Penny Arcade - Comic - Isolator
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Isolator
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Cocks sent the Pinkertons after the rest of the wizards to silence them, so no one knows...
They all hyper-focus on quarterly earnings, they ignore things like long-term profitability, they have zero regard for brand reputation, and they all ignore the human cost of layoffs.
The MBA caste are just the easily visible tip, the main body of the iceberg gouging out the hull of the ship are the shareholders.
And bitterly resent the penny a day spent on feeding it
You don't live quarter to quarter, and you don't want management that thinks short term. This has more to do with the fact that he's just bad at what he does, than "shareholders" demanding an immediate return. No one should be buying stock and living quarter to quarter by it.
This is a disaster if you're a shareholder.
Most people don't own shares forever. Most companies even more so. If there is an action that will pay off by greatly increasing the share price for the next five years at the cost of it stagnating or even falling afterwards, there are no shortage of people who will want that.
CEOs are often those people.
Everyone I know has said it's a legendary game, but luckily for me this year is stacked with games that would be GotY contenders in other years. I don't think we've had a year this good since like 2007.
I think it's important to remember that while people in this forum care mostly about D&D and MtG, that's only a small portion of Hasbro's business. I'd strongly argue that they depend far more on selling plastic to parents buying their kids Transformers and Nerf guns while hoping to sell GI Joe, My Little Pony, Power Rangers, and more special editions of Monopoly. Note that most of those properties haven't had new media in the US to help push toy sales in quite a while.
And parents of young children have been hit really hard by inflation. If it's a choice between money for food, clothes, and school supplies for the kids or whatever cgi mess of a big stompy robot was in the last Michael Bay Transformers movie, it's not the Transformer that's going to win.
The company is just doing poorly as a whole like many others that make non-vital goods. While D&D shouldn't be as affected by the hit to parents' wallets, layoffs tend to hit across all divisions of a corporations divisions and I'm also not sure how well D&D books are selling compared to other income streams given it's been quite a while since 5th edition launched and the nature of the game means only one person in a gaming group needs to purchase the infrequent new books.
And of course it doesn't help that a PnP RPG is really not in the wheelhouse of what's mostly a toys for kids company. DnD came along for the ride because WotC bought the property decades ago. A TCG is more in the domain of Hasbro as a whole so them buying out WotC did make business sense but that meant DnD is the odd property for them now.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Why care about your reputation when everyone else is just as much of an asshole as you? When one of them fucks up, they'll just wait for the next company to mess up. Just look at the streaming services we're left with: they're all part of gigantic companies and one after the other will fuck over some genuinely talented artists with no repercussions.
What? Hasbro/Wizards got an excellent game that sold really well and then dumped the salary of the now unnecessary workforce. They can coast a while on BG3 sales and then hire a new team at lower salaries if they want to make a sequel in the future. As far as the company c-suite is concerned their strategy is an unmitigated success and any consequences down the line will be someone else's problem.
See also: Diablo 4, Blizzard
If Hasbro stock is the only stock that you are ever allowed to hold, and you have to hold onto it forever, sure.
But that's not the case in practice. Which means outside of mandatory holding periods, the volatile nature of stocks will incentivize short term dividend strategies and constant portfolio cycling.
And fundamentally for an organization like this, it’s less about MBAs and business schools, and more about old school cronyism. Because their biggest shareholders (the ones they company actually listens too are all large investment firms). And they generally buy and sell around the edges to keep their risk profiles for their mutual funds.
Hasbro honestly did need to do some level of layoffs because they were losing money. However, the choice to target their one profitable division. That’s office politics.
Hasbro entertainment is the albatross taking a massive loss, that’s where the cuts should have targeted.
But Hasbro/Wizards didn't make BG3. Larian Studios did. If Hasbro wants a sequel, they're not going to be the ones hiring developers.
Powers &8^]
Larian developers were not the ones fired. Why would they be, as they aren't owned by Hasbro.
If Habro wants a sequel, they're going to be hiring the people who work for Hasbro that would need to work with Larian to do all the things to make sure it follows D&D content, rules, etc. That's the people that Larian says all got fired.
Though don't underestimate the stupidity of Hasbro. Some "genius" there will probably figure out how it'd be much cheaper to start their own internal development studio instead of paying the rates/share that a company that can execute at the level of Larian can demand.
Capitalism
None of those things are likely to maintain or improve the quality of your product, and in fact are quite likely to do the opposite.
It is exactly, precisely the opposite of capitalism. It's like they are competing with each other for title of "Worst At Capitalism". It is like they don't understand what a company even is.
That depends entirely on one thing. Will they, the individuals, come out of it with a lot of money? Not the companies or anyone else, but them specifically, right at that very moment, will it make them a bunch of money? Even if the entire company loses all its money in 6 months and everyone loses their job, will these very individuals make money before that?
If so, then yes.
Pure capitalism. The absolute essence of capitalism. Capitalism at its core, pure and naked.
I would argue this kind of no ethics, fuck you got mine greediness makes someone uniquely bad at running a company.
This greediness may make you bad at running a company by one metric or another, but the system rewards it and thus they are doing it "right".
Is it supposed to be, though? If it was, wouldn't the system reward those who are "good at business" (the way you describe it), and punish those who seek short term personal gain regardless of the cost? Whether or not this is capitalism, regardless of what the definition of capitalism is, the current system monetarily rewards greed, cryonism, screwing people and companies over for personal gain. Just look at John Riccitiello. Hell, look at how donald trump conducted "business" all his life, and realize he was once elected as president of the USA.
The question is: HOW is the system tempered? Where/what are the brakes?
And then it will be cheaper again to outsource that to a chinese code factory who are anyway already thoroughly experienced in producing gatcha mobile games
"Don't you have phones?" Moment.
Just one of the multitude of reasons Blizzard is no longer allowed on any purchase list of mine. People need to accept that the enshittification cycle is a thing and not continue to throw money at them hoping and whining for change, because that enables the cycle to persist within that company. Rentseekers will go wherever money (still) is.
But slacktivism is easier and still allows one to consoom.
Whether it's what you want it to be or not, capitalism rewards those who make the most money. Whoever makes the most money doesn't equate to whoever provides the most value.
Blizzard games are still good. I noticed in the graph of my steam year in review there was a drop off when I got into diablo 4 and Starcraft 2