The Guardian: Playing video games doesn’t lead to violent behavior

The Guardian reported earlier today that the analysis of 28 studies aimed at determining the correlation between video games and violent behavior was “miniscule”.

Persona 5 Royal sells more than 1.4 million copies

The Persona series is still going strong (let’s be honest: to the surprise of no one), according to the latest numbers from Atlus. Persona 5 Royal in particular sold more than 1.4 million copies, while the Switch spin-off Persona 5 Scramble sold over 480,000 copies in Japan and Asia.

Persona 5 was an exceptional game and at some point, I’m going snag a copy of Royal and hopefully play it without forcing myself to min-max every single day.

Are Analogue Pocket pre-orders starting next week?

Answer: Very possibly. Analogue tweeted out “Jul. 27, 2020 8 am PST” with a minty green background color that just happens to match their Pocket webpage accent color.

The company’s Pocket device is essentially a hella-upgraded Game Boy with a 3.5″ LCD sporting a 1600×1440 resolution. It plays all standard Game Boy/Game Boy Color/Game Boy Advance cartridges and also supports separate cartridge adapters for other classic handhelds such as the Neo Geo Pocket Color and Game Gear.

B-b-b-baka!

League of Legends’ Spirit Blossom 2020 event includes a visual novel

Riot Games is pulling out all the stops for its latest Spirit Blossom 2020 event. Along with a new champion (and most likely a second forthcoming new champion) and the return of the Nexus Blitz game mode comes a new visual novel game called Spirit Bonds, where the player can unlock paths in a visual novel by building bonds via in-game quests.

Nintendo executives are earning way less than their American industry counterparts

Switcher reports that the highest level executives working at Nintendo are making far, far less than their industry counterparts in the USA.

Nintendo’s president, Shuntaro Furukawa earned $2.4 million dollars in fiscal year 2019-2020, while director Shigeru Miyamoto pulled in $1.8 million and general manager Shinya Takashi made $1.24 million.

Contrast that with Activision’s CEO, Bobby Kotick, who pulled in a cool $28 million dollars while EA CEO earned $35 million dollars.

There are some cultural differences at play here, such as a Japanese law that requires companies to disclose the salaries of any employee making more than 100 million yen (about 1 million dollars, though right now more like 933k). Companies are incentivized to keep executive pay lower or pay executives through other means rather than risk social stigma.