Valve’s last two releases were Half Life Alyx and Aperture Desk Job. Both are single player games.

Aperture Desk Job even runs on Linux and Steam Deck.

I think the soil quality in the Donbas has decreased quite a bit since 2014.

M10 Booker

Microsoft made $158b gross profit year, which was a 14% increase over the previous year.

As a comparison, General Motors’ revenue was $170b. Microsoft made almost as much in profit as GM took in totality.

Closing the studios maybe will save Microsoft $0.1b, so potentially increase their profit line by 0.05%.

So hard to think of it as anything other than a middle finger to the devs. Even if it were a mistake, they could afford to let it cook longer like with Rare and redeem the “mistake”.

It’s the Juicero strategy.

“You can’t squeeze our juice packs! Only our special machine can properly squeeze our juice packs for optimal taste!”