Arcane Ascension
by Andrew Rowe 👍

When I say hacking, I mean hacking, hacking, magical runes have functions that can be broken down to almost API or ASM calls.

"Transfer temporary mana from PID1 to XXX" after a few books.

Starts a bit rough, YA series often do, but 6 books total.

Halfway through Book 2, it quickly became a rec...

j'crois c'est pour aussi avoir de quoi se protéger sur "Steam est en position de monopole sur le marché".

Si tu laisses la porte ouverte aux autres OS/logiciels, ça limite la casse possible.

In any case, I don't think the new Steam Machine 'kills' anything on the console side.

I think it may end up being mostly incremental volume and, if anything, impacts the still small NUC mini-PC market.

I’m sure they are looking at this as a huge value for the small section of the Venn diagram that:

Loves EA Games
Loves Ubisoft games
Already pays for Fortnite Crew or was already considering it

Given the EA news this week, Ubi’s current struggles, and the economy… this seems like a weird one

I don’t think it will juice Xbox software sales the way they think it will. I think it’ll drive players to other consoles or off the Xbox app (which continues to be a less-ideal user experience).

I’m reminded of one final thing: you know what would make this a bit more palatable? The family sharing they tested. That has evaporated.

And even if tariffs get wiped out, I'm not hopeful we'll see costs come down. Inflation turns into greedflation very easily when your company is managed via spreadsheet.

Anyway... been a miserable week for labor, and I wanted to get some of this down as wrap-up thoughts before I switch my brain off

The price increases (driven by tariffs, changing play habits among younger players, over-indexing on games-as-a-service, c-suite overcompensation, and the absurd practice of stock repurchasing) are putting the entire industry in a stranglehold.

I've said before that I've never seen a generation like this, with prices skyrocketing five years after launch. As generations go on, we typically welcome in more price-sensitive players to the latest generation.

The $480 buy-in is now $740 or $860 against the Premium / Ultimate price tiers for Game Pass as of the new price hike.

And that's before you even get to the cost of the Xbox Series consoles. When the Series X|S launched, you could easily recommend that someone pick up a Series S ($300) plus a year of Game Pass ($180) and have a pretty solid entry point to this generation.

As we've said on @virtualeconcast.com multiple times, we knew that Game Pass' value would decrease over time. We did expect it would still remain an easy decision to STAY subscribed (on a pure value basis).

The combination of the BDS movement and the new changes seems like a bad time revenue-wise.

That means that user acquisition costs are going to spike again if user numbers dip below the "acceptable loss" line and revenue starts coming up short. But this time, no one with a platform is going to champion Game Pass as "the best value in gaming" as we once did.