Agreed, just wanted to see if the OP would admit to it as well. Fully expect either no response or a passing of the buck along the lines of ‘I want to help who need it, but people hypothetically could take advantage of the system so let’s just scrap the whole thing.’

And what about the less fortunate? The infirm and disabled? They can rot?

Well, perhaps I’m just wrong then. But for me, I see twenty tears of MS buying up studios, sitting on them, and closing them with some sort of excuse about changed plans. It’s always the same though, studio performs well, gets bought, makes no games or games out of their genre, and closes. Call it whatever you want, I call it business as usual.

It’s how these large corporations operate though. Ignore, buy, or bury, that’s how they all operate. They may have ‘plans’ to use the studio, but for them if all they get are the assets and a less of a threat from the old ip, then that’s enough. I don’t think it makes any sense either, but it also absolutely something microsoft has done for years in their larger business model.

They know exactly what they are doing, they are reducing competition.

Uh, my time to shine? Back in grad school I used to clone paddlefish (gynogenesis) by heat shocking freshly fertilized paddlefish eggs at the right time so that the egg is activated but the males dna is never incorporated. Paddlefish and sturgeon, while looking totally different, are actually fairly closely related (they had a common ancestor like 200 mya) and so the chemical reactions take place to get everything going. But they are also distinct enough that if the timing isn’t right and the father’s dna accidentally gets incorporated, they create these hybrids. The hybrids are important because its the only way to identify males, which this whole process is designed to exclude. The reason you’d want to do this is the production of caviar in which males are of no value and cannot be easily identified for years.

Now, I was in Kentucky, and we were breeding paddlefish (the colbert report had a segment on ‘kentucky tuna’ that the economics professor terribly tried to promote if you can find it) for the non-existent paddlefish caviar market as opposed to breeding sturgeon like they did in this study, but its the same general principle at play. The inly real difference is that unlike these hybrids that could apparently grow to juvenile or adult status, the paddlefish mother hybrids were very much dead within a week of hatching and were obviously deformed at hatching.

Heartbreaking, the worst person you know just made a great point

‘Cal, I just farted’

Oh no, sounds like I should avoid this reddit you speak of. Any suggestions for alternatives?

I canceled my recurring over this about a week ago, explaining that this was the reason. One of their people sent me a lengthy response that I appreciated. Still going to wait a year before I reinstate it, hopefully they fully move on from this idea by then. It sounded a lot like this though, kinda wishy washy.

Never thought I’d cancel my recurring donation for them, but just sent the email. I hope they change their mind on this, but as I told them, I will not support this.

Quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. Although I bought the original children of time when it came out, so probably better to say has developed into one of my favorite authors haha.