I'm getting a bit older, in my late 30's now but I think as a group "gamers" have remained fairly consistent over the years. They're entitled, addicted and completely incapable of not engaging with the very systems they claim to hate. Not everyone, but enough of them I think to make some fairly accurate generalizations. They're mad at Larian because they're entitled brats - and that doesn't necessarily mean they're young. They think game development is orders of magnitude more simple than it is and throw hissy fits when they don't get what they want, to wit more of that digital crack escapism they crave. Disappointment would be an understandable reaction if you were hoping to get more BG, but anger? That comes from feeling like you're entitled to more.

No what they said is "we are canceling any work we've done so far towards an expansion and giving the IP back to WOTC. Screw everyone who wanted more and especially screw anyone who got their hopes up after we basically told you there would be more, it's all cancelled forever." Remember all the cut content around the upper city? Never happening. Did you want to see larians vision for levels 13-20? Tough. Extra painful for those who might want to adopt BG3 rules for tabletop or built their own mod expansion/conversions since everything is cut off half way.

@@estefencosta1835 These were the same fans cheering for Larian only 6mos ago and haranguing any devs/commenters who said BG3 was a unique and non-repeatable production. The same fans who said that they would never hold other games to that same impossible standard, because it would be absurd. And yet, here we are, and even Larian itself can't meet that bar.

Mind you, gamer-entitlement notwithstanding, Larian probably just couldn't come up with the cash to extend their license with Hasbro/WotC. Normally with a license like that, you'd include an option to extend, with a fixed dollar amount (or maybe a sliding scale based on the first product's revenues). There was a February 2024 story about Larian reaching out to Tencent (30% stakeholder) to foot the bill for a more expansive D&D-content license. Based on the GDC news, I'm guessing that deal didn't land. It circulated widely in tabletop/TTRPG circles, but I didn't hear much coverage on the video game side.

@@mandisaw That makes sense. Hasbro has been pushing the idea the the DnD brand has been "underutilized" and can be squeezed more to generate greater profits. So I am not surprised that they and Wizards of the Coast might have made the license too expensive for Larian.

Basically corruption combined incompetent kills everything

It's true. With enough money you can be a total monster and just say "Yep, I did it." and just walk away without consequence.

As george Carlin once said: "If that is true, that it's only these politicians acting like that, where are all the bright people of consience? I tell you where: We don't have people like that, in this country." It's not a fault of the system, but some 60 years ago the culture started to change. Going from "do what you enjoy, be yourself and be kind" to "The more toys you have, the higher your score!!". It's a cultural issue. If shame came back, sense of community, or simply the thought of 'Nah, I have enough' at SOME point, we wouldn't be where we are. But humanity is on the way out, we all have been told that money is all that matters and you can't change anything without it, and community is a distant dream form the past, ripped apart by media constantly hammering on our differences to drive us apart. What other thought than "I need to get mine before there is nothing left" can ever be in your head? We are fucked. Simple as that. We can't ever improve anything more than our immediate group. And we will do that until the famines start in 20-30 years, then billions will die, the rich cocksuckers that took the future from all of us will sit in their bunkers on their hoards, while a select few people are deemed worthy enough to serve them. But hey, at least we took the high road and didn't just start beheading them, because Hollywood said we need to take the highroad at all times. So sadly, Taylor will continue to fuck the atmosphere with her airplane, Musk will not use his wealth for anything but satisfying his immature childbrain, and Bezos just wants to be a sadist. But at least our wealth is concentrated in 15 people. And if y'all still go "but it's not just the billionaires", I'll give some perspective on how far apart they are from the rest of humanity, HOW MANY ressources they have compared to anyone else: mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

Even an honest politician, which do exist, have to be reelected. So anything that is long term and doesn't give visible benefits in 4 years won't help them get reelected.

the entire political system we have right now is designed around short term gains. there are plenty of long term strategies that could save trillions in the next couple of decades, but you will never see them being implemented because of the upfront cost and non-visible changes that will only be apparent when your opponent cycles back into power to take credit. "so is then the solution to go back to monarchy ?" no, because now the system is incentivizing doing nothing because you can't be removed from power, you just need to do barely enough to not piss people off and make sure the people that actually have power are happy to protect your position (vide: Putin's Russia).

Its redarded even in short term. Nobody is going to buy your product.

@@dmitriyrasskazov8858 You'd think, but time has shown it's not retarded when people keep buying. All this would end if people just had standards.

Except when it doesnt work at times when barely no one was interested or aware of the game existence, or​ people just refund afterwards@@custos3249

Then sink the yacht

​@@jackdaw16huls51if you're an orca you have to tell us

Watermelon

WB Already pulled the plug on 1 live service game. Why trust them to run another?

Fruit hanging so low that even Tantalus could reach it without difficulty.

Tomato ?

Even better in French, as potato is ''pomme de terre': dirt apple

and it's not limited to gaming, either.

Yeah, that's about the only thing that CEO's and finance-bros are good at. Screw everyone else over so they can fail their way into lining their own pockets and instead of facing any consequences, they get rewarded for it.

What you or I deem a failure is not such in the eyes of the corporate overlords, that's how they get you. Giving these suits the benefit of thinking that they are just incompetent is a mistake, their actions are malicious and planned out, all for the sake of shareholder value.

Yep, those that are better at networking then anything else will network their way to top. It's not just CEOs and boards, it's on all levels of management in all sorts of companies where the CEOs/boards prioritize their golf buddies and sleazy tactics over competence and making quality products.

@@hefoxed It's not that they're better at networking, it's certainly not that they were better at financing. The deck was simply stacked in their favor from the start. They knew someone who knew someone who could get them an in. In their minds they worked their way to the top because they "only" started as management fresh out of college and not as CEO.

And I think there were two books that led to a massive push to pay execs way more than they're worth, but have forgotten them since. I think one author was Jack Welch, forgot the other one. It kept being brought up during the Boeing scandal.

Ahhhhh, Capitalism. Ain't it great?

@@FlyingCIRCU175which Boeing scandal? I laugh to keep me from crying. And yes the former GE CEO popularized these practices while pulling up the ladder behind him

There is no reason that layoffs should *increase* share price though. It does not mean increased profit, it means less labor to profit from. It's a reduction in cost today that guarantees less profit next quarter. But that's *next* quarter, and the bulk of the people doing this are going to switch to a new company well before the piper needs paying. It's just predatory rich people ruining literally everything remotely commercial and anything that depends on anything remotely commercial... including governments. The reason investors are eager to buy stock at a higher price after a layoff is not because the company will be making more. It's because stock trading is a rigged game, rigged by the investors. They know what's going to happen after the layoffs, and that makes the company's performance predictable, so the price is manipulated and goes up, until it doesn't, and then the people who guess right take the short position and make even more money. Personally, I think getting rid of the stock exchange would go a long way towards fixing this crap. I'm not against people buying and selling stock, I'm against them buying and selling it without a shit-ton of paperwork. Buying a house should always involve less paperwork than a share in a company's future profits. A house never laid off 800 people right before the holidays.

The longer you've been working at a company, the closer you are to the guillotine. They are itching to downsize veterans making $100k with benefits and bring in fresh college grads for $40k and no benefits.

Love this! Great point. I used to work in the car business and my old boss was literally fired for stealing from the company. The next week he had a job at another dealership in town. I saw so many people bounce from place to place once they moved into management that it was baffling. These a-holes that get fired or "Resign" from their multi-million dollar exec jobs don't become nobodies and disappear, they just slip into the shadows somewhere else and start again. Or as George Carlin said it much better: "It's a big club, and you ain't in it."

basically, they're class conscious and use their power to crush the workers and everyone else

@@MrJekken That's not the definition of "class consciousness". Certainly not how Karl Marx defined the term.

Even in a less gross situation, people who've failed at management still have management experience. They're far more likely to get another management job than someone without that experience.

@@henrywarmoth1792 Kinda sounds like what happens to bad cops when they "resign".

Step -2 Take out loans Step -1 Form a small business or several for "experience" step 0 Declare bankruptcy

This sounds like the process of a Parasite - Host relationship...

​@@markguyton2868a la EMBRACER

@@markguyton2868 It is.

Ah yes, rampant piracy with extra steps. Or as they call it in fancy circles, "business".

Helldivers 2 says "hi"

​@@TOAOM123and eventually the company will be bought or the head developer preventing it from being bought will die or just decide to do the same problems and then hell divers 3 (or 2 if it happens quick enough) will have the same problems the industry has because profit motive inherently cannibalizes everything else

​@@thecaptain6520Well, they're definitely more trustworthy at the very least since not much monetization goes into smaller games.

⁠​⁠@@fartface8918Or maybe we just appreciate those that are independent until they die. I mean nothing lasts forever so may as well take your time to enjoy it.

@@RandomPerson-xi7jv it's not about likeing or disliking but rather understanding the deep cannibalism the profit motive necessarily invokes, as long as there is a legal requirement for shareholder value as long as most companies are publicly traded as long as money is valued over the most basic human axioms we wont know peace

Amen

Happened to Bethesda way before Zenimax was acquired by Microsoft.

@@thecaptain6520 After a .05 femtosecond glance at Valve... Nah.

Its happening in private companies too. I worked in few. Management is SO enamoured by the practices of big execs that they're basically simps. Fuck them

Say what you will about Valve, them staying private has definitely kept them from going AS FAR downhill as they could have.

Seems like a self inflicted problem though. Like, why not tell the business people to fuck off? Why hire business people that don't share your values and try to undermine you?

@@ninochaosdrache3189 Because the actual talented people are usually not the ones at the very top of said company. The ones at the top only see money to gain from a bigger business buying them up, too dumb to realize that they've doomed their company. Other times they're threatened by said bigger business that has the ability to naked short sell them into the ground.

The only thing execs want or care about is perpetually growing profits. Successes in development are actively punished when they cant top the last peak.

All for the god of short term profit. Why care if you burn and salt the land if your the only one with a parachute on the burning blimp?

Everything and everyone is expendable in the world of short term gains which we now operate at.

why? what happened?

Not to mention Insomniac pumped out what, 4 back to back great games, 1 of them being cross gen and two next gen, in the span of about 6 years. It's wild that they were even considered for cuts given their critical and commercial output.

At this point does it really matter who's pushing the milling and pinkertons about? It's a weeeeeeeird thing and I hope larian moves to others (and perhaps even a pathfinder one for the humor of if)

@@catharticgemini well I suppose they've no choice but to move on lol. I'm sure their next project will be wonderful.

I'm pretty sure they literally came out and said - after these allegations - that WotC had been very helpful and that they weren't the ones getting in their way, they just wanted to move on to the next project, and honestly, that seems like a pretty reasonable decision. Sometimes a story is just done being told, and they worked hard for a long time on it.

@@gwen9939 not completely true. They also said NO ONE they worked with on making BG3 was working on the company Hasbro anymore. Even after the huge commercial success and critical acclaim, they were dumped on the garbage bin.

​@@catharticgeminiLarian told multiple times they don't want to work on other IPs they want to do their own things again (Divinity series).

because that's what the marketing and PR from the Moneyed Men have told us to do. Plain and simple.

it stuff this and going workers this that makes go to union to even going to socialism then any theory book

thats the plan these huge studios hire good up and coming indie devs. then give them a flop to make and/or give them so many notes and force microtransactions and money making schemes all over the game. then blame them for the flop and ruin the dev team's good name

@@uanime1 because they are not allowed to say anything else, because they have have a contracting telling them what they are allowed to say and the project has a marketing team more expensive than the entire development team.

Kind of a bit deserved in some cases, the way developers tend to put them self out there and insult critique the fans... both sides deserve each other

And there's no law against mourder if you don't get caught

Isnt there one in Belgium?

I think the expectation was equally tied to the license itself. BG1 and BG2 both had expansions that continued the storyline after the main game.

I mean, can you blame people for wanting more? The game is really good and the fact that people want more stuff only shows how successful it was

Larian actually did dlc for Divinity 2 because original game was kinda disaster so they needed to add new content. But BG3 is already a gigantic game i really do not think it needs DLC at all. Also judging the last interviews (and the fact Hasbro team which consulted Larian was fired) it feels Swen is heavily disappointed working with IPs and wants to go back to his own creations without greedy publishers and corporate buІІshіt. Can't blame him.

​@@paultapping9510 Yeah, Bobby understands money=priority. That's all. The games are almost irrelevant, so we get Diablo Immortal style gambling apps disguised as games.

Bobby’s busy paying wet nurses to let him suckle that delicious breast milk. (Bobby probably isn’t the guy who infamously stole the breast milk out of the company fridge, but it’s funnier to imagine him as the one doing it.)

They frequently get their ideas from their nephew that they see maybe once a year and assume that said 7 year old nephew has the insight into what everyone wants and thinks is cool. Not even joking.

They technically don't need to, as the video indicates in the most cynical manner. The only idea there is to get investments and spend those investments to pay for half the game you promised while you pocket the rest.

according to Kotick "Never touched a joystick in my life" Yeah Bobby..we know.

people dont comprehend how much of the gaming industry exploits the love and passion software/art-design people have for games, chews them up and then throws them out.

Ah, the phenomenon of people who, being kicked and stomped and shat on from above, will lash out to the side at the _other_ poor bastards languishing in the same predicament, or deride them for daring to punch up on occasion, to _challenge_ this despicable state of affairs... I will never understand it, except as an expression of the most twisted form of Stockholm syndrome imaginable. Kidnappers are one thing, but imagine sympathizing with a _video game publishing CEO..._ Eugh.

Nobody forced them to make a shitty game though. There is a lot more wrong with these recent games than just the business model.

@@dikkeroege I'm sorry to break the news to you, but it is *really just* business model. Game dev is a job, and you have to work on 'tax write-off mediocre' game which no one on your team is passionate about because no one has any direction into what you have to make this game into, and all your and your coworkers' cool ideas for great game are shoot down. You're lucky if you actually work on that cool game that has too massive scale, with so many cooks in the project that one slip up might result in extra months of work and shareholders and higher-ups might push the deadline if the marketing says they should to maximize profit. Otherwise, if you don't comply to the industry you really wanted to work in, you're fired (you will still be laid off after the game inevitebly fails, because the laid-offs contributes to the paycheck for the higher up). Other avenue for game devs is Indie games, but the success is near impossible if you remember that the successful indies survived the battle; Survivorship bias in indies is very real, and if you decide to do your dream game instead, you can say goodbye to that fleeting success, because market demands the same variation of established game over and over. You want innovation as a gamer? Either you need to get very good at finding niche but excelt titles, expand your genre tastes, be open to new ideas, start buying any avangarde indie title which might dissapoint you, or get in time machine and go back to time when the medium was new and fresh and whipe your memory. I really suggest trying to find cool niche games and expanding your genre tastes, i've been doing it for 8 years already, ignoring massive, mediocre (or what people call shitty, but actually most people didn't play any actual shitty game) AAA and just playing some indies and i've enjoyed gaming more than ever.

@@dikkeroege Yes and no. Arkane wasn't forced to make a bad game explicitly, but they were forced to make a type of game outside their passion and experience. The fact it was bad was an understandable and likely outcome of that decision.

@@xintrosi6829 But how do you explain the bad AI then? Or the bland level design and graphical bugs? It all feels like beginner mistakes that a studio like that shouldn't be making anymore after so many good games. Or just look at Rocksteady who made the worst UI in a AAA game in the past 15-20 years. WB didn't make them do that. There's more going on than just greed. Big studios are getting worse.

​@@dikkeroegeIf a team is forced to work on something they know is a cynical cash grab that exists purely to financially benefit executives & investors, they'll do the logical thing: cut corners, & make it "good enough for release" so they can wrap it up and move on to a project they actually care about.

Funny you should mention that part of history. The COVID pandemic resulted in those large business executives taking off the masks of "compassion" and double down on their price gouging, anti-worker stances, and exploiting the simple-minded, convenience-obsessed consumers, especially as workers realized they did not want to die for minimum wage and started unionizing. There has been a drastic shift in the economy and class warfare from the pandemic alone and they're trying their damnedest to pretend that it's the new normal. Hell, I see this change in friggin' KZfaq. A lot of my favorite essayists and even journalists are resorting to click-bait articles and churning out content with lesser quality, going the content mill route, because times are even tougher than before and they're becoming desperate.

Unions have their own problems. They are a lot like their own little companies with their own executives running things into the ground for personal profit.

I've heard that a lot of the diversity politics thing has been to make sure employees are distrustful of one another, rather than of the corporation itself.

@@o00nemesis00o A lot of powerful people in both politics, mainstream news, and companies work to keep the masses divided to overlook the true crooks. It's been a tried-and-true method by the bourgeois for generations

"Let's all laugh at an industry, that never learns anything tee hee hee"

The sad reality is that it's not how to run a company wrong. It's the handbook to being a successful capitalist: make as much money as possible at any cost, morality, ethics and as many laws as you can get away with breaking be damned.

​​@@araonthedrake4049alternative modes of distributing ownership of the means of production are already demonstrated to produce better games, capitalism as an organizational structure truly provides zero benefit to the average human being in any sector of society

Yup. It's how to run a capitalist economy done right. That's just not something that helps society, instead it harms it. We need to readjust the goals of corporations at their heart. Environment and the public being the things they must benefit. Good luck with that, money wins and makes more money. Time to eat Bobby the Tick. Get your forks out people.

@@styfen What we need is confiscatory tax rates on creating money without creating economic value. Make and sell a product and in the process employ talented, hardworking people who make wages they spend into the economy? You're good. Make "investments" whose sole purpose is to sell on to the next sucker down the line-asset flipping, cryptocurrency-or circumvent the rules around an existing industry in blatant violation of the duck test (Uber and Airbnb for taxis and hotels, respectively)? You're getting taxed from nose to tail to fund the cleanup of the late-stage-capitalist economic Superfund site you just left in your wake. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "the best argument in favor of high taxes on the rich is a five-minute chat with the average rich person."

The indie scene may as well be the entire industry is. It's certainly where all the artistry is.

If you learn Hollywood history in the mid-early 20th century (more early) you'll basically see how gaming industry is going through the same evolution. I just wish we LEARNED something from the past though without having to repeat it. Unionise already!

Perfectly described what this video is for me.

jesus this was a great connection, I definitely wouldn't have thought of it but it's a great jumping-off point to examine perverse business incentives. plus, it's springtime!

🎵 It's Springtime, for Bobby and Acti-Blizz!🎵

Remember: it was based off a movie from 1967, right before this started happening in the industrial sector at GE or Boeing.

The real joke of The Producers is they intend to run with the loot, but accidentally create a masterpiece.

Don’t forget the final scene of the film that, though punished for their crimes, they learn nothing from it.

Seriously with all the click bait and rage bait(blaming wokes or whatever buzzword people use). It nice that second wind being a diamond in the sea of coal

I guess you could say, that's a pretty cold take~! .... okay, I'm sorry, that was so low-hanging it was practically a parsnip.

@@starmaker75 Like, there's all these things pointing to corporate greed and our systems favoring that greed... and these folk are blaming hiring low level workers who come from diverse backgrounds? Like, discrimination still is a thing. "diverse" folk paycheck still tends to be lower. So with corporate greed, corporations hiring "diverse" workers mean they save money and likely get overall more experienced/quality work for that wage (compared to hiring less discriminated against people at the same wage)... so like, it'd probably be even lower quality products without "diversity". It is true it is hard to hire "diverse" workers with high level of experience due to discrimination/lack of opportunities meaning they haven't been able to gain that experience, tho that's slowly changing and there is more "diverse" folk with high levels of experience.

Same! It is so oddly captivating to watch. Just constantly watching the size of the player increase. :D

its called Agario, free to play browser game. its so addictive

@@quillclock found it on mobile. Judging by the pictures, it has certainly become modern day mobile games...

I remember when the fifa series got caught using the same executable as the previous year, didn't even have the decency to advance the version number.

Couldn't believe 2K made two separate versions of NBA for the haves and the have-nots, with the PC version being the downgrade. The first year I get it, new tech, maximize old tech etc. But they're _still doing it_ and it blows my mind that for the same price point, this is a legal move.

In recent years I've been moving away from licensed sports games toward indies that offer great and often retro-inspired gameplay, games like Super Mega Baseball 3, Legend Bowl, and Tape to Tape (and I'm waiting for someone to do this for basketball, but it hasn't happened yet-if it has, please point me at the Steam page!) I've said this time and time again, AAA and indie might as well be two completely different industries, because the only thing they have in common is that their products are both called "video games", a term so broad as to be meaningless (put me in a room with someone who plays Fortnite or some other live-service looter shooter as their daily driver and we'd have absolutely nothing in common to talk about even though we're both "gamers.")

@@lebendystraw3683 It's cheaper and easier to port the old gen version, and you avoid the sensationalist headlines of "Terrible PC port" becuase the port is merely mediocre.

They are yearly live services, which is even worse because come the end of the year, all of your progress and purchase is essentially reset because now you have to buy the next iteration that has the latest roster and kit. At least with live services like Marvel's Avengers or Destiny, your progress is kept for longer than just one year with new content updates.

Tbf, would you layoff yourself?

@@ninochaosdrache3189 While he didn't lay himself, or anyone else, off, there was that time Mr. Iwata cut his own, and several other big wigs, pay when shit hit the fan. That's likely the closest we'll see to higher-ups being held accountable for poor decisions.

@@King_Luigi Satoru Iwata was a CEO with passion and a soul, and he paid the price as a result, giving us the Nintendo Switch as a parting gift. To succeed in capitalism you have to sell your humanity and soul to the all-mighty dollar.

Or someone buys a sinking ship with the intent to get it to float but only just enough to get it ashore so it's easier to scrap it for parts

Journalism as a whole has been hemorrhaging money for decades, and digital/web journalism in particular has struggled to balance the books in the days of adblockers and the shift to video platforms. Kotaku is one of the last holdouts, so something they're doing must be working, but you're right that it's a losing battle overall.

Kotaku has lived by the motto "there is no such thing as bad publicity" and yet that hasn't worked out for them.

And yet it's not really that funny, given it feels like crooks doing as they please, everyone else gets thrown under the muck-stained wheels of the gold-plated bus driven by those giving the orders.

I think that only applies to the US though.

Don't forget private equity. Just because you're not publically traded doesn't mean you're immune to such practices.

Basically this and if that CEO is not up for the task, they get voted out and replaced with a CEO that does. Cause investors want to see their short term investments grow like mad. So CEO's are pretty much obiligated to investment boards. But the other way is also true. Investors if they disagree with a companies way the CEO is doing things.. sometimes they cannot vote em out due to contracts. Investors can also pull out their stocks but doing that would be leaving without the maximum possible profit. But then you have hedge funds covering that stuff too. Ooh look so CEO's and investors both are safe if they force the ship to sink. Good CEO's can be held back by bad investment groups and good investment groups can be held back by bad CEO's. (Depending on circumenstances) Thus the cycle continunes when these investors start investing in the next company and elect the same CEO to take it over. They will always make money.

Not a defense for this practice, but this isnt true. Executives are allowed to consider long-term gains as part of fiduciary responsibility, even at the cost of short-term losses. Most just choose not to because it doesn't help you if the company does really well in 20 years when someone else is running things.

I'll keep it vague since i don't remember the case or verdict too well, but THESP is right. Some company in the US had focused on a morally good path that didnt bring as much profits as a morally questionable path. Investors sued or something because they expected more money. The court that determined the outcome stated that companies are legally required to listen to shareholders and to make reasonable efforts to make shareholders profits when such efforts don't otherwise break the law, and that the company violated that principle and was therefore liable for lack of profit.

@@atrustworthyfellow6887 That's not what I'm saying though. They are required to put profits over morality, but they aren't required to put short-term profits over long-term profits. Companies are allowed to take as long a view as they want, so long as that path can reasonably be interpreted as pursuing the greatest return on investor commitments.

You can blame the Dodge brothers for this. And a few more if you are feeling conspiratorial Ford was treating his workers better than everyone, not out of the goodness of his heart, but because retaining highly motivated talent is actually very important and profitable in the long run, almost like free-market capitalism actually works despite human greed. Ford wanted to cut back on shareholder dividends,he wanted to use that money to expand his business, hire more workers, lower the price of his products even more, etc. And the shareholders really did not appreciate that.

Yet they do it in the shittiest ways possible. Gone are the days of making good games. Since it's just easier to just monetize and churn them out

​@@armorhide406no company exists to make games. every company exists to make a profit.

How many of those execs were born into wealth and got sports cars despite bad grades? Probably a significant percentage.

There is no "we" here

we didn't hitch _ourselves_ to this economic system. we _were_ hitched to it, yes. just not by our own hand.

@@LexYeen I'm more addressing the "Capitalism and the free market will fix everything!" crowd.

Yes, a plutocracy. The result when money influences politics and a lack of regulation on predatory capitalistic practices, unfortunately. Those that are expected to work for the masses work for their donors and other bribes.

People will be able to game whatever system you put in front of them to get the best results for the least risk/effort whether it be in games or real life. The usual solution is that a regulatory body removes the loop holes that allow people to use unintended exploits which Frost mentioned is already happening in the movie industry.

That's more to due with needing to keep the movie license

​@@nohbuddy1Yeah that is part too, every 5 years they need a Spidery film or it goes to marvel or something like that right? The value of the license compared to the sheer cost of these flops and all the goodwill lost means there must be more to it though I'd assume.

@@davidchristie6003 Yep. Big reason they were desperate for the Marvel deal to add it to the MCU.

Looks like Embracer could smell their own. Asmodee had been buying every small publisher they could spot for eight years before Embracer acquired them.

In colonial America, lobster was considered a poor man’s food and was fed to prisoners, slaves, and the impoverished. At some point it became considered a delicacy and priced the poor out of it,

Kotaku burning is good. But WHY it's burning is bad.

@@TrojanManSCPEh, it's still bad overall. It's a chilling effect, which silences anyone who wants to legitimately call out bad practices in the industry while reinforcing the kind of astroturfed shilling that makes paying for stuff in games YOU'VE ALREADY PAID "palatable" or "good for everyone" (it's really not). And sure, you still have Second Wind. Excellent! I love this place. But barely 500k subs and only 100k views on average uploads does not a lasting company make. Second Wind is a Bluetooth speaker when you need Coachella-level sound setups to make sure these execs actually listen. You need that competition, and it's why places like Defector and The Autopian (former Deadspin and Jalopnik) continue to exist. It's why you need the asswipes who can't learn political correctness or stand for groups that they shouldn't be speaking for. Jason Schreier is ex-Kotaku yet is a key voice in all the BS we're in today. That or you do it. Be better than Kotaku when you write, but never be paid by anyone other than the gamers who would rather pay $100 for a skins in a Skinner Box. Form a staff of 50 and rent out a space with power and internet. Let's see how long you last.

@@TrojanManSCP Ok?🙄🙄

Maybe watch fewer reactionary youtubers?

​@@TrojanManSCP trying to make kotaku reputable and profitable seems like a good reason to me. I don't work my 9-5 out of the goodness of my heart, I do it to walk away from my shift knowing I was a richer man than when I walked in.

It's pretty much been like this for at least 50-60 years, with the advent and embracing of Taylorism, and the corporation's main incentive to work only for their shareholders.

"It's not just infinite money. There needs to also infinite growth. There needs to be MORE infinite money next year." Yahtzee was so right about that.

Well, on the other side, it's the fault of the smaller runners as well. They still have to agree to get eaten and if they do, that's their own faul.

It's hard because these games became basically psychological traps to give keep vulnerable people hooked. Same way loot boxes aim to hook people with gambling addiction in, micro transaction, gaming pass, seasons, a lot of these things are while no evil from the conceptual level they are twisted to make people feel that they need them, stuff like fomo is a powerful incentive specially to kids and teens

The problem with voting with your money is, the people with more money get more voting power. And none of us have as much money as the executives making these decisions.

@@LexYeenIf anything, the oligarchs beat one to the punch with 'voting with your wallet' and have been bribing governments and people that would actually make changes in our lives for our benefit for multiple generations. The only thing oligarchs care for is making more money and making sure they stay in their seat of power.

@@LexYeen Not just the executives, but the gvmnts who bankroll these projects or the big corpos like Blackrock who try to push an agenda, despite nobody buying their games.

Something that kinda gets lost in the mix is that those games do actually function as live-service games over the course of their single-year life cycles. Taking Madden Ultimate Team, for instance (I don't know anything about the other sports games but I imagine its the same), they continuously add limited-time events and cards to the game throughout the whole lifecycle, with the rewards progressively getting harder to acquire and more powerful. It's just like the live-service "season" model, only the seasons are a couple weeks long each. Their whole system is based on rating players 1-99, but eventually they'll get to selling people players with 115 overall scores and shit because they need to offer better and better players to keep people FOMOing into events and card packs. Which... you'd think people would wise up to it when the players they're buying in September are getting outclassed in October, but those sports games are fucking massive cash cows despite it. People are dumbasses.

I have an inkling he's been subscribed to the philosophy for a while, but it's kind of a hard topic to bring into a games journalism channel.