I don't get why any gamer would be mad at Larian. They asked "Are you gonna make another game as awesome as Balduer's Gate 3?" and Larian said "Fuck, we wish. W're just gonna see where things go." At least they're honest.
I'm getting a bit older, in my late 30's now but I think as a group "gamers" have remained fairly consistent over the years. They're entitled, addicted and completely incapable of not engaging with the very systems they claim to hate. Not everyone, but enough of them I think to make some fairly accurate generalizations. They're mad at Larian because they're entitled brats - and that doesn't necessarily mean they're young. They think game development is orders of magnitude more simple than it is and throw hissy fits when they don't get what they want, to wit more of that digital crack escapism they crave. Disappointment would be an understandable reaction if you were hoping to get more BG, but anger? That comes from feeling like you're entitled to more.
No what they said is "we are canceling any work we've done so far towards an expansion and giving the IP back to WOTC. Screw everyone who wanted more and especially screw anyone who got their hopes up after we basically told you there would be more, it's all cancelled forever." Remember all the cut content around the upper city? Never happening. Did you want to see larians vision for levels 13-20? Tough. Extra painful for those who might want to adopt BG3 rules for tabletop or built their own mod expansion/conversions since everything is cut off half way.
@@estefencosta1835 These were the same fans cheering for Larian only 6mos ago and haranguing any devs/commenters who said BG3 was a unique and non-repeatable production. The same fans who said that they would never hold other games to that same impossible standard, because it would be absurd. And yet, here we are, and even Larian itself can't meet that bar.
Mind you, gamer-entitlement notwithstanding, Larian probably just couldn't come up with the cash to extend their license with Hasbro/WotC. Normally with a license like that, you'd include an option to extend, with a fixed dollar amount (or maybe a sliding scale based on the first product's revenues). There was a February 2024 story about Larian reaching out to Tencent (30% stakeholder) to foot the bill for a more expansive D&D-content license. Based on the GDC news, I'm guessing that deal didn't land. It circulated widely in tabletop/TTRPG circles, but I didn't hear much coverage on the video game side.
@@mandisaw That makes sense. Hasbro has been pushing the idea the the DnD brand has been "underutilized" and can be squeezed more to generate greater profits. So I am not surprised that they and Wizards of the Coast might have made the license too expensive for Larian.
The cobra effect is also what's plaguing politics all over the world. When the punishment for crimes, broken promises and corruption is the option to walk away with all the profits, how can anyone be surprised politics work with their own benefit in mind rather than the people's
As george Carlin once said: "If that is true, that it's only these politicians acting like that, where are all the bright people of consience? I tell you where: We don't have people like that, in this country." It's not a fault of the system, but some 60 years ago the culture started to change. Going from "do what you enjoy, be yourself and be kind" to "The more toys you have, the higher your score!!". It's a cultural issue. If shame came back, sense of community, or simply the thought of 'Nah, I have enough' at SOME point, we wouldn't be where we are. But humanity is on the way out, we all have been told that money is all that matters and you can't change anything without it, and community is a distant dream form the past, ripped apart by media constantly hammering on our differences to drive us apart. What other thought than "I need to get mine before there is nothing left" can ever be in your head? We are fucked. Simple as that. We can't ever improve anything more than our immediate group. And we will do that until the famines start in 20-30 years, then billions will die, the rich cocksuckers that took the future from all of us will sit in their bunkers on their hoards, while a select few people are deemed worthy enough to serve them. But hey, at least we took the high road and didn't just start beheading them, because Hollywood said we need to take the highroad at all times. So sadly, Taylor will continue to fuck the atmosphere with her airplane, Musk will not use his wealth for anything but satisfying his immature childbrain, and Bezos just wants to be a sadist. But at least our wealth is concentrated in 15 people. And if y'all still go "but it's not just the billionaires", I'll give some perspective on how far apart they are from the rest of humanity, HOW MANY ressources they have compared to anyone else: mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Even an honest politician, which do exist, have to be reelected. So anything that is long term and doesn't give visible benefits in 4 years won't help them get reelected.
the entire political system we have right now is designed around short term gains. there are plenty of long term strategies that could save trillions in the next couple of decades, but you will never see them being implemented because of the upfront cost and non-visible changes that will only be apparent when your opponent cycles back into power to take credit. "so is then the solution to go back to monarchy ?" no, because now the system is incentivizing doing nothing because you can't be removed from power, you just need to do barely enough to not piss people off and make sure the people that actually have power are happy to protect your position (vide: Putin's Russia).
Step 1 - buy company Step 2 - gamble with their money Step 3 - profit Step 4 - after profit stops sell or crash company to keep IPs and then sell IPs or license them out for profit.
Something else to remember when wondering how this keeps happening (and this goes beyond the video game industry): The executives and board members all know each other. They got their MBAs at the same universities, go to the same country clubs and charity events, operate in the same social circles. They all look out for each other and make sure they all have their careers preserved and get their golden parachutes when (in their minds) the peons let them down.
Love this! Great point. I used to work in the car business and my old boss was literally fired for stealing from the company. The next week he had a job at another dealership in town. I saw so many people bounce from place to place once they moved into management that it was baffling. These a-holes that get fired or "Resign" from their multi-million dollar exec jobs don't become nobodies and disappear, they just slip into the shadows somewhere else and start again. Or as George Carlin said it much better: "It's a big club, and you ain't in it."
Even in a less gross situation, people who've failed at management still have management experience. They're far more likely to get another management job than someone without that experience.
This happens on the smaller side too. You get high enough up the chain and you can't fall back down. The last GM we had at our sears here was doing all sorts of shady stuff. Leaving the store unlocked but unattended, denting appliances and then selling them to himself or friends for 90% off, just straight up 'misplacing' merchandise. But when the company folded was he in the soup line? Of course not he had "was the gm for sears for 6 years" on his resume so he jumped up the road and became the GM of a pet store chain that was opening a location right about the same time. He even bragged to me about how he negotiated a higher salary for himself then he'd been getting at sears in the process. Sit down for 16 min of your 15 min break you get a write up, literally disappear for 80% of your shift every day as the manager and you get an indirect promotion. I worked at a hotel where the GM was embezzling money for something like 8 years. Was arrested, had her picture in the newspaper and everything. Guess where she is now just a couple years later? She's the GM for one of the fast food places in town. Her only punishment for the crime was having to pay the company back about $10k, which the owner said was probably about a tenth of what she'd stole but all they could prove and get the court to agree to. Someone steals 10 bucks from the register they are fired, steal 100 bucks and they're arrested. Steal six figures over the course of some years and you just have to give a little bit of it back. The district manager for another job I had was so toxic, so incredibly inept at his job that when he got assigned to our district it literally tripled the rate of turnover. (found out after the fact he got moved from a previous district because of all the complaints against him). He worked our district for about 3 years and after 1000 complaints, half of them sexual harassment related, the higher ups finally saw the problem he was and to their credit finally fired him. You'll never guess where he is now. He's an area supervisor for fito-lay here now. I only know this because I was talking to one of the drivers that frequents my current work and he was complaining about the new supervisor they just hired... Those are three stories from just MY personal life. I'm sure there are a million more out there.
What you or I deem a failure is not such in the eyes of the corporate overlords, that's how they get you. Giving these suits the benefit of thinking that they are just incompetent is a mistake, their actions are malicious and planned out, all for the sake of shareholder value.
Yep, those that are better at networking then anything else will network their way to top. It's not just CEOs and boards, it's on all levels of management in all sorts of companies where the CEOs/boards prioritize their golf buddies and sleazy tactics over competence and making quality products.
@@hefoxed It's not that they're better at networking, it's certainly not that they were better at financing. The deck was simply stacked in their favor from the start. They knew someone who knew someone who could get them an in. In their minds they worked their way to the top because they "only" started as management fresh out of college and not as CEO.
And I think there were two books that led to a massive push to pay execs way more than they're worth, but have forgotten them since. I think one author was Jack Welch, forgot the other one. It kept being brought up during the Boeing scandal.
@@FlyingCIRCU175which Boeing scandal? I laugh to keep me from crying. And yes the former GE CEO popularized these practices while pulling up the ladder behind him
There is no reason that layoffs should *increase* share price though. It does not mean increased profit, it means less labor to profit from. It's a reduction in cost today that guarantees less profit next quarter. But that's *next* quarter, and the bulk of the people doing this are going to switch to a new company well before the piper needs paying. It's just predatory rich people ruining literally everything remotely commercial and anything that depends on anything remotely commercial... including governments. The reason investors are eager to buy stock at a higher price after a layoff is not because the company will be making more. It's because stock trading is a rigged game, rigged by the investors. They know what's going to happen after the layoffs, and that makes the company's performance predictable, so the price is manipulated and goes up, until it doesn't, and then the people who guess right take the short position and make even more money. Personally, I think getting rid of the stock exchange would go a long way towards fixing this crap. I'm not against people buying and selling stock, I'm against them buying and selling it without a shit-ton of paperwork. Buying a house should always involve less paperwork than a share in a company's future profits. A house never laid off 800 people right before the holidays.
The longer you've been working at a company, the closer you are to the guillotine. They are itching to downsize veterans making $100k with benefits and bring in fresh college grads for $40k and no benefits.
As a long-time industry vet on the game design side, this vid on how bad business practices still make money for the "right" (wrong) people was very eye-opening. Cold Take is quickly becoming my favorite Second Wind series.
The fact that everyone expected Larian to make a bunch of dlc and shit for BG3 really goes to show how little most people know about how Larian operates. I don't think they've ever made a dlc or expansion for any of their games. They did do definitive edition updates for divinity OS, but I suspect that Larian really wanted to do their own thing without being shackled to wotc and that's perfectly fine by me.
Larian actually did dlc for Divinity 2 because original game was kinda disaster so they needed to add new content. But BG3 is already a gigantic game i really do not think it needs DLC at all. Also judging the last interviews (and the fact Hasbro team which consulted Larian was fired) it feels Swen is heavily disappointed working with IPs and wants to go back to his own creations without greedy publishers and corporate buІІshіt. Can't blame him.
@@koshetz i was about to get mad because i thought you were calling DOS2 a disaster, but then i remembered "divinity" is their favourite word, and they name every fucking game they release some variation of that
Its happening in private companies too. I worked in few. Management is SO enamoured by the practices of big execs that they're basically simps. Fuck them
What has been happening to every industry for years is happening to gaming: the devoted, inspired, dedicated people who created something because they were passionate are slowly replaced at the highest level with business school bros who never cared about the product and probably don't ever even have any interaction with it. Quality and ingenuity are put aside in favor of appeasing shareholders resulting in either cost cutting measures or watered down, lowest common denominator products, and eventually the public lose faith or the company bursts, or both. Then said executives "resign" and coast over to some other venture that they can milk dry for a profit and the once passionate people are now jaded and have to crowd fund to try to restart from scratch. The only true way to make quality products any more is to stay small enough that you don't attract the vultures.
Seems like a self inflicted problem though. Like, why not tell the business people to fuck off? Why hire business people that don't share your values and try to undermine you?
@@ninochaosdrache3189 Because the actual talented people are usually not the ones at the very top of said company. The ones at the top only see money to gain from a bigger business buying them up, too dumb to realize that they've doomed their company. Other times they're threatened by said bigger business that has the ability to naked short sell them into the ground.
Cynical but all too real. Witness the executives plummeting out of Boeing right now like so many unattached doors - they get their golden parachutes, but the planes should be on the no-fly list.
redfall is a real poster child for this from what I heard. It was forced on the studio for the sole purpose of inflating the aquisition price for just long enough. By the time it predictably bombed hard the people responsible for it were already gone with the money.
@@Fingolfin1190 I'm sorry to break the news to you, but it is *really just* business model. Game dev is a job, and you have to work on 'tax write-off mediocre' game which no one on your team is passionate about because no one has any direction into what you have to make this game into, and all your and your coworkers' cool ideas for great game are shoot down. You're lucky if you actually work on that cool game that has too massive scale, with so many cooks in the project that one slip up might result in extra months of work and shareholders and higher-ups might push the deadline if the marketing says they should to maximize profit. Otherwise, if you don't comply to the industry you really wanted to work in, you're fired (you will still be laid off after the game inevitebly fails, because the laid-offs contributes to the paycheck for the higher up). Other avenue for game devs is Indie games, but the success is near impossible if you remember that the successful indies survived the battle; Survivorship bias in indies is very real, and if you decide to do your dream game instead, you can say goodbye to that fleeting success, because market demands the same variation of established game over and over. You want innovation as a gamer? Either you need to get very good at finding niche but excelt titles, expand your genre tastes, be open to new ideas, start buying any avangarde indie title which might dissapoint you, or get in time machine and go back to time when the medium was new and fresh and whipe your memory. I really suggest trying to find cool niche games and expanding your genre tastes, i've been doing it for 8 years already, ignoring massive, mediocre (or what people call shitty, but actually most people didn't play any actual shitty game) AAA and just playing some indies and i've enjoyed gaming more than ever.
@@Fingolfin1190 Yes and no. Arkane wasn't forced to make a bad game explicitly, but they were forced to make a type of game outside their passion and experience. The fact it was bad was an understandable and likely outcome of that decision.
@@xintrosi6829 But how do you explain the bad AI then? Or the bland level design and graphical bugs? It all feels like beginner mistakes that a studio like that shouldn't be making anymore after so many good games. Or just look at Rocksteady who made the worst UI in a AAA game in the past 15-20 years. WB didn't make them do that. There's more going on than just greed. Big studios are getting worse.
@@Fingolfin1190If a team is forced to work on something they know is a cynical cash grab that exists purely to financially benefit executives & investors, they'll do the logical thing: cut corners, & make it "good enough for release" so they can wrap it up and move on to a project they actually care about.
For the fact a CEO can still be rewarded for doing a terrible job is the reason why I have no faith in this system. It's not about doing a good job, but by how much you can exploit and get away with.
@@TOAOM123and eventually the company will be bought or the head developer preventing it from being bought will die or just decide to do the same problems and then hell divers 3 (or 2 if it happens quick enough) will have the same problems the industry has because profit motive inherently cannibalizes everything else
@@fartface8918Or maybe we just appreciate those that are independent until they die. I mean nothing lasts forever so may as well take your time to enjoy it.
@@RandomPerson-xi7jv it's not about likeing or disliking but rather understanding the deep cannibalism the profit motive necessarily invokes, as long as there is a legal requirement for shareholder value as long as most companies are publicly traded as long as money is valued over the most basic human axioms we wont know peace
@@fartface8918 Yeah that’s kinda obvious and not a new thing. I just would rather focus on the time they had their freedom to do whatever they wanted and to see arrowhead studios focus on making something good. But there is a peace in knowing that I can’t do anything so it’s not worth mourning over. I mean feeling sorry for when every bad thing that happens is exhausting and doesn’t really help does it?
As a gamedev I SO WISH THIS POINT WAS TALKED ABOUT MORE! For standing up to management and being fired from game studios I more often than not get called a loser and rocking the boat by fellow devs/artists... I'm sick and tired of execs profiting off us and then having the audacity for blaming us for not working more than 12 hours a day and on weekends!! We have to unionise. Every year we wait the more we destroy our own industry. Gamers will BE ANGRY Fun fact, among wider artists and programmers, working in the gaming industry is seen as a total crazy move. Why would you work more for less money??
people dont comprehend how much of the gaming industry exploits the love and passion software/art-design people have for games, chews them up and then throws them out.
Even Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and Guerilla weren't safe. It doesn't matter if you make literally the most critically and commercially successful games in Playstation history. You're still expendable.
The only thing execs want or care about is perpetually growing profits. Successes in development are actively punished when they cant top the last peak.
Not to mention Insomniac pumped out what, 4 back to back great games, 1 of them being cross gen and two next gen, in the span of about 6 years. It's wild that they were even considered for cuts given their critical and commercial output.
The Naughty Dogs cut was pretty limited IIRC. We're talking 25 contractors not renewed in a company with a 500 people headcount. Not great, but hardly a mass layoff either.
None of the higher ups in these companies has any idea about videogames. They are business men. Do you think Bobby Kotick has played a video game lately? They haven't a clue.
@@paultapping9510 Yeah, Bobby understands money=priority. That's all. The games are almost irrelevant, so we get Diablo Immortal style gambling apps disguised as games.
They technically don't need to, as the video indicates in the most cynical manner. The only idea there is to get investments and spend those investments to pay for half the game you promised while you pocket the rest.
Entry number 427 in the category "Stuff I am smart enough to understand but not smart enough to articulate to others." That file is getting awfully full. Thank you sir, for another quality vid. If I had unicorn gold on hand I would mail you some unicorn gold.
I see that frost got his hands on the Bobby Kotick:s handbook on how to do run a company wrong. I can hear the Yahtzee jingle "lets all laugh at the gaming industry ti hi hi".
The sad reality is that it's not how to run a company wrong. It's the handbook to being a successful capitalist: make as much money as possible at any cost, morality, ethics and as many laws as you can get away with breaking be damned.
@@araonthedrake4049alternative modes of distributing ownership of the means of production are already demonstrated to produce better games, capitalism as an organizational structure truly provides zero benefit to the average human being in any sector of society
@@SimuLord what you are asking for is basically to end stock trading. because a private company value is directly tied to its revenue, unlike a publicly traded company whose value is mostly speculative.
The fucking thing is, have you looked at Activision blizzard stock price over the years? Hard to argue he ran it wrong... at least from an economics side. I'm pretty sure executives see a dip in stock price because of fan outrage only as a chance to buy said dip
To be completely fair, the BG3 team specifically wanted to make more BG3, but ended their relationship with WotC after WotC started having a Hasbro aneurysm.
At this point does it really matter who's pushing the milling and pinkertons about? It's a weeeeeeeird thing and I hope larian moves to others (and perhaps even a pathfinder one for the humor of if)
I'm pretty sure they literally came out and said - after these allegations - that WotC had been very helpful and that they weren't the ones getting in their way, they just wanted to move on to the next project, and honestly, that seems like a pretty reasonable decision. Sometimes a story is just done being told, and they worked hard for a long time on it.
@@gwen9939 not completely true. They also said NO ONE they worked with on making BG3 was working on the company Hasbro anymore. Even after the huge commercial success and critical acclaim, they were dumped on the garbage bin.
thats the plan these huge studios hire good up and coming indie devs. then give them a flop to make and/or give them so many notes and force microtransactions and money making schemes all over the game. then blame them for the flop and ruin the dev team's good name
@@uanime1 because they are not allowed to say anything else, because they have have a contracting telling them what they are allowed to say and the project has a marketing team more expensive than the entire development team.
Seriously with all the click bait and rage bait(blaming wokes or whatever buzzword people use). It nice that second wind being a diamond in the sea of coal
@@starmaker75 Like, there's all these things pointing to corporate greed and our systems favoring that greed... and these folk are blaming hiring low level workers who come from diverse backgrounds? Like, discrimination still is a thing. "diverse" folk paycheck still tends to be lower. So with corporate greed, corporations hiring "diverse" workers mean they save money and likely get overall more experienced/quality work for that wage (compared to hiring less discriminated against people at the same wage)... so like, it'd probably be even lower quality products without "diversity". It is true it is hard to hire "diverse" workers with high level of experience due to discrimination/lack of opportunities meaning they haven't been able to gain that experience, tho that's slowly changing and there is more "diverse" folk with high levels of experience.
Unions were supposed to make that trick harder; CEO's made sure everyone forget about that part. Worked for decades and probably will for another one or two.
Funny you should mention that part of history. The COVID pandemic resulted in those large business executives taking off the masks of "compassion" and double down on their price gouging, anti-worker stances, and exploiting the simple-minded, convenience-obsessed consumers, especially as workers realized they did not want to die for minimum wage and started unionizing. There has been a drastic shift in the economy and class warfare from the pandemic alone and they're trying their damnedest to pretend that it's the new normal. Hell, I see this change in friggin' RU-vid. A lot of my favorite essayists and even journalists are resorting to click-bait articles and churning out content with lesser quality, going the content mill route, because times are even tougher than before and they're becoming desperate.
Unions have their own problems. They are a lot like their own little companies with their own executives running things into the ground for personal profit.
I've heard that a lot of the diversity politics thing has been to make sure employees are distrustful of one another, rather than of the corporation itself.
@@o00nemesis00o A lot of powerful people in both politics, mainstream news, and companies work to keep the masses divided to overlook the true crooks. It's been a tried-and-true method by the bourgeois for generations
I mean The Producers is the most Tonys winning musical for a reason. It's hilarious and brilliant; but also Grounded in reality enough to sell the premise, while having the fantasy wish fulfillment that the big wigs would ever receive any amount of punishment for their terrible contribution to the world of art for the sake of profits alone.
jesus this was a great connection, I definitely wouldn't have thought of it but it's a great jumping-off point to examine perverse business incentives. plus, it's springtime!
If you learn Hollywood history in the mid-early 20th century (more early) you'll basically see how gaming industry is going through the same evolution. I just wish we LEARNED something from the past though without having to repeat it. Unionise already!
I'm very glad you're all independent now. Burn those bridges! Also, sports games were the original Live Service because they're based on a live event. They don't publish one $60 game and give roster and cosmetic updates through the years, the yearly $60+ game IS the update patch (that also wipes your cosmetics from previous years)!
My son asked me how there are billionaires, and I felt like I was too simple in responding with "It's easy to make lots of money if you don't care how you make it", but this entire video pretty much backs up my simplified statement.
It's always nice to see a video with real artistic merit come out on April 1st. This video put everything I've been thinking about corporate execs into words better than I ever could.
I think the last line is something more people should remember. While people are having a hard time finding work because not enough experience or skills not good enough, it's the people that make these decisions that are often not doing the bare minimum of their job.
To be fair Kotaku has been struggling for many years before this change even happened. The only times I ever really heard people talking about them were through the Jason articles which they lost after he moved to a different publication and the random rage bait articles that would mostly just be discussed by other people like youtuber's. I never actually heard anyone wanting to go to Kotaku for there's normal articles. I don't really think this is the same as the live service situation where a successful studio is forced to make a type of game they aren't good at making. This is more of a sinking ship trying one last new strategy to try and get the engine running again.
Journalism as a whole has been hemorrhaging money for decades, and digital/web journalism in particular has struggled to balance the books in the days of adblockers and the shift to video platforms. Kotaku is one of the last holdouts, so something they're doing must be working, but you're right that it's a losing battle overall.
I'm new to this channel and I love the delivery of this. Film noir style narration for talking about corporate greed screwing over the everyday worker and consumer is just perfection. I'd love to see more breakdowns in this format in the future. It made depressing news a joy to listen to, which is a nice change. A spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go to down.
As soon as a company is publicly traded, or purchased by a publicly traded entity, they're destined for either total dissolution or a future of pumping out the most efficient money printing games legally possible.
And yet it's not really that funny, given it feels like crooks doing as they please, everyone else gets thrown under the muck-stained wheels of the gold-plated bus driven by those giving the orders.
@@ninochaosdrache3189 While he didn't lay himself, or anyone else, off, there was that time Mr. Iwata cut his own, and several other big wigs, pay when shit hit the fan. That's likely the closest we'll see to higher-ups being held accountable for poor decisions.
@@King_Luigi Satoru Iwata was a CEO with passion and a soul, and he paid the price as a result, giving us the Nintendo Switch as a parting gift. To succeed in capitalism you have to sell your humanity and soul to the all-mighty dollar.
Mentioned but a bit lost- by American standards executives can are legally obligated to prioritize gains, regardless of how short term decisions create long term problems.
Basically this and if that CEO is not up for the task, they get voted out and replaced with a CEO that does. Cause investors want to see their short term investments grow like mad. So CEO's are pretty much obiligated to investment boards. But the other way is also true. Investors if they disagree with a companies way the CEO is doing things.. sometimes they cannot vote em out due to contracts. Investors can also pull out their stocks but doing that would be leaving without the maximum possible profit. But then you have hedge funds covering that stuff too. Ooh look so CEO's and investors both are safe if they force the ship to sink. Good CEO's can be held back by bad investment groups and good investment groups can be held back by bad CEO's. (Depending on circumenstances) Thus the cycle continunes when these investors start investing in the next company and elect the same CEO to take it over. They will always make money.
Not a defense for this practice, but this isnt true. Executives are allowed to consider long-term gains as part of fiduciary responsibility, even at the cost of short-term losses. Most just choose not to because it doesn't help you if the company does really well in 20 years when someone else is running things.
I'll keep it vague since i don't remember the case or verdict too well, but THESP is right. Some company in the US had focused on a morally good path that didnt bring as much profits as a morally questionable path. Investors sued or something because they expected more money. The court that determined the outcome stated that companies are legally required to listen to shareholders and to make reasonable efforts to make shareholders profits when such efforts don't otherwise break the law, and that the company violated that principle and was therefore liable for lack of profit.
@@atrustworthyfellow6887 That's not what I'm saying though. They are required to put profits over morality, but they aren't required to put short-term profits over long-term profits. Companies are allowed to take as long a view as they want, so long as that path can reasonably be interpreted as pursuing the greatest return on investor commitments.
You can blame the Dodge brothers for this. And a few more if you are feeling conspiratorial Ford was treating his workers better than everyone, not out of the goodness of his heart, but because retaining highly motivated talent is actually very important and profitable in the long run, almost like free-market capitalism actually works despite human greed. Ford wanted to cut back on shareholder dividends,he wanted to use that money to expand his business, hire more workers, lower the price of his products even more, etc. And the shareholders really did not appreciate that.
man, when the escapist blew up and second wind came around, i thought i'd just be watching yahtzee's stuff again, but a lot of the content that's been put out has been extremely high quality! honestly shocked how much i've come to love the cold takes
“Some employees protested against turning the site into another ad revenue content mill in an already over saturated field.” Spoken like someone with experience…
I absolutely love these videos. The hard boiled, jaded detective voiceover…the clear-eyed and ruthless takedowns of corporate enshitification…just gold.
Given what happened at Gawker, and Deadspin, and Jalopnik, and now Kotaku, I can assure you: Jim Spanfeller ain't gonna do his job for once. He's always been a "sell the bones off the corpse" type.
...oh my god, its The Producers. As in the Mel Brooks movie, where a failing producer realizes he could make more money with a flop than a success since he doesnt have to pay back investors and the irs doesnt look as closely at failures. This is literally The Producers.
I only discovered Second Wind like a month ago but it has already become one of my favorite channels of all time between Cold Take, Design Delve and Fully/Semi Ramblomatic you guys just *GET* gaming, gamers and games as well as devs, producers, excecs and publishers
It shows how bad things have gotten in a very short amount of time that The Producers plot no longer makes sense because the secret scheme that put the main characters in jail is now just openly business as usual.
Beautiful video, Frost! While nothing was new, the way you succinctly summarised the entire issue into such a digestible package is incredibly impressive and I absolutely love your wordplay and the beautiful visual pun of Agario. Love your stuff ❤
I will never ever understand how a company making losses can lead to an exec receiving bonuses. It's like your parents buying you a new game for getting an F on your Maths test. If you made a terrible call you should be the very first person to suffer the consequences of it with a paycut, especially if you earn so much you could receive a 90% paycut and still walk home with 4 times as much as the average person.
Yes, a plutocracy. The result when money influences politics and a lack of regulation on predatory capitalistic practices, unfortunately. Those that are expected to work for the masses work for their donors and other bribes.
People will be able to game whatever system you put in front of them to get the best results for the least risk/effort whether it be in games or real life. The usual solution is that a regulatory body removes the loop holes that allow people to use unintended exploits which Frost mentioned is already happening in the movie industry.
I understand Second Wind feels a lot of sympathy with Kotaku due to shared experiences but I disagree here. Kotaku was already a cesspool of hit pieces, bad takes and rage bait that wished to draw people into clicking on the site and bombarding themwith ads upon ads. It has gained a reputation for being some of the worst gaming journalism can offer. Yes, turning it to a video game guide site is gonna make it lose its identity but when its identity is so despicable, I believe that's for the better.
Kotaku is definitely the first example I'd think of of a formerly great gaming publication pissing away their reputation and scaring off all their real talent by focusing super-hard on monetization and meeting performance targets.
A Canadian comedic duo once said, "When s*** becomes valuable, the poor will be born without arseholes." In other words, the system seems to be set up in such a way that the few rich people at the top will always find or make a way to stay rich and powerful no matter matter how much changes or how much they screw up.
In colonial America, lobster was considered a poor man’s food and was fed to prisoners, slaves, and the impoverished. At some point it became considered a delicacy and priced the poor out of it,
That was one of the most concise and good explanation for everything happening lately in the gaming + media sphere. Thank you for the input und the time!
@@TrojanManSCPEh, it's still bad overall. It's a chilling effect, which silences anyone who wants to legitimately call out bad practices in the industry while reinforcing the kind of astroturfed shilling that makes paying for stuff in games YOU'VE ALREADY PAID "palatable" or "good for everyone" (it's really not). And sure, you still have Second Wind. Excellent! I love this place. But barely 500k subs and only 100k views on average uploads does not a lasting company make. Second Wind is a Bluetooth speaker when you need Coachella-level sound setups to make sure these execs actually listen. You need that competition, and it's why places like Defector and The Autopian (former Deadspin and Jalopnik) continue to exist. It's why you need the asswipes who can't learn political correctness or stand for groups that they shouldn't be speaking for. Jason Schreier is ex-Kotaku yet is a key voice in all the BS we're in today. That or you do it. Be better than Kotaku when you write, but never be paid by anyone other than the gamers who would rather pay $100 for a skins in a Skinner Box. Form a staff of 50 and rent out a space with power and internet. Let's see how long you last.
@@TrojanManSCP trying to make kotaku reputable and profitable seems like a good reason to me. I don't work my 9-5 out of the goodness of my heart, I do it to walk away from my shift knowing I was a richer man than when I walked in.
Welp, my comment got kicked from my own stupidity lol. Anyway, what I was gonna say, it sucks that actual talent is hurled to the wayside and the corporations just shill and profit. (Especially concerned as I know many people graduating and trying to find work, primarily the artists.) Timestamps below as I rewatch. (I didn't save anything.) 0:20 - I was questioning why he was harvesting potatoes. Then the line dropped. Genuis! 1:50 - I remember this when I was younger! Man, that just plagued the app store. (I just checked, it's still there.) It wasn't until the end till I realised why this was played. That is really clever. 7:10 - As someone living Singapore, I am embarrassed that this happened. (=_=;) 9:04 - Seems odd to say it here, but congratulations on going independent and still going strong, especially after being up for only 4+ months! (I was not there when it first happened, but I am very impressed by the bounce back. *Ignores the pit of comments stinking* ) \ (•◡•) /
Excellent cold take! Very few are ever this nuanced or as surgically targeted in their commentary. Keep up the good work. To often the viewpoint is limited to the end user experience, which is completely irrelevant in most instances to why corporations do what they do under societies/the economies current feedback loops.
Maybe sports games haven't switched to F2P live service with updates because they can keep selling full priced games every year AND you have to re-buy your Ultimate Team or whatever in each game and the suckers still buy them... If you keep the same game and just update it, people keep all the MTx they bought previously.
This was some real claws out stuff. Rightfully so. If anyone's interested exploring the problems Frost describes here in broader detail, the doctrine is called 'shareholder primacy' and it has become controversial within the economic academia in recent years for all the moral hazard talked about in this video.
Surprised The Day Before didn't get a mention here. A clear scam on investors, funneling money into the publishing company while stacking all the debts on the developer. Then the developer went bankrupt to escape the debts before being acquired by the publisher.
I think important to emphasize this kind of short term financial predation is long term disastrous for businesses. At the end of the day (quite a long day sometimes but still) you have to match up revenue to expenses and if you’re ruining your product it will catch up to you eventually. See Boeing and J/O Media as Frost says.
Thank you for putting to video what I've been commenting on every article I've seen about "necessary" mass layoffs in an industry where the biggest companies continue to see record profits year after year.
When it can't grow taller, it grows wider. Profit needs to exponentially increase but there is a cap. Instead of being at peace with being the winner at the finish line they need to keep going. So they eat other smaller runners and kill competition.
It's pretty much been like this for at least 50-60 years, with the advent and embracing of Taylorism, and the corporation's main incentive to work only for their shareholders.
It's amazing that the whole "vote with your money" thing doesn't actually work. But why? IMO, people aren't critical enough, and predatory games go unregulated and allow for phenomena like "whales" to fund their BS. But, looking forward to the next decade... Indie is the future as far as I'm concerned.
It's hard because these games became basically psychological traps to give keep vulnerable people hooked. Same way loot boxes aim to hook people with gambling addiction in, micro transaction, gaming pass, seasons, a lot of these things are while no evil from the conceptual level they are twisted to make people feel that they need them, stuff like fomo is a powerful incentive specially to kids and teens
The problem with voting with your money is, the people with more money get more voting power. And none of us have as much money as the executives making these decisions.
@@LexYeenIf anything, the oligarchs beat one to the punch with 'voting with your wallet' and have been bribing governments and people that would actually make changes in our lives for our benefit for multiple generations. The only thing oligarchs care for is making more money and making sure they stay in their seat of power.
@@LexYeen Not just the executives, but the gvmnts who bankroll these projects or the big corpos like Blackrock who try to push an agenda, despite nobody buying their games.
This is a problem in every industry. Capitalism's demand for infinite growth (which is obviously impossible) creates these types of scenarios where the people in charge are highly incentivized to make decisions that are, frankly, inhuman. And then every economic publication will congratulate those people for making a "savvy business decision." Remember folks, owning human beings was at one point considered a great business decision. It's not hard to imagine other examples of something that's good for a business that hurts basically everyone else that is still commonplace today.
Again the best promoting of socialism or restriction of capitalism isn't das capital or anything book of social theory, but seeing unregulated and uncheck capitalism
