PSNow has always had the overall larger catalog of games, but that doesn't really matter. What people pay attention to is the number of monthly titles/new releases/quality of games being added, and Game Pass has the clear advantage in all of those categories. 

I'm hoping it's now the 'best' case scenario just based on the amount of new hires and new studios that have been opened over the past just 6 months.

A studio that's in total disarray and have a awful workplace environment, I doubt would be able to convince Microsoft to hire a bunch of devs and open new studios.

Just look at what Microsoft did with Moon Studios. We wondered why they didn't purchase them, and now we know. 

Good points. It also could mean that after Jeff left, things went back to normal and the HR person left the company now because the past was being dug up. 

Any timetable as to when the article will go up?

If it is the worse case scenario, prepare for the impending flood of "Microsoft can't manage their own studios" 

When the only articles that ever come out about MS studios are about how things aren't going so great there, what exactly do you expect the responses to be? Combined with the fact that MS first party produced pretty much jack shit in the Xbox One generation, people aren't really gonna be giving them the benefit of the doubt. 

In fact, as far as gamer concern goes between toxic work cultures, harassment, crunch, etc. and lack of quality output...guess what people really care about? The average gamer might publicly condemn those cultures if confronted with it, but the reality is, as long as they're getting good games, they're perfectly content to look the other way on all that other stuff. Just look at ND, and Rockstar. Doesn't matter how many times somebody writes an article about how brutal it is to work there. The only thing people really wanna know is when their next games are dropping.

Point missed.

Problem with that list there, is that the larger gaming audience doesn't yet fully recognize most of those studios as being MS studios. They're going to actually have to release games under MS before that acceptance (or even just general awareness from casuals) sets in. Even among the people fully in the know, many of them are going to be sceptical, and take the view that those new teams simply haven't been part of MS for long enough to be negatively influenced by their management.

When people think of MS game studios, right now, they think of a significantly smaller list of teams. I promise you that nobody thinking about how good/bad MS is at running their studios is thinking about Arkane, iD, MachineGames, inXile, BGS, Ninja Theory, etc.

He must've put a Strain on Kotaku's release window

*Kotaku lead editor probably, "how are we supposed to control the narrative now?!?"

Honestly, if Strain's comments did delay the article somehow, that leads me more to think that they just have a clickbait article. Well, that's what I hope is the case. If Kotaku truly has damning information about how Undead Labs operates or operated, then it definitely needs to come to light, and comments from the former manager shouldn't cause them to delay anything. 

Played some Watch Dogs Legion recenty. Boy is it boring.
The prologue was okay but the story doesn't pick up at all and I've already completed 1/3 of the campaign.

One of the biggest issues of the game is the non-focus on a single main character. Naturally, when you have so many main characters you can't have long, interesting conversations or monologues since every voice actor would need to speak all of the main character's lines. So instead, 90% of the dialogue is done by the annoying AI and your main character says a line before and a line after a mission. Doesn't make me care for the character or the story.

Another thing I noticed, all of the missions so far have been extremely similar. Drive to a certain point which is a restricted area, hack a PC somewhere, leave the area. The original Watch Dogs had better mission design. It had police chases, looking for people that were hacking you, tailing missions, taking down car convoys, car chases plus the stuff that Watch Dogs Legion is doing.

I was already disappointed with Watch Dogs 2 due to the awfully boring main character but it had at least decent mission design. Here you're getting boring characters and bad mission design.

I seriously hope it picks up soon.

Yeah games like Fornite set a new bar for a live service game where there is something new almost daily.

Yeah, which does make other studios look bad until you realize that Epic has over a thousand developers working on Fortnite at any given time nowadays. Even back in March 2018, they had almost 700 developers working on the game after it started to blow up, which is more than what 343 has total now.

Plus it also doesn't help that 343 is barely getting into the live service space, so there were many more growing pains than they even anticipated.