The Elden Ring expansion straight up has a release date: June 21st 2024.

The problem you’ve got is that the two lists that you’re looking at are ones with concrete release dates, and we’re currently in the period of the year where the release dates are the hardest to come by. Basically everyone’s either just started their fiscal Q1 and so have a completely clear slate, or like Microsoft have just started their Fiscal Q4 which means all they’ve got left on the slate are the delayed stragglers.

More like grabbing a bargain; When Embracer bought Saber it cost them more than $500 million. They sold it to Beacon (who are basically just a bunch of investors and one of the Saber founders) for just under $250 million, and are now stacking up extras from the Embracer spending spree while they still can.

On a similar note, who do we reckon is buying Gearbox? My money is on Take 2, because who would be stupid enough to buy Gearbox (Embracer aside) when the Borderlands publishing rights are permanently in 2K’s hands?

Well this is concerning. If they’re not getting any more funding from 505 to make Control 2 and Condor then, uh, who’s funding Control 2 and Condor?

Eat the rich in Minecraft

They’ve got the look spot on, but everyone’s miscast and none of the jokes land.

I mean, Idle Champions Of The Forgotten Realms is right there already.

Depends on whether your plan is to right the ship (sensible, boring, doesn’t interest investors) or to take that money and gamble it elsewhere in hope for big returns (chaotic, potentially disastrous, shareholders love it).

Oh god, it’s 2K publishing.

Which means that the game disappearing from storefronts is one of the better case scenarios. It’s entirely possible that they’ll patch out the licenced songs from the soundtrack from every digital copy of the game.

It’s Rocksteady, so it’ll be higher than 40s. Heck, it’s almost impossible to get a score lower than 40 on metacritic…

Mid 60s I’m guessing, perhaps as high as 69 if reviewers are feeling generous. The kind of score which would be absolutely fine if it were a cheap and cheerful B-game made by a scrappy team of underfunded devs, but which is an absolute embarrassment when applied to a multi million dollar tentpole. The kind of score that implies ‘meh’.

Until reasonably recently, Embracer was known as Nordic Games. Their plan was simple and quite effective; buy old game IP, release remasters, make reasonably-budgeted sequels aimed at niches of the industry being missed by the increasingly laser-focussed AAA publishers.

It worked for a good few years, and they became a Katamari of game development studios. An increasingly unwieldy Katamari. And like any good Katamari they started picking up bigger and bigger things. Suddenly instead of spending a couple of thousand on a struggling legacy developer, they were paying upwards of a billion at a time, swallowing up things like Gearbox, Asmodee, Dark Horse Comics, Middle Earth Enterprises, Square Enix Europe. They lost focus and just kept buying things, including things they couldn’t afford to buy. Eventually, a planned deal with the Saudis fell through, and that Katamari just slammed directly into a wall.

GTAV has had quite a bit of polish, comparatively. Of course, I’m sure that if they weren’t mostly doing it to keep GTA Online looking vaguely fresh it would still look like a PS3 game.