We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes.

-Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview

This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games seriously.  But that is what VentureBeat is for, though even they have toned down the crypto puffery, having moved on to framing AI as the future of everything.  That AI is little more than a scam relative to the promises being made is not a coincidence.

Just wake up already

Anyway, we knew that Hilmar was into the blockchain thing because he had been ostentatiously hobnobbing with the crypto bros and shoving NFTs down people’s throats at the Alliance Tournament, to the point that it created such a backlash that he had to promise that blockchain would not be part of EVE Online… for the foreseeable future at least.  From a company that has a history of promises coming with unstated expiration dates, leaving the door open was ominous, but they have at least kept their word so far.

All of which is so much back story, but doesn’t really address the quote.  And, on its own, it doesn’t seem like much of a quote to get me riled up enough to make a post.  I mean, if I wanted wanted to get riled up I need go no further than the regular shitheel Mike Ybarra, who tried to inject himself into relevance again by declaring on Twitter that we should go easy on Microsoft Games/XBox head Phil Spencer after he killed more studios and laid off more staff because executives have feelings too.

Not to get too angry about this, but if you want to be the boss of a big organization that is going to close studios and lay people off, you better be up to the task of taking a bit of well warranted criticism because whatever in the hell else are you doing to earn that bloated compensation package.  Because you don’t actually MAKE anything or do anything on a day to day basis but make high level decisions that other people will implement.

You want to be the boss?  Then harden the fuck up.  Certainly don’t be a whiny bitch like Mike Ybarra.  Can we just put him in a ring with Mark Kern and have them battle over which “resting on extremely dubious laurels” contestant is the least relevant?  I don’t even care who would win, I just want their ignorance to stop showing up in my timeline.

You think I’ve gone off on a tangent here, don’t you?  Suddenly I’m all up about somebody who isn’t associated in any way with the quote at the top.  But you’re wrong!  It all ties together.

Because Hilmar is the head of CCP, so occupies that same role, being the captain who, if he isn’t actually steering the ship, is at least telling the helmsman the course to follow.  And when Hilmar gets a bad idea stuck in his head, he won’t let it go.

Which brings us to Project Awakening, the cryto game that CCP is making, though at least they are spending Marc Andressen’s money to do it, as a16z is in for $40 million to make this blockchain fantasy real.

I have a whole rambling post about Project Awakening and its source and implications, the former being a Hilmar obsession, the latter being a financial disaster, but we’ll let history judge on that should it ship.

What I did NOT expect was that a past Hilmar obsession… at least what I thought was a “past” obsession… would make an appearance in Project Awakening.  But there it is in that quote.  Hilmar was really fascinated by the book Three-Body Problem.

Somewhere I have a quote from him about how that book really inspired him and set him on a course to what became the “chaos era” of New Eden.  There is a whole tag dedicated to that and its effects if you click here and scroll down.

We got Drifters appearing and hitting player owned structures in null sec… mysteriously focusing on Delve at a time when we were burning down PanFam structures in Tribute… funny how that worked out… and then they were camping gates and then Hilmar wanted to stir the chaos era pot even further and initiated the null sec local blackout.

Local was delayed in null sec

That was a huge success… oh wait, I am holding the chart upside down… no, that led to the second lowest level of player logins in recent-ish memory.

Logins Crater with the Blackout Dip of 2019

The only bigger hit to player logins came with the industrial great leap forward when CCP absolutely wrecked the economy… once again, in the middle of a freaking war effectively ending by making capital ships too expensive to risk… leading to what I refer to as the Year of Disappointment, which was only broken when CCP relented a bit on the economy… though the mineral price index is still close to an all time high because their resource allocation program made certain minerals spawn only in low sec where miners are hunted relentlessly.

All of which you would think would be a lesson from which a company might learn.

But no, there is Hilmar up there referencing the Three-Body Problem again and, further on in the interview, talking about how the game takes place on a planet that is under the influence of three nearby black holes… something which he claims they are spending time modeling… which sounds to me like he is going whole hog on chaos again.

So if I wasn’t down enough on Project Awakening already for being blockchain based, which means it will, at a minimum, attract the type of people who like crypto due to the “get rich quick” allure of it, meaning even if it isn’t a scam, it will host scams before collapsing in on itself when it runs out of suckers, there is now the extra added level of Hilmar wanting to set things on fire right from the get-go.

There are currently zero crypto games that have been anything but brief successes before falling to the self-defeating logic of the idea that you can make money playing a video game over time.

But now the whole thing will be hamstrung by chaos.

Between that and EVE Vanguard, the fans of which have to keep saying “it’s only in alpha” as a defense of its lackluster showing so far, I wonder where CCP will be in five years.  I hope they get the upcoming Equinox expansion right and don’t mess up EVE: Galaxy Conquest, the other title they have in development.

We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes.

-Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview

This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games seriously.  But that is what VentureBeat is for, though even they have toned down the crypto puffery, having moved on to framing AI as the future of everything.  That AI is little more than a scam relative to the promises being made is not a coincidence.

Just wake up already

Anyway, we knew that Hilmar was into the blockchain thing because he had been ostentatiously hobnobbing with the crypto bros and shoving NFTs down people’s throats at the Alliance Tournament, to the point that it created such a backlash that he had to promise that blockchain would not be part of EVE Online… for the foreseeable future at least.  From a company that has a history of promises coming with unstated expiration dates, leaving the door open was ominous, but they have at least kept their word so far.

All of which is so much back story, but doesn’t really address the quote.  And, on its own, it doesn’t seem like much of a quote to get me riled up enough to make a post.  I mean, if I wanted wanted to get riled up I need go no further than the regular shitheel Mike Ybarra, who tried to inject himself into relevance again by declaring on Twitter that we should go easy on Microsoft Games/XBox head Phil Spencer after he killed more studios and laid off more staff because executives have feelings too.

Not to get too angry about this, but if you want to be the boss of a big organization that is going to close studios and lay people off, you better be up to the task of taking a bit of well warranted criticism because whatever in the hell else are you doing to earn that bloated compensation package.  Because you don’t actually MAKE anything or do anything on a day to day basis but make high level decisions that other people will implement.

You want to be the boss?  Then harden the fuck up.  Certainly don’t be a whiny bitch like Mike Ybarra.  Can we just put him in a ring with Mark Kern and have them battle over which “resting on extremely dubious laurels” contestant is the least relevant?  I don’t even care who would win, I just want their ignorance to stop showing up in my timeline.

You think I’ve gone off on a tangent here, don’t you?  Suddenly I’m all up about somebody who isn’t associated in any way with the quote at the top.  But you’re wrong!  It all ties together.

Because Hilmar is the head of CCP, so occupies that same role, being the captain who, if he isn’t actually steering the ship, is at least telling the helmsman the course to follow.  And when Hilmar gets a bad idea stuck in his head, he won’t let it go.

Which brings us to Project Awakening, the cryto game that CCP is making, though at least they are spending Marc Andressen’s money to do it, as a16z is in for $40 million to make this blockchain fantasy real.

I have a whole rambling post about Project Awakening and its source and implications, the former being a Hilmar obsession, the latter being a financial disaster, but we’ll let history judge on that should it ship.

What I did NOT expect was that a past Hilmar obsession… at least what I thought was a “past” obsession… would make an appearance in Project Awakening.  But there it is in that quote.  Hilmar was really fascinated by the book Three-Body Problem.

Somewhere I have a quote from him about how that book really inspired him and set him on a course to what became the “chaos era” of New Eden.  There is a whole tag dedicated to that and its effects if you click here and scroll down.

We got Drifters appearing and hitting player owned structures in null sec… mysteriously focusing on Delve at a time when we were burning down PanFam structures in Tribute… funny how that worked out… and then they were camping gates and then Hilmar wanted to stir the chaos era pot even further and initiated the null sec local blackout.

Local was delayed in null sec

That was a huge success… oh wait, I am holding the chart upside down… no, that led to the second lowest level of player logins in recent-ish memory.

Logins Crater with the Blackout Dip of 2019

The only bigger hit to player logins came with the industrial great leap forward when CCP absolutely wrecked the economy… once again, in the middle of a freaking war effectively ending by making capital ships too expensive to risk… leading to what I refer to as the Year of Disappointment, which was only broken when CCP relented a bit on the economy… though the mineral price index is still close to an all time high because their resource allocation program made certain minerals spawn only in low sec where miners are hunted relentlessly.

All of which you would think would be a lesson from which a company might learn.

But no, there is Hilmar up there referencing the Three-Body Problem again and, further on in the interview, talking about how the game takes place on a planet that is under the influence of three nearby black holes… something which he claims they are spending time modeling… which sounds to me like he is going whole hog on chaos again.

So if I wasn’t down enough on Project Awakening already for being blockchain based, which means it will, at a minimum, attract the type of people who like crypto due to the “get rich quick” allure of it, meaning even if it isn’t a scam, it will host scams before collapsing in on itself when it runs out of suckers, there is now the extra added level of Hilmar wanting to set things on fire right from the get-go.

There are currently zero crypto games that have been anything but brief successes before falling to the self-defeating logic of the idea that you can make money playing a video game over time.

But now the whole thing will be hamstrung by chaos.

Between that and EVE Vanguard, the fans of which have to keep saying “it’s only in alpha” as a defense of its lackluster showing so far, I wonder where CCP will be in five years.  I hope they get the upcoming Equinox expansion right and don’t mess up EVE: Galaxy Conquest, the other title they have in development.

We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes.

-Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview

This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games seriously.  But that is what VentureBeat is for, though even they have toned down the crypto puffery, having moved on to framing AI as the future of everything.  That AI is little more than a scam relative to the promises being made is not a coincidence.

Just wake up already

Anyway, we knew that Hilmar was into the blockchain thing because he had been ostentatiously hobnobbing with the crypto bros and shoving NFTs down people’s throats at the Alliance Tournament, to the point that it created such a backlash that he had to promise that blockchain would not be part of EVE Online… for the foreseeable future at least.  From a company that has a history of promises coming with unstated expiration dates, leaving the door open was ominous, but they have at least kept their word so far.

All of which is so much back story, but doesn’t really address the quote.  And, on its own, it doesn’t seem like much of a quote to get me riled up enough to make a post.  I mean, if I wanted wanted to get riled up I need go no further than the regular shitheel Mike Ybarra, who tried to inject himself into relevance again by declaring on Twitter that we should go easy on Microsoft Games/XBox head Phil Spencer after he killed more studios and laid off more staff because executives have feelings too.

Not to get too angry about this, but if you want to be the boss of a big organization that is going to close studios and lay people off, you better be up to the task of taking a bit of well warranted criticism because whatever in the hell else are you doing to earn that bloated compensation package.  Because you don’t actually MAKE anything or do anything on a day to day basis but make high level decisions that other people will implement.

You want to be the boss?  Then harden the fuck up.  Certainly don’t be a whiny bitch like Mike Ybarra.  Can we just put him in a ring with Mark Kern and have them battle over which “resting on extremely dubious laurels” contestant is the least relevant?  I don’t even care who would win, I just want their ignorance to stop showing up in my timeline.

You think I’ve gone off on a tangent here, don’t you?  Suddenly I’m all up about somebody who isn’t associated in any way with the quote at the top.  But you’re wrong!  It all ties together.

Because Hilmar is the head of CCP, so occupies that same role, being the captain who, if he isn’t actually steering the ship, is at least telling the helmsman the course to follow.  And when Hilmar gets a bad idea stuck in his head, he won’t let it go.

Which brings us to Project Awakening, the cryto game that CCP is making, though at least they are spending Marc Andressen’s money to do it, as a16z is in for $40 million to make this blockchain fantasy real.

I have a whole rambling post about Project Awakening and its source and implications, the former being a Hilmar obsession, the latter being a financial disaster, but we’ll let history judge on that should it ship.

What I did NOT expect was that a past Hilmar obsession… at least what I thought was a “past” obsession… would make an appearance in Project Awakening.  But there it is in that quote.  Hilmar was really fascinated by the book Three-Body Problem.

Somewhere I have a quote from him about how that book really inspired him and set him on a course to what became the “chaos era” of New Eden.  There is a whole tag dedicated to that and its effects if you click here and scroll down.

We got Drifters appearing and hitting player owned structures in null sec… mysteriously focusing on Delve at a time when we were burning down PanFam structures in Tribute… funny how that worked out… and then they were camping gates and then Hilmar wanted to stir the chaos era pot even further and initiated the null sec local blackout.

Local was delayed in null sec

That was a huge success… oh wait, I am holding the chart upside down… no, that led to the second lowest level of player logins in recent-ish memory.

Logins Crater with the Blackout Dip of 2019

The only bigger hit to player logins came with the industrial great leap forward when CCP absolutely wrecked the economy… once again, in the middle of a freaking war effectively ending by making capital ships too expensive to risk… leading to what I refer to as the Year of Disappointment, which was only broken when CCP relented a bit on the economy… though the mineral price index is still close to an all time high because their resource allocation program made certain minerals spawn only in low sec where miners are hunted relentlessly.

All of which you would think would be a lesson from which a company might learn.

But no, there is Hilmar up there referencing the Three-Body Problem again and, further on in the interview, talking about how the game takes place on a planet that is under the influence of three nearby black holes… something which he claims they are spending time modeling… which sounds to me like he is going whole hog on chaos again.

So if I wasn’t down enough on Project Awakening already for being blockchain based, which means it will, at a minimum, attract the type of people who like crypto due to the “get rich quick” allure of it, meaning even if it isn’t a scam, it will host scams before collapsing in on itself when it runs out of suckers, there is now the extra added level of Hilmar wanting to set things on fire right from the get-go.

There are currently zero crypto games that have been anything but brief successes before falling to the self-defeating logic of the idea that you can make money playing a video game over time.

But now the whole thing will be hamstrung by chaos.

Between that and EVE Vanguard, the fans of which have to keep saying “it’s only in alpha” as a defense of its lackluster showing so far, I wonder where CCP will be in five years.  I hope they get the upcoming Equinox expansion right and don’t mess up EVE: Galaxy Conquest, the other title they have in development.

It’s a very big game, and we feel people will really see how how vast and complete that game is. It’s a really full, triple… quadruple-A game, that will deliver in the long run.

-Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, justifying Skull and Bones’ $70 price point

What to say about Skull and Bones?

I wasn’t even going to do this as a quote of the day.  This quote was back at the beginning of the month, Skull and Bones feels like it is mainly a console title, and while I kept seeing it advertised on Twitter (that UbiSoft gives Elon money is another issue), it was never going to be something I would play.

To start with, it is a UbiSoft title and they have been on my blacklist for a couple of decades now for simply being complete shits.  I will buy EA titles, but screw UbiSoft and there customer hating policies.  Never is a long time, but I am willing to give it a shot in their case.

Skull and Bones – An original something

Furthermore, we all know, back in the logical parts of our brains, that AAA game prices (there are no AAAA games, knock that shit off before it infects the damn industry) being stuck at $60 for 20 years was not tenable in the real world where the price of nearly everything else has consistantly gone up.  So charging $70 isn’t a sin in my book, because if they don’t do that, then it will just be DLC and a cash shop and season passes… wait, they’ll do that even if they do raise the price.  That ship has sailed.  Nevermind I guess.

But the whole thing came up as part of the price discussion when an investor rep asked why the game couldn’t have been free to play and just loaded on more of the extras, since free will generally draw a bigger audience.  Anybody with some history knows how much UbiSoft hates the idea of anybody getting anything for free.  My early hate was fed by their draconian copy protection measures, which literally punished people who paid and encouraged pirating.

Finally, Yves Guillemot saying something dumb and annoying is barely news.  He is the arrogant face of a company that consistantly tries to prove it sees its customers as the enemy, or such is my extremely biased view.  I will repeat, every time I mention UbiSoft, that I hold a grudge.

But then I though about my new year’s prediction about UbiSoft finding some way to piss me off in 2024 and I asked myself, “Did this quote make me say ‘Fuck that guy!’ when I saw it?”

And yes, yes it did in fact make me say “Fuck that guy!” when I saw it.  It wasn’t a full throated utterance, but it rose to the point of muttered vocalization, and I am going to say that counts.  So I figured I had best document that quote so I can find it come December when I score my predictions.

Then, as icing on the cake as I wrote this I went to go check the review scores on MetaCritic, just to see how the alleged AAAA game was faring.  It is hard to tell.  I mean, on most days, when the review score range is locked in at 75-100 because gaming sites want ad revenue from the big names, seeing a score of 60 would be a pretty hard blow.

The PS5 has the most reviews, so I chose that

60 is better than 40 or 20, but it also smacks of “how low can we go before Yves bans our site from ads forever more?”  I am not completely unsympathetic to that reasoning.  Game sites gotta survive too.

Then again, maybe this is the new quadruple A grading scale?  Maybe a 60 is good?

Certainly the user reviews made reference to the AAAA quote from the CEO.

Skull and Bones apparently took a decade to make, costs somewhere in the region of $200 million over that time, and there was Yves painting a big target on its back, giving people an excuse to shit all over it and the price because it is also a full on live service cash grab.

Never change UbiSoft, never change.

Also, 10 points for Hufflepuff!

It’s a very big game, and we feel people will really see how how vast and complete that game is. It’s a really full, triple… quadruple-A game, that will deliver in the long run.

-Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, justifying Skull and Bones’ $70 price point

What to say about Skull and Bones?

I wasn’t even going to do this as a quote of the day.  This quote was back at the beginning of the month, Skull and Bones feels like it is mainly a console title, and while I kept seeing it advertised on Twitter (that UbiSoft gives Elon money is another issue), it was never going to be something I would play.

To start with, it is a UbiSoft title and they have been on my blacklist for a couple of decades now for simply being complete shits.  I will buy EA titles, but screw UbiSoft and there customer hating policies.  Never is a long time, but I am willing to give it a shot in their case.

Skull and Bones – An original something

Furthermore, we all know, back in the logical parts of our brains, that AAA game prices (there are no AAAA games, knock that shit off before it infects the damn industry) being stuck at $60 for 20 years was not tenable in the real world where the price of nearly everything else has consistantly gone up.  So charging $70 isn’t a sin in my book, because if they don’t do that, then it will just be DLC and a cash shop and season passes… wait, they’ll do that even if they do raise the price.  That ship has sailed.  Nevermind I guess.

But the whole thing came up as part of the price discussion when an investor rep asked why the game couldn’t have been free to play and just loaded on more of the extras, since free will generally draw a bigger audience.  Anybody with some history knows how much UbiSoft hates the idea of anybody getting anything for free.  My early hate was fed by their draconian copy protection measures, which literally punished people who paid and encouraged pirating.

Finally, Yves Guillemot saying something dumb and annoying is barely news.  He is the arrogant face of a company that consistantly tries to prove it sees its customers as the enemy, or such is my extremely biased view.  I will repeat, every time I mention UbiSoft, that I hold a grudge.

But then I though about my new year’s prediction about UbiSoft finding some way to piss me off in 2024 and I asked myself, “Did this quote make me say ‘Fuck that guy!’ when I saw it?”

And yes, yes it did in fact make me say “Fuck that guy!” when I saw it.  It wasn’t a full throated utterance, but it rose to the point of muttered vocalization, and I am going to say that counts.  So I figured I had best document that quote so I can find it come December when I score my predictions.

Then, as icing on the cake as I wrote this I went to go check the review scores on MetaCritic, just to see how the alleged AAAA game was faring.  It is hard to tell.  I mean, on most days, when the review score range is locked in at 75-100 because gaming sites want ad revenue from the big names, seeing a score of 60 would be a pretty hard blow.

The PS5 has the most reviews, so I chose that

60 is better than 40 or 20, but it also smacks of “how low can we go before Yves bans our site from ads forever more?”  I am not completely unsympathetic to that reasoning.  Game sites gotta survive too.

Then again, maybe this is the new quadruple A grading scale?  Maybe a 60 is good?

Certainly the user reviews made reference to the AAAA quote from the CEO.

Skull and Bones apparently took a decade to make, costs somewhere in the region of $200 million over that time, and there was Yves painting a big target on its back, giving people an excuse to shit all over it and the price because it is also a full on live service cash grab.

Never change UbiSoft, never change.

Also, 10 points for Hufflepuff!

Our overruling principle is to always maximize shareholder value in any given situation.

-Embracer Group, Calendar Q4 2023 Financial Report

This past week the train wreck that is the once ominously (and now tragically) named Embracer Group declared that sure, they were laying off staff and cancelling almost every project they had going, but it was because their “overruling principle is to always maximize shareholder value in any given situation,” which is such an astonishing lie that I combed Swedish police blotter entries for reports of individuals whose pants were literally on fire.

Embrace This… Comic Sans font used on purpose to register my disdain

Embracer Group has been the victim of tragicly incompentent management of the company, studios, and brands they own.  Remember, these are the people who own all of Tolkien and declared that they were going to fix their issues by exploiting Middle-earth to the maximum.

If there were any justice in the world the senior execs at Embracer as a whole, and CEO Lars Wingefors in particular, would be run out of town on a rail, then face lawsuits and possible criminal charges for their overtly deceptive behavior at the helm of the enterprise.

Instead of reprecussions however, those execs are trying to claim they are very concerned about shareholder value while being shocked and surprised that their gamble with shareholder money did not play out.

The thing is, when you’ve screwed things up so badly and so deliberately, if you start spending your Saudi blood investment money before you’ve closed the deal and you don’t have the good sense to have a plan, then you have already blown your fiduciary responsibility to the investors, you have already proven that you do not, in fact, in any way, have the maximization of shareholder value in mind in the operation of your business.

You cannot fuck everything up and then claim to be a champion of the shareholders.

There is a lot to hate about that quote at the top of the post.  Certainly at the top of the list would be equating short term stock price with shareholder value.  Shareholder value is a lot more than that, or should be.  I am keenly aware of the perverse incentives that reward short term thinking, that only what is happening in the current fiscal quarter matters, and how captial management groups and Wall Street in general hold  companies accountable only on that dynamic.

All of this late stage capitalism where gambling on stock prices and demanding that the line must always go up is very bad and will always end in tears.

Tom Toro cartoon from The New Yorker

(You can read a bit about Tom Toro here.)

It is easy to get mad about that, and more people should be mad about that.

But Embracer isn’t even in that league.  These fuckwits screwed things up in patently predictable and obvious ways, during which time they were clearly not considering shareholder value with any more depth than if they had gone to Vegas and put all of their money on red.

It was only after screwing things up and getting the company in a bind that they decided it was time to come out and make an empty declaration about shareholder value.

I am reminded of a Dennis Miller quote about nobody finding Christ on prom night.  It is only when you’ve fucked everything up that seeking salvation seems like a good plan.

For once I am on the side of Wall Street.  Or I would be if I had any hope that they would see through this bald face lie and vote the rascals out at the earliest possible opportunity.  Again, justice would be the executive staff finishing their lives working at an off-brand fast food restaurant where their shift leader asked them at least once a week how the shareholder value thing was going.  Hey Lars, how is the shareholder value today?  Did that customer get any shareholder value with their lutefiske Lars?  What are you doing at the deep fryer that is maximizng shareholder value Lars?

A man can dream.

Alas, it won’t come to pass.  If there is one thing I have learned in life is that the rich take care of the rich.  As a CEO you only face actual reprecussions if you betray your class.  Even if they drive the whole thing into the ground, which they could still do given the business accumen they have shown so far, they’ll still get positions of responsibility, serve on boards, and prosper in all the little ways that show how the rich take care of their own.

Related:

• Game Developer – Embracer says it’s looking out for shareholders after cutting almost 1,400 jobs
• Massively OP – Embracer confirms layoffs of nearly 1400 people were part of efforts to ‘always maximize shareholder value’
• Kotaku – Embracer Cancelled Nearly 30 Games In Just 6 Months
• IGN – Embracer Warns of More Layoffs Despite Already Letting Go 1,387 Staff
• Games Radar – Embracer Group quietly cancelled 29 unannounced games and shut 7 studios within six months last year
• PC Gamer – Embracer reveals it laid off around 1,400 people in 6 months last year, but don’t be a bellyacher—this is all about ‘maximising shareholder value’
• Fandom Wire – “always maximize shareholder value”: Embracer Group Shows Its True Colours After Sacking More Employees
• Gamesindustry.biz – Embracer CEO says layoffs are “something that everyone needs to get through”

Our overruling principle is to always maximize shareholder value in any given situation.

-Embracer Group, Calendar Q4 2023 Financial Report

This past week the train wreck that is the once ominously (and now tragically) named Embracer Group declared that sure, they were laying off staff and cancelling almost every project they had going, but it was because their “overruling principle is to always maximize shareholder value in any given situation,” which is such an astonishing lie that I combed Swedish police blotter entries for reports of individuals whose pants were literally on fire.

Embrace This… Comic Sans font used on purpose to register my disdain

Embracer Group has been the victim of tragicly incompentent management of the company, studios, and brands they own.  Remember, these are the people who own all of Tolkien and declared that they were going to fix their issues by exploiting Middle-earth to the maximum.

If there were any justice in the world the senior execs at Embracer as a whole, and CEO Lars Wingefors in particular, would be run out of town on a rail, then face lawsuits and possible criminal charges for their overtly deceptive behavior at the helm of the enterprise.

Instead of reprecussions however, those execs are trying to claim they are very concerned about shareholder value while being shocked and surprised that their gamble with shareholder money did not play out.

The thing is, when you’ve screwed things up so badly and so deliberately, if you start spending your Saudi blood investment money before you’ve closed the deal and you don’t have the good sense to have a plan, then you have already blown your fiduciary responsibility to the investors, you have already proven that you do not, in fact, in any way, have the maximization of shareholder value in mind in the operation of your business.

You cannot fuck everything up and then claim to be a champion of the shareholders.

There is a lot to hate about that quote at the top of the post.  Certainly at the top of the list would be equating short term stock price with shareholder value.  Shareholder value is a lot more than that, or should be.  I am keenly aware of the perverse incentives that reward short term thinking, that only what is happening in the current fiscal quarter matters, and how captial management groups and Wall Street in general hold  companies accountable only on that dynamic.

All of this late stage capitalism where gambling on stock prices and demanding that the line must always go up is very bad and will always end in tears.

Tom Toro cartoon from The New Yorker

(You can read a bit about Tom Toro here.)

It is easy to get mad about that, and more people should be mad about that.

But Embracer isn’t even in that league.  These fuckwits screwed things up in patently predictable and obvious ways, during which time they were clearly not considering shareholder value with any more depth than if they had gone to Vegas and put all of their money on red.

It was only after screwing things up and getting the company in a bind that they decided it was time to come out and make an empty declaration about shareholder value.

I am reminded of a Dennis Miller quote about nobody finding Christ on prom night.  It is only when you’ve fucked everything up that seeking salvation seems like a good plan.

For once I am on the side of Wall Street.  Or I would be if I had any hope that they would see through this bald face lie and vote the rascals out at the earliest possible opportunity.  Again, justice would be the executive staff finishing their lives working at an off-brand fast food restaurant where their shift leader asked them at least once a week how the shareholder value thing was going.  Hey Lars, how is the shareholder value today?  Did that customer get any shareholder value with their lutefiske Lars?  What are you doing at the deep fryer that is maximizng shareholder value Lars?

A man can dream.

Alas, it won’t come to pass.  If there is one thing I have learned in life is that the rich take care of the rich.  As a CEO you only face actual reprecussions if you betray your class.  Even if they drive the whole thing into the ground, which they could still do given the business accumen they have shown so far, they’ll still get positions of responsibility, serve on boards, and prosper in all the little ways that show how the rich take care of their own.

Related:

• Game Developer – Embracer says it’s looking out for shareholders after cutting almost 1,400 jobs
• Massively OP – Embracer confirms layoffs of nearly 1400 people were part of efforts to ‘always maximize shareholder value’
• Kotaku – Embracer Cancelled Nearly 30 Games In Just 6 Months
• IGN – Embracer Warns of More Layoffs Despite Already Letting Go 1,387 Staff
• Games Radar – Embracer Group quietly cancelled 29 unannounced games and shut 7 studios within six months last year
• PC Gamer – Embracer reveals it laid off around 1,400 people in 6 months last year, but don’t be a bellyacher—this is all about ‘maximising shareholder value’
• Fandom Wire – “always maximize shareholder value”: Embracer Group Shows Its True Colours After Sacking More Employees
• Gamesindustry.biz – Embracer CEO says layoffs are “something that everyone needs to get through”

Our overruling principle is to always maximize shareholder value in any given situation.

-Embracer Group, Calendar Q4 2023 Financial Report

This past week the train wreck that is the once ominously (and now tragically) named Embracer Group declared that sure, they were laying off staff and cancelling almost every project they had going, but it was because their “overruling principle is to always maximize shareholder value in any given situation,” which is such an astonishing lie that I combed Swedish police blotter entries for reports of individuals whose pants were literally on fire.

Embrace This… Comic Sans font used on purpose to register my disdain

Embracer Group has been the victim of tragicly incompentent management of the company, studios, and brands they own.  Remember, these are the people who own all of Tolkien and declared that they were going to fix their issues by exploiting Middle-earth to the maximum.

If there were any justice in the world the senior execs at Embracer as a whole, and CEO Lars Wingefors in particular, would be run out of town on a rail, then face lawsuits and possible criminal charges for their overtly deceptive behavior at the helm of the enterprise.

Instead of reprecussions however, those execs are trying to claim they are very concerned about shareholder value while being shocked and surprised that their gamble with shareholder money did not play out.

The thing is, when you’ve screwed things up so badly and so deliberately, if you start spending your Saudi blood investment money before you’ve closed the deal and you don’t have the good sense to have a plan, then you have already blown your fiduciary responsibility to the investors, you have already proven that you do not, in fact, in any way, have the maximization of shareholder value in mind in the operation of your business.

You cannot fuck everything up and then claim to be a champion of the shareholders.

There is a lot to hate about that quote at the top of the post.  Certainly at the top of the list would be equating short term stock price with shareholder value.  Shareholder value is a lot more than that, or should be.  I am keenly aware of the perverse incentives that reward short term thinking, that only what is happening in the current fiscal quarter matters, and how captial management groups and Wall Street in general hold  companies accountable only on that dynamic.

All of this late stage capitalism where gambling on stock prices and demanding that the line must always go up is very bad and will always end in tears.

Tom Toro cartoon from The New Yorker

(You can read a bit about Tom Toro here.)

It is easy to get mad about that, and more people should be mad about that.

But Embracer isn’t even in that league.  These fuckwits screwed things up in patently predictable and obvious ways, during which time they were clearly not considering shareholder value with any more depth than if they had gone to Vegas and put all of their money on red.

It was only after screwing things up and getting the company in a bind that they decided it was time to come out and make an empty declaration about shareholder value.

I am reminded of a Dennis Miller quote about nobody finding Christ on prom night.  It is only when you’ve fucked everything up that seeking salvation seems like a good plan.

For once I am on the side of Wall Street.  Or I would be if I had any hope that they would see through this bald face lie and vote the rascals out at the earliest possible opportunity.  Again, justice would be the executive staff finishing their lives working at an off-brand fast food restaurant where their shift leader asked them at least once a week how the shareholder value thing was going.  Hey Lars, how is the shareholder value today?  Did that customer get any shareholder value with their lutefiske Lars?  What are you doing at the deep fryer that is maximizng shareholder value Lars?

A man can dream.

Alas, it won’t come to pass.  If there is one thing I have learned in life is that the rich take care of the rich.  As a CEO you only face actual reprecussions if you betray your class.  Even if they drive the whole thing into the ground, which they could still do given the business accumen they have shown so far, they’ll still get positions of responsibility, serve on boards, and prosper in all the little ways that show how the rich take care of their own.

Related:

• Game Developer – Embracer says it’s looking out for shareholders after cutting almost 1,400 jobs
• Massively OP – Embracer confirms layoffs of nearly 1400 people were part of efforts to ‘always maximize shareholder value’
• Kotaku – Embracer Cancelled Nearly 30 Games In Just 6 Months
• IGN – Embracer Warns of More Layoffs Despite Already Letting Go 1,387 Staff
• Games Radar – Embracer Group quietly cancelled 29 unannounced games and shut 7 studios within six months last year
• PC Gamer – Embracer reveals it laid off around 1,400 people in 6 months last year, but don’t be a bellyacher—this is all about ‘maximising shareholder value’
• Fandom Wire – “always maximize shareholder value”: Embracer Group Shows Its True Colours After Sacking More Employees
• Gamesindustry.biz – Embracer CEO says layoffs are “something that everyone needs to get through”