I don’t know who Spike Laurie is, but I don’t trust him.
Hiro Capital partner Spike Laurie believes you can trace the current wave(s) of layoffs to one in particular: Elon Musk cutting 50% of Twitter’s workforce in November 2022.
“[Elon Musk] had figured out from people’s electronic passes that there were more people serving food in the cafeteria than actually there to eat it,” he says. “This was the impetus other business leaders needed in order to start looking carefully at the size of their companies and start making judicious cuts.”
This sounded suspect so I looked it up. The claim was posted to Twitter by Musk himself, completely unsubstantiated, and directly contested by Twitter’s former VP of real estate. If I had to choose between this being the actual impetus for other businesses making judicious cuts or the empty claims of a Musk fanboy, I’m betting fanboy.
Avera adds another factor: consumers are buying fewer games and spending more time with select franchises, a trend likely to accelerate as the market continues to shift towards live service titles.
Well, given who the layoffs are hitting, perhaps we're done shifting that way and can start to shift back.
The author then goes on to mention game length, and yeah, I agree. Halo and Gears of War used to be 10 hour linear campaigns, and now they're open world. Assassin's Creed games used to be shy of 30 hours, and now they're over 60 hours. Baldur's Gate 3 is as long or longer than Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 put together; quite frankly, if the game was only Act 1, it would have more than enough content to justify its asking price, and it feels a lot like I just played through an entire trilogy rather than a single game.
People spending more time with fewer games is not a reason, in publishers' minds, to reverse course. It's the intended outcome.
Having the same number of people (or near the same number) playing fewer games, and filling those games with monetization features is cheaper and easier to maintain than having a broad and growing library of titles.
Remember, the ideal for publishers is to have one game that everyone plays that has no content outside of a "spend money" button that players hit over and over again. That's the cheapest product they can put out, and it gives them all the money. They're all seeking everything-for-nothing relationships with customers.
But in a world where we assume that they achieved that, ignoring the long games without microtransactions like Baldur's Gate and Zelda, there are industry-wide effects at a macro level.
Impossible. Can’t go after an entire firm. (I joke; but Blizzard is so fucking rotten to the core, even if I’d rather they not have been bought out by Microsoft)
It’s not the building that the problem, it’s the transporting the guillotine, the public event permits, hiring security, finding a suitable venue, organising biohazard cleanup, not to mention ticket master fees.
And that’s all before you need to actually pry your chosen billionaire out of their secure vehicles or offices or residences and invite them to participate.
I agree, but he technically was an executive that got what was coming to them, or at least received something close to a just punishment. If they all got what he got we might have less assholes ruining everything for profit
This makes more sense. The headline just says harassment which is generally a civil suit where you get sued but not arrested. Assault is criminal that you will be arrested over.
It world definately be hard to prove it. One would be purchases made while actively playing the game, and if you had an alibi by being at work or something as a parent, and the network/ip used to be purchase it doesnt match the network at work, at least the general area.
Yeah that a good alibi if it was purchased early and you can prove that you’ve been in the office at that time. What happens if it happen in the evening, and a lot of people are from home so its not a strong argument. Uterine what they’ll do in this situation
That process is typically part of the class action suit/settlement. It often comes with a binding agreement that by participating you are waiving your right to seek compensatory damages individually.
Yes, i’m sure it’s a lot of work to move game engines but time and time again it’s the same story. Closed source anything is free until the easy money has been sucked up so why even bother with anything closed source?
Sooner society stops feeding the greed, hopefully the sooner we get back to a sustainable society!
Part of the problem are the stockholders who expect the shares to go up in price every time. If it starts dipping down enough a huge portion of them will pull their shares and bankrupt the company. This causes companies to mostly think in the short term cause it’s better to make a bit more money than be bankrupt.
gamesindustry.biz
Gorące