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No, I'm not joking. If I somehow had $900 billion in personal debt, it would affect a lot of powerful people and they're going to have to pay me some walking-away money so they can step in and fix the situation. I think it would also work with $900 million.
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Apr 23, 2024 19:03
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Robert Facepalmer posted:It is probably in the other CCGs thread, but wasn't someone friends with a developer on Star Wars Unlimited and they said they were front-loading the design to have like nine sets ready to go? Still think that that is upper levels knowing that there was going to be some studio closure fuckery happening, but wanted to maintain the cash flow as long as projected. Probably me, and not friends, just terminally online. They've been honest about their timetables: Set 9 is in the planning stages (I bet Set 9 is little more than a 10 page Word doc and some photographed whiteboards right now). But Set 6 (scheduled for November 2025) is currently having all the art work done (an artist on Twitter last week mentioned that they were excited about one of their Set 2 cards being previewed, but that they couldn't wait for the Set 6 previews to start so they could show the one they're working on now. Or something to that effect). Set 4 (March 2025) is already locked at the printers, I believe.
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Apr 23, 2024 19:03
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Oh hey I went back to look at the article again and noticed something I hadn't noticed before and it's LOL the $900M in debt is in euros. The capitlization/profit of the Asmodee group is in SEK, swedish krona. 1 swedish krona = 0.086 Euro quote:Asmodee, a global leading tabletop games publisher and distributor with an extensive studio network and IP catalogue. Converting the debt to krona is easier: 900M Euros = ~10.4B SEK Assuming an 8% interest rate (that's a huge assumption and it could easily be much lower) that's about 833M SEK interest annually Adjusted EBIT of 1.9B means just the interest payments are ~44% of profits. That's still... manageable, but it's big, a lot bigger than I had been thinking also lol journalists can you use consistent units ever
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Apr 23, 2024 19:06
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gradenko_2000 posted:Context: Warhammer recently posted that Custodes [sic?] do/did include women, and this has caused some parts of the hobby to go full Sephiroth. I find it very funny that these guys will try and defend 40k's depiction of Space Marines as "Real men are stoic, sexless, steroid enhanced mutants who die needlessly in service of a genocidal tyrant and are then locked into coffin tanks so they can continue to battle fruitlessly against the evil forces of violence, pestilence, lust, and intelligence for all eternity" and surely, there's no way a woman could be similarly brainwashed, mutated, and surgically implanted because of ✨Reasons✨
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Apr 23, 2024 19:11
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I like the idea that the Space Marine creation process does so much to the subject that the concept of an original gender is meaningless, and half of them have always been trans-masculine.
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Apr 23, 2024 19:28
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Leperflesh posted:Oh hey I went back to look at the article again and noticed something I hadn't noticed before and it's LOL https://embracer.com/releases/asmod...embracer-group/ Furthest thing from a finance guy but it seems to be that the €900M/10.4B SEK is being taken as a loan by Asmodee to repay the existing Embracer 8B SEK loan they have that is due in Feb 2025. The new loan is then due in 18 months, so October 2025? I suppose it buys you an extra 8 months, but the loan is called out as being ring-fenced to Asmodee with no recourse to Embracer Group which certainly seems like its being set up to be its own problem. It doesn't seem repayable, so a series of short loans whose interest eat up most of your profits to keep servicing the debt?
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Apr 23, 2024 19:37
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Halloween Jack posted:No, I'm not joking. If I somehow had $900 billion in personal debt, it would affect a lot of powerful people and they're going to have to pay me some walking-away money so they can step in and fix the situation. I think it would also work with $900 million. If you owe the bank 1 million dollars that's a you problem. If you owe the bank 900 million dollars that's the bank's problem.
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Apr 23, 2024 19:49
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HidaO-Win posted:https://embracer.com/releases/asmod...embracer-group/ I mean, basically, yes. The main reason the debt will leave with the Asmodee Spinoff is because if the debt defaults at any point, the creditors get Asmodee's assets that were used to secure the loan. I don't know how that works with a publisher group, because there's degrees of intangibles involved (Are the IPs being included? Is it physical assets only?), but yeah, it's likely going to be something that either gets chipped away at much slower than it should, or is just being set up for another buyout somewhere else down the line. Especially since Embracer is saying they're going to get proceeds from some of the other divestments, I imagine this isn't completely shameless capitalism to prop up what's left, just mostly shameless capitalism.
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Apr 23, 2024 20:31
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Halloween Jack posted:No, I'm not joking. If I somehow had $900 billion in personal debt, it would affect a lot of powerful people and they're going to have to pay me some walking-away money so they can step in and fix the situation. I think it would also work with $900 million. This was literally what the WeWork CEO did.
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Apr 23, 2024 21:00
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Ravus Ursus posted:If you owe the bank 1 million dollars that's a you problem. If I owe anyone 1m dollars that is def their problem!
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Apr 23, 2024 21:01
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SimonChris posted:This was literally what the WeWork CEO did.
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Apr 23, 2024 21:17
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Ravus Ursus posted:If you owe the bank 1 million dollars that's a you problem. I guess either you die or some arrows get drawn on some maps.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:29
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HidaO-Win posted:https://embracer.com/releases/asmod...embracer-group/ Companies have a lot of options for raising capital, including to pay debt. One option is to sell more shares of yourself, diluting your shareholders. This is usually considered a Bad Sign. But it's something you can do if no bank will refinance your debt or offer you terms etc. The short-term nature of the new loan is likely due to the very significant risks involved in this split. If Asmodee come out of the split and demonstrate a few quarters of ongoing profitability, it may be they can access cheaper debt or longer-term debt. Perhaps issue some bonds for example.
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Apr 24, 2024 01:53
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They only split up the companies to do kill the one loaded with debt. Hell I presume they can pick up the IP from the dead rotting carcass afterwards in an auction.
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Apr 24, 2024 02:09
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Comstar posted:They only split up the companies to do kill the one loaded with debt. I mean... no. It's correct to be cynical and gently caress Embracer and all that, but debtors don't just let you refinance all your debt into a corpse because "lol." Their debtors expect the independent Asmodee to be viable enough to make them back that money.
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Apr 24, 2024 02:35
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admanb posted:I mean... no. It's correct to be cynical and gently caress Embracer and all that, but debtors don't just let you refinance all your debt into a corpse because "lol." Their debtors expect the independent Asmodee to be viable enough to make them back that money. I probably wouldn't go that far, but even as a financial layman this isn't a Toys R Us situation. This is Embracer Group eating as many companies as they could and spending the next three years choking on them. Asmodee got the debt because Embracer hosed up royally and they were the biggest coherent company they could split off in this reorganization. What else were they going to do, throw this on one of the video game companies before they have an actual name? The annoying thing about Embracer Group is how it did absolutely nothing positive. Just a constant sense of "the one good thing you could do was pour money into something cool, and you couldn't even do that right".
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Apr 24, 2024 03:27
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Lurks With Wolves posted:I probably wouldn't go that far, but even as a financial layman this isn't a Toys R Us situation. This is Embracer Group eating as many companies as they could and spending the next three years choking on them. Asmodee got the debt because Embracer hosed up royally and they were the biggest coherent company they could split off in this reorganization. What else were they going to do, throw this on one of the video game companies before they have an actual name? I agree with all of this. I just don't draw "Asmodee is a dead corp walking" as a conclusion.
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Apr 24, 2024 04:49
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For comparison, Hasbro, a company that is still viable albeit in some trouble, as of Dec 31st had US $6.5B in assets including $545M in cash and $1B in receivables, $5.4B in liabilities including $1.3B in payables $500M in short-term debt and $3B in long term debt. In 2023 it had $5B in sales and gross profit of $2.8B but with a $1.7B impairment and other charges (one-time costs, supposedly) and $2.7B in ordinary operating expenses for a reported EBIT of -1.5B and EBITDA of -863M. In other words the company took a significant loss, and is carrying at least $3.5B in debt against $5B in gross sales. As we have seen it is slashing operating costs and this will definitely cost revenues but might bring it back into profitability, but it'll likely be carrying most or all of that $3.5B in debt forward. It's still trading as of close today at over $54 a share, with a market capitalization of $8B. This indicates that investors believe it'll be profitable, and Hasbro could easily raise money by taking on more debt if it needed to. Hasbro is due to report first quarter earnings tomorrow, so we'll get another look at how its doing and its projections. In the meantime, you can see that a company like Hasbro is considered impaired, but certainly not hopeless, by the market.
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Apr 24, 2024 05:49
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90s Cringe Rock posted:If you owe the bank 900 billion dollars that's If you owe the bank 900 billion dollars the government has a problem. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 14:02
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Hasbro is up this morning after reporting an earnings beat. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hasbro-shares-rise-first-quarter-133646042.html quote:The Pawtucket, Rhode Island-based company reported adjusted earnings per share of 61 cents compared with the 27-cent average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue was $757.3 million, more than the $738.5 million analysts forecast. shares are currently trading up about 11% at $64.73
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Apr 24, 2024 17:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:Context: Warhammer recently posted that Custodes [sic?] do/did include women, and this has caused some parts of the hobby to go full Sephiroth. I do like that this dong decided that the "woke" are Horus's followers who hosed off into a realm of pure imagination where they're busy freebasing elf souls and loving boob snakes while he and his ilk are the miserable sad sacks purging each other to hold together a crumbling fascist institution.
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Apr 25, 2024 18:26
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PeterWeller posted:I do like that this dong decided that the "woke" are Horus's followers who hosed off into a realm of pure imagination where they're busy freebasing elf souls and loving boob snakes while he and his ilk are the miserable sad sacks purging each other to hold together a crumbling fascist institution. “Woke is when your fascism has women in it” is “more female prison guards” for the far-right.
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Apr 25, 2024 18:28
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I really don't like private equity culture capitalists
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Apr 30, 2024 16:38
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Well I do
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Apr 30, 2024 17:48
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Farg posted:Well I do Really?
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Apr 30, 2024 23:21
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At the risk of summoning up dumb drama, what is going on with Shawn Tomkin (Ironsworn / Starforged author) getting dogpiled about something in a Sundered Isles excerpt? https://twitter.com/ShawnTomkin/status/1785365842643021931 Thread here, but no links to the actual thing that's going around, and I apparently (and thankfully) don't have any twitter ties to the places where the discussion is actually happening.
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May 1, 2024 03:37
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Kestral posted:At the risk of summoning up dumb drama, what is going on with Shawn Tomkin (Ironsworn / Starforged author) getting dogpiled about something in a Sundered Isles excerpt? https://twitter.com/StrigaRosa/status/1784898877050556662  I think this is it, which is an incredibly loving stupid thing to be mad about. It's not a board game, where a rulebook line like that would deserve ire (though even there designer endorsed and written variants are a common feature), it's a loving roleplaying game that is foremost designed to be play solo. Why on earth would "feel free to do things the way you want" be a controversial issue? It's a good note for new players that might get too hung up on mechanics at the detriment of their game and story. https://twitter.com/binarystargames/status/1784916891875651923  yes, lets just make up an entirely different scenario that has nothing to do with this Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 03:57 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 03:54
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I'm sorry, but actually if you play a Solo RPG and don't follow the rules to the letter, the RPG police will come to your house and arrest you. Just imagining people out there playing differently to me impacts my own enjoyment!
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May 1, 2024 04:03
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That is only the first of 28 tweets they made about it in that thread. goddamn 
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May 1, 2024 04:11
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as someone who came across Lu's tweet in the wild and had an inclination to agree with it, I think it comes from a broader context where this idea of "just tear out whatever rules you don't like" is pervasive in particularly D&D 5e and 5e-adjacent discourse, where a game cannot possibly be considered bad so long as you're willing to fix it yourself with a houserule. yes, TTRPGs perhaps do not come with a strong expectation that their rules should be followed to-the-letter, as much as boardgames do, but I would throw the question back: why not? why shouldn't we design TTRPGs whose game mechanics are supposed to be a closed-loop, fully-formed ecosystem? because the alternative is a regression to the Paradox/Bethesda model of design, where it's considered acceptable to release bad games since you're going to rely on the playerbase to "mod" it into a functional one
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May 1, 2024 04:31
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"You can always change what you want" is obvious to the point of being self-evident. If I wanted to do game design, I would just do it, whether you gave me permission or not. Being encouraged in the rules to ignore the rules speaks to a lack of confidence in the systems you've built, to an expectation that the player will fix what you couldn't be bothered to get right -- exactly as the OP says. e: "The customer is always right" is a fundamentally anti-artistic sentiment. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 04:38 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 04:34
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I think those points are more valid in traditional TTRPG design. For solo games like Shawn Tomkins designs you are basically providing a framework for free form journaling. I don't really see an issue with guidance along the lines of "if the game system demands something incongruous or unsatisfying then bend the rules" in that context. This is essentially the role of the GM in all multiplayer games after all. It's useful to call out in the text that as a solo player, you have that power yourself.
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May 1, 2024 04:39
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who cares if it “can be considered bad”? if you consider it bad, then go ahead. some people will disagree with you, but you’ll make it through, and Shawn will be fine too ironsworn and starforged have always had optional components to help the player tailor the game to their desired experience. virtually every oracle consultation is “pick one or roll, your choice”. similarly, many games let you vary how dark the tone is or how detailed combat will be. how opinionated a system is, and how much the intended experience depends on rigorous adherence to finely balanced rules, is a space containing many possible points of success and value in a board game, and to a lesser degree a multiplayer RPG, the system forms the basis of an understanding between the participants about what they can expect from the experience and each other. in a solo RPG experience, where there is nobody’s experience but your own to ruin or make incredible, the argument for requiring consistency without options is very weak IMO if he had published a variant of the game for each combination of rules—a feat that’s possible with digital distribution—would you have also felt that to be violating some sanctity of design?
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May 1, 2024 04:40
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tanglewood1420 posted:I think those points are more valid in traditional TTRPG design. For solo games like Shawn Tomkins designs you are basically providing a framework for free form journaling. I don't really see an issue with guidance along the lines of "if the game system demands something incongruous or unsatisfying then bend the rules" in that context. I will grant that in the context of a solo RPG, some of the edge of my agreement with Lu's criticism does fall away, and I wasn't aware that that was the kind of game getting posted until just this discussion.
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May 1, 2024 04:41
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I would think that in a solo RPG submitting to restrictions on your agency before you understand exactly what sort of experience they're guiding you towards, and trusting that they were designed with intent, would be even more important.Subjunctive posted:if he had published a variant of the game for each combination of rules—a feat that’s possible with digital distribution—would you have also felt that to be violating some sanctity of design? Probably, yeah? It's one of my main criticisms of AD&D, and I also think this about video games with particularly granular / boutique difficulty settings, for that matter. It's a sliding scale and not some kind of bright line singular criteria for if a game is good or bad but if I were trying to get a quick sense of whether something was worth my time I'd definitely take it as a red flag. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 04:51 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 04:43
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I would think that in a solo RPG submitting to restrictions on your agency before you understand exactly what experience they're guiding you towards, and trusting that they were designed with intent, would be even more important. 
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May 1, 2024 04:43
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gradenko_2000 posted:as someone who came across Lu's tweet in the wild and had an inclination to agree with it, I think it comes from a broader context where this idea of "just tear out whatever rules you don't like" is pervasive in particularly D&D 5e and 5e-adjacent discourse, where a game cannot possibly be considered bad so long as you're willing to fix it yourself with a houserule. There's a big difference in a game giving full guidance with the caveat that you can omit stuff you don't like vs a game that has huge gaps in guidance and expects you to fill in the blanks (5e, etc).
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May 1, 2024 04:45
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:
Portraying a designer/player relationship with this metaphor is deeply flawed and itself anti-artistic. And yes, RPG veterans are comfortable with changing the game to suit their table, but newcomers are not going to be as familiar with that concept or comfortable "breaking the rules", even in a solo game. It's a harmless note that is far from the giant red flag that rant portrays it as in this game and it reads as them airing their grievances with TTRPG design as a whole. Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 04:53 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 04:48
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What are some RPGs that tell you NOT to change the rules?
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May 1, 2024 04:57
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mellonbread posted:What are some RPGs that tell you NOT to change the rules? there are some pretty decent "if you're a nazi, gently caress off, don't even play my game" disclaimers in recent memory also i think it might have been Vincent Baker who wrote an essay about how if you're not playing the game by the rules, that's fine, do what you want, but in that case you aren't playing the same game not 100% certain about the author, though, and i think it was a separate thing and not actually part of the rules text
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May 1, 2024 04:59
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