In the UK charts Lego Horizon debuted at No.13 (PS5 77%, Switch 23%), Astrobot is at No.17 this week (physical charts)

Not a strong start for Horizon but its success will take a long time to determine, hopefully it does find have legs over the holiday and on Switch. Strong hold for Astro in amongst all the new releases since it came out

Did anyone get the Stellar Blade DLC with Nier stuff? I love Nier but not sure I want to pay if its just costumes? Is there any gameplay stuff at all?

I ran out of gaming charge towards the final parts of Ys 8 and Valkyria Chronicles which I'm barely playing in the last 10 days. Ys 8 is definitely a disappointment... a FlashGuard/Move fest with poor boss fights compared to Origin. I do enjoy the story and characters.

Valkyria Chronicles's story went south after the whole Alicia thing imo, but it may pick up later, idk. I hope I'll return to it soon and not drop it or Ys 8 like many other games in recent years.

But fuck all that... I found out a couple of days ago that Unicorn Overlord had a demo so I went and downloaded it... and boy is it a long demo! The game is unique, interesting, fun (so far) and audio-visually captivating. Waiting to see if it's getting a Black Friday discount but I'm getting it regardless.

Sony’s playing a dumb game acquiring studios. Their competition is literally Microsoft, who could purchase Nintendo if they really wanted to.

p.s. Acquisitions = Bad! Nintendo acquiring Grezzo is good! Sony acquiring some small partner dev is also good! Sony acquiring the devs behind Elden Ring, however, is awful. Microsoft acquiring the devs behind CoD is awful. Nobody should be happy with these deals.

Whether or not you think acquisitions are bad, Sony not doing any M&A in fear of Microsoft "retaliating," is not how they should run a business lol. 

Microsoft started this shit and we warned the guys who actively cheered for MS's insanity that what they're doing will push Sony to do big acquisitions of their own. If this goes through, it will be Sony's 2nd big acquisition, with possibly more to come from both sides.

But I'm not even mad anymore, because the industry (Including Sony. Excluding Nintendo) is moving towards multiplatform support for economic reasons. FromSoftware actually stands to gain from Sony's technical expertise/tools/multimedia power so if their games remain multiplatform, it could be a win for everyone.

Microsoft can prevent an "Elden Ring level" exclusivity by threatening to remove Call of Duty from Playstation, assuming they still care about Xbox hardware and are prepared to sacrifice software sales.

Sony is doing the bare minimum to secure Playstation's future. MS was going to make these acquisitions regardless of Sony's actions/reactions.

I think it's a little silly to boil this down to "Sony acquiring studios". Gaming is a relatively small part of Kadokawa. 

Sony's been pushing pretty hard on expanding their manga, anime, etc.

All of this is likely at the Sony Group level, and they're not competing in the gaming space the same way that the company SIE is.

I think it's a little silly to think that Microsoft would have acquisition retaliation plans. Particularly for a studio like From Software, which has tended to have more share on PS. And a studio that Sony has already put money into acquiring shares. 

MS has spent like 20x what Sony has on gaming studio acquisitions. And it's clearly not paying out the way that they had hoped, they're under a lot more pressure to meet certain numbers. We're seeing a lot of their exclusives come to PlayStation and Switch. 

[edit: deleting post b/c too mean. Sorry y'all. I need to be better.]

Looking at the sales of BO6, I am pretty confident that Sony would see this for the bluff it was. MS aren't taking CoD away from PS platforms, that would be a massive drop in the income CoD brings.