Why Gearbox Won’t Give Us Borderlands 3 | Xbox One UK

lelo2play14h ago(Edited 14h ago)

Square should ask Sony for more money...

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Outside_ofthe_Box9h ago

Square should ask Microsoft to buy them out...

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FinalFantasyFanatic7h ago

@Outside_ofthe_Box,
So that Microsoft can close down the studio after doing nothing with them? Right...

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gleepot13h ago

Sad but true. It's the consequence of a shift in player habits, massive overhead, and out of control budgets across the industry.

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XiNatsuDragnel15h ago

Unfortunate man

blackblades15h ago(Edited 15h ago)

What did NA and EU did anyways? Just translate or something? I would say it might help them get back to there roots but DK.

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Hofstaderman14h ago(Edited 14h ago)

Actually, you are correct they play a hand in localization especially in Europe with the many languages. That and marketing.

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EternalTitan12h ago

They ate up salary.

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Workshyskiver14h ago

Industry is in the gutters.

Profchaos5h ago

Yup videogame crash 2024 edition

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Battlestar2314h ago

They should of never of made those exclusive deals with Sony. If SE made FFXVI/FFVIIRemake/Rebirth available on PS/PC/Xbox/Switch Day 1 they would of sold 20/30 million copies of each game and would mostly likely would not of lead to layoffs.

Exclusive games to any platform is not only anti gamer but they are toxic to the gaming industry. All games made by Sony and other companies should be made multi platform.

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CantThinkOfAUsername14h ago(Edited 14h ago)

20-30 million. Right. SE must be sleeping on Japanese CoD right here.

P_Bomb14h ago

Absolutely absurd estimate.

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neutralgamer199213h ago

Battle

lol are you serious? Let’s see

First game is on PC and so will the rest

Switch can’t run FF remakes

Xbox again I ask are you serious? Xbox game sales accounts for such little piece of the pie in overall gaming that there are publishers doubting if they could recover their development and porting costs for Xbox versions

The real issue here is square enix just can’t stop releasing 1-2 really bad AAA games on year basis

Babylon's Fall
Left alive
Marvel avengers
For spoken

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JEECE13h ago

Lol I love how the "Publishers can sell tons of copies of JRPGs on Xbox" myth won't die. The failure of exclusive JRPGs on 360 (by far the most popular Xbox) couldn't kill it. The low Xbox sales of FF games that launched on Xbox and PlayStation at the same time couldn't kill it. The fact that Gamepass has the few players on Xbox who actually play JRPGs conditioned to expect them for free can't kill it.

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Profchaos5h ago

Publishers aren't selling millions of anything on Xbox the fanbase has adopted the I'll wait for gamepass mentality so publishers are actually starting to skip the platform unless it's a garunteed hit like GTA

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RNTody13h ago(Edited 13h ago)

Are you insane? Final Fantasy has historically not really sold close to those numbers, those are God of War and Spider-Man numbers dude. Final Fantasy 15 sold 5 million at launch, on both PS4 and Xbox One and had the benefit of releasing three years into the console lifecycle with no cross gen releases slowing the adoption rates. It sold a lifetime of ten million copies. Yet, 80% of sales were on PS4 and only 20% on Xbox One.

Are you going to seriously sit there and tell us the Game Pass crowd are going to double the sales of these games?

Put your mind onto the real problems. It isn't exclusivity. It's out of control budgets, over estimated and unrealistic sales expectations, bloated game development and poor management.

The budgets for Final Fantasy 16 and Remake and Rebirth far exceed Final Fantasy 15, exponentially so, yet did the audience grow exponentially? No.

Don't make this about something it's not, and don't fall for the crap from publishers that triple A games are unsustainable. The next stop on the station is games need to be more expensive and we need more monetisation methods like adverts in games. The problem is with publishers, not us.

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shinoff218310h ago

It's like everyone just wants to hate on it. Fact of the matter is the install base for ps5 just isn't that big compared to ps4. Right now. I've read double packs weren't counted(remake, rebirth pack) I'm not sure if it's true, and then some are just waiting for the whole trilogy to be done. I know someone doing that.

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EternalTitan11h ago

"If SE made FFXVI/FFVIIRemake/Rebirth available on PS/PC/Xbox/Switch Day 1 they would of sold 20/30 million copies of each game"

Lmao.

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ocelot0711h ago

I like how a lot of people are blaming the Sony exclusive deals. Yet in the last 4 years they have released about 50 games. 70% of them being multiplatform, 20% being Nintendo Exclusives and about 10% PlayStation Exclusives yet lets all blame the Sony deals lol.

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shinoff218310h ago

Exactly. Where my dragon quest spinoff that only Nintendo do keeps getting. Stop crying about Sony. Hey Xbox players. Remember last remnant, squares exclusive Xbox 360 game Ms paid for, you guys were sht at supporting that. Same with lost odyssey, blue dragon, and infinite undiscovery. That's why Japanese devs don't wanna develop for it.

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notachance8h ago

this. many people didn't realise switch had more square exclusives than sony.

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shinoff218310h ago(Edited 10h ago)

You mean pc

Wouldn't have sold sht on Xbox, and the switch couldn't hang

Xbox accounted for 9 percent of ff15 sales. Lol. Xbox ain't doing sht

CrimsonWing698h ago

What JRPG has ever sold 20 - 30 million?

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14h ago

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DOMination-14h ago

To put it into perspective, take a studio like Black Box who went through a spell of churning out half decent Need for Speed games annually.

Need for Speed: Underground - 15 million+
Need for Speed: Underground 2 - 11 million+
Need for Speed: Most Wanted - 17.8 million
Need for Speed: Carbon - 15.6 million
Need for Speed: ProStreet - 10.9 million
Need for Speed: Undercover - 8.9 million

This was the norm for the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era.

A Need for Speed game now requires more employees, considerably more time than one year to develop and absolutely a whole load more capital to fund development, let alone the extra costs of developing Frostbite and adapting it to a racing game (if that's still a thing). And at the end of it, it will likely never sell anywhere near even the worst game in that list above.

In that same era, Rockstar Games (albeit, various Rockstar studios) released GTA3, GTA VC, GTA SA, State of Emergency, Manhunt, The Warriors, Red Dead Revolver, three Midnight Club games and Bully. We're lucky if we even see a single game from them this generation.

In summary, committing to making a big AAA game now is barely worth it. Unless you are lucky enough to be sat on a mega IP like CoD or GTA, it's a huge gamble. Games simply take too long, require too many employees and cost too much. Unless AI or Unreal Engine can fix this and QUICK, the industry is going to be reduced to mobile-like experiences.

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Profchaos5h ago

That era is one of my favourites but let's face it games were different back then at the time underground felt like a revolution so did the GTA trilogy and even shooters like halo changed the way we play.

I honestly believe that generation laid the template for how most of our modern games worked but development times were like 12 months for a decent project the budgets were far lower and publishers could freely experiment.

Since that generation we are playing mostly the same ips and most have anywhere between 5 to 10 sequaks since that point so many of these IPS are classics but are getting stale who even cared the nfs heat came out. Halo 2 was a mega event and a global phenomenon but haloe infinite got a decent amount of buzz but was gone off the radar in a month.

RNTody14h ago

The gaming industry needs to learn just like Hollywood. You cannot sustain "more, more, more" indefinitely if your sales are not increasing in line with your costs. But no, every sequel needs to be three times the size of its predecessor, have twice as many staff, have monetisation systems and 100 hours of padded content and six year development cycles. But are these sequels ever twice as good?

Godzilla Minus One, on a poultry budget of $15 million, blew anything Disney has done out of the water since 2021 in terms of visual effects and created the best monster movie I've seen in my life.

Asobo made A Plague Tale Requiem for $25 million and its visuals, writing and quality rival games with ten times its budget.

Am I against big production values? No, God of War, The Last of Us, and so on justify their budgets and sell ridiculously well. But I am against unrealistic excess. If a game sells two million copies, tripling its budget isn't going to get you six million copies.

Square Enix is facing the reality that Final Fantasy sales are in decline and have been since FF15, yet they seem to be ramping up their development costs exponentially. It's hard to find facts but word seems to be FF15 had a budget of $50 to $100 million and FF16 had a budget of like $250 million plus. Same goes for FF7 remakes.

Yet other factors affected their market potential, like years of cross-gen releases slowing the PS5 adoption rate.

These lay offs will keep happening until publishers make their costs sustainable and stop trying to make it seem like triple A development is impossible or that we need more monetisation and higher priced games to account for their hubris.

Petebloodyonion13h ago

Talk about a sound explanation instead of it didn't sell well because it releases at the same time as X game or it's because it's only digital.

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Chocoburger11h ago(Edited 11h ago)

I've been saying this for a long time, game budgets have ballooned out of control. We don't need better graphics, we need FUN GAMES that feel complete and satisfying to play. But publishers have a one-track mind, they've all been convinced that better graphics and bigger and more detailed worlds are required or people will pass on their games. This logic obviously doesn't apply to Nintendo which sells games in excess of 15 million copies, with out-dated visuals.

Publishers need to lower the budgets, and stop killing themselves off, its pure insanity.

RNTody9h ago

I actually don't think it's because they're pushing graphics, I mean, these massive budget titles are not actually that much greater visually or technically than smaller games these days. The talent of the graphics artists matters an enormous amount. Take the movie scene with Disney, their budgets are twenty times that of smaller films like Godzilla Minus One or Monkey Man, and more than double larger productions like 1917, yet they're outclassed by these lesser movies.

The reasons for the development costs ballooning in my opinion, is far too many staff working on projects leading to inefficient production (i.e like what we heard about Starfield), forced monetisation systems which eat up development time and resources and push for engagement in the hope of an uptake with in-game purchases, bloated game design and world building which increases time required to playtest and code all the filler content, prolonged development periods and repeated delays where the quality doesn't come close to the time spent (see Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League), mismanagement, excessive spend on advertising beyond what the title is reasonably expected to sell, lack of focus in game development.

Dead Space remains the best example I can ever use. The original sold a million copies and was a breakout success. Dead Space sold two million copies but EA was disappointed in its performance. They then lost their minds and ramped up again for Dead Space 3, with an unrealistic sales target of like 5 million to breakeven. Of course, it crashed and burned, because they forgot their original audience was between one and two million. Exponentially increased their budget, unrealistically increased their sales expectations, kept adding more and more costs and unnecessary excess until it became completely unsustainable.

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VersusDMC8h ago

No way FFXV had a budget to 80 to 100 million...that was probably it's marketing budget. FFXV has 3 versions. Versus 13, Nomura directed XV and after taking nomura off the project the rushed and downdraded final version of XV.

Those numbers come from a random message board.

https://www.ffxivpro.com/fo...

Here's a message board speculating it had a budget of 600 million based on financial statements if this is the kind of accuracy were going for.

https://www.ffxivpro.com/fo...

TiredGamer14h ago

It's the implosion I keep talking about. Expectations and reality in the industry are no longer aligned. This will continue until some sort of market equilibrium is reached.

Hofstaderman14h ago(Edited 13h ago)

Agreed, this cannot continue and something has got to give. I miss the old days where development costs and time were managable and SquareSoft released hit after hit. Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Final Fantasy 7 to 9 released ONE year apart and all of them were critically acclaimed.

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13h ago

Exvalos13h ago

The facts are the time and money needed to make games has gone through the roof and we as gamers just aren't buying enough. These games are costing 100 of millions to make and even games rated highly are doing good to get 3 or 4 million in sales. Something has to give.

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P_Bomb13h ago

Raising prices has failed. Seeing games go from $89 CAD to $94 in some cases. I’m just not buying those games.

neutralgamer199213h ago

We all can see the days of square enix being 3rd party are coming to an end which is really sad because they have so many valuable IP’s only if they manage them properly.

kaos8913h ago(Edited 12h ago)

Layoffs = Bidenomics, folks!

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Reaper22_12h ago

Like I said before, it's not just Microsoft laying people off. It's happening throughout the industry.

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shinoff21839h ago

Ms has come under fire because they have recently dropped so much money on studios and publishers. That's people's issue. That and the highest rated game they've released in years seeing its studio closed. That's why there's a difference.

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-Foxtrot12h ago(Edited 12h ago)

Are we sure, and I mean super sure, fanboyism aside and the like that maybe Final Fantasy XVI and especially VII Rebirths sales weren’t at least a tad disappointing for them?

We keep fighting about it but if freaking VII, Square Enix’s Golden boy and it’s hype of us begging for a remake for almost 15-20 years didn’t set the world on fire like Square Enix wanted then what else can they give us product wise at this point high expectations and all.

I’m not saying it would have stopped this and everything would have fixed its self if they launched on more platforms since the industry seems like it’s imploding within itself at the minute but it could have given them a little leg room.

Maybe it’s time to admit, regarding your feelings on the games, and this has NO impact on the quality of the games, that XVI could have felt more FF like being more that a simplistic hack and slash game and VII’s remake should have just been a single, less ambitious game just telling the original story over reimagining it?

Even Kingdom Hearts III felt shallow, look at how convoluted it’s become and they are still doing that with all the Missing Link / Union X shit before Kingdom Hearts IV even comes out.

EternalTitan12h ago

Looks like after the disaster of 16 they are shaking up.

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ROCKY2812h ago

this is beginning to look like 83 crash :(

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PhillyDonJawn11h ago

Wth is going on!!!!?

rlow111h ago

What’s new? The whole industry is in an upheaval and this isn’t the end of it. I really think the pandemic poisoned the industry as a whole. Big profits, everyone playing games during the pandemic. Now it’s back to normal and they’re trying to regain those pandemic numbers numbers. Our hobby hijacked by a bunch suits.

meatnormous10h ago

Release more copies of FF pixel remaster on physical discs for ps4. Idiots

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shinoff21839h ago

Fking word. It's fk up how they just raised the middle finger to ps4 players. I'm still peeved about this

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thesoftware73010h ago

This is not limited to any one company, the industry is in a major change, for better or worse. Game budget and time for development have skyrocketed, and the industry is trying to find it's balance again, it will level out, it's just a matter of when.

Restructuring come with layoff 90% of the time.

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XiNatsuDragnel1d 16h ago

Imo they have no reason tbh

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Reaper22_10h ago(Edited 10h ago)

They have a reason but they don't need to give a explanation. Gamers nowadays think they have a say so in telling people how to run their company. It's not the end of the world, fanboys. Microsoft is gonna due what benefits them the most. It's never been about you. Same with sony. Some of you need to get a grip. The crazy part is that some of the ones complaining don't even own an xbox.

enkiduxiv10h ago

I don’t own an Xbox and I have no real interest in HiFi Rush. I just hate to see a talented group of people lose their jobs when they did everything that was asked of them. You know… the decent, normal reaction to have when something like this happens.

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Relientk771d 13h ago

There's no logical or good reason to give for closing Tango Gameworks. They make great games consistently and Hi-Fi Rush was the highest rated Xbox game in literal YEARS. Closing the studio was just plain stupid and nonsensical.

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notachance17h ago

It’s quite strange to not see Phil Spencer in any talkshow or podcast… usually the dude would talk almost daily when there’s even a bit of news from xbox.

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Hofstaderman16h ago

Muzzled and/or in on it from the very beginning. You have to be a very stupid person not to anticipate that your division is going to be under scrutiny from shareholders after 80 Billion Dollars worth of acquisitions

Aloymetal16h ago

The beauty of being a CEO here in America is that when your company does well, you get extra money as a reward...
And when your company does badly, you get extra money to encourage you to stick around and lead it through the storm...And at some point, you get to bow out and float toward retirement on your golden parachute, which means and you guessed it, MORE MONEY!! What a deal for snake oil man Phil!!

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14h ago

-Foxtrot12h ago(Edited 12h ago)

Oh god no

You see when shit like this happens he throws Sarah Bond to the wolves

Seriously I only hear from her when it’s the yearly big Xbox showcase or when it’s super bad.

When the whole multiplatform release came out earlier this year he put her front and centre…kept his mouth shut for most of it

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shinoff21839h ago

Maybe she's the one pushing

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Michiel19892h ago

weird huh for a president of a division to say thing about said division?

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purple10117h ago

Perhaps they think they can sweep this one under the rug, gamers will forget about it,

We will not

They made a good game and you put the whole studio in the bin, this couldn’t be clearer, ms don’t care, everyone suspected it, but now we KNOW it

Amplitude16h ago(Edited 16h ago)

She's kinda got the verbal communication of 3-years-ago Biden trying to say something he knows nothing about.
What she meant to say is: "We wasted our budget for the next couple years buying Call of Duty, and we're moving all our chips to that one series"

It's starting to seem quite obvious that XBox is going to be shutting down most of their studios or selling them off, then focusing on some sort of PC/Console hybrid OS for the next XBox where they can collect royalties Valve style.

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esherwood14h ago

To be fair I don’t think there is a good answer, I’d rather her been honest but that probably would have pissed more people of then the word salad route.

Silly Mammo12h ago

Amp- Do you ever get tired of trying to make everything political?

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1Victor12h ago

@amp please leave your political red ruby sleepers at the door this is a gaming site or go back to truthfoxnewsmax to comment over there.
BACK ON TRACK
It’s obvious that Microsoft is moving on the money now direction guided by their investors watching all the failures from the 3rd quarter of the 360 gen to this generation I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a plan to replace Phil with Bobby as he proved for years he kept making money for activision.

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shinoff21839h ago

Bobby jeez that would be an interesting turn of events and they'd certainly go 3rd party

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shinoff21839h ago(Edited 9h ago)

Always that one guy bringing politics.

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z2g16h ago(Edited 16h ago)

As sad as it is it actually makes perfect sense. It just requires you to be objective from a business perspective and understand the web of revenue and operating budgets

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romulus2315h ago

Objectively speaking, Hi Fi Rush was their best game in a really long time.

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WiiU-Dude10h ago(Edited 10h ago)

Yeah and regardless if it wasn't exactly a blockbuster as a company you have to nurture a source that seems to be making great content for your brand. Sheesh. They have next to no exclusives and Hi Fi Rush certainly didn't cost what it costs to make Halo or Gears of War does. Yet if you care about your fans those that love Xbox you show support not pull the plug on a development team that just brought you a great game for Xbox and fans. It is puzzling.

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anast16h ago

Tango must have had a lot of friends in the media. Definitely not enough gamers to care to be reeling.

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Zeref15h ago

There's nothing they could say that would justify it that wouldn't make the company look bad. It's pointless to speculate.

I could say that they closed it because they found child p*rn on their leaderships laptop and it would be as valid as anyone else's guess.

I like Jez Cordens thoughts on this. He said it could be because it's a Japanese studio and Xbox has been working on making their teams work together as much as possible. Them being isolated all the way in Japan makes that very difficult. There's also cultural differences to consider.

XiNatsuDragnel8h ago

Still terrible excuse nii san

Chocoburger15h ago

Xbox executives giving incoherent explanations? They've been doing that since they started to promote the Kinect back in 2011 with all that B.S. marketing and have never changed since then.

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esherwood14h ago

Yeah there’s no reason. They litterally just released a hit which is why they bought the studios to begin with. He’ll release there games seperate from gamepass and let them survive on there own if need be

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WiiU-Dude14h ago(Edited 14h ago)

I have been a defender of Microsoft and Xbox for many years. I was there at midnight to pick up the original Xbox. Been there through it all. I always buy every machine, but between Sony and Microsoft, I backed Microsoft more. Why? My son, most friends etc were on Xbox. But I am finally losing faith. They are not new to the video game business. They have been in it for 23 years now. There is no excuse that they have next to no games in terms of exclusives. Shuttering all these development teams is ridiculous. They are ridiculous. I have invested so much in the Xbox ecosystem. Hundreds and hundreds of games and now I fear for my investment. I really question why they are in video games anymore. This answer she gave here is pathetic and sickening. Microsoft has lost any, which hasn't been much of any, credibility in calling itself interested in video games. They SOLELY are interested in money. Period. Not one shred of interest in gaming.

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