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Blizzard could've made a ton of easy money treating Overwatch as a merchandising opportunity by continuing to release things like animated shorts and other things that keeps the casual community engaged instead of taking a year of furious lore brainstorming to come up with "Soldier is Gay"
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Sep 30, 2021 10:28
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Studio posted:Second time this post has popped up and it's kinda silly imo. Video games have bonkers potential profit margins, while physical merchandise always has the costs associated with physical goods. Meanwhile, a Mercy skin can just make money, forever. Game companies really only care about bringing in players through associated media, not the profits in that media or merchandising. I'm counting skins as merchandising. My point was that they squandered an opportunity to develop a narrative universe that a ton of people were interested in. They dabbled with this with the various story events that had skins tied to them. Heck there's even two Nendos of Mercy, one of her default skin and one of her cobalt skin. In any case for the first year or two they were putting out animated shorts and comics and the fanbase ate it up. Don't know if it's entirely related but when they pivoted to eSports that mostly dried up. That's about the time I noticed a lot of my casual friends disengaged from the game, meta be damned.
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Oct 1, 2021 00:32
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Don't worry, if you scratch the surface of the FF14 population the bad comes oozing out just like anywhere else. It's just better behaved in public.
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Oct 4, 2021 01:12
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Minrad posted:the painting removal, in context, is perfectly reasonable. mostly the way it's being told to people from third parties is done with an agenda to cover that up or make it sound like all paintings of women are being removed, which leads to a lot of the weird takes about it. people just looking for excuses to get outraged basically. Thinking about how for over a decade the community accepted term for skimpy outfits is called Slut Mogs and one of the biggest WoW streamers is called Slootbag and maybe the censorers had the right idea.
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Oct 5, 2021 07:44
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Tarezax posted:afaik this is the way FF14 rolls. For example, dudes also get to wear 2B's sexy thigh high boots Yeah but the rest of the Nier raid models are almost completely unique across male/female models which sucks.
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Oct 5, 2021 10:02
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The Gadfly posted:People are going to complain no matter what, so my opinion is that any game should just stick to the original artist(s) vision, and let people either buy the game if they like it, or not buy the game if they don't like it. That doesn't make sense in the context of an MMO. How do you vote with your wallet for side content that you wish had more options when it comes at part of your monthly sub?
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Oct 5, 2021 16:39
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I suppose you could Not Buy the bust enhancing Bavarian Beer Maid female-only outfit in the FFXIV cash shop but it's not like Not Buying is an actual measurable metric.Unlucky7 posted:Ahem Yeah most of that stuff including Dragoon AF1 are ported over from 1.0. Most subsequent stuff has been pretty tame even though they continue to lock new stuff to gender.
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Oct 5, 2021 17:44
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Considering how many billions he has siphoned off to himself and shareholders and how big Activision-Blizzard has grown over the years, yes he has made objectively good business decisions. It just so happens that things that are good for business are awful for workers and everyone else.
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Nov 17, 2021 01:03
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William Bear posted:Why would investors be satisfied by Kotick? ATVI has had it's stock price decline 26% since the beginning of 2021. The S&P is up 27% over the same period. Probably because of this:  ATVI spiked to about $18 on July 2008 when it merged with Blizzard and peaked at $101 this year in February before settling down to a little north of $90 until the scandals started breaking. The S&P went up 312% in the same period.
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Nov 17, 2021 02:11
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Unironically it's starting to look like repeated scandals from untouchable leadership has very tangible results on productivity because everyone is too busy printing resumes and posting on twitter about what a shithole the company has become. This then gets compounded by key people leaving and hiring basically outright stopping. Next thing you know it's taking you 4 years to develop OW2, which is a glorified expansion pack It's not like it matters because investors have already reaped huge returns from ATVI. Making a Good Product can be pretty orthogonal to what's best for shareholders when a company is publicly traded.
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Nov 17, 2021 02:20
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bloodysabbath posted:How does “literally threatened to kill a woman while having the resources and connections to actually do it” not equate to for-cause, especially after admitting to it on the record? Hate to say it but I think people in power just don't respect women as human beings
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Nov 17, 2021 21:15
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Herstory Begins Now posted:feudal lords were still accountable to kings, which is a key difference here Also we don't have a pretender to the throne of Activision Blizzard King being violently installed in Bobby Kotick's place after losing the confidence of the court Well, not yet anyway
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Nov 26, 2021 17:41
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Does remind me that Nintendo is almost unique in the games industry for actually retaining their talent. Like, some years ago in a thread some folks looked up the folks in the credits of Mario 64 and almost all of them still work there, or have retired or died. I think it's more common in Japanese companies, but still- actually retaining talent and not blowing up the company on a regular basis to play the numbers game is rare enough in the industry. Doesn't help that studios kept getting bought out and strip-mined for talent and IP and as a result whenever a good team does get put together there's a race to scatter them to the wind ASAP. And the horrible treatment of employees, harassment and sexism probably doesn't help when it comes to retaining talent- it's rare that the misogynistic cockhead fratboy wannabes have much actual talent after all. Japanese corporate lifer culture almost killed Square Enix when the guy who did FF11 made FF14 without looking at any other MMOs that existed on the market and created such a money pit that it almost blew up the company. FF15 began as FF13 Versus, a project started under Tetsuya Nomura (the guy who freakin' loved belts and also was in charge of Kingdom Hearts) in 2006 who hosed around so long that FF14 came out before his side project was even close to done and they had to kick him out in 2012 so they could release FF15 in 2016. It's insane they wasted 10 years to make that game. RagnarokZ posted:Isn't Destiny 2's engine notoriously known for bloat, taking up waaaay more space than contemporary MMOs? Destiny 2 was intended to be second in a trilogy of games with associated DLC over a 10 year contract with Activision. As a result it is absolutely not intended to be a forever game so they made a lot of shortcuts and it's safe to assume that the Activision helper studios made even more shortcuts (allegedly the first two expansion packs, which were made by Activision studios, just duplicated a lot of in game resources out of laziness?). Same goes for the infamous Sunsetting of older guns. They had made very strong guns with the intention that in a few years everyone's inventory pools would be reset with Destiny 3 so they wouldn't have to account for mudflation but then Destiny 3 essentially got canceled so they were stuck with guns that were basically 8/10 or 9/10 of potential maximum stats with not much room to make more guns that were good enough to be worth farming. By limiting their item level they intended people to farm up new guns every year with different combinations of stats and perks to keep things lively like a Magic: The Gathering card set rotation but Destiny players got really attached to their guns that they farmed and yelled real loudly until Bungie relented and said No More Sunsetting. So the old guns are still sunset and basically unusable outside of (non high-end) PvP but now they had designed an entire year's worth of guns under the assumption that these guns would be sunset after a year so we again have the problem of insanely high stat guns just floating around in perpetuity with the only option being make Even Better Guns to make you want to farm them.
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Nov 29, 2021 23:17
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To be fair they've been trying to get ahead of the story since 2018 shortly after the new CEO got the job.
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Dec 12, 2021 00:53
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FF14 money is being funneled down the NFT toilet which is some poo poo
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Jan 10, 2022 04:16
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FF11 made Square so much money they let the guy who made it have carte blanche with FF14 and he decided to not look at anything in the MMO world for influence because he got high on his farts and the rest is history
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Jan 10, 2022 10:05
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genovefa fedelmid posted:I'd also like to know who these good bosses are, tbh. Well we already know one of them, Jeff "tigole bitties" Kaplan
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Jan 13, 2022 10:49
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Mokinokaro posted:Yeah Kaplan had a reputation for sticking up for his team. Jeff's official farewell message on the Blizzard website was completely uncapitalized and like two paragraphs long so both possibilities seem believable.
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Jan 13, 2022 14:21
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Dick Burglar posted:I do not remember this at all--as in, I don't remember the message, period, not that I am doubting your claims. Is there any record of it still around? Yeah it's from here: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/overwatch/23665015/new-leadership-for-overwatch  Which exudes amazing "i dont give a poo poo anymore" energy that belongs in a banme thread
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Jan 14, 2022 04:02
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WoW's content cycle is hosed right now. FFXIV gives you 4 raid bosses every 6 months and some random stuff you'll do a few times before you're bored but at least it's like clockwork.
Eej fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Jan 18, 2022 |
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Jan 18, 2022 16:39
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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.
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Jan 18, 2022 17:31
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The 7th Guest posted:i hate this news. I hate that bobby kotick will continue to oversee and do nothing about harassment in his company for at least the next year and a half if not longer. i hate that this will go through without a block, i hate that this was done purely for money and opportunity and a stock bump, i hate that employees who already are fighting for their rights now have to dread whether they'll even keep their jobs after the merger goes through, i hate acquisitions in general, and i hate that the whole thing feels like a reward for activision rather than a punishment. This is realistically the most likely way to get rid of Bobby though
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Jan 18, 2022 18:21
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:okay hear me out: Well we'd have months maybe years more of this thread spinning around in circles while Bobby Kotick and friends refuse to get rid of him I guess?
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Jan 18, 2022 18:33
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That's some crazy fanfiction about how WoW tokens work and nothing to do with reality
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Jan 19, 2022 16:40
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Endorph posted:video game movies have been tried a bunch and very rarely been a success. there's a ton of flops, and the biggest successes are fairly modest. like, what, the resident evil movies? I will not stand for this Mortal Kombat erasure
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Jan 20, 2022 02:33
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dr_rat posted:All the inclusion and respect stuff is just corporate BS obviously. MS only goes so far as they need to for pr reasons and make money. But so far MS has been pretty good at being pretty hands off with successful studios and just let them do what they do. AFAIK Microsoft does dump a lot of money into accessibility which I'm not sure actually translates into big PR wins in video gaming? https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/1482832513294766080 https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/1482834907663532032 And I don't think you can get a dev more cynical than ropekid
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Jan 20, 2022 18:39
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Vegetable posted:If this free them up to make more art instead of printing t-shirts or some other resource-intensive knick-knack, then they should totally go for it. Actually this is the most resource intensive thing you can make
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Jan 28, 2022 19:12
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Destiny 2 is absolutely playable nowadays and it's super fun despite the onboarding process. It is, as they say, in its best state it's ever been in.FishMcCool posted:So that's Destiny and... what else? I get the irony of the name behind Halo going Sony exclusive, but it's not like they own the IP anymore. It's more consolidation, for sure, but how does that qualify as 'seismic'? Bungie is working on a new IP named Matter that has a 2025 estimated release date. They also took in a $100m payment from NetEase to do *something*.
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Jan 31, 2022 19:56
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It means Indie Games are more or less dead as a long term thing now. The big companies have enough liquidity to just throw stupid amounts of money at smaller devs that they can't refuse. If not MS or Sony then Tencent or whatever.
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Jan 31, 2022 20:11
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To reiterate the point: you can only become so successful on your own until someone rolls up with money bags.
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Jan 31, 2022 20:21
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Craptacular! posted:Meanwhile, Devolver continues to have insane year (Fall Guys) after insane year (Inscryption) due to developers with less than 500 employees. Doesn't Epic own Mediatonic now though?
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Jan 31, 2022 20:30
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Kanos posted:This is an insane take. The entire point of indies is that an indie studio can form out of one guy in his home office, or two people in their garage, or a group of friends who decide to put together a game together. Big companies might sometimes buy the largest successes but there's nearly a constant churn of new indies to replace them when they "sell out". There is an endless tide of new indie games releasing on Steam every single day; 99% of them are trash almost no one will ever play, but occasionally you get big whammies that rise from the pack. Yeah and I'm saying that long term existence as an indie dev is in question now that they will just swoop down and grab you if you get too big. Of course people will continue to make indie games but continued success means you're gonna reach a ceiling where you have to start walking away from a lot of money on the table. I never said indie game development is dead, just the idea of a long term greatly successful independent game development company.
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Feb 1, 2022 01:21
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kirbysuperstar posted:I don't think the acquisition of Bungie, a company that's been around since 1992 or something, with 900 employees, partly controlled by various megacorps at different times of their live, signifies the death of indie game companies in totality, Eej. I think it's just a sign of the times, with how much money the big players have to throw around now. The Bungie deal predates MS buying Activision but that certainly gave Sony an extra sense of urgency to close it. Epic is on a buying spree, acquiring game devs and creation tool companies alike. Everyone's taking their covid profits and consolidating the industry. So again, to reiterate to all the bad faith posting: growing out into a large independent company is increasingly unlikely now because you'll get bought out by the big dogs. cheetah7071 posted:I hear that indie devs who get a breakout hit will use that to fund full time professional game development, thus shedding their indie status. Truly a horrifying state of affairs. Indie games are dead. I mean there's literally an ongoing concern about the everyone being bought out so... yes it is a concerning state of affairs?
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Feb 1, 2022 02:29
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cheetah7071 posted:In music or whatever it just literally means independently published but that's such a meaningless statement in games these days that it just means small studio run by people who don't have game development as their day job, or didn't until the Kickstarter payout hit I mean sure you can mean independent as the original meaning or as a vibe but fairly large (for indie dev) companies like Obsidian existed on their own for a while before getting bought out. Magmarashi posted:Yeah man who is going to want to found an indie studio and make games now that there's a chance a studio with more money than sense might drop a fat stack of bills in their lap what in the gently caress are you talking about?? Starting a studio in order to get bought out is different from starting a studio to create games without a controlling interest over you.
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Feb 1, 2022 03:12
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:I don't think ditching discord will be as easy as ditching mumble, skype, teamspeak, or the like all were. Discord will absolutely be replaced by something better and the tragedy is that unlike forums or even reddit all that accumulated knowledge will be gone because who the gently caress is going to remember which channel on which server has pins about a specific thing
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Feb 3, 2022 18:04
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Sleeping Dogs owned cause HK cinema is founded on dumb cops and triads poo poo so there's so much to mine. I enjoyed my soon to be dying language being relevant for immersion for once.
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May 5, 2022 00:33
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The funny thing is that "healing is for girls" is actually represented in the analysis where 0 is all male and 5 is all female, they come in at a score of 3.33 while tank and DPS are basically equal at 2.1.
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May 13, 2022 21:26
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MarcusSA posted:Feelin pretty smug about my female whm in ff14 rn it's not a good thing!!
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May 13, 2022 21:43
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Personally I'm interested to see how the tool works outside of the hands of white people. Like is Egyptian still a 7.0 rating if you're a game dev situated in Cairo? Genshin Impact must get crazy diversity score for having a whole nation of Germans.
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May 14, 2022 00:50
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Realistically the screenshot was taken before all that happened Alternatively just like literally anyone who still plays the game the devs still call him McCree.
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May 14, 2022 00:57
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