You see, movies pay millions for actors, who are actual draws and get people to spend money for a film. Video games, however, have to spend those millions on corporate executive bonuses, who do absolutely nothing anyone else in their position couldn't. They're basically the same!
This is the thing which has bothered me for even longer than I can recall Jim Steph talking about it...Which, y'know, they've been doing for a very long time now. Companies, defenders (bootlickers?), marketing staff, investors, and so on claim two things which are only compatible in a handful of edgecases, none of which are good: margins are so slim they're always on the verge of collapse and record-smashing yearly profits nearly every year. The handful of edges this can actually be true? Management and executive decision is so unbelievably incompetent that they burn up all the revenue in no time, or independent studios wrestling with an industry designed to force them under companies like Sony, EA, and so on. Steph already covered the first part: either greed or massive incompetence on management, and they often talk about the latter because it strangles creative efforts. We should all be skeptical of these two simultaneous claims because they too often cover greed and/or incompetence, either by publishers using the claims as a shield or because those publishers created an independent-hostile environment.
The games industry is somehow in a constant state where it's both on the brink of absolute economic ruination and collapse, yet it's also more profitable than ever, every single year.
@@jimmyseaver3647 Its the same thinking whereby certain uh... people, are considered by those on far-right to be weak and gross and unworthy, but also, insane smart and secretly run the whole world. Its 2 mutually exclusive realities that satisfy both the need to be on top but also defensive, that services greater systems.
Because if you aren't making record profits, by any means necessary, the company is deemed a failure by shareholders. And those "necessary means" inevitably lead to further sacrifices to obtain record profits. It's a doom spirit.
It's like a toddler claiming sole access and control of the cookie jar, helping themselves to it constantly while only occasionally letting the rest of the household have _crumbs,_ and demanding everyone else work harder and harder to afford more and more cookies because "I *NEED* it, I _have_ to eat or I'll _starve!_ :( " But instead of telling the selfish little bastard that the world doesn't revolve around them, everyone just shrugs their shoulders and says "Well, I guess this is how it has to be, kids need to eat after all."
I love how game publishers are rich enough to make money for their shareholders yet not enough to pay their employees. I also love it when the fanboys came to their defense, punching down on anyone who dared to speak against their favorite triple-Ayy brands. Truly a match made in hell.
My favorite part is that these fanboys also are aware that AAA studios suck and are bleeding the industry dry, but they are diametrically opposed to criticism of capitalism or predatory corporate practices, so they literally cannot acknowledge the obvious problem with the industry. "It's not corporate salaries, that's just business! It must be because of all the woke women and PoC characters! There is no other conceivable reason!"
The fan boys were consistantly well off people who felt games getting more expensive would root out the Other, whomever they're casting as The Problem. Usually women and people of color.
Fanboys defending the 500 dollar Ahri skin with "Companies gotta make money somehow" and "Well those DLC's are there so you can play the game for free".
Reminds me of my job at Home Depot. They report record profits and yet they can't afford to pay their employees. They will keep raising their expected profits in store and when we can't make their unrealistic sales plan we lose our yearly bonus. They found ways to pay us even less and make more money. Late stage capitalism at its finest.
Line must go up. Line must always go up. Line must go up faster than last year. And God help the little folks if it doesn't, 'cause the line sure won't.
I remember telling people that video game companies aren't there to make video games, they're there to make shareholders money. I was told I was wrong and not all AAA(A) studios were like that. These same people are baffled at publishers closing of studios that made good games that sold well.
@@nicolasferreiro4492 Indeed, we are not customers to these publishers; we are walking wallets, ore veins to be strip-mined of money and bled dry of all resources. We are meant to pre-order deluxe editions packed with exclusive garbage that brings no joy whatsoever, long before release, so that we may play the most broken rushed-out version of the game on day one, if the inexplicably needed servers for our single-player game are even working. We are a cultivated cult of the gullible. Nintendo arguably made strides in this area early in the games industry's history, creating their own island of people who not only accept but _crave_ their singular brand of _weird_ design decisions, never-discounted prices, suddenly revoked access to already-purchased classic game libraries and other abuse. But they are by no means the only company with these kinds of problems, even Atari had its share of bizarre shit going on, and likely most companies since - especially the big ones, the _profitable_ ones with lots of shares and investors to constantly poke them about up-ing that line on their graphs more and more.
@@drakontisaraptikos9927 Yeah, that's always oversold. They don't do that out of the kindness of their sweet angelical hearts. It's a law in Japan, that is in place to protect employees from layoffs, and shareholders from fraudulent executives. When profits fall they have to reduce, by law, executives compensation. They don't have a choice on the matter or the company faces legal repercussions and gigantic penalties.
And then they go on the summer games showcase and whine about how "difficult decisions had to be made". Bullshit. If they have to pick between their piles of money or doing the right thing, it's the money every time.
I love how each Jimquisition Is an attempt to tangentially teach Sulpurs Value to gamers without actually mentioning the word or any of Karl Marx's teaching so they don't panic out of red scare. Excelent job. Maybe some day they'll learn.
Way too late for me I'm afraid, I was told 20+ years ago by a University Lecturer in Social Sciences that I was the first real Marxist he had met in 25 years lol
Ideas evolved and continue to evolve beyond marx,it's useful that he named part of the beast but treating all anti capitalism as his legacy is missguided
@@tubensalat1453 Oh shit! We'd better get Karl Marx's ghost out of the gaming industry before he explains in simple and adequate terms the socioeconomic reasons behind unethical business practices and helps people understand why they happen and therefore how they can be stopped!
Executive: Making and selling games like in the PS2 era is too expensive. Developer: How about we make a game on a smaller budget with less people needed and work more smartly to deliver a quality game like in the PS2 era? Executive: No! We'll make it even MORE expensive but we like having less around to pay. That's why we're gonna replace them all with A.I.! We won't pay you anymore. Developer: If you have no human making the game, then where will the money go!? Executive: To us! Those yachts, country clubs, cocaine and donations to our favorite politicians aren't gonna pay themselves.
I was playing an opensource port of the original Jak and Daxter last year and while playing I thought ‘damn, Naughty Dog used to make fun lighthearted colorful games while still being critically acclaimed groundbreaking works’ and they didn’t have to bitch about profits either.
That there is the golden age of gaming, imo. After that, things have slowly gotten more and more worse (speaking triple ay games here), until where we are now, sigh.
I mean they finished the Jak series and wanted to move on to something else, what’s wrong with that? If anything that’s one of the things that I really one of the things that I really like about studios like ND, Insomniac and Sucker Punch, they don’t tie themselves down to one type of game
When J&D website was still up, there were a bunch of "fun facts" in the precursor orbs, and one of them was that 16h workdays + sleeping in the office was common enough that they "jokingly" called their wifes widows. People have found a part of the map of Jak 3 in Jak II, meaning they were likely already developing the sequel, so the overworking was likely constant and just occasionally less or more of it. I don't know if it was more the culture of "this is fine you gotta be passionate if you wanna work in the industry" or Sony giving so little of the profits that they couldn't afford to hire more people to lessen the overworking. Probably both. Anyway, I've forgotten my point in lieu of ranting about how unethically my favourite game was produced. Imma leave this here for that sweet engagement anyway.
Game and Film industry: Making our products is getting to expensive! Everyone else: No one told you that you have to throw 100Bn down the toilet to make interesting content. That's on you.
the biggest problem is that they make the same shit over and over again and spend more and more money to promote it so the consumer (cash cow) consumes it. The movie industry is at a point where the marketing budget for a "AAA" "Block Buster" gets close to double the actual budget of the thing. Also the film is actual dog shit. If you ask me about two good movies I've seen in the last 11 years what comes up in my head is "Only Lovers left alive" (2013) and "Love Lies Bleeding" (2024) plus a hand full of tiny budget b and c movies e. g. "Haymaker" (2021)
I simply can't wait till we reach the point of not being ably to buy anything. The corporations don't want to pay us workers, yet want us to engage in buy product. The landlords want us to rent/own homes yet raise prices regularly to be almost unreachable. Basic needs keep going up, and we can't aford them slowly more andnmore cause we can't get more funds from the places we work. Yet regularly we here of record profits and gains, yet also complaints that people aren't buying the overly expensive things. And the solution to that just to make things more expensive and have more ways to keep people paying rather than make things less expensive. I wonder what will happen when everyone is priced out save the suits?
See, the thing about greed is It's like a little pet And the more and more you feed it The more hungry it'll get But you can't blame greed, you see It's got a worm inside And that worm always needs to feed And it's never satisfied But the more you try to find it The more it likes to hide It really is a nasty little worm I like to call it 'Pride'... (All credit to the song "Biggering", created as part of the original prospectus for the _Lorax_ movie that was then scrapped because it was entirely too faithful to the original book. Find it and give it a listen!)
It's so weird how Stardew Valley and Dwarf Fortress made enough money for three individuals to never work again a day in their lives but studios of hundreds of experts with access to almost any resource imaginable can't find the same success.
Well, it's kinda similar to why Valve is a virtual monopoly but doesn't pull anything close to the kinda shit most giant corporations do. Valve is not a publicly traded company. Publicly traded companies have a legal obligation to make money for their shareholders. The products are actually materials. We're the livestock the pseudo-product is fed to. Profit is the actual product, and shareholders are the customers. Gaben is legally allowed to have values because he didn't choose to make his company subject to those laws. You can obvious debate whether or not his values are actually good or if he lives up to them, but that discussion isn't really relevant to publicly traded companies.
@@Ramsey276one Ah no, not finished. They had a minor financial crisis so decided they needed to start offering more conventional options to fund development so got together with KitFox to sell it early access on Steam with improved UI and graphics. It's still free with ASCII graphics on the website though. So are all previous versions.
"We had layoffs by firing all the people who can actually develop a game and giving their salary as a bonus to the executives that couldn't make Pac-Man with an instruction manual. We are geniuses !" 😒
If the predatory monetisation doesn't result in record profits, then there needs to be more of it. If the predatory monetisation does result in record profits, then there needs to be more of it. It's Catch-22 filtered through an MBA
It’ll never not be funny when the rich start crying poor. I still roll my eyes remembering some of the stuff that was coming out of the MLB lockout drama around the pandemic where you had ownerships trying to both insist that the game of baseball has been in decline and they just can’t make money and yet admitting that values of said franchises are more inflated than ever, worth tenfold more than they did 10-20 years ago
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?” And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
@@BladedEdge Damn, crazy how often people just appropriate someone else's work without any credit. Someone should make a 4 hour long video about that or something.
It’s important to remember that executives do not want to pay their workers, they hate and resent the actual developers and have antagonistic class interests
As a dev, I hate people pretending to stand for my interests and lick the corpo boot. I fervently believe that even selling copies of software, what most consider the most innocuous of options, is already a humongous compromise, a market that to even exist requires on the monopoly on violence threatening any person daring to do crtl+c on their computers. Other models exist and are perfectly viable, heck, when business develop software for each other they often charge for dev time, even when charging for licenses/subscriptions the models are simple and free of predatory monetization. It's just average people the ones they feel entitled to leech.
That star wars hunters menu is so 2021. Only one microtransaction push? Only two currencies? You can still find the PLAY button? I thought this was 2024!
If the play button isn't buried under AT LEAST 5 or 6 weird icons and pop-ups that no one can understand until they've played 73 hours of the game, is it even a real video game at that point?
There's also "that's just how the industry is" I almost had an argument about that but we were at a party and I thought better of it in the name of having a good time. What is it people say? It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Something like that
I enjoy the maths-based invectives from Yahtzee Croshaw's Galaxy books, quote: In “Pilot Math”, the word multiply (shortened to ply) replaces the most popular swear word, with subtraction (or trac) filling in as an all-purpose noun with scatological leanings. Bracket became a common insult, as did decimal point (or doint) and division (div), which also came to mean male and female genitalia, respectively.
Not related to the topic but I just wanted to know that the effort put into including Bruce Lee in at least one adverb per episode has not gone unnoticed nor unappreciated.
I feel like im going to live long enough for the home console market ranging from the og Atari to the Gamecube/ PS2/Xbox to be deemed an abberation rather than what a lot of people grew up as normal. After all, what else is all the various DLC varieties and shift in game design but going back to the arcade era? Theyve basically put a coin slot on their machines 😂😢😅
The big problem is that 'profit' is _not_ the metric by which a company is determined to be successful. Growth is. In our current system, a profitable company will be considered failing if it did not make more profit than it did the year before even if it made billions beyond its operating costs.
This is one of the reasons Larion is so unique, management cares about making good games first and foremost. Most companies are not game companies, the them games are just another product to exploit
The industry really needs a push towards worker-owned and other types of collective development houses. Let the big publishers fight over who has the more A's in their games, the smaller devs will be the ones creating new gaming experiences and trends.
An easy way to refute the line about "supporting the developers" is to ask whether the wages of the actual creative people working in development are in any way tied to sales. Because generally they are simply not. They are jobs with fixed wages and not directly affected by sales. The extra profit from monetization schemes simply goes into corpo pockets.
Indie games seem to make a decent amount of money when it's one guy in his basement with no budget beyond their proper job. Maybe the problem with games being "too expensive to make" is actually involving spending too muh money in the first place
@@jingbot1071 for real. Like you look at voice acting lists, and I'm not saying that they don't deserve to be paid. But maybe, just maybe we don't need to hire Jennifer Hale, Troy Baker, Colleen Clinkenberg etc. For every game and we could hire someone else.
I remember some years back, Nintendo weren't getting Wii level sales from the WiiU and, instead of dumping devs, Miyamoto and his executive teams took heavy pay cuts. (Ofc, there were multiple mass layoffs later, because "business", but still... it was a nice-looking gesture.)
I think the most frustrating part of it all is that so many people defend every shitty disgusting system and decision by these companies and nothing will ever change as long as we don't stand together against it gaming becomes less and less fun as this poison takes every 'good' or indie dev and destroys or corrupts them and it's exhausting
What's even more frustrating is that even if, be it by miracle or unimaginable solidarity, the poison runs its course, and all studios are left alone, happy and free of the leeches sucking them dry until only the desiccated husk remains - they won't be gone, there will be no meaningful reckoning. They'll still be rich and insatiable and latch on to the next thing they'll be paid to ruin.
The underlying problem is that gamers / customers will keep on buying whatever new bullshit monetisation idea they have. The fact people just "suck it up" and keep spending is a huge issue.
I love Gloopface, its iconic bell and gloop face are only slightly less thoroughly disturbing in an existential and partially sexual sense the second time it appeared, which is good because that means it has staying power. Franchise potential?
Meaning that AAA company CEOs can absolutely be down in the fucking trenches with them. They choose not to because they refuse to do any actual work for their millions.
Especially upsetting since they shut down London studio, those guys made my childhood with singstar. And now they’re no more even after the “most profitable generation”.
For years now I consider anyone who argues games are too expensive to develop, to suffer from sever brain damage, to be a child or corporate shill. Anyone with 10 working neurons should be able to see how much of a scam the industry is.
On top of the insane benefits for the executive class, don't forget that a lot of them work as an executive for multiple companies! They don't even pretend it's a full time job.
Given that Summer Games Fest (aka E3-but-not) weekend ends today, this is still a relevant topic for the day. Especially since Geoff "allegedly" charged $5k per feature slot. With how long Riot's slot was compared to every other thing featured on the showcase, just goes to show how much profit they have to burn
Its some kind of double think or something how gamers will defend their own exploitation vis a vis "games have to make money" but in the same breath say things like "omagurd moi fav gamez is so successful and made so much money! global hit! so many copies!!!" The corpos really did a good job getting in peoples heads, uh?
I'm not actually sure I would call that doublethink, because those aren't contradictory things to say. Gamers defend exploitation with "games have to make money," exploitative games go on to make money, gamers that defended them see that as a victory for the games they defended and for themselves. They see the games they like as an extension of themselves, whose success is a personal success in which they played a role and whose failure is a personal attack on themselves by people who want them to personally fail (which is also why they get so upset about negative reviews of games they haven't played). It's part of the broader billionaire bootlicker mindset you see from so many people: They defend billionaires' right to keep being billionaires unmolested because they see those billionaires' success as a proxy for their own and like holding on to the nebulous hope that they could also be so successful so long as nothing happens to limit that possibility (they won't ever actually *try* to become that successful, but they want to keep the option open just in case they ever get around to it).
"Making games is Expensive" has always struck me the same way my favorite SciFi shows getting canceled because they were getting too expensive to make struck me. "Do the executives not have budget control?" Like, okay, sure, there's video games out there about A superhero that cost as much to make as an Avengers Movie. But... who decided the game had to be that expensive? The logic would have you believe that the entire AAA industry is holding each other in a mutual hostage crisis, and the first one to deliver anything less than 200 hours of "content" and better graphics than the last game that came out is the first to die! How much money could the Spider-Man games have saved if they cut a few of the Ubisoft-style "missions" that got REAL repetitive REAL fast? I might have enjoyed them well enough to complete them all, but I didn't enjoy them well enough that I'd have missed their absence. "You know what this game needs? 100 collectables, each with their own unique art, and little bit of Spider-Man lore scattered around the map" is a sentence I would have never uttered. I LIKED those little easter eggs, I understood every character they were referencing. I am the target audience for that shit, and I would not have missed it. If the full AAA game industry went "Hey, we're gonna cap the budget for (flagship title) at 100 mill," suddenly, the break even point for 60 dollar digital sales (assuming a 30% cut taken by the storefront) is just a little bit under 2 and a half million. Suddenly all those critically acclaimed single player games that "underperformed" because they failed to sell a copy to literally every male, human American in the 15-35 demographic are profitable again. They're whining about a problem they have COMPLETE control over. Spider-Man games aren't affected by the price of RL spandex. There isn't a weird supply chain issue that's going to affect their costs. They let the budgets climb infinitely because they're locked in an arms race to have slightly better lighting on a wet street than the game that came out 2 months prior. The people who give a fuck are NOT going to, alone, make or break a commercial release.
Thank you for the work you and have been doing for quite a bit! You're an industry treasure as far as I'm concerned. Sometimes when I feel despair about games, I remember games like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Oh how I love that game
Talk about how useless executives are, the former CEO of QANTAS (aussie airline) took it from one of the world's best airlines to one that can barely get its flights to launch on time, illegally sacked thousands of workers at the height of the pandemic, took multiple government handouts (that were supposed to save jobs) that were paid out as dividends to shareholders and he got paid over $30,000,000 dollarydoos (not including the lurks and perks) a year to do it.
@@DJDocsVideos he was.. "encouraged" to leave the job after doors and windows started falling off planes in flight. Turns out that out-sourcing maintenance to a developing national isn't a great idea.
One question the press has to ask during interviews from now on: "How much money does this game have to make to prevent layoffs or a studio shutdown?" Addendum: "How will the executives be punished if the game isn't a success?" As the headline once said, "Executives are hugely expensive, who not replace them with automation?"
Something to include for when this topic inevitably comes up again, based on what I've read: Satoru Iwata famously docked his executive salary in order to keep Nintendo afloat in the Wii U years and prevent employee layoff. While it's often framed as a noble act of martyrdom, it's actually because Japan has fairly strong protections in place that basically demand employee layoffs to be THE LAST POSSIBLE RESORT. Just throwing that out there 😊
Things I care about: The well being of the people actually making the games. Things I don't care about: The shareholders' and executives' pocket books. If they need to trim the fat to maintain the illusion of perpetual growth I can think of a few places they could do that.
i always feel like Stef has been picking the torch which was once held by them and TB (among a few others) .... and just keeps going with it, cause someone has to call out all this shit that corpo-publishy has been pushing. and i am glad about it. loved the bell at the end, i imagine it is a nod to youknowwho. overall i am just glad we still have them around. the golden one, foretold by the ages and all that.
The old men ceos who run these game companies still think video games are for children. They can’t understand that the average gamer is in their 30s and smart enough to see through their bullshit
They rely on gamers being indifferent, lazy, greedy, FOMO-riddled, tired and defeated. Where else are gamers gonna go? There is no alternative industry. And thats the point.
I wonder what it would take for the games industry (or corporations in general) to give up on the myth of perpetual growth? They can't keep cutting corners forever. Eventually, someone's going to end up with a very small circle. Do the execs think it's going to be a problem for whoever replaces them when they retire? Are stockholders just willfully blind that the layoffs are covering up the losses as long as the money keeps rolling in? I can't understand how blind it makes them all look. What's it going to take to break that?
You load 16 tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store
God, the subject matter of The Jimquisition is so depressing sometimes. Truthful, witty, brilliantly written, edited, and performed, but so, SO depressing. Keep bringing us the truth, Steph. It might be sad, but it needs to be said.
there was a twitter thread recently by some (ex-?) industry person where they explained that publishers largely weigh the success of the game as compared to the average returns of a stock portfolio. if a game makes less money than what they would get for putting the same amount of investment into the stock market, it's a negative to them - they might as well have not financed the game. because all they care about is making money, and making games is only something they care about for as long as it makes them more money than the stock market.
(speaking as a corporate manager), there is an "amazing" future ahead: the investors/shareholders group are not friends with the CXOs and their huge paychecks, unless these groups physically overlap. So what is coming with what I hope to be a certainty, is CXOs being replaced by AI. It is a perfect case - every feasible business decision in terms of running a company has already been made and documented, so a generative AI can reproduce and adapt it very well, for basically free.
It never ceases to amaze me that Naughty Dog went from making the Jak series to the Uncharted series. A lotta people dismissed the Jak and Daxter trilogy at the second game because the cute cartoony platformer HAPPENED to have a similar mechanic to GTA. People rolled their eyes at the Edgy Pretention and FAILED TO NOTICE THE GAME IS ABOUT HOW AN INNOCENT CAN EASILY SEE HOW BROKEN THE STATUS QUO IS AND SPARK A REVOLUTION. Haven City is, in Jak II, the last place with people on earth that we know of. Jak was sent into an idillic past to grow up safe from harm and return to succeed where The Old And Injured Despot Named PRAXIS, AS IN THE LITERAL WORD FOR PUTTING POLITICAL THEORY INTO ACTION, failed. As a kid who was born in 91, was lied to about every horror we are currently facing in the interest of protecting my innocence, and whom had to discover the entrenched failures of various global systems on their own because school was not interested in teaching me what was going on, and who always feels a little outta step with my peers because I grew up in rural Minnesota to the point that it feels like I did grow up in some kind of nebulous, idyllic yester year that lets me preserve at least a few ounces of hope for my fellow people.... the Jak trilogy felt more and more like it was 20 years ahead of its time. Jak 3 is about the aftermath of revolution, how people will take ANY shift in power to try and steal more of it and achieve their own ends no many how many innocents it literally crushes. It's dressed up with some other Very Video Gamey bullshit, but at its CORE the game is about power and the struggle to direct it properly while every self interested dumbass is trying to ride it to immortal glory as the one who Led Haven Out Of The Darkness and make shit exponetially harder as a new crisis emurges. .... and then they made Uncharted, a dumb adventure game about finding shinies, man pain, and shooting things. It should be noted the 2 main creative directors left the company after Jak 3. Everything they've made since then feels like it lacks a soul.
So they wanted to go on and do something different, what’s the problem with that? And I can’t agree to the notion that what they had made since Jak “lack soul”, ND is a talented team who knows how to make games, it may not be your thing but credit where it’s due
A lot of arbitrary value is placed on studio names. It's a deliberate tactic to remove the praise of individuals so they can be swapped out easily, an obvious example is how DMC2 was made by a completely different team but only nerds would be aware of that back in the day. Even when you have "superstar devs" like Shinji Mikami, just having them attached to a project means all the media focus buzzes around them and ignores actual issues or talented individuals within the team. It's basically the same as political spin. Hold up a big logo people recognize that hides everyone fighting behind it. If someone notices a trail of blood they get shouted down by gullible supporters.
@@loorthedarkelf8353 fair enough, it’s just when I hear the world soulless, it’s just the image of a Ubisoft open world game come to mind you know what I mean
@@daryno9048 It's not the people of the dev team I find without soul. I don't know them or their conditions. All I know is that the creations of that team felt different after a certain point-- no longer genuine or earnest, but smirking and smug. When I can no longer find meaning in a creative team's work, I suspect the abuse of the workers. Its hard to make meaning when you're barely making it month to month. I intend to research the studio for a deep dive essay of my own. It's sparked enough of my curiosity to merit that effort.
3:10 the worst thing is that it works, that's why we have people defending broken games at launch, it happened to me the other day discussing Etrian Oddisey 3, which is utterly broken in spanish, and is a 40 USD remake of a DS game, yet defenders were spitting at me for pointing out the localization breaks the UI in important moments
I hope you do an in depth video in the future about aa publishing becoming a thing with how among us is using its profits to get publish other games and even a heartless corporation like Blumehouse is at least TRYING to publish games to see what the audience likes so they can try and sell more of that. I really want someone to keep on eye on this to see how well it goes
The fate of capital is to be invested and lost. Because in the real economy capitalists dont produce a darn thing, and workers create material riches. So money, a representation of material riches has to return to the people.
Videogames simultaneously making more than some movie franchises but somehow having no money to keep people employed is capitalism in a 🥜😅
You see, movies pay millions for actors, who are actual draws and get people to spend money for a film. Video games, however, have to spend those millions on corporate executive bonuses, who do absolutely nothing anyone else in their position couldn't. They're basically the same!
@@IdentityChrist yes, we all flock to videogame companies for their amazing CEOs! 😂
@@IdentityChrist not to pile on, but its not like film execs are broke. cant see kevin feige using a food bank
Capitalism in a peanut
It really is capitalism in a nutsweat
“We are having our most profitable year ever… But still can’t afford to not bleed you dry, not fire our departments, or afford business ethics.”
they fired all the creatives except those in accounting.
This is the thing which has bothered me for even longer than I can recall Jim Steph talking about it...Which, y'know, they've been doing for a very long time now.
Companies, defenders (bootlickers?), marketing staff, investors, and so on claim two things which are only compatible in a handful of edgecases, none of which are good: margins are so slim they're always on the verge of collapse and record-smashing yearly profits nearly every year. The handful of edges this can actually be true? Management and executive decision is so unbelievably incompetent that they burn up all the revenue in no time, or independent studios wrestling with an industry designed to force them under companies like Sony, EA, and so on. Steph already covered the first part: either greed or massive incompetence on management, and they often talk about the latter because it strangles creative efforts.
We should all be skeptical of these two simultaneous claims because they too often cover greed and/or incompetence, either by publishers using the claims as a shield or because those publishers created an independent-hostile environment.
Most profitable year ever but we still can't pay you on time.
"Business ethics" is an oxymoron. It's never affordable because it doesn't exist.
@@nintendovirtualboywastakenfsr Sort of like "Enough growth".
The games industry is somehow in a constant state where it's both on the brink of absolute economic ruination and collapse, yet it's also more profitable than ever, every single year.
I genuinely cannot comprehend how it manages that. It feels like there's some factor that's being missed.
@@jimmyseaver3647 Its the same thinking whereby certain uh... people, are considered by those on far-right to be weak and gross and unworthy, but also, insane smart and secretly run the whole world.
Its 2 mutually exclusive realities that satisfy both the need to be on top but also defensive, that services greater systems.
That's because profit it's never enough for capitalist corporations, it must always be way more, infinite!
Because if you aren't making record profits, by any means necessary, the company is deemed a failure by shareholders. And those "necessary means" inevitably lead to further sacrifices to obtain record profits. It's a doom spirit.
Schrodinger's Game Industry
"Video games are so expensive to make!"
My brother in Christ, you set the budget
My sibling in Satan, your CEOs are the ones demanding all of that money, not the games.
It's like a toddler claiming sole access and control of the cookie jar, helping themselves to it constantly while only occasionally letting the rest of the household have _crumbs,_ and demanding everyone else work harder and harder to afford more and more cookies because "I *NEED* it, I _have_ to eat or I'll _starve!_ :( "
But instead of telling the selfish little bastard that the world doesn't revolve around them, everyone just shrugs their shoulders and says "Well, I guess this is how it has to be, kids need to eat after all."
Nice analogy.
Except the toddler is an 800 year old demilich that's escaped it's phylactery.
The word you're looking for is "parasite."
@@peterclarke7240 I was thinking of leech but parasite is more accurate.
I love how game publishers are rich enough to make money for their shareholders yet not enough to pay their employees. I also love it when the fanboys came to their defense, punching down on anyone who dared to speak against their favorite triple-Ayy brands. Truly a match made in hell.
My favorite part is that these fanboys also are aware that AAA studios suck and are bleeding the industry dry, but they are diametrically opposed to criticism of capitalism or predatory corporate practices, so they literally cannot acknowledge the obvious problem with the industry.
"It's not corporate salaries, that's just business! It must be because of all the woke women and PoC characters! There is no other conceivable reason!"
The fan boys were consistantly well off people who felt games getting more expensive would root out the Other, whomever they're casting as The Problem. Usually women and people of color.
"Wait, why are games even worse now ? You think firing all the skilled and creative people had anything to do with it ?"
Fanboys defending the 500 dollar Ahri skin with "Companies gotta make money somehow" and "Well those DLC's are there so you can play the game for free".
I'm just baffled that so many people believe them.
The "smol bean" defense, the "I'm being bullied", "where has decorum gone" crying of those in power/capital
Reminds me of my job at Home Depot. They report record profits and yet they can't afford to pay their employees. They will keep raising their expected profits in store and when we can't make their unrealistic sales plan we lose our yearly bonus. They found ways to pay us even less and make more money. Late stage capitalism at its finest.
Oh hell nah that's messed up 😔
Didn't Home Depot just settle a class action lawsuit after being caught committing wage theft?
If they did they aren’t paying a penny wage theft is the largest percentage of theft but has terrible accountability
I'm sure the managers still got their bonus though, but they can't afford to give you that 0.05 cent an hour raise.
It sounds more like they got record profits because they underpaid their employees.
Line must go up. Line must always go up. Line must go up faster than last year. And God help the little folks if it doesn't, 'cause the line sure won't.
The line is God. All shall worship the line. No sacrifice is too great for the line. The line, must forever, go UP.
@@PingMe23 Ed, Edd, and Eddy did an episode about exactly this.
I remember telling people that video game companies aren't there to make video games, they're there to make shareholders money. I was told I was wrong and not all AAA(A) studios were like that. These same people are baffled at publishers closing of studios that made good games that sold well.
They think they are the customers, but the gamer for those company is a resource to suck dry.
@@nicolasferreiro4492 Indeed, we are not customers to these publishers; we are walking wallets, ore veins to be strip-mined of money and bled dry of all resources. We are meant to pre-order deluxe editions packed with exclusive garbage that brings no joy whatsoever, long before release, so that we may play the most broken rushed-out version of the game on day one, if the inexplicably needed servers for our single-player game are even working. We are a cultivated cult of the gullible.
Nintendo arguably made strides in this area early in the games industry's history, creating their own island of people who not only accept but _crave_ their singular brand of _weird_ design decisions, never-discounted prices, suddenly revoked access to already-purchased classic game libraries and other abuse. But they are by no means the only company with these kinds of problems, even Atari had its share of bizarre shit going on, and likely most companies since - especially the big ones, the _profitable_ ones with lots of shares and investors to constantly poke them about up-ing that line on their graphs more and more.
But Nintendo though🤪 /s
@@aturchomicz821 In fairness, when the Wii U bombed, the heads of Nintendo took pay cuts rather than lay off workers or close studios.
@@drakontisaraptikos9927 Yeah, that's always oversold. They don't do that out of the kindness of their sweet angelical hearts. It's a law in Japan, that is in place to protect employees from layoffs, and shareholders from fraudulent executives. When profits fall they have to reduce, by law, executives compensation. They don't have a choice on the matter or the company faces legal repercussions and gigantic penalties.
"Companies don't 'indulge' in layoffs. No - they are 'hit' with layoffs"
So effing true.
"I'm hit with the ant I stepped on, pity me."
And then they go on the summer games showcase and whine about how "difficult decisions had to be made". Bullshit. If they have to pick between their piles of money or doing the right thing, it's the money every time.
Were you watching this video on mute except for that one sentence?
I love how each Jimquisition Is an attempt to tangentially teach Sulpurs Value to gamers without actually mentioning the word or any of Karl Marx's teaching so they don't panic out of red scare. Excelent job. Maybe some day they'll learn.
A specter is haunting the gaming industry...
Way too late for me I'm afraid, I was told 20+ years ago by a University Lecturer in Social Sciences that I was the first real Marxist he had met in 25 years lol
Ideas evolved and continue to evolve beyond marx,it's useful that he named part of the beast but treating all anti capitalism as his legacy is missguided
@@tubensalat1453 Oh shit! We'd better get Karl Marx's ghost out of the gaming industry before he explains in simple and adequate terms the socioeconomic reasons behind unethical business practices and helps people understand why they happen and therefore how they can be stopped!
*Looks at profile image* Physiognomy checks out.
Executive: Making and selling games like in the PS2 era is too expensive.
Developer: How about we make a game on a smaller budget with less people needed and work more smartly to deliver a quality game like in the PS2 era?
Executive: No! We'll make it even MORE expensive but we like having less around to pay. That's why we're gonna replace them all with A.I.! We won't pay you anymore.
Developer: If you have no human making the game, then where will the money go!?
Executive: To us! Those yachts, country clubs, cocaine and donations to our favorite politicians aren't gonna pay themselves.
I still miss PS2 era.
@@youtubeuniversity3638 It was a magical time.
I was playing an opensource port of the original Jak and Daxter last year and while playing I thought ‘damn, Naughty Dog used to make fun lighthearted colorful games while still being critically acclaimed groundbreaking works’ and they didn’t have to bitch about profits either.
That there is the golden age of gaming, imo.
After that, things have slowly gotten more and more worse (speaking triple ay games here), until where we are now, sigh.
Seems like such a long time ago...
I mean they finished the Jak series and wanted to move on to something else, what’s wrong with that? If anything that’s one of the things that I really one of the things that I really like about studios like ND, Insomniac and Sucker Punch, they don’t tie themselves down to one type of game
Naughty Dog went down the shitter when they embraced realism over fun.
When J&D website was still up, there were a bunch of "fun facts" in the precursor orbs, and one of them was that 16h workdays + sleeping in the office was common enough that they "jokingly" called their wifes widows. People have found a part of the map of Jak 3 in Jak II, meaning they were likely already developing the sequel, so the overworking was likely constant and just occasionally less or more of it. I don't know if it was more the culture of "this is fine you gotta be passionate if you wanna work in the industry" or Sony giving so little of the profits that they couldn't afford to hire more people to lessen the overworking. Probably both.
Anyway, I've forgotten my point in lieu of ranting about how unethically my favourite game was produced. Imma leave this here for that sweet engagement anyway.
"But think of the children" is actually "But think of the Profits"
Game and Film industry: Making our products is getting to expensive!
Everyone else: No one told you that you have to throw 100Bn down the toilet to make interesting content. That's on you.
the biggest problem is that they make the same shit over and over again and spend more and more money to promote it so the consumer (cash cow) consumes it. The movie industry is at a point where the marketing budget for a "AAA" "Block Buster" gets close to double the actual budget of the thing. Also the film is actual dog shit.
If you ask me about two good movies I've seen in the last 11 years what comes up in my head is "Only Lovers left alive" (2013) and "Love Lies Bleeding" (2024) plus a hand full of tiny budget b and c movies e. g. "Haymaker" (2021)
I simply can't wait till we reach the point of not being ably to buy anything.
The corporations don't want to pay us workers, yet want us to engage in buy product.
The landlords want us to rent/own homes yet raise prices regularly to be almost unreachable.
Basic needs keep going up, and we can't aford them slowly more andnmore cause we can't get more funds from the places we work.
Yet regularly we here of record profits and gains, yet also complaints that people aren't buying the overly expensive things. And the solution to that just to make things more expensive and have more ways to keep people paying rather than make things less expensive.
I wonder what will happen when everyone is priced out save the suits?
We are kinda already there. Through credit.
Yeah, and more and more jobs will be lost o Ai....fantastic dystopia we let happen! People are more powerful than they think yet they never act as if.
Those suits have a terrible armor class.
Just saying.
See, the thing about greed is
It's like a little pet
And the more and more you feed it
The more hungry it'll get
But you can't blame greed, you see
It's got a worm inside
And that worm always needs to feed
And it's never satisfied
But the more you try to find it
The more it likes to hide
It really is a nasty little worm
I like to call it 'Pride'...
(All credit to the song "Biggering", created as part of the original prospectus for the _Lorax_ movie that was then scrapped because it was entirely too faithful to the original book. Find it and give it a listen!)
It's so weird how Stardew Valley and Dwarf Fortress made enough money for three individuals to never work again a day in their lives but studios of hundreds of experts with access to almost any resource imaginable can't find the same success.
Well, it's kinda similar to why Valve is a virtual monopoly but doesn't pull anything close to the kinda shit most giant corporations do. Valve is not a publicly traded company. Publicly traded companies have a legal obligation to make money for their shareholders. The products are actually materials. We're the livestock the pseudo-product is fed to. Profit is the actual product, and shareholders are the customers. Gaben is legally allowed to have values because he didn't choose to make his company subject to those laws. You can obvious debate whether or not his values are actually good or if he lives up to them, but that discussion isn't really relevant to publicly traded companies.
It will be a sad day in the future when Valve changes hands.
Dwarf Fortress is being sold?? It's finished?!?
@@Ramsey276one Ah no, not finished. They had a minor financial crisis so decided they needed to start offering more conventional options to fund development so got together with KitFox to sell it early access on Steam with improved UI and graphics. It's still free with ASCII graphics on the website though. So are all previous versions.
@@Ramsey276one I don't know if it's finished, it probably never will be. But yes, it is on Steam now.
The Bruce Lee puns will continue until morale improves
In which case, indefinite-lee?
@@Dead-EyeJuncan Oh man, having 1776 the Musical flashbacks...
@@Dead-EyeJuncan This fella gets it
"We had layoffs by firing all the people who can actually develop a game and giving their salary as a bonus to the executives that couldn't make Pac-Man with an instruction manual. We are geniuses !" 😒
If the predatory monetisation doesn't result in record profits, then there needs to be more of it. If the predatory monetisation does result in record profits, then there needs to be more of it. It's Catch-22 filtered through an MBA
It’ll never not be funny when the rich start crying poor. I still roll my eyes remembering some of the stuff that was coming out of the MLB lockout drama around the pandemic where you had ownerships trying to both insist that the game of baseball has been in decline and they just can’t make money and yet admitting that values of said franchises are more inflated than ever, worth tenfold more than they did 10-20 years ago
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Kurt Vonnegut, "Joe Heller", New Yorker Magazine May 2005. Cite your sources.
@@BladedEdge+1 for appropriate knowledge management
@@BladedEdge Damn, crazy how often people just appropriate someone else's work without any credit. Someone should make a 4 hour long video about that or something.
@@nintendovirtualboywastakenfsr I understood that reference
It’s important to remember that executives do not want to pay their workers, they hate and resent the actual developers and have antagonistic class interests
"Games are too expensive to make" is kinda like "free trade is good," the root of the issues is in the premises that've gone unquestioned.
As a dev, I hate people pretending to stand for my interests and lick the corpo boot. I fervently believe that even selling copies of software, what most consider the most innocuous of options, is already a humongous compromise, a market that to even exist requires on the monopoly on violence threatening any person daring to do crtl+c on their computers.
Other models exist and are perfectly viable, heck, when business develop software for each other they often charge for dev time, even when charging for licenses/subscriptions the models are simple and free of predatory monetization. It's just average people the ones they feel entitled to leech.
That star wars hunters menu is so 2021. Only one microtransaction push? Only two currencies? You can still find the PLAY button? I thought this was 2024!
If the play button isn't buried under AT LEAST 5 or 6 weird icons and pop-ups that no one can understand until they've played 73 hours of the game, is it even a real video game at that point?
There's also "that's just how the industry is"
I almost had an argument about that but we were at a party and I thought better of it in the name of having a good time.
What is it people say? It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Something like that
It's an Ursula K. Le Guin quote connecting the divine right of kings to capitalism regarding power and the potential to end!
Allowing companies to be publicly traded was the original sin.
I enjoy the maths-based invectives from Yahtzee Croshaw's Galaxy books, quote:
In “Pilot Math”, the word multiply (shortened to ply) replaces the most popular swear word, with subtraction (or trac) filling in as an all-purpose noun with scatological leanings. Bracket became a common insult, as did decimal point (or doint) and division (div), which also came to mean male and female genitalia, respectively.
Gives a whole different meaning to plying one's trade.
That sounds like a load of old wank, to be honest.
Not related to the topic but I just wanted to know that the effort put into including Bruce Lee in at least one adverb per episode has not gone unnoticed nor unappreciated.
I feel like im going to live long enough for the home console market ranging from the og Atari to the Gamecube/ PS2/Xbox to be deemed an abberation rather than what a lot of people grew up as normal. After all, what else is all the various DLC varieties and shift in game design but going back to the arcade era? Theyve basically put a coin slot on their machines 😂😢😅
Ooh brand new Sterling video. I’m both excited to listen, and dreading the state of our gaming industry.
Maybe the industry could save some money by replacing all the CEOs with AIs, it's not like they would be more incompetent.
The big problem is that 'profit' is _not_ the metric by which a company is determined to be successful. Growth is. In our current system, a profitable company will be considered failing if it did not make more profit than it did the year before even if it made billions beyond its operating costs.
You know what is ever and ever growing? Cancer.
This is one of the reasons Larion is so unique, management cares about making good games first and foremost. Most companies are not game companies, the them games are just another product to exploit
100%
The industry really needs a push towards worker-owned and other types of collective development houses. Let the big publishers fight over who has the more A's in their games, the smaller devs will be the ones creating new gaming experiences and trends.
An easy way to refute the line about "supporting the developers" is to ask whether the wages of the actual creative people working in development are in any way tied to sales. Because generally they are simply not. They are jobs with fixed wages and not directly affected by sales. The extra profit from monetization schemes simply goes into corpo pockets.
the Skeleton Warriors! bit has always been my favorite old thing
the joys of the very toxic executive - investor symbiotic relationship.
the only symbiosis where literally all the rest of the ecosystem suffers
Considering executives are also investors and extract far more than they give I'd call it parasitic, not symbiotic.
Indie games seem to make a decent amount of money when it's one guy in his basement with no budget beyond their proper job.
Maybe the problem with games being "too expensive to make" is actually involving spending too muh money in the first place
I wonder if this has been happening in the movie industry for at least forty years? 🤔
@@jingbot1071 for real. Like you look at voice acting lists, and I'm not saying that they don't deserve to be paid. But maybe, just maybe we don't need to hire Jennifer Hale, Troy Baker, Colleen Clinkenberg etc. For every game and we could hire someone else.
I have a memory from when I was 6 of throwing that Frisbee and losing it. It's literally one of my core memories.
At least someone else found it
That Honestly at 8:05 might be the best joke ZMann has made yet
I remember some years back, Nintendo weren't getting Wii level sales from the WiiU and, instead of dumping devs, Miyamoto and his executive teams took heavy pay cuts. (Ofc, there were multiple mass layoffs later, because "business", but still... it was a nice-looking gesture.)
I think the most frustrating part of it all is that so many people defend every shitty disgusting system and decision by these companies and nothing will ever change as long as we don't stand together against it gaming becomes less and less fun as this poison takes every 'good' or indie dev and destroys or corrupts them and it's exhausting
What's even more frustrating is that even if, be it by miracle or unimaginable solidarity, the poison runs its course, and all studios are left alone, happy and free of the leeches sucking them dry until only the desiccated husk remains - they won't be gone, there will be no meaningful reckoning. They'll still be rich and insatiable and latch on to the next thing they'll be paid to ruin.
They're gratefully gobbling it all up even.
"If I become a Millionaire I have failed my audience"
Jason Thor Hall, CEO of PirateSoftware
I caught that frame from Legend of the Overfiend. I see you Z. Man Zilla :P
The underlying problem is that gamers / customers will keep on buying whatever new bullshit monetisation idea they have. The fact people just "suck it up" and keep spending is a huge issue.
Well, they're starting to price me right out of their AAAY industry. Games are getting to be over 100 CAD, who can afford that shit in this economy?
I love Gloopface, its iconic bell and gloop face are only slightly less thoroughly disturbing in an existential and partially sexual sense the second time it appeared, which is good because that means it has staying power.
Franchise potential?
Reminder that CEO (along with CTO an CFO) are titles many indie devs take on, ontop of actually developing games
...and?
many video game studios actually began that way
Meaning that AAA company CEOs can absolutely be down in the fucking trenches with them.
They choose not to because they refuse to do any actual work for their millions.
Especially upsetting since they shut down London studio, those guys made my childhood with singstar. And now they’re no more even after the “most profitable generation”.
For years now I consider anyone who argues games are too expensive to develop, to suffer from sever brain damage, to be a child or corporate shill. Anyone with 10 working neurons should be able to see how much of a scam the industry is.
Have to say I appreciate Jim's (and the team's) consistency in putting these out week after week for years.
On top of the insane benefits for the executive class, don't forget that a lot of them work as an executive for multiple companies!
They don't even pretend it's a full time job.
Given that Summer Games Fest (aka E3-but-not) weekend ends today, this is still a relevant topic for the day. Especially since Geoff "allegedly" charged $5k per feature slot. With how long Riot's slot was compared to every other thing featured on the showcase, just goes to show how much profit they have to burn
PS5: Releases no games
Sony: "This is our most profitable generation!!!"
5:19 Never underestimate the power of Hostess fruit pies.
I remember a twisted toyfare theatre where the punisher used explosive fruit pies to kill supervillains
8:10 "Well, Z. Man, I hope you're prepared for an unforgettable luncheon!" x1,000
Its some kind of double think or something how gamers will defend their own exploitation vis a vis "games have to make money" but in the same breath say things like "omagurd moi fav gamez is so successful and made so much money! global hit! so many copies!!!"
The corpos really did a good job getting in peoples heads, uh?
I'm not actually sure I would call that doublethink, because those aren't contradictory things to say. Gamers defend exploitation with "games have to make money," exploitative games go on to make money, gamers that defended them see that as a victory for the games they defended and for themselves. They see the games they like as an extension of themselves, whose success is a personal success in which they played a role and whose failure is a personal attack on themselves by people who want them to personally fail (which is also why they get so upset about negative reviews of games they haven't played).
It's part of the broader billionaire bootlicker mindset you see from so many people: They defend billionaires' right to keep being billionaires unmolested because they see those billionaires' success as a proxy for their own and like holding on to the nebulous hope that they could also be so successful so long as nothing happens to limit that possibility (they won't ever actually *try* to become that successful, but they want to keep the option open just in case they ever get around to it).
There I was thinking that Chungus Inc couldn’t possibly hire a worse CWTFO than Kenneth Chodesmith, boy was I wrong.
"Making games is Expensive" has always struck me the same way my favorite SciFi shows getting canceled because they were getting too expensive to make struck me.
"Do the executives not have budget control?"
Like, okay, sure, there's video games out there about A superhero that cost as much to make as an Avengers Movie. But... who decided the game had to be that expensive?
The logic would have you believe that the entire AAA industry is holding each other in a mutual hostage crisis, and the first one to deliver anything less than 200 hours of "content" and better graphics than the last game that came out is the first to die!
How much money could the Spider-Man games have saved if they cut a few of the Ubisoft-style "missions" that got REAL repetitive REAL fast? I might have enjoyed them well enough to complete them all, but I didn't enjoy them well enough that I'd have missed their absence.
"You know what this game needs? 100 collectables, each with their own unique art, and little bit of Spider-Man lore scattered around the map" is a sentence I would have never uttered. I LIKED those little easter eggs, I understood every character they were referencing. I am the target audience for that shit, and I would not have missed it.
If the full AAA game industry went "Hey, we're gonna cap the budget for (flagship title) at 100 mill," suddenly, the break even point for 60 dollar digital sales (assuming a 30% cut taken by the storefront) is just a little bit under 2 and a half million.
Suddenly all those critically acclaimed single player games that "underperformed" because they failed to sell a copy to literally every male, human American in the 15-35 demographic are profitable again.
They're whining about a problem they have COMPLETE control over. Spider-Man games aren't affected by the price of RL spandex. There isn't a weird supply chain issue that's going to affect their costs. They let the budgets climb infinitely because they're locked in an arms race to have slightly better lighting on a wet street than the game that came out 2 months prior.
The people who give a fuck are NOT going to, alone, make or break a commercial release.
The random snippet of Valheim Vikings doing a dance caught me so off guard. Dont really see those blue eyed goons outside of dedicated channels.
4:01 don't call me Shirley
It doesn't get said enough, Z Mann Zilla's editing is on point, and I love it.
Thank you so much!
Thank you for the work you and have been doing for quite a bit! You're an industry treasure as far as I'm concerned.
Sometimes when I feel despair about games, I remember games like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Oh how I love that game
Talk about how useless executives are, the former CEO of QANTAS (aussie airline) took it from one of the world's best airlines to one that can barely get its flights to launch on time, illegally sacked thousands of workers at the height of the pandemic, took multiple government handouts (that were supposed to save jobs) that were paid out as dividends to shareholders and he got paid over $30,000,000 dollarydoos (not including the lurks and perks) a year to do it.
Aussie aussie aussie!
:/
That is the definition of a successfull manager. Multiple manager of the year awards incoming.
@@DJDocsVideos Can't be a bad manager if you don't have anyone to manage! 🤓
@@DJDocsVideos he was.. "encouraged" to leave the job after doors and windows started falling off planes in flight. Turns out that out-sourcing maintenance to a developing national isn't a great idea.
One question the press has to ask during interviews from now on: "How much money does this game have to make to prevent layoffs or a studio shutdown?" Addendum: "How will the executives be punished if the game isn't a success?"
As the headline once said, "Executives are hugely expensive, who not replace them with automation?"
feels like this video has the most unhinged background gameplay I've seen so far on this channel
Something to include for when this topic inevitably comes up again, based on what I've read:
Satoru Iwata famously docked his executive salary in order to keep Nintendo afloat in the Wii U years and prevent employee layoff. While it's often framed as a noble act of martyrdom, it's actually because Japan has fairly strong protections in place that basically demand employee layoffs to be THE LAST POSSIBLE RESORT. Just throwing that out there 😊
Things I care about: The well being of the people actually making the games. Things I don't care about: The shareholders' and executives' pocket books. If they need to trim the fat to maintain the illusion of perpetual growth I can think of a few places they could do that.
Where is Buckets? I demand everyone’s favorite puppet back! BRING BACK BUCKETS
IT'S NOT JUST ME! BRING BUCKETS BACK 😭
i always feel like Stef has been picking the torch which was once held by them and TB (among a few others) .... and just keeps going with it, cause someone has to call out all this shit that corpo-publishy has been pushing. and i am glad about it. loved the bell at the end, i imagine it is a nod to youknowwho.
overall i am just glad we still have them around. the golden one, foretold by the ages and all that.
Thank you (hypothetical) god for COMMANDER STERLING.
My cats were freaked out by the lobster bell. Ha.
What a good way to start the day with a new video.
The old men ceos who run these game companies still think video games are for children. They can’t understand that the average gamer is in their 30s and smart enough to see through their bullshit
na, they (mostly) correctly assess that adults arent much more discerning.
If only...
They rely on gamers being indifferent, lazy, greedy, FOMO-riddled, tired and defeated. Where else are gamers gonna go? There is no alternative industry. And thats the point.
@@satyasyasatyasya5746 yeah fair point. Support Indie devs
If we're smart enough to see through their shit then how are they making record profits off us?
Can't believe the industry continues to peddle this frelling dren
I want a longer video of the person promoting the Poundin' It shirt at the end. There's something... entrancing about the way they move.
My chosen fictional swear word is "frak" from _Battlestar Galactica._
I wonder what it would take for the games industry (or corporations in general) to give up on the myth of perpetual growth? They can't keep cutting corners forever. Eventually, someone's going to end up with a very small circle. Do the execs think it's going to be a problem for whoever replaces them when they retire? Are stockholders just willfully blind that the layoffs are covering up the losses as long as the money keeps rolling in?
I can't understand how blind it makes them all look. What's it going to take to break that?
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
This fella gets it
I dont want profitable games I just want them to make games like silent hill 2 again.
God, the subject matter of The Jimquisition is so depressing sometimes. Truthful, witty, brilliantly written, edited, and performed, but so, SO depressing. Keep bringing us the truth, Steph. It might be sad, but it needs to be said.
Yooo, I used to have one of those Frisbees as a kid - never knew what they were called until now
Still waiting for Cucumber Succulence to come back 💙
i was just thinking about that the other day!!! hahahahaha
You know you're bad when you're somehow f***** worse than Hollywood
I don't think Goop face will be a hit like cornflake monster. I also miss the TV that was shaped like an apple.
there was a twitter thread recently by some (ex-?) industry person where they explained that publishers largely weigh the success of the game as compared to the average returns of a stock portfolio. if a game makes less money than what they would get for putting the same amount of investment into the stock market, it's a negative to them - they might as well have not financed the game.
because all they care about is making money, and making games is only something they care about for as long as it makes them more money than the stock market.
ok that automaticalee meme got me
Executive pay is the biggest drain on the economy in general. The game industry is just an example.
(speaking as a corporate manager), there is an "amazing" future ahead: the investors/shareholders group are not friends with the CXOs and their huge paychecks, unless these groups physically overlap. So what is coming with what I hope to be a certainty, is CXOs being replaced by AI. It is a perfect case - every feasible business decision in terms of running a company has already been made and documented, so a generative AI can reproduce and adapt it very well, for basically free.
It never ceases to amaze me that Naughty Dog went from making the Jak series to the Uncharted series.
A lotta people dismissed the Jak and Daxter trilogy at the second game because the cute cartoony platformer HAPPENED to have a similar mechanic to GTA. People rolled their eyes at the Edgy Pretention and FAILED TO NOTICE THE GAME IS ABOUT HOW AN INNOCENT CAN EASILY SEE HOW BROKEN THE STATUS QUO IS AND SPARK A REVOLUTION.
Haven City is, in Jak II, the last place with people on earth that we know of. Jak was sent into an idillic past to grow up safe from harm and return to succeed where The Old And Injured Despot Named PRAXIS, AS IN THE LITERAL WORD FOR PUTTING POLITICAL THEORY INTO ACTION, failed.
As a kid who was born in 91, was lied to about every horror we are currently facing in the interest of protecting my innocence, and whom had to discover the entrenched failures of various global systems on their own because school was not interested in teaching me what was going on, and who always feels a little outta step with my peers because I grew up in rural Minnesota to the point that it feels like I did grow up in some kind of nebulous, idyllic yester year that lets me preserve at least a few ounces of hope for my fellow people.... the Jak trilogy felt more and more like it was 20 years ahead of its time.
Jak 3 is about the aftermath of revolution, how people will take ANY shift in power to try and steal more of it and achieve their own ends no many how many innocents it literally crushes. It's dressed up with some other Very Video Gamey bullshit, but at its CORE the game is about power and the struggle to direct it properly while every self interested dumbass is trying to ride it to immortal glory as the one who Led Haven Out Of The Darkness and make shit exponetially harder as a new crisis emurges.
.... and then they made Uncharted, a dumb adventure game about finding shinies, man pain, and shooting things.
It should be noted the 2 main creative directors left the company after Jak 3.
Everything they've made since then feels like it lacks a soul.
So they wanted to go on and do something different, what’s the problem with that?
And I can’t agree to the notion that what they had made since Jak “lack soul”, ND is a talented team who knows how to make games, it may not be your thing but credit where it’s due
A lot of arbitrary value is placed on studio names. It's a deliberate tactic to remove the praise of individuals so they can be swapped out easily, an obvious example is how DMC2 was made by a completely different team but only nerds would be aware of that back in the day. Even when you have "superstar devs" like Shinji Mikami, just having them attached to a project means all the media focus buzzes around them and ignores actual issues or talented individuals within the team.
It's basically the same as political spin. Hold up a big logo people recognize that hides everyone fighting behind it. If someone notices a trail of blood they get shouted down by gullible supporters.
@@daryno9048 feelings are subjective, and thus it is definitionally my opinion. I speak only for myself.
@@loorthedarkelf8353 fair enough, it’s just when I hear the world soulless, it’s just the image of a Ubisoft open world game come to mind you know what I mean
@@daryno9048 It's not the people of the dev team I find without soul. I don't know them or their conditions. All I know is that the creations of that team felt different after a certain point-- no longer genuine or earnest, but smirking and smug.
When I can no longer find meaning in a creative team's work, I suspect the abuse of the workers. Its hard to make meaning when you're barely making it month to month.
I intend to research the studio for a deep dive essay of my own. It's sparked enough of my curiosity to merit that effort.
In the great words of Pian Dao from Avatar the last airbender. "Try Lee, there's a million Lees."
I wish I knew which one was my favorite.
3:10 the worst thing is that it works, that's why we have people defending broken games at launch, it happened to me the other day discussing Etrian Oddisey 3, which is utterly broken in spanish, and is a 40 USD remake of a DS game, yet defenders were spitting at me for pointing out the localization breaks the UI in important moments
"Ring the little lobster bell!"... classic Goop Gloop
I hope you do an in depth video in the future about aa publishing becoming a thing with how among us is using its profits to get publish other games and even a heartless corporation like Blumehouse is at least TRYING to publish games to see what the audience likes so they can try and sell more of that. I really want someone to keep on eye on this to see how well it goes
"Flark," while maybe a bit overused in the Guardians of the Galaxy game, deserves a spot in the Made Up Swear Words From Fiction Hall of Fame imo
Your piss take of Aiden Pierce's iconic hat has actually cemented that design permanently in my head. Unironically making it iconic to me.
The fate of capital is to be invested and lost. Because in the real economy capitalists dont produce a darn thing, and workers create material riches. So money, a representation of material riches has to return to the people.