That logo quit being worthwhile seeing 15 years ago.

Now it just looks like a flushing toilet.

Yeah, it was around the time when I was excited for the Assassin's Creed games.

Oh it has, but the implications become clear when you look at the ones that did. Like evergrand...

The Nestle of video games. Because just like the food empire it never got flagged by the EU for overreach.

e-sports washing

Then the AAA studios will use some of their Saudi cash to buy out the most prominent indie developers, only to slowly strangle their products

Don't forget AA, doing pretty good too.

I'm noticing it happens with all companies.

They start out small and can't afford to pay businesspeople to figure out how to fuck over their customers as hard as possible.

Then, after the company is successful thanks to the hard work of the workers, the business-school people start applying in droves to make sure every company operates like gas stations across the street from each other.

It results in companies making decisions like having higher budgets for advertising than what they spend on actually making a product, because the data says it will make them more money and stupid customers keep reinforcing it.

Nothing will meaningfully improve until our culture stops valuing people based on their wealth. I have no hope for that to happen in my lifetime.

Professional (as in they earn money, not skill level) Xers fuck everything up. (here, X is an arbitrary verb or a brand name)

My anecdotes: Youtube was good before professional youtubers became a thing (systemic problem, people are not the issue but the environment which breeds them), now it's attention economy and or one topic discussed for 50 minutes (a video explaining the same topic with the same intensity from 10 years ago is 2 minutes long)

Gamers were problematic but harmless, professional gamers caused betting pandemic (sponsored content).

Streamers were funny, professional streamers are sexy/deadly-sells-to-children.

I liked it when people were sharing stuff online because they were bored, and not because they were hungry.

"We've finally decided to listen to fans. We're releasing a new Splinter Cell...animated show!"

To be fair, they are too big.

They just have too many employees and costs. The way they’re organized, they’re stuck with gigantic budget, milquetoast, broad appeal games just to attempt sales they need to break even, with all the inefficiency that comes at that team size… unless they fire a ton of people and split up the rest.

My observation over the past decade is that “medium size” is the game dev sweet spot. Think Coffee Stain, Obsidian, and so on.

Nah fuck that if they make a new splinter cell game it would end up being open world with a cosmetic store

They are also hellbent on infecting everything they touch with Denuvo malware. I haven’t bought anything of theirs in years for that reason alone.

Like they just licked a French doods ashtray.

You can do whatever you want there, as long as you are ok with the penalties.