Worst November for video game retail in the US since 1995, why? Surely couldn't have anything to do with the president causing the most self-inflicted economic crisis of all time. The job and unemployment numbers look awful, and that's after he hired his own psychophant to fudge the metrics.
If your response to a 112 page presentation from a profit-maximizing investment fund about the need for corporate restructuring (i.e. layoffs), integrating non-gaming (i.e. sell merch or build a theme park) and other corporate initiatives, is that it's about "go woke, go broke", then it's because you've lost the ability to think in any terms. Awful way to live your life. Private equity is destroying the games industry while you obsess that Square made a cringe game every...
Second best is to remain private, get bought up by private equity and have them decide two years later you don't fit into their mobile gaming strategy and shut you down.
Brave. I for one denounce how the shareholder-centered economy has completely destroyed the gaming industry, but being angry that you're not able to squeeze even more profit out of a creative industry is one way to go as well. Have fun with yet another failed corporate restructuring.
Well, hell has frozen to ice
Trump/Saudi alliance is on an all out war against free speech. It was already media, news, social media, now entertainment.
Congrats on electing the Bush government again. A bunch of incompetent reactionaries going to war in every corner of the planet, robbing the treasury and enriching themselves. More overtly fascist this time around too.
Crysis looked MINDBLOWING in 2007 (at least the few frames I could render on my PC did), still looks good today, which is an amazing feat. But has definitely aged when you consider the wow factor it once had. Braid is a game from 2007 that's future proof bc the graphical style is so simple. Looked good then, looks as good now.
People who try to use either woke or anti-woke as a marketing tactic to sell their games, always lose to people who just focus on making a good game and tell a good story with great characters. All for more great games with diverse casts, but don't let one become the enemy of the other. That just does us a disservice at this point.
Another brain rotted away by rabid anti-wokeism. This is an addiction, and your life is worse because of it. The other answers cover the matter at hand well, I just wanted to say that this is no way to live your life.
If you can't enjoy something any time it has a woman in it, because you impulsively have to make up some reason why that's "woke" i.e. "bad", you're not gonna have a good time.
For publicly traded companies, it's not specifically venture capital but private investors. Nearly every publicly traded video game company had a share price peak in 2021 (Take-Two, Ubisoft, Tencent, Nexon). Interestingly, Nintendo did not.
A really good video about private equity's impact on the gaming space here: https://www.youtube.com/wat...
For venture capital more spec...
Investment firms poured money into the gaming industry in 2020 - 2021, blindly believing the growth seen during Covid, when more people stayed inside, was sustainable. Then the lockdowns ended, and inevitably companies that had been pumped up on venture capital cash had to do massive layoffs.
We need to rethink private finance entirely, because it is fuelling all sorts of unsustainable bubbles that wreck people's lives. It's finance for the sake of money, instead of...
@VariantAEC Conservatives just aren't very good at living up to their stated values whether it's historical accuracy, "family values" or protecting people's lives or the environment. Modern-day conservatism is really only about protecting capital and the very rich, and everything else is just a bait-and-switch to convince anyone outside that small group of people to vote for them.
Cutting taxes, but only for the rich, and cutting life-saving regulation...
A key ingredient in any conservative project is to get people to forget what the past was really like
Pretty cool that Fallout 5 will release in the same year Fallout 3 takes place in. 2277
Microsoft is the king of acquiring companies and running them completely into the dirt, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were to blame
You don't have to be a communist to tell that something is deeply broken with running the videogame industry entirely on a profit-based motive. It has lead to massive consolidation (the risk of making a single unsuccessful game is too big for small companies), and an overflow of safe and formulaic games, as well as a focus on creating addictive formulas that are less about the experience or enjoyment of the player, and more about getting people hooked.
You don't nee...
I'm not an artist, I'm a consumer, but I'm not sure "Only the people who work in the industry would say that" is as much of a critique as you think it is? If the people working inside the industry say that, then they're probably onto something?
Also, if you think maximizing operating profit aligns with artistic and social value, I don't know what to tell you.
You have to understand that to Konami this is not a problem. The priorities of a company in a capitalist economy is to maximize profits, often in a very short-term way.
If you're going to mention consumer spending, you need to look at what type of consumer spending is growing. In short: It's driven by rich people spending more. The top 10% of Americans now account for half of all consumer spending. This is also a reason specific metrics like "how many people are buying video game consoles" are useful to look at. They give specific insight into how comfortable a median household is.
There's no other place to put the bl...