They improved their support ticket throughput by orders of magnitude by automating a lot of it already. There are lots of versions of automation, too, like collecting information about the user's problem before you even get to a human.
My guess, and it's a personal pet peeve of mine, is that it's the term that people use to refer to anything that isn't live service. In this case in particular, it's a perfect example of how stupid it is for that to be the term we use for that. While both can be played with only one player (so can Fortnite), they were both marketed as games that you would be playing primarily multiplayer.
The official PS blog says the disc version of the PS5 is $649 and discless is $599. It's currently on sale on Amazon, but the regular list price for a PS5 with disc drive there is $649.
If you're a Batman: Arkham combat sicko like me, and you've been waiting for an imitator to come along and do it right again, Dead as Disco might be the real deal in a way that the likes of Spider-Man are not.
Sounds like you asked him right after he finished the Tanker chapter but before “Iroquois Pliskin” showed up on the Big Shell.
100%
As for the ending, it was already getting pretty postmodern, so I doubt it would have been substantially different otherwise.
The layoffs across the games industry over the last two years have been widely framed as a cost correction.
They are. Maybe you were fortunate enough for your 1200-person company to sustain itself on one big hit, but an economic downturn shrinks your audience considerably and makes it tougher for you to break even, and that's assuming the quality of your game and marketing are just as good as your last hit.
I saw this firsthand while leading the external production team during the development of Immortals of Aveum. The project makes a useful case study precisely because it was ambitious and structurally complex: one of the first major titles built on Unreal Engine 5, with multiple external teams contributing across characters, creatures, weapons, and first-person gameplay assets in a multi-vendor AAA environment.
Maybe the problem was that a brand new team made something so ambitious on their first go?
The question is no longer whether external development is essential. It's whether the industry is willing to treat production continuity as infrastructure — or continue optimizing for short-term cost while the capability that made AAA possible quietly fragments.
Maybe we ought to question whether AAA as the author knows it is really necessary. We can get excellent production value out of small teams that reduces the risk of not breaking even, and Unreal 5 is pretty damn good at enabling that. There's an enormous success like Clair Obscur, but then there's also a more modest success like The Alters or The Thaumaturge. I find it interesting that, despite their name and some pretty undeniable successes, a US studio like Supergiant Games can still measure their workforce in the dozens, not hundreds. I'll bet they're pretty good at retaining that talent.
And then in 2019 Kojima would make a game about a guy delivering Amazon packages to people hunkered down and social distancing amidst the imminent threat of death.
In middle school, in homeroom, I sat behind a guy who could not contain his excitement for MGS2. It was the first week or so of school. Every day it was a countdown to when he could play the game. "One more day, man. One more day until Metal Gear Solid 2." So the next day, I asked him, "So how is it?" He was shellshocked. "Snake died, man." Excitement was gone. His day at school was ruined. I didn't check in with him later, but presumably, a 7th grader couldn't make heads or tails of the ending of that game, if he made it that far. I didn't play it myself until a few years later, and it was one of the most talked-about endings in all of video games, because it was so barely comprehensible, at best.
If you played it at launch though, it did have a rough time scaling up to PC hardware that was better than consoles. It was pretty infamous for that back then.
I was a Goldlewis main for a while too. I hope you can get in on zoners without White Wild Assault now.
Certain engines form certain reputations, but those people need to see enough counter examples to realize that the engine is just a contributing factor to what the resulting game is. Unity had "a look" for years, because so many devs used the default lighting, but then you realize that stuff like Cuphead, Hollow Knight, and Subnautica all run on Unity, and that reputation fades.
I definitely value my eyes more than you do.