambitious plans, Hasbro has secured four studios: Invoke Studios, Atomic Arcade, Skeleton Key, and Archetype. Hasbro has tasked each of these to work on games with AAA aspirations with some working on original ideas and other using Hasbro's extensive list of IPs. For example, Ayoub revealed that Atomic Arcade is working on a mature GI Joe title, Invoke on a a Dungeons & Dragons game, Skeleton Key on an original horror-themed title, and Archetype on a new AAA franchise led by former BioWare alum, James Ohlen.

All of these gaming ambitions will be operating under Hasbro's Wizards of the Coast digital brand which not only was buoyed by Baldur's Gate 3 being a massive success but also Monopoly Go, which generated $2 billion for Hasbro is about 10 months. Nonetheless, Wizards of the Coast also spent $500 million to market the game, which exceeds the marketing budget of even the likes of The Last of Us Part II.

Now, for those of you that have been around the block for a while, you may recall a time when Hasbro was a major player in the video game arena. Hasbro Interactive, Inc. was at one point the third largest video game publisher in the world. Unfortunately, Hasbro Interactive's aggressive growth only happened due to Hasbro spending money like crazy and when the Do-Com Bubble Burst, the gaming division bled money. It also did not help that Hasbro's hardware division, Tiger Electronics, Ltd, struggled to make handheld devices, though it had the saving grace of making the Furby. Nonetheless, at one point Hasbro Interactive lost $74 million on revenues of $237 million and when Hasbro decided to exit the video game market, that is what led to Atari SA/Infogrames.

Nonetheless, Hasbro does have the advantage of having a plethora of IPs that are bound to sell. Wizards of the Coast has been itching to make a sequel to BG3, even if Larian has signaled they have no plans to continue working with Wizards to even make DLC for BG3.

These Stellar Blade weirdos/chuds realize that South Korea as a country has some of the strongest anti-porn laws in the world, right? They know it's not coming from a place of absolute freedom, riiiiiiiight?