Up At Three

Philip Tetlock on sacred values: if something is sacred to you, you won't trade it for anything, and being offered a trade is offensive. To these studios it's not a business decision. It's a value they won't sell, and they expect the studio to pay.

I defended Gears of War. 270,000 people saw it on X and they were not happy. So this time I waited two weeks before saying it: Modern Warfare 4 sucks. And it's not because of the women. They removed everything that made it a game.

Irving Janis, 1972: why teams of smart people make disastrous decisions. Symptom one: the group believes it's morally right, so pushback isn't feedback, it's evil. Symptom two: you're not a customer anymore, you're the enemy.

Before The Acolyte came out, Star Wars fans asked for one thing. Make it feel like Star Wars. They made it anyway. Cancelled after one season. The lead actress called the pushback bigotry. They heard every word. You were just the enemy.

EA shut down BioWare. Andromeda missed, so Anthem. Anthem died, so Veilguard. In 1976 Barry Staw showed why people double down after a bad call: turning around means admitting the first decision was wrong. Escalation of commitment. One studio just died of it.

WARDOGS. Small studio in England. $40 early access. No battle pass, no SBMM, no story, no lecture. 400,000 playing at once. 2 million copies in 5 days. The audience was never a mystery.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Critics: 84. IGN: 9. Players on the same website: 3.8. Critic scores aren't reviews anymore. They're the group grading itself.

Captain Price spent twenty years escaping the whole planet. In Modern Warfare 4 he needs a drug dealer to tell him the guy with the AK-47 in France isn't a cop.

The last thing the new Modern Warfare games still had was brotherhood. Soap dies. Gaz and Ghost get told to hunt Price down, dead or alive. Their answer: "yep."