Max HP
Max HP: Allen Murray, Private Division
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#65: Over the wall
Hello! Not an awful lot has happened out there since Wednesday, which is good, because it means I can feel a little less guilty about spending today’s Hit Points talking about myself a bit. Specifically, I wanted to explain my thought process for the long-promised arrival of subscriber-exclusive #cahntent,
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#64: Like and subscribe
Growth in Xbox Game Pass is slowing. Just how concerned should Microsoft be?
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#63: Token gestures
Valve is the first of gaming’s big gatekeepers to ban NFTs. It won't be the last
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#62: Community spirit
Yesterday MOBA Group, a Swedish company I have never heard of, announced the $4.5 million acquisition of the enormously popular gaming forum ResetEra. Hit Points has covered at length the game industry’s ongoing obsession with consolidation. There is so much money flying around at the moment that it
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#61: Unto dust
Brands, eh? I love brands. Who doesn’t? I love supporting my favourite brands online. I love engaging with my favourite brands online. But what I love most of all is when my favourite brands engage with each other online. I can’t imagine anyone thinks these things, really — not
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#60: Never too much
Jim Ryan gave a decent interview to GI.biz last week, reflecting on the challenges of launching a console in a pandemic and PS5’s strong start, and telling a few excellent stories from earlier in his career (it is worth a read if only for the Ken Kutaragi bit)
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#59: Passing the torch
In a way, I sort of owe Toshihiro Nagoshi — whose departure from RGG Studio and Sega has been confirmed overnight — my career as a game journalist. Back in the early 2000s, when I first discovered Edge, he had a monthly column that I think was supposed to be about games,
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#58: Down time
Gosh, that Facebook outage the other day was funny, wasn’t it. I particularly liked the detail, from Alex Hern at The Guardian, that Facebook is so structurally dependent on itself that its tech staff could not communicate with each other about the outage, log in to assess the problem
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57: To the point
Sony has finally announced the acquisition of Bluepoint Games, confirming one of the worst-kept secrets of the year. It’s further proof that Sony is thinking about acquisitions in a very different way to Microsoft. The Xbox maker’s most eye-catching buyouts — Bethesda, Double Fine, Ninja Theory — have been historically
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#56: Odd future
I’ve avoided writing about NFTs in Hit Points so far. This is in part because I did some work for a blockchain-gaming startup a while ago, and needed a bit of distance before I could think clearly, fairly and personally about it. There’s also the fact that, despite
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#55: Adapted from screen
Over the weekend, gel-slicked Naughty Dog co-president Neil Druckmann tweeted a still from the forthcoming HBO adaptation of The Last Of Us. At first glance, I thought it was a screenshot from Part II. They have absolutely nailed the aesthetic, but I doubt I’ll watch it. I find playing