Sacred Symbols+, Episode 284 | Catching Up on Legalities With Rick Hoeg (Patreon)

Please give a warm welcome to lawyer Rick Hoeg, Last Stand's legal analyst and personal friend of the company who returns to Sacred Symbols+ for the first time in 2023. For those unaware, Rick had a stroke late last year, and has been on the steady road to recovery ever since. We get Hoeg settled back in with a tried-and-true topic: Microsoft's attempted acquisition of Activision. The deal has been clearing hurdles left, right, and center, and it looks like it's on a smooth path towards completion. We catch everyone up on recent happenings (including Sony earning the ire of the American government), and contemplate possible endgames, including a chip-on-the-shoulder Sony that starts making purchases of its own. We cap off our talk with a brief discussion on Chris Avellone, the once-accused games writer recently cleared of wrongdoing in a civil suit that awarded him seven figures. It's notoriously hard to prove a libel suit. How did he do it?