Ben Lindbergh

And some of them we saw for two weeks before they disappeared forever.

Yeah.

And maybe more will come out.

Maybe there will be a Jason Schreier TikTok blow by blow.

How did this happen exactly?

But from afar, at least it's hard not to have that interpretation.

And I think that's what leads to a lot of the live service fatigue and frustration, which we talked about last week.

We praised the upcoming PlayStation lineup and all the games that were teased.

But we also talked about High Guard and how everyone had it out for High Guard and why there is just no patience whatsoever for this genre.

And I don't think it's

solely that there are so many games like that and that it's hard for new ones to stand out, but also because you have studios that are just being forced to fit into this.

It's very much a square peg, round hole sort of situation.

And when you're actively cannibalizing talented studios that could make other kinds of great games...

to feed the live service beasts and then not even have those games come out or be successful.

That just feels like a huge own goal.

And I think this is the third studio that Sony has officially closed after acquiring it over the past few years.

Others have been downsized or haven't released any games or have undergone struggles like Bungie, for instance, which of course will be releasing Marathon.

in a week, which we will talk about on Button Mash.

And so there is still a lot being placed into this basket with the Horizon game that is about to be beta tested that we talked about last week with Marathon.

We'll see whether any of those gambles pan out, but they didn't.