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pentyne posted:What is the endgame for Embracer? Is this just like some kind of desperate controlled bankruptcy sell off? I don't understand what kind of future they have. All the studios they own are presumably generating future positive value (until they get shitcanned before their WIP games release). Embracer's issue is not insolvency, as far as I know. Their problem is liquidity. They bought all these profit-generating game developers but they won't actually get the money until those studios actually finish and sell the poo poo they're halfway working through. As a result Embracer has no actual cash on hand to pay off their massive loans, even though their theoretical future value is good enough to pay them off (or at least, in an econ 101 sense it ought to be, if the purchase prices for each studio were fair market values). So basically these layoffs are a devil's bargain of killing part of their future profits in exchange for postponing their runway and getting more time for game-release money to start rolling in and paying off the debts. At least that's my uneducated non-insider guess.
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Dec 5, 2023 03:15
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njsykora posted:Not the only company yeeting people, EA are doing what literally everyone said they were going to do and gutting Codemasters. codemasters just switched over to unreal engine so if nothing else they're probably downsizing the tech side now that they're not maintaining their own engine anymore
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Dec 5, 2023 03:17
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I would simply secure the deal before writing a bunch of checks you can't cash but I didn't go to business school
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Dec 5, 2023 03:20
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Feldegast42 posted:I would simply secure the deal before writing a bunch of checks you can't cash but I didn't go to business school if you finance with other people's money it always goes this way, and at that scale it never is your own money in fact, if you actually had that money, you would use it to get 10 times more money from other people and invest that
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Dec 5, 2023 09:09
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There's also literally no meaningful consequences for the people who get to make those decisions besides mild personal embarrassment and a slightly smaller yacht.
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Dec 5, 2023 10:14
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repiv posted:on the contrary, rockstar hates the PC RP community because they play on modded servers that are detached from their microtransaction ecosystem
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Dec 5, 2023 12:15
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kliras posted:console versions also do a better job of hiding their piss poor netcode with rampant cheating Yeah, for those who don’t know, GTA Online’s net code is completely peer to peer and client authoritative. It’s super easy for malicious actors to develop tools that allow you to, say, teleport everyone to one location over and over, or spawn a bunch of invulnerable hostile NPC‘s or even a whole second copy of the terrain, or change the weather, or spawn money on top of people. You can’t even report the hackers, because of the way that the reporting works under the hood is to send the hacker a packet saying “hey someone is reporting you, please send a packet containing your client details to the Rockstar CS server”. Obviously, if you’re running a modded game client, you can just intercept that packet and do nothing with it. it’s totally worthless.
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Dec 5, 2023 13:17
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Pseudoscorpion posted:Yeah, for those who don’t know, GTA Online’s net code is completely peer to peer and client authoritative. It’s super easy for malicious actors to develop tools that allow you to, say, teleport everyone to one location over and over, or spawn a bunch of invulnerable hostile NPC‘s or even a whole second copy of the terrain, or change the weather, or spawn money on top of people. You can’t even report the hackers, because of the way that the reporting works under the hood is to send the hacker a packet saying “hey someone is reporting you, please send a packet containing your client details to the Rockstar CS server”. Obviously, if you’re running a modded game client, you can just intercept that packet and do nothing with it. it’s totally worthless. I’m going to be abusing this soon in single player to turn into Bigfoot and fight what I think might be a Superman analogue (the secret final boss). Pretty cool!
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Dec 5, 2023 13:23
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Pseudoscorpion posted:Yeah, for those who don’t know, GTA Online’s net code is completely peer to peer and client authoritative. It’s super easy for malicious actors to develop tools that allow you to, say, teleport everyone to one location over and over, or spawn a bunch of invulnerable hostile NPC‘s or even a whole second copy of the terrain, or change the weather, or spawn money on top of people. You can’t even report the hackers, because of the way that the reporting works under the hood is to send the hacker a packet saying “hey someone is reporting you, please send a packet containing your client details to the Rockstar CS server”. Obviously, if you’re running a modded game client, you can just intercept that packet and do nothing with it. it’s totally worthless. Also it was really easy to just pop open cheat engine and give yourself a billion dollars. Which was just kind of sad? Even the shittiest of online games I've played are incredibly hard to gently caress around with like that. But not GTA Online!
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Dec 5, 2023 13:30
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So basically it was an adequate solution for some buddies fooling around in multiplayer GTA until someone decided "hey, let's scale this up to MMO-numbers"? Would people do that, blindly applying some tech to something beyond it's intended purpose?
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Dec 5, 2023 14:21
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Also the load-times whenever you did anything got absurdly long until someone did some packet sniffing and made a Youtube video pointing out that hey, maybe making the client download several hundred MB of JSON or whatever every time they switch into or out of an activity is a bad idea.
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Dec 5, 2023 14:23
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the issue wasn't so much the size of the JSON but their parser having exponential complexity, which is an insidious type of bug because it was probably fast enough during initial development when the JSON was fairly small but as the item schema grew in size it gradually ended up taking minutes to load someone probably should have realised something was wrong, but of course the engine A-team was busy working on RDR2 at that point
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Dec 5, 2023 14:31
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As a software developer I really feel that lol My current job I joined I ended up very early on debugging an issue with some pages on our test site taking up to 80 seconds to load (not sure why they didn't have the customary 30 sec. timeout) and I figured out after digging through execution plans that the system set up for role verification was very badly unoptimized. So when I came in to get training on our proprietary system as a dev and got a couple dozen roles assigned across multiple domains to check all the different modules we are making, it ended up with the page view having to look through many hundreds of millions of rows through at times inefficient joins and outer applies lol. Rarely likely to be a big issue outside of test but it sped ut some views in prod from 4-5 second loads to near instant - I have no idea how nobody else ran into it but they got it fixed quick after I reported the issue. Scaling can be really difficult to plan and foolproof for.
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Dec 5, 2023 14:47
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Arivia posted:I’m going to be abusing this soon in single player to turn into Bigfoot and fight what I think might be a Superman analogue (the secret final boss). Pretty cool! And THIS is the game that's a massive cash cow for Rockstar thanks to pay2win microtransactions?
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Dec 5, 2023 15:23
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Here's a writeup by the guy who found the bug. At least they gave him 10k for his troubles.
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Dec 5, 2023 15:40
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Ghost Leviathan posted:And THIS is the game that's a massive cash cow for Rockstar thanks to pay2win microtransactions? That content is actually in the base game, it’s a secret bit after you get 100% completion. I’m going to use a mod or something to help unlocking it though, since the preceding step that kept it well hidden is to find a specific hidden plant in a four hour window once during the in game week, with a different plant for each day. Oh, and it has to be a specific weather condition, which is just totally random.
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Dec 5, 2023 17:32
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Twitch will be shutting down operations in Korea: https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-korea/
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Dec 6, 2023 05:21
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Another day, another set of layoffs: https://www.eurogamer.net/layoffs-reported-at-hello-neighbor-publisher-tinybuild
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Dec 6, 2023 05:21
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Hyper Inferno posted:Twitch will be shutting down operations in Korea: https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-korea/ I'm kinda curious to know why Twitch was so much more expensive to operate in Korea than elsewhere, and how other livestreaming services are able to operate under the same conditions - presumably turning a profit.
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Dec 6, 2023 05:29
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Shooting Blanks posted:I'm kinda curious to know why Twitch was so much more expensive to operate in Korea than elsewhere, and how other livestreaming services are able to operate under the same conditions - presumably turning a profit. here's the explanation i found: quote:Korea recently passed a law that made it legal for ISPs to charge companies for the bandwidth their websites use, which bumps up operating costs 100x because now if you have a 1-50 viewer 1080p stream you have to pay out the rear end every hour that they stream. It's just not sustainable for any streaming services. I also heard that foreign companies are charged significantly more to encourage local alternatives
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Dec 6, 2023 05:39
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Shooting Blanks posted:I'm kinda curious to know why Twitch was so much more expensive to operate in Korea than elsewhere, and how other livestreaming services are able to operate under the same conditions - presumably turning a profit. Network Neutrality got killed in South Korea last year. ISPs in South Korea now require sites to pay for user traffic to isps. Twitch Korea has been struggling to pay network fees ever since and they've just decided it's not worth the money to operate in South Korea at all.
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Dec 6, 2023 05:41
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Answered better above about how stupid SKs law is and why net neutrality is actually stupid important.
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Dec 6, 2023 05:44
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So how does that work exactly? Wouldn’t Koreans just use a VPN to access Twitch at that point?
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Dec 6, 2023 06:18
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xgalaxy posted:So how does that work exactly? Wouldn’t Koreans just use a VPN to access Twitch at that point? As an aside, quote:Twitch streamers in Korea have devoted significant time and effort into building their communities, and we plan to help these communities find new homes — even if it’s regrettably not on Twitch. We will work to help Twitch streamers in Korea move their communities to alternative livestreaming services in Korea. We are also reaching out to several of these services to help with the transition and will communicate with impacted streamers as those discussions progress. if they actually go through with this, this is a good gesture on Twitch's part.
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Dec 6, 2023 06:33
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Next up: Australian indie studio League of Geeks (Armello), which has laid off a little over half its staff and put one of its two Early Access titles - starship simulator Jumplight Odyssey - in cryosleep in a mad sprint to use what's left of their finances and resources to ship the other - Hell-themed strategy game Solium Infernum - in February. An FAQ cites dramatic increase in costs, the decline of the Australian dollar, lengthened development times from remote work and several investment deals falling through for the decision. One last patch for Jumplight Odyssey will be put out before it goes on ice containing everything that's ready for human consumption, and 50% of all revenue from the next year of sales will go straight to the development team.
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Dec 6, 2023 07:50
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drat, this thread is just a grim parade of layoffs.The Kins posted:One last patch for Jumplight Odyssey will be put out before it goes on ice containing everything that's ready for human consumption, and 50% of all revenue from the next year of sales will go straight to the development team. Good for them. I hope the bet on Solium Infernum keeps them in the green. It's gotten a decent amount of press.
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Dec 6, 2023 07:59
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Jumplight looked pretty promising. I really hope they can turn things around.
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Dec 6, 2023 08:01
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kirbysuperstar posted:Jumplight looked pretty promising. I really hope they can turn things around.
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Dec 6, 2023 10:46
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The Kins posted:I played it briefly at PAX Aus, and can definitively say that it's... not the kind of game that demos well at a crowded, expensive double-length expo booth. Yeah, I can see that lol
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Dec 6, 2023 11:49
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I don't really want to support statements that include blaming working from home for delays, unless they are specifically talking about the difficulty of getting everybody networked and coordinating different tasks and jobs, but that's a skill issue
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Dec 6, 2023 14:47
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I don't see any reason not to take them at their word here. Remote work isn't a magic, free productivity boost. There's obviously a cost to the act of switching, itself. And that paradigm will work better for some people and teams, and worse for others. For a small team like that, each individual makes up a large portion of the total, so if it's a drag for even a handful of people, that can be a big deal. Add that into all the other stuff they mention and yeah, it can totally be a contributing factor to their struggle.
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Dec 6, 2023 16:28
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It's definitely a case-by-case thing. Some places utterly thrived under remote work, while others lost a lot of productivity when their usual approaches to handing team organization no longer worked. Meanwhile, IGN reports that morale at Bungie is exactly as sunny as you'd imagine given recent circumstances, with their last vestige of independence (they have a split board of directors) potentially getting crushed under a dissolution of the existing board and Complete Sony Domination if they fail to hit certain revenue goals, resulting in a ton of cost cutting measures to the point of no longer sending out birthday cards to staff. quote:Several people we spoke to told us that leaders had reiterated, across multiple meetings, that they couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be more layoffs, with two specifically recalling chief people officer Holly Barbacovi outright stating that layoffs were a “lever” the company would pull again.
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Dec 6, 2023 16:37
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I just can't imagine the gall you'd need to have to just say, "no gently caress our employees" instead of "we weigh all solutions to financial difficulties carefully" On the one hand, it's incredibly forthright and honest which is good. On the other hand, the statement is effectively violence towards all of your staff. Just a really weird choice for managing morale.
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Dec 6, 2023 16:46
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leper khan posted:
"Morale? What's that? Hold on, let me check my metrics here.....hm....nope, I don't think we're tracking that one, I don't see how it'd be relevant to the company if it's not being tracked in the quarterlies. Did you mean MAU?"
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Dec 6, 2023 17:11
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leper khan posted:I just can't imagine the gall you'd need to have to just say, "no gently caress our employees" instead of "we weigh all solutions to financial difficulties carefully" The way the news and government talked about workers over the last 2 years has been increasingly hostile. It shouldn't be surprising that tone and messaging is filtering into the management class.
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Dec 6, 2023 17:25
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I find it strange that companies believe that remote work is the reason for delays when nobody can keep a fuckin job for more than 6 months before getting laid off or "restructured"
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Dec 6, 2023 17:44
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Mr Hootington posted:The way the news and government talked about workers over the last 2 years has been increasingly hostile. It shouldn't be surprising that tone and messaging is filtering into the management class. Got your dog and tail in the wrong order there
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Dec 6, 2023 17:58
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Mr Hootington posted:The way the news and government talked about workers over the last 2 years has been increasingly hostile. It shouldn't be surprising that tone and messaging is filtering into the management class. What's funny is that workers probably haven't had such broad public support in decades. There have been multiple, high profile union battles over the last 18 months, all of which were pretty well regarded. This gets beyond the game industry, but there is talk of unionization at developers and that would be fantastic.
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Dec 6, 2023 18:48
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a company I was an exec at once nixed the exec layer’s bonuses so that the rest of the employees would get more of theirs (the numbers didn’t line up, but it let us convince the board to approve a higher amount for everyone else), and pretty much nobody in our peer group at other companies believed that we would even consider it the team executed well, and the outcome was due to a weak strategy! it’s the only reasonable thing! I would not expect to see that happen in big game companies, lol
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Dec 6, 2023 18:51
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leper khan posted:I just can't imagine the gall you'd need to have to just say, "no gently caress our employees" instead of "we weigh all solutions to financial difficulties carefully" Bungie needs to use their tried and true tactic and buy themselves out of their contract with Bungie
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Dec 6, 2023 18:51
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