you get a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show their investors growth—because why else does somebody own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not going to grow?
I thought the way it was supposed to work was, a company starts out investing in its growth and during this period shareholders get gains from the price of the stock going up, and then when it has maxed out just switch to shoveling the profits into dividends instead? If the industry has stopped growing, I don’t see why there isn’t a path to acknowledging that to investors, what am I missing?
Shouldn’t that depend on the dollar amounts? Why would $X of dividends be worse than $X of stock growth? And if growth just isn’t in the cards anymore, it would be in reality a worse bet as the companies pour resources into a black hole of false hope and self sabotage seeking something that isn’t actually going to happen.
Growth stocks rise more because they carry more risk than steady dividend payouts. In a perfect dividend world, dividends would match growth, but because there is inherent risk in growth stocks there is a larger upswing
There are competing schools of thought in the investment world, and Growth has solidly beaten Dividend investing. Even better, going for a market-weighted global index fund is best.
You don’t pay tax on growth, you do on dividends. For large shareholders a high dividend can be a problem. Even for me, a very small time retail investor, I have to keep a balance of growth (like Apple) and dividend (I tend to use a dividend ETF so I can fairly reliably estimate my dividends) so I can avoid paying tax on the dividends.
It never ceases to amazing me how angry people get when a game isn’t perfect and bug free. We want more and more content and graphics with the same amount or less resources, all the while refusing to pay any more for it.
I miss the days when people were happy with n64 and ps1 graphics. You didn’t need a team of 200 people to put out hyper realistic graphic open world games that people would still shit on.
Fucking why? You can buy a ship for $20, go download the game, and play it this very second. The fuck does the “1.0 release!” title do differently? Give you full license to shit on how it’s now out and xyz isn’t done?
The people concerned about it releasing are the same ones who will bitch about it releasing ‘too soon’. Fuck em.
I’m on the other side of the fence here, amazed that people still bat for a company that can’t deliver a product after what, 10 years past the first estimate release date?
I’m not on any side of the fence. I just see these posts shitting on games all the time, and get tired of seeing them. If you don’t like a game fine, don’t play it. But making games is hella difficult. I make indie games in my spare time, and I can honestly say, just making a single player game is hard, let alone a multi-player game, or anything realistic. Like Jesus, if you have such a huge problem with these games, go make a better one yourself.
I agree with you for most games, people are picky and don’t understand the challenges. But this game solicited donations 10 years ago, people bought into the vision, and they were wildly successful, I think they raised $600M, which is like the most money any game has ever raised?
And despite that, 10 years later, it’s still mostly just a tech demo (edit: perhaps I’m wrong? Maybe there is $40 worth of playable content. See discussion in child comments, I haven’t tried this myself in many years, out of fear of being disappointed again). They are focused on adding cool but superficial animation things, rather than just making a fun playable experience.
If they were focused on making a fun playable (but possibly buggy and limited) game then it would be different. But instead they seem to be chasing random superficial features like projecting your face from your web cam onto your character. It feels like they are not seriously committed to making even an early access game in a reasonable timeline.
If this project was funded by some billionaire who wanted to spend 30 years to make the most amazing MMO ever with a ton of never before seen features, then that would be fine. But instead normal people chipped in $40+ to fund this game, and the developers don’t seem to be prioritizing actually making a fun playable game. It’s barely beyond a tech demo even 10 years later (edit: maybe this is not completely accurate). It is reasonable to assume that the management of this project does not care about making a playable game, they can work on whatever fun features they want, they’ve already made a ton of money.
edits: perhaps I’m wrong about the state of the game. I haven’t tried it in a while. I’ll have to give it another try.
I agree that the project has fallen victim to arguably the worst example of scope creep to ever plague the gaming industry, but it’s much further along than “barely beyond a tech demo”. I know people who play several hours a week and say they’re having a great time. There’s definitely a full game in the alpha, but it’s far from polished or finished.
To your point about feeling different about the slow development if it were funded by a single investor rather than crowdsourcing: what’s the difference? Every person I know who’s spent money on star citizen seems happy with their RoI. Isn’t that all that matters with an investment? I’m not sure why it would be better if it was just a single investor being happy rather than a million investors being happy, even if it is all just delusion.
TL;DR: I may be mistaken about how playable it is, I’ll have to give it another try. Thanks for the reassurance. I haven’t tried it myself in many years, and have only relied on articles like this to hear about the progress. Perhaps I’m biased since the comments always love to hate on Star Citizen and few people are defending it. RE single investor: if everyone who paid money for it was happy then yeah there would be no difference. But I think a lot of people paid money expecting a longer gaming experience within a few years, and instead it’s taken a long time and they’re still focusing a lot on cosmetic things rather than gameplay and content. IMO gameplay and content should be the top priority, and cool visual stuff can come later. But if piracy/mining/exploring planets/missions can actually provide ~10 hours of enjoyment without being seriously hindered by bugs, then I’m totally wrong and should update my comment.
Thanks for the info, perhaps I should update my comment. It was barely beyond a tech demo when I tried it so many years ago, but it does seem like it’s added a lot since then (and I’ve only learned about it after digging in more today). I’ve seen some comments in this post that said there isn’t much to do besides walk around and look at stuff, which matches my experience many years ago, but perhaps it’s not really accurate anymore. Some articles have talked about piracy and mining actually being viable as ways to make money to get a better ship. If those are enjoyable and not severely limited in content and so buggy that progress is hard, then I’m totally wrong and can maybe say that 10 years later my return on investment is adequate :) , and maybe in another few years there will be even more content and give me something more like ~10+ hours of enjoyment.
I know people who play several hours a week and say they’re having a great time. There’s definitely a full game in the alpha, but it’s far from polished or finished.
This is actually really reassuring to me, I’ll have to give it another try.
Every person I know who’s spent money on star citizen seems happy with their RoI.
Perhaps the people you’re talking to about it now are somewhat skewed towards people who still enjoy it for what it is now. I’ve almost forgotten and wouldn’t think to mention it to most people, but I paid $40 for it around 9 years ago, because a friend mentioned it to me and it seemed like such an amazing idea. It showed so much promise, the racing seemed fun and complex, and later I tried Squadron 42 and felt like I could see the vision coming together. But then after not trying it for a few years, I keep hearing more of the same thing: new cool superficial feature, but still lacking in significant enjoyable gameplay. I am actually kind of scared to try it again and be disappointed in the lack of content.
I realize too that Squadron 42 is apparently a fairly long and mostly finished experience? That alone might be worth $40, though I do think 10 years is a little long to wait for that. I’ll concede that they do seem to be delivering on some of the hype, it just takes way too long, and I’d rather they prioritize on something simple but playable for long periods, versus cool immersion and fancy animations and concepts.
Perhaps a lot of the people who enjoy it now enjoy the kind of role playing aspect of getting in a ship with friends and walking around exploring? I would enjoy that somewhat too, every few years, almost like a really advanced VR chat, I guess. But my friends have lost interest in this due to the never ending development cycle. And I would hate to be the one to say “hey guys let’s try this out again, it’s way better now”, and then have everyone be disappointed when someone gets stuck in a wall or the content seems really limited.
Anyway to summarize: perhaps I’m wrong, maybe the game is worth $40 now and I’ve just been biased from people loving to hate on a game that they haven’t even tried. I’ll have to give it another try.
I think it’s worth a try if you haven’t played in several years! There isn’t a lot of gameplay if you don’t have a ship geared towards combat/mining/cargo, but those contracts are pretty fun (there wasn’t a huge amount of variety, but still several hours of gameplay). I will admit that all my evidence of player enjoyment is anecdotal, but it was a bit shocking to me to hear about how much fun friends were having when I keep seeing so much hate towards the game online. I’ve gotten a couple ships as gifts from friends/family, but my PC hasn’t ever been beefy enough to run the game at a stable frame rate (I’ve since upgraded so it’s probably time to try it again ¯*(ツ)*/¯)
Awesome, thanks! It’s nice to hear a perspective that is different from the mainstream. I’ve also been limited by my PC for a while, but I’ve upgraded since I last tried it, so hopefully I’ll have more luck this time.
Every person I know who’s spent money on star citizen seems happy with their RoI
Every person you know personally? Most comment sections I’ve seen discussing Star Citizen seems to have at least one or two people who are unhappy with their roi. Personally, I don’t feel like I’ve been able to get my full money’s worth yet. I think I will some day, I know it’s more than a tech demo, but the gameplay isn’t quite there yet and the game is still really buggy and unoptimized.
If they can release Squadron 42 this year or next, I think that’d really start to turn things around for them more than anything else
Let’s be honest the people who would defend their ROI have lost interest in defending it to the unwilling. Star Citizen has become a cat call to all the haters whenever it’s posted in general gaming (namely r/games and c/games now) communities. The only way the narrative changes is by showing not telling, and that only happens with further polishing like this article is covering, and in future release.
There is a reason they’ve successfully increased pledge numbers year over year, you just don’t hear from people outside that community due to this stigma that’s not worth bothering to explain.
Homie you’ve been able to fucking play it for a decade. If you haven’t figured that out yet, you’re the problem. If they said they released it years ago and called these all “updates” you’d have nothing to bitch about and that’s why I fucking loathe people like you. It’s not “officially released” so it’s a scam, it’s disappointing, it’s whatever the fuck else you can dredge up to downplay the fact they’re still fucking developing it like any other active game. Even Elite Dangerous still drops updates and it predates Star Citizen. You people are impossible to please and it’s exhausting. Move the fuck on.
tech demo out = game is playable, unbeatable logic
If they said they released it years ago and called these all “updates” you’d have nothing to bitch about
It’s not about what the developers say the state of the game is, it’s about what’s actually out and playable - and for Star Citizen, last time I checked it’s some barebones version with one planet, bajillion missing features, 200000000$ ships and in general a buggy mess
You star citizen fans are insufferable. I get spammed with these videos, ads and articles hyping up the game for being the best thing ever, always claiming the next update to be some gamechanger but it’s still the same unfinished garbage. Love how every time someone mentions the absolutely disgusting monetisation, it goes in one ear and out the other.
Now get back to licking chris robert’s shoes, you’ve missed a spot
Oh boy! Can’t wait for my grandchildren to use AI to customize the sponsorship logos on Cyborg-Messi’s Jersey or change the hue of the football pitch to a slightly more artificial green in EA Sports FC 2077!
You misunderstand. Larian is the company that made the BG3 video game, and they haven’t laid people off.
However it’s a licensed game. Baldur’s Gate and D&D are IPs that are owned by a company called Wizards of Coast. And Wizards is owned by Hasbro. Hasbro is forcing layoffs at Wizards, specifically on the D&D team because it doesn’t print money as efficiently as say, Magic the Gathering does.
The people at Wizards, i.e the people who actually make D&D are no doubt passionate wonderful people. But Hasbro (and probably some of the Wizards management) are awful corporate parasites determined to suck every last penny from their properties.
They don’t give a shit how loved a product is, if it’s not making $100M per year then it’s basically worthless to them and they won’t fund it. So layoffs happen.
Please do not tell me that anyone is surprised that a triple A game studio laid off most of their employees as a reward for a job well done.
Please. Please tell me everyone has figured out that nearly all large game dev companies are pure fucking evil.
EDIT: Welp, thats what I get for making an ill informed post after 36 hours on the road before passing out in my motel, yep, I probably should have read the article.
The headline here on lemmy is unreadable gibberish with BG3 in the title. It could as well be
Layoff 5blagagasjjee Swen shgrwaaahahaaaa Baldurs Gate 3 dacghgfrtf gone. Click here for ads.
So i get where he’s coming from. On the other hand, once you start reading the ads with some content in between it becomes clear immediately that this is about the IP holder, not the game studio.
‘There’s almost nobody left’: CEO of Baldur’s Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke says the D&D team he initially worked with is gone, due to Hasbro layoffs
Same Lemmy title as the article. You know exactly who’s talking (“CEO of Baldur’s Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke”), about whom (“the D&D team he initially worked with”), what happened to them (“is gone”) and who is to blame (“due to Hasbro layoffs”).
As far as titles go, it’s pretty good at telling you exactly what the actual article is about. Sure, you may need basic knowledge about how a licenced product works, and that BG3 is under the D&D licence. It would be rather hard to fit all that in a title.
Off-topic, but when I mentioned this in a different thread, an actual answer I got is basically the fediverse is really similar to reddit - how can the culture be any different?
Anyways, if the fediverse starts to become Reddit 2.0 I think it would be high time to go.
You…You might want to consider reading the article.
Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, who own DnD. Larian, a completely separate company, got the rights to make BG3 from Hasbro. Hasbro laid off nearly everyone Larian Studios worked with at Wizards of the Coast.
What? No. They’re saying that Larian, a completely independent company, worked with a team from Wizards of the Coast. Wizards of the Coast is owned by Hasbro. Hasbro laid off 1100 employees from Wizards of the Coast. Many of those employees were on the team that worked with Larian to make BG3.
Larian Studios had literally nothing to do with this. Larian did nothing wrong.
Game developers seem to be very afraid to change core features or the story of the game in a major way (even if the actual work would not be too extensive) after release. But there are enough examples where games improved a lot after release.
Sure, the initial impression of the game might be ruined, but that is more a consequence for the producers that most often where responsible for the rushed release, than for the gamers or developers, of the game is fixed afterwards.
Its insanity, Unity is a good product. There is a place for it in reality. In any sane world this product would have continued to operate how it was and it would have benefited people. But since profits are attached everything will have to be ruined eventually. Unreal is next to bat.
That’s really well said and an underrated comment here. In a sane world, Unity would “make a living” just fine. Another user commented on where they spent their margins, and my bet is that it’s on bullshit. Executive compensation should be first to get slashed, and if anything they should concentrate on keeping the “golden goose” or core development team alive.
Allowing leaders to use profits however they wish has been a disaster. I don’t know if it was codified into law, but when companies had to invest in R&D, and they had to invest in employees before drinking their own koolaid the world was a better place. Employees were taken care of, average people could thrive. Now its an open feeding trough everyone else is exempt from. The modern world only thrives with checks and balances, its proven that without them the powerful cannot be trusted.
I would say, being even more pedantic, that the game uses a blockchain (which is just a different type of database) to record in game digital asset ownership. This game could have been made with a normal db taking that roll and would probably run no differently.
He is mentioning and using a blockchain over a normal db for no other reason that it probably helped to secure funding in 2017 as it was a massive tech buzzword at the time.
It could, sure, but I’m positive the only reason he’s making it is because of blockchain. I seriously doubt Pete was rolling around a game idea for online real estate separately and just threw blockchain in as a way to get funding.
Oh boy can’t wait to have cups that burn a hole right through their coolers
I’d really love it if we’d just have a generation or two where they focused on making cpus more efficient and less hot rather than ramping power every generation , same with gpus
This only got bad with the most recent generation of CPUs. AMD 5xxx series is very efficient as demonstrated by Gamers Nexus. The Intel CPUs from 2500k to idk, 8xxx series? were efficient until they started slapping more cores and then cranking the power on them.
Yes the second thing about cranking power and cores is what I’m talking about.
Also, as far as gpus, the 2000 series was ridiculously power hungry at the time, and it looks downright reasonable now. It’s like the Overton window of power consumption lol.
I dunno, I ran a 2080 on the same PSU that I used on a 2013 build, a 650W seasonic. Got some graphs? Power consumption didn’t seem to jump that bad until the latest gen.
My current 3090 is a power hog though, that’s when I’d say it started for Nvidia (3000 series). For AMD, 7000 series CPUs, and I’m not really sure for Intel. 9900k was the last Intel CPU I ran, it seemed fine. I was running a 9900k/2080 on the same PSU as the 2500k/570 build.
As for as the 2080 goes, like I said, it was big FOR THE TIME, and power hungry FOR THE TIME. It’s still reasonable especially for today’s standards
As for as the last two gens, 3000 and 4000 series, they are known to draw more than their rated power requirements, which, for their min recommended psu wattage, 3080 was 50 watts more than the 2080 (750w), and 4080 was 100 w more than that (850w)
To add to that, both of these gens of cards, when doing graphics intensive things like gaming, can overdraw power and have been known to cause hard shutdowns in pcs with PSUs that are even slightly higher rated than their min rec. Before these last two gens you could get away with a slightly lower than rated wattage PSU and sacrifice a little performance but that is definitely no longer the case.
And sure, the performance to watts used is better in the 3080, but they also run 10+ degrees hotter and the 4000 series even moreso.
I just hope the 5000 series goes the way of power consumption refinement rather than smashing more chips onto a board or vram fuckery like with the 4060, like I’d be happy with similar performance on the 5000 series if it was less power hungry
The 7 series are more efficient than the 5 series. They just are programmed to go as fast as thermals allow. So the reviewers that had really powerful coolers on the cpus saw really high power draw. If instead you set a power cap, you get higher performance per watt than the previous generations.
Having the clocks scale to a thermal limit is a nice feature to have, but I don’t think it should have been the default mode.
Intel became less efficient because of how long they were stuck on 14nm. In order to compensate to beat amd in performance mindshare, they needed to push the clocks hard.
Overtime, cpus have been sitting closer to max clock, defeating the purpose of overclocking to many, where adding 1GHz was not out of the ordinary. Now getting 0.5GHz is an acheivement.
I felt the same when the current-gen CPUs were announced, but when I looked closer at AMD’s chips, I learned that they come with controls for greatly reducing the power use with very little performance loss. Some people even report a performance gain from using these controls, because their custom power limits avoid thermal throttling.
It seems like the extreme heat and power draw shown in the marketing materials are more like competitive grandstanding than a requirement, and those same chips can instead be tuned for pretty good efficiency.
Yeah I’m talking about Nvidia and Intel here, but tbh ryzen 4000 cpus run pretty hot, but they also optimized ryzen quite a bit before they changed to this new chip set, which makes sense to me. Seems like Nvidia and Intel are worried about what looks good power wise on paper rather than optimization sometimes.
AMD uses 290/390 to compete with Nvidias 970, people buy Nvidia, shoulda bought a 390 meme is born after the 3.5 gb vram controversy happens. AMd mocked for high power consumption.
AMD releases 6000 series gous to compete with Nvidias Ampere line, uses a notibly significant lower power draw, people still buy Nvidia.
That’s because Nvidia still has the leg up on rtx, but that doesn’t mean Nvidia shouldn’t be thinking about it. I’m not talking about what the market directs them to do, I’m talking about what I hate personally
I mean they did this generation technically. All of the rtx 4000 cards sans the 4090 are fairly efficient… only because nvidia moved the names of the gpu for each tier thats not the halo card.
Point is, you cant have everything and people generally prioritize performance first. Because efficiency has rarely gave either gpu company more profit gpu wise.
If you cared about efficiency, Nvidia answer to people would be buying their RTX 4000 SFF Ada(75w ~3060ti perf) or RTX 6000 Ada… if you can afford it.
It’s interesting that this comes out during the FTC vs Microsoft case.
As much as Google shot itself in the foot, as usual, this also shows the anti-competitive landscape in gaming. One of the biggest issues Google had was convincing AAA studios to develop games for their “console”. Meanwhile, Microsoft is solving that by buying studios like Zenimax, Mojang, and soon Actiblizz. If you own the studio, they’re guaranteed to develop for your console, and they may choose not to develop for any competitor’s consoles.
But it has always been that way, with first party titles and exclusives , even purchasing studios like Rare or Psygnosis, its not like a brand new situation that developed right after Google announced Stadia.
If Google had done even any research, I would have started by looking at the PS1 launch and how Sony broke into a market then dominated by Nintendo and Sega with their exclusives, they would have secured a multi year pipeline of AAA titles before launch.
This is a mess Google could have completely avoided with some basic research and discussion with the remaining independent studios. Instead they launched and assumed that they could fix this shit later, rather than making an informed decision on if they actually had a real chance.
its not like a brand new situation that developed right after Google announced Stadia
No, but it’s telling that one of the world’s richest companies ran into this problem. It’s pretty typical of Google to be arrogant and not understand the market they were trying to break into. Also typical of them to give up when it turned out to be a hard problem to solve. But, still, they chose to give up rather than make what (for them) would have been a reasonably small investment to buy a few AAA studios.
It seems to me that to have been successful in this attempt they would have either had to become a major console manufacturer with their own exclusives (maybe not a market they wanted to be in) or to be the junior partner working with another console manufacturer, where they controlled the server side and the other company controlled the client-facing and studio-facing side. But, Google rarely does partnerships like that. You’re right that it really seems like they didn’t go into it with their eyes open. They seemed to just arrogantly assume that their technological superiority would be enough to disrupt consoles without having to do what everybody else did.
But this is a situation of their own making, anybody even remotely cognizant of how Sony and Microsoft entered the market, even Steam has lessons to share, would have been aware that they needed that pipeline of AAAs, and exactly how expensive AAA titles are to make. Its usually public record how much one of the manufacturers paid to buy studios as well, the order of magnitude of cash needed to properly enter the market are hardly secret.
Either they thought they could bully their way into getting them or they thought they didn’t need them, which is even worse, way way worse. They could have spent the money the others are in this space but didn’t, this is the main reason this fell on its arse. They can moan all they like about the price of admission but they could have afforded to pay it if they wanted or lobbied to change it before hand rather than wasting a few billions on this.
It will be very interesting at the level Apple pitch their new gaming service if the rumors are true. Do they go after the mobile lite eco system that Netflix is cobbling together or do they go all in?
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