I did a little more research, and it tends to be only specific circumstances and shareholder agreements, but there are times when a shareholder can force a company to buyback the shareholder’s stock.
Shareholders have a right to sell their shares. If there is no other buyer, then the company will have to pay them for it. They may not have enough liquid capital to pay off 30%. Other assets might have to be sold off, which may make it difficult to operate.
We hit diminishing returns a while ago. It will be much harder to find improvements, both in terms of techniques and computation.
Consider that there is ten years between Atari Pitfall and Wolfenstein 3D, ten years between that and Metroid Prime, and ten years between that and Mass Effect 3, and then about ten years between that and now. There’s definitely improvement between all those, but once past Metroid Prime, it becomes far less obvious.
We’ve hit the point where artistic style is more important than taking advantage of every clock cycle of the GPU.
There’s a saying in computer graphics: if it looks right, it is right. Meaning you shouldn’t worry if the technique makes a mockary of how light actually works as long as the viewer won’t notice.
2d games did, too. The SA1 chip did a lot to make games run better on the SNES. There’s mods out there for running games on the SA1 chip, especially shooters like Super R-Type, and it’s a substantially better experience.
People who think modern coding practices are bloated should study why certain speed running mechanics work. A lot of them stem from things we would never do today. We’ve removed entire classes of bugs by using “bloated” languages and tools.
Gaming crash was more of a console thing. One of the arguments was why you should buy a console when you can buy a computer for a bit more and do so much more. Computer games ran through it mostly unfazed.
Hasbro is unprofitable, but there was a memo a while back that said Wizards of the Coast was their most profitable division. Possibly their only profitable division. That covers Magic: The Gathering and D&D.
This is also why we’re seeing both those properties getting the fuck monetized out of them. Big influxes of MTG sets based on other licensed properties, and attempts to undo the open licensing around One D&D.
But then it makes even less sense to lay people off from those divisions.
Nintendo did try that, though, and mixed it around again whenever they felt like it. “New research uncovered that…” blah blah. Better off if they don’t bother anymore.