Imagine if there was an actual populist candidate on the left with the message "the economy is bad and the ultrawealthy are to blame". How sick would that be. Public smearing would probably start instantly.
We might still buy new stuff, because adding things to existing can be expensive (in terms time and effort). I just spent hours (and I'm not done) looking for PC parts to utilize my old CPU in a home server. If I didn't have very specific hardware requirements I'd just chuck it in the bin and buy a pre-built mini PC. And for most people I'd imagine that's the case. People don't want to tinker, they just want things to work. Right to repair is very much right to tinker. It suits people like me, but it's not going to matter to people like my wife, who would much rather buy a new laptop than make the current one not work at a snails pace.
Don't get me wrong, right to repair is important and I 100% support it, but my point is that it's only important to us. The average Joe will never care and will much rather buy a new thing than make the existing one like the new one.
I think you meant Phil Harrison. Spencer is the current head of Microsoft gaming division and Harrison is the turd who somehow keeps failing upwards.
I think that's really the issue with Ubisoft, they just don't make "must play" games anymore. Seriously, what's the last universally liked Ubisoft game that everyone wanted to play? Far Cry 3. Close second is probably AC: Black flag but that was already suffering from AC fatigue and its critical acclaim has come retroactively. Those games are over a decade old. Ubisoft hasn't released anything in the last decade where the mainstream gaming goes "We must play that". Ubisoft simply doesn't make exciting games anymore. They make games that are for everyone which also means they're for no-one.
Selling literal shit at a restaurant also isn't unfeasible if the customer doesn't care about eating shit. But nobody is going to eat shit and nobody (normal) is going to pay $10+ a month to get mostly gimmick features. At a glance there's barely anything useful in the API.
The older stalker games are worth it only if you want the story. If you want to experience the gameplay you can download stalker Anomaly for free. Anomaly is a standalone mod that combines the 3 stalker games into one (minus the story) and adds cut content and has been "modernized" over time. It's a much better experience than the original games and the community considers it THE way to play Stalker, and ontop of being a mod it also has a healthy modding community.
I don't remember how beginner friendly it might be (probably not very because the mod gives you a lot of customization options before you even start the game) but I'm sure there are some beginner guides on YouTube. And for the price of free the only question is how much time you're willing to invest to play Stalker. And if you think the OG games will be much easier, not really. No matter what stalker game you start with you're bound to meet the relatively steep learning curve.
Releasing even bad games is already a feat. Considering how Musk doesn't know how to run a web development company I would be surprised if his "game studio" releases anything. The only way that company releases anything is if Musk won't be involved, and we know the "expert at everything" will be involved.
There are some. For example extraction shooters kinda lose a core aspect of its genre because the player interactions are built on the idea that you don't know who the other groups in the server are. Are they hostile? Are they friendly? Will they stab me in the back or help me out? How many are in a group? Technically it would be possible to set up community servers (if you had access to the server software) but if your community plays on the same server you kinda lose that uncertainty of who you're going to meet, because you know the people you're playing with.
Another one IMO that benefit from matchmaking are 1v1 games. Chess or fighting games or anything of the sorts. Community servers would be moot because you can only have 2 people in a match. You could probably build a tournament style community server but it wouldn't add much value. I think matchmaking makes much more sense there.
There might be more but I think that list will be relatively short and in general most games would probably benefit more from having community servers.
To be fair, if your first month estimate is 5 mil and you don't even sell 2 mil in 3 months that could easily be a panic. And for comparison, fallen order had sold over 8 mil units in about the same time period.
Per stream can be very misleading because if Apple pays double per stream but the song gets double the streams on Spotify the payout is exactly the same. There's an argument to be made that if you got as many streams on Apple as you do on Spotify you'd make more money but let's be real, if Apple got as many streams as Spotify their per stream price would also be closer to what Spotify pays. These companies aren't paying extra out of kindness. Their per stream pricing is higher because they know they (on average) won't get Spotify number of streams. They can undercut Spotify to make themselves look better while most likely paying out roughly as much (or maybe even less than) what Spotify pays out.
Do they actually pay less or do they pay less per stream? Because those two things are not the same.
Why should we see that?