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Let me try.
By creating a culture that singularly valued money and production over all other concerns, including the well-being of staff, Kotick created and cultivated the conditions needed for abuse to set in.
And Kotick is the kind of sociopath that leads to this when other things are swept under the rug.
Maybe it wasn’t a line item on his payslip though.
Yeah, but Kotick was not really the real issue. He’s a straw man of sorts, a target dummy, designed to draw fire for unpopular decisions.
It is the board and shareholders who massively incentivized him into that behaviour. CEOs are brought in to act in the interests of shareholders, while also abstracting them away from blame and direct culpability.
The goal of blizzard (and any other publically listed company) is wealth creation for shareholders via share price growth, not making games per se.
Yeah you’re right, a divider. Or a 0.x multiplier I suppose.
And you’re also right about the divide between highly skilled and not, but I think that’s what we saw quite strongly in SAO. The side effect of serious consequences separated the players.
I don’t think it’s a successful design approach for a commercial game, most players do not play permadeath even if it’s an common option.
The underlying threat of serious consequences changed player behaviour, psychologically.
Today gamers throw themselves into monsters with limited regard for consequences, which changes our perception of the encounters.
I wonder what would happen if number of deaths was a tracked stat that acted as a multiplier for player skills / powers.
Exactly, just another corporate cash grab. From here it will go to “you buy base game only”, but if you want this city or that quest or planet then it’s paid. You want that npc? Money. The final boss? Credit card pls. Fast travel? That’s platinum club only.
And all in the name of “why should you pay for quests you don’t like” or some other thinly veiled greed.
But they gotta keep that profit line climbing infinitely you know, somehow.
The thing is that this guy is not the head of a public company where shareholders demand massive and continually growing profits. So he acts in the interests of the consumer, the customer, the gamer. But if this was a public company, shareholders would buy shares and then demand he do something to grow that share price, so they can sell the shares later for profit.
When that happens we see that CEOs do everything they can to maximize profits, like promising release dates in earnings calls.
The difference between private and public companies is the single biggest threat to us all because as soon as the company acts in the exclusive interest of profit, everything else gets fucked. And most do.
That means employees, customers, everyone. Only the 1% benefit from the gutting of everyone else.
That’s great, I suppose less concentration to a single platform is a better direction.
Is there less rage and frothing at the mouth on Bluesky? I would imagine whatever ills plague Twitter would also eventually come to Bluesky, because people are there. And people are people. We don’t seem to have a solution to the problem - which is a specific subset of people intent on harm, and allowing them direct and wholesale access to the social fabric.
So easy nowadays to fabricate rage-inducing and follower-generating bait. No time for truth and no plan to really get there. How long before we see someone take a stab at a ministry of truth?