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  1. #61
    Hackey Thread Lurker since 2010
    I could have bought an 11 pull and have 1000 gems left over, but all I got was this silly title.

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    Who didn't see this coming

  2. #62
    Mr. Bananagrabber
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    Honestly I would have expected it to go up.

    Cashing in on some mobile gaming and not having to spend time or money developing a new game since it's pretty much just a reskin? That's a win for investors.

  3. #63
    Impossiblu
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    Might buy some stock while it's down tee bee aych cause that shit will skyrocket once Diablo hits top 5 grossing in the app store... which it will, regardless of quality.

  4. #64
    The Defense is ready, Your Honor
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    It'll sell like hotcakes, which shareholders love. Tech companies as a whole were down today. I wouldn't read too much into this. Greedy shareholders don't give a flying toss what a bunch of "entitled nerds" think.

  5. #65

    I have no doubt its launch will be okay. Most semi-decent mobile games do okay in that regard. It's the long game that's important, with how Blizzard then intends to monetize and gate.

    Anyway, I'll just sit here missing the time when games launched complete and didn't need DLC to fill in gaps.

  6. #66
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    AAA games cost significantly less to develop and still cost $60, back then, and they still run about $60 bucks now. How exactly would you run a company and make up that development/marketing difference without ever increasing the cost of the base game, because the market won't pay more for them? Companies have two choices right now: DLC, and Micro-transactions. I suppose we could just do with Indie games. Wouldn't be the end of the world, right, or would people bitch about how we wouldn't have any AAA games anymore?


    I highly recommend this blog, if you're even the slightest bit interested in the forum flame statements that go on about the industry. Gives a real perspective on this type of thing.

  7. #67
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    They get tax breaks, dump money in offshore accounts to evade paying what taxes remain, outsource to cheaper talent whenever available, have sponsorship deals, exclusivity deals (best buy gets this mount skin; gamestop gets this one; both pay me for the rights), brand deals, marketing deals with other major companies (hello dorito ads?) and sell 50 versions of the same game from anywhere from $60-$200 by chopping up existing content and parceling it out to other companies.

    Tell me again how companies NEEEED to dump MTX in every game?

    Don't confuse gaming profits with shareholder profits. Games are making more money than ever before, but if shareholders see a 95% end-over-end increase in revenue this year, they wont be satisfied with just $95% next year. They'll demand an increase of 105%. So the companies chop up the games even further and ink more brand deals to make more money.

    We're long past the days of any of the major mega-companies (EA, Acti-Blizz, Ubisoft) struggling to break even on AAA games. They're only "struggling" to keep up with the hilariously greedy expectations of their true customers: the shareholders.

  8. #68
    Absolute Messenger of Promathia
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    Amen and correct.

    They’ve gorged themselves on insane profits because of microtransactions and now share holders expect that level of profit to somehow grow and grow. Which is why these things went from pay for items to pay for a chance at items and will only get worse.

  9. #69
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    Its the same shareholders as the ones that latched onto the subprime firms. They leech onto a profitable venture, demand increasingly large profits until that venture becomes unsustainable, then, like the ticks they are, race off to find the next medium to invest in and repeat the process. They destroy individual economic ecosystems and then move onto the next like a flood of locusts.

    There's too much cheddar in the game for any of these public companies to go private, though. They have to stay in, so the PR gets seedier and seedier as they're all but forced to lie to our faces to justify the bullshit they're shoveling at us in the name of hitting shareholder sales figures and profit margins. There literally will never be a "this is enough profit" scenario, because that's not how shareholders work. You invest money; you expect not just a return, but the biggest return possible. Consequences be damned.

  10. #70

    It's also for pretty much the same reason I label sub fees for MMOs a scam anymore. Do these games cost money to develop and update? Sure. Does all that money go back into it? Hell to the fuck no. I routinely slammed on people who thought D3 would be "saved" if Blizzard just sold stash space, cosmetic items, and other goods, when 30m+ sales is good enough to both recover the cost of development and feed expansion development many times over, of which sales of that then perpetuate things. It's all greed with pretty much zero after-the-fact accountability since they already got the money and still have the balls to mandate online play here.

    I'll just stick to my mantra that if one makes a good game, people will buy it. DRM isn't really need no matter how much anti-piracy advocates would try to convince us it is. Good people will still pay, while those on the fence often use it as a try-before-they-buy mechanism. And maybe if one day we're not looking at multiple consoles, multiple iterations of the same game(s) wouldn't need to be developed, either, siphoning yet more development cost.

    Otherwise, we're pretty much looking at the AAApocalypse if they all jump to mobile en lieu of more fleshed out console/PC titles because development is way cheaper. I'd rather the Switch get dev attention more than phones, but that's largely because the Switch can still be played from a TV alongside not relying on touchscreen controls.

  11. #71
    Yoshi P
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lucavi View Post
    Don't confuse gaming profits with shareholder profits. Games are making more money than ever before, but if shareholders see a 95% end-over-end increase in revenue this year, they wont be satisfied with just $95% next year. They'll demand an increase of 105%. So the companies chop up the games even further and ink more brand deals to make more money.

    We're long past the days of any of the major mega-companies (EA, Acti-Blizz, Ubisoft) struggling to break even on AAA games. They're only "struggling" to keep up with the hilariously greedy expectations of their true customers: the shareholders.
    This. Most of the AAA 'failures' you hear about nowadays didn't lose money, they just didn't make as much (in initial sales) as investors wanted. Even if the cost of development has gone up, the worldwide customer base for games (especially PC), has increased in size dramatically in recent years. Not only are more people in general gaming, places like china, russia, and central/south america are absolutely gigantic markets that weren't relevant like a decade ago. It's not a matter of AAA games not being profitable, rather than targeting whales with microtransactions is often more profitable, especially in the short term.

    As an aside, I don't get why people get so hung up on the $60 or whatever pricetag of games. There is almost no overhead for an individual copy of a game; a couple bucks for physical and essentially zero for digital. Price-point in a vacuum doesn't matter, price x sales does.

  12. #72
    Atheist Douchebag.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lucavi View Post
    Its the same shareholders as the ones that latched onto the subprime firms.
    This part of your response is lulz-worthy. Everything else is true.

  13. #73

    Quote Originally Posted by Lucavi View Post
    They get tax breaks, dump money in offshore accounts to evade paying what taxes remain, outsource to cheaper talent whenever available, have sponsorship deals, exclusivity deals (best buy gets this mount skin; gamestop gets this one; both pay me for the rights), brand deals, marketing deals with other major companies (hello dorito ads?) and sell 50 versions of the same game from anywhere from $60-$200 by chopping up existing content and parceling it out to other companies.

    Tell me again how companies NEEEED to dump MTX in every game?

    Don't confuse gaming profits with shareholder profits. Games are making more money than ever before, but if shareholders see a 95% end-over-end increase in revenue this year, they wont be satisfied with just $95% next year. They'll demand an increase of 105%. So the companies chop up the games even further and ink more brand deals to make more money.

    We're long past the days of any of the major mega-companies (EA, Acti-Blizz, Ubisoft) struggling to break even on AAA games. They're only "struggling" to keep up with the hilariously greedy expectations of their true customers: the shareholders.
    God this is why I want to work in management for a company that does stuff like this (which is basically every company) ever again. My mentor when I was doing this kind of stuff told me 'don't be an allstar, you'll regret it.' I didn't quite get why and of course, tried to be an allstar, and I was. We hit 30% profit on a 29% budget which was basically unheard of in the field. We pulled out every trick we could think of and constantly brainstormed. At that point there was basically nothing else we could possibly do to increase revenue or decrease costs.

    Next years budget came - 31% with less labor. Basically half the department (including myself) ended up leaving within 2 years mostly because of this. It made me hate people so much.

  14. #74
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    Quote Originally Posted by Zetanio View Post
    This part of your response is lulz-worthy. Everything else is true.
    I may be using the wrong word for the stocks I'm talking about. If I am, that's on me. I was pretty tired when I posted that.

    Edit: Even now, I can't remember which finance area greedy investors absolutely tanked. I need to re-read some articles.

  15. #75
    Atheist Douchebag.
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    I think you may have a misunderstanding of how stocks and shareholders work.

    They aren't leeching off of anything. They invest in companies they believe to be profitable. If the companies fail to continue being profitable, they sell their shares. Comparing this to the subprime mortgage crisis is disingenuous at best. Most of the largest shareholders of ATVI are passive index fund investors that have bought in via the S&P Index or a tech index.

  16. #76
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  17. #77
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    I lol'd

  18. #78
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    Spoiler: show

  19. #79
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    Alpha Gameplay

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