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Penny Arcade - Comic - Epic Fail, Etc.
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Epic Fail, Etc.
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
+8
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I used to remember Epic Megagames for ZZT-OOP. Now I will remember them for putting Bandcamp on a road to ruin and embracing everything wrong with the industry.
pleasepaypreacher.net
If firing you gets me a fat bonus this quarter it doesn't matter if I've lost your productivity next quarter. Cash in hand means more than you, the consumers, or the company itself. Good will doesn't pay my lifestyle
Turns out people making firing decisions don't always make it fully informed, with long-term goals in mind! Turns out most corporate systems incentivize short term gains and are very bad at measuring productivity anyway.
If your salary is equal to your productivity, no one can make money by hiring you.
You poor dear sweet summer child
They absolutely can. Just because they're not publicly traded does not mean they have no investors, or that those investors cannot be manipulated in exactly the same ways by triggering short term improvements right before key earnings calls. In some ways it's even easier as key regulatory bodies are not automatically looped in.
Epic Games is a business. Shit happens. You don't need to spend more than 15 minutes on this forum to figure out that no one likes the Epic Store, and a lot of people prefer to buy exclusively from Steam, especially when everything is on sale. My kids play Fortnite. None of my adult friends do. So, it's not surprising to me that they're seeing the massive piles of money Fortnite use to make get smaller and smaller. At this point, it sounds like Epic can no longer sustain itself on that Fortnite dollar, and has to look at being profitable elsewhere to sustain itself.
Also details of the severance packages for these employees, for what it's worth. But if you've ever lost a job before, this ain't that worse way to hit the ground:
Anyway, if someone finds that article about how much Sweeney paid Eminem to be at his birthday party, that'd be great.
While the absurd sums they dropped to get exclusives when the store launched add up to an unrecovered loss, they realized in the first year that titles could be bought for much less than they were offering and they have curtailed that spending and they've said within the last six months that ongoing spending to secure exclusives pays for itself. That startup money's gone and not coming back and isn't even on the sheets for this year.
Remember: companies can lie to the public and can lie to employees. Only investors have recourse if a company lies to them. So when it's available always cross check.
One year of profits (potentially) after fives years of losses doesn't magically fix the balance sheet.
And that money went to the developers...and Epic lost out on the deal. Giving developers money upfront in the hopes of sales recouping that cost, versus putting the entire development burden on developers, and letting them take the risk on sales turned out to not be a winning strategy. Turns out platform loyalty (like Steam) is real, and extremely difficult to chip away at.
Always happy to read more. Feel free to share a few links.
That's the problem with non privately held corporations - the c-suite and shareholders are largely shielded from market accountability. A sole proprietor is taking on a lot more personal risk.
It's the same issue with politicians and lifer bureaucrats in the government. They are immune to most of the consequences of the policies they implement. When was the last time a member of Congress was required to rely on Medicare or the VA to not die?
Are you suggesting a sole proprietor who makes bad business decisions would fire themselves rather than random low-level employees, because if so, I got bad news for you.
Never said they wouldn't - what I am talking about is that a sole proprietor stands to lose a lot more financially from being a bonehead since as a sole proprietor, there’s no separation between your personal and business assets and expenses. You are personally responsible for all your business’s debts and obligations. There isn't the same level of incentive for enshittification since there is a lot more personal risk for doing so.
Granted, some people will be dumb anyways, but that going to happen in any organization, so a complaint about that does not constitute a rebuttal of my point.
Huh? That's the opposite. They didn't say sole proprietors are pure and kind, just that they are much less accountable. If a business owned by a sole proprietor goes under, they will often lose their livelihood or go bankrupt. Sometimes they will emerge happy and wealthy, but members of the PMC (professional managerial class) will emerge squeaky-clean and happy no matter what happens to the businesses they manage.
in both circumstances this did nothing but make my bosses suspicious that i had somehow gamed the system and in one of those instances they wasted months going back over everything i had done to look for mistakes or other evidence that my massive amount of completed work was somehow illegitimate
no problems were found
yet my effort netted me naught but misfortune
your superiors in authority who are your inferiors in ability are incapable of recognizing as such any talent which is greater than their own and their reaction to such talent will be to categorize you as a threat
Basically. Thus why I also trotted politicians and lifer bureaucrats in the government as a co-example too. LLC's in particular are so susceptible to enshittification in part because they function in a similar way to a bloated and out of touch government when it comes to accountability of their managerial castes for crappy decisions.
I've worked as part of both and the similarities are fucking *eerie*.
I have a co-worker that went through certain routine tasks at a high rate of speed. Looked wonderful, high achieving, numbers go up! It wasn't until later it was discovered that corners were being cut and the consequential cleanup caused by that came home to roost.
Supervisors have an obligation to ensure that you aren't pulling that.
I get a pass on being a slacker a lot because my supers know that once I've done something, it means I got it done well enough to ensure I never had to touch it again if at all possible.