I use Goodnews to read RSS feeds from Destructoid, Eurogamer, GamesIndustry, Gematsu, Nintendo Life, PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, RPG Site, The Jimquisition, VG247, and Xbox Wire.
This week I've used the Game Pass availability as an excuse to play through Grand Theft Auto V (and to be reminded of all the reasons I dropped it in the first place). I've also played through The Case of the Golden Idol, which is too goddamn short; I need more puzzles. I've only got one DLC puzzle left and I am going to take it slow and savour it.
I'm also a decent way into TOEM and have started on Techtonica because, you know, Game Pass.
I believe all we know is that everything is open to negotiation, so some companies will take an up-front fee, some get paid per player, and some take a combination of the two. But I suspect the actual amounts involved are so vastly different as to be completely useless for analysis.
You don't even need that many 'if' statements. If you're stringing together a sequence of cause and effect binary decisions (as so many RPGs are wont to do), then you only need 14 of them to get over 16,000 possible combinations!
Although these days Fantatical is the games retail arm of Fandom, who are the company that enshittified most of the video game wikis on the internet after they bought Wikia. So they're legit, but their parent company sucks.
The price of Game Pass Core is the same as the current price of Xbox Live Gold. This is basically a rebranding exercise (and the long-expected culling of Games With Gold).
Yeah. When IBM started getting wary of antitrust in the 80s, that paved the way for Microsoft, and when Microsoft started getting wary of antitrust in the 90s, that paved the way for Google. The FTC may be toothless, but the more it sucks up a corporation's time and resources and just makes things difficult, the more it serves it's purpose regardless.
Ironic!