It's Video Game News

[s. goblin]

lets do it

we have to go back

[Blissful]

lets do it

we have to go back

personally id like to go forward, just without the phones in

[Skeletor]

i saw that for phone games they're going to try to get it out of apple rather than the developer?

wait the number or the money

neither seems very likely but the money seems zero percent

i guess you must mean the money since they're not getting the number from the developer in any case

[Rylinks]

the money

[Rylinks]

matt levine just wrote about how the GAAP for stock compensation may not capture what's actually going on:

If you are the board of directors of a small ambitious company that intends to disrupt and remake the whatever industry, but has not done so yet, probably the way you should pay your chief executive officer is (1) give her enough cash to pay her rent and (2) promise to make her very rich if the company actually works out. The exact mechanics of that promise are flexible, but one pretty standard approach is:

Give her a reasonable cash salary; and
Award her a huge slug of stock options, at the beginning of the journey to disrupting and remaking the industry, that will be worth, like, $5 billion if the company ends up being worth $50 billion. But if the company ends up being worth $0, they’ll be worth zero. And if the company just sort of muddles along doing okay but never really disrupts or remakes anything, they will also be worth zero: They will only pay off if the company gets really big. They are a stretch goal, a huge reward for huge success; they are not meant to reward the CEO comfortably for modest success, but to encourage her to take big swings.
[...]
The appeal of this approach is obvious, grounded in theory, aligned with shareholders and not uncommon. In the state of the world where the CEO gets rich, the shareholder have also gotten rich, which is what the shareholders want.

But the accounting is weird. As a matter of accounting, what happens is that you give the CEO a one-time grant of options whose payout is something like “$5 billion if the company gets to $50 billion and $0 if it stays under $5 billion,” or whatever, and then an accountant throws that into a Black-Scholes calculator and computes that the options have a fair market value, now, of $100 million or whatever, and then you disclose that value as the CEO’s “compensation” for “this year” in your securities filings. And then journalists cheerfully report that your CEO gets “paid” $100 million “per year,” and that she is one of the highest-paid CEOs in the country despite your company being kind of small and not having had much success... And you say, well, of course we are small and haven’t had much success; the point of the options grant is to change that. The options will cost you $5 billion if the company works out great and $0 if it doesn’t. They didn’t “really” cost you $100 million now, and the CEO certainly didn’t get $100 million now: The calculated fair market value of the options today might be $100 million, but she can’t sell them, and she will never get any value for them unless the company succeeds. The $100 million value is, crudely, the $5 billion value of the options in the success case times the 2% chance of achieving it.[7] It’s “worth” $100 million in expectation, but 98% of the time it will end up worth zero.
[...]
Giving the CEO of a $500 million company $100 million in annual pay seems odd,[8] but of course CS Disco didn’t do that. They gave him a big one-time grant of options with a $109 million fair market value, but the options (1) have a strike price of $32 and (2) vest at prices starting at $150 and going up.[9] The $32 strike price was the company’s initial public offering price, but by the time we talked about it the stock was at $8.40 and, I wrote, “the most likely value of this $109 million pay package is zero dollars.”

[Rylinks]

although this is probably not going on with unity specifically

[Crunchums]

did they end up walking back the Unity thing or are they sticking to it?

[Ashenai]

There's some nuance, but short answer is they're sticking to it

[Crunchums]

wow

[s. goblin]

wow

it's actually worse than that because there's rumors / rumblings that they're willing to waive the fee, at least on cellphones, if you bake their malware into your app

"The LevelPlay suite of tools allows you to "control every aspect of your monetisation strategy" via in-game ads in Unity games for smartphones, with various types of ads, ad testing and analytics available to serve up commercial content most likely to earn money."

edit - Unity makes an oblique reference to this plan in its blog post on the controversial fees, with a note that "qualifying customers may be eligible for credits toward the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games".

Developers reading the blog post are then encouraged to "please reach out to your account manager to learn more".

[haplo]

afaik the latest news is that ~10 of the biggest mobile devs (billions of combined installs across them) have said they're removing unity ads from their games until the install policy changes

[Skeletor]

wow

it's actually worse than that because there's rumors / rumblings that they're willing to waive the fee, at least on cellphones, if you bake their malware into your app

"The LevelPlay suite of tools allows you to "control every aspect of your monetisation strategy" via in-game ads in Unity games for smartphones, with various types of ads, ad testing and analytics available to serve up commercial content most likely to earn money."

edit - Unity makes an oblique reference to this plan in its blog post on the controversial fees, with a note that "qualifying customers may be eligible for credits toward the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games".

Developers reading the blog post are then encouraged to "please reach out to your account manager to learn more".

maybe that was the play all along. they make like half their money on ads. so this is to get everyone to use their ad service

[Skeletor]

https://twitter.com/unity/status/1703547752205218265

[Skeletor]

announced an announcement

[s. goblin]

[groff_enthusiast]

these are unity executives selling stock shortly before the fees announcmenet, on the theory that they knew this would bad, did it anyway, but sold their shares so they didn't lose money

"Automatic Sell" is a specific term meaning the sale was long ago scheduled, before the knowledge of material negative events.

[Ashenai]

South Korea hosted a Diablo 4 live event and basically no one showed up, it was just an empty auditorium and a peak of 300 viewers on stream. The streamer doing the event expressed his surprise and was asked to stop streaming

[Doug]

Is it that it has the same player base as subsequent games? Have they moved on?

[Ashenai]

Yeah apparently both the player and viewer counts have completely collapsed. I don't know why but people are saying it's the monetization and shitty unrewarding endgame grind.

[Ashenai]

Also there's a lot of hype for PoE2, I've heard claims that it's killed Diablo 4 despite not even being out yet

[s. goblin]

Yeah apparently both the player and viewer counts have completely collapsed. I don't know why but people are saying it's the monetization and shitty unrewarding endgame grind.

this is kind of a weird two sided thing. like, people will tell you that the game is good; that it was worth the 80 dollars and the 20 extra that they paid to get to play the game a few days early early because we're in hell (not actually where diablo takes place), because, like, hey, it does have a main campaign. a story (that's dogshit) that they enjoyed. and a character creation that makes characters that looks just like narcissistic psychopaths

this all sounds terribly negative, but, like, you are getting all of that, 50 hours or whatever out of this game, and the opportunity for there to be even more hours down the road, if they ever do figure out the end game, or make the classes more engaging or whatever.

having said that though the expansion is already in the pipeline and that's going to cost. if fuck diablo 5 itself isn't already on its way. but, you know, they could theoretically land on an expansion that is fun and does brings players back. there's a new one coming up in october i guess.

i think their problems are a bit beyond, though. samey feeling classes. mmo cool downs. pack size / loot problems. people were really hoping that season 1 would fundamentally fix a lot of this stuff and instead of doing any of that they just nerfed all of the classes, so

[Ashenai]

Maybe they should try making videogames again instead of just the same Battlepass Simulator sewn into the corpses of various once-beloved IPs

[Rylinks]

mihoyo has made battlepass simulator sewn into good videogames and that's worked alright, maybe they can try taht

[Ashenai]

mihoyo has made battlepass simulator sewn into good videogames and that's worked alright, maybe they can try taht

speaking of

man I don't think I'm going to survive Zenless Zone Zero

[Rylinks]

try getting hired to translate the game into hungarian so you get everything for free

[Ashenai]

money is really not the problem, mihoyo games are very friendly to F2P and low-budget players (they will also exploit and murder you if you are an obsessive spender, but I'm not)

[Rylinks]

if you get everything for free you don't have to do the annoying parts

[Ashenai]

well, I talked to a dude once who had lots of money and no compunctions about spending it, so he just got everything he wanted in Star Rail

and it straight-up ruined the game for him, because all the challenge was gone

[Rylinks]

you'll still have the challenge of translating the game into hungarian, so it'll be fine

[s. goblin]

you'll still have the challenge of translating the game into hungarian, so it'll be fine

this character says that they are very hungry

then this character says they are also

hungry