So if we

look at Steam concurrence, which are obviously not the most necessarily dispositive metric, Star Wars is, I think, at a peak of around 15,000 players.

Gears of War is at a peak of around 23,000, I think, on Steam.

Now, naturally, both are also on consoles, so that only gives us a partial estimate.

view as to the success you know in terms of number of players on uh steam um but we can extrapolate some sales out there it seems um gears of war is tracking a little bit ahead of star wars currently we'll see sort of how that shakes out over the rest of the year obviously sales are relative to to budget and one might suggest that the star wars budget is probably a bit less than uh the gears of war albeit the star wars game will obviously have to pay a significant royalty to Disney Lucasfilm for those rights.

But if you go out from sales, I think you just have to look at the objectives of those two.

I mean, obviously, both companies are trying to sell games to be profitable and so forth.

Nintendo makes a ton of sense, right? Like, but all of that IP lives rent-free on

now.

And if I were either an investor or an employee, I'd be quite concerned about that because fundamentally, that's his job to work that out.

And the answer to it, well, is you need to sell video games so that you can make at least three times your expenditures in revenues and probably, hopefully, 10 or 100 times.

And I just think that, again, I've spoken and written at length about subscription businesses across media.

I really think that they have a dangerous effect on creative and on just the culture of companies because they divorce companies and the employees of companies from cause and effect, from the idea that what they do actually has to sell and have a positive commercial impact.

And so you get into this sort of stasis of thinking, well, BigCo will keep We'll keep funding me forever and we can do whatever we want.

And I think Microsoft leadership, former leadership, takes some culpability here because that's what they were told.

You've seen the new Resident Evil movie, and I don't want to do any spoilers here, but the OG Resident Evil movie, they're two very completely different types of movies, and I'm curious on how you can compare the two and if both of them can do it justice.

Simon, I guess one of the questions I have is why are all these acquisitions happening? If the IP is so valuable where it is, why are all these studios, and it's going back a couple of years, selling themselves?

Yeah, it's an excellent question.

I think to some degree, it's about the changes, the technological changes in the business, right? A lot of these conglomerates effectively had, you know, they had monopolies on sort of media and entertainment, right? They had TV stations, which generated a huge amount of cash, theaters, they controlled the windowing and the value chain of movies and television series through that industry.

They would syndicate television shows, you know, throughout the world.

And they may even, in some instances, have owned, you know, local newspapers that were a monopoly.

The Internet has changed, has changed all of that.

I think that the rise of streaming, at least initially, blindsided Hollywood.

Were you surprised by that, Simon?