It’s not the Blizzard that used to make games we loved anymore. It’s just a name now, and behind that a corporation focused on maximum profit exclusively.

Has there been any movement from those wallets in the years since Satoshi went dark?

We’re not going to hit those targets anyway… SO LET’S MAKE IT WAY FUCKING WORSE

I wonder if we’ll ever get to the place where people like this unexpectedly meet violent ends. They’ll sacrifice any number of lives for their shareholders interests.

Any one want to guess who will really end up paying for the price hike?

It’s not AT&T.

Let me try.

By creating a culture that singularly valued money and production over all other concerns, including the well-being of staff, Kotick created and cultivated the conditions needed for abuse to set in.

And Kotick is the kind of sociopath that leads to this when other things are swept under the rug.

Maybe it wasn’t a line item on his payslip though.

Yeah, but Kotick was not really the real issue. He’s a straw man of sorts, a target dummy, designed to draw fire for unpopular decisions.

It is the board and shareholders who massively incentivized him into that behaviour. CEOs are brought in to act in the interests of shareholders, while also abstracting them away from blame and direct culpability.

The goal of blizzard (and any other publically listed company) is wealth creation for shareholders via share price growth, not making games per se.

The CEO and his management team created this, they did not take care of the workforce, and they cultivated the most recent reputational damage.

If this game releases with good quality my friends and I are day 2 customers for sure. Seems fun as hell from the videos.

This guy was brought on the team as a distraction, and his axing is already planned for a moment where they want to steal the news cycle

Yeah, I like them but I’m firmly in the camp of waiting for player reviews. We’ll see.

I’m not super into anime, no connoisseur by any measure, but I recently felt like there might be something great to watch in that area. I looked up highly rated anime and Frieren came up.

I’ve watched a few episodes and it seems, well there’s no question it’s well made and a great story, but it’s pretty heavy. Sad at times. Does it get happier and more fun, or is this the tone throughout?

If so I might have to try something else.

With his ethics there’s no way I’d let any company controlled by him attach itself to my brain.

I have a hard time imagining that for any profit driven corporation, but most especially him.

I wonder if there’s any value to considering the point he makes on its own merits.

And billionaires are also bad.

Yeah you’re right, a divider. Or a 0.x multiplier I suppose.

And you’re also right about the divide between highly skilled and not, but I think that’s what we saw quite strongly in SAO. The side effect of serious consequences separated the players.

I don’t think it’s a successful design approach for a commercial game, most players do not play permadeath even if it’s an common option.

Why is PCMag supporting more Twitter usage? It’s a poison, a platform for mass manipulation.

The underlying threat of serious consequences changed player behaviour, psychologically.

Today gamers throw themselves into monsters with limited regard for consequences, which changes our perception of the encounters.

I wonder what would happen if number of deaths was a tracked stat that acted as a multiplier for player skills / powers.

We demand infinite growth. Why? Because shareholders want to buy shares and sell them later for more.

Do anything it takes to make that transaction happen, cut people’s jobs en masse, whatever.

Forever.

Pump the rage into their veins, that’s the ticket. Can’t possibly go wrong, and even if it does it wasn’t us.

OK, maybe it was us but it’s not that bad. Ok, it’s bad but who knew?

OK, we kinda knew, but that monetization tho!

He’s broadcasting to all businesses and billionaires that anyone who strongly supports him gets their back rubbed right back.

He’s not saying EVs are great, that we should support them because it’s good policy, the right move for America etc.

Its simply quid pro quo.

Yeah, fully agree. This is one of the reasons big tech is dangerous with AI, their sense of humanity and their instincts on what’s right are way off.

Oozes superficiality. Say anything do anything for market share.