Thanks for sharing that comment.

I found this section of Shaun’s comment to be particularly reflecting of the way North American investors treat their businesses.

とくに近年の外資系企業では大規模な投資に対して短期間での成果を求める傾向が強まり、十分な時間をかける前に株主の期待に応えるための方向転換が行われる場面も少なくありません。今回の報道もそうした構造の中で起きた出来事だと受け止めています。

For those who need a translation:

In recent years, particularly, when it comes to companies that rely on foreign investment, there’s been an increasing expectation that large scale investments will be met with quick results in the short-term. And it has become commonplace that before enough time can be spent on a project, these companies opt to switch directions in order to satisfy investor demands. That the events this time is yet another such example, is what we’re taking of this situation.

The later paragraphs lament the lost opportunities and wasted efforts that employees have to witness and go through, and how customers are disappointed that something that they’ve looked forward to failed to materialize.

Working in a company with a strong venture capitalist voice from above, I feel this. People in the company are trying really hard to create features and address problems for our customers, to make a really good product, and fortunately we do have a really good product. But the constant “you have to do this (because it increases your company value, but I won’t say that part out loud),” just to catch a hype, even when it doesn’t make sense, forces us to have to spend resources to essentially placate the investor, thus stretching us thin.

These people have no idea why businesses are successful, and they don’t really care. All they’re doing is to spray and pray, and hope that one of their investments will become the next Stripe, the next Spotify, the next Netflix, etc, and they would’ve made much more than what they’ve lost from businesses who can’t keep the engine burning.

This is a very hand-wavy way of discerning distros, but they basically differ by 3 things:

1. the set of the defaults they ship with when installed,
2. the system packages that they distribute through their official package manager hosted on their own package repositories, and
3. the package manager, which encompasses the distro’s release strategy.

Major distros generally manage how a package gets built on their distros, in a way that’s compatible with the rest of their package repository, while smaller players may choose to directly use one of the repositories from the major distros, go their own route, or do something in between, i.e. repackage some of the packages from the upstream repositories. Typically, the smaller distros re-use large parts of a larger distro and give a sort of flavour to the larger distro. In the Linux community, these larger distros end up being called “bases”, and many smaller distros are generally “based on” some larger distro.

Manjaro is based on Archlinux, which, incidentally, is also what the newer SteamOS is based on (SteamOS used to be Ubuntu-based). Whether Manjaro actually provides benefits remains to be seen, cause their reputation has been really bad for several years because of how they’ve soured their relationship with a really supportive community earlier on in their life, and badly handled the distribution and communications of several critical packages. I haven’t followed their news in a while, but if they stroke a deal with the company to work together and ship essentially proprietary software or drivers, you can certainly expect some advantage, at least earlier on, but experience tells us that these usually don’t end up well in the long term.

As far as the handheld market goes, you aren’t wrong: every company and their mother that has a potential to get into this market is now ogling at the chance to gain that market share after seeing the success of the Switch and Deck. Many see the Deck as an underpowered machine and believe that they can offer better specs at lower prices (particularly large companies as they typically already have the benefit of economics of scale). AFAIK the Deck has been unbeatable in terms of market share, but that might be outdated info from several months ago.

That comment is just my opinion (hence the “imo”), cause most of the reviews will just say that the story is meh without explaining why it’s meh. People aren’t pissed about the contradiction between the gameplay loop and the story.

And imo it’s perfectly fine if you’re viewing it through the lens of “it’s just a game in a fictional setting that happens to have a relatable message,” or simply an “idk is there even a story?” Most people play MH, and honestly just a lot of games, with that mindset, so just cause people never really cared over all the old titles, it doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable: it’s just ignored. Now, I don’t really take issue with that (I’m typically a bit of a lore buff) or the contradiction itself: it’s fictional, do what you want, even if it doesn’t make sense or even contradictory; but I do wonder what Capcom’s intention is, spending all that money and time to create some kind of story. I mean, there are so many other settings they could choose, but they went with this.

I see a whole bunch of low effort negative reviews from Chinese players that seem to be hating on Capcom. Not sure if something triggered that.

But there are also a lot of player concerns that have basically just surfaced with about 4 months into the life of the game:

• bad performance and optimization continues to plague the game
• constant crashes for a lot of people
• too little content, and people really don’t seem to like the slow release of new contents, and wonder why aren’t they just putting em all out at once (though many big titles are trying to go for a cadenced content release cycle to keep people interested in the game, and it’s always a bit of a debate on whether that’s good or not)
• story is too low effort (but MH has never really been a story-centric game; and imo the story in Wilds seem to contradict with the gameplay itself: talks about the cycle of life and the ecosystem around it, but here we are just hunting everything down)
• the monsters are too easy
• older players of the MH series find that the game has made itself too easy and not punishing enough: rare items are easy to get so there’s no satisfaction to be found there, builds are too shallow, etc

I played the first Nioh and really liked it. Been planning to play 2, but dang there’s now a 3 upcoming?

Really hoping their recent mixed records won’t carry forward here though.

The Urban Dictionary is useful for lots of modern abbreviations or Internet lingo

“Let’s give the CEO big bonuses instead of investing it back into our failing business that desperately needs that money.”

Says, apparently, no one at Intel.

Edit: I just realized my punchline was off but I’ll leave it as is anyways. You get the point.

弾幕 (read: danmaku) is literally translated as “bullet curtain” to refer to a barrage of bullets that are so close together they form some kind of veil, or curtain. But yeah, it’s what we know as “bullet hell” in English.

I’ve seen Vampire Survivors referred to as “reverse bullet hell” at some point, but didn’t look like that stick.