Because PCs are worse for living room/controller gameplay, you have to deal with Windows or Linux, and many other factors?

The exact same services? Did YouTube exist in the 1980s?

The Mozilla FUD where I said I like Firefox and pointed out how many of the projects continued in some form after Mozilla ended them?

Most of the services Google kills are also because they “fizzled out”. If you scroll through the Killed by Google site, a lot of the stuff listed there were test apps or small-scale experiments that most people never heard about or cared to try, like all the apps under Area 120. There are a few high-profile examples (Reader, Stadia, etc) but they’re definitely not the majority, same as Mozilla.

Modern consoles are pretty great about backwards compatibility. There’s room to improve for sure, but an Xbox Series X/S can play all Xbox One/Series games, plus hundreds of 360 and original Xbox games. PS5 is a bit worse with only PS4 backwards compat. The Switch is in the roughest shape, because PowerPC emulator or hardware compatibility wasn’t practical with the design or hardware of the original Switch.

They still have the benefit of being a fixed hardware platform with guaranteed compatibility for the games built for them.

Even if official support isn’t possible past a certain point (Google and Samsung are pushing 7+ years, fwiw), all phones need to have a bootloader unlock mechanism for unofficial support past that point. LineageOS or mobile Linux with some broken functionality is still better than nothing.

Game publishers are not your friend.

“Gentleman’s NDA” is not a thing. It’s either a legally-binding NDA or it’s not. It’s within Valve’s right to ban him from the game but saying the game shouldn’t be covered at all is silly.

If every news outlet avoided a topic because the company wouldn’t outright confirm its existence, we would never have reporting based on leaks and rumors. That’s dumb and would make journalism worse for everyone.

If Valve wants to be shitty about it, that’s within their right (unless they want to sue, which would be difficult to defend in court without a written legal agreement). It is also true that other outlets are free to do handshake agreements to not cover the game. The Verge didn’t break any rules, and Valve already maintains a minimal relationship with the press, so not talking to The Verge probably wouldn’t change anything.

The rest of the industry uses embargo agreements with mutual consent if they have private information. This doesn’t change anything for other game companies, unless they also want to do private-but-not-private beta tests.

They did ask Valve:

Though Valve didn’t respond to my requests for comment

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Valve barely talks to press anyways, in a very similar fashion as Apple. At worst, maybe The Verge won’t get a Steam Deck 2 review unit ahead of time or something.

Yep, tech and game companies use invite-only systems to generate hype constantly. Bluesky is another recent example.

That’s not how this works. The Verge didn’t break an NDA or embargo because they didn’t get either of those things. Valve allows random people to invite other random people to play, with just a “pretty please don’t talk about this game” warning. There was already people talking about it online and leaked footage.

They didn’t get an NDA.

Stock price is largely about future earnings potential, not current quarter or past results. That’s why a company can have record-breaking earnings, but still eat shit in stock price for a while if it lowers predictions for next quarter.

The layoffs were announced at the same time as Intel’s Q2 financial results: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/actions-accelerate-our-progress.html