It's a game and games are nice. why can't it be on HN? HNers shouldn't play games? This is a great AAA title from a famous franchise of a famous company. Ofcourse everyone is excited about it!
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It's not that I can't find this news elsewhere, and how does it gratify my curiosity? It's the most discussed news item today.
It doesn't gratify your curiosity but it does for others. They're curious about how this game is going to be, is it going to live up to their expectations, what do other people feel about it. If you need every conversation to revolve around software engineering, there's even a sub-thread about how they manage to keep this series so high quality.
Demanding that things should justify their existence to you is a symptom of main character syndrome.
Many HN readers grew up with this franchise so they're invested. And surprisingly, the devs managed to make a game so good that it would be considered top 50 of all time. This thread is mostly just a bunch of excited fans looking forward to playing the game.
HN just likes some games more than others. Will we see a thread for Horizon Zero Dawn or Last of Us? No. Will we see one for a Factorio sequel? Definitely.
It really shouldn't be, but large events that a lot of people on here are interested in is always gonna make a splash.
Especially since a lot of people here who are interested in it are probably not interested in participating in gaming-related social media.
Same goes for huge news events where loads of people here who usually don't pay attention to news suddenly all want to pay attention to one item; it's natural to do so on the only news community they usually engage with, even if it doesn't actually make sense for that community as a whole (as this community is largely defined by NOT having that content.)
