FancyJehuty

@ottoecamn
The Saudi investment had a direct effect on the product, because they put two of their cultural ambassadors in the roster of a fighting game. This is way more than any "woke" invester (which I assume is what you mean by "ESG money").

And again, you don't seem to understand what an ESG score is. Every investor uses them, it's an industry standard. It's a way to rate a company based on their performance in the environmental, social (which includes labor laws and diversity, among other factors) and governance. It's a way to measure certain aspects of a business, to guide sustainable and ethical investments. That's the exact thing that consumers do when they read about the CEO of a game developer being convicted for sexual abuse and decide not to buy their games. But the job of professional investors is to manage large sums of money, so instead of making decisions based on feelings or a single press release, they use metrics like ESG. And those metrics are based on avoiding risks to their investments: to stay with the same example, the CEO of a company that routinely has women in positions of power is less likely to get himself (and the company) in trouble for groping his employees, as opposed to an environment scoring lower on that metric.

ESG has been flaunted as a scarecrow by far-right activists and politicians who claim that they force companies to hire POC, women, and other minorities. They say that if a black person was hired, it was because of diversity, and not based on merit. They oppose diversity and merit: if the black guy was hired, it's obviously because of ESG/DEI, because he's obviously less qualified than a white guy. And that reasoning is a problem.

And once again, I find it appalling that you'd prefer having an investor who's proven to sponsor assassination, over one that's allegedly "woke".

@ottoecamn
So for you scoring businesses based on environmental, social/labour, and governance practices (which is what ESG actually means) is worse than State-commissioned assassination (and all the grave human rights violations that you leave "aside")? Please check your values.

@ottoecamn Actually it's part of Saudi Arabia's strategy to shift away from its oil-based economy and become a global tourism and entertainment hub. They made huge investments in sports (see the evolution of the Saudi Pro League, but also combat sports like BJJ) and videogames (multiple developers including SNK, leading e-sports teams, organizing the Esports World Cup and rigging it so that only their team wins, currently trying to buy EA, etc.). To become that tourism and entertainment hub, Saudi Arabia must improve its image and distract from the grave Human Rights violations committed by the regime (the most blatant example is journalist Jamal Khashoggi who got cut into pieces for criticizing the crown prince).

The video games world is already influenced by that Saudi strategy. The EWC is a giant advertisement for the country as a touristic destination and SNK has included two of the country's official "cultural ambassadors" (Cristiano Ronaldo and Salvatore Ganacci) as playable characters in their latest game.

So yeah, sad news.

Question: how likely is it that they have the Movie Direct on Monday/Tuesday so they can announce a General Direct at the end of it for Wednesday/Thursday?

Yes I'm on copium.

@JohnnyMind It will definitely affect workers, of course. The buyout by the Saudi fund (which was made possible by letting the Trump clan profit from the deal, BTW) also involves EA taking up a $20 billion debt, which is unprecedented in the video games industry. To absorb that debt, EA will drastically reduce costs. That means closing studios (BioWare is probably the first name on the list, once the next Mass Effect game is out) and firing as many people as possible that they can replace with generative AI. Many artists are already complaining that they get offered miserable fees to correct AI generated content instead of regular, decently paid work, and the language of the announcement in this article suggests exactly that.

As we say, when you think EA couldn't get any lower, it keeps digging.

@Bats1234 To be clear, which GB/GBC games do you consider better than Pokémon on the tech side, then?

@ShadLink Red/Blue had front and back sprites + unique sounds for each of the 151 Pokémon + a complex and relatively extensive soundtrack. Yellow could play Pikachu's voice clips with technology that could not use registered sounds (the voice clips were actually composed from scratch using the sound chip). And as you said Gold/Silver had a whole second map + Gen 1 crammed into the game thanks to Iwata's compression algorithm. I'm not saying they had no downsides but those were very ambitious games on the tech side, but then, that was almost 30 years ago.

@Bats1234 Pokémon Red/Blue, Yellow, and Gold/Silver were technical marvels for their time. And even if I'm not familiar with the later entries I reckon they had quite advanced systems (seasons/weather in B/W I think?).

Many blame Game Freak for the poor graphics and technique of recent Pokémon games but the Beast of Reincarnation trailer clearly shows that the problem lies elsewhere.

It's puzzling. With that lack of polish compared to their capabilities, it really feels like they're disinvested and make Pokémon on order, like companies that make licensed shovelware to make ends meet.

@mereel @AlexanderDaniels

A quick Google search says that she's an alt timeline (and gender swapped) version of Johnny Cage so, of course she looks like a man. I'm pretty sure she's not designed to be attractive and that nobody's pressuring you into saying she is.

I'll pass on that one...

I own the original and DLC and can't upgrade to Vengeance, what's the point of buying all that again just for some content I can watch on youtube?