Oh cool, I just noticed that Raison Varner left Gearbox after Borderlands 3 shipped and has been the audio director and composer on Avowed since 2020. Raison is pretty great, was Audio Director on Borderlands 2 and 3, and did a fair amount of the soundtracks on both Borderlands 2's DLC's and Borderlands 3, was responsible for what are two of the best Borderlands tracks imo, absolute bangers:

Facts, only good thing about this country.

You are welcome :)

Minecraft Legends - Previews

Minecraft Legends Is an Amazing Action-Strategy Game That Only Fools Will Overlook | Windows Central

Minecraft Legends Hands-On Preview: A Winning Strategy | Gamerant

Minecraft Legends: The Final Preview | IGN

Minecraft Legends is the fourth Minecraft spinoff game (Telltale's Minecraft: Story Mode and Mojang's Minecraft Earth and Minecraft Dungeons preceding it) and after getting an hour with its campaign and about an hour with its PvP multiplayer, it's already building to be my favorite of the bunch.

Minecraft Legends Gameplay Preview – The Next Game Pass Co-op Classic | PCGamesN

Whether you want some serene exploring and base building, co-op piglin fighting action, or PvP that’s as endlessly chaotic as the procedural maps you explore, this Game Pass release is right around the corner, and it looks like it’s going to be a good one.

Minecraft Legends Preview - I Shall Be Victorious | The Gamer

Minecraft Legends brings me so close to reliving my glory days of obliterating the carefully crafted bases of my enemies (read: friends and family) in old-school strategy games like Command & Conquer Red Alert. Except this time, everything is made of cute little blocks and I'm up against my own children.

Minecraft Legends Hands-On Preview – Crafting A New Legend | Press Start

A telltale sign that a preview has gone well is when you don't want to put the controller down once your time is up. While I wouldn't say I was chomping at the bit to see where the PVE mode would take me next, the controller had to be peeled out of my hands when it came to the PVP, and this was much the same for the other players in my game.

Minecraft Legends Expertly Blends Strategy and Survival | Digital Trends

Minecraft Legends is shaping up to be a much more impressive and ambitious title than I gave it credit for when it was announced. What I initially wrote off as an even-more simplified riff on Pikmin with a Minecraft skin is a much more involved real-time strategy experience with fully voice-acted cutscenes, a procedurally generated open-world to explore, and lots of base-building and resource gathering that truly adapts Minecraft's formula into another storied genre.

Videos

Minecraft Legends Hands-On Preview - Kinda Funny Xcast - YouTube
Minecraft Legends: The Final Preview - IGN - YouTube
Everything You Need To Know About Minecraft Legends Gameplay - Eurogamer - YouTube
Minecraft Legends Gameplay Preview: 24 Questions Answered - Xbox On - YouTube

Responses to the CMA Addendum PF

- Microsoft (6 pages)

The Provisional Findings Addendum confirms that Microsoft's incentives in relation to Activision content cannot be extrapolated from past conduct. The recognition that, in fact, Microsoft's past actions were not good evidence of any incentive to foreclose must also mean that the CMA should revisit its incentive analysis in relation to Theory of Harm 2 (cloud game streaming), which is focussed on qualitative evidence. At the same time, this should also cause the CMA to re-assess the current evidence available to it relating to Microsoft's incentives in relation to cloud game streaming.

The qualitative factors on which the CMA relies to question Microsoft's incentives to withhold more generally have been re-assessed and ultimately dismissed. The CMA has not undertaken any comparable exercise quantifying incentives in relation to Theory of Harm 2 as it did for Theory of Harm 1. The absence of that analysis does not somehow make the qualitative evidence in relation to Theory of Harm 2 stronger. Indeed, the absence of any, even broad, profitability analysis to support Theory of Harm 2 further undermines the conclusions. As has been explained to the CMA, [REDACTED].

The qualitative evidence available to the CMA in fact shows that Microsoft has entered into agreements with NVIDIA, Boosteroid and Ubitus, pursuant to which the distribution of Activision content on multiple cloud gaming services is provided for, should the Merger proceed. Not only does this show that Microsoft has no ability to withhold Activision content from rival cloud gaming services (given the presence of legally binding and enforceable agreements with these providers), it is also clear evidence of Microsoft's intention not to withhold Activision content from other cloud gaming services. Any analysis of both Microsoft's ability and incentive should be updated accordingly to reflect this development. Simply put, the CMA has found no incentive to withhold Activision content in relation to console, and the evidence shows it should reach the same conclusion in relation to cloud game streaming.

- Joost Rietveld, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship UCL School of Management, in London (23 pages)

Cloud Gaming Is Not A Distinct Market

A Typology of Cloud Gaming Services and What It Means for Microsoft's Proposed Acquisition of Activision Blizzard

There exists significant ambiguity as to whether cloud gaming should be considered a distinct market or not. The CMA's final decision on whether to block or clear Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard hinges in large part on this very question. Here, I have put forward the argument that we cannot combine all cloud gaming services into a single, clearly defined market definition. Rather, we can identify four types of gaming services that each use and rely on cloud streaming technology in different ways.

Microsoft's Game Pass offers cloud streaming as a feature; cloud gaming is an ingredient to a much broader value proposition that also includes natively run games as well as other services. Cloud-gaming-as- a-feature services arguably do not compete against cloud-gaming-as-a-complement (e.g., NVIDIA's GeForce Now, Boosteroid) and cloud-gaming-as-an-input services (e.g., Ubitus, GameStream) due to their more specialized offerings and differences in target customers. Microsoft arguably does compete against cloud-gaming-as-a-platform services such as Amazon's Luna and Blacknut—though not so much because they both stream games from the cloud, but rather because they both provide consumer-facing video game distribution platforms to overlapping customer bases.

To date, however, Activision Blizzard has not released any of its internally-developed video games on any of the cloud-gaming-as-a- platform services. Moreover, several cloud-gaming-as-a-platform services have ceased operations as this type of service has generally struggled to gain traction with consumers.

Consumers' willingness-to-pay for standalone cloud gaming services apparently is low and this is perhaps the strongest indication that cloud gaming should not be considered a distinct market: Cloud streaming is a potentially promising distribution method that will very likely continue to be used and relied upon to various extents by different companies with different offerings aimed at a diverse set of customers that can be both end users and business-to- business customers.

It behooves the CMA—and other agencies—to view it as such.

Source: Idas

Splitting Sony's into the next post.

- Sony (10 pages)

The CMA's reversal of its position on its consoles theory of harm is surprising, unprecedented, and irrational.

The Addendum takes a diametrically opposite approach and focuses almost exclusively on a single economic model on which it places "significantly more weight" than other available evidence.

In conclusion, SIE respectfully submits that the Addendum does not justify the CMA's U-turn on the consoles theory of harm.The revised LTV model is vitiated by errors that bias the model to finding no incentive to Microsoft to foreclose. The Addendum jettisons, without sound reason, the PFs' thorough analysis of other evidence establishing Microsoft's incentives. And the Addendum's partial foreclosure discussion is based on pure speculation, rather than evidence. To reach a robust decision, the CMA should revisit its analysis of Microsoft's incentives and partial foreclosure, correcting for the errors identified in this paper.

-

And just last week, two days before the Addendum was published, on March 22, the video game trade publication IGN published fresh evidence in the form of an interview with Redfall's creative director, Harvey Smith, that provides additional insight into Microsoft's strategy.19 Like Call of Duty, Redfall is a first-person shooter game that features both single player and cooperative multiplayer modes. In his interview with IGN, Mr. Smith explained that Redfall was originally planned to be released on all platforms, including PlayStation, but once Microsoft acquired Bethesda, there was a "huge sea change … [Microsoft] said, 'No PlayStation 5. Now we're gonna [sic] do Game Pass, Xbox, and PC.'"20 He also explained that ZeniMax "was working on a PlayStation 5 version of the game" until Microsoft bought ZeniMax. After the acquisition, Microsoft "then canned the [PlayStation 5] port."21 Even though the studio had already put in the work to make a PlayStation version of the game, Microsoft decided to terminate this work and make the game exclusive to Xbox.

(Feel bad for Harvey being dragged into this but honestly he said something that was so damn obvious anyway and CMA already knew about it so Sony is clutching at straws by dragging him into it, CMA already acknowledged Microsoft acquired titles to make them exclusive, that Redfall/CoD are completely different and past precedent in regards to both Minecraft and Zenimax is irrelevant)

-

Any degradation in the price, performance, or quality of play on PlayStation or any delays on release would quickly harm SIE's reputation and cause a loss of engagement and of players. As SIE's CEO, Jim Ryan, explained to the CMA at the Remedies Hearing, if PlayStation received a degraded version of Call of Duty, it would "seriously damage our reputation. Our gamers would desert our platform in droves and network effects would exacerbate the problem. Our business would never recover."

(This is just fucking hilarious, Lmao)

-

Conversations in forums, chatrooms and public gaming sessions confirm that gamers are very conscious of the slightest changes in a game’s performance. 24

24 - By way of example, one player noted (with several others concurring) that at “[t]he 30fps [frames per second] from last gen consoles generally feels fine to me. Play a while at 60 or 120fps and go back to 30fps it feels a bit choppy and weird” and another player explained that “...people have a right to be picky considering a game costs 60 bucks, there should be some certain expectations of quality after paying that amount of money.” Reddit, Gamers, why is everybody so picky now a days? and Giantbomb, Are Gamers To Picky.

(Yes, Sony is using a Giantbomb article from 10 years ago as evidence and a Reddit thread)

Jim Ryan when the next CoD runs 5fps lower on PlayStation versus Xbox.

Can't even get their own first party games to up to snuff on PC...

Talk about sloppy shop. smh.

Must be great for all those other sony studios morale to hear that their games are not enough.