421–430 of 461 posts
That is cost of 300x GTA IV or 100x cyberpunk 2077 games. Wouldn't it be more cost effective to just fund 300 new studios?
That is cost of 300x GTA IV or 100x cyberpunk 2077 games. Wouldn't it be more cost effective to just fund 300 new studios?
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Are you sure you got your info right? I'd not be surprised if they've been stuck at $60 after adjusting for inflation, i.e. costing around $30 in 1995.
No, many games absolutely retailed for upwards of $60 in 1995 and earlier. Source: lived through it. https://www.reddit.com/r/Switch/comments/1jr81yf/video_game_...
Welp, EA was already among the worst publishers out there, I can only imagine things will get exponentially worse being owned by private equity.
There's a recent book called "Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America", and seeing this news makes me want to revisit it. The author outlines the usual tactics used by private equity firms to turn a functioning business into their own short-term profit factory, often driving the business into bankruptcy in the process. EA already has a reputation as a semi-broken company, but things can probably get a lot w…
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The PE firms strip the assets, aka have them take on huge amounts of debt, sell assets, and then pay them dividends etc. before they collapse.
Why would banks keep giving PE firms loans for these kinds of deals if the companies inevitably collapse and default on those loans? Not trying to defend PE here, but this narrative doesn't make sense to me.
It turns out that if you kill the goose there's a cache of 3 billion dollars worth of eggs within it.
The goose is gone and everybody made money off of it's demise.
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PE (not always) is effective at finding under-valued companies and ensuring that they record the value on the PE's books.
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I spent time as a TD on both the dev and publishing sides - the perception all EA (the publisher) is doing is money and terms is very much mistaken. To take the case of Bioware, the SW:TOR launch was a notable disaster. There is no way in hell Bioware by themselves could have recovered from that, and it took a lot of "external" firefighting to get that under control. OTOH various decisions many people assume came fro…
So we can’t fault EA for creating an incentive structure that rewards self-destructive behavior on the part of their acquired studios?
I cannot go into the juicy specifics but on the EA publishing side you would be hard pressed to find someone that did not think the finance department were engaged in cutting off the company nose to spite the face of whoever in the company they didn't want to pay this week. (OTOH this was because there were supposed historical cases of excessive leniency, which from what I heard may even be understating it). I personally had a lot of trouble with the self fulfilling prophecies of marketing like "we didn't make money from X last year, so we won't do it this year", "that's because we didn't try it last year", "your point?" etc. but many were more sympathetic to that.
Like them or not, EA has been a major force in gaming for over 40 years (I used to work there). They invented the term "Game Producer". Their early vision for promoting Game Designers like hollywood Directors was ahead of its time. They have a hallway lined with gold discs of million seller hit games. They basically created the casual gaming industry (The Sims Division, Pogo, Casual Divisions) in a time when games we…
I am old enough to remember a time when I had positive associations with being an "EA game". The games in question were on my Commodore 64. But still, there was such a time. EA has a reputation for buying companies and draining all of their reputation for money. The first company that the EA of today did that to was EA itself. There was a time it was just a gaming company. Actually it was about up to the Origin acqui…
I am finding myself having some conflicted feelings on this. First, I absolutely hate who is buying them. Especially as a huge Bioware fan with a Mass Effect tattoo. That being said, putting aside who is buying them for a moment. I would actually be happy to see more gaming companies going fully private. I feel like the need for constant growth (instead of just sustainability) is what has caused much of the issues in…
BioWare is long dead anyway.
BioWare games notably moved the needle forward on allowing same-sex relationships in their games. [0] Should we expect that such things might be removed from the existing titles under Saudi ownership?
[0] https://medium.com/brinkbit/a-brief-history-of-biowares-lgbt...
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the owner of a company gets the profits, and that's what he lives off of. investors in public companies get a share of the profit as well, of course, but it's usually vanishingly small because it's split by every investor. So for privately traded companies the people who own them can make their living just based on the money left over after they pay all their expenses, but for investors in public companies the only f…
Yes, for a public company. We’re literally discussing the difference between public and private companies. Dividends don’t exist for private companies. The dividend is the profit.