My take is that the Saudis were incredibly fortunate to be sitting on a resource that has had inelastic demand for decades. So fortunate in fact that they didn’t get good at anything else that wasn’t related to oil.

They’ve known for some time that the oil reserves can’t sustain them forever so they’ve dabbled in investments in various industries with lacklustre results.

Their recent foray into gaming is symbolic of this. An industry that bleeds cash without the creative talent that underpins it. I mean Microsoft is a good example of when ‘business’ intersects with the production of art.

mark zuckerberg must have the hardest time making any sort of genuine human connection.

creatives who are successful want more money to fund bigger projects and increase the scope of their art.

capitalists want studios to make money to line their pockets at the expense of creativity and eventually kill them when the games become just another vector to funnel cash to the wrong places.

Pol Pot was right

it’ll be ripped from netflix and put on youtube anyway. that’s just how modern content works.

be annoyed/angry at the right things.

i was referring to physical games as a whole and not necessarily tied to Playstation games or their discs.

They’ve been transitioning this specific manufacturing division since 2024. It can’t be a “double down” because they’re not going to revert two years of already re-trained staff and re-purposed equipment because of online forum talk.

Messages to shareholders like this is pretty standard. They’re basically saying:

• decision is final
• components manufacturing is more lucrative than disc manufacturing
• we will distribute our IP

So they’re hedging their bets on what their future could be. If they lose out on gaming they’ll make back on microlenses.

Sony didn’t really “double down”. The decision to wind down their physical games category was made years ago. Everything after the initial public announcement is to manage public relations.

Not sure many outside Japan realise but Sony are a conglomerate that dip their fingers into unrelated industries. This to them is clearly just a line through a smaller category on the balance sheet.

There’s a discussion to be had about ownership and physical games but i think that market is going to re-emerge in the future in perhaps a more bespoke way, like the resurgence of music vinyls.

To me, Sony seems to be interested in just managing the distribution of IP opposed to “gaming” itself. They’re not true custodians in that space or if they were, then they’re not now.

no. we have other issues here.

it’s not a test bro just go watch it

OpenAI is trying to artificially plump themselves up before going for IPO. They “attacked” a vendor that dispenses LLM and LLM-adjacent products that are similarly aligned with OpenAI’s goals. It almost seems like it was a coordinated event to generate a sense of mystique around their premier models (à la Anthropic with Mythos).

pretty sure the original devs from disco elysium had split years ago from za/um. the studio is now just a name.

thats right, the average ‘gamer’ is casual. they’ll purchase a couple games per year and maybe a handful more on special.

gaming itself is a leisure activity so when other aspects of life starts getting expensive or free time is reduced then what gets dropped first is an overpriced subscription service.

the bowel mover diet

literally said at the conference last week that we don’t need people we need more agents to get rid of the people.

this cunt is high off his own supply and is barely held accountable for the contradictions he makes

if we’re assuming that they can actually achieve what they’re saying (and not doing a pump and dump) the market would have already shifted infrastructure-wise and the cost to setup would have increased.

We’d be presuming that Allbirds owns their warehousing space. For all I know they could be drop-shipping from third-party warehousing.