thefncrow

@Korwin:

No, the creditors are still better off under this. The real value of the Clearlake plan was apparently actually $50m, but even if you take it at $60m, they're still better off.

The way the Clearlake plan works is this:

Clearlake establishes NewTHQ, which Clearlake owns entirely. NewTHQ buys everything of worth from OldTHQ for $50m/60m. OldTHQ now sits around as an entity stripped of any worth aside from the $50m/60m they got from NewTHQ, and uses that money to pay out creditors and investors. No one who was owed a dime of OldTHQ gets any stake in NewTHQ at all.

The auction brought in $71.3m, and THQ estimates they have $29m in remaining assets, so right around $100m for creditors and investors to split. The Clearlake deal would have been the $50m/60m and not a dime more.

Awesome. I'm actually heading out to QuakeCon this year because of Idle Thumbs panel. I was thinking that while I was out there I might get a chance to see Dishonored and, maybe, some Borderlands 2. I'll have to add this to the list.

@lokey013 said:

Instead of us paying for dlc that's already on the disc....just include it in the frakkin game already....FREE!! Thanks

What leads you to believe that if DLC revenue suddenly dried up you'd still get all that content they were charging you for but now it'd be free?

Less revenue coming in means smaller budgets, which means less content. The end of DLC isn't going to mean that stuff gets wrapped into the main game, it just means the content that was once sold as DLC will either get left on the cutting room floor or get held for expansion packs or sequels.

@Telekenesis said:

@sins_of_mosin:

They should have to say clearly on the box then what on the disc is being purchased and what is not. Claiming and presenting the item as a complete product purchased with the price displayed is fraudulent when in fact it is not, and how can someone be held liable when they unlock that content as it is not made clear what was purchased for $60 and what was not *before* your purchase.

Do you have any examples of a company advertising features on the box that weren't included in the game but were actually a paid DLC purchase? Because unless you have that, I don't exactly see the problem. If the advertising only points to actual content that's in the main game and included with the base game purchase, then who cares what DLC items are additionally included on the disc?

The base game is a complete product. If you don't want to go beyond the base game, that's fine and good and you've got a complete game experience (except of course for the Asura's Wrath nonsense which I completely agree is incredibly gross). But what's the rationale for requiring them to disclose items on the disc that aren't part of the base game experience?

@sins_of_mosin said:

What is the difference if the first DLC is on the disc or is ready to be downloaded on day 1? Either way you still have to buy it. I tell you if the Assassin's Creed 2 DLC was on the disc and ready to go from day one, I would of bought it. But since it came out too late in my opinion, I never got around to playing that game again.

Well, the AC2 DLC was DLC precisely because the development team realized that they couldn't finish the game on time, and so they ended up cutting those 2 chapters and a few game features (like the ability to replay single missions) so that they could finish it and get a polish run to stomp bugs.

The fact that DLC was an available route just made it an easy way to continue work on those sections of the game post-release so that the content could get into AC2 eventually.

@Top8cat: Except that the alternative to selling that content as DLC isn't "the content is on the disc as part of the regular game", but "the content never gets produced because there's no revenue stream to support it."

I mean, is it your opinion that SFxT would be a better game if those DLC characters they're going to sell just flat didn't exist, barring some sort of serious commercial success for SFxT that would clear the way for Super SFxT next year?

I've been really frustrated over this ME3 ending stuff and especially how GB has covered it, because my complaint about the ending basically gets entirely glossed over.

I don't really care that the ending is bleak.

I don't really care that Shepard dies in most of the endings.

What I care about is the fact that everything after Shepard climbing on the elevator doesn't fit with the games that preceded it. What I care about is that the ending takes one of the key themes of the entire Mass Effect series and subverts it without any real reason for subverting it. What I care about is a Shepard who spent the entirety of 3 games acknowledging that having a diversity of life is important and who tried to bring together all the major species in the galaxy by cooperation and not subjugation who somehow flips a switch in the final moments of the game and is willing to go along with the whole "there can be only one" spiel of Space Kid.

What I care most about, though, is that ME3's ending basically forces you to submit to the Reapers. The final choice isn't about how to rid the galaxy of the Reapers, but about how to force the Reapers' solution upon the entire rest of the galaxy, to force some method by which there will be no diversity of life, with the end of the Reaper invasion being essentially incidental to that solution. Either you destroy the sentience of synthetic life, thereby rendering it as something less than what can be properly called "life", or you just flat destroy all synthetic life outright, or you blend all synthetic and organic life together (and don't think about the implications of that for more than 2 minutes or you'll realize how dumb this option really is).

I don't need a happy ending, or an ending where Shepard lives. I need an ending that meshes narratively and thematically with the story that came before, and on that level, the ending of Mass Effect 3 is a complete and utter failure. If Bioware was insistent on this specific ending being the end of the Mass Effect trilogy, then they needed to produce wildly different versions of Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3 in order to seed the themes and plots that they would need to execute this ending instead of spending those games seeding a bunch of themes and plots that explicitly counteract their intended ending.