Shindig

@bigsocrates: I wouldn't consider TV/Movies/Music as good comparison against gaming. It's a different world.

Netflix has 270 million people on the hook worldwide. Spotify has 230 million subscribers and 650m active users. These are the numbers that make streaming services work.

Gaming is not that ubiquitous. It's fractured and always has been.

@bigsocrates: I've never understood the economics of Gamepass. Compensating developers versus raw sales data doesn't add up to me. If subscriptions gained matters, how can that balance the books when a $20-$40 game brings in $1 from a new sub.

It's a self-sabotaging approach I cannot wrap my head around. At least with the old model of actual sales, you can map it a lot easier. Hell, the developer is theoretically getting a better metric for success. Being compensated at the outset seems like your money pile is starting at a deficit and no amount of $1 subs will recapture that.

@thepanzini: Have they also conditioned a set of players that simply don't pay (aside from the subscription fee) for the games they play? I wonder.

Gamepass is something of a problem. It's not going anywhere because Microsoft are all about services but is it actually making money for developers? Something like Hi-Fi Rush failed to meet expectations despite reaching 2 million players. If you have Gamepass, you don't need to buy Hi-Fi Rush and I can't imagine any release of that size surviving that model.

Ninja Theory must be shitting themselves. Take a month of gamepass, play Senhua's Sacrifice 2 and bounce.

If I told 1997 me how many free games I'd get for being part of a service or having a free account, he'd think the future was amazing.

So there's that.

Coming so soon after porting Hi-Fi Rush to the other platforms, I wonder if staff knew the axe was coming?

Yeah, remote play has been on the table for a decade now. It's not a fresh concept. The Portal is just a dedicated device for it.

One line of dialogue from Blackwood Crossing. It's about two kids that have lost their mother. One of the kids is younger and when he's asked to draw his mother's face he struggles and says, "I can't remember what she looks like."

Hit me like a truck, it did.

It's also worth noting that NBA 2K and MLB never really stopping being good at replicating their sports. They have that pull that isn't just coming from a slot machine.

Bloody hell. I hope those guys land on their feet.

I was thinking more about investment within Saudi Arabia rather than investing in overseas companies. Their homegrown efforts appear very, very small.