Crucial and Samsung have good reputations.

If they exposed the specific reasons for each rating, that would expose how arbitrary it all is.

It also would have been perfectly fine to name the company in the headline. There is plenty of room for it. But that’s Business Insider for you.

However, I have a strong suspicion that video game subscription services will end up following a similar trajectory to TV/movie streaming services at some point… Gamepass doesn’t really have any major competitors, and has been priced very aggressively in order to build market share, and it reminds me a lot of Netflix in its early digital stages.

Netflix pricing has always had a lot of pressure on it because the company has no product diversity. All Netflix offers is Netflix, so all of its revenue comes from there. Meanwhile, MS has Office as the world’s default productivity suite, and it rakes in billions from corporate Windows licensing and cloud services. As of about a year ago, gaming was actually less than 10% of their annual revenue. So they can support narrow margins on Game Pass pretty much indefinitely. And they are motivated to do so as the heavy underdog to Sony, whose consoles consistently outsell theirs by a ratio of about 2:1.

The issue with the donation has multiple stages. Stage 1 was the donation itself. Stage 2 was the intellectually insulting way that Brendan Eich defended his actions. Stage 3 is the negative impact that Proposition 8 had on California for many years, during which time millions of dollars in taxpayer money was wasted on legal proceedings to walk back the amendment banning marriage for people who dared to be of the same gender.

And we did actually hear a lot about the people who donated millions to Proposition 8. There was a lot of coverage of the millions that Mormons donated to get this type of marriage banned. It was a political decision that haunted the LDS church for years. Example 1, five years later. Here’s some more coverage from just last year. We’ve been hearing about those people for years. Because California remembers the damage that they wrought.

No one is saying that it should be free. The issue is that $50 for a straight port of a 13 year-old game is ridiculous when Sony’s competitor offers free backwards compatibility—and 4K upscaling. Microsoft absorbed their expenses for that as the cost of doing business, and it would be a blip on Rockstar’s balance sheet as well, since they make a perpetual avalanche of money from GTA Online. There’s really no credible justification for a price this high.

Clearly a coincidence.

Happened quite often in the past…over the course of thousands of years. Man-made global warming is a very different animal.