People still read Kotaku?

Its been like this for much longer too. I’m still mad they closed FASA game studio.

It’s worth mentioning this is deliberately worded to sound as bad as possible. Q2 is down from Q1 (it always is), and revenue is down but so are expenses as unprofitable stores are closed (remember when your local mall had two of them?)

The company was profitable in this last quarter, but only barely. There was an operational loss, but interest on the massive $4Bn war chest pushed it over. This isn’t great, but marks a real improvement over hemorrhaging money which it was doing before. Its also the first profitable Q2 in years. The year of 2023 turned a narrow profit and 2024 is on track to be a little better.

Hate GameStop all you want (and by all means, frequent your local indie game store). But keep in mind that business wise, someone still feels the need to spend money on ‘attack’ articles like this one.

Anybody else playing the new satisfactory update?

See, this is an interesting question. Are they?

They certainly succeed in giving off that vibe. They seemingly have seen a lot of economic growth while Russia stagnated. I would probably guess that they are, indeed, more competent.

But, they’re an even bigger unknown than Russia. They’re notoriously opaque and at least sometimes cook the books when showing the outside world their economy growth, or stuff like their rate of fatalities during COVID.

They seem to have a much bigger GDP and a much more loyal citizenship than Russia. We think their technology is better than Russia’s, but not as good as ours.

But, we won’t really know if they are a paper tiger until we see them in a real conflict. They could, with the advantage of proximity, be unassailable by the west if they invade Taiwan. Or we might see themselves completely blunder trying to stop a rebellion in a small country. I don’t think anybody guessed Ukraine would hold up like they have, even with western supply lines.