u/mpyne

Or, in some states (and with good grades), scholarships. Though I ended up joining the military after that anyways, so joke was on me I guess.

Hoarding by itself doesn't do anything bad, it's a bunch of numbers in a database.

What is bad is spending that money on things disastrous to our society. That's certainly a bigger risk with billionaires than with the rest of us, but just having the money isn't bad on its own, it's not like the 1800s where holding onto gold and silver actually did prevent other people from engaging in their own craft.

Well videogames aren't priced as "cost-plus", they're priced based on value (like CDs). That's what allowed video game developers to absorb significantly higher developments costs and still keep the price of the game broadly the same.

You can find $5 games on Steam right now, if that's what you want to play. But they'll mostly play like $5 games...

This is completely off-topic, but this is how you know Snowden was working with Russia back in the day. He wasn’t some poor soul stuck at an airport with a Russian government powerless to ignore a canceled passport and put him on a plane to somewhere. He could have flown to Ecuador if they'd have taken him (as they did Assange). He could have flown back to the USA if Russia didn't want to deal with it. Him getting “trapped” in Moscow was always a ploy.

As long as the government of the country you’re going to is fine with it, you don’t need a passport at all, canceled or not.

That should be an advantage of a giant company -- there is always work to be done somewhere -- but it rarely actually works that way.

Yeah, I noted in a different reply downthread that I admire how Nintendo approaches this same thing as compared to Sony. But for whatever reason Sony and Microsoft each seem to keep the separate dev studios very separate. Maybe it's that the workers themselves don't want to pack up and go work for a different studio, but it feels more like that's just now how most American companies structure work anymore.

They're a very large company, owned by a huge publisher, who had a game sell very well

200 isn't a very large company by any definition. My company had actually been bigger until after our layoff, and we had more than 1 iron in the fire. Even that wasn't enough to tide over the loss of our largest customer.

Yes, Sony could put money into them, but that huge publisher would likely ask why they should put more money into them and not one of their other first- or second-party studios? Or even use that money to make a deal with a third-party dev like Square Enix. These companies all have labor to employ too, not just Sucker Punch.

They made an estimated net profit of ~$300M on Yotei.

I don't think this is a reflection on Yotei's performance. They either have work planned for their labor force or they don't. Given Yotei's performance they could get investor or publisher funds to pay for the work they plan for the next project, if Yotei's profits alone couldn't fund it.

But if they don't have work to do on the next project, what do you expect the workers who would be retained to work on? Again, in an actual "very large" company they would be able to move these workers to one of multiple upcoming projects, because there would be more than one "next game".

You are right that Sony could be more effective in using the talent they have across their various dev studios. A publisher like Nintendo would have no qualms about moving a few extra people from one first-party studio to support another (e.g. Monolithsoft supporting BotW development) or even to help supervise a third-party developer (e.g. Metroid team supervising Retro Studios and MercurySteam). I don't know that I've ever seen anything like that from stories from Sony, maybe I'm wrong.

But either way, if Sony is closing up the money spigot then Sucker Punch has to make choices that fit within the money they're going to get. This fucked-up economy is fucked-up for everyone, not just labor. Sucker Punch has to compete for investment money from Sony and the broader market from other profitable uses of funding, so they won't get away with just asking for a blank check. The ZIRP days following 2008 are well and truly dead.

Don't fall for this, it wasn't always like this. When you have full time employees the idea was to keep them on in-between projects. You budget for it,

This is precisely the part that has changed. You cannot "budget for" the labor cost for AAA games as a small studio. We are far past the days when you could develop NES Final Fantasy with a team of like 4 people.

This was what had happened to my company. If we had been a Big 4 consulting firm then the loss of the one customer funding our team would have been NBD. Indeed, they are big enough that you can just plan for it as part of your HR model. But we were quite a small company, the customer was our largest, and it would have drowned the remaining teams had we been kept on the payroll until enough BD had happened to put everyone impacted onto a new paying project.

In the end, you can only budget for so much, at some point the costs involved will exceed your ability to pre-plan for them. Then you have to react. Sucker Punch's press release agrees with you that their plan had been to keep them on, if everything could have worked out. But it didn’t.

Sure, but you just let that employee go, you don’t wait to batch these all up and then lay them off with a press release.

You’d obviously try to arrange a lay off so that it only impacts your lowest performers, but it’s almost certainly all going to hit good performers because dirtbags would have already been fired and replaced if they were consistently doing nothing.

So every game has to make more money than the last otherwise it's a failure and people need to be fired? That's not a sustainable metric and isn't realistic to assume infinite growth.

A game needs to make money in line with the cost associated with making it.

If Ghost of Tsushima had been followed up by a dirt-cheap 2D puzzle game (just to pick one example), it could have made far less money and things would be OK. But of course, a dirt-cheap 2D puzzle game would have led to the same layoffs, because you don't need a team of the size needed for GoT to do a dirt-cheap 2D puzzle game—that’s how it became dirt cheap.

But if you’re going to follow up a game like GoT with a bigger followup with more development cost, then it will necessarily have to make more money just to be considered ‘about as successful’, yes.

Studios that are able to decouple their staffing from the success of individual games are typically able to do this if they have lots of games in development. That reduces the risk of mispredicting any individual game’s performance, since the games that are more successful than expected can account for the games that don’t hit the mark.

But you need to be a really big studio to get away with this, or have much cheaper games to develop than like GoT, or both.

Companies no longer care about sustainability

They never cared about that. They always cared about line go up.

They used to believe sustainability was required to maximize the amount by which the line went up. “Invest in our employees and we’ll have higher-quality products and outperform our competitors in the market thanks to savvy customers choosing us over them.”

They no longer believe sustainability is required. And, they’re actually probably right given the games we consumers buy. Old studios fold, new studios are formed, and the beat still goes on.

These are full time positions in the main team.

I worked at a company (non-gaming, but software) and we had something like 100+ FTEs all get laid off, myself included, because the project we were working on was suddenly canceled by our customer. Without the income from that customer the company had no way to afford the payroll for 100+ tech workers so poof, off we all went.

Contractor/FTE doesn't change the dynamics that there needs to be work to do. Larger companies like Nintendo solve this by always having a ton of projects to absorb FTE staff, but you can't afford to do that when each of your projects are dazzling “AAA” worlds like the Ghost of games.

I was trying to figure out how the heck he pulled off a cover of that Flyleaf song and then I realized I was slightly off of what I thought the title was.

Wow, I didn’t know there were people who wrote perfect code consistently each time. It’s an honor to meet someone with skills like that.

No wonder he stayed in college.

I used to maintain the primary build tool for KDE developers. I run Gentoo Linux and build most of the system from source using rolling updates.

Across both of those I have basically never encountered this. ODR violations are kind of serious business so if you keep running into this, that seems like a good thing to fix even outside of contracts being on the menu.

I’d avoid Qt unless you happen to be particularly wealthy.

You don't need to pay for a license for a personal project.

REST formalized the design that made that possible.

REST formalized a design that could make it possible.

But the Web we actually got is hardly in line with REST's design, as noted in the OP discussion. So I wouldn't call REST the design that made it possible.

Man we've got to nationalize this company, if only for our own national security. If he can do this to Ukraine he can do this to us.

Hate to say it, but nowadays high uptime is not a mark of pride, but a glaring risk factor.

As much as possible we should be designing apps for zero-downtime updates so that it's safe to deploy frequently. Even including the platforms we're deploying them on.

Rail workers did it first, and might even have been more disastrous for the cause of labor. Their attempt to extort essentially the entire American economy following the end of World War 2 led directly to the Taft-Hartley Act (which was so severe that Truman tried to veto it, despite having threatened himself to draft the striking workers into the Army during the strike).

It helps that certain words, like “socialism” mean different things to different people. That’s one reason why just describing the specific policy you’re talking about often helps, because you don’t have people thinking the gulag will be an option if they vote for a politician.

Weird way to spell “AOL CDs spammed to everybody in the mail”. Trumpet Winsock was word of mouth, but the Internet had tons of hype, as did the video games that actually got popular.

“Word of mouth” is “OMG you should play Cheetahmen 2, it's so bad it's good!”

Word of mouth is a lousy marketing scheme. The NES saved video games from the video game crash caused by a market flooded with lousy games for the Atari and its competitors.

Yeah, that mentality was more or less how they nearly wiped out North American auto manufacturing. It's not stupid of them. Money can be exchanged for goods and services, but unsold inventory costs money to have made, and costs more money to get rid of. Minimizing the amount of inventory you have to carry on hand is smart business, to the extent you can get away with it.

They don't produce extra, so there isn't extra inventory to mark down. Nintendo has seen what happened to other publishers from always putting their games on sale, and it's just reinforced in their mind the value of their model of not doing deep discounts for games that are still fun to play.