We've sorta gone over the Helldivers issue, in a potent strip and an incomparable Newspost Malone. Now that the worst is behind us, now that ointments have been applied to the affected regions, has the healing begun? I mean, you tell me. Player count seems solid, and the Reddit has descended into its classic ratio of crunchy memes and internecine warfare. So, nature is… I dunno, man. It's doin' somethin'.

So, this was a case of a publisher not fully understanding the new Steam audience they'd courted, finding out, and then being like "Oh shit." For a company as big as they are, Sony moved like lightning. Things changed fast; there are more PC players than PS5 players in that game and it's not close. This week's other story is about the studio closures. And it's an index of these wicked times that "the studio closures" might require more context to even know which ones.

Leading up to the Xbox One era, what you might call The Assassination Of The Xbox Brand By The Coward Don Mattrick, they were getting rid of development talent right when development talent might have been a good thing to have. They had a pretend new idea about what the future looked like - or what they could make of it - and then dug a grave for their platform that they've spent a decade trying to climb out of.

I always liked the Xbox, even when it didn't want me to. Shit, man. I'll go on record and say that Xbox, Record That was as cool as they hoped it would be. I'm a subscriber to Game Pass in part because, back when I originally got into it, I had friends who were able to make decent money being a portion of the catalogue. I don't know if it still works like that; it feels to me like that particular Gold Rush is over. But it reliably has things I want to play on it, or things I didn't have time to play when they came out, and - tell me if this is a shock to you - I do like a buffet.

I also thought that by being on there, one of the things I was doing was enabling the kind of pervert shit that Obsidian and others were putting out - games about who gets to write history, or a survival game that looks like a cutesy, fun for the whole family affair but is actually extremely hardcore. Weirdo stuff for weirdos. I love seeing the craziest junk, just trailer after trailer, on an ID@Xbox video and being like, yeah. We're movin' the needle.

But it simply can't be the case that if one of your teams comes out of nowhere with a fucking banger like Hi-Fi Rush - and then you say, see? This is the type of shit we enable - that you shutter that studio. With these exchange rates? I think that when you win as hard as Microsoft is winning in aggregate, it's incumbent on you to put people on. I understand that these things exist in different internal categories - what I'm saying is that a company with a three trillion dollar market cap is a company we absolutely must demand more from. Yes, it's naive of me to want a better world and I'm never gonna stop doing it. A company at this scale constitutes an abrogation of fundamental norms, and it's apparently a lesson we have to learn over and over.

I was gonna grab Another Crab's Treasure on there today, but now I'm just gonna buy it.  Which is probably what I should have done to begin with.

The signal this sends to internal studios is one of horror and chaos. "Scale," by itself, is not a plan. What is the plan? Is there a plan? Because I'm not seeing a plan.

(CW)TB out.