fyi, in case someone isn’t clear on the difference:
stakeholder ≠ shareholder
stakeholders are basically all people involved, including staff, and even stuff like landlords, janitors, citizens (sometimes things like parents), etc.
it’s anyone with a stake in an organizations operations!
example: a city decides to create a new bus route. in this case, stakeholders include the local residents, the companies involved in creating the route, the companies supplying the buses, the mechanics needed to keep the fleet running, etc., etc.
there’s a usually a LOT of stakeholders, and typically you don’t always include everyone in every little decision because it quickly becomes unmanageable. so only the most relevant ones are included in most decisions, and who exactly that is depends on the project.
shareholders on the other hand are what everyone is probably thinking of, and that’s the people (“people” being used generously here) only interested in next quarters profits. you know! the parasites!
of course the message is still bullshit and nothing but coded corpo-speech for “shareholders”, but i thought some folks might be interested in knowing the difference anyhow.
even if, in this case, it’s only important to highlight the extra special bullshit they put into the statement…
I think when all these famous studios were interesting, they still by inertia functioned the way people with actual skills founded them. I’m thinking of BioWare, Black Isle, Obsidian, but reading the history of any famous video game studio gives that impression. It was a rather personal business in 90s and early 00s, it seems.
Then the “professionals” came and started “fixing” everything, and something about today’s computing makes me personally deeply disgusted of anything advertised there.
I don’t want a shooter not better than a hundred Q3 clones, but taking 50GB disk space. I don’t even want it with “photorealistic” (no they aren’t) graphics. I don’t want CK3 because it’s slow and has too much bullshit happening, the secret of success is in quality of content more than amount, and more is not always better if a player gets bored with small events. I admit, I haven’t tried Hogwarts Legacy, put from what people say its open world is as useful as Daggerfall’s map the size of England, because most things on that map are all the same, though as a dungeon crawler Daggerfall is still better than typical modern game. And Star Wars - its Expanded Universe mostly came into existence in the 90s, it’s designed the way very convenient for all kinds of video games, or any entertainment and any secondary art at all, and George Lucas approached that theoretically before making the first movie (the “obscenely huge profits” part he may or may not have considered, but it came as a welcome bonus, I suppose), and still every modern time Star Wars game is just not interesting to me ; my favorite one is KotORII, so there is, of course, a gap between me and the majority, but it’s still baffling how didn’t they even try to make an X-Wing remake.
One can go on. People want to play interesting games. Very few people play games because of “more, better, wider” in ad. The whole idea of a game is to be interesting. It’s entertainment. It’s not “I’ve got a new iPhone and you don’t” dick size contest. Some game being very technically cool, but absolutely bullshit in gameplay, writing, UI design, character design, location design etc, - is not entertaining. Some other game being technically a visual novel (not necessarily), but with all those things done well, - it is entertaining.
So, making a good game doesn’t even require a lot of very competent and very stressed CS heroes working since dawn till dusk to the extent of their ability.
I live in the midst of something that can be very carefully called capitalism. It was called socialism once and then the “socialist administrators” did sort of a rebranding.
I think the big “issue” is that there’s a notable lag between loss of goodwill and loss of income/profit/value, and there’s an even bigger lag between trying to fix goodwill and returns on that. It makes it too hard for any profit-first company to get right.
External MBAs taking over running businesses will either result in this or making a billion dollar company through the heavy exploitation of their workers and the consumers. I think the vast majority are the former though.
In addition to Steam not being subscriptions, Valve has so far not screwed over their users. The way the Ubisoft exec suggested that we should change our attitude really showed what they in plan
I’ve got two friends that can’t log in anymore. I feel your pain. It sucks a lot for sure. I enjoyed the article, thank you for posting.
One thing I wished they would have explored a little more was the psychological effects these memorial pages have on those left behind. Part of what helped me fully grieve and accept the loss was to eventually stop going to the pages. I guess in some way a false hope kinda starts taking root, at least it was that way for me
I have one friend on Steam who is incarcerated. My best friend that died is on my PlayStation friends, and Fortnite specifically. For the first year I used to log in to see how long it had been since he last played. As time went on I did that less and less. I still view his profile.
Wow AC shadows pre sale levels must be really bad. Not too surprising tho. For a studio that basically said “there’s way more interesting time periods we want to focus on” the fact they finally went to feudal Japan felt more like they ran out of interesting ideas. Doesn’t help ghost of tsushima beat them by a few years and was basically the best AC game since black flag.
Steam is just another soul-less capitalist business. They employ less then 100 people but take 30% on every game sold. They would do the exact same things as Ubisoft if the estimate they could profite more from it.
That’s a stupid analogy. The employees are not responsible for the bad management déecisions, they just want to be fairly paid for doing a job they like. Meanwhile “gamers” are fucking obsessed about trashing a game that isn’t out yet because “nO bLaCK SaMuRai iN my HiStorIc vidiyaGame aBout ficCtiNal chArcTers RuNNInG oN wAlls”. Just dont buy their games.
The travelers of the titanic were not responsible either for the crashing of the ship. Either way you’re missing the point. I didn’t mention a single game, the company which has taken a bad direction because of greed is to blame that developers have now lost their jobs. Not gamers.
Yeah, just go ahead and blame the consumer because the company makes shit product. They keep pushing stuff that the people don’t want. Any business doing this is going to go tits up. That’s just how it works. Are you out there buying 30 extra versions of Far cry to help them out? If not, stfu about it and blame the people in charge, definitely not the consumer.
The worst thing is none of the executives are getting fired (in a proper more manner, no golden parachutes and clawbacks on any stock based compensation).
Yeah? The executives are firing people, to lower costs, make the numbers look better…? Which makes the owners of the business money?
Why wouldn’t the executives get bonuses or golden parachutes if let go? They are doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
Executives don’t make products, provide services, or add any productive value. They are just the face of the owners, and will do the “hard” things for them.
Executives are responsible for the direction of the company. They aren’t just there to cut costs (at least, not usually). They’re there to see what opportunities the company to move into, and guide them to success.
This is the opposite of what most executives at these gaming companies have done lately. They’ve driven up budgets and pushed them in a direction that makes people not want to purchase their games, causing them to fail.
If a company has to fire employees then that’s the fault of the executives. They should be taking cuts first, not the people who were doing their job well but were just pointed in the wrong direction.
In Skull and Bones they couldn't even replicate the experience from their own previous IP, and then advertised is as AAAA game. It's a disgrace - they deserve to burn.
I was lucky enough to catch the big dip a few months back, my hope is that they have a big enough library that someone just buys it. But the Guillemot’s want to have their cake and eat it by selling but maintaining control. There’s a big old battle with the big shareholders and the Guillemot’s. It jumped 33% when tencent made plans to buy it. Course they could just liquidate the whole thing and walk off. The Guillemot’s really are being almost negligent at this point I think now more people have lost their jobs for ego.
eurogamer.net
Aktywne