Oh dang, almost forgot to listen.
I looked up the Persona 5 trailer since I know nothing about the series and yeah, it does look incredibly Japanese.
I don't have quite the same experience with Star Wars as you, but I get where you're coming from. I really liked Knights of the Old Republic. But the Battlefront game... a friend bought a ps4 just to play it. I put in maybe half an hour on it and decided I wouldn't have bought it even if it wasn't an EA title.
Nintendo owned the Mariners? I feel like I should've known that.
Wow from that description, The Division sounds incredibly broken. I like the idea of cheater quarantine.
Yay I indirectly got a question into the podcast! It makes a lot of sense to think of the licensing along the same lines as movie licensing like the spiderman and fantastic four movie stuff. It also makes sense that games have to hit certain points in the calendar for financial and marketing reasons. You mentioned that a few big studios can ignore those kinds of timing considerations. Would that also be true for the other end of the scale? Say very small or indie studios, games like Stardew Valley or Hotline Miami, things that end up being big hits on Steam but don't have to worry about getting physical copies distributed to stores in time for holiday sales or something. Or maybe they have to deal with the same calendar considerations and I just don't notice.
I tried Duck Game on that free weekend and didn't really like it because everything was a one hit kill. But it might have grown on me a bit more if I had played it longer.