It's modern C++ so, a little of both I think. 20 years of it and I still have people saying "I should work on my fundamentals" so it's totally fine to be a bit of both.
Bungie, in its post-Halo standalone incarnation, was running a microtransactions empire from day one and funded itself on the debt owed by those; it was not ‘taken over’ by financial engineers, so to speak, because the call was coming from inside the house from day one. They executed on some very nice tricks to get funded but their business was operated consistently (impeccable scenic and gunplay, variable-quality story and voicing, catastrophically-bad management) throughout.
The others are all well-known acquisitions or acquirers, but I’m not seeing a clear link to my point. Certainly they’re stellar examples of ‘greed minmaxers’ but not so much of ‘profitable incompetence through financial engineer takeover’ like happened to, say, Toys R Us or Wizards of the Coast. Perhaps you could explain in more detail?
If that were true, then Bungie post-Halo would still be Bungie post-Halo, a part of Microsoft. Not Bungie post-Activision... certainly not Bungie post-Sony...
It's not all the studio head's fault in some of these situations. It was larger studios/publishers like Microsoft Studios coming in and buying them out. The consolidation of these studios is what burned them.
The point here is that mergers and acquisitions are not the underlying cause of the problem. Yes, most M&A is private equity these days, but the problem with that is private equity. Yes, as the post we’re discussing suggests, most AAA gaming is in shambles after the hAIst of the century; blaming that on mergers and acquisitions needlessly excuses the leadership of the acquiring companies from their ultimate responsibility for the shambling. Consider ustwo: they’re employee-owned, a registered B corp, and are pivoting from employees to contractors because it’s more cheaper. One of the launch workers for that game described an event in 2014 that is an much earlier, pre-AI instance of the shambling:
> I remember having a call with a business partner just before Monument Valley came out. And they couldn't get their head around it. They're like, 'Right, so it lasts two hours, it doesn't have in-app purchases, it doesn't have leaderboards, it doesn't have adverts... Well, why are you making this again?' No one could get their head around it.
That their unicorn became real is in sharp contrast to how their business leadership thought it would go, and then they launched two sequels that were no more successful than the second and third Matrix movies. We were lucky that MV escaped containment. The studio was not threatened by mergers or by AI; it was threatened by bad management, who wanted to engineer the most financial profit rather than simply shipping a good game.
Yes, Ubisoft will fuck over everyone they buy. But that’s because Ubisoft is badly managed; consider the Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider trilogy, widely considered excellent and preceded by their acquisition. Yes, it’s easier to place the blame on AI. But that’s because bad management is often greedy and miserly, and AI fits those desires like a glove.
This is no defense of Ubisoft or AI fucking over everyone, and I sure do loathe them both, but consider my point about Bungie in these terms: They took their own reins and mismanaged themselves into the ground, with a merger halfway through their decade that did not noticeably alter how they mismanaged their business. Bungie spent ten years doing strange financial engineering with multiple funding sources (Sony was merely the last one), locking the color palette picker behind cosmetic transactions, selling season passes and DLC, launching an entire sequel that bombed in year one because it removed the addictive loot box mechanism, and going so far as to delete one entire half of their world-class game rather than just refactoring it.
That’s bad management, and they’re a poster child for the entire gaming industry as a result. The financial engineering I’m blaming for this collapse, for these shambling monsters we’ve created — well, some would call it profiteering, but fintech has finops and findev, just like any other tech industry, and they engineered this outcome, so I’m simply giving them the courtesy of name that they deserve.
I agree on all of that, and to add to it that the leaders of these studios that had good games were leaders because they made good games. Not because they were good at business management. They weren’t and they thought bringing in the big folks would provide that and it always turns out terrible for everyone involved.
There are also all the companies building iOS apps that need mac mini compute clusters for CI/CD because of dumb Apple requirements (ask me how I know..).
why do anything? why Linux? why FreeBSD? why Mac at all? Why build your own wind turbine when corporations make large ones? Why build a cyclekart when you own a car? Why workout when everyone's going to die?
With that mindset, everything is useless and nothing has a point. Have I made my point?
I regret to actually say this, and mean no controversy - but, I have been actually asking myself just that - and, not in the "workout or not" sense, alone. In the "does anything have a point", way. Apologies.-
PS. To indeed contribute something: I am a big fan of the "doing things because of the joy of doing things" itself theory of it all, which is, seemingly, an antidote.-
In general, things have meaning because people assign meanings to them. Nothing inherently has meaning as meaning exists only within the human mind/soul. If you are searching for meaning, you will find nothing.
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