So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have.

-Stars Reach, What is Stars Reach About

Getting along is less the point for me than enjoying the benefits of an online game without being forced to get along at all.  But I am mildly grumpy most of the time anyway.  Also, I am sure somebody it going to get annoyed about politics in video games, like they were not always that way.

I wasn’t even going to write a post about the latest design vision posted over on the Stars Reach site.  After three rounds of pillars, I was feeling kind of done with a lot of promises and not much substance.

If you missed the pillars posts, you can find my thoughts here.

• Part I  – Stars Reach has Some Design Pillars for You to Get Invested In
• Part II – Stars Reach is Back with More Design Pillars about the Game Look and Feel
• Part III – Stars Reach is Back with a Final Set of Pillars, This Time About the Vibe

But yeah, I wasn’t going to bother.

Stars Reach Announced

And then Raph had to get in there and call the tragedy of the commons a lie and my brain exploded.  I mean, fuck subtlety or nuance or reasoned thought!  This is so incendiary in my head that I am half convinced it was a troll for attention.  I mean, it generated a lot of comments over at Massively OP when Bree decided to lead with that in the headline.  All of which put me in a mood, and the only therapy that works is words.

So op success if it was a troll!

I could write a whole post about why that statement is absolutely NOT the correct summary of the work of Dr. Ostrom, and how a better interpretation might be that people pretty reliably find some solution before it becomes the tragedy, even if those solutions are not always fair or equitable, because survival often depends on it.  Don’t make me go into the communal distribution of arable land in Czarist Russian agriculture.  I’ll post about village level plot allocations and archaic strip farming traditions if you push me!

Anyway, I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me cover the other parts of the post from Raph and Playable Worlds… I’d like to think Raph gets input from the team before he posts these things, that it isn’t all just “Raph says” because he has Carneros on the team, who I know from EVE Online both as a fellow member of Reavers and as the former leader of a sizable in-game player group, which seems like useful experience, but these posts always framed as being exclusively from Raph so it is hard to tell… which goes through Raph’s four questions exercise.  Those questions are:

• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)
• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Seems a pretty reasonable set of questions, to the point I wish a few titles that went to Kickstarter for funding would have given them a shot.

Raph’s short answers for the four above questions were:

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)

After ruining our homeworlds, we are given a second chance to learn to live in harmony with one another and with the natural world as we venture forth into the galaxy.

So we have messed up our home world and are being given another shot to do it again!  There is always an element of fantasy in science fiction I suppose.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)

Diverse groups of people with very different ways to play come together to build new societies, and grapple with the problems of building sustainable space settlements.

Sure, but how?  That is very nebulous.  I guess “how” is next, but this seems pretty light even for a thematic response.

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players work together to maximize their economic standing and in-game investment without destroying the resource pools they draw from as they build up their in-game investment and social groups.

Making the line go up.  Progression of some form or another along with resource management.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players form economic dependencies on each other’s characters by advancing in diverse specializations and skills, all of which draw from the common exhaustible resource pools available in each zone, thereby creating a Tragedy of the Commons problem to navigate as a group.

And here we get to Raph setting up the strawman so he can knock it down and call it a lie.  Why even bring that up in the answer only to turn around and say it isn’t a thing?  I don’t know why.  It is an outcome that people work hard to avoid because their lives depend on it, yet we can find some examples in the real world all the same.

I would argue that the well water situation in the central valley of California, the state where both Raph and I live, where the law is that you can pump all you want, has led to a situation where large almond farming concerns have been motivated to drill deeper, plant more trees, and pump all the water they can to irrigate them before the water runs out… to the point that during the last major drought the water table dropped enough that older wells to ran dry and even caused some areas of land to collapse, might be somewhere in the zone of tragedy of the commons.  It has the classic hallmarks.  The water in the ground is the commons and the industrial almond farmers are abusing it to the detriment of all… even themselves in the longer term.  But when does business think about the long term these days?

However, we don’t need to go to the real world because we are talking about a being online and virtual worlds.  One might be tempted to bring up Ultima Online and the whole natural spawning mechanics that were supposed to populate the wilderness so that if you killed too many prey animals then the predator population would drop off due to lack of food, a concept totally demolished by players harvesting resources in a way that pretty much clear cut anything in site.

But let’s go to a big obvious one.  Let’s talk about Usenet!

I wrote about Usenet earlier this year, so I have some links to hand.  Some old fart out there probably thinks I am going to bring up the September that never ended.  But that was just elitism, a bias against anybody new showing up and upsetting the established order.  That was practically a purity test… no, not that one… as to who deserved to be able to access Usenet.  Students and faculty of universities were good, AOL users were bad, simple as that.

Usenet dealt with that.  It was no big deal in the end.  What killed Usenet were the Green Card Lawyers, Canter and Siegel, who discovered it was extremely cheap to spam ads on Usenet, such that even getting one response after cross posting to thousands of groups was a complete financial victory.

And Usenet was then made unusable by spam bots.

This was facilitated by the fact that Usenet was designed to be a distributed system with no central authority who could do things like ban or block offenders.  Everything had to be done at the local level.  Your local sys admin had to care enough to subscribe your local serve to cancel channels that would remove know spammers, though there was always discussion as to who counted and what threshold had to be crossed to be worth of the list.

In the end people just left because unlike the real world, you can just walk away from any part of the internet you don’t find value in.

What else has been described as a distributed system with local authority setting the rules?  Why, Stars Reach!

To be fair to Raph and team, they know there is a potential problem and they at least acknowledge it in the post with this:

All that is needed is for the players to have the tools to collectively manage their space. We as a team definitely need to nail that aspect. And then, yeah, it gets hard, because trying to solve for everyone’s competing needs and desires means a lot of compromising and negotiation and tough choices.

It is my long time policy to dismiss as garbage anything that starts with a phrase like “All that is needed…” which is then, in the style of the underpants gnomes, is followed by a vague proposed fix to a tough and possibly insoluble problem, but at least they admit they have a problem.  First steps and all that.

The problem is, how much power do player groups running planets need?  Too little and then Usenet is your destination.  But too much power and it becomes petty tyrants and and in-groups and tribalism as those who show up first impose their system on the late comers.

Imagine if you will all those indignant Usenet denizens in 1993 if they had the power available so that they did not need to merely whine at you that you needed to read the group FAQ that is published on the first of every month, before you post because your question is off topic or already answered but could, instead, set up rules to make you adhere to the arbitrary group rules that a few zealots and try hards came up with back when the group was created automatically?

Well, Usenet might have been saved, but at the price of it becoming the domain of a host of online exclusionary clubs unwilling to welcome anybody who wouldn’t toe the line.

Likewise, Stars Reach will face problems if there is too little control given the free ranging ability to modify just about everything on a planet.  Sure, “we’ll spawn more planets” is a possible answer, but given enough latitude some will seek to tear things up just to annoy other players.  Griefing runs deep in some gamer’s DNA.

While on the other side of the equation is the homeowners association view of the world, which ideally keeps chaos at bay through common sense rules agreed upon by the community… but which can often turn into an irresistible attraction to those who seek petty authority and love to tell people what to do.

Do I even need to expand upon homeowner’s associations?  They’re not all bad, but when they’re bad they can be really bad.  I recall a guy on the association board in the for the condo development we lived in way back when my wife and I first got together.  He would dig through people’s garbage can’s and send nasty notes with threats of fines if he found anything that was possibly recyclable in the trash.  He would literally staple things like grocery store receipts pulled from deep in the trash to his notes.  We used to call him the garbage nazi.  That is the sort of person often attracted to such positions.

“We‘re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford. “And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t.  They win.”

Ford Prefect – Life, The Universe, and Everything

I am more Arthur Dent than anything.  I don’t want to run the homeowners association, I just want them to leave me alone.  Likewise, in online games I don’t want to run the guild, fellowship, or corporation, except occasionally as an administrative function with some friends.  Usually so I can spend my own in-game currency to expand the guild bank or hand out medals to corp mates.

It is those who do want to run things, those who are obsessed with a level of control, that send me packing online.  I see the need for a homeowners association in real life and in the vision that Stars Reach is pitching.  But I can see it going wrong.

There is almost a dichotomy of Raph where, on the one hand, he can promote ideas like “the client is in the hands of the enemy” on his rules for online world design while also espousing an vision where players… the people who are “the enemy” in that scenario… can be given responsibility to run an online game, to be the literal governing body that dictates how you will be allowed to play in a given space.

We’ll see what happens… but nothing will be happening for quite a while yet.

Related:

• Stars Reach – WHAT IS STARS REACH ABOUT?
• Massively OP – Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach

So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have.

-Stars Reach, What is Stars Reach About

Getting along is less the point for me than enjoying the benefits of an online game without being forced to get along at all.  But I am mildly grumpy most of the time anyway.  Also, I am sure somebody it going to get annoyed about politics in video games, like they were not always that way.

I wasn’t even going to write a post about the latest design vision posted over on the Stars Reach site.  After three rounds of pillars, I was feeling kind of done with a lot of promises and not much substance.

If you missed the pillars posts, you can find my thoughts here.

• Part I  – Stars Reach has Some Design Pillars for You to Get Invested In
• Part II – Stars Reach is Back with More Design Pillars about the Game Look and Feel
• Part III – Stars Reach is Back with a Final Set of Pillars, This Time About the Vibe

But yeah, I wasn’t going to bother.

Stars Reach Announced

And then Raph had to get in there and call the tragedy of the commons a lie and my brain exploded.  I mean, fuck subtlety or nuance or reasoned thought!  This is so incendiary in my head that I am half convinced it was a troll for attention.  I mean, it generated a lot of comments over at Massively OP when Bree decided to lead with that in the headline.  All of which put me in a mood, and the only therapy that works is words.

So op success if it was a troll!

I could write a whole post about why that statement is absolutely NOT the correct summary of the work of Dr. Ostrom, and how a better interpretation might be that people pretty reliably find some solution before it becomes the tragedy, even if those solutions are not always fair or equitable, because survival often depends on it.  Don’t make me go into the communal distribution of arable land in Czarist Russian agriculture.  I’ll post about village level plot allocations and archaic strip farming traditions if you push me!

Anyway, I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me cover the other parts of the post from Raph and Playable Worlds… I’d like to think Raph gets input from the team before he posts these things, that it isn’t all just “Raph says” because he has Carneros on the team, who I know from EVE Online both as a fellow member of Reavers and as the former leader of a sizable in-game player group, which seems like useful experience, but these posts always framed as being exclusively from Raph so it is hard to tell… which goes through Raph’s four questions exercise.  Those questions are:

• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)
• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Seems a pretty reasonable set of questions, to the point I wish a few titles that went to Kickstarter for funding would have given them a shot.

Raph’s short answers for the four above questions were:

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)

After ruining our homeworlds, we are given a second chance to learn to live in harmony with one another and with the natural world as we venture forth into the galaxy.

So we have messed up our home world and are being given another shot to do it again!  There is always an element of fantasy in science fiction I suppose.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)

Diverse groups of people with very different ways to play come together to build new societies, and grapple with the problems of building sustainable space settlements.

Sure, but how?  That is very nebulous.  I guess “how” is next, but this seems pretty light even for a thematic response.

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players work together to maximize their economic standing and in-game investment without destroying the resource pools they draw from as they build up their in-game investment and social groups.

Making the line go up.  Progression of some form or another along with resource management.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players form economic dependencies on each other’s characters by advancing in diverse specializations and skills, all of which draw from the common exhaustible resource pools available in each zone, thereby creating a Tragedy of the Commons problem to navigate as a group.

And here we get to Raph setting up the strawman so he can knock it down and call it a lie.  Why even bring that up in the answer only to turn around and say it isn’t a thing?  I don’t know why.  It is an outcome that people work hard to avoid because their lives depend on it, yet we can find some examples in the real world all the same.

I would argue that the well water situation in the central valley of California, the state where both Raph and I live, where the law is that you can pump all you want, has led to a situation where large almond farming concerns have been motivated to drill deeper, plant more trees, and pump all the water they can before to irrigate them before the water runs out… to the point that during the last major drought the water table dropped enough that older wells to run dry and even caused some areas of land to collapse, might be somewhere in the zone of tragedy of the commons.  It has the classic hallmarks.  The water in the ground is the commons and the industrial almond farmers are abusing it to the detriment of all.

However, we don’t need to go to the real world because we are talking about a being online and virtual worlds.  One might be tempted to bring up Ultima Online and the whole natural spawning mechanics that were supposed to populate the wilderness so that if you killed too many prey animals then the predator population would drop off due to lack of food, a concept totally demolished by players harvesting resources in a way that pretty much clear cut anything in site.

But let’s go to a big obvious one.  Let’s talk about Usenet!

I wrote about Usenet earlier this year, so I have some links to hand.  Some old fart out there probably thinks I am going to bring up the September that never ended.  But that was just elitism, a bias against anybody new showing up and upsetting the established order.  That was practically a purity test… no, not that one… as to who deserved to be able to access Usenet.  Students and faculty of universities were good, AOL users were bad, simple as that.

Usenet dealt with that.  It was no big deal in the end.  What killed Usenet were the Green Card Lawyers, Canter and Siegel, who discovered it was extremely cheap to spam ads on Usenet, such that even getting one response after cross posting to thousands of groups was a complete financial victory.

And Usenet was then made unusable by spam bots.

This was facilitated by the fact that Usenet was designed to be a distributed system with no central authority who could do things like ban or block offenders.  Everything had to be done at the local level.  Your local sys admin had to care enough to subscribe your local serve to cancel channels that would remove know spammers, though there was always discussion as to who counted and what threshold had to be crossed to be worth of the list.

In the end people just left because unlike the real world, you can just walk away from any part of the internet you don’t find value in.

What else has been described as a distributed system with local authority setting the rules?  Why, Stars Reach!

To be fair to Raph and team, they know there is a potential problem and they at least acknowledge it in the post with this:

All that is needed is for the players to have the tools to collectively manage their space. We as a team definitely need to nail that aspect. And then, yeah, it gets hard, because trying to solve for everyone’s competing needs and desires means a lot of compromising and negotiation and tough choices.

It is my long time policy to dismiss as garbage anything that starts with a phrase like “All that is needed…” which is then, in the style of the underpants gnomes, is followed by a vague proposed fix to a tough and possibly insoluble problem, but at least they admit they have a problem.  First steps and all that.

The problem is, how much power do player groups running planets need?  Too little and then Usenet is your destination.  But too much power and it becomes petty tyrants and and in-groups and tribalism as those who show up first impose their system on the late comers.

Imagine if you will all those indignant Usenet denizens in 1993 if they had the power available so that they did not need to merely whine at you that you needed to read the group FAQ that is published on the first of every mont, before you post because your question is off topic or already answered but could, instead, set up rules to make you adhere to the arbitrary group rules that a few zealots and try hards came up with back when the group was created automatically?

Well, Usenet might have been saved, but at the price of it becoming the domain of a host of online exclusionary clubs unwilling to welcome anybody who wouldn’t toe the line.

Likewise, Stars Reach will face problems if there is too little control given the free ranging ability to modify just about everything on a planet.  Sure, “we’ll spawn more planets” is a possible answer, but given enough latitude some will seek to tear things up just to annoy other players.  Griefing runs deep in some gamer’s DNA.

While on the other side of the equation is the homeowners association view of the world, which ideally keeps chaos at bay through common sense rules agreed upon by the community… but which can often turn into an irresistible attraction to those who seek petty authority and love to tell people what to do.

Do I even need to expand upon homeowner’s associations?  They’re not all bad, but when they’re bad they can be really bad.  I recall a guy on the association board in the for the condo development we lived in way back when my wife and I first got together.  He would dig through people’s garbage can’s and send nasty notes with threats of fines if he found anything that was possibly recyclable in the trash.  He would literally staple things like grocery store receipts pulled from deep in the trash to his notes.  We used to call him the garbage nazi.  That is the sort of person often attracted to such positions.

“We‘re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford. “And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t.  They win.”

Ford Prefect – Life, The Universe, and Everything

I am more Arthur Dent than anything.  I don’t want to run the homeowners association, I just want them to leave me alone.  Likewise, in online games I don’t want to run the guild, fellowship, or corporation, except occasionally as an administrative function with some friends.  Usually so I can spend my own in-game currency to expand the guild bank or hand out medals to corp mates.

It is those who do want to run things, those who are obsessed with a level of control, that send me packing online.  I see the need for a homeowners association in real life and in the vision that Stars Reach is pitching.  But I can see it going wrong.

There is almost a dichotomy of Raph where, on the one hand, he can promote ideas like “the client is in the hands of the enemy” on his rules for online world design while also espousing an vision where players… the people who are “the enemy” in that scenario… can be given responsibility to run an online game, to be the literal governing body that dictates how you will be allowed to play in a given space.

We’ll see what happens… but nothing will be happening for quite a while yet.

Related:

• Stars Reach – WHAT IS STARS REACH ABOUT?
• Massively OP – Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach

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 is going to be one of those Fridays where I am going to uncork a bottle of frustration and rant a bit about various business deals and statements, each of which has managed to make me progressively more annoyed.  When I started this post I thought I might have to divert to Twitter to add in some of the more recent screw ups Elon has made.  But no, the video game industry continues to provide, and the main problem was limiting myself to a few stories and ranking them in the order of how likely they were to make my head explode.

• EG7 Sold PlanetSide and then What Happened?
  

Back in the EG7 Q4 2023 financials it was stated that the PlanteSide IP had been sold.  The actual mention was:

Daybreak successfully closed on the sale of a non-core IP for USD 5.9 million. The transaction provides EG7 with further improvement to its liquidity. This transaction will not affect EG7´s business plan and performance other than the P&L effect from the asset sale.

Closed a deal!  Sold the IP!  That must mean something, right?  A publicly held company can’t just straight up lie about this sort of thing, can they?

It came out later that PlanetSide was the IP in question and that the trademarks had been transferred to Bay Tower, a private equity firm, but that there was some sort of Jason Epstein connection in that and what the hell was that even about and what did it mean to the actual game, PlanetSide 2?  Let me just repost all the links from that point in time in case you are interested.

• • EG7 – Investor Relations Page
  • Massively OP – EG7 Q4 2023
  • Massively OP – Daybreak sold PlanetSide for $5.9M
  • Game Whisperer – PlanetSide IP sold to Shell Corporation
  • Inventory Full – Games for Sale
  • Massively OP – Daybreak’s DC Universe Online studio Dimensional Ink hit with layoffs
  • Gaming Idustry.biz – Daybreak confirms “less than 15” layoffs

And I guess we don’t know the answer to a lot of that, but apparently PlanetSide 2 has been moved within Enad Global 7 to fall under Toadman, the smallest of the EG7 studios, which posted a net loss of $5 million SEK in Q4 2023.

That toad looks like he works in capital management

So now they had PlanetSide 2, in contention for the worst performing title in the Daybreak stable, has been moved to the worst performing studio in EG7’s stable.

Yay?

Some coverage:

• • Massively OP – EG7 transfers PlanetSide 2 development from Daybreak to Toadman
  • MMO Bomb – Remember How Daybreak Sold the Planetside IP?

Still, I should not be too hard on Toadman as, on their site they say they have done work for hire for a range of Daybreak titles including PlanetSide 2 and might have been responsible for the console port.  Maybe them taking over PlanetSide 2 will mean a PlayStation 5 native client for the title?  Who knows?

Meanwhile, that still doesn’t answer the question about the IP being sold, who really owns it, why they bought it, what they plan to do with it, or what it means to EG7, though I suspect part of the sale must had included the right to keep using the IP for PlanetSide 2 because to do otherwise would have been insane.

• UbiSoft Says Screw You to fans of The Crew

Back on the first of the year I made a prediction that UbiSoft would do something that would piss me off, and thus help sustain me in my beyond two decades grudge against the studio.  And, of course, they obliged almost right away by declaring their Skull & Bones title a AAAA game.

But, just in case that wasn’t enough, we have how they are handling The Crew, their 2014 racing title, which they are pulling the plug on and removing from player libraries.  If you try to find the copy of The Crew you paid $60 for, UbiSoft will suggest maybe you should buy something new rather than playing that raggedy old title.  They managed to come across so badly that the whole thing is driving a call for game preservation.  Some coverage:

• Massively OP – Ubisoft pulls The Crew 1 from player libraries, encourages them to ‘check the store to pursue your adventures’
• Massively OP – Stop Killing Games is a modern games preservation initiative prompted by The Crew’s cynical sunset
• MMO Bomb – Ubisoft’s “The Crew” Fiasco Is Just One Example Of Why We Need Games Preservation And Physical Media

Now, live service games are always going to be problematic in this arena.  At some point the game will stop earning enough money to pay to keep the servers running… and keeping the servers running costs more than you probably imagine.

On the other hand, a title that charges full price up front better have a plan for when the servers go down.  The servers to support the back end portions of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl were taken down years ago, but I can dig out my old cobalt blue Nintendo DS Lite and STILL PLAY the core portion of those titles.

Saying “Screw you, buy another game!” and yoinking purchases out of player libraries is not a plan, it is a way to bring the wrath of fans down on you.

This is UbiSoft management just being their usual shitty selves.  Business as usual.  I vowed not to give them another nickel when they made it clear they hated their customers more than 20 years ago, and they continue to keep proving it every year for me.

• Mike Ybarra say Let Them Eat Tips!

I was vacillating between making this its own Quote of the Day post or just ignoring it completely because it was so dumb, then hit a middle ground an decided it fit into this piece.  Mike Ybarra, former head of Blizzard, thinks we should be able to tip devs if they make a good game.

That is pretty innocuous in and of itself.  A charmingly naive desire to reward somebody for making a good game would earn a pat on the head from many sources.

However, a former President of Blizzard who demonstrated no issue with paying women less than men for the same job, only giving a mild bleat when Jen Oneal resigned because she was being paid less as Co-President of Blizzard in partnership with Ybarra, and who was blatantly trying to gaslight employees by pleading poverty while cutting bonuses for those outside the executive management boys club, coming out with that sort of statement against the background of mass layoffs in the video game industry just proves he is either completely unaware of reality or a complete shitheel… though, as always, I have to add “why not both?”

People rightfully dogpiled on his since edited tweet to point out the many problems with his sentiment.  Leaving aside the whole “everybody wants tips these days” and the fact that any such mechanism would likely go to the publisher who would extract their cut before passing anything on to the people who did the actual work, the whole thing would encourage publishers and executives to keep industry salaries low by pointing out that tips were now considered part of the compensation package.

If you want to help somebody out, but another copy of an indie dev title you played the hell out of.  That will probably help somebody.  But tips… those will go into somebody elses’ pocket without a doubt.

Coverage:

• Massively OP – Former Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra thinks players should be able to tip developers for their work
• Rock Paper Shotgun – Former Blizzard boss reckons you should be able to tip developers ‘another $10 or $20’ on top of $70 games

Also, here’s to hoping Mike Ybarra fades into even greater irrelevance so I won’t feel the need to ever mention him again.

• The Strains of Im-Possibility Space

We got something of a two-fer from Jeff and Annie Delisi Strain, the husband and wife duo who run/ran Prytania Media which funded several game studios.

The first up was the abrupt closure of Crop Circle Games, which was shut down in late March with little notice and no severance for employees.  A publisher treating game devs as disposable trash?  Must be a day that ends in “Y” I guess.  Crop Circle’s site was replaced by a terse statement about being able to secure funding after two years.  Normal industry stuff, callous but no surprise.

The weird bit is that on April 4th Annie Delisi Strain appended a long rambling statement making the whole situation about herself and the fact that Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach was going to bring her health issues into a story (something that never happened and Kotaku denies was ever planned) that was so strange that even an AI wouldn’t be that incoherent.

Once that bizarre addition got some attention, the site was shut down completely, but not before I went and made sure the Internet Archive had backed it up.  When gaming execs show you who they really are, don’t let them memory hole it later.

Then, a week or so later, Jeff Strain announced another sudden studio shut down (images of his statement), Possibility Space, this time because he alleges that employees were leaking information about their project to the press.  The common thread here is again Kotaku, which was implicated as the reason, with their reporter Ethan Gach being named once more.

“Somebody leaked something so let’s burn the place down!” isn’t a normal business take.

Sure, the games industry isn’t doing well right now, contracting as it is from the pandemic highs when we all stayed home and added to our Steam library in search of distraction, so there are lots of reasons studios shut down.  But when your funding publisher shuts down two studios while attempting to blame one reporter at Kotaku… well, it feels more like the Strains live in some sort of paranoid bubble where Kotaku is out to get them.

• Pity Poor Naive Lars who Blew Up Embracer Group!  Oops!
  

Then we’re back to the Embracer Group, which has been struggling to survive by shutting down projects and laying of developers, all due to some extremely poor and dubious even at first glance business decisions made by CEO Lars Wingefors… who still has his job.

Embrace This

But in an interview over at IGN about Embracer Group Matthew Karch, who is CEO of Sabre Interactive, which managed to break free of the disaster that is Embracer, paints a picture of Lars merely being naive and feels that people are being unfair.  While the interview covers other topics, other sites like Game Developer immediately picked up apologist nature of Karch’s statements.  Incredulity was a common response.

The only things I can come up with for Karch’s narrative is that there is a non-disparagement aspect to his contract taking Sabre out of Embracer’s grip, that he doesn’t want to say anything that will come back to haunt him if/when he too turns out to be an incompetent boob and lays off a bunch of staff, or just solidarity among the capitalist class and feeling the need to protect themselves from all those greedy workers demanding to be paid, as they really eat into CEO bonus potential.

Anyway, back here on planet earth Lars Wingefors, whose compensation package no doubt dwarfs any of the people who actually make the things that Embracer sells, is paid based on the clearly flawed assumption that he is SO SMART AT BUSINESS.   Yet he foolishly bet on the line always going up despite obvious signs there was going to be a reduction in demand, negatively impacted the lives of thousands of people.   And in doing that, the only consequence he has suffered is being publicly called out for it… and dammit, Matthew Karch says that is going way too far!  CEO’s have feelings too man!

It is clearly too much to ask that a CEO be at all responsible for their decisions.  Accountability is for suckers.  Get a job where other people have to pay for your mistakes.

Maybe CEO should get tips.

• Random Rant about Private Equity

Then, not really on the topic of video games, I saw a nice article over at Vox about how private equity firms… also known as equity management and other innocuous terms… have been simply destroying everything they touch in the name of milking every last cent out of companies and then casting them aside to let them fail.

• Vox – What is private equity, and why is it killing everything you love?

They kick off with the example of Toys R Us and how it was bought stripped, and left to die as a deliberate business plan, but you can find many more examples.  The plan is to find the victim target for the same tactic, where a private equity firms buys it out, brings it private, loots it of all value, saddles it with debt, then had a final cash grab by going public with it again in the hope that a familiar name would fool people.

It happens over and over again and the firms that do it set everything up so they get the cash but bear none of the responsibility for what they have done.  Anyway, if you want to get mad, you can read that and how even Taylor Swift has had to fight the vultures of private equity.

There is the constrain refrain from the boss class in the US about “nobody wants to work anymore” that one can trace back over 100 years that is mostly a lament that people kind of expect to be able to live on their wages.

The irony in that is today it feels like nobody on Wall Street wants to run a business, they just want to get paid, either by demanding companies deliver all profits directly to them or through these private equity looting frenzies that destroy a company in the long term in order to get paid today.

We need more regulation in the market.  That’s it.  That’s the message.

It is going to be one of those Fridays where I am going to uncork a bottle of frustration and rant a bit about various business deals and statements, each of which has managed to make me progressively more annoyed.  When I started this post I thought I might have to divert to Twitter to add in some of the more recent screw ups Elon has made.  But no, the video game industry continues to provide, and the main problem was limiting myself to a few stories and ranking them in the order of how likely they were to make my head explode.

• EG7 Sold PlanetSide and then What Happened?
  

Back in the EG7 Q4 2023 financials it was stated that the PlanteSide IP had been sold.  The actual mention was:

Daybreak successfully closed on the sale of a non-core IP for USD 5.9 million. The transaction provides EG7 with further improvement to its liquidity. This transaction will not affect EG7´s business plan and performance other than the P&L effect from the asset sale.

Closed a deal!  Sold the IP!  That must mean something, right?  A publicly held company can’t just straight up lie about this sort of thing, can they?

It came out later that PlanetSide was the IP in question and that the trademarks had been transferred to Bay Tower, a private equity firm, but that there was some sort of Jason Epstein connection in that and what the hell was that even about and what did it mean to the actual game, PlanetSide 2?  Let me just repost all the links from that point in time in case you are interested.

• • EG7 – Investor Relations Page
  • Massively OP – EG7 Q4 2023
  • Massively OP – Daybreak sold PlanetSide for $5.9M
  • Game Whisperer – PlanetSide IP sold to Shell Corporation
  • Inventory Full – Games for Sale
  • Massively OP – Daybreak’s DC Universe Online studio Dimensional Ink hit with layoffs
  • Gaming Idustry.biz – Daybreak confirms “less than 15” layoffs

And I guess we don’t know the answer to a lot of that, but apparently PlanetSide 2 has been moved within Enad Global 7 to fall under Toadman, the smallest of the EG7 studios, which posted a net loss of $5 million SEK in Q4 2023.

That toad looks like he works in capital management

So now they had PlanetSide 2, in contention for the worst performing title in the Daybreak stable, has been moved to the worst performing studio in EG7’s stable.

Yay?

Some coverage:

• • Massively OP – EG7 transfers PlanetSide 2 development from Daybreak to Toadman
  • MMO Bomb – Remember How Daybreak Sold the Planetside IP?

Still, I should not be too hard on Toadman as, on their site they say they have done work for hire for a range of Daybreak titles including PlanetSide 2 and might have been responsible for the console port.  Maybe them taking over PlanetSide 2 will mean a PlayStation 5 native client for the title?  Who knows?

Meanwhile, that still doesn’t answer the question about the IP being sold, who really owns it, why they bought it, what they plan to do with it, or what it means to EG7, though I suspect part of the sale must had included the right to keep using the IP for PlanetSide 2 because to do otherwise would have been insane.

• UbiSoft Says Screw You to fans of The Crew

Back on the first of the year I made a prediction that UbiSoft would do something that would piss me off, and thus help sustain me in my beyond two decades grudge against the studio.  And, of course, they obliged almost right away by declaring their Skull & Bones title a AAAA game.

But, just in case that wasn’t enough, we have how they are handling The Crew, their 2014 racing title, which they are pulling the plug on and removing from player libraries.  If you try to find the copy of The Crew you paid $60 for, UbiSoft will suggest maybe you should buy something new rather than playing that raggedy old title.  They managed to come across so badly that the whole thing is driving a call for game preservation.  Some coverage:

• Massively OP – Ubisoft pulls The Crew 1 from player libraries, encourages them to ‘check the store to pursue your adventures’
• Massively OP – Stop Killing Games is a modern games preservation initiative prompted by The Crew’s cynical sunset
• MMO Bomb – Ubisoft’s “The Crew” Fiasco Is Just One Example Of Why We Need Games Preservation And Physical Media

Now, live service games are always going to be problematic in this arena.  At some point the game will stop earning enough money to pay to keep the servers running… and keeping the servers running costs more than you probably imagine.

On the other hand, a title that charges full price up front better have a plan for when the servers go down.  The servers to support the back end portions of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl were taken down years ago, but I can dig out my old cobalt blue Nintendo DS Lite and STILL PLAY the core portion of those titles.

Saying “Screw you, buy another game!” and yoinking purchases out of player libraries is not a plan, it is a way to bring the wrath of fans down on you.

This is UbiSoft management just being their usual shitty selves.  Business as usual.  I vowed not to give them another nickel when they made it clear they hated their customers more than 20 years ago, and they continue to keep proving it every year for me.

• Mike Ybarra say Let Them Eat Tips!

I was vacillating between making this its own Quote of the Day post or just ignoring it completely because it was so dumb, then hit a middle ground an decided it fit into this piece.  Mike Ybarra, former head of Blizzard, thinks we should be able to tip devs if they make a good game.

That is pretty innocuous in and of itself.  A charmingly naive desire to reward somebody for making a good game would earn a pat on the head from many sources.

However, a former President of Blizzard who demonstrated no issue with paying women less than men for the same job, only giving a mild bleat when Jen Oneal resigned because she was being paid less as Co-President of Blizzard in partnership with Ybarra, and who was blatantly trying to gaslight employees by pleading poverty while cutting bonuses for those outside the executive management boys club, coming out with that sort of statement against the background of mass layoffs in the video game industry just proves he is either completely unaware of reality or a complete shitheel… though, as always, I have to add “why not both?”

People rightfully dogpiled on his since edited tweet to point out the many problems with his sentiment.  Leaving aside the whole “everybody wants tips these days” and the fact that any such mechanism would likely go to the publisher who would extract their cut before passing anything on to the people who did the actual work, the whole thing would encourage publishers and executives to keep industry salaries low by pointing out that tips were now considered part of the compensation package.

If you want to help somebody out, but another copy of an indie dev title you played the hell out of.  That will probably help somebody.  But tips… those will go into somebody elses’ pocket without a doubt.

Coverage:

• Massively OP – Former Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra thinks players should be able to tip developers for their work
• Rock Paper Shotgun – Former Blizzard boss reckons you should be able to tip developers ‘another $10 or $20’ on top of $70 games

Also, here’s to hoping Mike Ybarra fades into even greater irrelevance so I won’t feel the need to ever mention him again.

• The Strains of Im-Possibility Space

We got something of a two-fer from Jeff and Annie Delisi Strain, the husband and wife duo who run/ran Prytania Media which funded several game studios.

The first up was the abrupt closure of Crop Circle Games, which was shut down in late March with little notice and no severance for employees.  A publisher treating game devs as disposable trash?  Must be a day that ends in “Y” I guess.  Crop Circle’s site was replaced by a terse statement about being able to secure funding after two years.  Normal industry stuff, callous but no surprise.

The weird bit is that on April 4th Annie Delisi Strain appended a long rambling statement making the whole situation about herself and the fact that Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach was going to bring her health issues into a story (something that never happened and Kotaku denies was ever planned) that was so strange that even an AI wouldn’t be that incoherent.

Once that bizarre addition got some attention, the site was shut down completely, but not before I went and made sure the Internet Archive had backed it up.  When gaming execs show you who they really are, don’t let them memory hole it later.

Then, a week or so later, Jeff Strain announced another sudden studio shut down (images of his statement), Possibility Space, this time because he alleges that employees were leaking information about their project to the press.  The common thread here is again Kotaku, which was implicated as the reason, with their reporter Ethan Gach being named once more.

“Somebody leaked something so let’s burn the place down!” isn’t a normal business take.

Sure, the games industry isn’t doing well right now, contracting as it is from the pandemic highs when we all stayed home and added to our Steam library in search of distraction, so there are lots of reasons studios shut down.  But when your funding publisher shuts down two studios while attempting to blame one reporter at Kotaku… well, it feels more like the Strains live in some sort of paranoid bubble where Kotaku is out to get them.

• Pity Poor Naive Lars who Blew Up Embracer Group!  Oops!
  

Then we’re back to the Embracer Group, which has been struggling to survive by shutting down projects and laying of developers, all due to some extremely poor and dubious even at first glance business decisions made by CEO Lars Wingefors… who still has his job.

Embrace This

But in an interview over at IGN about Embracer Group Matthew Karch, who is CEO of Sabre Interactive, which managed to break free of the disaster that is Embracer, paints a picture of Lars merely being naive and feels that people are being unfair.  While the interview covers other topics, other sites like Game Developer immediately picked up apologist nature of Karch’s statements.  Incredulity was a common response.

The only things I can come up with for Karch’s narrative is that there is a non-disparagement aspect to his contract taking Sabre out of Embracer’s grip, that he doesn’t want to say anything that will come back to haunt him if/when he too turns out to be an incompetent boob and lays off a bunch of staff, or just solidarity among the capitalist class and feeling the need to protect themselves from all those greedy workers demanding to be paid, as they really eat into CEO bonus potential.

Anyway, back here on planet earth Lars Wingefors, whose compensation package no doubt dwarfs any of the people who actually make the things that Embracer sells, is paid based on the clearly flawed assumption that he is SO SMART AT BUSINESS.   Yet he foolishly bet on the line always going up despite obvious signs there was going to be a reduction in demand, negatively impacted the lives of thousands of people.   And in doing that, the only consequence he has suffered is being publicly called out for it… and dammit, Matthew Karch says that is going way too far!  CEO’s have feelings too man!

It is clearly too much to ask that a CEO be at all responsible for their decisions.  Accountability is for suckers.  Get a job where other people have to pay for your mistakes.

Maybe CEO should get tips.

• Random Rant about Private Equity

Then, not really on the topic of video games, I saw a nice article over at Vox about how private equity firms… also known as equity management and other innocuous terms… have been simply destroying everything they touch in the name of milking every last cent out of companies and then casting them aside to let them fail.

• Vox – What is private equity, and why is it killing everything you love?

They kick off with the example of Toys R Us and how it was bought stripped, and left to die as a deliberate business plan, but you can find many more examples.  The plan is to find the victim target for the same tactic, where a private equity firms buys it out, brings it private, loots it of all value, saddles it with debt, then had a final cash grab by going public with it again in the hope that a familiar name would fool people.

It happens over and over again and the firms that do it set everything up so they get the cash but bear none of the responsibility for what they have done.  Anyway, if you want to get mad, you can read that and how even Taylor Swift has had to fight the vultures of private equity.

There is the constrain refrain from the boss class in the US about “nobody wants to work anymore” that one can trace back over 100 years that is mostly a lament that people kind of expect to be able to live on their wages.

The irony in that is today it feels like nobody on Wall Street wants to run a business, they just want to get paid, either by demanding companies deliver all profits directly to them or through these private equity looting frenzies that destroy a company in the long term in order to get paid today.

We need more regulation in the market.  That’s it.  That’s the message.

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”