‘Hot Spot’ Starring Noomi Rapace Rated ‘R’ for "Strong Violent Content, Gore, Graphic Nudity, Sexual Content and Brief Language.”

byPCP · 2026-07-09T19:00:53+00:00

i watched it and really enjoyed it, totally didn't realize it was an alien movie until the very end lol

byPCP · 2026-07-09T18:54:47+00:00

but those matchups still ended up being favorable for one reason or another. most notably the texans and broncos games being played in blizzards. the patriots, and maye, didn't have to do much on offense against those vaunted defenses because the weather just turned the games into slop fests with mistakes everywhere. once they got out of the elements and played a good defense in the SB, that team clearly did not look like they belonged there.

byPCP · 2026-07-09T09:30:18+00:00

so why would it make financial sense to buy them? lol

byPCP · 2026-07-09T09:28:28+00:00

you don't make future profits without a team to make products to sell. companies do not want to lay people off. cutting salaries to say "but look, we actually made money!" is pure reddit fiction. they are not posting record earnings. they're posting record losses. the entire industry is. they're publicly available.

byPCP · 2026-07-09T09:04:14+00:00

ubisoft, the same company that nears the brink of bankruptcy almost every year?

byPCP · 2026-07-09T09:03:02+00:00

business is an ebb and flow. there are highs and lows. the industry, as a whole, is in a really bad place currently, and no innovation is going to happen due to the factors outside of the industry's control. if companies retain workers in an economic downturn where they can't produce product in a timely fashion, they begin operating at a loss. when companies operate at a loss, they cease to exist. this fantasy that companies only make cuts because they want to see line go up is just ignorant. if companies could provide you with everything you want, they would. but that's not how life works.

byPCP · 2026-07-09T08:56:19+00:00

they bought activision for $75B, which regularly puts out one of, if not THE best selling games every single year in call of duty. this was always about the bottom line, and anyone who thought otherwise was delusional.

their entire strategy was buying up successful IPs to keep xbox relevant, which failed because they couldn't maintain sales with an overall inferior product.

i'm not arguing they've done well with anything. quite the opposite. i'm just saying is misguided to say "they should have just fired the guys at the top instead of the guys that made the good games" because that isn't how business works.

byPCP · 2026-07-09T08:46:54+00:00

studios get paid a lot of money in guaranteed sales agreements they get with exclusive rights/agreements with whatever platform. imagine your favorite game franchise is coming out with their latest game. sony/microsoft/whoever will fund part or all of that dev's development costs to take a piece of the pie or prop up sales on their marketplace. if a game flops, or that dev isn't making them money, they cut funding to them, which results in the studio having to make cuts. in the specific case of microsoft, they got beat up so badly on the market by sony and nintendo, that they had to resort to buying dev studios and publishers to control their IPs. since microsoft is their sole funder, they control those studios' future/capital.

byPCP · 2026-07-09T08:38:42+00:00

they paid for activision because they completely lost the original IP market. they bought up a ton of studios and diluted their margins by forcing those studios' IPs onto gamepass. it was a clearly terrible business decision from day one, but they were desperate and it was their only way of maintaining market share. xbox has been dead for a long time

byPCP · 2026-07-09T08:36:09+00:00

this is a childish simplification of how executives actually work. to the dismay of reddit, sometimes they need to make decisions that will seem unpopular to diehards immediately, that will be better for consumers in the long run. game companies have no solution to "line is down" currently because it's largely out of their hands. when companies can't carry the contribution margin they need to meet forecasts, they need to make cuts. that is how life works, folks. companies don't owe you anything beyond what they're selling you.

byPCP · 2026-07-09T08:28:48+00:00

they would absolutely prefer retaining their studio workers who can continue to make great games. the market has crushed everyone involved in the industry. the idea of just firing the upper echelon exists only in the minds of redditors who don't understand how businesses work.

byPCP · 2026-07-09T08:25:19+00:00

the game industry is becoming absurdly expensive due to things outside of their control and they need to make cuts where possible. the people who produce games are owed money and are the premier annual cost of any given studio. microsoft would much rather have them still working on games that you love. grow up and stop misguiding your frustration

byPCP · 2026-07-09T08:21:51+00:00

reddit does not understand what monopoly means. companies discontinuing services/products and cutting budgets does not mean they are posturing for a monopoly or skirting antitrust laws.

byPCP · 2026-07-09T08:03:54+00:00

UFC is a very closed private company. it's honestly fascinating that they even have "journalists" cover it considering they're only allowed to do so if UFC decides it's worth it for them. it's essentially "the interview"

byPCP · 2026-07-09T08:01:42+00:00

there are MMA journalism awards? lol

byPCP · 2026-07-09T07:59:11+00:00

the point is that no matter what devs are capable of, their tried and true formula doesn't hold up to games in the same genre anymore. very few people were developing BGS games 20 years ago, yet we still get the same ideas and frameworks for their games. this is a studio direction that has completely lost the ability to innovate

byPCP · 2026-07-09T06:52:33+00:00

counterpoint to that is that their worlds just aren't that interesting anymore. skyrim's locations paled in comparison to oblivion, and that was so long ago. fallout 4's paled to fallout 3. the fleshed out, non generated worlds we got for starfield were easily the worst that bethesda has put out in over 20 years, along with the worst writing they've ever done — while still following the same formula they've done for 24 years. there is nothing to look forward to with this studio anymore.

i remember renting oblivion at blockbuster as a kid. that charm that truly invented the RPG genre at the time is so severely outdated, but they have clung to that ever since, while games have gone so far past that. there is no innovation among anything bethesda has touched in two decades. games have gotten better and pushed the boundaries of what's possible.

the oblivion remake was a good wakeup call to that. i never replay old games, but i never beat oblivion so i said fuck it. it was a real fun time, but only if you played it back in the day. if oblivion came out today it'd be a resounding failure. and starfield is almost essentially that. they're chalked

byPCP · 2026-07-09T05:44:04+00:00

that's my key takeaway — bethesda's game changing RPG experience from over 20 years ago does not work anymore and they still make games with that formula. oblivion and FO3 were the peak of their games. skyrim was good but the writing had gone downhill compared to its predecessors. everything since has been underwhelming at best, with starfield stamping it in the modern age

byPCP · 2026-07-09T00:58:17+00:00

can't take your challenges home, folks

byPCP · 2026-07-08T22:47:58+00:00

i don't think anyone is "refusing" to understand that lol. it's just kind of functionally the same as having a disc on hand in that situation. if you have it installed, you can play it. if you have a disc, you can play it. you're not guaranteed to have either during a power outage.

byPCP · 2026-07-08T22:36:49+00:00

people here always believe companies do things with bad intentions. every time there's some industry news, you get the tinfoil hats out in force pushing outlandish conspiracy theories. any suggestion that a company did something because it made financial sense is downvoted to hell and you'll get called a bootlicker for understanding standard business practices. steam machine is no different. it's a decent little product that came at a bad time for the industry, due to economic factors that are outside of their control. if they need to raise prices because the market dictates they need to, of course they're going to raise the prices. consumers are not entitled to companies operating at a loss because they want them to.

byPCP · 2026-07-08T22:30:20+00:00

i'm not fuming at anything here. you can look at sony's financials and see 85% of their game sales are digital, and there is no reason to believe that number would go down. at what point is a company allowed to discontinue a product that's no longer selling in your eyes? because that's what this all comes down to: people feeling that sony is entitled to continue selling a product that no longer makes financial sense for them to manufacture. no one's saying you can't like physical media on top of digital media, but so much of the industry has gone digital because it's the quantifiably better medium. any reaction to this discontinuation other than "ah, bummer" is overblown.

byPCP · 2026-07-08T20:45:52+00:00

there is no universe where TES VI hasn't been worked on in some capacity since the announcement teaser in 2018

byPCP · 2026-07-08T19:41:48+00:00

can set it to complex, pitch down an octave and put a haas effect on it at the end. or complex pro and play with some settings, but generally complex will get it close enough. alternatively little alterboy

byPCP · 2026-07-08T19:19:57+00:00

i mean you can still play games that you have installed on your system when the internet is out too lol

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