Exactly what Nintendo was hoping for. I can’t blame the developers, though. But this sucks.
Old ass game systems where it’s practically impossible or expensive to get the physical games anymore, let alone the console, with some titles locked to those systems, never to be enjoyed again except through emulation.
Old ass game systems where it’s practically impossible or expensive to get the physical games anymore, let alone the console, with some titles locked to those systems
And if you do manage to acquire a physical copy Nintendo isn’t go to see any of the money you spent on it anyway
It’s the classic thing that happens to all these movies and TV shows that are written by people who purposely avoid the source material and brag about “we didn’t play the game or read the books” like that somehow is going to make the content better?
Offhand I can only think of one movie (and sequels) where “didn’t read the book” made the movie significantly better: The Bourne Identity. Those books really were awful!
Not only that, they probably would have been better off not using the original 4 playable characters since every game comes with a new set. Just make sure the side characters are done well and you keep the same feel as the games and it should have been an easy win
Workers rights absolutely. Pay your human workers even while using ai to make a great product. AI didn’t do anything to me, it’s how the companies decide to use it.
Oh yeah I’m sure they will use the ai to pay human workers as well. You definitely know that if they are allowed to use ai they won’t use it in a way that means they can stop paying humans and can just have ais generate everything all whist delivering a lower quality product to the customer.
It’s a win win, as long as you are an executive or a shareholder.
I am potentially okay with this. The entertainment industry has been creatively bankrupt for too long. Actors will move to more independent work, more interesting and experimental content will get made, corporate will advance AI technology. Win-win?
Or more Ai as a cash incentive. It’s already an industry that creates npc’s, Ai will improve this, Indy’s might just sit there and craft perfect Ai actors and license them out.
Hey voice actors, take this five bucks today so we can make your job vanish tomorrow, it’s a win win! For us. Not you. This guy thinks you should do it though because we already… make npcs? That you currently voice.
I just think it’s inevitable that we will see fully voiced and interactive ai npc companions. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, I’m in a union and I’m pro worker but this is tech and I think tech is gonna tech.
It’s inevitable if you give up and let companies do whatever they want yes. It’s not if you get them to sign papers and lobby for regulation to protect workers.
I don’t understand this defeatist mentality at all sorry.
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…
If you are bad at your job, you lose your job. If the CEO is bad at their job, you lose your job. If the CEO is REALLY bad at their job, they get a golden parachute.
These stories are so dumb/intentionally misleading/outrage bait.
Executives have predefined stock sale schedules at regular intervals. This allows them to convert their equity to cash and avoid conflicts of interest. That is, it’s hard to gain an advantage over the market when you sell exactly the same amount every month for the next 4 years.
Where was everyone’s outrage the other 99% of times this guy sold exactly the same amount of stock?
Seems like if they wanted to avoid this sort of suspicion, they’d time the announcement for either right before or nowhere near when the scheduled sale would take place.
But then they wouldn’t get to feel like a Bond villain, so…
Yes, hypothetically the CEO could influence the date an announcement is made for their own personal gain, but it’s not worth it and there will be many more sell events in the future.
Long run, trying to scheme an announcement to gain more at 1/100 sales isn’t worth it.
CEO John Riccitiello shifted 2000 shares last week on 6th September, … part of a trend over the past year where the exec has sold more than 50,000 shares in total and bought none.
This is a drop in his equity bucket and any gains this article implies are due to “insider trading” will disappear in subsequent events.
Having the scumbag of a CEO in the headline may have been a mistake. Riccitiello sold the least shares in the recent transaction history of the company. Also, I don’t know where you get your "retaining over 3000000 shares’ from. The source says Riccitiello sold all his shares in his possession.
The article mentions two others:
Tomer Bar-Zeev who sold 37.5k shares on 1st September, for around $1.4m. Shlomo Dovrat, meanwhile, sold 68k shares on 30th August for around $2.5m.
Bar-Zeev sold 37500 shares of ~1300000 owned on automated sell. That’s a factor of ten and a fair bit away from 2k sold from 3 mil, but that might be normal. It was automated, after all.
Dovrat’s transaction is mostly the same, roughly double the shares sold and roughly double the shares owned. However, it was not automated.
I believe the article mentioned them because they sold the most, but they clearly weren’t taking the amount retained into account. The third most sold, however, by Robynne Sisco was a sell of 25768, retaining 14700 (sold ~64%).
There are a fair number of other sells, but if the Bar-Zeev and Dovrat sells don’t look suspicious, nothing else will stand out.
What does seem a little odd- and I have no idea if this is at all unusual- is that in the last twelve months, more shares have been bought than sold (net shares almost 10,000,000), and in the last 3 months more shares have been sold than bought (net shares almost 3,500,000). In the last 3 months, the number of insider traders is a little over 1/3 of the amount of insider trades over the last 12 months (under the assumption it should be about 1/4). All of the insider buys seem to be the options granted for working for Unity. I assume it isn’t too odd for the board of directors to sell and never buy, but they have increased selling a fair bit in the last 3 months, and it seems specifically the last two weeks.
More confusing accounting that I’ve never learned, and probably never will.
At first I thought it was because of direct/indirect ownership. But what is the point of “5. Amount of Securities Beneficially Owned Following Reported Transaction(s) (Instr. 3 and 4)” being 3mil with no transaction, but the 2000 stock transaction showing they owned none? I see nothing on the form or in the definition showing that direct or indirect ownership show be reported differently. They are all owned by the ‘reporting person’. But clearly this is all me just not being able to read how they filled it out.
I agree $80k is nothing to $100mil, I do believe that if they have 3mil of securities, then it doesn’t matter, no matter how high or low the securities are worth. I disagree with the idea that automation makes it not suspicious, though. If the stocks were all automatically sold off, then the company devalues itself afterwards, it has the same intent and outcome as any other insider trading.
Ok, so the report is on the person (CEO in this case). Only directors and certain executive levels are required to report.
Table I shows ‘non-derivative securities’ (regular stock). The CEO holds in their own name 3 million+ shares. No transaction was reported for those, but they have to be listed.
The CEO’s spouse aquired 2000 shares at a cost of $1.425 each. After this transaction, they had 2000 shares total (column 5).
They then sold those shares for $40 each. After, they weren’t holding any stock, so column 5 shows 0.
The CEO financially benefits from this, so the transactions are listed on their form, as (I) for indirect. If the spouse also had a position within Unity which required reporting this would be listed on their own SEC form as well.
Yeah I just had a scene where wyll asked me to dance and I was ready to dunk on him with my skillz but instead they danced and make out and the game didn’t even ask me if I wanted to
Ugh, I hate bad PC writing. It's bad enough when it's "I agree 100%," "I agree 100% and wanna s your d," and "You're the stupidest, ugliest, evilest piece of absolute crap I have ever seen in my life and I'd kill you myself if it wouldn't get your blood in the carpet" but then some games just insist on somehow making it non-obvious which is which >:|
It’s a fun wrap-up to act 1 before you dive into the underdark or the mountain pass. It also serves as an important relationship set-up - it’s where you’re meant to establish who you want to romance, if anyone.
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
He’s been involved in several of the big Unity scandals, yes.
This most recent event wasn’t one thing, it was a culmination of poor decisions. If Unity had been sunshine and rainbows all up until now, then the reaction wouldn’t have been so bad. It was the final nail in the coffin, really.
Since he’s been involved, it’s been fuck up after fuck up.
Off the top of my head there’s failing to prepare for massive changes to the ads they could run on Apple and Google’s platforms and then realising that the money they were making was way less than expected, purchasing a company associated with malware, calling game developers “fucking idiots”, growing the company enormously over lockdown and then realising they’ve pissed all their money away. I don’t really know what a CEO actually does so a lot of that could be just company decisions, but JR definitely seems like a loose cannon who can’t help being wildly unprofessional.
There was also a bunch of sexual harrassment that was swept under the rug. He’s an incredible scumbag and a shitty CEO, which is why the psychopaths that inhabit corporate boards seem to love him
9 years of everyone telling him that forcing the UNITY splash screen on “baby’s first game” was a bad idea and was hurting the engine, because people were assuming all games made in the engine were bad, because good games didn’t show they also used Unity. Now that he is gone this changes.
Also he is a huge fan of the “metaverse” idea: venturebeat.com/…/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-the-… and I am sure some of Unity’s money went there at a time they could not afford it and with nothing to show for it.
What people might not catch is that this isn’t artists, designers or engineers. It’s voice actors only. I’m all for people getting what they deserve but as I see voice actors in the games industry demand profit sharing and more rights, I’m reminded that those who actually make the games don’t get that. They have overtime without pay.
Voice actors are among “those who actually make the games.” Voice acting in particular also is strenuous work that can and does cause physical injury when workers are compelled to work long hours doing rough voices and so on. People end up having to have surgery on their vocal cords.
We don’t need to devalue voice actors to value other game industry workers. The only difference is the voice actors organized first, probably because of the injury risk, and when you form a union you have to define a group that you can reach and coordinate. It shouldn’t be an us vs them among works.
Don’t forget mocap. A lot of actors are doing mocap for games now, which also potentially results in injury.
This also includes stunt workers (who do the more intensive motion capture work) and stunt coordinators, many of whom are in the Screen Actors Guild already.
Oh, great, trade unions. That never caused any issues for worker’s unity. If you can’t organise everyone, from tech lead to cleaning staff, in the same industrial union you’re playing right into the capitalists’ divide and conquer game.
Not so. It makes sense to organise in trade unions. The heads of those unions are on the same side most of the time, as it would be in this case, and they can easily coordinate their actions. But in some cases the interests of one trade have no bearing on another, or are even in opposition, in which case it would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to organise a balloted action across the entire union. Thus nullifying the strength of the union and playing right into the capitalist’s hands.
So instead of coming to terms with your fellow workers you rather have them fight capitalists by themselves? Leave them to the scraps the bosses deem sufficient while you’re wheeling away a wagonload of concessions won through your unique bargaining power?
You’re limiting the strength of worker’s. If train conductors don’t strike for train toilet cleaners noone will.
And any opposition between worker’s interests is negligible compared to that between workers and capital, who have no interests in common at all.
They need to unionize too. Also count actors are included in the "actually make the games" group. Everyone should be paid well, don't drag a group trying to fix that down because the rest aren't doing anything.
I’m reminded that those who actually make the games don’t get that. They have overtime without pay.
Yes, capitalism fucks everyone every day unless you fight for what you deserve, usually for decades, and even then only getting half of it. It's surprising that keeping this in mind requires reminders.
I think they asked for that in the last strike, but I haven't seen it mentioned in this one. And some speculated it was only included for something they could drop in the eventual resolution as a form of compromise.
The Bayonetta lady was asking for profits and took to Twitter to boycott the game when she didn’t get what she wanted. Claiming that she made those games what they are.
I never said it was about this strike directly but instead overall how VAs have been pushing to get more than those on the front line of game creation.
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