So EA put way too high of a sales target on the game, obviously held it back from becoming what it could be, and now are blaming the studio with layoffs, ensuring the next game will flop.
I don’t care what their “numbers” and “projections” were. The game was on the top 10 list in Steam. Even if it wasn’t an A+ game I’d say it looked like it at least hit Assassin’s Creed numbers, I’d hardly call that a failure. Sounds more like a failure to accurately predict, maybe they should fire their business analysts instead of the people who you know, make the games.
But the business analysts are the most profitable group, anywhere! If you don’t believe me just hire a business analyst to analyze things and they’ll prove it to you!
As a Data Analyst / Business Analyst, let me assure you: Not all of us are stupid (some are, for sure), but there’s only so much you can do about stupid managers. If they decide that a certain measure is key, it can be really hard to explain why it isn’t that important or where a certain distortion comes from. To compound this, some managers genuinely don’t understand their business processes and are unwilling to have it explained to them. They’ll make assumptions about how things work, then base their demands on those.
For an entirely made up example, consider a department manager looking to monitor a software development team’s workload. That workload, to them, consists of bug tickets and feature implementations. Not counted here are feature requests because, apparently, fielding them and discussing their feasibility isn’t actual development work. That’s management work, which is the Product Manager’s job… Except the Product Manager can’t unilaterally decide whether something is feasible without consulting those actually familiar with the code, taking up the developer’s time. On the other hand, since it’s an internally developed tool for other units, they can’t just say No to every request or else they risk people calling their team’s funding into question.
Now, you have the choice between frustrating yourself and annoying the manager by trying to explain all that, or gritting your teeth and just giving them the stupid chart on bugs closed and feature implementations completed over time. Guess which one is healthier for your employment prospects?
And we haven’t even started talking about the variance in effort of bug fixes or about non-feature work for code stability or QA. Eventually, we’ll reach the point where the measure becomes a target and you have to start reframing bug fixes as features and splitting features up into smaller features just to make the figures look nicer.
What I’m getting at is this: Sometimes, the analysts aren’t to blame, but the managers making decisions.
That’s not to say there aren’t absolutely shitty business analysts out there that will gladly figure out ways to polish the figures and then cash the check for making the figures look better.
Thank you for that perspective. It seems to be somewhat similar and thankless to when I get tasked with taking microbio samples from the machines to check for contamination and then get grumpy department leads because the analysis results show over and over again that their cleaning procedure is inefficient.
What, can’t you just… idk, check better to see how clean it actually is? That can’t be right, you probably got your samples contaminated. Were those really from that machine? Maybe you got them mixed up. Well you’re really itching to find contaminants, aren’t you? Of course you’ll find something if you look hard enough…
I don’t know how your business works, so I’m trying to project the managers I know onto it - am I so far off that I look like a manager?
Hahaha the production lead actually suggested that I might have been sick and coughed germs onto the sample sponge or that the sponges themselves were already contaminated during manufacturing, because every single sample showed high counts of pseudomonas.
Maybe instead she should start listening to us when we tell her that production equipment from 1970 might not be sufficient to run a food production with the hygiene requirements of today. But no, replacing that would cost more money than just taking samples over and over until the results are low enough (probably because by the 37th swab I cleaned the surface better than the production workers)
Couldn’t you just add up the germs found in successive swabs to the total and increase the total count with each test?
(I assume you have certain testing and evaluation standards you’re bound to, so that’s a “No”, but I like the idea of the results getting worse rather than better)
What would newer equipment do differently to make it less prone to hygiene issues?
I think the real world implementation of “Kingdoms of Elyria” is Kingdoms Reborn. A multiplayer 4X/city-builder hybrid (although it works just fine in single player too).
Hey wow, look what happens when we don’t buy their games and loudly organize to tell others not to buy their games over this bullshit!
There’s still nothing Sony puts out that I really think is all that good, but hopefully this serves as another message to the industry to stop with this dumb bullshit. Funny how Sony has been getting a lot of those kinda messages recently.
I recommend waiting until they revert the restrictions on countries that can’t have PSN. That’s the indicator on how serious they actually are about making PSN optional. So far the restrictions are in place so fuck em.
games are famously terrible at boycotts. if people didn’t buy spidey2 the most probable reason is that the reviews are full of thumb downs saying it runs like shit even on the best hardware.
For context, it’s somewhat common here in Latin America to name markets after the owner’s name; doubly so in smaller cities. (The city where this happened has 9k inhabitants)
It’s also common to name supermarkets “Super [something]”, to highlight that it sells general goods instead of just produce.
With that out of the way: seriously? Nintendo going after a mum-and-dad market in a small city in North America??? This only highlights that the current trademark and intellectual property laws across the world are toilet paper - they aren’t there to defend “healthy competition” or crap like that, but to ensure megacorps get their way. Screw this shit and screw Nintendo - might as well rename their company to Ninjigoku/任地獄, bloody hell.
If there’s one thing that Sony’s transition from a quality electronics company to a copyright-heavy media-driven pro-DMCA-lobbying company back in then 00s has taught me it’s to “Never, ever trust Sony”.
To be fair Sony may have produced quality electronics but their tactics have always been anti consumer.
They always insist on proprietary everything and try to get first mover advantage for each new iteration of tech and then lock the market down. The problem is they hold out for so long with their proprietary formats that it makes their products unattractive. Case in point their memory cards.
Requiring a psn account is just another anti consumer control tactic by the company.
Having dealt with Sony for years as a engineer their non consumer hardware is a true pain. Trying to interface with some of their ccd image sensors was some of the most PITA integration i’ve ever dealt with.
I honestly don’t know how a company that’s supposed to know the industry took this long to figure it out. They’ve been giving people fortnite skins for a long time, they know the bar is super low for people to get super excited about changes instead of antagonizing them.
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