Well, the tweet and the doc (don’t know if there’s more) only says you should be wary, not run. For good and bad, they are what they are.
The problem is that he’s saying it’s not a very good contract, while the reality is that it’s actually something a lot of studios would consider pretty good, if not close to ideal in many ways.
Stuff like arguing the 15% markup makes no sense if you consider they don’t compute their direct overhead against the net revenues (the 15% probably is meant to cover their operating expenses, afaik). 50/50 split with a publisher funding development is full is a VERY good split for a full funding deal, unless there are some shenanigans with the computation of net revenues (which I do t think is the case). Also consider studios under a full funding deal are going to try to bake some profits into the advances themselves (normal operating procedure is 10-20% overhead markup in any given budget).
It also sucks that transparency (something I strongly believe in) is not exactly rewarded.
I for one am shocked that gamers
aren’t by and large taking a nuanced view of this.
This is true, but in my experience they also dramatically underestimate the time it will take to complete every project by 50% or more, so few independent studios ever actually bank that profit.
What commonly happens is that dev studios end up signing progressively worse and worse extensions that only cover their run rate just so they don’t go out of business before they finish their project.
Yep, that happens very frequently, but that’s on the dev studio underestimating. But if you are baking 15% profits don’t argue against a 15% markup from the publisher, I guess?
The published deal accounts for a monthly dev cost plus possible extensions to it, so in that regard (funding extension in case of project extension) it’s relatively benign (everything to the publisher discretion, but in general reasonable terms).
Two things here…
- this is not in fact “normal”, in any industry I’ve heard of. For ages, on basically every industry, bonuses are generally more common than permanent raises in terms of rewarding specific cases of exemplary performance.
- hard work is not what should earn someone a promotion. You earn a promotion by being able to perform the job of the new position. If you promote someone just because they are working hard and doing their current job well, then you will eventually just promote people into positions they fail at.
Sure, but the comment was addressed at the mere concept of rewarding performance… there are lots of ways sometime can achieve superior performance… But superior performance should still be rewarded.
But if the idea is only that productivity, not specifically hours worked, should be rewarded, that’s cool.
Absolutely. Fairly recently, actually.
There’s actually a term for this and it comes across as logically very true: Peter principle - Wikipedia.
Basically, people only transiently occupy positions in which they are competent, as they tend to get promoted out of them and end up being parked in the position in which they are incompetent because it’s really hard to know whether someone will truly succeed in a new position until you put them in it. In a lot of organizations, demotions and terminations are pretty rare, which is really the only way to avoid the Peter Principle.
Dont I know it, coming from the cooking industry. The problem there is actually twofold- you’re a good cook, so you get promoted into management, which very few are suited to and/or are trained for but also very few actually enjoy- there ends up being less of the stuff you have a passion for (ie, the cooking). On the converse, many feel forced into this, as the industry is so historically terrible with wages that the only way to make a livable wage is to to go for that promotion (completely discounting the fact that you’re forced to work so many hours that your actual per-hour wage is still shit). Fuck, I’m glad to be out of that rat race.
This is a first for gaming company sins- I don’t think any company’s being accused of funding terrorism yet.
Epic Games purchases 87-acre mall and announces plan to run it into new HQ by 2024.
Records filed with Wake County on Dec. 31 indicate the sale price was $95 million.
That mall was dead when I moved here a decade ago. It’s only gotten worse since then. They were supposed to add an Ikea to the area a few years ago, but just before it started, they pivoted away from building new locations, and that really sealed the fate. Appreciate Epic for ridding us of the tragic sight, hah.
And an amazing deal for $95 million, considering the $5 billion Apple poured into their new campus.
Awesome, maybe they’ll finally get a shopping cart.
That’s just the sale. We don’t actually know the cost of renovation… right?
There was a decent Indian restaurant there in the '90s. Oh well.
Yeah, I’m sure that’ll be significant, more than the purchase price. Still probably a good deal.
Yeah. I was not in favor of that until Armando said it’s basically a dying mall. I suppose a lot of them area, and like big box stores, it’s hard to find a buyer for that carcass. Maybe it will revitalize the area a bit. Who knows? I suspect turning a mall into an HQ is going to have a very large price tag, but yeah 95 mill for a mall seems less than I would think a mall that size would go for. I also kind of assumed that’s why they die slowly for like decades, no one wants to buy them or no one wants to pay the asking price.
Depends how many desks they need, but I could imagine keeping a lot of the walls and doing some kind of kitschy mall theming thing. Just need to partition a couple smaller stores into meeting rooms and they already have a food court for the cafeteria…
Well this company doesn’t like to be out of the limelight for long, so I am sure we will hear all about it, whatever they do.
A more boring tech company around here bought a mostly dead local dead shopping mall of about the same size. They started off in a third of it, and now I think they are using two thirds of it. It’s been a huge relief to the community to have someone really caring about the whole property and the parking lot again, honestly.