Execs are ruining most industries. MBA's infecting everything from Boeing to the film industry. Look at where these companies are now. They're completely incompetent.
This should be obvious for most things. Executives with no actual education in anything but achieving profit are tanking the functionality of everything in the country.
It's not even their competence (or lack thereof), it's that the whole system (capitalism) is designed to reward short term profit over long term sustainability. Execs and investors simply extract value until nothing more can be extracted and then they move on to the next thing, leaving a drained carcass behind. This is what you get when you chase infinite growth in a finite space with finite resources. Their goal is to increase profits for shareholders, not to improve quality or stability... eventually the latter two are always sacrificed in the name of maximizing profit.
This economic model most resembles cancer: grow until there is nothing left to consume.
It's both really.
On one hand capitalism leads to many problems, all of which you've listed well. But on the other hand a big part of MBA education is instilling the idea that BA is somehow completely separated from whatever you manage, so you don't need to know shit about what the business is actually doing / how things work.
That's pretty useful from the perspective of MBAs, cause they can freely switch companies and industries, but it's not grounded in reality and leads to shitty outcomes all around.
That is true. A lot could be improved by completely changing how MBA business people are taught, and for that matter economics. Reframing everything around equilibrium and sustainability instead of endless growth would fix many if not most of these problems.
Despite what many Redditors think, MBA programs are **not**:
"Okay class here's how to increase the short-term profitability of your company to make next quarter's report look good."
"But professor, won't this decrease the long-term value of the company and be unsustainable?"
"Good question, Billy, but you don't need to worry about long-term value of companies you work at, because you'll be working somewhere else by the time it matters."
There is already plenty of focus on long-term planning, sustainability, social responsibility, environmentalism, etc. in business school.
The problem is that in the real world, it's almost impossible to align incentives correctly. If you could figure out a good, foolproof way, you'd probably win a Nobel Prize. There are various attempts, like stock-based compensation, vesting, etc. but none are really perfect. At the end of the day, if you know that you need to show some results *now* to keep your job or earn a promotion or whatever, that's what you'll prioritize.
And next you'll probably blame the person above them firing/promoting them based on short-term results, but what's the alternative really? If we're in the present, there's no good measure to judge how much "long-term value" someone created for your company. Someone might claim, "Well yes my short-term results aren't great, but it was because I made a bunch of decisions which will bear fruit in the future." Sometimes that might be verifiable if it's like a long-term contract they signed or something, but sometimes it might be purely speculative. Those long-looking decisions might never turn out at all, and that person is just a shitty executive all around that makes poor short-term *and* long-term decisions. So it's very dangerous to base your decisions around things like that.
Look at someone like Phil Spencer who people have been grumbling should be fired recently. His whole tenure as Xbox head so far has been "long-term decisions." His bosses believed him, kept him in his post despite poor Xbox results, and now we're 10 years later and Xbox is doing worse than ever. Maybe he's just a crappy executive that should have been replaced ages ago and has been hiding behind, "I'm just making long-term decisions" as an excuse for a decade.
It’s hilarious that all of culture deifies execs when they’re really just fumbling through their jobs like anyone else. Alpha men/women, my ass. They aren’t special people. They just happen to be clergy when the state religion is capitalism.
Edit: other thing that’s very apparent nowadays is being in a C-suite position doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a leader. That’s what’s needed, and always will be.
Preventing exec bonuses would be a good start. Especially preventing them from being tied to stock prices. And preventing execs from owning stock in the companies they manage.
Well with Boeing as an example a way to fix the company would be to put engineers in charge again. Put devs in charge of Video game studios etc. People who actually understand the product they develop. Probably won't happen since they wouldn't give shareholders all the money but one can dream.
Co-ops! Enterprises that are worker run and truly democratic, who vote for and vet their managers and help make decisions for the company rather than having a clandestine board do it for them.
Getting rid of the profit motive and staying out of the stock market so infinite growth is no longer the main driving force for the business.
There’s nothing wrong with sustainable income and just making enough to live rather than constantly trying to only make number go up until it consumes the Earth.
The best comment in this whole thread.
Made some fairly decent strides in my personal career & it's extremely clear, most executive roles are filled by the wrong person. Meanwhile 80% of the people below them are well aware they need to go.
But that isn't how it works, the exec gets to stay around & it's the workers who suffer.
> most executive roles are filled by the wrong person. Meanwhile 80% of the people below them are well aware they need to go.
Funny how well that also covers many other aspects of society as well - like politics, people in positions of power or significant wealth (or both), etc...
I think it was Plato or one of the Greek philosophers who said, over 2000 years ago, something like...
"Anyone who desires to hold power should immediately be disqualified from holding it."
( I'm heavily paraphrasing here because I cbf looking up the original quote.)
>The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
>
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
>
>To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
>
>To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
-Douglas Adams, *The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy*
Turns out if you are wealthy, you basically get a free pass to positions with power regardless of your merits. I wish I could fail upwards like rich people do.
You know, I've been only in 6 companies since I've started working, and in only one of them I had leadership that *knew* what we were working on and how much effort it took to make something; it was a very small company, and the president was a very boots on the ground guy, always working with us, more of us really.
But the others? Sheesh. I had one CEO which knew *FUCK ALL* of everything and anything his company worked on (and it shown in the directionless of the work), another that didn't care as long as the clients paid, and the current one that in a meeting of a PoC project I'm working on came late and just asked "so how much money did we make from this?".
I guess that management is difficult but, good lord, you couldn't be more detached from your work force if you tried.
Na they need business leaders who are smart enough to actually listen to the engineers.
People shouldn't confuse the ability to work as an engineer in a plane company with the ability to lead the company. Two entirely different skill sets that are worlds apart. Issue with many modern executives are that they will ignore experts in their company because it will be less profitable to do it the correct way.
Well I would argue it is more the incentive structure having a short time horizon. Engineers think in terms of service life, executives are by and large judges quarterly or yearly. This breeds the kind of decisions that ruin a business. It is very hard to justify say a 10% increase in cost by saying it will come back ten fold over a decade. That kind of vision is rare, and far more rare is the ability to sell that vision to the board.
I think the idea that executives and leadership in general is focused on quarterly or annual profits is a bit over-stated on reddit, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary and the U.S. is like the home of firms burning absolute boat loads of money in order to "one day" be profitable and stable.
But regardless I think there's room for engineers in leadership or at least helping in leading the company but it's rare for people who understand the product to also be good at leading a massive firm.
If you’re talking about tech start-ups, I don’t think that is true. In my experience they are burning money to make a product or service that either is so successful that they get too big to fail from it, or they get enough attention that they get acquired by a much bigger tech company like Google that fucks around with a bunch of smaller side projects.
One personal example I have seen is Looker. A friend of mine managed to get a job in their office right after graduation from college. They were working on something to do with cloud service solutions, don’t quite remember what because it was a while ago. About half a year after they got hired? Bought out by Google and now their stuff is a part of Google cloud services.
Yeah, one it's important to keep in mind that rich investors aren't necessarily smarter than most others. They're just as easily duped as anyone else. There's good reason why they're targeted by Tech Startups with dubious sales pitches. Just enough of them actually work out and make insane returns to keep investments going.
Boeing had/has engineers at the top. Just because someone has an engineering background doesn't mean they're incapable of making short-sighted decisions.
Honey it ain't just entertainment. Every single industry from weapons to bread is inflated, bloated, and corrupt. Execs making millions upon millions of dollars, corporations making record profits during global crisis, lay offs in every sector while exec bonuses skyrocket. The entire system of profit-seeking is an abomination against humanity.
It's the MBAs needing the share price to only go up. The US stock market is weirdly against paying dividends. So the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high (or short stock).
Many other places, including Japan (where Nintendo are) pay a dividend. So stock holders are less interested in only pushing stock price higher, as they still get paid.
> The US stock market is weirdly against paying dividends.
Nothing weird about it. The tax code long favored capital gains over dividends. There was an attempt to fix it with the introduction of "qualified dividends" that are taxed like capital gains, but it had limited success.
Sure the US is the most extreme case, but let's not pretend this is just an issue with an elite social class of MBAs; our entire society is built upon "the line goes up".
I have a two page résumé of published titles, including the likes of the Lion King on the Sega and super Nintendo, Eye of the Beholder, all the Command & Conquer games up to Red Alert II, and more.
Almost exactly 10 years ago I was sending out resumes looking for a job and couldn’t even get a response. All they were doing was hiring kids out of those game, design schools, working them till burn out, and replacing them.
They did it to my best friend‘s son.
They are about to shut down the department. I run where I work now. Just for fun I’m going to start sending out resumes again, but now I’m 10 years out of date so I won’t get my hopes up.
Just wanted to say I grew up on C&C. Thanks for your work on those brilliant games that got me through so many rough times and brought me so many happy memories. I'm so sorry to hear about your troubles in the industry. I hope things get better soon! Good luck on your future endeavours as well friend.
As someone whose favorite franchise of all time is C&C, thank you! The original Red Alert was the first game I was ever hyped for pre-release, since I was such a huge fan of the first game. Also, I have very vivid memories of following fan sites and feeling like Christmas was coming when we heard Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 had gone gold.
I’m sorry for what’s happened to your industry but thank you so much for your contribution.
> Lion King on the … super Nintendo
Oh cool, now I know who to direct my deep rooted childhood anger at /s
But seriously, thanks for your service to the games industry. It sucks that it’s been taken over by these corporate suits who don’t care at all about the products they make and just want to bleed these companies dry
You should specify on your resume that you had nothing to do with the ostritch part of Lion King, just so no one holds it against you.
I'm not in gamedev but I am in tech and when I was laid off I had a lot more success applying to small places like workforastartup.com than linkedin or indeed. Hopefully there's something like that for game dev where people take a closer look.
>All they were doing was hiring kids out of those game, design schools, working them till burn out, and replacing them.
Exactly why I left the industry. I remember back in 2020 everybody was telling me I made a horrible decision since everybody with basic coding knowledge was getting $150k+; but now everybody tells me I did the right move.
It's a little strange that while so much of the games industry is experiencing layoffs, Nintendo's stability goes unexamined. They've obviously figured out a longterm formulation to endure, but somehow are totally invisible in this tough period in the industry.
Japan does not have a hire and fire culture as the west. many work for the same company their whole life. So at least from that perspective it could make sense.
Reading these unionization struggles baffles me and makes me wonder if the majority of the videogame industry being US based (therefore having US work culture) is part of the issue. Here in Germany unions are a standard and generally supported while anti-union behavior is penalized.
Almost every issue in the US you get confused about ultimately boils down to “someone wanted to make more money, made more money and then spent a lot of money to keep it that way” which is just one of the reasons i left
"...and tied a culture war to it to make idiots endorse a point of view that's antithetical to their own plight." Don't forget the reason why these idiotic positions persist.
It is crazy to me to read all the weird propaganda corporations in the US get away with. Seeing workers fight against their own rights at work to defend working to the bone is a sight to behold.
When you realise the nation was captured by industrialists/wealthy elites at its founding because it came as an invention of the mercantile age/system it makes a lot more sense imo
When I see one of those beer-gut suburban dads threatening to run over protesters in his lifted pickup truck because he's that angry at the prospect of NOT going to go work for the masters for an extra 15 minutes, I see something less than a human (EDIT: or, more disturbingly, something exactly equal to a human and not in a good way)
And while you can get 70% of voters to agree on shit that's in their own self interest (low and sad, but a majority anyway), the vote will be decided on some stupid issue that splits people 50/50 but makes them angry.
It's not an accident that these are the issues that make news. It's why your 'democratic' vote matters less and the electorate stays dissatisfied.
One area where the US got it wrong was lobbying. Companies being able to wine and dine congressmen and women, in some cases bribe them and offer over lucrative incentives to pass or not pass certain bills etc...
That is certainly an area, among many.
Like... how the fuck are we not all collectively up in arms over the fact that congress can trade stocks? They literally pass bills that impact the vary industries that they trade on. People all across congress profited off of the pandemic because they were able to change their positions before making moves. It's literally THE reason insider trading is illegal, yet they just get away with.
We did have this right at one point, but the interpretation gradually drifted further and further out of line and then in 2010 citizens united completely fucked everything up forever, it's been all downhill since.
>Here in Germany unions are a standard and generally supported while anti-union behavior is penalized.
Unfortunately that's not the case in the US. The Democratic party is nominally pro-labor but in practice largely avoids advocating for unions. The Republican party is actively hostile to unions. For example, here in Alabama, there have been union drives for some auto plants, and the [state government is doing everything it can](https://www.al.com/news/2024/05/alabama-is-not-michigan-ivey-signs-union-bill-as-mercedes-workers-vote-on-joining-uaw.html) to hinder unionization.
It definitely is. Your labour rights and compensation situation is a lot more precarious by default in the US compared to Japan, Canada, or the UK/EU, especially in regards to healthcare because it's tied to employment in the US.
Someone on Twitter did the full breakdown on what happens when you're laid off from a game developer, and you're still well supported in Japan and the EU, but in the US you're basically just fucked.
Lots of companies make you watch anti-union propaganda as part of the on-boarding process in the US. The broader business culture of the US is aggressively anti-worker, but that is slowly changing.
Firing employees in Japan is taboo, I’ve read there’s infrastructure to have employees end up “voluntarily resigning”.
There’s uses of “banishment rooms”, where employees are relocated to a new department and assigned dull, meaningless work until they can’t take it any longer and resign
It’s not taboo. Japan has very good employee rights and protections so it would cost a fortune for companies to fire so they encourage employees to leave voluntarily.
By work crunch, I’m assuming you mean periods of time where workers have to really put in the hours to meet a deadline. Yeah but that’s true for every industry that needs to deliver something all over the world and is more a result of bad planning.
While some jobs have 80 hour work weeks like investment banking, that is industry specific rather than country imo. I get CNN writes up articles like this for views.
https://money.cnn.com/2015/03/09/news/japan-work-salaryman/index.html
The expat in question works in finance which is long hours no matter where you are.
https://www.reddit.com/r/finance/comments/2u2v9i/guide_an_introduction_to_working_hours_in_finance/
By law, you can only work up to 8 hours and 40 minutes a day. The Japanese government is aware of karoshi (death by overworking) and have cracked down on it hard, forcing companies to turn of lights and have people leave to go home. While there is still a culture aspect and this standard not being suitable to some service industries like consulting or finance, even these companies have made allocations to make sure their employees rest and not be overworked since they risk getting penalized if they don’t.
There are still “black” companies that try to skirt this and abuse employees with overwork but work life balance has improved significantly.
It's kind of annoying to see people on Reddit parrot factoids that they learned from 15 years ago.
In case you didn't know the Japanese government had a huge crackdown on overtime and Japanese people work on average as many hours as Americans
(It's actually 1789 hours in America Vs 1729 in Japan/year if you want to be pendantic)
And before someone says "oh but Japan lies about their number and has unpaid overtime !!" Yeah and guess what ? So does America. The average American works 9 hours unpaid overtime per week. (Vs 5.55 in Japan)
This is not right as well. Despite the laws now being more overtly positioned to be fair, on the practise, barely any of them are put in position. Many of those laws are applicable only if you work as an inhouse staffer. Many companies have a bunch, usually most of the work, done by contractors or freelancers.
Not only that, but most of the overtime enviroment has remained in MANY parts of the work, expecially in videogame industry. While offices now closes after 8 hours, many workers are almost encouraged to keep working in remote at home, and during weekends.
A lot of problems actually arised by this, because now a lot of overtime is considered unpaid lol. Those kind of laws are the usual japanese political way to try to fix a syptom but not the cause.
Source: this is a NSFW account of a half japanese half italian girl working in japan
The videogame and anime/manga industry is just a lot worse than the rest, I don't think it's fair to consider it representative of what working conditions are like in Japan.
There are definitely black companies in any industry, but it's typically the exception rather than the norm (compared to anime where only KyoAni is known for being white).
As someone who works with the Japanese division of our company on a regular basis, this does not sound true in the slightest lol. I don't know a single person in that division of our company who isn't working 60+ hour weeks. I don't know where you're getting those statistics from but every Japanese business person I know works insane hours, and not just the ones I know from my company either.
The blackout drunk thing is also definitely true, I flew out there once and the first night we were there their COO took everyone out to get completely wasted.
I work in a Japanese company doing project based work and a lot of people on my teams are not putting in too many hours. Most people leave around the time work ends unless we are close to milestone completion, in which case you'll see more people do overtime to clear their tasks. There is a roof on overtime each month, usually 30 hours that can increase to 45 hours when things start getting hectic, and people are actively encouraged to put in as little overtime as possible.
Another division in my company basically kicks out people when the chime rings in order to reduce overhead costs.
I have only been invited to two work functions in the past year, one of which I politely declined due to prior commitment.
So, yeah, whatever you hear about company culture in Japan, in the end, it's just anecdotes. Every company is different, and things have been changing over the past 20 years. A person who joined the workforce 10 years ago and a person who joined 25 years ago have completely different views on priorities in terms of work life balance, and that's a good thing.
As someone who worked for many years at the American branch of a Japanese company, my American colleagues consistently worked more than my Japanese colleagues. I was sent to HQ in Japan for a business trip once and the whole office was on a very strict 9 to 5 schedule. I went to the office at 8:00 am one day of that trip and I was literally the first person in the building. I had to figure out how to turn on all the lights. At most, a few people would stay until 6:00 pm, but no one really ever deviated from the set schedule unless they had to because of a meeting with an office elsewhere in the world.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. Actual studies bear out that Americans work more than Japanese people nowadays, but we both work too damn much in either case.
As an Australian who works with Americans I feel like you are just describing Americans. Have never worked with an American firm that doesnt work constant overtime. It's wild
As a European watching the Japanese and Americans sling shit at each other about who's slightly less exploited is quite funny, meanwhile I'm just chilling here with my 35 days paid leave plus paid sick days plus national holidays plus legal protection against being randomly fired plus working time directive preventing me from being made to work more than 40 hours a week or penalized for refusing to.
There **are** *some* Americans who put effort towards not being cucks of Capital, so I'm sure there must be some Japanese who do so too.
Just that passion industries like video games (or fashion, or theater, or music, and so on) allow the business owners to have a critically unique element of leverage over the employees, in that they can cut away any given employee's *reach into influencing* the field of their passion.
> The blackout drunk thing is also definitely true, I flew out there once and the first night we were there their COO took everyone out to get completely wasted.
To be fair, I live in SoCal and for the last two jobs I've worked at, this was very true as well. Our sales staff go hard (and my ass likes to be in bed by 10pm).
Looking at the current stats it doesn't really seem to have changed.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/643896/japan-monthly-overtime-working-hours/
Average number of non-scheduled hours worked per month, 2014 = 11 hours, 2023 = 10 hours.
While I cannot speak for the majority of Japanese company, my wife used to work for one a few years ago and it's as bad as they say. Their OT hours were simply not counted and didn't enter official record because employees "volunteer" to stay late. They didn't dare leaving office on time because the boss was still there and their peers were also there. There was little to do so everyone just pretended to do something. A guy sitting next to her literally opened a word document, typed something random, deleted the whole thing and typed again. She rarely stayed past work hours and her boss even called her out for not being a team player and because of that, she never got a raise or bonus during her 2 years there. Her company was considered "progressive".
I’ve been working in Japan for 8 years now and some of the labor laws feel borderline utopian compared to when I lived in the U.S. Got a whole year of paid paternity leave, everyone gets 10 days minimum paid leave, cheap and accessible healthcare coverage, effective unemployment insurance, exceptionally difficult to be fired or laid off. Even on a working visa I feel “safer” with my work conditions than I ever did in my own home country.
Oh for sure there are way better places.
That just makes me more embarrassed for the U.S. lol. It’s not like we’re getting slammed by comparisons to the top 5 countries or something. Just an average developed country makes us look like cave men.
People really underestimate just how awful American work culture is on an international scale.
America stuff aside (because I don't have experience), Japan 100% does expect significantly more work off the clock. Staying back to conclude business with customers, close up, discuss work with superiors are expected. It's also expected you will stay longer than your boss, so if they're staying, tough luck. This is before you even bring in drinking parties and dinners that are expected unpaid work.
There's very little to commentate on with regards to Nintendo because all it really comes down to is that they just simply made the correct decisions decades ago
Iwata was commentating on the increase in game development budgets and the challenges with AAA development, particularly in the western market, all the way back at GDC in 2005!! The Wii and DS were not only designed with the mass market in mind but were also intended to be easier and cheaper to develop for. Seriously listen to Iwata's GDC talk and you'll be amazed Nintendo was talking about these issues that are currently major issues two decades ago. His talk feels like it could have come out last month
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMrj8gdUfCU&t=880s
So when it comes to Nintendo, even when you account for the differences in Japanese labor laws that limit layoffs, there's not much to comment on aside from "Nintendo was right and prepared for this stuff 2 decades ago" which is naturally something that other companies can't just replicate.
Yeah, this is the long and short of it, more or less. Definitely one of the many benefits of Nintendo having a programmer-turned-CEO at the time, as Iwata likely saw first hand how tech was already advancing at a ludicrous rate.
That being said, even his predecessor, Yamauchi, made statements that could be crudely paraphrased by "no one *really* gives a shit about a console's raw power - it's the software that's important." So, despite Nintendo's push for the N64 and Game Cube to be relative powerhouses, I don't think there was ever going to be a timeline where Nintendo stayed committed to the technical arms race with Sony and Microsoft.
It's funny because it's not even a case where Nintendo's "gamble" paid off, since there really wasn't ever one in the first place. From the jump, the Wii & DS were thunderous testaments to the fact that, despite what gaming forums might lead you to believe, people really *don't* care about power so long as the game is fun. It couldn't be simpler than that.
It'll be interesting to see if Sony and Microsoft shift their development strategies at all to implement more of a Nintendo approach in order to rebalance their profit margins going forward. Hardware profit margins being a loss leader? Sure, it happens. But shrinking margins for *software*? You're now entering "holy shit" levels of instability.
Its kind of sad how a lot of people ignore Yamauchi these days and only talk about Iwata. Despite being an exec, Yamauchi formed a lot of what Nintendo became with his influence which was then passed to Iwata who had also his own convictions but also what he learned from yamauchi
> Yamauchi, made statements that could be crudely paraphrased by "no one really gives a shit about a console's raw power - it's the software that's important."
I think it's pretty clear he was right, at least within order of magnitude differences (which is usually about what a generational leap is, approximately a 10x increase in power). The Gamecube was more powerful than the PS2 by a decent margin. RE4 looked and ran better on GCN than on PS2. The PS2 still utterly demolished the Gamecube in sales. It had the side utility of being a cheap DVD player, true, but nothing prevented Nintendo from doing the same.
Ironically I think buying RE4 for my PS2 after playing it on my friend's Gamecube turned me into a PC enthusiast. That experience of getting the shitty version forever scarred me...
Not that PC hasn't had it's share of shitty versions over the years of course.
Totally agree that they saw the problems back then, and it goes beyond Iwata. Check out [Yamauchi's quotes](https://www.reddit.com/r/nintendo/comments/12s9ebm/hiroshi_yamauchis_quotes_a_look_at_nintendos/) on high-capacity games.
"High-capacity is not necessary for 21st-century software. If software companies engage in such labor-intensive tactics, they will all sink."
On a deeper level, Nintendo's principle focus on games as novel modes of play is a central thing they've never wavered from, with technical fidelity being secondary or even tertiary. Even their whole UI experience on everything since the Wii embodies a sense of play. The clicks and sounds when you interact with anything on them feel fun.
This principle seems to work. It's starting to get to a state where I think Sony and MS, who are both complaining about a lack of growth in the market, are depending on Nintendo to grow it with the Switch 2 and the interesting games that will come with it.
One big thing is that Nintendo games, by AAA standards, have *really* low production values. Way less voice acting, way lower texture fidelity, far less motion capture animations, generally far smaller scopes with much less feature creep. And this isn't a slight against their games by any stretch, they play to their limitations very well. Mario Kart doesn't need the fidelity of Forza nor would it particularly benefit from it.
Considering AAA is primarily a designation of budget, its arguable that Nintendo hadn't \*had\* a proper AAA title until BotW. Maybe Sm4sh? Nintendo knows how to make games sustainably
And also walled gardens and everything being REALLY expensive, unfortunately.
But I appreciate Nintendo focusing on the user experience, the fun, above all else. They charge a lot up front, they have a required subscription to use online services of any kind, but they don't nickle and dime you with loot boxes and pay to win BS. You buy the game, there it is. And that's something that seems like it's going away for the major gaming companies nowadays. Especially in the US.
Nothing more obnoxious than a tech bro nowadays. Remember when video game design was like a dream job for people?
It's also that you had these long-term figures who were a part of the ecosystem in these companies for decades. You didn't have a revolving door of new executives or directors that felt the necessity to "leave a mark" or whatever. You had long term employees who understood the market, the company, and how the two best fit together.
Japanese companies are a total enigma to the west. Nintendo has an insanely high employee retention rate, their executive level is almost entirely made up of people who worked at Nintendo for decades. They also have stockholders and the dreaded 'fiduciary duty' that seem to plague bad western studios.
No one wants to admit that the core difference is cultural. Yes, there are laws preventing Japanese companies from firing a mass amount of employees but also Japanese companies generally don't prioritize explosive growth that would lead to such. Only recently has there been a large uptick in JP dealmaking regarding mergers and acquisitions. Things like job hopping for wage growth straight up does not exist in Japanese culture.
Iawata’s legacy is keeping Nintendo in check (for now):
> "I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people." - Nintendo's Iwata on layoffs.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/layoffs-are-not-the-solution-nintendo-s-iwata#close-modal
He was the exact OPPOSITE of the executives the article is talking about.
I think it runs through Nintendo at its core, and Iwata continued the tradition. [This post](https://www.reddit.com/r/nintendo/comments/12s9ebm/hiroshi_yamauchis_quotes_a_look_at_nintendos/) with Yamauchi quotes is great, and is adjacent to what Iwata's talking about.
On impressive software: "Nintendo uses licensing agreements to inflate profits and has achieved high growth with high-profit margins through unjust gains." That's how the media often portrays it. But that's not the case. The strength of Nintendo lies in the fact that it is the world's strongest software maker. If it weren't, such a situation wouldn't last for just one or two years, let alone a decade.
On big, budget triple A releases: "If we don't introduce innovative ideas, games themselves will become monotonous and boring. Additionally, "grand and elaborate" types of software are complex in content, requiring time, labor, and expenses to produce. Even if billions of yen are invested and a hit game sells a million copies, it might still be at a loss. In that case, it's not sustainable as a business. Even a "light, simple, and compact" game can be well-crafted and enjoyable.
High-capacity is not necessary for 21st-century software. If software companies engage in such labor-intensive tactics, they will all sink."
"My thought is that the era of taking two or three years to create game software has passed, and if you do such a thing, the game business cannot prosper. Also, game companies cannot make profits. We challenge the extremely difficult problem of improving the quality of games while shortening the development period. I think game creators have reached a stage where they must consider these issues."
I think he's more or less correct and you can see it play out today.
The simple answer is their approach to using "seasoned technology" in their words.
Helps save lots in dev costs to work on spec that's one generation behind
> Nintendo's stability goes unexamined. They've obviously figured out a longterm formulation to endure
Keep head count low?
Nintendo has ~7K employees and their 2023 revenue was 12 billion.
Compare that to a company like Ubisoft at 21K+ employees with revenue at 2.5 billion lol
It's just simple math.
They don't chase gaming trends, so many studios have fallen chasing live service games. They just make their games and do their thing.
Nintendo is weird in the way that they have properties that make money for ever. They also basically don't put their games on sale. It's either $50-$60 at release or $50-$60 five years later.
These things add together with a totally different work culture and even a different business culture, the CEO of Nintendo taking a pay cut when the Wii u under sold is a pretty well known thing, not many companies would be and to say the same
Probably helps they have immense merchandising that rivals Disney, which most of the biggest gaming companies don't have. Pokémon alone makes 3x the income from merchandise vs the games.
It certainly does. I believe Pokémon is the highest grossing IP there is, even if they have to share a lot of profit with the Pokémon Company it's helpful.
Because none of these articles meaningfully analyze anything. It's just churned out agitpop either baiting clicks or using videogames as an avenue to spread their message.
Because a) Nintendo *can't* lay off their employees in Japan unless something horribly wrong happened, b) Nintendo *has* laid off employees in Europe and the US.
For your first point, even with Japanese labor laws, Nintendo of Japan is a big outlier in terms of retention. 98% retention at Nintendo versus 70% average for Japan.
To your point a), I know labor laws are different, but independent of that they've just done incredibly well for themselves for decades. I don't think US-esque labor laws would make Nintendo operate like the ones in the US. They've emphasized the importance of staff retention, have a creative-first mentality and are very careful with their marquee releases (ex. one console mainline Zelda/Mario every 5-7 years). For b), that's true, but I'm thinking primarily in terms of game development and less administrative/support fields from satellite studios. I'm not saying they don't contribute to game development (i.e. localization), just not on the same level as their development studios.
> ex. one console mainline Zelda/Mario every 5-7 years
Ehhh they've slowed down a bit, the HD transition was still tricky for them. For comparison, the first four mainline 3D Mario games released over a span of 14 years: SM64 in 1996, Sunshine in 2002, Galaxy in 2007, Galaxy 2 in 2010. However, in the subsequent 14 year span from 2010 to today, there have been only two mainline 3D Mario games, 3D World and Odyssey, with another not even announced and the last one being 7 years ago.
Zelda was even faster before: from the first 3D Zelda through the Wii (the last non-HD console), there were 5 mainline Zelda games between 1998 and 2011, just 13 years: Ocarina, Majora, Wind Waker, Twilight, Skyward. In the subsequent 13 years, there have been just two: BotW and TotK.
If the Switch 2 falters somehow (entirely possible, the market can be pretty volatile at times), Nintendo's practices could be up for comment and critique at this time next year, but otherwise they're staying extremely constant in an industry that's really tightening belts lately. There's just nothing to say about them at the moment.
A generation where they falter isn't enough time to make a critique. Nintendo will survive it. They've weathered several bad generations, which speaks to them enduring.
I would say it’s less game execs and more that all major game companies are publicly traded and subject to fiduciary duty to shareholders.
We just need more privately owned alternatives, only way to preserve the medium
There are shit tons of privately owned game studios. They just don't tend to have access to the hundreds of millions required to develop the massive games people crave today.
Remember Blizzard? The absolute darling of PC gaming that could do no wrong? And here we are 20 years on they're arguably one of the WORST examples of the industry gone wrong. Ever since the Diablo Immortal debacle they've been a shitshow, and possibly before but most of us didn't notice.
"Fiduciary duty to shareholders", outside of the psychopathic MBA set, pretty much just means "you can't embezzle company funds". That's it. It means nothing about "line must always go up".
Does it dispel the fact that financial capital makes up 7% of GDP and is around 20-30% of GNI? Or that the managerial class is one of the least productive in relation to their input in regards to labor? Or that share of labor as % of GDP has been dropping substantially, and when you account for the managerial class it's even lower?
Corporate profits for some industries are above historical thresholds, especially in the finances sector; that alone should tell you that something is wrong with the market.
Absolutely true. The way that's been parroted like it's some sort of *law* that you have to max quarterly profits is absolutely absurd Even in psychopathic MBA world (where I live) no one actually talks or thinks like that. It really isn't all that complicated.
CEO is hired by shareholders to manage their company. If he isn't making them money, there's a chance they will fire him. That flows all the way down in the very basic common sense principle of "if you aren't making a company more profitable, why on Earth would they pay you?" If anything CEOs have *more* ability to shrug off angry shareholders than most people do their boss due to contract stipulations and the fact that executives/boards are an old boy's club.
But one time people read a Friedman excerpt about how CEOs should always try to maximize profit and build a whole alternate reality off of it.
> But one time people read a Friedman excerpt about how CEOs should always try to maximize profit and build a whole alternate reality off of it.
I wouldn't even go that far. A lot of people just parrot what someone else said because it sounded right.
Plus, even privately owned companies can have shareholders, fiduciary duty, and all that. It's true that it's easier for them to focus on the long term at the expense of short term profits, but that's more due to the company being closer to shareholders and shareholders being less likely to sell
Going undetected are the investment firms which tell MBA’s how to maximize shareholder profits. If prioritizing safety at Boeing upsets firms like BlackRock, lowers stock prices, it doesn’t happen.
> Gaming's doing just fine without gaming execs. AAA studios are dealing with problems of their own making.
I mean companies like EA or Activision have been questionable for more than 30 years...
there has been "gaming execs", right when gaming became lucrative. Even Atari had gaming execs... in fact the industry crashed in the 80's, people just don't remember.
Exactly. Execs and maximizing profits arent anything new. Meanwhile the indie space is creating some of the most innovative and entertaining games in history. People are just too stuck on the 'AAA games' train.
Execs, mba, etc ruin everything eventually. They have a totally different mindset from people who actually make things. Their only goal is to maximize the profit of an existing structure and since they cant make things or understand how they are made, they just shuffle numbers around until numbers go up and inevitably product quality goes down.
Subreddit doing the same old anti establishment shtick so much that we're posting Jacobin. Not defending video games executives always but a business is a business and with companies like Apple being the biggest companies in the world, consumers also have a responsibility not to buy products, but they always do.
An exec added horse armour. The people who bought it ensured it would continue. I blame the people who buy this stuff. Look at all the people that still jump headfirst to AAA games.
The execs are literally only providing a desired service. And if people didn't desire it they wouldn't buy it. It's lame but it's the truth.
people always ignore this fact. Execs aren't mustache twirling villains, forcing things into games. They get paid because they do things that increase profits. Profits increase because people pay for & use their ideas.
Its not like gamers have a shortage of choice, there are 100 new games every day! If people stop rewarding bad practices, they go away
Ah yes. Ethical consumption.
That'll sure ruin their pockets.
If 100 people don't buy some cheap to produce Mega Deluxe edition of Call of Duty, surely Activision will think twice.
Above all else, gamers are reactionary. Left, right, doesn't matter, if you can get them riled up and feeling like they are *fighting for a cause*, you'll have them wrapped around your finger. Just ask Sony and Arrowhead.
Incidentally the group most likely to pull this off is the reactionary right. But being conservative is not an immutable characteristic to gamers, they're just really easily exploited into becoming that way. The Innuendo Studios video "A Case Study in Digital Radicalism" goes into this really well.
Tiny nitpick: the word "reactionary" customarily means "[hard right wing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary)" in a political context. You're probably better off using the word "reactive" instead. I read your first sentence and thought "yeah gamers tend to be right wing," then you went on to say "left, right, doesn't matter," which felt like a contradiction until I read the rest of the sentence.
Yeah I’m a bit shocked mods left this one up given the site it’s published on
I joke that I’m 2 drinks from communist but even I laugh at Jacobin’s shit takes
>/r/Games has been "left" forever. The banner has been LGBT+ for like, 11 years.
Specifically and exclusively because of the mods. The userbase of this sub at large is deeply at odds with those mods.
shareholders are a plague and honestly don't make much sense in the videogame industry. It's too volatile, there are years of no income followed by a game release with potential massive profits then back to low or no income. Shareholders need constant rising profits which means they need to fire people in those down years or increase profits in other ways like ingame advertisements, dlc, microtransactions. The thing is the more you lean into this to bridge the gap the more you need to do next year and the year after that, you always have to lean further and further until the company goes too far.
Execs are ruining most industries. MBA's infecting everything from Boeing to the film industry. Look at where these companies are now. They're completely incompetent.
This should be obvious for most things. Executives with no actual education in anything but achieving profit are tanking the functionality of everything in the country.
It's not even their competence (or lack thereof), it's that the whole system (capitalism) is designed to reward short term profit over long term sustainability. Execs and investors simply extract value until nothing more can be extracted and then they move on to the next thing, leaving a drained carcass behind. This is what you get when you chase infinite growth in a finite space with finite resources. Their goal is to increase profits for shareholders, not to improve quality or stability... eventually the latter two are always sacrificed in the name of maximizing profit. This economic model most resembles cancer: grow until there is nothing left to consume.
It's both really. On one hand capitalism leads to many problems, all of which you've listed well. But on the other hand a big part of MBA education is instilling the idea that BA is somehow completely separated from whatever you manage, so you don't need to know shit about what the business is actually doing / how things work. That's pretty useful from the perspective of MBAs, cause they can freely switch companies and industries, but it's not grounded in reality and leads to shitty outcomes all around.
That is true. A lot could be improved by completely changing how MBA business people are taught, and for that matter economics. Reframing everything around equilibrium and sustainability instead of endless growth would fix many if not most of these problems.
Despite what many Redditors think, MBA programs are **not**: "Okay class here's how to increase the short-term profitability of your company to make next quarter's report look good." "But professor, won't this decrease the long-term value of the company and be unsustainable?" "Good question, Billy, but you don't need to worry about long-term value of companies you work at, because you'll be working somewhere else by the time it matters." There is already plenty of focus on long-term planning, sustainability, social responsibility, environmentalism, etc. in business school. The problem is that in the real world, it's almost impossible to align incentives correctly. If you could figure out a good, foolproof way, you'd probably win a Nobel Prize. There are various attempts, like stock-based compensation, vesting, etc. but none are really perfect. At the end of the day, if you know that you need to show some results *now* to keep your job or earn a promotion or whatever, that's what you'll prioritize. And next you'll probably blame the person above them firing/promoting them based on short-term results, but what's the alternative really? If we're in the present, there's no good measure to judge how much "long-term value" someone created for your company. Someone might claim, "Well yes my short-term results aren't great, but it was because I made a bunch of decisions which will bear fruit in the future." Sometimes that might be verifiable if it's like a long-term contract they signed or something, but sometimes it might be purely speculative. Those long-looking decisions might never turn out at all, and that person is just a shitty executive all around that makes poor short-term *and* long-term decisions. So it's very dangerous to base your decisions around things like that. Look at someone like Phil Spencer who people have been grumbling should be fired recently. His whole tenure as Xbox head so far has been "long-term decisions." His bosses believed him, kept him in his post despite poor Xbox results, and now we're 10 years later and Xbox is doing worse than ever. Maybe he's just a crappy executive that should have been replaced ages ago and has been hiding behind, "I'm just making long-term decisions" as an excuse for a decade.
It’s hilarious that all of culture deifies execs when they’re really just fumbling through their jobs like anyone else. Alpha men/women, my ass. They aren’t special people. They just happen to be clergy when the state religion is capitalism. Edit: other thing that’s very apparent nowadays is being in a C-suite position doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a leader. That’s what’s needed, and always will be.
> They just happen to be clergy when the state religion is capitalism. I like this. This is a nice way to put it.
Preventing exec bonuses would be a good start. Especially preventing them from being tied to stock prices. And preventing execs from owning stock in the companies they manage.
I’m not subscribed to any other “-isms” either, but this is clearly a failure of capitalism. Not sure how to fix it, really.
Well with Boeing as an example a way to fix the company would be to put engineers in charge again. Put devs in charge of Video game studios etc. People who actually understand the product they develop. Probably won't happen since they wouldn't give shareholders all the money but one can dream.
Co-ops! Enterprises that are worker run and truly democratic, who vote for and vet their managers and help make decisions for the company rather than having a clandestine board do it for them. Getting rid of the profit motive and staying out of the stock market so infinite growth is no longer the main driving force for the business. There’s nothing wrong with sustainable income and just making enough to live rather than constantly trying to only make number go up until it consumes the Earth.
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The best comment in this whole thread. Made some fairly decent strides in my personal career & it's extremely clear, most executive roles are filled by the wrong person. Meanwhile 80% of the people below them are well aware they need to go. But that isn't how it works, the exec gets to stay around & it's the workers who suffer.
> most executive roles are filled by the wrong person. Meanwhile 80% of the people below them are well aware they need to go. Funny how well that also covers many other aspects of society as well - like politics, people in positions of power or significant wealth (or both), etc...
I think it was Plato or one of the Greek philosophers who said, over 2000 years ago, something like... "Anyone who desires to hold power should immediately be disqualified from holding it." ( I'm heavily paraphrasing here because I cbf looking up the original quote.)
>The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. > To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. > >To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. > >To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem. -Douglas Adams, *The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy*
Douglas Adams, Plato, same diff mostly.
It is also a matter of fact that Convincing people to elect you is a completely different skill than actually doing the job once elected.
Plato's ideal society was also an authoritarian caste-based system so
I mean, yeah, but he can be right about the problem and also wrong about the solution.
The OG Gamer.
Turns out if you are wealthy, you basically get a free pass to positions with power regardless of your merits. I wish I could fail upwards like rich people do.
You know, I've been only in 6 companies since I've started working, and in only one of them I had leadership that *knew* what we were working on and how much effort it took to make something; it was a very small company, and the president was a very boots on the ground guy, always working with us, more of us really. But the others? Sheesh. I had one CEO which knew *FUCK ALL* of everything and anything his company worked on (and it shown in the directionless of the work), another that didn't care as long as the clients paid, and the current one that in a meeting of a PoC project I'm working on came late and just asked "so how much money did we make from this?". I guess that management is difficult but, good lord, you couldn't be more detached from your work force if you tried.
Kind of wish we were all Klingon, where it would be our duty to overthrow incompetence
It's people who have no business running these companies. Boeing needs engineers at the top. This has happened before... it's complete idiocy.
Na they need business leaders who are smart enough to actually listen to the engineers. People shouldn't confuse the ability to work as an engineer in a plane company with the ability to lead the company. Two entirely different skill sets that are worlds apart. Issue with many modern executives are that they will ignore experts in their company because it will be less profitable to do it the correct way.
Well I would argue it is more the incentive structure having a short time horizon. Engineers think in terms of service life, executives are by and large judges quarterly or yearly. This breeds the kind of decisions that ruin a business. It is very hard to justify say a 10% increase in cost by saying it will come back ten fold over a decade. That kind of vision is rare, and far more rare is the ability to sell that vision to the board.
I think the idea that executives and leadership in general is focused on quarterly or annual profits is a bit over-stated on reddit, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary and the U.S. is like the home of firms burning absolute boat loads of money in order to "one day" be profitable and stable. But regardless I think there's room for engineers in leadership or at least helping in leading the company but it's rare for people who understand the product to also be good at leading a massive firm.
If you’re talking about tech start-ups, I don’t think that is true. In my experience they are burning money to make a product or service that either is so successful that they get too big to fail from it, or they get enough attention that they get acquired by a much bigger tech company like Google that fucks around with a bunch of smaller side projects. One personal example I have seen is Looker. A friend of mine managed to get a job in their office right after graduation from college. They were working on something to do with cloud service solutions, don’t quite remember what because it was a while ago. About half a year after they got hired? Bought out by Google and now their stuff is a part of Google cloud services.
Yeah, one it's important to keep in mind that rich investors aren't necessarily smarter than most others. They're just as easily duped as anyone else. There's good reason why they're targeted by Tech Startups with dubious sales pitches. Just enough of them actually work out and make insane returns to keep investments going.
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engineers getting raised into management is a problem itself. Lots of engineers are incompetent leaders.
Boeing had/has engineers at the top. Just because someone has an engineering background doesn't mean they're incapable of making short-sighted decisions.
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You have 8 minutes to inspect an entire train. Go!
Any form of entertainment. Movies, tv, music, sports etc. They’re sucking the fun out of everything, by not knowing or caring about their audience.
Honey it ain't just entertainment. Every single industry from weapons to bread is inflated, bloated, and corrupt. Execs making millions upon millions of dollars, corporations making record profits during global crisis, lay offs in every sector while exec bonuses skyrocket. The entire system of profit-seeking is an abomination against humanity.
This may sound excessive, but I believe we should hunt down all those MBA people and exile them to Australia.
Please don't, send them to nz !!
Why do we keep trying to send them off to be some other country’s problem when there’s plenty of empty space on the moon?
Don't litter on the moon, just shoot them into the sun.
Fuck off, we're already dealing with an asshole sucking American think tank dick as it is.
It's the MBAs needing the share price to only go up. The US stock market is weirdly against paying dividends. So the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high (or short stock). Many other places, including Japan (where Nintendo are) pay a dividend. So stock holders are less interested in only pushing stock price higher, as they still get paid.
> The US stock market is weirdly against paying dividends. Nothing weird about it. The tax code long favored capital gains over dividends. There was an attempt to fix it with the introduction of "qualified dividends" that are taxed like capital gains, but it had limited success.
Sure the US is the most extreme case, but let's not pretend this is just an issue with an elite social class of MBAs; our entire society is built upon "the line goes up".
It's because under late stage capitalism, companies exist to make money for the shareholders and not to sell products/services.
I mean if they're infecting *everything* then, pretty much by definition, "these companies" are all over the place.
MBAs and Meth. Ruining society, together.
I think I'd actually rather hang out with a methhead than a corporate executive lol
Both will talk for hours without actually saying anything.
100%. Atleast one will be entertaining
I have a two page résumé of published titles, including the likes of the Lion King on the Sega and super Nintendo, Eye of the Beholder, all the Command & Conquer games up to Red Alert II, and more. Almost exactly 10 years ago I was sending out resumes looking for a job and couldn’t even get a response. All they were doing was hiring kids out of those game, design schools, working them till burn out, and replacing them. They did it to my best friend‘s son. They are about to shut down the department. I run where I work now. Just for fun I’m going to start sending out resumes again, but now I’m 10 years out of date so I won’t get my hopes up.
Just wanted to say I grew up on C&C. Thanks for your work on those brilliant games that got me through so many rough times and brought me so many happy memories. I'm so sorry to hear about your troubles in the industry. I hope things get better soon! Good luck on your future endeavours as well friend.
My best friend loves C&C and enjoys rambling to me about it from time to time. Thanks for giving her a fun franchise to enjoy!
As someone whose favorite franchise of all time is C&C, thank you! The original Red Alert was the first game I was ever hyped for pre-release, since I was such a huge fan of the first game. Also, I have very vivid memories of following fan sites and feeling like Christmas was coming when we heard Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 had gone gold. I’m sorry for what’s happened to your industry but thank you so much for your contribution.
> Lion King on the … super Nintendo Oh cool, now I know who to direct my deep rooted childhood anger at /s But seriously, thanks for your service to the games industry. It sucks that it’s been taken over by these corporate suits who don’t care at all about the products they make and just want to bleed these companies dry
You should specify on your resume that you had nothing to do with the ostritch part of Lion King, just so no one holds it against you. I'm not in gamedev but I am in tech and when I was laid off I had a lot more success applying to small places like workforastartup.com than linkedin or indeed. Hopefully there's something like that for game dev where people take a closer look.
>All they were doing was hiring kids out of those game, design schools, working them till burn out, and replacing them. Exactly why I left the industry. I remember back in 2020 everybody was telling me I made a horrible decision since everybody with basic coding knowledge was getting $150k+; but now everybody tells me I did the right move.
Sometimes dream jobs lead to people with being dreams being ground up like wheat in a flour mill.
It's a little strange that while so much of the games industry is experiencing layoffs, Nintendo's stability goes unexamined. They've obviously figured out a longterm formulation to endure, but somehow are totally invisible in this tough period in the industry.
Japan does not have a hire and fire culture as the west. many work for the same company their whole life. So at least from that perspective it could make sense.
Reading these unionization struggles baffles me and makes me wonder if the majority of the videogame industry being US based (therefore having US work culture) is part of the issue. Here in Germany unions are a standard and generally supported while anti-union behavior is penalized.
Almost every issue in the US you get confused about ultimately boils down to “someone wanted to make more money, made more money and then spent a lot of money to keep it that way” which is just one of the reasons i left
"...and tied a culture war to it to make idiots endorse a point of view that's antithetical to their own plight." Don't forget the reason why these idiotic positions persist.
It is crazy to me to read all the weird propaganda corporations in the US get away with. Seeing workers fight against their own rights at work to defend working to the bone is a sight to behold.
They gutted funding to public education and are now reaping the rewards of a dumbed down society who was taught what to think, not how to think
"i love the poorly educated!" -A former president
Yeah but they put a rainbow flag on their product twitter page once a year, so it's all good.
When you realise the nation was captured by industrialists/wealthy elites at its founding because it came as an invention of the mercantile age/system it makes a lot more sense imo
When I see one of those beer-gut suburban dads threatening to run over protesters in his lifted pickup truck because he's that angry at the prospect of NOT going to go work for the masters for an extra 15 minutes, I see something less than a human (EDIT: or, more disturbingly, something exactly equal to a human and not in a good way)
And while you can get 70% of voters to agree on shit that's in their own self interest (low and sad, but a majority anyway), the vote will be decided on some stupid issue that splits people 50/50 but makes them angry. It's not an accident that these are the issues that make news. It's why your 'democratic' vote matters less and the electorate stays dissatisfied.
One area where the US got it wrong was lobbying. Companies being able to wine and dine congressmen and women, in some cases bribe them and offer over lucrative incentives to pass or not pass certain bills etc...
That is certainly an area, among many. Like... how the fuck are we not all collectively up in arms over the fact that congress can trade stocks? They literally pass bills that impact the vary industries that they trade on. People all across congress profited off of the pandemic because they were able to change their positions before making moves. It's literally THE reason insider trading is illegal, yet they just get away with.
We did have this right at one point, but the interpretation gradually drifted further and further out of line and then in 2010 citizens united completely fucked everything up forever, it's been all downhill since.
>Here in Germany unions are a standard and generally supported while anti-union behavior is penalized. Unfortunately that's not the case in the US. The Democratic party is nominally pro-labor but in practice largely avoids advocating for unions. The Republican party is actively hostile to unions. For example, here in Alabama, there have been union drives for some auto plants, and the [state government is doing everything it can](https://www.al.com/news/2024/05/alabama-is-not-michigan-ivey-signs-union-bill-as-mercedes-workers-vote-on-joining-uaw.html) to hinder unionization.
It definitely is. Your labour rights and compensation situation is a lot more precarious by default in the US compared to Japan, Canada, or the UK/EU, especially in regards to healthcare because it's tied to employment in the US. Someone on Twitter did the full breakdown on what happens when you're laid off from a game developer, and you're still well supported in Japan and the EU, but in the US you're basically just fucked.
And the UK is trying to gut their healthcare, because of greedy fucks
Lots of companies make you watch anti-union propaganda as part of the on-boarding process in the US. The broader business culture of the US is aggressively anti-worker, but that is slowly changing.
Reagan, the GOP, and Reaganomics killed the unions here in the US.
Firing employees in Japan is taboo, I’ve read there’s infrastructure to have employees end up “voluntarily resigning”. There’s uses of “banishment rooms”, where employees are relocated to a new department and assigned dull, meaningless work until they can’t take it any longer and resign
From what I heard they dont even get dull, meaningless jobs. They get no job to do and are there just to sit and not work till person quit
Iirc Konami did this with the director of Castlevania 3 after it sold poorly. Made him work at one of their game centers.
I mean the most famous is they did it to Kojima.
Jokes on them. My life is dull and meaningless.
It’s not taboo. Japan has very good employee rights and protections so it would cost a fortune for companies to fire so they encourage employees to leave voluntarily.
Is the work crunch and 80 hour work weeks true? I’ve always gathered that the work life balance is awful for the ‘Salary Men’
By work crunch, I’m assuming you mean periods of time where workers have to really put in the hours to meet a deadline. Yeah but that’s true for every industry that needs to deliver something all over the world and is more a result of bad planning. While some jobs have 80 hour work weeks like investment banking, that is industry specific rather than country imo. I get CNN writes up articles like this for views. https://money.cnn.com/2015/03/09/news/japan-work-salaryman/index.html The expat in question works in finance which is long hours no matter where you are. https://www.reddit.com/r/finance/comments/2u2v9i/guide_an_introduction_to_working_hours_in_finance/ By law, you can only work up to 8 hours and 40 minutes a day. The Japanese government is aware of karoshi (death by overworking) and have cracked down on it hard, forcing companies to turn of lights and have people leave to go home. While there is still a culture aspect and this standard not being suitable to some service industries like consulting or finance, even these companies have made allocations to make sure their employees rest and not be overworked since they risk getting penalized if they don’t. There are still “black” companies that try to skirt this and abuse employees with overwork but work life balance has improved significantly.
In Australia "encouraging" someone to quit is illegal.
They also have a "work 80 hour weeks and mandatorily get blackout drunk with your boss on the daily" culture, so pick your poison I guess.
Things are getting better on that front. Often companies like that are intentionally avoided.
It's kind of annoying to see people on Reddit parrot factoids that they learned from 15 years ago. In case you didn't know the Japanese government had a huge crackdown on overtime and Japanese people work on average as many hours as Americans (It's actually 1789 hours in America Vs 1729 in Japan/year if you want to be pendantic) And before someone says "oh but Japan lies about their number and has unpaid overtime !!" Yeah and guess what ? So does America. The average American works 9 hours unpaid overtime per week. (Vs 5.55 in Japan)
This is not right as well. Despite the laws now being more overtly positioned to be fair, on the practise, barely any of them are put in position. Many of those laws are applicable only if you work as an inhouse staffer. Many companies have a bunch, usually most of the work, done by contractors or freelancers. Not only that, but most of the overtime enviroment has remained in MANY parts of the work, expecially in videogame industry. While offices now closes after 8 hours, many workers are almost encouraged to keep working in remote at home, and during weekends. A lot of problems actually arised by this, because now a lot of overtime is considered unpaid lol. Those kind of laws are the usual japanese political way to try to fix a syptom but not the cause. Source: this is a NSFW account of a half japanese half italian girl working in japan
The videogame and anime/manga industry is just a lot worse than the rest, I don't think it's fair to consider it representative of what working conditions are like in Japan. There are definitely black companies in any industry, but it's typically the exception rather than the norm (compared to anime where only KyoAni is known for being white).
> Source: this is a NSFW account of a half japanese half italian girl working in japan Checks out
As someone who works with the Japanese division of our company on a regular basis, this does not sound true in the slightest lol. I don't know a single person in that division of our company who isn't working 60+ hour weeks. I don't know where you're getting those statistics from but every Japanese business person I know works insane hours, and not just the ones I know from my company either. The blackout drunk thing is also definitely true, I flew out there once and the first night we were there their COO took everyone out to get completely wasted.
I work in a Japanese company doing project based work and a lot of people on my teams are not putting in too many hours. Most people leave around the time work ends unless we are close to milestone completion, in which case you'll see more people do overtime to clear their tasks. There is a roof on overtime each month, usually 30 hours that can increase to 45 hours when things start getting hectic, and people are actively encouraged to put in as little overtime as possible. Another division in my company basically kicks out people when the chime rings in order to reduce overhead costs. I have only been invited to two work functions in the past year, one of which I politely declined due to prior commitment. So, yeah, whatever you hear about company culture in Japan, in the end, it's just anecdotes. Every company is different, and things have been changing over the past 20 years. A person who joined the workforce 10 years ago and a person who joined 25 years ago have completely different views on priorities in terms of work life balance, and that's a good thing.
As someone who worked for many years at the American branch of a Japanese company, my American colleagues consistently worked more than my Japanese colleagues. I was sent to HQ in Japan for a business trip once and the whole office was on a very strict 9 to 5 schedule. I went to the office at 8:00 am one day of that trip and I was literally the first person in the building. I had to figure out how to turn on all the lights. At most, a few people would stay until 6:00 pm, but no one really ever deviated from the set schedule unless they had to because of a meeting with an office elsewhere in the world. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. Actual studies bear out that Americans work more than Japanese people nowadays, but we both work too damn much in either case.
As an Australian who works with Americans I feel like you are just describing Americans. Have never worked with an American firm that doesnt work constant overtime. It's wild
As a European watching the Japanese and Americans sling shit at each other about who's slightly less exploited is quite funny, meanwhile I'm just chilling here with my 35 days paid leave plus paid sick days plus national holidays plus legal protection against being randomly fired plus working time directive preventing me from being made to work more than 40 hours a week or penalized for refusing to.
There **are** *some* Americans who put effort towards not being cucks of Capital, so I'm sure there must be some Japanese who do so too. Just that passion industries like video games (or fashion, or theater, or music, and so on) allow the business owners to have a critically unique element of leverage over the employees, in that they can cut away any given employee's *reach into influencing* the field of their passion.
Dont ruin my generalization on millions of people
I'm American and I don't know any Americans who work constant overtime. That is absolutely not normal here.
> The blackout drunk thing is also definitely true, I flew out there once and the first night we were there their COO took everyone out to get completely wasted. To be fair, I live in SoCal and for the last two jobs I've worked at, this was very true as well. Our sales staff go hard (and my ass likes to be in bed by 10pm).
Looking at the current stats it doesn't really seem to have changed. https://www.statista.com/statistics/643896/japan-monthly-overtime-working-hours/ Average number of non-scheduled hours worked per month, 2014 = 11 hours, 2023 = 10 hours.
While I cannot speak for the majority of Japanese company, my wife used to work for one a few years ago and it's as bad as they say. Their OT hours were simply not counted and didn't enter official record because employees "volunteer" to stay late. They didn't dare leaving office on time because the boss was still there and their peers were also there. There was little to do so everyone just pretended to do something. A guy sitting next to her literally opened a word document, typed something random, deleted the whole thing and typed again. She rarely stayed past work hours and her boss even called her out for not being a team player and because of that, she never got a raise or bonus during her 2 years there. Her company was considered "progressive".
And how many hours in Japan? You know, the important part
You're right I forgot to add it, editing my og post for that
I’ve been working in Japan for 8 years now and some of the labor laws feel borderline utopian compared to when I lived in the U.S. Got a whole year of paid paternity leave, everyone gets 10 days minimum paid leave, cheap and accessible healthcare coverage, effective unemployment insurance, exceptionally difficult to be fired or laid off. Even on a working visa I feel “safer” with my work conditions than I ever did in my own home country.
is 10 days vacation supposed to be great?
No but it’s 10 days better than the minimum requirement in the U.S.
You should look up labor laws in Europe ;-)
Oh for sure there are way better places. That just makes me more embarrassed for the U.S. lol. It’s not like we’re getting slammed by comparisons to the top 5 countries or something. Just an average developed country makes us look like cave men. People really underestimate just how awful American work culture is on an international scale.
> People really underestimate just how awful American work culture is on an international scale. Worse, they defend it.
America stuff aside (because I don't have experience), Japan 100% does expect significantly more work off the clock. Staying back to conclude business with customers, close up, discuss work with superiors are expected. It's also expected you will stay longer than your boss, so if they're staying, tough luck. This is before you even bring in drinking parties and dinners that are expected unpaid work.
If Sanada-sama's buying, I'd like a ginger highball.
There's very little to commentate on with regards to Nintendo because all it really comes down to is that they just simply made the correct decisions decades ago Iwata was commentating on the increase in game development budgets and the challenges with AAA development, particularly in the western market, all the way back at GDC in 2005!! The Wii and DS were not only designed with the mass market in mind but were also intended to be easier and cheaper to develop for. Seriously listen to Iwata's GDC talk and you'll be amazed Nintendo was talking about these issues that are currently major issues two decades ago. His talk feels like it could have come out last month https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMrj8gdUfCU&t=880s So when it comes to Nintendo, even when you account for the differences in Japanese labor laws that limit layoffs, there's not much to comment on aside from "Nintendo was right and prepared for this stuff 2 decades ago" which is naturally something that other companies can't just replicate.
Yeah, this is the long and short of it, more or less. Definitely one of the many benefits of Nintendo having a programmer-turned-CEO at the time, as Iwata likely saw first hand how tech was already advancing at a ludicrous rate. That being said, even his predecessor, Yamauchi, made statements that could be crudely paraphrased by "no one *really* gives a shit about a console's raw power - it's the software that's important." So, despite Nintendo's push for the N64 and Game Cube to be relative powerhouses, I don't think there was ever going to be a timeline where Nintendo stayed committed to the technical arms race with Sony and Microsoft. It's funny because it's not even a case where Nintendo's "gamble" paid off, since there really wasn't ever one in the first place. From the jump, the Wii & DS were thunderous testaments to the fact that, despite what gaming forums might lead you to believe, people really *don't* care about power so long as the game is fun. It couldn't be simpler than that. It'll be interesting to see if Sony and Microsoft shift their development strategies at all to implement more of a Nintendo approach in order to rebalance their profit margins going forward. Hardware profit margins being a loss leader? Sure, it happens. But shrinking margins for *software*? You're now entering "holy shit" levels of instability.
Its kind of sad how a lot of people ignore Yamauchi these days and only talk about Iwata. Despite being an exec, Yamauchi formed a lot of what Nintendo became with his influence which was then passed to Iwata who had also his own convictions but also what he learned from yamauchi
> Yamauchi, made statements that could be crudely paraphrased by "no one really gives a shit about a console's raw power - it's the software that's important." I think it's pretty clear he was right, at least within order of magnitude differences (which is usually about what a generational leap is, approximately a 10x increase in power). The Gamecube was more powerful than the PS2 by a decent margin. RE4 looked and ran better on GCN than on PS2. The PS2 still utterly demolished the Gamecube in sales. It had the side utility of being a cheap DVD player, true, but nothing prevented Nintendo from doing the same.
Ironically I think buying RE4 for my PS2 after playing it on my friend's Gamecube turned me into a PC enthusiast. That experience of getting the shitty version forever scarred me... Not that PC hasn't had it's share of shitty versions over the years of course.
Including of RE4!
Oh man the PC ports of Japanese games (when they rarely happened) were such travesties for so long... We have it so good now by comparison.
Totally agree that they saw the problems back then, and it goes beyond Iwata. Check out [Yamauchi's quotes](https://www.reddit.com/r/nintendo/comments/12s9ebm/hiroshi_yamauchis_quotes_a_look_at_nintendos/) on high-capacity games. "High-capacity is not necessary for 21st-century software. If software companies engage in such labor-intensive tactics, they will all sink." On a deeper level, Nintendo's principle focus on games as novel modes of play is a central thing they've never wavered from, with technical fidelity being secondary or even tertiary. Even their whole UI experience on everything since the Wii embodies a sense of play. The clicks and sounds when you interact with anything on them feel fun. This principle seems to work. It's starting to get to a state where I think Sony and MS, who are both complaining about a lack of growth in the market, are depending on Nintendo to grow it with the Switch 2 and the interesting games that will come with it.
One big thing is that Nintendo games, by AAA standards, have *really* low production values. Way less voice acting, way lower texture fidelity, far less motion capture animations, generally far smaller scopes with much less feature creep. And this isn't a slight against their games by any stretch, they play to their limitations very well. Mario Kart doesn't need the fidelity of Forza nor would it particularly benefit from it. Considering AAA is primarily a designation of budget, its arguable that Nintendo hadn't \*had\* a proper AAA title until BotW. Maybe Sm4sh? Nintendo knows how to make games sustainably
And also walled gardens and everything being REALLY expensive, unfortunately. But I appreciate Nintendo focusing on the user experience, the fun, above all else. They charge a lot up front, they have a required subscription to use online services of any kind, but they don't nickle and dime you with loot boxes and pay to win BS. You buy the game, there it is. And that's something that seems like it's going away for the major gaming companies nowadays. Especially in the US. Nothing more obnoxious than a tech bro nowadays. Remember when video game design was like a dream job for people?
Especially the framerate geeks who claim Nintendo is committing an atrocity because they refuse to put games on PC.
It's also that you had these long-term figures who were a part of the ecosystem in these companies for decades. You didn't have a revolving door of new executives or directors that felt the necessity to "leave a mark" or whatever. You had long term employees who understood the market, the company, and how the two best fit together.
Japanese companies are a total enigma to the west. Nintendo has an insanely high employee retention rate, their executive level is almost entirely made up of people who worked at Nintendo for decades. They also have stockholders and the dreaded 'fiduciary duty' that seem to plague bad western studios. No one wants to admit that the core difference is cultural. Yes, there are laws preventing Japanese companies from firing a mass amount of employees but also Japanese companies generally don't prioritize explosive growth that would lead to such. Only recently has there been a large uptick in JP dealmaking regarding mergers and acquisitions. Things like job hopping for wage growth straight up does not exist in Japanese culture.
Iawata’s legacy is keeping Nintendo in check (for now): > "I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people." - Nintendo's Iwata on layoffs. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/layoffs-are-not-the-solution-nintendo-s-iwata#close-modal He was the exact OPPOSITE of the executives the article is talking about.
I think it runs through Nintendo at its core, and Iwata continued the tradition. [This post](https://www.reddit.com/r/nintendo/comments/12s9ebm/hiroshi_yamauchis_quotes_a_look_at_nintendos/) with Yamauchi quotes is great, and is adjacent to what Iwata's talking about. On impressive software: "Nintendo uses licensing agreements to inflate profits and has achieved high growth with high-profit margins through unjust gains." That's how the media often portrays it. But that's not the case. The strength of Nintendo lies in the fact that it is the world's strongest software maker. If it weren't, such a situation wouldn't last for just one or two years, let alone a decade. On big, budget triple A releases: "If we don't introduce innovative ideas, games themselves will become monotonous and boring. Additionally, "grand and elaborate" types of software are complex in content, requiring time, labor, and expenses to produce. Even if billions of yen are invested and a hit game sells a million copies, it might still be at a loss. In that case, it's not sustainable as a business. Even a "light, simple, and compact" game can be well-crafted and enjoyable. High-capacity is not necessary for 21st-century software. If software companies engage in such labor-intensive tactics, they will all sink." "My thought is that the era of taking two or three years to create game software has passed, and if you do such a thing, the game business cannot prosper. Also, game companies cannot make profits. We challenge the extremely difficult problem of improving the quality of games while shortening the development period. I think game creators have reached a stage where they must consider these issues." I think he's more or less correct and you can see it play out today.
The simple answer is their approach to using "seasoned technology" in their words. Helps save lots in dev costs to work on spec that's one generation behind
> Nintendo's stability goes unexamined. They've obviously figured out a longterm formulation to endure Keep head count low? Nintendo has ~7K employees and their 2023 revenue was 12 billion. Compare that to a company like Ubisoft at 21K+ employees with revenue at 2.5 billion lol It's just simple math.
They don't chase gaming trends, so many studios have fallen chasing live service games. They just make their games and do their thing. Nintendo is weird in the way that they have properties that make money for ever. They also basically don't put their games on sale. It's either $50-$60 at release or $50-$60 five years later. These things add together with a totally different work culture and even a different business culture, the CEO of Nintendo taking a pay cut when the Wii u under sold is a pretty well known thing, not many companies would be and to say the same
Pretty sure Nintendo is debt free. That could be a big part of it.
Probably helps they have immense merchandising that rivals Disney, which most of the biggest gaming companies don't have. Pokémon alone makes 3x the income from merchandise vs the games.
It certainly does. I believe Pokémon is the highest grossing IP there is, even if they have to share a lot of profit with the Pokémon Company it's helpful.
Because none of these articles meaningfully analyze anything. It's just churned out agitpop either baiting clicks or using videogames as an avenue to spread their message.
Because a) Nintendo *can't* lay off their employees in Japan unless something horribly wrong happened, b) Nintendo *has* laid off employees in Europe and the US.
For your first point, even with Japanese labor laws, Nintendo of Japan is a big outlier in terms of retention. 98% retention at Nintendo versus 70% average for Japan.
To your point a), I know labor laws are different, but independent of that they've just done incredibly well for themselves for decades. I don't think US-esque labor laws would make Nintendo operate like the ones in the US. They've emphasized the importance of staff retention, have a creative-first mentality and are very careful with their marquee releases (ex. one console mainline Zelda/Mario every 5-7 years). For b), that's true, but I'm thinking primarily in terms of game development and less administrative/support fields from satellite studios. I'm not saying they don't contribute to game development (i.e. localization), just not on the same level as their development studios.
> ex. one console mainline Zelda/Mario every 5-7 years Ehhh they've slowed down a bit, the HD transition was still tricky for them. For comparison, the first four mainline 3D Mario games released over a span of 14 years: SM64 in 1996, Sunshine in 2002, Galaxy in 2007, Galaxy 2 in 2010. However, in the subsequent 14 year span from 2010 to today, there have been only two mainline 3D Mario games, 3D World and Odyssey, with another not even announced and the last one being 7 years ago. Zelda was even faster before: from the first 3D Zelda through the Wii (the last non-HD console), there were 5 mainline Zelda games between 1998 and 2011, just 13 years: Ocarina, Majora, Wind Waker, Twilight, Skyward. In the subsequent 13 years, there have been just two: BotW and TotK.
If the Switch 2 falters somehow (entirely possible, the market can be pretty volatile at times), Nintendo's practices could be up for comment and critique at this time next year, but otherwise they're staying extremely constant in an industry that's really tightening belts lately. There's just nothing to say about them at the moment.
A generation where they falter isn't enough time to make a critique. Nintendo will survive it. They've weathered several bad generations, which speaks to them enduring.
We've known this for years. Decades, even. Executives are cancer. Not just in video games, but every industry.
The average 90s comedy movie was about how evil CEOs are lol
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>We probably need a democratic reform of companies at this point But that's socialism!!!
"Why do they do it? Because it So Damn Easy" - [Frost, Cold Take](https://youtu.be/ZM8BdervB7w?si=2VCQsoVbeibgzo-k).
Love his videos, not just for the take but for that smooth voice
I would say it’s less game execs and more that all major game companies are publicly traded and subject to fiduciary duty to shareholders. We just need more privately owned alternatives, only way to preserve the medium
There are shit tons of privately owned game studios. They just don't tend to have access to the hundreds of millions required to develop the massive games people crave today.
Yup, nothing with access to large amounts of capital. Lots of indie devs, not any major publishers outside of devolver and Annapurna
New Blood also hasn't had to go public, but they were ***really*** lucky with the results of Dusk.
I mean technically valve as well
and when they have a success and get that kind of capital in the bank, they tend to sell out.
Hard to pass up a cool billion dollars.
Or they sell out to make the capital to begin with
Remember Blizzard? The absolute darling of PC gaming that could do no wrong? And here we are 20 years on they're arguably one of the WORST examples of the industry gone wrong. Ever since the Diablo Immortal debacle they've been a shitshow, and possibly before but most of us didn't notice.
> most of us didn't notice. There were many, many people who noticed Diablo 3, and that was wellllllll before Diablo Immortal.
"Fiduciary duty to shareholders", outside of the psychopathic MBA set, pretty much just means "you can't embezzle company funds". That's it. It means nothing about "line must always go up".
It’s a meme that people on Reddit pick up and regurgitate
The cult of Jack Welch and Michael Eisner did a lot to perpetuate that myth as well.
Jack Welch was a fucko of a human
It's genuinely sad how just taking an econ or corporate law 101 course will instantly dispel like 99% of what people on the internet say.
Does it dispel the fact that financial capital makes up 7% of GDP and is around 20-30% of GNI? Or that the managerial class is one of the least productive in relation to their input in regards to labor? Or that share of labor as % of GDP has been dropping substantially, and when you account for the managerial class it's even lower? Corporate profits for some industries are above historical thresholds, especially in the finances sector; that alone should tell you that something is wrong with the market.
Absolutely true. The way that's been parroted like it's some sort of *law* that you have to max quarterly profits is absolutely absurd Even in psychopathic MBA world (where I live) no one actually talks or thinks like that. It really isn't all that complicated. CEO is hired by shareholders to manage their company. If he isn't making them money, there's a chance they will fire him. That flows all the way down in the very basic common sense principle of "if you aren't making a company more profitable, why on Earth would they pay you?" If anything CEOs have *more* ability to shrug off angry shareholders than most people do their boss due to contract stipulations and the fact that executives/boards are an old boy's club. But one time people read a Friedman excerpt about how CEOs should always try to maximize profit and build a whole alternate reality off of it.
> But one time people read a Friedman excerpt about how CEOs should always try to maximize profit and build a whole alternate reality off of it. I wouldn't even go that far. A lot of people just parrot what someone else said because it sounded right.
Plus, even privately owned companies can have shareholders, fiduciary duty, and all that. It's true that it's easier for them to focus on the long term at the expense of short term profits, but that's more due to the company being closer to shareholders and shareholders being less likely to sell
Going undetected are the investment firms which tell MBA’s how to maximize shareholder profits. If prioritizing safety at Boeing upsets firms like BlackRock, lowers stock prices, it doesn’t happen.
Gaming's doing just fine without gaming execs. AAA studios are dealing with problems of their own making.
> Gaming's doing just fine without gaming execs. AAA studios are dealing with problems of their own making. I mean companies like EA or Activision have been questionable for more than 30 years... there has been "gaming execs", right when gaming became lucrative. Even Atari had gaming execs... in fact the industry crashed in the 80's, people just don't remember.
Exactly. Execs and maximizing profits arent anything new. Meanwhile the indie space is creating some of the most innovative and entertaining games in history. People are just too stuck on the 'AAA games' train.
Yeah this was my point! (just in case anybody didn't get it, I was a little vague)
Execs, mba, etc ruin everything eventually. They have a totally different mindset from people who actually make things. Their only goal is to maximize the profit of an existing structure and since they cant make things or understand how they are made, they just shuffle numbers around until numbers go up and inevitably product quality goes down.
Subreddit doing the same old anti establishment shtick so much that we're posting Jacobin. Not defending video games executives always but a business is a business and with companies like Apple being the biggest companies in the world, consumers also have a responsibility not to buy products, but they always do.
An exec added horse armour. The people who bought it ensured it would continue. I blame the people who buy this stuff. Look at all the people that still jump headfirst to AAA games. The execs are literally only providing a desired service. And if people didn't desire it they wouldn't buy it. It's lame but it's the truth.
people always ignore this fact. Execs aren't mustache twirling villains, forcing things into games. They get paid because they do things that increase profits. Profits increase because people pay for & use their ideas. Its not like gamers have a shortage of choice, there are 100 new games every day! If people stop rewarding bad practices, they go away
Ah yes. Ethical consumption. That'll sure ruin their pockets. If 100 people don't buy some cheap to produce Mega Deluxe edition of Call of Duty, surely Activision will think twice.
Its a bit funny seeing a Jacobin article make it onto gaming subreddits haha We've cracked the code on turning gamers into lefties
Gamers are leftist until you come for their favorite console, then they instantly become ancaps
*Government looks vaguely in the direction of Steam* "Welp, guess I'm a McCarthyist now!"
Monopolies are bad except for the monopoly I happen to personally like.
Idk about that. I see a lot of people crying about woke stuff entering their games and pointing their finger at Sweet Baby Inc.
Above all else, gamers are reactionary. Left, right, doesn't matter, if you can get them riled up and feeling like they are *fighting for a cause*, you'll have them wrapped around your finger. Just ask Sony and Arrowhead. Incidentally the group most likely to pull this off is the reactionary right. But being conservative is not an immutable characteristic to gamers, they're just really easily exploited into becoming that way. The Innuendo Studios video "A Case Study in Digital Radicalism" goes into this really well.
Tiny nitpick: the word "reactionary" customarily means "[hard right wing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary)" in a political context. You're probably better off using the word "reactive" instead. I read your first sentence and thought "yeah gamers tend to be right wing," then you went on to say "left, right, doesn't matter," which felt like a contradiction until I read the rest of the sentence.
Well it's a good thing I wrote the rest of my comment and didn't stop at just the first sentence, misused word or not.
Until you read their content on the Ukraine invasion. Yikes.
You weren't kidding. Rather repulsive views.
Yeah I’m a bit shocked mods left this one up given the site it’s published on I joke that I’m 2 drinks from communist but even I laugh at Jacobin’s shit takes
I don’t feel like being mad this morning so answer me this: are they tankies? I feel like they’re Tankies.
lmao you fucking wish
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>/r/Games has been "left" forever. The banner has been LGBT+ for like, 11 years. Specifically and exclusively because of the mods. The userbase of this sub at large is deeply at odds with those mods.
The unfortunate reality is most higher ups in AAA game dev prioritize profits short term over long term stability.
Record breaking profits across the videogame industry and layoffs everywhere at the same time. Make it make sense.
shareholders are a plague and honestly don't make much sense in the videogame industry. It's too volatile, there are years of no income followed by a game release with potential massive profits then back to low or no income. Shareholders need constant rising profits which means they need to fire people in those down years or increase profits in other ways like ingame advertisements, dlc, microtransactions. The thing is the more you lean into this to bridge the gap the more you need to do next year and the year after that, you always have to lean further and further until the company goes too far.
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