• MudMan
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    02 months ago

    It’s probably worth highlighting that, despite the clickbait headline, this guy has not been affiliated with Sony or Playstation for almost twenty years, and these days he’s mostly an investor on multiple middleware and outsourcing videogame-adjacent companies.

    Also, to his credit, what he’s actually saying is that he’s optimistic that people and the industry will rebound fairly quickly and may need to bridge themselves over to the next gig somehow. The other thing he apparently proposes is “go lay on a beach somewhere”. But he’s not saying that you should go be an Uber driver if you lost your games industry job, he’s saying it’s likely that your games industry skillset will remain valuable and you’ll find something else soon-ish.

    I hate that media keeps making me do this and defend people I disagree with. I think there’s an interesting debate here about whether the gig-fire-hire-repeat flow of the games industry is good or sustainable, and about what alternatives there are. But if you go and clickbait this hard I’m kinda forced to point that out first and now we’re all arguing about what was said and not about the underlying issue.

    • @[email protected]
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      02 months ago

      Lemmy in a nutshell. In like one post. Print it out, hang it on the wall, you never need to log in again.

    • @[email protected]
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      02 months ago

      Thank you for pointing that out. I don’t think his opinion a wrong on a fundamental level, but I agree that his choice of words makes him seem more depreciative than his intent is.

  • peto (he/him)
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    02 months ago

    “Greed is not the issue here” - actual dragon sitting on literal pile of gold.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      Billionaires are greedier than dragons. The richest greediest dragon in all of fiction is Smaug, and he has an obscene amount of wealth. I’ve seen estimates of his wealth ranging from 5 billion dollars of gold on the low end, all the way up to 15-20 billion dollars of gold on the high end.

      However, Smaug is an incredible outlier. He’s basically the Musk of Dragons. The absolute most gold you’ll find on a dragon in any video game or ttrpg is 5 million gold pieces. That’s only if RNGesus smiles on you, and rolls as high as it could. The average is more like 3.5 million gold pieces of wealth.

      1 gold piece = ⅒oz of gold. So we are looking at 350,000 - 500,000 oz of gold for the upper 50% of all red elder worms. Any other dragon type doesn’t hoard that much.

      That comes out to a real world value of between $800,000,000 to $1,200,000,000. That’s for the richest dragons out there.

      Most dragons aren’t billionaires.

      Therefore, billionaires are literally greedier than the anthropomorphic caricaturization of greed from legend, namely dragons. The greediest fictional thing we could come up with isn’t greedy enough to accurately portray these people’s mental illnesses.

      • peto (he/him)
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        02 months ago

        Shadowrun probably throws these assumptions off a bit. Dunkelzahn’s net worth is hard to pin down but I think the listed cash dispursements in his will exceeded 1 billion nuyen, plus all the real estate and the establishment of several foundations, several items of extreme power and a number of ‘wishes’.

        Lofwyr owns a AAA megacorp that he assembled out of purchases made within about 30 years of waking up. My personal he’d cannon is that he ate Musk at some point in this process.

        Even the less well known ones have serious stock portfolios and including multiple point shares in megacorps. Dragons took to business rather well as soon as they worked out what share certificates were.

        • @[email protected]
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          02 months ago

          Fair enough. Never played Shadowrun, and didn’t know there were dragons in that system.

          I would be curious what year it is set in, and how inflation may affect their currency value vs current real world currency values.

          • peto (he/him)
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            02 months ago

            2050s for 1st edition, I think current edition is 2070s. Dragons started waking up in the early 2010s though. There has also been significant geopolitical upheaval, especially in the Americas and Europe. The general assumption is that a nuyen being about 1 modern dollar is about the right ballpark.

  • @[email protected]
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    02 months ago

    It’s people like this asshat the reason why I rarely play an AAA game anymore and the few I play are always the pirated version.

    • MudMan
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      02 months ago

      You’d be misplacing that anger. He hasn’t been part of a AAA studio or publisher in decades, and as far as I can tell his last venture involved investing in and shutting down some edutainment dev in Malta.

      I guess “money guy for a bunch of middleware companies” didn’t get nearly as many clicks as “exSONY BOSS PLAYSTATION MAN”.

      • @[email protected]
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        02 months ago

        It’s crazy how the 1980s mafia bust-out strategy for squeezing a business dry used to be the thing a district attorney would level RICO charges against.

        Now its the preferred strategy of hedge funds run by the children of those district attorneys.

      • @[email protected]
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        02 months ago

        Even if he isn’t part of the gaming industry, we can’t pretend he’s the only one thinking like this (hence my comment “people like this asshat”). This kind of assholery is the reason the AAA industry is like this.

    • @[email protected]
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      02 months ago

      On Reddit, your account would be banned for contributing to an anti-social atmosphere after two dozen corporate accounts red-flagged this image and reported it to the PR staffer currently operating as the subs moderator.

      Industry insiders will pay tens of millions of dollars a year to fight off the bad press of their shitty decisions, while doggedly insisting the market cannot support the salaries of a few middle income developers living in some of the most expensive residential markets in the country.

      • cupboard
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        02 months ago

        What are you even on about? The guillotine joke is probably one of the most common reaction posts to any corporate news on Reddit. On any major sub it would get thousands of upvotes and there would be dozens of comment replies with the same overused jokes people post every single time like “Ah, back to the classics”, “Time to dust off the old guillotine”, “Eat the rich 🍽️”, “When’s the revolution starting? I’ll bring snacks.”. Pretending anyone at Reddit HQ cares about this kind of thing is peak Redditor behaviour.

        • @[email protected]
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          02 months ago

          The guillotine joke is probably one of the most common reaction posts to any corporate news on Reddit.

          Who subs have gotten shut down because Reddit administrators accused the local mods of failing to curtail it.

          Pretending anyone at Reddit HQ cares about this kind of thing is peak Redditor behaviour.

          The application of the ban rules tend to be arbitrary and highly political. But guillotine jokes absolutely get accounts banned. And moderators who fail to consistently ban certain accounts were targeted for removal very aggressively over the last four years.

          • cupboard
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            02 months ago

            I use Reddit. This joke is still insanely popular even on the generic default subs. No one cares enough about this to shut down /r/gaming or /r/funny. Reddit is already pretty bad in reality, there’s no need to fantasize about it being even worse.

            This has the same vibe as the hundreds of posts that appear on there every single year around the Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary saying stuff like “Reddit is owned by Tencent!!!1! and they’re banning everyone who mentions Tiananmen Square!!!11!!!” despite there being literal thousands of posts about the massacre on the platform.

            • @[email protected]
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              02 months ago

              This has the same vibe as the hundreds of posts that appear on there every single year around the Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary saying stuff like “Reddit is owned by Tencent!!!1! and they’re banning everyone who mentions Tiananmen Square!!!11!!!”

              Yes, the anti-China trolls love to insist they’re speaking truth to power rather than just echoing a bit of recycled propaganda from the 1990s.

              No, that doesn’t change the fact that Rule #1 gets invoked on guillotine posts regularly.

              • cupboard
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                02 months ago

                There’s really no point in continuing this, but again, I use Reddit. I see these posts all the time. I’m not saying no one ever gets their posts removed or banned from communities or whatever, but they’re insanely popular to the point someone like me who uses the platforms every few days sees it all the time.

                • @[email protected]
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                  02 months ago

                  I’m not saying no one ever gets their posts removed or banned from communities or whatever

                  That crazy, because that’s exactly what I’m saying. And yet we’re stuck here with you calling me a liar.

              • @[email protected]
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                02 months ago

                echoing a bit of recycled propaganda from the 1990s.

                Excuse me, I can’t follow. What do you mean by propaganda?

                • @[email protected]
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                  02 months ago

                  “Nobody in China is allowed to know what happened in Tienanmen Square. You’re not allowed to talk about it. Everything is censored. Nobody in China knows what happened.”

                  Pure propaganda. This shit is in Chinese elementary school textbooks. Its about as poorly disseminated and heavily censored as the Kent State Massacre or the Waco Siege or the OWS protests in the United States.

    • @[email protected]
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      02 months ago

      I really don’t care what starts the revolution, but I’d be pleased as punch if history books of the future had to note that gamers ate the first CEO after he shit on their favorite devs

  • @[email protected]OPM
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    02 months ago

    Christ what a soulless anti human, and these people infest and run AAA companies. Would explain the rot behind those companies for the last 2 decades.

  • @[email protected]
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    02 months ago

    drive an Uber or whatever, go off to find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.

    Shockingly tone-deaf.

    When I was laid off, my savings were running very low after about 3 months until I was able to get another job.

    Absolutely no way I would be able to take a year off to go to the beach. It’s like he doesn’t realize we all aren’t CEOs.

    • @[email protected]
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      02 months ago

      cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.

      Cheap place… Lol

      Close to the beach!? LMFAO

      This ghoul isn’t even from our reality and they’re trying to tell us to chill out. Stick to your own dimension where housing is affordable, especially with any proximity to a beach…

  • @[email protected]
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    02 months ago

    When was the last time he was even in charge of anything? Who cares what his opinion is? He should fuck all the way off.

  • Bob Robertson IX
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    02 months ago

    This is the opening to John Scalzi’s Starter Villain. Great book for anyone interested in a humorous look at late stage capitalist supervillains.

  • Hal-5700X
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    02 months ago

    Corporate greed is a reason. But it’s not the only one. The other reason is they’re not making games people want to play. Look at Dustborn and Concord.