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"Bobby Kotick's decisions made our games worse," says former Call of Duty dev
(www.eurogamer.net)
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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Nothing good comes from public companies making games.
That may be true now but it wasn't always. If they hadn't made the classics they wouldn't be the giants they are. The incentives changed, and it was a short fall into the pits.
It's not impossible, but it makes it a hell of a lot harder. The pockets of the shareholders are almost always directly opposed to the wants of the players. The public company needs to fight the shareholders not to rake the players over the coals or through other means gain 20% per year. Every time the big ships gobble up the small fries, the odds readjust toward late stage capitalism
I'd say it still holds some truth - Activision started out as a private company and didn't go public until 14 years later.
Once a company goes public, it suddenly has to answer to shareholders instead of just its owners, and that's how any creative vision gets diluted and, eventually, lost completely.
True, on the other hand Nintendo was public when they made it big in the 1980's. They were public before they stopped making trading cards and well before they thought of Mario, Kirby, and really any of the ninetendo characters we love. The same is true for Sega. What happened was C Suites starting putting their fudiciary oath to the shareholders above all else, even company name and reputation. Which, in today's age, might explain some of FromSoftware's uniqueness, as they are a private company.
I always thought that Gamestop should have pivoted incredibly hard and used all that extra money to buy a game developer company. If enough shares are in household hands you can still do cool stuff.
That would have been pretty cool. I kinda expected they'd just take some cash and go into publishing. Maybe do a gamefly online launcher for used titles by staking real physical copies.
Instead they seem to be wasting it on NFT and WEB3 gaming... IDK seems like a bad strategy.
Don't worry, NFT is sliding, it'll eventually die off. A lot of game designers are bored and looking for a new hammer. The same guys that have been looking for nails with blockchain on 'em for a decade. You know, I get it, it's a whole economy and payments system with no fees in what looks like a clean bundle. Problem is it's not as shiny as it looks when you start digging in to it and they're all finding that out.
I haven't looked at their Financials lately, but I was just worried they blew their resurrection gift from retail on a bunch of NFT drifters. It's been a while and I haven't seen anything come to fruition.