you know what’s funny to me, that when large organizations manipulate the apparent consensus on Reddit about a topic, that’s “clever marketing” and “innovative campaign techniques”.
When a bunch of random people collectively organize to do it suddenly it’s a “dangerous”
public companies do not necessarily have a Fiduciary duty to the shareholders, let alone one to increase value. Any that they did have (based on the laws and how they are incorporated in a given jurisdiction) would also be applicable to a private company. Private companies also have shareholders, the shares are just not traded publicly.
You’re probably thinking of the theory of “Shareholder Primacy” but that is a theory not a legal reality, although some insist it is based on a questionable interpretation of the precedent set by dodge vs ford motor company.
Public companies can be run in what ever way the board/shareholders see fit.
Plenty of privately owned companies do the same things so I don’t think it can be chalked up to an issue with publicly traded companies.
Because then tech would have to admit they’re moving in to a period of stability rather than a period of constant growth.
The big companies and start ups need to prove they’ve still got “revolutionary” potential otherwise the stock values start to drop. And lower stock values means less bonuses for leadership.
See, in a lot of games generas I could look past performance issues, but with city builders? Yah, nah, good performance is kind of core. It’s basically impossible to make cities of much more than 40,000 unless you have a monstrosity of a CPU, and even then your game will be chugging. Scale of city is fundamentally limited by the performance, you can just make a larger, more interesting city in cities skylines at the moment. There are some interesting game play changes from from the first, but not interesting enough to make up for the limitations to scale.
Victoria 3 also has some big performance issues. Like paradox games have always been known to slow down in the late game, but you basically can’t get through the end game in Victoria 3 unless you’re willing to run the game in the background. Again, this is even on good, modern, mid range CPUs.
I love the flying car example because it reveals a huge issue with the whole “tech will get better” idea. People are still trying to make flying cars happen but it’s running in to the same fundamental issues; large things that are mechanically complex, energy intensive, and moving at high speeds in a crowded urban environments are just too expensive and dangerous.
There is no way around the physical realities, no clever trick or efficiency that will push it over some threshold of practicality.
How much will it affect ranking in the search algorithm? When will they announce the asking price? What about legitimate sites that cannot pony up that inevitable price?
Call me conspiratorial but this seems like a way to further subjugate civil society to cooperate society. . “Oh well, they couldn’t make a profit to pay for the blue check, so they’re not legitimate”
I mean there are huge issues with tech, but like, they’re in no way limited to kids… nor does it seem to affect them particularly strongly.
I don’t think it is so much that executives cannot learn, it’s more that their priorities are consistent predictable margins, not the overall health of the industry.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma, most of the benefit of succeeding with something original is for the industry as a whole; proving certain concepts and ideas are viable, revitalizing public interest in the medium, ect. But the risks are mainly carried by a single publisher or studio, if it flops, they loose money.
So the general trend is to avoid risk and maximize predictable profit, this shrinks the over all profitability of the industry by fatiguing public interest and willingness to pay, but maximizes safety for individual publishers and studios.
Having a low budget segment that can afford to take risk on new ideas is key to preventing industry decline, but the industry has moved away from that towards the highest possible revenue generating films. The publishers and studios that used to do that have all ether folded or moved up to bigger budget higher return options, and they’ve pulled up the ladder behind them by making it so difficult to get indie projects in to theaters.
The same thing could happen in the video game industry. Luckily the indie game market exists, and they’re still able to get their products distributed on large platforms like consoles if they prove a big enough hit on the PC market. It is getting harder though, and more and more, small budget, small team games are getting relegated to PC where there is just a smaller market. Ideally, consoles should make it easier to get small indie games onto their platform, or more people should start playing on PCs.
Shocker, self driving “taxi” service is a nuisance.
Almost like the solution to car based issues isn’t “more advanced cars”, but “less cars”.
I suppose in my mind AAA refers more to certain group of publishers and parent companies. A certain way of structuring companies and doing business. As supposed to a metric of the budget needed for a game.
That’s actually kind of shocking to see that indie games have surpassed AAA in revenue. I expected that was kind of inevitable given how uninspired and criticized modern AAA stuff is. But to actually see it already happened is cool.
It’s been shocking to see the amount of financial industry money and control at some of the bigger studio, and the way they talk about the future of the industry is disturbing. Although, if the money isn’t rolling in, or there are other parts of the market making more money, it makes me hopeful that finance will loosen it’s grip on these companies and let them make good projects rather than chasing arbitrary metrics.
This is a shame, I haven’t played a sims game in a while and I remember them quite fondly. The latest EA sims stuff has just been utter micro transaction slop, or at least last I checked. I hate to see a smaller studio that’s not working through one of bastard publishers get hit like this.
I’m a lot more patient with paradox than I am with other publishers. Their focus still seems on producing interesting games rather than chasing “maximized revenue”. There are realities to being a publisher though. if a studio is failing to produce something and your financials are limited, there’s only so much risk you can take on extending deadlines, and writing something off for a quick boost to financials is a alluring sirens call.
I have my issues with how paradox studios design is affected by their DLC model, but I don’t think there’s a better way to bring in ongoing revenue to fund further development.
It’s a mess, all of it, but it is a results of the context and system they exist with in, not necessarily the will of those making the calls at paradox. Paradox tends to do a better job of existing with in the system without making pure slop than other big publishers, so they have my patience for that.
Yah I suppose that’s true, broad cast was a thing, suppose that’s the equivalent for free to play or something.
I could definitely see how cotton could be used in some pretty heinous ways, maybe not by definition slurrs, but still. Given the historical context of the United States In particular.
I think the larger issue here is that you can’t compare music or TV shows to games, at least not in how people interact with them.
TV has always been a subscription model, the only difference with streaming is getting to choose when and what you watch. Games have always ether been pay per play or pay for a copy, with the notable exception of free to play or MMOs that require a subscription. Music is an odd case because it’s split between two models historically, radio and records/CDs.
I generally watch a show or movie once, maybe I’ll rewatch it if I really like it, similar for music. If i loose acces to it because a streaming service drops it, shame, but no big deal. But I’ll often go back and play a game for hundreds of hours, loosing acess to a game is a much bigger deal. People generally put a lot more time and effort in when they play a game, owning it makes more sense in that context. Personally, I don’t buy that many games over all, having access to thousands of titles doesn’t mean much if I’ll only ever play a handful. Something like Game pass is more expensive than the rate i buy new games at and loosing access to a game that i routinely play is a legitimate concern with a streaming model, ether because i stop paying the subscription or they decide to take a title off the service.
Ugh, this is all so pathetic.
Bending over backwards to accommodate the loudest idiots in the room because they complain when they face consequences for their actions.
I had an idea recently of describing these chatbots as holograms.
Complex ideas and concepts are being flattened. Depth, a dimension if you will, in the form of context and conception, is being removed.
Like how a 3D object gets flattened on to a 2D plane, a hologram.
Signalis mentioned?
because they weren’t throwing money at it until it was fun. They were throwing money at it trying to make a new “brand” and live service money printer.