Progressively More Annoying Friday Bullet Points about Video Game Business

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.