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I don't really remember HotS having a particularly egregious problem with heroes being released overpowered and then nerfed; maybe it occurred after I quit playing(which was when they announced they were loving over the esports division). There were plenty of heroes who released as complete dogshit, like Artanis and Yrel. HotS charging for heroes seemed almost like a secondary afterthought for them, since all of their predatory money-grabbing design went into HotS 2.0's lootbox system.
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Sep 24, 2021 11:58
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Craptacular! posted:I don't think losing esports killed HOTS because it's really not into "individual skill expression" with most wins or losses being fought over map-specific objectives. I remember one game I won where 9/10 players died but we won the right to launch Mechagodzilla before the wipe and the lone living player on the enemy team was a healer could not stop the mechagodzilla from crushing his team's throne building. We won a game despite all being wiped by having good enough timing to let the AI do the actual work for us. While it was an interesting final clash full of very awesome plays, it would not be an esport moment to be proud of since the map gimmick effectively pushed through the enemy's high ground for us. Losing esports itself absolutely didn't kill HotS, because HotS's esports scene was comparatively tiny(though it did hugely gently caress over everyone employed in the HotS esports scene with basically no notice or warning despite previous assurances to the contrary). It's just that Blizzard pulled the plug on active HotS support and development and put the game on functional maintenance mode very shortly after officially killing the esports scene, so "HotS esports died" lines up really closely with "HotS died" in the timeline.
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Sep 26, 2021 07:02
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Algid posted:I want to kill Lavos. Need to. It's not a hope or a dream. It's like a hunger. A thirst. Hearthstone is financially similar to every other TCG insofar as if you're looking to compete remotely seriously in constructed play you can look forward to dropping, on average, a couple hundred dollars every single time a new set comes out to ensure you have access to every important card. If you're okay with not being particularly competitive you can skate by for substantially less, but you will almost assuredly not be keeping up with the meta. If you're a pure draft mode warrior, you can play for a whole lot less, but not everyone likes drafts. There was a controversial update last year which ended up making the game even less generous to f2p players, to boot.
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Sep 27, 2021 14:23
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Blaise330 posted:street fighter 5 launched with no arcade or story mode but slowly became a success overall through patches, having a very forgiving fanbase, constant dev support, and being a 90s franchise thats too big to fully fail. Also dota 2 launched with a million dollar esports tourney. Being a sequel helps cause people had years to fall in love with the franchise casually in the previous game. OW being as big as it was without being a sequel was a huge blown opportunity. DotA 2 is kind of cheating in this example, because the game started explicitly as a direct port of DotA 1 to a new engine and focused very heavily on achieving almost exact parity with DotA 1 from its conception until a very long time after its release until it finally achieved exact 1:1 content parity, at which point Icefrog finally sunset the old DotA map and started bringing DotA 2 in its own direction. It's kind of like if Starcraft 2 had just been Brood War on a new engine for the first year or more of its existence before Blizzard started adding unique SC2 things.
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Sep 28, 2021 01:03
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Good Dumplings posted:isn't the point of cod that you can basically be piss-drunk and still play? it and battlefield can be hardcore but I don't think that's what most of their audience is there for, otherwise shooters would be evolutions of quake and ut right now The general populace really likes the pseudo-realistic oorah military fps. The times that even CoD and BF have dipped into scifi stuff haven't been remotely as popular as guys in camo in a desert or a favela with m16s and ak-47s. I don't think it's really a matter of being a serious or hardcore game, since counterstrike can be an enormously tryhard game to play and that's still ridiculously popular.
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Sep 29, 2021 13:05
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Dick Burglar posted:Ah yes, the halcyon days of "the brief hype period before Blizzard utterly gave up on developing WoD shortly before it even released." I don't remember, was Kargath surviving the initial encounter ever actually implemented during development, or was it just sound/dialogue files that never got used? Kargath meets you in the (actually pretty good) intro questline of WoD, which introduces the various Warlords and sets them up. You fight an arena encounter with him involved, escape, and then he gets pissed about you running away; it's actually a decent attempt at setting up an antagonist that the player has a personal history instead of the usual parade of boss candidates such as Lord Vaxulon The Corrupted, Random Guy You've Never Seen Before This Raid Opened. Then you go to Highmaul and Kargath is there as the first boss of a raid he has almost nothing to do with beyond "there is an arena and Kargath was an arena fighter", you fight him there and kill him permanently, the end.
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Sep 29, 2021 14:21
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mutata posted:As with most things, the realities are multi-tiered and complex. Were some people turned off by a perceived or actual e-sports focus? Yep. Were some people turned off by the seeming "dumbing down" of mechanics in favor of casual players? Sure. I honestly think that most people, myself included, just... moved on. In that aspect in particular I agree with Blizzard's decision to start work on a sequel or at least a substantial update. Lots of players really like the PvE elements and a campaign is a great way to start to flesh out the characters and extend that aspect of the game, which is obviously a large part of OW's broad appeal. You can argue about timing, sure, and they seem to have decided to smother the remaining enthusiasm for OW1 which is probably an eyebrow-raising decision as you start trying to spin up hype for a sequel, but they've also had a TON of talent drain over the past few years, including leadership roles on the project. A large part of people "moving on" is because of Blizzard's bungling of their support of the existing product, though. Multiplayer games in the present day live or die in large part based on a perception if the game is being supported and updated or not. HotS is a really good example here - the game is still up and you can play it right now, but as far as the vast majority of players were concerned, it died when they put it on maintenance mode. You really can't expect a multiplayer game to remain broadly popular nowadays unless you're either releasing a new version constantly(the CoD model) or you're continually pushing updates and new content for the playerbase to consume(the Fortnite model). Blizzard tried to abandon the latter in favor of the former but they are absolutely terrible at actually releasing new products on a timely basis.
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Sep 30, 2021 02:53
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mutata posted:I don't completely agree generally, but I do agree you can extend the lifespan of a game by supporting it well (obviously). Even Counter-Strike has moved on to a few sequels though. I'm not sure I can think of a hugely successful multiplayer game that doesn't get new content/balancing on the regular these days. Even older games like CSGO still get new cosmetics and patches periodically. It's only going to become more common to expect games to constantly have new content being pumped into the players' retinas in the era of Fortnite.
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Sep 30, 2021 06:36
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The Gadfly posted:I think people need to stop anthropomorpizing companies. Don't get so attached or loyal to them. Great games are made because a group of specific developers worked at the same company in the same time period. It's these developers that people should respect for solely their game-making ability, not the overall behemoth of a company. I don't think anyone in the universe really feels any loyalty to ABK, the giant conglomerate. They feel a sense of lingering attachment to specifically Blizzard Entertainment. For like the first fifteen years of its existence, Blizzard had a virtually unprecedented record of banger after banger that was almost entirely unmatched in the industry. In terms of products released to products beloved ratio, it was in the running with titans like Nintendo. It's not unreasonable to expect that a company is going to be a reliable source of good products if they build a consistent record over many, many years. The developers are the important part, but in the specific context of Blizzard, they had several high profile, hugely influential developers like Bill Roper and Dave Brevik depart the company during their golden era and the company did not, at the time, seem to be affected overmuch by their departures, which added more oomph to the mythology that it was Blizzard Magic that made their games so successful rather than any individual dev's contributions. Many people reminisce about Blizzard because Blizzard games were an important part of their lives at one point - a lot of people still playing Blizzard games at this point were people who grew up playing them. It's almost exactly like finding out that your favorite musician was/is a sex creep, or your favorite TV star was/is a domestic abuser; it forces you to reexamine all of those happy memories and recontextualize them in an unpleasant way that taints those memories and makes you wonder if you're somehow hosed up or wrong for ever having liked that person/thing. It's not really weird for people to want to wax nostalgic about "hey remember when we lived in a world where as far as anyone knew Blizzard Entertainment did not sexually harass a woman to the point of suicide", as long as they don't mentally avoid or rewrite the truth in the process. Kanos fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 16:51
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Alkydere posted:Which step is the horny for Sylvanas added? Lead devs? Smaller writers? Both? A combination between Chris Metzen's original "all women are built like supermodels and wear either bikinis or skintight outfits" aesthetic, no one at Blizzard in a position of authority having a problem with that aesthetic, and fanbase inertia. People threw a fit when they added a goddamned leather corset to her ingame model because it covered her midriff.
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Oct 1, 2021 18:27
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cheetah7071 posted:Lying to investors is the only crime a rich person can commit, because it's a crime against other rich people. Not surprised they're going after actual humans instead of the corporate entity for that. Yeah if there's any hope for there to be any consequences for anyone out of this entire affair it's the fact that rich investors feel like they've been wronged here. The surest way for a rich person to suffer actual penalties is to screw other rich people.
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Oct 8, 2021 20:09
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Regalingualius posted:On the other hand, if they thought he went too far in his personal life, why didn’t they already start looking for a replacement composer years ago? Was his employment contract just that ironclad? Sugiyama wasn't just a composer, he was also a rich and relatively powerful dude who had a seat on the biggest copyright board in Japan and also owned his own record label. Coupled with his status as "the dragon quest music guy", actively removing him would probably have kicked up a huge controversial shitstorm over an issue that doesn't really seem to be seen as big of a deal in Japan as it is in the west. Most of the "hell yes I'm glad that fucker is dead" stuff is coming from the western audience. Unfortunately the dude basically had tenure until he willingly retired or keeled over dead.
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Oct 9, 2021 16:01
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Thing is, for Blizzard this has always worked before. They don't have anybody capable of imagining it won't work this time. Yeah, from what we know this behavior goes back to the early days of the company and has never really been a problem before despite apparently being so endemic they had dudebros getting drunk and sexually harassing people in their cubicles during work hours. If you can get away with poo poo that blatant for so long, it's not hard to imagine someone thinking they can just keep getting away with it.
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Oct 12, 2021 17:05
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chglcu posted:My linkedin feed has shown about an equal number of people leaving and starting at Blizzard recently. No idea why anyone would actually be joining now, really. I'm wondering if it's people taking a gamble that the troubles will blow over/be dealt with and if they do you're now set with a position at an established company.
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Nov 20, 2021 04:40
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Poil posted:Does blizzard really care if they completely brain drain all of the programmers and artists etc? Couldn't they just restructure into only having management, marketing and sales to sit on the licenses and subcontract out all the actual work? The idea is that if they allow every scrap of talent that actually built up the inherent value of those IPs to run away screaming, the value of those IPs will fade and become worthless as it becomes increasingly difficult to produce new entries with that IP that live up to or exceed previous entries. Blizzard in particular already has a glaring example of how easy it is to horribly mismanage and gently caress up a slam dunk with subcontracting with War3 Reforged(which, to be fair, was entirely on Blizzard because the subcontractors they hired were not incompetent). The present definition of "good business" doesn't give a poo poo about long term investments because they involve sometimes not making zoinks profits every quarter, so yeah they could just turn them into an IP farm house for a few years to squeeze some money out of people who are desperate for Diablo 4 or whatever until people stop caring about the new stuff they're making. For another example of this process, see Bioware! Kanos fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Nov 26, 2021 |
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Nov 26, 2021 16:32
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Keighley going up and giving an extremely vague "we do not tolerate abuse and harassment" statement after an introduction plastered with Ubisoft games and then immediately being followed up by the voice actor for the dude from Far Cry 6 to give an announcement sure was a moment.
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Dec 10, 2021 02:51
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MarcusSA posted:What did the voice guy from far cry do? The actor is guilty of nothing that I'm aware of and the issue isn't with him as a person. Ubisoft is almost as mired in poo poo as ABK so bookending your "no harassment" speech with an opening trailer featuring Ubisoft games before and then a presenter who is being primarily credited for his work headlining an Ubisoft game after is pretty lovely.
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Dec 10, 2021 03:56
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Yeah, company boards are only interested in things that will make the company money. Owning up to and addressing endemic sexual abuse in your company is hard and expensive and involves lots of bad press even if you make a real effort at it, which means most companies will simply try to ignore it and sweep it under the rug. Meanwhile NFTs are the hot new way to try to scam stupid people out of money so of course they're all excited and brainstorming on how to make those work.
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Dec 19, 2021 03:56
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Yeah, depending on the specific game's esports setup, a lot of esports players make a significant share of their money through prize takes, so if you cancel a big money tournament because the audience are a bunch of howling idiot morons you're seriously cutting into the players' potential bottom lines. That and it's really likely to backfire - if you cancel an event because the audience keeps yelling misogynistic poo poo at a female player, the fan reaction is probably going to be to blame the woman for ruining everything, not for the fans to police each other.
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Jan 8, 2022 11:42
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Endorph posted:people will find a way to be racist even with just emotes. twitch has already tried emote only stuff and proved this. if theres a monkey, spam it when theres a black guy on screen. if they get rid of that, spam a chicken. if they get rid of that, find an emote of a black guy making a funny looking face. if they get rid of that, etc, etc. Yeah, there's actually an ongoing controversy still sputtering on right this instant about racist shitheads on Twitch spamming the TriHard emote(which is simply an emote of black streamer Trihex smiling) whenever any black person appears on a stream for any reason. It's possible to moderate and wrangle large twitch chats in various ways and be relatively successful, but it generally requires an experienced mod team and use of stuff like subscriber or verified only chat functions, which are usually disliked because people see them as dampening enthusiasm. AGDQ tried sub-only chat and people were literally donating money to "free the plebes". It's also much harder to keep a handle on a chat if it's not an established community with a particular vibe and expectations of behavior - it's nearly impossible to effectively moderate a once-a-year popup stream like E3 or the VGAs or something.
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Jan 9, 2022 12:55
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Weedle posted:it's good to make uncharitable assumptions about terrible companies imo. they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt This thread is a lot more useful and interesting when it's a place where people post and discuss actual verifiable news instead of a screaming hate echo chamber of made up shitposts.
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Jan 11, 2022 21:12
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30.5 Days posted:https://kotaku.com/xbox-boss-not-interested-in-virtue-shaming-activision-1848334067 It's mostly disappointing because they couldn't even last long enough for everyone to forget about their "pooh pooh on you, activision" statements before revealing that they were lies.
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Jan 12, 2022 16:08
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Chillgamesh posted:Could they actually keep developing and updating WoW profitably if everyone who's playing it is playing through Gamepass? Aren't MMOs notoriously expensive to keep running? Feels like they might be better off not touching that one for the most part unless they just want to gut it MMOs are hugely expensive to develop and deploy in the first place, but they aren't expensive to maintain once you've made the initial investment outlay for your infrastructure, especially since you tend to need to run less infrastructure over time as your playerbase dwindles. There's tons of MMOs out there with vanishingly tiny playerbases that have been chugging along forever. They can be expensive to continually make new content for, but the tradeoff for that is that people are willing to buy full game priced expansion packs as often as you can produce them. One of the primary reasons why MMOs were such a development craze for so long is because it's understood that once you hit it big you can print money off the thing forever. Once A Realm Reborn made FFXIV popular and profitable, the game printed so much money for Square-Enix that it functionally bankrolled the rest of the company's embarrassing development boondoggles for years. Don't underestimate the value of a captive playerbase of addicts who are so habituated to playing your game that you can crank out $50 expansions every year and a half and they'll buy them regularly. This is basically the model Call of Duty follows, it's just that CoD markets them as sequels instead of expansions. WoW's decline is in part that Blizzard is extremely *bad* at producing quality content in a timely manner to feed this cycle, so people get frustrated and bored and break out of the Skinner Box because there's no new shinies to keep them in it. Kanos fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Jan 18, 2022 |
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Jan 18, 2022 16:05
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Chillgamesh posted:I'm not sure how ESO works but WoW is definitely structured like a classic sub fee MMO where it's gonna live or die based on the frequency of content updates. Dunno if you could do that with a buy-in payment model at any level. That said, I'm sure they've seen the success of the FFXIV free trial and probably have some ideas for how they could expand WoW's to rope in new players. WoW's largest content updates are paid expansions on top of the subscription model. Even if you rolled WoW subs into gamepass, people would still be shelling out $50-60 every time you dropped a new expac. If Microsoft somehow manages to shake Blizzard up and get it to produce content again, I'm confident WoW still has enough cachet among long-time players that they could absolutely revive its flagging fortunes and get people buying expacs on a constant basis again, especially with the fig leaf of "new management, see? no more sex pest problems here, new bosses in charge". Kanos fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Jan 18, 2022 |
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Jan 18, 2022 16:13
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Chillgamesh posted:So you think they're going to move to annual expansions with fewer content patches between expansion launches? Blizzard has literally tried to do this in the past(which led to the Warlords of Draenor disaster), so it's something that even Blizzard themselves recognizes would be massively profitable. They've just failed to execute said plan in the past, which I would likely blame on the fact that the company seems to be allergic to producing any sort of product or content in a timely manner(presumably because significant portions of their workforce were too busy drinking at work and going on cube crawls).
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Jan 18, 2022 16:17
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C-SPAN Caller posted:Why did vanilla WoW have such a great track record with updates anyways A fair number of the vanilla patches were heavily focused on game mechanics tweaks and class balance rather than large scale content deployment, and they were willing to fire those tweaks and balance changes out in smaller, more rapid patches instead of bundling them together into big omnibus patches. As the game evolved, the focus moved to fewer, larger patches, usually headlined by major content updates. This was done presumably because it's easier to keep your version control in order if you're not patching all of your servers every few weeks, especially for an operation the size of WoW.
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Jan 18, 2022 17:14
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Cythereal posted:Under the current CEO for the last five years or so, Microsoft's been pretty hands-off with the studios they acquire. They probably bought ActiBlizz for Candy Crush and Call of Duty, I'd be surprised if Blizzard specifically is affected much - they're small potatoes in ABK. This is repeated constantly but it isn't true. Blizzard doesn't make as much as King or Activision but they're still an extremely significant slice of the company and to say they're "small potatoes" is entirely incorrect. As of their Q3 earnings report of 2021, King reported $652m net revenue, Activision reported $641m net revenue, and Blizzard reported $478m net revenue. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-11-02-king-blizzard-push-activision-blizzard-to-q3-growth e: gently caress, beaten, but i posted numbers!!!
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Jan 18, 2022 17:26
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Eej posted:So some napkin math: in 2020 ABK had a market cap of $70bn and in 2022 MS bought them out for around that price which is like a 40% premium over its current value. The average takeover premium is about 30% so the current price is a bit overvalued. The move only make sense if MS is betting that ABK's net worth is depressed due to lawsuits and once everything is settled they will climb back up to its true value and beyond. Essentially the plan is they're buying the dip at no premium while also collecting a ton of valuable IP. There are probably other concerns here beyond "how soon will MS make money on this deal". This is part of Microsoft's apparent attempt to be the Disney of video games and isolate its competitors by simply buying up all of the most popular IPs; being able to permanently subsume household names like CoD into the Microsoft ecosystem and away from Sony might be worth some short term financial duress, especially since they're loving Microsoft and can handle said duress easily. Remember that MS was willing to shovel billions of dollars into the unprofitable tire fire that was the early Xbox division for over a decade before the 360 did gangbusters.
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Jan 18, 2022 17:40
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Srice posted:If you enjoy the multiplayer you're probably gonna jump to the new game each year because that's the new hotness everyone will be playing (And now that Warzone exists and is a big deal, that's another tangible benefit to staying up to date with the series). Yeah, it's more accurate to recognize that the CoD series is effectively three different studios putting out games in the same genre on a tri-yearly rotating basis than a Madden situation. "Call of Duty" is less of a singular game series and more of an umbrella term for a specific style of gameplay subgenre at this point.
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Jan 18, 2022 22:41
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Anno posted:I have what’s probably a dumb question - the title of this thread implies it’s for discussing a certain type of game industry news, but the discussion here seems to indicate that it’s also a general industry news/numbers kind of thread. Can anyone clarify? It's about dysfunction(typically of the gross kind), but it's kind of sprawled out in the last few pages because the Microsoft acquisition of Extremely Dysfunctional And lovely Company actiblizz has lots of ramifications. People started talking about CoD because of questions like "what makes it worthwhile for Microsoft to acquire such a stinking shitpile?"
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Jan 18, 2022 23:09
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Yeah, people absolutely do buy mythic carries(and I used to participate in carry runs from the carrying side back when I played), and the way it works is that people who want carries but don't have the gold on hand will buy tokens for cash, sell them for gold on the auction house, and then use that gold to pay for the carry. The people getting paid/providing the carry receive the gold and either use it for the things you'd use gold for(auction house stuff, mounts, whatever) or buying tokens to cash out into game time/balance. At no point do tokens directly change hands, and gold cannot be rendered entirely worthless because you explicitly cannot use tokens as a medium of direct exchange without several degrees of removal. I expect that the entire scheme is financially neutral or relatively small net gain to Blizzard, but the real purpose was to internalize and regulate the previously external process of gold buying/real money transactions, which existed since the game's infancy but was done through sketchy third party sites that generated enormous headaches in customer service via people getting scammed in various ways. e: You also can't even hoard tokens without having multiple accounts to store them, because there's a hard cap on how many you can hold on one account at once, and it's a very, very low cap. IIRC it's 20, which is too low to allow even slight market manipulation without running dozens to hundreds of accounts. Kanos fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 16:47
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BULBASAUR posted:Netflix gaming is a joke like Stadia, Luna, etc. Its been time tested that tech companies can't buy their way into the games business, despite their 'best' efforts Rarity posted:Microsoft at least tried to buy into the business properly by investing in a console (not a fake console like the Stadia, a real one) and even they were running at a loss for years before managing to break out with the 360. Netflix Gaming is barely a drop in the ocean for the level of investment needed to establish yourself. Yeah, it's important to emphasize that microsoft WAS a joke for like a decade after the original Xbox launch. The original Xbox was never, ever profitable and they were at best a trailing insurgent competitor - the reason why they eventually became a real competitor at the table is that they had brute persistence and the infinite wells of Microsoft cash to draw on to soak those lumps and beatings until they got established, at which point their biggest competitor Sony's unforced errors with the PS3 gave them the window they needed for the 360 to be a gangbuster success. For a lot of these big IP holder companies it makes a lot more sense to simply license out their IPs and collect passive cash from that than it does for them to spend a gorillion dollars spinning up their own development houses and trying to figure out how to make video games that don't suck rear end from scratch.
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Jan 19, 2022 20:52
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Splorange posted:The funny thing about Kotick is that he cares so much about his reputation. As long as he isn't officially let go for being a slimy rear end in a top hat, he can go on and pretend he isn't a slimy rear end in a top hat. He doesn't give a single poo poo about his reputation among the proles. Some dudes on reddit calling him Bobby Nodick and photoshopping devil horns on him, or Jim Sterling making a video on how much of a douchebag he is; these things don't even register on the radar of someone with his level of influence and money. The reputation he cares about is his reputation for being a super effective business guy, which is under threat now. It cannot be overstated - for the last decade plus Bobby Kotick has been the very model of a massively successful CEO. He took a mediocre company and exploded its size and profit margins to a ludicrous degree and has developed a seemingly sustainable profit model(churning CoD games) in an industry famous for turbulent booms and busts. Him being a terrible person doesn't matter at all, because as far as the shareholders and board is concerned he has been doing his job impeccably, and I suspect that is just as much of a reason that they've been hesitant to remove him as contract clauses and good old boys' clubs. Now that all of the horrible poo poo that has piled up over the years is threatening the money printing machine and miring the company in bad PR and scandal, Kotick's reputation for being a super effective CEO among people who matter is being hit, which is why you see him trying to push the blame onto stuff like Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 being held up because those can be explained away as failures of the employees rather than failures of the executives.
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Jan 20, 2022 18:53
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SubponticatePoster posted:Personally I think that time has passed, you've got a lot more alternatives for shootymans now. With the cost of current gen consoles and a lack of high-end graphics cards due to crypto miners I don't think people are going to jump ship from PS5 or purchase a gaming PC just to play CoD. People were sure that Minecraft would become xbox/pc exclusive after they bought Mojang and that the PS version wouldn't get any more patches or updates. Turns out they were wrong, because MS likes money. What alternatives? Call of Duty is far and away the largest FPS franchise that exists, especially in the context of consoles. A 30%+ decline in CoD sales still puts it an order of magnitude ahead of its immediate competitors, and the closest franchise to a credible competitor in the same subgenre, Battlefield, has managed to trip over its own feet on a nearly constant basis. I don't think MS would make exclusive any ongoing games - they didn't cut off Minecraft, and they won't cut off Warzone - but it's entirely realistic that they might decide that further entries will be PC/Xbox exclusive. Your argument that "people won't jump ship just to play CoD" works the other way, where the scarcity of hardware means that if a prospective buyer is only going to buy one gaming platform, they might lean towards the one they can play CoD on.
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Jan 21, 2022 04:42
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SubponticatePoster posted:If that's the case though, it'd be in their best interests to say that now. "Just to let you know, after 2022 (or whenever the existing contracts run out) future CoD's will be Xbox exclusive so you should take that into consideration when buying a new console!" So those who haven't scooped one up can factor that into their purchasing decision. Not say it's remaining multiplat. They don't own the company yet.
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Jan 21, 2022 06:08
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DanielCross posted:His Golden Parachute has been discussed to death here, but I'm genuinely curious about the non-financial fallout he might face. Like, surely his name is radioactive by now no matter how much cash he gets on the way out, right? I wouldn't bet on it. You don't reach and maintain a position of power like that for an extended period of time without making a lot of high level friends and acquaintances who will be totally willing to overlook this kind of thing. To become truly radioactive to other rich people you generally need to participate in a scheme that fucks over other rich people, which he absolutely has not. The Microsoft buyout forcing him out is likely going to be the only consequence the man faces for any of this.
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Jan 21, 2022 19:49
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genovefa fedelmid posted:I don't really get how unions work in the US. Here you join the union that is appropriate for your job. Your employer never knows unless you tell them because it's none of their business. You stay in that union while ever you stay in that field. It seems unions are workplace specific in the US? Except there are also unions that seem like the way they are here too, like the entertainment industry unions. Why don't the games industry workers as a whole make a union similar to the actors, writers, crew unions that seem pretty powerful in Hollywood? There has been a sustained century plus long effort in the US to stamp unions out of existence and tons of our law structure is built to suppress and break them up. Since national unions are generally formed and built by the combination/coalescing of smaller, local unions, this constant suppression has meant that very few industries in the US ever formed enough local unions with enough local power to form larger organizations here. As some examples of suppression tactics, we have a lot of states which are "right to work", which means that you have the "right to work" in any profession without joining a union, even if that profession is unionized. This cuts off an enormous source of worker solidarity in a given profession, allows companies to specifically hire anti-union or union-apathetic workers to shrink the unionized working populace, and starves the unions of dues required to keep running. We also have "at will" employment states, which allow employers to fire employees for basically any reason they want at any given time as long as it's for a "non-retaliatory, non-discriminatory" reason. Did you start unionizing your workplace? Oops, you're fired. No, they didn't fire you because you're unionizing, because that would be retaliatory. They fired you because you were five minutes late twice two years ago. We also have plenty of examples of companies that are willing to shut down entire local locations and franchises if workers show that they're willing to unionize. Starbucks in particular famously "temporarily" closed down several profitable franchise because the baristas at those franchises put together local unions. These large companies are willing to soak large short term losses if it means they retain the ability to treat their employees like indentured servants. When you take these suppression efforts, toss in the implied threat of "If you unionize you will lose your job either by us firing you directly or by us simply shutting down the business and moving it somewhere without a union", and add them in to the decades upon decades of anti-union propaganda along these lines...   It means you get a huge chilling effect on union membership and activism that gives corporations all the power. The powerful unions that do exist in the US mostly - with a few exceptions - exist in industries or professions that are old enough that unions formed before stuff like right to work and at will employment became common and before "socialism" became a dirty word in the US. It's really easy for people on Twitter and stuff to go "drat they should unionize", but trying to openly unionize in the US is really dangerous and you are at a serious risk of being rendered unemployed and potentially unemployable if you're recognized as a ringleader. The workers who do spearhead new union organization efforts are incredibly brave. Kanos fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Jan 27, 2022 |
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Jan 27, 2022 01:29
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Craptacular! posted:This isn't quite right. A place that requires joining a union and can only employ union members is called a "closed shop", and even ask union people and they'll tell you that there are aren't closed shops in America since the Taft–Hartley Act largely outlawed them in 1947. However, working at a place and NOT joining the union still requires paying dues to the union that's not representing you without a right to work law, so most people join the union instead of paying them for no benefit. This is specifically correct but I was simplifying for the sake of someone from outside of the US who is interested in the subject but is probably not interested in reading legal minutiae. To expand the point slightly, as Craptacular says, we passed a national law in 1947 that forbade "closed shops", which were union-only places of employment. If those places were fully unionized, it was still allowed for the union to charge non-union employees working there union fees, because in theory even the non-union members were benefiting from the union's organization efforts at that employer - this was a huge driver in union recruitment, because if you're going to be paying union dues you might as well join the union. Right-to-work removed the ability for unions to charge non-union members, which allowed employers to divide and conquer using propaganda like the Delta posters I linked above.
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Jan 27, 2022 01:50
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Studio posted:The problem with NFTs in larger games is that game companies don't really want a limited supply of anything they're selling. It's easier to make an outfit that can be resold for a decade and can be sold to hundreds of thousands of players instead of 600 expensive hats to 600 people - maybe. Most games have mechanics where big whales can spend a whole bunch of money to get something really juicy too, but never limited. On top of that, unless game companies can get a chunk of the resell, they absolutely don't want to support that. Yeah this is the thing that makes me puzzled at why these companies are even bothering(besides pleasing idiot brainless investors/stockholders who hear about shiny new thing and want to know why the company isn't investing in it). There are tons of incredibly tried and true ways of fleecing tons and tons of money out of a playerbase that don't require having to commit to any blockchain poo poo. We already have loot boxes and battle passes and paid cosmetics. How is it possibly to Ubisoft's advantage to make NFT hats in their current FPS when they could just sell normal cosmetic hats and be completely free of any implied long-term commitment to said NFTs? Kanos fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Jan 30, 2022 |
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Jan 30, 2022 15:20
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I'm honestly surprised Bungie sold for that much. Destiny is absolutely decent-sized property but the plans to make it The Next New Big IP kind of fizzled out and the company has very little else in the way of established IP.
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Jan 31, 2022 19:10
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