781–790 of 981 posts
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>150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin! Oy vey maybe this kind of money grubbery is not good for our society.
What's not to understand that when you're having to spend 4.85B in order to get 5B in revenue makes your business quite risky. You want to be operating on larger margins than that
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The awareness of a poor return on investment is a good thing for society. We want to do more with fewer resources. Making terrible decisions, such as investing in distractions for your company and consumers, and then letting your workforce pay the tab.. is the thing that is not great for society.
>We want to do more with fewer resources. Who is the "we" here? Because the profit margin not being high enough is certainly not a problem for consumers. The only people who should care about that are the company's shareholders and "shareholders" certainly isn't synonymous with "society".
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"Let's go from 1 in 15 gamers to 1 in 3 gamers" sounds nice, probably gonna need employees for that!
You need the right products and services. If you know what those are, then you need employees to build them. Until you figure out what those are, you are (sadly) better off with fewer people.
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This is where Nintendo is at. It’s hilarious how much fun me and my kids are having playing games like Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros, Mario Party, Pokemon Pokopia, and the surprise smash hit has been Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. My kids make all the neighbors and have them get married and laugh about it and it’s just such a goofy concept. The graphics are good enough that you no longer notice there’s graphic…
There's a lot I don't like about Nintendo, but the one thing I admire about them is they understand that fancy cinematic graphics aren't what make a great game.
> I like to think of it like buying a car. Admit it. Your left brain looks at a vehicle in terms of the numbers. What's the horsepower? The towing capacity? The 0-60? That's our competitor's approach. But your right brain is different. There's only one question out there: sitting behind the wheel, where will this baby take me? In other words, do you want to go just a little bit faster, down the same streets you've always driven, or down a new road, to places you've never seen before? That's the difference with Nintendo DS.
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Entire post text: > This post was about the insider news I got this morning that a majority of Id's studio is being laid off, including most (if not all) coders.
Even in the age of AI how the hell can you make a game without programmers?
games are competing with netflix competing with tiktok competing with sleep
Johnny Mnemonic: Yeah, the Black Shakes. What causes it?
Spider: What causes it?
[points to various pieces of equipment throughout the room]
Spider: This causes it! This causes it! This causes it! Information overload! All the electronics around you poisoning the airwaves. Technological fucking civilization. But we still have all this shit, because we can't live without it. Let me do my work.Earlier quoted context omitted.
Margins that low are dangerous because businesses can often see year to year margin variance higher than that.
So? Why is it impossible for businesses to do long-term accounting?
3% is pretty close to 0% which is very close to -1%. Think of it as a 3% margin for error.
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Russ: "Anyway, next thing you know, we IPO, stock triples in a day and AOL gobbles us up. All of a sudden, I'm 22 years young and I'm worth 1.2 billion. Now a couple decades later, I'm worth 1.4. You do the math." Richard: "Okay. Well, that's a gain of $200 million over 20 years. Um, 16.66 repeating. That's less than 1% return. Inflation is, like, 1.7. I think CDs are 2%. So that's less than a CD."
I liked your reference. And if Russ is blowing $100M a year on lifestyle and still has those numbers then he’s winning at life.
What a take. Of a character that is, albeit incredibly entertaining to watch, not displayed in a good light at all.
Alternatively, he's everything that's wrong with the system. He's certainly not generating any value to society.
But yeah, in a purely individualistic take, he's certainly winning at life. While making everyone else's a bit worse.
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Acquiring a game studio only makes sense if you see a way to make it grow either by providing capital or better management. E.g. Activision acquired Treyarch in 2001 for $20M, which was probably 4-5x of its annual profit at the time. Seeing that very few people played (or even heard of) Die By The Sword or Draconus you could imagine that there was still a room to grow so there was a good chance you break even on your…
> What was Microsoft plan to increase profit? IMO, at the time, it was to buy ABK and make CoD an Xbox exclusive. That clearly didn't play out when everyone screamed about it being (rightly!) anticompetitive, and so they had to resign themselves to accepting that day 1 gamepass exclusive was going to be their way to get people to switch over from PS. That also didn't work. The 'K' part of ABK was also probably going…
Instead, they paid way over the odds for IPs that seem past their prime.
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> Phil's strategy made sense on paper It was a risky bet that became even higher risk when MSFT spent ~$80 billion dollars rolling up game studios near the peak of the historic COVID gaming bubble. They bet it would greatly increase Game Pass sub growth. Instead, Game Pass sub growth slowed down. At the time I thought it was a reasonable plan - but not at the prices MSFT was paying for content. Then the DRAM drought…
I needed a new DVD player and I pretty much splurged on an Xbox. But I haven't really used it for gaming.