If Bioware wasn’t already dead from the corporate bullshit that was Dragon Age 4 (and that comes from me who still found enjoyment in DA4), then this is. I doubt that Mass Effect 5 game will ever see the light of day.
Oh man, this is hilarious from the outside because I’ve worked for private equity before. They are the biggest hype bros that exist. They are in their own reality every time. They can see something as small as a random tweet and think that it’s the truth. There’s no way this goes well for them.
2 examples. Long story but if you want to hear how smart “Private equity” is in tech, here are my two anecdotal experiences:
First, I was an engineer on a project that we were wrapping up a major “V2” rewrite of. We were weeks from finishing this now year long project. They came and asked “How long until released” and I said a month until clients can start using the beta. (Padding a week or so just in case). They didn’t just come back and say “You have a 2-3 weeks”, they came back and said “You have 1 week because we have signed contracts saying that it’ll be ready by then”. What. I was the head engineer. On whose authority did they do that? Who told them it would be ready? Of course no one, they just said it should be done, engineers lazy, they super smart. The project isn’t done in time of course, clients pissed, and they fired the dev team. I hear a year later the entire org had shuttered. They pissed away the entire investment.
Second, again working leading up a major project, a whole new idea in the fintech space. Team is jazzed. We push for 9 months and we release - zero bugs, not a cent lost, we test scaling and we should be able to handle millions of users - we’re ready. We release to… zero fanfare. None. We had no idea what was happening, we’re engineers so we’re used to it but no one cared. Turns out we were being acquired! Hooray said the investors! So much money! The other company claims to be doing what we are already… interesting since we had a novel idea. So we merge, and we decide to do a bakeoff (test each product against each others). Ours of course passes. Theirs tips over after 100 users. Ruby on Rails monolith, they’ve never had more than 100 users. Turns out they just slapped some stuff on a postgres database and called it a fintech product. Business investors at the top high five, show off how much money they’re going to make. Same thing, our loyal customers who were excited for our product got pissed and left. They lied to everyone else about the product just like the other place, the lies eventually caught up, and the stock tanked. Now they have two worthless companies. From what I heard they didn’t make a single sale in Q1 or Q2 of this year, and are shuttering the offices and moving engineering to India. Typical big brain business move.
Never work for private equity. If you ever get bought by private equity immediately start planning your exit. This is a card game to them, they’re sitting at the table in Vegas and are doing anything they can to make it look like the company is valuable just long enough to con someone else into buying it. If they make any profit it will go to them, the company will not see a dime of it. Your budgets will be less than shoestring, you will not have bonuses or dinners out, everything goes to them. You immediately are replaceable, with any, and I mean any developer or AI bullshit being able to replace you. Everyone at EA should be looking for new jobs right now.
Private equity is the death knell to any brand. For example Joanne’s was sold to private equity. I’ve worked for companies owned by private equity, they are there to extract every last cent for themselves while the brand is whittled away. Any cent that would be invested is instead given to the investors so they can buy new Audis and boats.
I’m not saying EA didn’t deserve it, but this is for sure the end of EA as we’ve ever known it
Okay but if there isn’t a guy living out of a car with three doors, one hauling shopping carts, and an assistant trailer park supervisor/cheeseburger prostitute then I don’t even care.
No, I disagree with that. It’s always been perfectly normal to have ultra graphics a bit out of reach so that the game will look great on future graphics cards, and 120fps is a ridiculously high number that should never be expected even with top of the line graphics cards for a brand new release. (Assuming 2 or 4k)
However, a 1 generation out of date graphics card should be able to easily play most things on High settings at a decent framerate (aiming for 60) on 4k settings, which Borderlands failed at horribly. Medium to low settings on a 4000 series card sounds like a gutpunch to me.
I’ve read reports that people can’t get more than 30fps on low settings on 4000 series cards. I’m definitely not one to expect sweet 120fps on ultra on launch day, but a 4000 card not even getting low settings? They failed. Hard.
I’m aware, we aren’t going to make a massive dent. However, for this 2 million dollar settlement, how many people would need to be swayed to not buy a switch 2 to make the settlement more expensive? In other words, how many sales would need to be lost because of us not buying the console to make the settlement moot?
In the case of 2 million, that’s about 4,500 switch 2s, not counting the loss in games bought or accessories.
If just 4500 people were convinced not to buy one because of this settlement, then the cost to their brand being tarnished is worse than the loss of potential sales due to the chip.
There’s a dozen other factors too, legal costs, what drives these potential sales, etc. what I’m trying to say is that if they’re willing to be this litigious over a few thousand console sales, then that means that even small groups like us not buying consoles can actually be noticed. It may be a simple dip in sales on a chart, but they’ll notice. To a greedy corporation willing to go after a single guy in a garage, they’ll notice a couple thousand people not buying consoles.
I continue to not buy Nintendo devices or software because of their continuing nonsensical litigation like this. Whatever value they think they lost because of these chips I say compare that to their continued tarnishing of their name.
If your drm can be altered with a chip some guy made in his garage then it’s your drm that’s at fault. Financially ruining the guy only hurts the Nintendo brand.