There is a legitimate point of contradiction in the minds of the professional class, as they assume that they are adding value to their firms and are therefore entitled to a share of that value in wages.
They don't see the value of investment dollars or the cult-psychology of the C-levels who consider labor purely a liability. They see their work as productive and meaningful, at least to the company's bottom line. And so when they generate a bunch of new value only to have their jobs terminated before they can reap a payout, they're confused and frustrated by the seemingly illogical nature of the decision.
But then they all go back out and seek other jobs at lower salaries, with fewer benefits, and under harsher labor conditions. They end up working for another set of businesses who all got credit from the same folks that rewarded their last set of employers with new investment for layoffs. And they go through the same cycle of productive labor -> constrained payout -> early dismissal, never really putting the pieces together because its all obscured at the highest levels of financialization.
A lot of this is the result of Econ 101 level propaganda. A lot of this is the fetishization of commodities and the magical realism of financialization. A lot of this is people simply not having the brain-space to draw conclusions from individual life-experiences ten years removed from one another. I don't begrudge folks for missing how the three-card monte of wage labor works, because its a difficult trick to follow. But, at some point, you can't argue with the results. They're getting more revenue and you're getting less pay over time. You don't need to follow the card to know the game is rigged.
I spent most of the last twenty years screaming at coders that all the coding academies and magnet schools and boot camps were a sinister conspiracy by silicon valley to proletarianize them, but did they listen to me? Did they organize? Did they union-maxx? DID THEY BUILD A SINGLE DEATH ROBOT? No> NO! THE FOOLS!
ugh, I had this argument with a coworker who insisted that we "were of another class"
actually I'm part of a different class immune to the predations of capitalhe said us. he was trying to convince me medicare for all was bad because of a healthcare shortage. a necessary one.
"No bro, open source is the solution. Im not some sort of free software brainwashed radical. We are going to give up copyleft protection to the software we create for the most freedom ever (expat "MIT" license) Trust me, it's not like companies with astronomically more capital than us can exploit our labor to corral people into nonfree software."
Few years later...
"proprietary software is inevitable, stop fighting against it. It's okay that microsoft scanned all our code for their machine learning algorithim, i will still use github (owned by microsoft) because Im not some gnu loving weirdo"
Oh tech people are completely incorrigible. They have their nose shoved so far up their libertarian asses that they can’t conceive of group action and collective bargaining.
I think part of it is the industry got itself into a mini-bubble over the promises of the Games as Services model. They thought every game could emulate Fortnite in terms of constant revenue streams from season passes, cosmetics, loot boxes, etc. So while sales were good, the failure of that fantasy to materialize for the overwhelming majority of games that tried to push that model meant projections weren’t met and thus layoffs to bridge some of that gap.
projections weren’t met and thus layoffs to bridge some of that gap.
Was this year not once again the most profitable year ever for the games industry like the last few were?
Fuck I hate capitalists so much. They shouldn’t be allowed to know how much profit they made, just “yes” or “no”. If you made $0.01 in profit that means you succeeded. That is a successful year. You paid all of your employees including yourself and didn’t have to dig into the company’s savings.
If you make one single cent in profit and lay off so much as one single person, whoever decided to do layoffs should be fucking shot.
And to be clear this isn’t me just going “capitalism bad,” this is me going “capitalists are the dumbest people on the planet and aren’t good at capitalism”
As a capitalist, you should hold these beliefs, because chasing after ever increasing profits is obviously unsustainable and will destroy capitalism. Steady profits year on year is what you, a capitalist, should want, because that’s how you keep capitalism fucking going.
If I heat my home by burning logs, I want them to burn at a steady rate and keep my home at a consistent temperature. I don’t want to make sure every day I can burn more logs than the day before and get the house hotter than it’s ever been. If I do that I run out of logs and/or the house burns down.
As a capitalist, you should hold these beliefs, because chasing after ever increasing profits is obviously unsustainable and will destroy capitalism. Steady profits year on year is what you, a capitalist, should want, because that’s how you keep capitalism fucking going.
The problem is that if you settle for steady profits, your competitors with no scruples will outdo you. If they outdo you enough times, they'll buy your company and/or drive you out of business, and then you'll have no profits.
Most rational system
Capitalists are in competition with one another to maintain their position, which means they simply can't have steady profits. Unless they're selling something niche that will always exist, from day 1 they're on a shrinking treadmill with other capitalists in their industry praying for their failure.
They only have class solitary among one themselves when it comes to keeping capitalism around or keeping labor cheap.
Video game studios are in another bucket of worms where it turns out the most profit comes from selling garbage on a subscription model, or just taking a percentage of what other developers make (such as what Valve, Epic, Nintendo, Sony, etc all do).
Companies that make a steady, tiny profit are gonna be bought out or their workers will find somewhere else that promises more long-term stability. Look at the tragedy of what happened to Raven Software and Treyarch, forever doomed to work in the CoD mines.
There's a "Dragon devouring it's own tail" element. You might be a smart capitalist, but shareholders aren't, and they hold your leash. You could try to develop a stable, powerful, robust company, but if you're not return-maxxing and profit-pilled the shareholders will pull their investments and go to someone who promises a higher short-term return.
Individual firms, unless they're privately owned, often can't pursue a steady, stable position even if someone in the C-Suite is Marx-brained enough to understand how this whole nightmare works. They're in the hands of forces beyond their control, the great god Capitalism who thirsts for the blood and bone of humanity.
In the US due to an utterly insane theory of "Shareholder Value" the C-suite is legally required to maximize sharehold profits at all costs and ahead of other considerations, and they can be removed or sued if they do not.
the TTRPG Eclipse Phase kind of goes in to this. The feral anarchists who write the thing posit that after late-Capitalism will come hyper-capitalism, where all the big firms break down in to "agile" and "flexible" hyper-corps, the evolution of mega-corps. Hyper-corps will assemble labor and resources for months or even days at a time to squirt out a minimum viable product leveraging every kind of labor-strangling technique they can. In the Eclipse Phase world that's countless millions of "infugees", refugees from earth who uploaded their brains in to cold storage to escape the apocalypse and are now utterly at the mercy of Hypercorps who buy them as de-facto slaves and only break them out of cold storage to put them on a project in a vastly accelerated simulated spaces. The infugees are desperate for any time in the waking world and take contracts that last days or months of real-world time but might be years of simulation time. If they're very lucky they might be able to buy clock-cycles to keep operating as a digital consciousness after their project ends, but most of them get tossed back in to cold storage, essentially frozen in time, until, if they're very lucky, their quickly aging skill set is needed again.
The anti-capitalist moeities out beyond the Belt are in a cold-war with the in-system Hypercapitalists, and part of that is spinning up as much compute time as they can to rescue as many infugees as they can manage, then cranking out minimally viable cybernetic robot shells so they can at least put people in simple bodies that can participate in the physical world while they wait in the long, long, long queue for a biological human bodie, or at least a partially biological synth body. Some people are fine being a free or mostly free digital consciousness and living in the data networks, or embodied in simulations, but most people want to have meat bodies that can be part of the "real" world again.
It's a cool system. It goes hard in to what trans-humanism might mean for us in the near future, investigating both the wonders (nearly-unlimited bodily autonomy for wealthy hyper-capitalists and well equipped anti-capitalist societies) and the horrors (terrifying new kinds of slavery made possible by speculative and emergent technologies).
Shareholders are powerless, no one really cares about shares on the secondary market and shareholder value is a just a thin excuse to keep doing what capital does.
legally required to maximize sharehold profits at all costs and ahead of other considerations, and they can be removed or sued if they do not.
This is not actually the case, I can find a couple articles if you're interested.
Eclipse Plane reminds me of the Iain Banks book Surface Detail with a simulated hell.
This is not actually the case, I can find a couple articles if you're interested.
I would like that, thank you.
Let me know if the link doesn't work - book https://is.gd/mLTVsQ and a blog post - https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
Directors tend to have very broad latitude as long as they're not stealing from the company
because chasing after ever increasing profits is obviously unsustainable and will destroy capitalism
Wrong, my firm needs to grow the fastest so it can acquire all the other firms and then we'll be the sole owners of the remnants of the earth
That's still too framed inside the idea of capitalism. We should, as a society not be afraid to change what we do. That is incredibly important to learn. What that requires is a deep and fundamental decoupling of job and access to material well being.
Oh certainly, I just find it interesting that the capitalists can’t even manage capitalism in a way that it won’t fall apart. They’re a serpent eating their own tail and can’t even listen to the people pointing out they can’t possibly do that forever.
The capitalists only care for the system to work for their lifetime. Collapse beyond that horizon is moot.
Projections weren't met so we cannibalize our own company by laying off our employees (yk the ones that make the stuff that makes profit) in order to meet projections, then next year/quarter they make even greater projections with less workers 😂 and thus the cycle keeps going. This is what happens when shareholders run the company.
In my eyes, whenever a company goes public (selling shares in the market) it is implicitly announcing its death. That is the precise moment that a company should get nationalized.
Especially as a lot of these publicly traded companies aren’t video game specific companies but rather media/software conglomerates (Microsoft, Warner Bros). The C-suite and board members don’t really understand the video game market, they just see money printer.
People at the very top are unfamiliar with how any company works. In that I mean they don't understand how to make or perform a service for a customer. They only know how to manipulate capital to their benefit and at no point does it matter what the company theoretically does at all. Make wigets or polish shoes or serve burgers, none of that matters, only their valuation and quarterly earnings report matters.
That and that there were historically low interest rates and the fact that gaming and tech in general saw a huge boost during COVID that has started to subside last year added to the obvious bubblr
Exhibit A: Embracer Group
Sucked up a ton of studios when it was almost free to do so, but now they can't afford to actually do anything with them. And since the Saudi deal fell through no one wants to invest in a sinking ship
I think part of it is the industry got itself into a mini-bubble over the promises of the Games as Services model.
Its the same bubble they got into with MMOs. This isn't a new approach to selling software (particularly gaming software). But we're at the point where hardware isn't improving fast enough to demand radical new changes in the platform/engine. And there's an expanded workforce abroad who will do the grunt-work of game production far cheaper, particularly now that all the hard work of engine design is done and you're just rolling out new shapes and colors for the hogs.
It isn't as though EA or Activism/Blizzard can't bring in tons of new revenue every year (particularly with the glut of sales post-COVID). Its just that they need less labor and from less-skilled professionals, while they are far more invested in sales and marketing in order to move units after go-live.
Not every game needs to sell like Fortnite to turn a profit. And even Fortnite doesn't need to work too hard to keep the wheel spinning, now that the underlying mechanics of the game are in place. So all that excess labor can be dumped, while investors vacuum up the profits.
I'm excited for the extraction shooter bubble. Frugnk the Caveman pick berries. Frungk run from predator. Frungk make it back to cave, fashion berries in to machine gun with extra poison damage. Life good. Frugnk happy.
Meh. It's not that bad as long as you don't overly focus on every granular detail as you go along. Just read it, keep going even if you feel lost, then go back and reread if you feel it's necessary. Also, since I don't think Capital is taught in colleges much if at all anymore (?), I recommend people read and then listen to/watch David Harvey's multiple part series (on YouTube for free). He contextualizes the chapters with his historical knowledge and inserts his own personal experiences as a lifelong and now very old Marxist scholar. No one will please everyone, but he's quite good. I read through Capital in about a month (or so) along with him. He also covers Vol II/III (selected chapters)
FOSS
THEFT
