Ah, it’s good someone is looking out for the poor poor shareholders. Just earlier I saw a long line of them at the unemployment office, begging for food from passerbyes, destitute in their poverty. /s
The shareholders at the local yacht club were really bummed out because many of them were saving really hard to add another ship to their collection, and some might even have to cancel a 2 week international vacation. Ive started a GoFundMe because no shareholder should feel so deprived of those basic needs.
It really is sad these days. You can see them holding signs written on the back of Form 10-K documents at road intersections say things like:
“Need dividends. Any amount helps. God Bless.”
But really, you have to just ignore them. You know anything you give them they’re just going to blow on equities in unproven klepto-corporate business models with over aggressive spending attempting to capture market share in industries paying abusively small wages to their destitute workers. You can try to help them like I did one time:
Me: "Hey, here’s a couple of shares in a company that hires those recently released from prison for light industrial assembly work giving them a good reference for future employment. Its not worth much, but they do some good for the community."
Them: "Can I as a shareholder petition the board to fire the ex-cons, ship the assembly work offshore, and perform a stock buyback increasing the value of the shares?"
Me: "I don’t think the board is interested in that as it violates the company mission"
It’s refreshing to see evil motherfuckers being evil openly instead of trying to hide it with doublespeak or outright denying it. I love Coffee Stain Studio’s games and how they handle monetization, and this announcement makes me worried for both the studio and their projects.
Don’t worry, the business model of companies like Embracer is literally to strip mine “inefficient” businesses run by artists through short circuiting the positive feedback loop between game developers passionate about what they do and loyal fans, trashing the work environment for the employees by cutting everything, and ripping off fans until they realize the place that made the art they love is alive only in name.
We always hear about shit companies like embracer, but who are the actual people in charge? Who are the people who are very bad at their jobs and should be publically ostracized for damaging not only their ips but the lives of hundreds to thousands of working developers? Like what are their names? Who are these faceless scumbags?
Embracer is just a name to hide behind, the people involved in the decisionmaking here should be known by name, like Bobby “incredible piece of human filth” Kotick
I honestly do believe Lars Wingefors is passionate about games and the industry, he’s been trying to find a place in it his whole career, but I do not think he’s a good business man nor worthy of stewardship for these IPs.
Very well could be. I didn’t research their backgrounds. I just know from first hand experience of people who get jobs who graduated with business degrees who don’t care about the stuff they sell.
There is a precise technical answer to your question a finance person can probably give you but it doesn’t really answer the question no matter how many acronyms they throw at you.
The actual answer is that there is no reason any of this has to be rational. Business people believe so strongly that companies like embracer are valuable and have a function in society that they detect zero cognitive dissonance when said companies don’t actually do anything but buy smaller companies, dissect them and destroy value.
You can’t understand business and finance people like they are scientists, they are closer to priests of a religious sect that believe in things because of their belief system not because of some rational framework that actually supports their ideas.
I think for the rich, it is just “good practice” to commit economic violence against smaller companies, it is good hygiene for keeping the power in the hands of the rich like mowing a field once a year or something. This doesn’t fully explain how poorly some of these companies function like embracer however.
Companies like Embracer are a disease. Their leadership are taking any passion out of the art, and continue running the money printing machine with no oil between the gears
Literally the only property of Eidos that I care about, and it was bad enough that the studio wasted so much time on that garbage avengers game rather than finish the deus ex story they left hanging.
You are walking and see a very high place, that you can't reach with your basic jump, so you decide to continue on your way.
Eventually, you get the power of flight. Your mind goes back to that high place, "oh shit, now I can get there and see what's in that place!".
Multiply that several times, with several paths, with different powers/gadgets/abilities/whatever, and that's Metroidvania.
The nature of the obstacles and the tools that unlock those obstacles doesn't matter, if the world is structured around blocked paths and tools that unlock them in non-linear ways, that's Metroidvania or at least Metroidvania-adjacent.
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