The full quote is:

Hey Tom [of The Verge], I can confirm this [last minute decision thing] is not true. We just limited the knowledge of this news to a very small internal group. Intention was to share this news first with our players and everyone watching showcase.

A lot has changed since Asha came into role 107 days ago. We are moving fast and it’s frankly pretty energizing inside the hallways here. I was made aware of these exclusives roughly a month in advance. Hope that helps!

It was my paraphrase, which I made somewhat facetiously. I don’t think a lot of replies here know what paraphrasing is.

Some additional developments not captured by this article: Jeff Grubb says a source tells him there is a finished PS5 version of this game sitting on a drive somewhere that will now go unused. And second, an Xbox…sorry, XBOX exec said that (paraphrasing), “No, this decision wasn’t made last minute. We decided this over a month ago but just wanted to keep it secret so it would be a fun surprise for gamers.” So they definitely made this decision last minute.

Gotcha, thanks for taking the time to humor me. I never would have guessed.

Maybe you said so in some lingo that’s foreign to me, but what upsets that reputation? What kinds of configurations do they not like, and why is it not set and forget? Sorry for asking for a dissertation, but I never had any idea e-mail could be more complicated than set and forget.

What is your reputation in this context? And what does losing it cost you?

Would you care to give some additional context here? I haven’t had the itch to host my own e-mail, but what kinds of misfortune do you encounter when you’re not in the good graces of Google of Microsoft? And what could land you in that situation?

To each their own. I said elsewhere that video game ads like these are about all the ads I ever see in a given year, and it’s how I’ll know I’m interested in a thing that a summary might not capture. Plus, my favorite games outlet will do an MST3K style talkover, and that’s fun too.

Yeah, the bright side of the past couple months is that companies have seemingly finally realized that live service is a losing bet.

A lot of us here are disillusioned with Nintendo, but there are still so many third party games that are supposedly coming in 2026 that don’t have release dates yet that this could be worth watching. Or perhaps you play Fantasy Critic and want to know if those new Luigi’s Mansion or Xenoblade Chronicles rumors are true.

Do you remember what E3 presentations used to be? Go back to 2006 and watch one straight through. Or even 2016. Lots of slides about how great the presenter’s company was, live demos that didn’t work; for about 2 hours that felt like 4, with far fewer games shown in the same amount of time as today. That’s not to say this is objectively better, or that it’s always good, but it’s how we arrived here. Compared to 20 years ago, I also have so many different ways to cut advertisements out of my life entirely that this and the Game Awards are basically the only times I seek them out. And it’s not just Geoff’s show; take a look at the Steam “showcase of showcases” page, and you’ll see all of the other little events tied around this time of year, too, often with demos available for us to play.

One of this year’s best-rated games is a 2D game that looks like it was made for the Game Boy Color, and last year’s Call of Duty got a 65 on OpenCritic. Perhaps critics like Remake and Rebirth for the ways they subverted the idea of remaking a classic while still integrating a classic combat system into a modern one, as that’s what their words would seem to indicate. The reality is that what you might consider a masterpiece is going to be grating for someone else, and that’s going to bring down its average review score.

Yes, Rebirth required a hardware upgrade to play, which is going to lose a lot of players compared to the install base of the PS4 in 2020. There are also the folks waiting for the trilogy to finish before picking up either the entire set or the one in the middle they hadn’t played yet. And anecdotally, though I haven’t seen this stat tracked yet, if you make me wait over a year for exclusivity to run out before you port it to my platform, I’m not playing it the first day it’s available; they trained me to wait already, so I may as well wait for a deep sale. I still haven’t purchased or played Rebirth, but I plan to during this upcoming summer sale, and I’m replaying Remake now ahead of that.

Review scores are just someone’s opinion, and they’re only “inflated” when it’s not an opinion you share.

Their sales recovered once they left PlayStation, so now that there’s a simultaneous launch, the smart money is on it doing phenomenally well.

This looks awesome. A Bloodsport/kumite plotline should have been made into a video game a long time ago, and we’ve got RGG making a Virtua Fighter game.

“This mission seems like it’s going to be a cakewalk, so just go by yourself with three R2 units. It’ll be fine.”

RAM prices came down a bit in mid-April, as I said, when one of those deals fell through because it wasn’t actually set in stone, and one of those major AI companies was less cash rich than everyone thought. That doesn’t mean it’s back to where we started, but they came down from their peak, at least for a time, and have somewhat stabilized since then. We’re also seeing data centers meet opposition, not just legally but logistically, and folks are trying to read the tea leaves there for prices, too.

No, because some of the supply constraints we thought were locked in contracts were actually just handshake agreements that fell through, so that frees up supply and sends prices back down a bit. There’s also the part where this came for RAM first, but then SSDs were hit on a lag because a lot of the same tech is used, and then HDDs were hit on a lag because SSDs were scarce. HDDs don’t really factor into these devices, but there are ripple effects that can make predicting long-term costs difficult.

Then you forget that everything that got worse was also replaced by something better.

Around this same time would have been the old flash cartoon, “The Decline of Video Gaming”, which accurately predicted the trend of all genres taking on RPG elements, perhaps even more than they thought possible. I’m not quite sure where this pessimism came from, as we were hot on the heels of all of the mega hits that came out in the late 90s, and everyone was quite aware of imminent releases of the early 2000s at this time, like Super Smash Bros. Melee, Final Fantasy X, and Metroid Prime.