891–900 of 981 posts
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Aws is closer to monopoly than to utility
Most utilities are monopolies.
It was pretty rich seeing armchair video game industry analysts act like the new CEO was gonna usher in a new age for Microsoft's gaming division because she got to announce the updated logo and some games that would have obviously been in development long before she became CEO. Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the interv…
> Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the intervention from marketing and HR in their products. Gaming is like cuisine. Can it be art? Sure. But most people will never visit a Michelin starred restaurant in their whole lives. They go to McDonald's and their local equivalent. Mainstream games have been like McDonald's for a l…
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Adobe
Can you share more information? I just looked at their Wikipedia entry and they spent 2018- basically doing acquisitions. What were they layoffs you were thinking of? It's hard to find historical data from 2016. And what's their new focus? It looks like they still have the same huge roster of apps.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/adobe-laying-off-600...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/adobe-to-cut-9-perce...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/adobes-transition-to...
They went through a heavy period of layoffs for a few years and now are killing it and it meets your criteria of about 10 years ago
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Pretty much the Switch experience. It sometimes downloads updates, but system updates are like 10 seconds, and games are updated in the background seamlessly. I don't play Fortnite, but it's also always updated in the library. Yes, if you don't keep it powered, it won't do that, but why wouldn't you if it just stays in the dock dark and quiet?
Nintendo finally implemented a modern update system that installs the new version in a new volume, reboots you into that volume, and deletes the old one once booted. It's why it's so fast. The work happened before you pressed update.
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That messaging is for investors. To a dev's ears, it's a meaningless thing to say. It reminds me when Elon took over twitter and made a comment to the effect of "we need to rethink the entire tech stack from the ground up". Someone asked Elon what was wrong with the tech stack, and he called them a jackass.
It's quite insane that twitter went from 7500 -> 1500 employees and the site didn't implode. 80% of the people gone.
Before the buyout (2021), twitter made $5.1 billion in ad revenue ($6.22 billion inflation-adjusted).
In 2025, it made about $2 billion.
So Twitter is now about 1/3rd of what it was (revenue wise) when purchased.
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We already saw this during the Kickstarter era where all the temporarily confused AAA studios sold themselves as having been held back by unreasonable publishers all this time only to produce the most bland and still unfinished games now that they were funded directly by fans.
Also, Chris Roberts should never be allowed to manage anything bigger than a shoebox. Sometimes, adults minding the financial shop focuses creativity.
If the company lacks either, or either gets too much power they are in trouble. Creative types will spend too much money on things that are nice but won't deliver enough value and so the company goes bankrupt. Financial types don't understand what customers want and optimize away all the expensive creative value the customers buy.
Note that the above applies to every type of company. Exactly what "creative" means is different for different industries, and some need it more than other (how much innovation do you need in soap?...). It always applies though so you need to ensure you get both types in leadership positions even though they don't like or understand each other.
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I needed a new DVD player and I pretty much splurged on an Xbox. But I haven't really used it for gaming.
I remember that was my calculus in the PS2 era. At one point near launch, they weren't much more expensive than a dedicated DVD player.
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> you can lose your job at any time for any reason. Depends on where you are.
I see no difference in this story between where studios are and the challenges facing their employees. It’s the basic fact that you are in an organization which may change direction. And you do not control that organization.
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This is the frustrating thing reading these comments, where people seem to assume that any profit margin is good enough to sustain a business. People see a 3% return and think, "Well, they aren't losing money so there is no reason they can't just keep doing business as usual." What this idea is missing is that the investors in a company aren't choosing between "keep my money in this company" and "sit on the cash", th…
So basically: The stock market is cancer.
It's this competition that leads to prosperity, the alternative is central planning which leads to poverty.
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If you shut down the things that bring in $5 billion revenue, you no longer have $5 billion revenue, you have a gamble that some other industry can ramp up to that quickly. $5 billion has never been "quick money". (Inflation would have to get a whole lot worse for that to happen and that point the company has too many other problems.) That's "Opportunity Cost" among other bits of what used to be past corporate wisdom…
People are pointing to treasury bonds that would give a similar rate of return with no risk at all.
The time value of money suggests money invested today is more powerful than money returned tomorrow, even if you magically get the highest possible rate of return.
The opportunity costs say that if you jump ship on an entire industry don't expect to have the same revenue next year.
I love this weird short term thinking with long term mistakes that treasury bonds are the right benchmark for something like Microsoft's margins and net revenue. It's really fun to watch all the armchair capitalists come out to play that seem to follow quarterly reports like hawks but seem to act like they never took an actual economics course.