He’s just trying to set expectations before announcing a Boba Fett game probably.
“Please be polite to the people who literally don’t care if (and possibly prefer) you die” seems non-optimal.
Not taking a side is something I think Rush had a catchy song about.
What? They’re adopting a completely dispassionate position where they’re accepting of both the people that think everyone should be free to make their own choices and the people that think everyone else should be forced to do what they say even if it literally kills them. What could go wrong?
Heh. Exactly.
In all seriousness, either remain moot on the specifics, and reiterate a company policy of weaseling out (that is, some sort of cop-out ban on all political talk), or do the right thing and say bigots and wannabe Inquisitors have no place in your company. Anything else is kind of asking for trouble with no pay off.
I don’t know…doesn’t seem like he wrote anything controversial here.
The language itself? No, not really. And this is definitely an area where people will have different opinions (hah!). To me, singling out a specific hot-button issue and saying “respect everyone’s opinion on X” is not really being even-handed or neutral in most cases. In most cases issue X is one where the divisions of opinion are not just clear but are often part and parcel of extremely powerful world views and overall ideological frameworks that are zero sum games. The abortion issue, gender identity, race, religion; things like that are pretty much guaranteed to produce people with opinions that effectively say to one group of people “you don’t deserve to exist.” Telling people to respect opinions like that is neither useful nor moral in my view.
Obviously not the same thing, but this is why “both sides” rang so hollow when people were talking about literal Nazis marching with tiki torches. There’s no discussion or free exchange of ideas when one party advocates eliminating you either via killing or deportation.
I don’t think that the message itself is controversial.
But, he should not have said anything at all.
It is obvious that corporate policies would support his stance of “both sides have fine people” even though I know that is wrong. But corporate policies suck.
The anecdote about cat birthdays is hilariously off tone though. So bad.
This is an email you run by HR and a PR team before you send, he clearly did not do this.
The correct email to send is:
“Right now there is a lot of political disagreement over many issues, it is important to note that our company has policies x,y,z over employee conduct. If you or a loved one are having issues, we offer free counseling (most companies have this anyway) etc.”
Be as basic as possible. Trying to “both sides” this issue is bad, it pisses off both sides.
Oh I think I agree with you here.
Shot himself in the foot.
Just keep quiet is the safest option, although that is itself quite a sad state of affairs.
Sometimes the best option is to say nothing at all.
My wife works for a local business that has a much older man as CEO.
He sent an email a couple weeks back about how much of a joy it has been for him to be able to work from home while immunocompromised.
Employees have never been able to work from home the entire pandemic. He got special treatment.
That email didn’t go over well.
The result of that email has been a disconnection of his ability to send company wide emails without review. It is hilarious how out of touch many CEOs can be. This person had also sent multiple chain email style messages, as well as fox news talking point articles companywide. I mean… come on.
Bingo.
I love (hate) that this was the result and not, say, reevaluating policy and letting employees who are able to work from home.
I always enjoyed it when our CEO could work(or not) whatever the hell random hours he felt like. Might come into the office one day a week(guess who enjoyed working from home most of the time while insisting regular employees needed to be in the office) and then be furious at an employee for being 5 minutes late. Especially considering these were software devs who had no real need for strict hours and the devs who stretched their start time a bit(this did include me, to be fair) were the ones who were most likely to also stay late working.
One thing that seems true across all types of business is the need for some managers to exert control over people regardless of whether such control is actually needed, or even beneficial. This is particularly true, though not limited to, middle managers, who often seem incapable of even comprehending the idea that getting the job done is the important thing, not proving how many people you have sitting at desks outside your corner office.
ActivisionBlizzard (actually the King division) spent years developing a system to measure the diversity of a video game character. Today they revealed it! It… has not gone over well.
https://twitter.com/JDespland/status/1525231154223542272
For bonus points, it happened because people worked on it for no pay (from the press release):
People were spending their off-hours working on the tool, simply because they believed in its potential so much.
The article is interesting for a few reasons. First, they’re pretty open about their budgets and the terms they got from both PS+ and Game Pass. And second, releasing a game on Game Pass just killed their Xbox sales, in a way that PS+ didn’t on PS. And third, they seem to believe that indie games aren’t going to be viable to even port to Xbox unless they get on Game Pass.
I’m not sure I buy that their evidence supports that last claim, but it would be fascinating if true. What a bizarre ecosystem you’d end up with on Xbox.
(I was just thinking of reinstalling Furi a couple of weeks ago, so this is timely )
I wonder about that. Is the assumption that many of these people who played on GP folks who would have otherwise put money down to buy their game? In my experience, Game Pass has been pretty great for exposing me to games that I probably wouldn’t have bought. Some of them have been worthwhile, but some have not. Is the latter group considered a “lost sale” if I wouldn’t have bought the game anyway?
Always an interesting question. It’s related to discussions of piracy, where publishers often count every pirated copy as a lost sale.
I can see where the devs are coming from, though. The barrier to trying out a game on Game Pass is far lower than the barrier to spending even five or ten bucks to buy a game you aren’t terribly familiar with but in which you have at least some interest. Without Game Pass, potential buyers might not even know about the game, given the volume of indie titles flooding the marketplace. With it, though, players have zero incentive to buy most games that are on the Pass, unless those games are among the few that people love to come back to time and again.
The article is not very well written, but the argument is as follows:
1-Their games are very expensive to make. 1.5M€ for Furi is a lot. Haven’t played Haven, but what I’ve seen of it makes me think 3M€ is equally expensive.
2-They get very good first party deals that make such budgets less risky.
3-Without those deals their business model might not be sustainable.
That said, of course having a game in Game Pass affects sales. Not everybody who gets the game would have bought it, but subscribers that would have bought the game will not (it is pretty obvious). And since Game Pass subscription is very widespread (much more now than PS+ was with Furi), the extra word of mouth does not compensate. However, as things stand, for many bigger indies getting a game in Game Pass will net more money (significantly more) than any lost sales. That’s why getting there is important.
Now, having said this, I do not agree with their calculus, specially for porting full games. I doubt their porting costs (to any console platform) from a game already set up to be released in other consoles and built in a third party engine (Unity in this case) would be higher than an extra 50k€ or so if done internally (with a team of 12, quite feasible). And that’s a very generous estimate (half that would be more realistic, specially for a team that already has gone through the process). Even third party porting can reasonably be found for that price or less. For games with their budgets and expected sales, it’s just a rounding error (1-2% of total costs, and you are going to get more than 2% of sales per platform).
For the Furi DLC it might make sense not to port, if you ignore the PR issues (which I think is unwise for a studio with those sales numbers/cash flow, as the “outcry” seems to show). The costs are similar than porting a full game, specially with the underlying platform changes, but the overall DLC budget and the number of potential sales are likely way lower (say porting it’s now 15% of the DLC budget per main platform and you are not getting those 15% of sales on Xbox given current and former player counts).
I think your costs underestimate the real budget. They mention middleware updates; depending on what they use, many (most) licensing is per platform. So you’ve got the “actual work” for the updates (which won’t be insignificant for a 2016 game), although most of that will be spread across all platforms equally. But then you’ve got licensing costs which will grow with each platform you add, and QA (a small team like theirs probably outsources to someone like Testronic). For the Series platform, that’s two SKUs you’re testing (X and S), on top of retesting for XB1 and XB1X (the game came out pre-1X I think, so maybe they wouldn’t do anything for that). Then you’ve gotta account for post launch support and CS.
I don’t think you’re too far off, but if they’re operating on thin margins, I can see how it wouldn’t make sense when they add up all real costs and potential costs.