MolochAlter

Neither of those people were ordinary in any way tho.

Very small font on very thin paper.

That would be quite smart of them tbh.

Yeah I mean, it's got upsides and downsides, like everything. Unparalleled access means anyone can make something, which means a lot of things that have niche appeal can find their audience, etc.

It also means a lot of things without any appeal will be out there.

It's not good or bad in itself but it can be impractical on the consumer side of the equation, and it makes even the remarkable stuff very likely to just disappear in the shuffle.

Sure, but the stock is tanking now, and the regulations are not on the books.

Like, I agree there needs to be an overhaul of a bunch of regulations regarding monopolies and such, but this doesn't help analysing the current situation where they're not in place.

That's just generally all of media right now. We are at perhaps the highest level of accessibility for media creation we've ever been, but that means that any schmuck with a pair of thumbs and time to waste can make something.

High accessibility means abysmal signal/noise ratio, turns out.

You realise this isn't make believe at all, right? Stocks are ownership.

If a stock dips low enough it's possible to do what microsoft did with Activision Blizzard and buy out another company wholesale, for instance.

Speculation on the stock market isn't the reason the market exists, it's a side effect of its pricing mechanisms, the actual point of it is to gather money for companies and gather stake for buyers.

If a major company like Ubisoft keeps tanking, odds are you can look forward to another major buyout and merger which will make the already horribly oligopolistic game industry even smaller, which is not good for anyone involved.

They did not say "do I enjoy it?" they said "Is it worth the effort?" and if having food made exactly to your taste is not worth the effort you either have no standards and would be fine with microwave slop and fast food, or you lack the skill to make something that satisfies you.

Either way, skill issue.

The one exception would be if you're disabled or something, and I don't mean "I have adhd" disabled, I mean "I physically can't stand at the stove for 20-30 minites" disabled.

Is it worth the effort?

No.

Sounds like you suck at cooking, my guy.

Because it's pressvertising.

Veilguard has had a year (at least) of relentless, shameless astroturfing, ever since BG3 got GOTY, because EA knows it's not gonna be even close to competing with it and they (rightly) fear Veilguard will get shat on, especially since Bioware is on a 2 games abject failure streak with Andromeda and Anthem both failing horribly and Inquisition having at best a mixed reception with how buggy and repetitive it was at launch.

As a rule of thumb: if an article comes out before a game's actual release, it's positive about an aspect the game or franchise is known to be lacking in, and it sounds like John Oliver's parody of a corporate shill? It's pressvertising.

It's access-for-coverage, a trading of favours that stays undisclosed because technically no money changed hands; however, in the past we've seen what happens to outlets that don't kiss the ring and use the access to actually speak negatively of the product, or even neutrally, so we know there is an implicit (and explicit if you know the history of these dealings) pressure to be positive at any cost.

So in short: it's a bad article pretending to analyse the content they have early access to when really they're just advertising the game uncritically. It's literally just source-washed marketing material.

Here's to a multi-year long process to port the campaigns from BG1 and 2 into 3.