This is exactly it. They’re not building their brand by providing a superior service/experience or driving market prices down. They’re using venture capital to fund giving away games to get you to use their wildly subpar services. They’re trying to buy market position without the services to justify it.
If you’re a fallout fan, you’re already on board. Our viewership is a given, and is theirs to lose. But for people who aren’t big fans, having big names attached shows it’s serious business. It’s meant to convince people on the fence that it’s worth an initial watch since there’s money and names behind it so maybe it’s not just “some dumb low budget video game shit.”
Maybe it’ll be good, maybe it won’t. But after the 400+ hours I spent in fo4, I’m willing to commit to another hour to see if the first episode is any good. I’ve spent longer than that hunting for literal trash in-game. :)
You’re not wrong, but shareholders look at their investment very differently than stockholders. Private shareholders can’t necessarily cash out whenever they want because the sale of private equity is usually tightly controlled by the company. This means they need to be interested in long-term growth and success. While public stockholders can also hold their shares for a long time, there’s much more ability and incentive to buy and sell quickly to make a quick profit.
Anecdotally, I worked for a publicly traded company for 6 years before they got bought and taken private by a private equity group. The way profitability and trends are measured is night and day. As a public company, everything was hyper focused on quarter by quarter results. One underperforming quarter meant a tank in stock prices, hiring freezes, and a general sentiment to the employees of “quit spending money on expenses if you want to have a job next quarter”. Being controlled by private equity, they’re most concerned with year over year growth and the long-term stability of our operations.
It’s not a myth, it’s called Fiduciary Duty. The board, officers, and executives of a public company have a legal responsibility to put the financial interests and well-being of the company above other personal interests. The article you linked doesn’t deny this, and it also isn’t discussing the legal definition of it. It’s discussing what you might call “toxic fiduciary duty”, or more or less the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. It’s the idea that profit is the primary motive and should always trump all other considerations.
Fiduciary duty is important to create a concrete stance against corruption and misuse of the company’s assets for personal gain. But when taken to an extreme, it becomes toxic and has negative consequences for the company. Employee wages are probably the most obvious example. There has to be a balance between underpaying and overpaying. If you chronically underpay, the best employees will seek more gainful employment elsewhere and the company will suffer from a poorly qualified workforce. If you overpay, like 100% revenue share with employees, the company will cease to make a profit and will be unable to function. A balance has to be struck to retain the best talent in order to drive success for the company; that is the point of the article you linked.
TL;DR extremism is always bad
(Please don’t mistake this for a pro-capitalism rant, there’s nuance to be had here)
One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.
Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use or modification from its original design.
Unreal Engine is technically open source, because it’s source code is made available to the general public. But it is licensed under a restrictive EULA instead of any of the normal licenses you’d expect for an open source project (MIT, Apache, GPL3, etc).
This is definitely pedantic, but “open source” is a colloquial term, not a technical one. Most people mean FOSS when they say open source, but the terms aren’t exactly equivalent. The license that governs the code is really the only part that actually matters.
What's up with Epic Games? angielski
I can’t seem to find that one comment explaining the issue with them…...
Fallout TV Show - Teaser Trailer (m.youtube.com) angielski
Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Capcom President Thinks Game Prices Are 'Too Low' - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Capcom president Harushiro Tsujimoto claims that the prices of video games need to increase to meet ballooning development costs.
Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com) angielski
Godot Engine hits over 50K euros per month in funding (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.