Uncle Mike

3 minutes ago, rgraves said:

I love how everyone on here is so 100% confident on the laws around this now - I mean my stance is "I don't honestly know, so it might be possible - they've not just stopped throwing money at it yet so they must think there is some way forward and they're getting better advice than me". Everyone else is "Alex from RLLMUK says it's a no go, so anything else is inconceivable".

Well no, not really. We're saying the pulling ABK out of the UK doesn't seem to evade the CMA having a say. And that's obviously a question MS and ABK leadership would be asking its legal team! But they're still and publicly throwing money and lawyers at trying to change that CMA ruling, most obviously. Hence the meeting with Hunt, hence the appeal against the CMA outcome. No-one's suggesting that the merger is dead. All that's being said is that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to be able to simply avoid it without being legally sticky. Either give up, overturn it, or be in breach and see what that entails seem to be the options.

You can get your lawyer to look at it, and they can say "no that's not really possible" and everyone can be telling the truth.

So if you're hypothetical ABK EU, and all the money UK customers spend on COD go through ABK EU SARL, the CMA still have a regulatory impact on that business? Cool. Then yes, clearly it's 100% bollocks.

I think you're misunderstanding why I'm asking. I don't believe that they'd do it. It's all obvious sabre-rattling prior to a meeting with the big boys. I pay it no credence.

I'm just curious as an intellectual exercise whether it's technically possible to go around the ruling like that. If there's no UK entity for one of the merging parties, is there any relevance to the CMA ruling?

I mean, I'm not at all suggesting it's likely. And we keep seemingly pretending that it's just the CMA that's against the deal, when the FTC is also trying to block it. But if they did decide that they wanted to proceed and couldn't overturn the CMA ruling, would ABK shuttering its UK division solve the problem legally? I genuinely don't really know.

That's essentially what I asked a few weeks ago. If one hypothetically just shutters ABK UK so it doesn't exist, then the CMA don't have anything to regulate or block, as there's nothing in the UK for them to point at. And then ABK EU can just sell its games/services as imports.

Fast Five is the best, certainly of the modern era where they've left their street racing roots behind. You could probably understand everything you actually needed to understand in 5 by watching 1 and reading a synopsis of 4.

We went to see it last night and, even for a Fast and Furious movie, it was weird and bad and poorly strung together.

Jason Momoa was the best thing about it for sure, narrowly followed up by John Cena.

Vin is looking incredibly weird now, his face much much pudgier than his apparent physique (although he's never been shredded, I guess, just sort of big?)

Some proper being able to see the seams between various takes and reshoots etc (super apparent when Mirren and Diesel are supposedly talking in Rome, but huge parts of it don't match at all.)

I generally like the Fast movies for being stupid and fun and OTT and all that, but this one was ridiculous and not really in a good way.

Every other nation other than its home regulator, that is? The FTC aren't into the merger if I recall correctly? I dunno, I'm definitely not an international M&A nerd.

2 hours ago, Lorfarius said:

Easiest one I can think of is removing all the free 365 email access to education bodies across the UK, so many schools depend on that and couldn't afford to go for the paid editions.

No way. Everyone moves en masse to the Google equivalent, MS lose more future customers. This sort of stuff strikes me as silly speculation. With or without AB, the UK has been one of MS's stronger Xbox territories, hasn't it? Mainland Europe was much more strongly PlayStation last I knew. They won't pull out in a fit of pique, even if they might rattle some sabers. If anything, they'll be doing the reverse - offering carrots, not sticks.

Other than some of the stats on resignations and perhaps the parts about struggling to recruit young people if you're based in Texas (big oof there for the US economy) it seems perhaps entirely unsurprising and just what everyone assumed? Bethesda wanted a GaaS, tried to force one into existence without a vision for why it would be good, no-one with a solid plan got involved. The surprise for me is less that this all happened, and more that no-one in ZeniMax (or whatever it's called) or MS at any point noticed that it wasn't very good.

I think you could look at Diablo 3's support over god knows how many years now and feel pretty confident in the track record of long term support for the service part.

Someone either doesn't have a partner, or their partner is incredibly forgiving for all that glitter.

Gerbik outing himself as the CMA lawyer was a surprise.

5 hours ago, dose said:

How so? Genuine question.

Multiple households probably means greater average usage (because people will be using it independently of each other.) Greater average usage = more data being streamed across networks, more average capacity utilisation etc.

I did like that Helldivers is coming, Plucky Squire obviously looks really cool, Spider-Man I want but overstayed its welcome I thought. Dragon's Dogma 2! 

I'm definitely looking forwards to this, but I thought the reel last night was too long and too focussed on a high-spectacle low-interactivity segment. I know it'll have flashy semi-cutscenes. I don't care about those. As with the whole Showcase, talk to me about the game and how and where it's new/better/different. Don't just show me the same old thing, but with better graphics (and then the graphics are chiselled off by compression and streaming anyway.) Stupid.

I think the format of these virtual showcases just doesn't do anyone any favours. The Sony ones in particular have this sterile corporate flavourless texture to them that I think detracts from everything they're trying to show.

It turns out without someone awkwardly not knowing what to do with their hands, without someone breathlessly explaining why Franchise Entry n+1 is better because now you can talk to the enemies, game reveals are just dull. Like, I think I was supposed to infer that AC: Mirage is something of a shift away from the RPG trappings and back to some more original AC in playstyle? Did it also have different eras in it? I don't know.

They're all CGI. That's how they're produced.

2 hours ago, MattyP said:

We are nearly half way through the year already... A new Killzone? Motorstorm? Be interesting if they did resurrect some of their old IPs

No resurrect needed, just make new things. As much as I enjoyed Motorstorm and Killzone 2 (only 2) they don't need to be brought back. There's nothing special about those settings we need to see more of.

I've got no interest at all in this apparent smorgasbord of Service games, and it makes depressing reading for everyone that they're not seemingly reading the obvious tealeaves here that everyone is done with them. How can you, in 2023, not be seeing the state of GaaS and wonder if it's really such a fertile furrow as you though?

Let Bungie complete Destiny, have them move onto whatever's next for them, and let everyone else make good games. Forcing such a Service direction doesn't seem like foolproof success.

It's inexplicable how the thread about the review scores in Edge magazine ended up in a discussion about the review scores they gave to certain games. What a complete surprise to all involved.

On 19/07/2022 at 11:24, SMD said:

I'm pretty sure it's zerc

Just remembered how great this post was. Truly excellent jape.

Just bought the new one for my Dad for his birthday. Which feels really nicely circular for me, as I had the original trilogy, as a bumper edition, bought for me as a birthday present back when it was new. It went round my whole family, who all loved it, and to some family friends and so on. We all consumed all the sequels and so on.

But my bumper edition got absolutely trashed by the pass-round, and I remember flipping out at my parents for not taking care of it (I'm the sort of person that keeps his paperbacks in pristine condition) and was furious for ages about it - the covers were hanging off, the pages were all furled, there was sand in the spine and all sorts.

Years later, they had it rebound and all the mangled covers/spine embossed into a hardback, and I now have this really ancient-looking tome of the thing. It was a really touching present which I love.