paultimate14

@paultimate14@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Krafton claim former Subnautica 2 leads have "resorted to litigation to demand a payday they haven't earned"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, the easy analysis is just to ask “what would be in Krafton’s best interest?”

  Anyone who has paid attention to the videogames industry will tell you that games releasing in an unfinished state has been a problem throughout history, and one that has gotten much worse in recent decades as the budgets have increased and the ability to patch games post-launch over the Internet has granted an opportunity for redemption. Recent Mario Party entries, No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk, Redfall, Concord. Some games get salvaged and some games get dropped. In all of these cases, the community consensus seems to be “wow these games should have been delayed, the publishers were greedy to sell an unfinished product without labeling it as pre-release or beta properly”. So my gut reaction when I hear that any publisher is delaying a game is not to think “wow that’s a greedy publisher”, but rather “wow it’s good to see a publisher actually caring about the quality of their product who is willing to incur more costs and delay their revenue in order to get it right”.

  Delaying a game is expensive. This is going to incur another year’s worth of development time. Another year’s worth of salaries and associates payroll costs, licenses, office space, all sorts of ongoing costs. Krafton would have been expecting to see revenue from the game hit 2025, and the studio to begin work on their next game, which is now getting pushed back. If Krafton has any debt that means they have increased interest costs. Their equity will suffer from this.

  Let’s say that Subnautica 2 WAS in a great, finished, release-ready state whenever they fired the founders. The costs of delaying the game by a year are going to far exceed the costs of bonuses. Afaik the actual structure of the bonus has not been released, but typically these sorts of things would be structured in a way where the bonus would not have been paid if the game didn’t meet it’s sales targets

  There are two pieces of information the public does not have which I think are necessary to make a judgement here. What was the structure of this promised bonus, and what was the state of the game at the time that Krafton decided to delay it? While I don’t have those answers, both Krafton and the founders do. Looking at their motivations, I just have a hard time seeing why Krafton would look at a fantastic, complete game ready for release and say “nah, we would rather sit on this thing for a year”.

  The only alternative explanation I can come up with is that Krafton wants to stuff the game full of micro transactions or other live service elements. But that’s just pure speculation on my part: even the listed founders have not mentioned anything about that.

  I am generally inclined to side with individual artists over these giant corporations, but what the founders are claiming just doesn’t add up. And what Krafton is claiming - that the founders basically abandoned the game to work on other things and did a pretty terrible job- seems like something that would be easily either proven or disproven in court. So either Krafton is lying just to try to get good PR for a few months until the discovery happens, or Krafton expects to be vindicated in court.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Stop Killing Games’: Demands for game ownership must also include workers’ rights⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I keep seeing this same website posted on Lemmy and it’s always the same thing. A click bait title that makes unnecessary connections between two things attached to an article that just regurgitates basic concepts without adding anything. All the paragraphs are one, maybe two sentences so the whole thing feels like reading a series of tweets instead of an actual article.

  Maybe it would bother me less if this was poised less as the opinion of the authors and instead was just objective reporting on SKG. SKG has press materials available for that purpose that The Conversation is choosing not to use. Heck, they could even include some statements from game publishers or government officials. It’s still a good thing that they are spreading awareness of the movement, but I’m really confused as to what kind of person consumes and enjoys this website.

  It’s frustrating because I largely agree with their sentiments. I support Stop Killing Games, and I support worker’s rights, but this article is just… Bad. It doesn’t even make a connection between SKG and the working environemt- it just makes a claim that such a connection exists and leaves that claim unsubstantiated. Such a connection DOES exist, these authors just fail to communicate that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox Drops Work on ‘Contraband’ Video Game After Four Years⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Is Microsoft’s new strategy just to cancel every other game so everyone has nothing left to buy but Call of Duty?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure what you are saying here?

  Are you saying that Valve and Itch did not respond to Collective Shout? Well, so did I… My comment was saying they were justified in doing so.

  Are you saying Collective Shout are not religious nutjobs? That’s an easy mistake to make because their website and branding does a really good job of trying to hide it from a casual researcher, but the founder Melissa Reist is pretty obviously a devout Catholic- she gives interviews with Catholic organizations, appears at Catholic youth camps, and describes herself as a “pro-life feminist”, which is of course an oxymoron. She’s definitely a religious nutjob.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As they should have. Why should Steam or Itch.Io have to respond to every tiny cult of religious nutjibs making ridiculous requests?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay your first two paragraphs are just ad hominen attacks at this point. You aren’t refuting anything by just claiming I’m backpedalling on… Something? And just assuming the other people didn’t read the article when in fact it seems they did and are also making great points that you’re also just refusing to talk about. Like… Why did you even post this if you didn’t want to actually talk about points, methodology, potential explanations, etc?

  Xbox is just plain doing badly. They’ve tried a lot of different approaches to change that over the years: leaning hard into alternative control schemes with Kinect, trying to push Xbox as a general multimedia machine rather than just a videogame console, pushing hard to develop small indie studios, then pushing for mega-acquisitions of publishers and developers. I’m not even sure which “old model” you’re talking about because they are constantly, desperately pivoting to something else. They seem to be terrible at predictjng what consumers want or how markets will react to their decisions. So I’m still waiting for you to explain why copying them is a good idea. As I said earlier: they have always had less focus on exclusivity because their hardware sells at a loss, and they haven’t changed that.

  Nintendo is coming off the 3rd best-selling console of all time, the best-selling console in 2 decades. The Switch 2 not only had the best 1st week on history, but the best 1st month too. I suppose it is still early and totally fair if you want to wait for the first full year to make a judgement, but it seems to me like Nintendo produce a unique and innovative product that people want back in 2017 and are continuing that success now. That product is in a very different market than the Xbox, and uses a very different business model where the hardware itself is profitable. They’re the only one of the 3 that hasn’t shut down studios or laid off employees lately. So, once again, the idea that thinks he knows better than them seems pretty far-fetched right now.

  There’s something else that’s been bothering me…

  He’s done this job for a long time, and people trust and respect his work

  I’ve been following the videogame industry for decades and I’ve never heard of this guy. Which is not all that outlandish on its own. But I also have never heard of The Game Business- it seems like a new website just created this year. And you seem to be incredibly defensive of this guy- completely ignoring any discussion of the industry and binging your entire argument here on his credibility. Are you Mat Piscatella himself on a burner account?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t backpedal on anything at all so I’m not sure why you think that. My initial statement was that he did not provide enough data to reach his conclusion and seems to be drastically oversimplifying the problem to reach his conclusion, by focusing on the unit sales of singular pieces of software in a vacuum and assuming that games are fungible. I pointed out how different videogame companies operate with different business models that are more or less condusive to exclusive 1st party titles. None of that has changed, and the only thing you’ve said to try to dispute any of it is “this consultant said in an interview that he thinks exclusives are bad”. No attempt at discerning causation or explaining it, no attempt at even refuting the arguments I present, just “you should trust this guy, who also happens to be selling a product”. If I wasn’t bored killing time at work I wouldn’t even bother responding because this isn’t really a conversation, you just keep going “nu uh”.

  Not just me: You’ve spent this whole thread arguing with myself and everyone else who are pointing out the obvious and glaring holes in what he’s saying.

  One of my favorites is this one. Xbox has failed to make a profit throughout the entire history of the company. They’ve spent the last few years shutting down studios and laying people off, which has led to a lot of industry speculation. Insiders have reported rumors that Spencer might get pushed to resign or even fired. There’s been speculation that Xbox might be considering exiting the hardware side of things entirely, in part because of their own marketing campaigns. I am not saying I believe that, but these are strong signs that Xbox is doing badly.

  Nintendo, by contrast, just had the single best launch week 1 in the history of videogame consoles. Pretty much every way you look at the Switch 2 sales numbers they are breaking records. And this guy saying that Nintendo should copy what Xbox is doing. That is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence for me to take seriously.

  And while anecdotes are pretty useless, I agree with you that many publishers have trended towards multiplatform releases and I said that earlier. I’m not disputing that: I’m disputing his comments about 1st party publishers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If he was lying about any of this, competing firms or their business partners would call him out.

  Well first of all, this interview was published today so the only people who have had a chance to really respond to this are the general public on the internet. Beyond that, it is not safe to assume that any of their competitors would have any reason to respond to this publicly at all. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, and maybe that decision has more to do with wanting to either keep up with Circana or differentiate from Circana than anything related to the truth. That’s kind of the problem with dealing with bias in sampling like this.

  People have been saying this exact same thing for decades and it hasn’t happened yet.

  And I’m all in favor of the end of exclusivity. Exclusivity is harmful to consumers, and to society as a whole from the perspective of preserving culture and history. But just because I want something to be true doesn’t mean I’m going to believe some consultant casually speculating while promoting his company.

  If he provided data and outlined the methodology of projection they used them we could at least have an interesting conversation about this. But right now he’s just about as credible as the 3rd grader at recess whose uncle works for Nintendo and says the next Halo is coming to Switch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That still doesn’t include most of the data necessary to reach this conclusion, and furthermore the bigger issue is that THE ARTICLE ITSELF DOES NOT CONTAIN ANY. It is an unbacked claim that we cannot verify. If he can’t share the data because ris propriety, he shouldn’t be making the claim publicly.

  He’s looking at software sales in a vacuum, and he is probably correct that any singular piece of software would sell more units if it were released on more platforms. That’s not new or interesting: that’s obvious.

  What he’s missing, even in the screenshot of claimed data he has, is everything else.

  Consultants like this are not trustworthy sources. They’re trying to sell their own product.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Does he have access to the proprietary sales data of Nintendo, Xbox, Sony, Valve, and Google?

  I’d be shocked if he did, because those companies are all big enough to have their own in-house departments for that. He’s trying to sell consulting services to smaller publishers. Consults don’t get paid for saying "well I don’t really have enough information to say that for sure*, they get paid for making executives feel smart.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s backing it up by misusing data. He’s lumping games together and assuming that they all would hypothetically have the same market characteristics, then extrapolating that to other games.

  As an example he brings up how the Pokemon Company has released basically the same software on both Switch and mobile platforms. Which is true, but that does not mean it makes sense for Nintendo to release Tears of the Kingdom on mobile. We can already see that Nintendo knows this because they maintain Mario Kart Tour separately from the console versions. They’re entirely different business models, control schemes, and experiences.

  I would argue that a more complicated analysis is required than just saying “multiplatforms are better than exclusives”.

  He also just briefly glosses over what is the main BENEFIT to manufacturers: the profits made on hardware sales. There is not a lot of publicly available information, but we do know what each company tends to do. Nintendo prices their hardware above cost, so for them the additional hardware sales could offset the reduced software sales. Xbox prices their hardware at a loss, which explains why they valued exclusivity the least and have finished last in hardware units sold every generation since the original Xbox. Sony usually sells PlayStations at a loss to start the generation, but through hardware revisions and scaling ends up turning them profitable after a few years- a more balanced approach. And we see this reflected in their approaches to exclusivity: Nintendo is super-exclusive, Xbox is loose, and Sony is somewhere in the middle.

  You also need to factor in how exclusives impact the ecosystem. The marketing budget for Mario Kart World Tour is not merely helping them to sell the game, but also to sell consoles. And not just consoles, but controllers and cases and branded SD cards and the USB camera and extra docks. It also encourages more software sales: the same person buying Mario Kart World and a Switch 2 might also buy other Switch 2 (or Switch 1) games. Even if they buy 3rd party games, Nintendo is still getting licensing fees. So if they release these big games on other platforms they might gain some revenue, but they lose out on a lot, plus they have to pay licensing fees to Sony/Xbox/Google/Apple/Valve to sell on those platforms.

  If we were just discussing software sales in a vaccun then this would be accurate. Any 3rd party publisher has a much easier equation to determine which platforms to release on. Will the additional costs (development of a port plus the fees and asded marketing) be less than the revenue from additional units? It’s a bit complicated because some consumers have multiple platforms and will choose just one to buy the game on. This also helps explain why Sony delays the PC releases: they want to sell as many units overall as possible, but they also want anyone choosing between PS5 or Steam to be pushed to PS5 where their margins are higher.

  The author doesn’t have anywhere near the data required to do any of this analysis, so he’s reaching a fundamentally flawed conclusion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This may just be me, but I see delayed exclusives as basically being equivalent to multiplatform releases. Especially for single-player games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do they hate money now for some reason??⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing is, those costs are already built into their margins and they have acceptable thresholds for them. Do porn games in particular exceed that threshold? We would need their proprietary data to determine that.

  My hypothesis would be that these games have much lower rate of these charges. The reason being that these sorts of games are already subject to stricter restrictions and parental controls. I would expect the strongest association with charge backs and fraud investigations to be with games that are recurring subscriptions (people forget to cancel) or micro transactions. Which could include both pornographic and non-pornographic games.

  I would also expect to see spikes in charge backs for specific games at specific times. Like when. Publisher adds Denuvo or some other draconian malware, or when 2K decided to add launchers to their game that hurt Steam Deck compatibility, or when some update happens that ruins gameplay, or when some executive comes out and says something stupid. But those would be events, not trends.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do they hate money now for some reason??⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d argue this also violates their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders as this reduces their volume.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the difference between a platonic and a romantic relationship?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s important to remember that this is a model used to analyze relationships. Famously, “all models are wrong, but some models are useful”.

  Human relationships can reach incredible levels of complexity. Heck, human sexuality alone is a huge thing to study.

  I know a couple where a bi person is married to an ace person in an open marriage. I know a couple that owns their own house and run their own business together but keep separate personal bank accounts. I’ve heard of people who are “just friends” who parent and raise children together. I know people who are married but maintain separate residences. And of course I know people who are married, own and live in one home together, and have parented and raised children together, and have a joint bank account. There are a lot of different ways people can relate to each other.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Krafton Issue Statement Regarding Subnautica 2⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also a great point.

  I’m not ruling anything out at this point. It could be a classic case of a greedy corporation pushing out the real artists in order to exploit the art. It could be that the devs (specifically the 3 guys involved in the lawsuit) got lazy after they got paid. It could be both, neither, something else entirely. Honestly with how things go these days I’m just grateful there hasn’t been anything distasteful enough tl give me qualms about playing Subnautica.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Krafton Issue Statement Regarding Subnautica 2⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  After the last decade or more of people complaining about greedy publishers forcing devs to release half-baked messes too early (Cyberpunk, No Man’s Sky, etc), it feels like I’m living in a bizarro world to see so much criticism for a publisher delaying a game to (allegedly) make it better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pop it in your calendars⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The public does not have enough information to judge the relative probabilities. Krafton has that information and has every incentive to release the game as soon as possible, and they still chose to delay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pop it in your calendars⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s how bonuses work. If it was guaranteed regardless of how the company perfroms, it wouldn’t be a bonus.

  It is entirely possible that, even if they had released Subnautica 2 in its current state right now, it may not meet sales expectations and no one would get a bonus anyways. They could make a great game and the marketing team drops the ball- no bonus. They could market like crazy but the game sucks- no bonus. Data breaches or corporate embezzlement or world war- there are tons of factors that could prevent them from meeting those goals.

  The amount is also important because it is being used by the position to try to support an argument that Krafton made this move in order to avoid paying the bonus. When in reality the cost of that bonus payment is probably a tiny fraction of what they are losing by delaying the game.

  Personally I hate bonuses, and I have always advocated at my company for more of the payroll to be structured as salary. But other colleagues of mine really like bonuses. They like the increased reward and risk involved. It comes down to risk aversion, so I’m not going to call those people or employers evil or anything just because it’s not my preference.

  I’m also not defending Krafton’s decision to replace the leadership and delay the game. Personally I suspect that they did so in order to add more monetization to the game, but that’s impossible to know until reviews start to get published. I will say that no one should pre-order the game, but I would also say no one should pre-order any game. Why are people pre-ordering games at all?

  And what if Krafton is right? What if the game is actually in a state right now that would disappoint customers? Seems like for the last decade every videogame community has been complaining about games being released as unfinished and buggy meses. No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk for example. Any time Nintendo delays a game, all their fans applaud and share the Miyamoto meme (“a delaged game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad”). So I’m really surprised to see that a publisher has come out and admitted that they think the game needs more time to meet customer expectations and instead of applauding them for taking the loss the Internet is instead promoting these weird conspiracy theories that don’t add up to explain how it’s actually bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pop it in your calendars⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025

  The whole key to this is how the bonus is structured, and that is unknown still. They very well may have just been something like “10% of net profit, capped at $250 million”.

  If the whole cost of the game was JUST $250 million, that would put it in the [top-15](The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025) most expensive games we have official numbers for. This doesn’t pass the smell test.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pop it in your calendars⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bloomberg reported that the bonus was tied to revenue targets. So the $250,000 estimate must be estimating significantly higher revenues for them in 2025.

  What you posted is just the sales on 1 platform for 1 game, whixh came out in 2018 when games were cheaper.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pop it in your calendars⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it still more expensive if they just shelve it

  Yes. Like, it’s not even a question it’s more expensive to delay it. First of all, they are choosing to pay for 6-12 months of extra development, which alone is probably several times more money than the bonus that they would have paid out. I don’t know what their payroll is, but we don’t need to know because math.

  If the bonus was for 1/2 annual salary per person (which would be insanely high), then the cost of the bonus would be the same as 6 months of additional payroll. Meaning that with any longer delay than 6 months or smaller bonus structure than 1/2 of annual salary, it becomes more expensive to delay the game. Both of which are incredibly likely in my opinion.

  And that’s just salary. It’s possible the studio was planning on laying people off after release, but more likely that they would have moved to a other project that is currently wrapping up pre-production. So this is causing a cascading effect unless they hire additional staff to catch up.

  Then you have marketing costs. The rule of thumb in the industry is that half the overall budget is marketing. There are all sorts of contracts they probably had- digital stuff like banner ads on websites, on the console digital storefronts, partnerships with twitch streamers and YouTubers and review websites, physical stuff like cardboard cutouts and fliers. They may have started printing for boxes for physical releases (though I’m not sure whether this game would have had one or not). They may have started acquiring merch inventory: shirts and stickers and backpacks and flashlights and more perhaps. Some of these contracts they may be able to postpone or cancel, but they certainly aren’t getting back 100% of what they paid.

  And in all of this time they aren’t getting the huge revenue spike they were expecting. The vast, vast majority of a game’s revenue comes at launch (excluding live services, which this hopefully will not have). They need to survive another year on the trickle of revenue coming in from the sales of their other games, or Krafton may need to pump more of their own money into Unknown Worlds. Or debt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pop it in your calendars⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m at least willing to wait until it gets reviews to make a sound judgement.

  I don’t think the bonus would have been a big enough reason to delay the game. Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been. That’s a gigantic revenue spike they were expecting to get this year and now have to push out to next year, and they may well end up paying out similar bonuses next year too.

  My suspicion, from the history of Steve Papoutsis, is that Kraftom wanted to add in anti-player elements and the original founders refused. Probably micro transactions, or maybe even having a bigger multiplayer focus to make it closer to a live-service game. Some mechanism to get money from customers beyond the original purchase. I suspect crap like that will be reason enough not to buy the game when it comes out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can only bring back one. Which do you choose?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That does not match my own experience.

  Back in my day, I received a couple of demo disks packed in with my PS1, and I got a couple more through other means like magazines and the famous Pizza Hut promotion. Some games would include demos for other games too: Spyro and Crash Bandicoot used to do that a lot. Now that I think if it I don’t remember ever seeing any cartridge-based demos at all for any Nintendo or Sega systems, even the later ones like GBA and N64. There were kiosks in public places, but I never saw anything intended for a consumer to have- carts were just too expensive.

  By the PS2 era demos had mostly dried up. I have a God of War demo that came with a magazine and that’s about it. I could only speculate as to why, but I suspect increasing game sizes and DVD’s being more expensive than CD’s may have been a factor?

  I’ll admit I stopped paying attention to demo’s for a while, so maybe I missed a peak at some point from like 2010-2020. But nowadays Steam, the Switch, and the PS5 all have a category or filter option to look through demos. There’s tons of indie games trying to get attention, and of course tons of shovelware too. But most of Nintendo’s published games have demos on Switch. Scrolling through the PlayStation store I see EA sports games, Persona 3, Power wash Simulator, Ys, Diablo 4, FF VII Rebirth, Tekken 8, Crow Country., Chants of Senaar, Sea of Stars, Ghost Trick (I didn’t even know that was on the PS5 lol), Like a Dragon, Resident Evil 4… So Square, Capcom, Sega, EA, Activision-Blizzard, tons of indies, and more. Sony is the only publisher whose absence I noticed, unless you count VR stuff. The number of demos available today is overwhelming, if you look for them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VC behind ‘996’ work culture debate says 5-day weeks won't build billion-dollar startups⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  He probably “works” more than that, because for him his “work” looks like riding a private jet, golfing with business associates, fancy lunches and dinners, or sending emails from his phone on the beach.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can only bring back one. Which do you choose?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean… Your last sentence is already becoming more and more true every day, and has been for years. Microsoft was trying to eliminate the used game market back with the Xbox One. In the US at least there has been a sever decline in videogame stores. Gamestop used to be just one of a handful like Babbage’s and EB Games. Other stores on this initial post like Toys-R-Us also used to carry physical videogames too (I think Circuit City may have too?).

  Plus I always felt that videogames are just consumed too differently from movies. Movies are something easy to consume in a night or a weekend, especially because the rental versions were usually just the movie with none of the special features. I rented videogames a few times as a kid, and I always felt so much pressure to try to play as much of the game on the time I had it as possible. It ended up a stressful and unpleasant experience. Plus you had some videogame developers who adjusted difficulty specifically for rental markets, like Lion King and Battletoads, which I would argue was detrimental to those games.

  There’s a reason TV show rentals never really caught on like movies either- it just takes too long to consume comfortably. The Netflix mail model made a bit more sense for shows at least, but couldn’t quite bridge the gal for videogames. GameFly tried it and I suppose technically still exists, but I haven’t heard anyone talk about it in years. RedBox tried and had a nice moment, but ultimately got swallowed by streaming.

  Plus DLC and updates are becoming more common, so it would be annoying to have to go and re-rent a game, purchase the DLC, try to speed through it in a weekend, then return the rented game but still be out whatever you paid for the DLC with no way to play it.

  Rentals were pretty good for being a low-risk way to try a game out. You could spend $1-$5 usually for a game that might cost $40-$50 to buy new, and occasionally publishers would have promotions where a rental would come with a coupon to offset the rental price if you want to buy the game. Nowadays that has been replaced by free downloadable demos. Which aren’t perfect, but I think are better than the old rental system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can only bring back one. Which do you choose?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Please enlighten me then- what does Scarecrow Video do that makes them special? From a quick Internet search it looks like they re-organized into a non-profit, got officially recognized as a museum by the state, have relied on Kickstarter campaigns to stay running, and seem to still be struggling to keep the lights on. So just from skimming their website it seems like less of a business and more of a preserved piece of nostalgia and novelty.

  Don’t get me wrong- I’m very much in favor of physical media and media preservation. Today’s streaming and digital “purchase” landscape has a ton of issues. I just think the solution to that is public libraries, and it looks like Scarecrow is trying to be a hybrid of a library, museum, and business with the business part failing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can only bring back one. Which do you choose?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Video rental is just plain outdated. Streaming as it is today has a lot of problems, but they are ones that could be easily solved through regulation if regulators ever had the appetite. These stores went out of business because technology made their industry obsolete. I bet most people would have to do a little work to even play a DVD or Blu-Ray today. Maybe dig out an old device and hook it up, or use a laptop with a disc drive. Maybe a gaming console, but there have been a lot on the market for a while now that don’t have optical drives. There’s enthusiasts of course- including people who still keep VCR’s and laser disc players and even people with their own reel-to-reel projectors, but they’re a tiny minority.

  Friendly’s I only went to once and it was unremarkable casual dining. That industry DOES have a problem where private equity keeps on buying, looting, and destroying companies, but I’m also hopeful that can open up more space for small businesses instead. I’ll pass on this one.

  My memories of RadioShack were that it was cheap junk that was overpriced, but often the only reasonable option unless you wanted to order online or through a catalog from somewhere that could take months to arrive. I do wonder what the world would have been like if RadioShack had positioned itself as a repaor parts supplier and lobbied for Right to Repair legislation. Probably a stretch of the imagination.

  Circuit City… For some reason I thought they went out of business largely due to embezzlement, but when I look forward that now I can’t find anything so maybe I’m thinking of another company? Best Buy seems to be struggling to compete with Amazon and Wal-Mart still today, so I don’t think Circuit City could have lasted much longer than it did either way.

  Party City and Toys-R-Us are the 2 that make me upset, because both were successful businesses ruined by Private Equity. Not that I want to simo for these corporations, but what PE has been doing to so many industries in the past decade is absolutely disgusting. Id I had to choose one to bring back I’d say Party City because a lot of the custom and specific party supplies there aren’t going to be stocked by your local Target or Wal-Mart, and that’s the kind of thing you’d prefer to see in person rather than order online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is closing down Xbox studio The Initiative, with Perfect Dark killed as well — joining Everwild and ZeniMax's new IP, and other unannounced projects⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They bought the Perfect Dark IP though. That’s probably just going to languish now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deus Ex devs say they weren't trying to make a statement when they made one of the most political games of all time: 'What I think is the right future for humanity is irrelevant. It's all about...'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think of that with BioShock 1 and Infinite too. Rapture was an atheist society while Colombia was highly religious. Colombia was highly centralized and regulated by an authoritarian dictator, while Rapture is deregulated and allows private businesses to run wild and cause chaos. It’s almost as if BioShock Infinite was written as a counterpoint, to clarify that the first game was not meant to be political.

  I suppose you could say both games are criticizing extremism, which combine to form a centrist message. But even that I think was less of a choice to discuss politics and moreso just “We need conflict to create an interesting videogame. What’s a good way to create conflict? Just take some political views and crank them up to the extreme- surely no one will sympathize with them then!”