https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/677324/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-services-redesign-app-future-travel
Yeah, nah
And then going "we have a hammer and everything is a nail!"
To me it kind of reeks of the sort of thing where before you would have washing machines that last for generations in the family and now they break within two years.
Now any old indie dev can potentially make something really interesting which as people have rightly been pointing out is what's happening. It's also far easier to stand out more when you actually know how to write code and make your own stuff in my view.
At the end of the day they really are just tools, they're not necessarily good or bad, it's all about how devs can use them effectively and the true masters can make something amazing out of it.
effortposting
If you're a massive global megacorp and your telos is making money, then you might assume that as long as you do things that make more money then it doesn't matter which rules you follow. The problem is, people get to choose what they buy, and they get to choose what they play, and if you make slop with all these anti-gamer things, eventually as the video game industry is discovering the customers go away and your company is in big trouble.
For some devs, their telos isn't making money but being part of some cultural movement and engineering social change. The fact is, it doesn't change anything with respect to fulfilling your duty as a developer to your players. People say "video games were always political", and that may be true, but they weren't always political *first*. People used to tolerate the political messaging in games a lot more because the games were a lot better, and because the games were fun people would buy them to have fun and would accept the messages as part of the ride. Once game developers gave up on their duty to their players to make a fun and engaging experience first, the customers gave up on their role as players and moved on to something else (or as steam statistics show, they keep on playing 10 year old video games from the era where video games were fun.)
For completeness, some devs in following the telos of making money act to engage in social change. That may appear at first to be deontological, but it's just the means to an end, not fulfilling one's duty or principles, and eventually the ESG money runs out and your company gets sold to a Chinese megaconglomorate.
So what is that duty to players? That's a tough thing to say, because it isn't always the same thing. Video games can be engaging and entertaining but not be conventionally fun. Spec Ops: The Line fulfilled its contract with its player not by being a terribly fun generic military shooter, but by taking the player on a journey that made them feel increasingly uncomfortable with the implications of the narrative scaffolding of the modern military shooter and linear storytelling in video games. Even a game like thief isn't about conventionally fun activities, but instead hiding in the darkness waiting for a chance to sneak into the next room, but it's held in very high regard as a game that fulfilled its duty to the player.
Entire platforms have been taken down by the failure do to right by the player. The Atari 2600 died because the video game industry was focused on making cheap slop, and part of the success of Nintendo later was the "Nintendo seal of approval", a promise that the games you buy would meet at least a very basic level of quality. Smart phones were on track to become the largest gaming platform on the planet, but most people avoid the platform like the plague because the games generally fail to meet player expectations.
We're seeing a total media landscape collapse besides just gaming at the moment because this concept doesn't apply just to video games, but to other forms of media such as TV, movies, music, and even novels. Western markets for these forms of media have collapsed, and part of the reason is that they refused to follow the rules and do their duty.
As a counterpoint to the many examples of video games which failed deontologically and thus failed teleologically, I'd propose Stardew Valley as an example of a video game which succeeded deontologically and thus overwhelmingly succeeded teleologically. The one guy making the game wanted to make a certain type of game, and put his all into it, and kept his promise to the player, and even years after its release, Stardew Valley is still a highly successful game. As an example of a game that started off by breaking its promise, but ultimately largely kept it, No Man's Sky started off as something most people considered just more slop in part because it broke so many promises, but in the end it ended up succeeding because it ultimately did do its duty to the players. In doing so, it ended up succeeding in the telos of making money and today is held as a gold standard in saving a game from the scrap pile.
There was a study people often cite in management circles about old rules -- they took a bunch of monkeys, and when a monkey started climbing a rope to get to a banana they'd spray every monkey with freezing cold water. Eventually any time a monkey started to climb the rope, the other monkeys would beat them up to stop them. Over time, they replaced the monkeys, but the new monkeys learned to beat up the monkeys who tried to climb the rope, and eventually there were none of the original monkeys left but all the new monkeys would beat up any monkey who tried to climb the rope, even though none of them had any memory of getting hit with the hose. In management circles, this is used as a warning not to just keep doing things a certain way "because that's how it's always been done", but you can also take the opposite lesson: That just because you don't know why a certain thing is done a certain way doesn't mean there's no reason. With the influx of money people into gaming, and the huge influx of doe-eyed college kids who think they know everything who are getting into the field because they're cheap and work 190 hours a week for a 40 hour salary because it's their dream property they're working on, a lot of the lessons that built the industry are being lost.
Another problem comes from Genesis -- Moses formed a compact with God, and led his people for 40 years, but in the end he got cocky and yelled to a rock "Hey rock, make water because I said so" instead of paying proper respects to God -- and God did make water, but he also cursed Moses to never set foot in the promised land. A lot of old game devs were super successful by following the rules and eventually started to think the reason they were successful wasn't because they were following the rules but because they could do no wrong. You see that sort of hubris from some game developers who used to do great work but today are filled with hubris and disregard both the rules and their players, assuming that the customers will always return. They do for a little while (the water does come out for Moses), but many of those developers are now developing failed games and their careers are effectively over. We saw this long before the modern era, with examples like Daikatana -- John Romero saw himself as a patron saint of gaming who only needed to be released from the damning constraints of id software. At Ion Storm, he developed Daikatana -- a game that even after 25 years of patches by the community is just barely playable.
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The problem people have is when games are used as a political tool - the game is *subservient* to politics. A good game, a good piece of art, anything, can be very political and still be good - but that is because no changes were made to make it a more "effective" political tool.
Picasso's Guernica is a good piece of art that is extremely political. I think the communists in the spanish civil war were evil and horrible people - that doesn't change the quality of that work, though, because in the end it speaks to the horrors of war, because it specifically didn't make itself subservient to that cause.
The nerd already has:
- Developed core gameplay
- Found an audience
- Prepared most art/story/etc.
You simply swoop in with money and resources to take over a proven product and 'help' finish it. No need to take a risk, other than trawling Early Access. And after all, you "do" want your game to make it big, don't you Mr. Smith?
@Aether @sickburnbro I don't think "Tech companies make money through stock market speculating" is a good representation at all; first they have to get public listed, after all, though an IPO or nowadays also SPACs which are held in ill-repute, I'm not even sure they earn investment banks much money.
"The kikes in silicon valley" are C level finaicial types at best, after the US finished destroying the venture capital business model with SarBox. So there aren't many new ones.
You're saying they trying to trick A level "kikes in New York" ... I don't think that's happening, except for routine very small asset allocations that go to VCs on the off chance they'll invest in a real unicorn. Which does happen, but as the name suggests, very rarely, and there the money is going to be pass through minus paltry fees because the total amounts are so low.
For the stock market, said latter kikes just arrange the above going public events, they make fees, but they don't put their own money into it unless they think it'll make them money ... which as A level types they're possibly better at judging, except NY financial types of all races generally don't understand tech companies.
There there are the handful where it pays for the failures and for 3 yachts full of cocaine too
@sickburnbro @lethn @Aether "GE once made a ton of things, but then spun most of them off."
GE's business model was to be #1 in any given field, and if they failed that, like with computers in the 1960s, they spun it off (there to Honeywell, which doomed Multics).
Then they were seduced by financialization, eventually made a horrible acquisition, and are selling off a great deal of stuff to try to survive, which many think is impossible.
In between, Jack Welch ruined the corporate culture with stack ranking, that is, firing ~10% of the "lowest ranking" employees every year. See Microsoft under Ballmer for a better known example of that and its consequences.
@lethn @Aether @sickburnbro "Planed obsolescence" doesn't work if people stop buying your games after you've burning them once on a franchise.
Or never buy them for duds like Concord or don't buy them much now that gamers have their own channels to learn about games ahead of purchase. See also Steam's buyer's remorse refund policy if you quickly decide a game is a dud.
@sickburnbro @lethn @Aether You're assuming the people cut are actually the lowest performing, it's political so that's often not true.
I've been in a big companies decline and fall where they were just cutting to survive, and in an essential for the company's survival product project, where they made a point of firing the best guy, all but explicitly telling us that was to prove no one was safe (the company of course died).
And how many cycles before the employee's #1 focus is on surviving next year's cuts? At the highest level, they sabotage other projects like Microsoft's Kin, a billion wasted along with massive brand damage including it's nascent cloud offerings.
At all levels, you can never assemble a team of top rankers, because at least one will be fired every year. At the low level, managers will go as far as hiring people they plan to quickly fire, just to protect the ones they need to keep. Amazon's now the paradigm of the latter.
@EvilSandmich @Aether @sickburnbro "Who the consumer is and what the product is doesn't matter."
Only to an extent. Higher spending consumers are more valuable, and this is one advantage Apple has with the iPhone, if you can only afford to support one smartphone platform, this provides useful segmentation both ways.
Product matters because if "no one" buys it, there's no consumer to rent seek off of.
@sickburnbro @lethn @Aether Except you're missing or not agreeing with my point that this is an inherently political process.
The first cycle will fire very capable workers, often essential ones, especially since there's such a perceived bonus to firing the oldest, most expensive ones, which also has a bonus in their at least in times past typically being fucking white males.
Now, some companies save themselves from disaster by rehiring the most vital as consultants for much more money, but they've blown the prior commitment they got from them, and anyone with an alternative won't be available.
OK, another example. One DEI obsessed Intel CEO Brian Krzanich fired the (fucking white males) who were responsible for verification, a last straw for Apple, and most importantly the ones required for what was then then "10 nm" node (now Intel 7, marginal in the 7+ version, and a very expensive, low profit one).
Intel may never recover from this, unless the PRC removes TSMC from the market (Arizona won't save the situation in the long term, the skills etc. to design masks for a new design are still back in the island, a very complicated thing with EUV and multi-patterning, often both).
re: effortposting
@sj_zero @lethn @Aether @sickburnbro "For some devs, their telos isn't making money but being part of some cultural movement and engineering social change."
And for the rest in these pozzed companies, they've got to go along with this or get purged from a large part of the industry altogether. This does not encourage them to do good work, especially since they're walking on eggshells.
Everyone with a clue is walking on eggshells because even the most pozzed are in danger of a denunciation for political or ego gain by others, and the holiness spiral treadmill never stops except by force (for now, think a studio closing down vs. the Thermidorian Reaction).
"We're seeing a total media landscape collapse besides just gaming at the moment because this concept doesn't apply just to video games, but to other forms of media such as TV, movies, music, and even novels."
I've read Disney's Wish, which was supposed to be a capstone of their hundredth anniversary, was pozzed from top to bottom. The theme was your parents are evil for not giving you everything you wish for, thus not a movie clued in parents will take their children to, and at the lowest level it revealed Disney's animators could no longer handle a horse's legs in motion.... (And it lost another over hundred billion dollars.)
Or how Kathleen Kennedy's series development and script writing process cycle starts with her meeting with all her strong strong wahmen, then the Official meeting that includes the men ignores all their inputs.
"That just because you don't know why a certain thing is done a certain way doesn't mean there's no reason."
AKA Chesterton's Fence. Too bad the only thing we've learned about history is that people don't learn from history....
Pretty much all altcoins are forks of Bitcoin and not true original code which is something the normies have zero understanding of when they smugly talk about crypto.
However, each of them is eliminated for one reason or another.