I feel like the lesson here is that the bell curve of humanity is wide, and if you work on any sufficiently successful mass market product you're gonna encounter outliers at both ends of the curve that you are not prepared for.

And yes this is massively dependent on how it was spun, which is almost certainly in part due to gender.

Seriously, I'm seeing people who've been at the studio for over two decades showing up laid off on LinkedIn. It's just a tragedy. I really hope I'm wrong.

Oh, and Embracer are fucking terrorists.

This is not because I think it will be bad. I think there's a pretty good chance it'll be fun. But it'll almost certainly have a 6-7 year dev cycle AT MINIMUM. There's just no way it's going to make back that investment, and the studio is already cutting so deep into talent they're hitting bone

Hades II gets honorable mention. I love that it exists and it's good, even though I know from playing Hades that it's not going to be my cup of tea.

I think it's not just the regulations, we've already had a few instances of journalists getting fed into the ICE meat grinder in retaliation after they reported on topics embarrassing to the administration.

This feels a bit like "the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed". Even if it's not a fascist country in totality, we have parts of the govt (border patrol) behaving, and certain groups (non-white foreign born journalists) being treated as if it is

Seriously, I thought it was pretty creepy for 18 year old high school seniors to be dating 15 year old freshman when I WAS an 18 year old senior, middle aged men dating minors is is an easy red line to draw, and anyone who thinks there needs to be nuance there is suspect