
I mean they MAY have cash on hand but looking at revenue is different. I may have 100k in the bank but if I’m unemployed and have no income that won’t last long. They need a source of income and with most game purchases going online that won’t work so they need something else.
Ebay is probably too big of a target for them though…
I don’t know how it is these days but a cool Fandom used to be eve online. The game sucked. 99% of the time you didn’t do anything. Literally. Like to gain isk(money) you could go mining, you would go to an asteroid, click it, activate mining laser, wait, transfer ore to a hauling ship, wait, repeat for several hours. Oh you want to attack someone? Go there, click on them, set ship to rotate, set ship to auto fire, wait to determine if you win or they do.
That said you spent hours in voice comms just hanging out with your group. Many people used the time to make art. There were some who made songs about the game. Many people made life long friends as they were just talking every night for a few hours. This also led to a lot of creative incidents, like the guy who created his own insurance company for in-game property.
There were some assholes. One notable one being the guy who damaged the literal physical obelisk the company made engraved with all the player names and showcased at their convention. He scraped and carved a person’s name out who he was fighting with online. Didn’t hear the end result but I know the company was looking into legal repurcussions.
Plus there the added fact that you can buy a month of game play with RL money or with in-game money and things which are destroyed are gone for ever. That means you can calculate a ratio between in-game and rl money and know how much money that ship you just blew up cost.

I guess I will just keep playing factorio. That’s a game which doesn’t involve any automatic generation involving intelligence … Wait… Fuck!
/s
To be clear I don’t think factorio has any Gen Ai. It does have a lot of automation, a lot of generation and requires a lot of intelligence. I thought it was just a clever bit of word play.
FACTORY MUST GROW!!



Reminds me of an old joke…
Man goes to his boss and says “can we talk. I have a problem!”
His boss gets mad and replies “I don’t want to hear about your problems. We are an opportunity based company. We don’t have problems we have opportunities to improve. Do you understand?”
The man thinks and then replies “yeah, I get it.”
“great now tell me what you wanted to talk about, and you better not use the word problem!”
“well… Based on what you said, I have a huge drinking opportunity”

I like some of their developer products that said… Wtf is with their marketing department? I’m a techy and play some games but if someone asked me to buy them a Xbox I honestly don’t know which one is best… Xbox one series S? I think??
Now atleast on Playstation I know it’s ps5 as it’s the biggest number.
You want Nintendo… Switch as it’s a different enough name to make it stick.
Imagine going to but a truck… Do you want a Ford f150, a Ford f150 series x or a ford f150 series s? Now keep in mind a Ford f150 can’t go on any roads built in last 5 years and if you pick the wrong series letter your speed is capped at 30mph…
Don’t get me started on visual studio vs visual studio code…

For when things go bad look at early episodes of doctor who… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

Somewhat… Not completely but most of the really bad parts were changed https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/unity-makes-major-changes-to-controversial-install-fee-program/
Actually a mod that adds debt and loans into rimworld could be kinda interesting