Yes, those are not conflicting pieces of information. The poor allocation of resources is not having a Project B ready for people to move to when their job on Project A is done.

Eh, there are enough news reports of record profit game sales followed by massive layoffs to say otherwise.

That doesn’t dispute what I said in the slightest.

None of those things can happen indefinitely. Loss leaders make up their profits on the back end; the classic example in this industry is selling a console at a loss while selling software at higher margins.

AI is still in the investment phase. By anyone’s account, this is a bubble about to burst, investing in something that doesn’t generate enough money to justify the investment. It won’t do that forever. I’d be surprised if it continues without a major correction in a few years. No one can predict how or when it will happen, but we’ve seen so many bubbles throughout history. They all need sustainable profit eventually, or they become a disaster. Gaming already had its own bubble in the wake of the pandemic, and that’s where these layoffs are coming from.

Are you willfully misunderstanding at this point? Those wages come from averages and projections based on past results of how much money previous games make. If they continually don’t make money, their jobs disappear, because the work they’re doing no longer justifies how much it costs to pay them to do it.

Not forever. The profits need to outweigh the losses, and the rest comes down to averages. That’s how all of this works.

You are mixing units and data at this point. Acquisitions cost money. Blizzard and Call of Duty come in the same purchase. Call of Duty had a bad release this past year. And none of those things are a measure of how profitable Blizzard games are.

What? They haven’t been flopping either critically or commercially. Even Overwatch 2 and Diablo Immortal, with vocal dissatisfaction from players, still made tons of money.

Not for more than one or two games in a row.

The Founder is an underrated movie.

That’s a different story entirely. That’s poor allocation of resources on large projects, when certain disciplines needed at the end of a project don’t necessarily have work to do at the beginning of another. The money that hired those people in the first place still came from selling the company’s previous video games.

No, I didn’t miss the independent studios being bought up, nor did I miss the countless others formed in their wake and free from corporate control. I’m not ashamed that I have a realistic view of the world, and I find yours to be childish.

I can’t dictate whether or not you pirate; I just think you can help influence the world in a more positive way if you don’t. There are games made by people who worked hard and aren’t employed by a corporation. I would encourage you to buy from them, because you can show that you value their hard work and want them to keep doing it. Games have the good fortune of being more democratized than other media, so even if they have the lion’s share of the market, you can go on enjoying video games, even paying for video games, without giving those corporations the time of day.

Being frank, nothing will come of a movement about consumer rights if it looks like you just want to get things for free.

Plenty of them aren’t. Pay them.

Most but not all of the survival crafting genre will allow you to host your own servers. Others still have LAN using listen servers, but both are rare.

To each their own, but I’d say none of those compare to Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, and Skullgirls.

No, they typically don’t. That’s more what startups do. In the corporate world, the schedules are amortized, but the money has to come from somewhere.

You’ll find far fewer of them creating when they need to spend more of their time at a job that will allow them to feed their families. And I don’t think the games I’ve found for free (actually free, not given away for free once as a promo) have tended to be better than the paid ones.

The wages only appear if the thing they produce creates profits for the corporation. If they continually produce something that doesn’t sell, they won’t have a job anymore. And I’ll raise you another part of this equation. If you pirated Assassin’s Creed: Shadows because you hate Ubisoft or whatever, that game will take somewhere between 35 and 65 hours for most people to finish, according to How Long to Beat. That’s 35 to 65 hours that you weren’t spending in some other game, perhaps a game that respects your values enough that you’d part with your money to play. Maybe that’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance II or The Alters or Knights in Tight Spaces; whatever your preferences are, there’s some other game that also didn’t get your money because you were playing that pirated game instead, and I picked those three examples because they’re recent and run a range of different developer/publisher models while still being DRM-free.

I agree with the first sentence, but that’s what I feel this slogan does a poor job of reinforcing.