I'm not under an illusion that it does any good, but I swore off all Blizzard products after the Blitzchung incident. It doesn't feel right giving money to a company that would side with the CCP over human rights in Hong Kong. I'd previously played Hearthstone and Overwatch, and I'd been a Blizzard fan since the original Warcraft. That happy company is dead, and something ugly is animating its corpse.
I think company founders are often great, idealistic people. People who genuinely want to make the world better.
When they step aside, however, the people who take over after them tend to be terrifying: zero empathy creatures who favor profit maximization over any and all human cost. Does anyone know why this happens?
Oh it's easy to explain. Steve Jobs said it best [1]. He talks about innovation at Pepsi being a new bottle. That's what Activision Blizzard is. They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. They just release a new "bottle" every 1-2 years.
Game studios are a bit like a large film studio. They don't like the creative process. It's too unpredictable. They want a formula to produce content that can be predicted, projected and tracked.
Here's another key point: everything you do as a company either adds to or subtracts from your brand value.
For example: Square Enix giving discounted subscriptions and a general mea culpa around the original FF14 release, brand value add. Blizzard adding micro-transactions to classic TBC? That's nothing more than the short-term extraction of brand value into money.
It's a bit like delivering pizza. You're trading long term car depreciation and maintenance for short-term cash.
I think you’re more explaining what happens than why it happens.
Personally I know every project or initiative I’ve pushed for is because I have a vision of how things should be. When I give up the reigns to someone else, usually they’re just doing it because they have to.
Once an organization has grown to multiple layers of management the people on top will eventually become those who are good at climbing the ladder.
How we choose our leaders is IMHO one of the most important problems we yet don’t really understand. It’s partly a function of how we structure our organizations.
Just trying to play devils advocate, im not sure it’s possible to do it differently. You simply can’t replicate true founder attitudes and mentality and choices with a management with stock options and fiduciary responsibility.
Steve Jobs seemed to be very concerned about this and spent a lot of time trying to create an innovative organisation independent of him. What have we got since him? A smart watch and ever increasing apple taxes on the App Store. And incremental improvements to the iPhone.
It’s really depressing but I’m not sure as humanity we can do better really. The entrepreneur is just someone who starts with nothing and creates something. You can only go so far in recreating that in a large organisation.
> A smart watch and ever increasing apple taxes on the App Store. And incremental improvements to the iPhone.
And Swift, and Apple Silicon, and FaceID, and HomePod (which hasn't been a massive success but is at least an attempt at something new), and a return to the Cheese Grater Pro, and massive improvements to Maps, and the perpetual autonomous driving rumors. What am I forgetting? Oh, Apple actually halved App Store rates for smaller developers, inducing the stores on other platforms to do similar. Maybe some of these were on some sort of roadmap that Jobs left behind, but not all of them could have been.
The "innovation at Apple died along with Jobs" argument is looking more and more ridiculous as more time passes and Apple continues to innovate.
And you can’t talk about the Apple Watch without talking about the other half of its wearables: Airpods, which are near-universally lauded and undoubtedly innovative.
And who was talking about wearables before Apple entered the game? Only nerds, pretty much. There is something to be said about Apple repeatedly setting trends in our society. Many will chalk it up to “Apple worship” or whatever, but I think the real answer is that Apple is one of the only tech companies who can innovate in the cultural space.
> Airpods, which are near-universally lauded and undoubtedly innovative.
Are airpods innovative? I thought wireless Bluetooth headphones have been around for ages, including ones with better (subjective) aesthetics and sound quality than airpods.
This is a sincere question. I'm not familiar enough with airpods to know if they have some novel feature, or pulled off a magic combination of marketing+quality+features that predecessors had not, like the iPhone did.
Ha I get you, I tend to have a low opinion of Apple products so I try to temper my assumptions and ask questions about the products with an open mind.
Hm, my understanding is that this combination of positives wasn't especially novel in the wireless headphone market. Was it?
As far as the design, I tend to think Apple has historically excelled at design, to the point that my favorite phones aesthetically have been shameless Samsung rip-offs of iPhone designs. But I don't see this reputation lived up to in their last few products: eg, the square Apple Watch is a lot uglier than the contemporary (at launch) round Motorola offering. And I personally find Airpods to look like hearing aids; I was recently in the market for high-quality Bluetooth headphones and the Airpods' hideousness is part of what knocked them out of the running.
Also, the size is key. Hearing aids keep getting smaller and less visible while continually improving at varying performance metrics, and airpods represent that technology starting to impact the consumer market.
GP probably meant that people pay more and more for apps. They buy more apps or more expensive apps or more people buy apps. In other words, even with rate staying the same Apple has ever increasing revenue from the App Store.
And the GP would be wrong. Apps have never been cheaper and the App Store is a prime reason. The drive to $.99 or free apps started there.
Apple's increase in services revenue is primarily due to the incredible number of Apple devices in use, as well as the increased number of services being offered now.
I’m curious about your “apps have never been cheaper” comment. Is that actually true? Does that take into account long term ownership (recurring subscriptions)?
When the App Store first launched, it wasn't unusual to find apps being sold for more than $20. That quickly dropped to where it was hard to find an app that cost more than $.99. Of course this meant that many large vendors simply didn't create or sell apps in the Store, fearing to cannibalize their products.
Now the model has shifted to subscription based apps. But even with these, there's a huge amount of free apps as well. It appears that the majority of income comes (as it does in Las Vegas) from "whales" who spend an disproportionate amount of money, primarily on games.
I’m sure we can do better, but not sure exactly how. Working with longer time periods for incentives is probably of importance. Actively nurturing creative behavior rather than just risk mitigation also. I think this is something organizations need to be aware of because it is not natural.
Also I don’t think we are at a optimization level where only the most radical types like founders are needed. It is probably enough to get out of the way of reasonably smart people. I see this in the public sector all the time.
As the company grows the types of people that are attracted and unattracted by the company change, as do those that are accepted and rejected by it. For example, risk averse people are attracted to mature companies, and they don't like risk takers.
One of the consequences is that companies become more specialized and lose deep expertise. To put it bluntly, its because they no longer have people with deep expertise, and even when they do they are ignored by management who tend to be less interested and knowledgeable about the subject matter.
I don't know of any company that has tried to prevent this. It's a general force that permeates everything, including recruiters, HR, their job postings, etc. So even companies that think they're preventing it probably still walk right into it regardless.
Of course, specialization is not necessarily good or bad. In a very competitive environment the company may not have a choice.
Why it happens is because you cannot find a genuinely creative person with the drive and motivation needed to keep pushing a juggernaut like Blizard forward who would be willing to drop their own creative vision and adopt the one of the original founders. Who knows what they'll do? When its time to eat plates of shit will they do it? It's far too much risk to put an unknown in that position.
Your only option is to send in the corporate fleet because they're predictable. Even if they've failed before they will never surprise or throw out any curve balls to investors and shareholders and that's valued far above the possibility of a new creative spark achieving something.
A large market position (not really anything related to monopoly power per se) leads companies to be very risk-averse since they can always make better gains in the short-term by incremental improvements rather than radical changes. Right up until someone disrupts the market and crushes them.
>Steve Jobs said it best. He talks about innovation at Pepsi being a new bottle. That's what Activision Blizzard is. They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. They just release a new "bottle" every 1-2 years.
Isn't this also kind of what Apple has become in the post-Steve Jobs era?
Cook is not a product leader cut from the same cloth as Steve (I mean... few are). His talent was always for supply side management. This is really significant. To secure components and manufacturing capacity for Apple's scale is no mean feat.
I would say 2 significant things have happened on Cook's watch though:
1. The Apple Watch. This certainly hasn't had the impact the iPhone had. It was also launched as a luxury product (remember the ex-Burberry CEO who drove this? The $10,000 Apple Watch edition?). It later got rebranded as a health product and there I think it has potential. The latest version can do ECGs and determine blood oxygen. IMHO there's a massive future market in passive health monitoring.
It's still a somewhat awkward user experience however in a way that never would've happened on Steve's watch. Apple's reputation for polished user experience as a whole is degrading and we may eventually get to the point of Bill Gates's legendary rant [1].
Steve also pushed back against Johnny Ives' hardline pure vision and I doubt the butterfly keyboard fiasco would've happened under Steve.
The second innovation is on the silicon front. There are two prongs to this:
1. Replacing Intel with ARM (M1); and
2. Breaking Qualcomm's "monopoly" on wireless broadband chipsets. This is still ongoing.
Apple still has a lot of inertia from Steve even after all these years. Who knows how long that will last.
Somewhat late to this discussion. But I am willing to bet Apple Watch didn't start out as some sort of innovative product. It was born as an urgent need for a product with leading edge technology. Or a need for the operation and supply chain. That is why the user experience didn't quite match the usual Apple standard and went on for a few years as path finding / soul searching.
iPhone success has its own problem. You can no longer put leading edge technology into it, because these tech dont scale to hundred million of unit per year. That is why you always see Apple being late to many tech. The only way to do that, or to help doing that, is to have a product that are sold in lower volume, higher margin, and allow them to test and innovate. Both Apple Watch and iPhone Pro ( or iPhone X ) were that. Apple Watch allowed their supply chain to test and improve OLED, LTPO, playing around with material such as ceramics, stainless steel, titanium alloy ( coming soon to iPhone Pro ), SiP ( System in Package ), Double Side Packaging, New Battery packaging, Low Power Bluetooth and WiFi and lots of other small details. They allow Apple to refine the process before they are put on iPhone, or in many cases never actually arrive on an iPhone.
The development line of the A CPUs that led to the M1 is definitely not ‘a new bottle every 1-2 years’. The M1 out-innovated Intel, Qualcomm and to a lesser extend AMD.
Apple also branched out to other categories with the Apple Watch and AirPods.
However, I'd argue the CPU change is considered a black box vertical improvement by the vast majority of end users. It's a big innovation, but it's still just an improvement to an existing product. And AirPods aren't really groundbreaking.
Apple Watch counts, but is also just a nicer version of something available to people for almost a decade, whereas the iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, and early Macintoshes really offered something very different from anything else you could reasonably get at the time.
A modern equivalent would be, say, "just works" AR glasses, or something no one even knew they might want (faster horses vs. cars, etc.). It's a lot to ask for, but that is the reputation they're trying to maintain, and they are worth over $2 trillion.
While the nerd in me wants to agree with you, aren't all of these just great examples of deeper vertical integration?
When I started in computing most major players had their own CPU's, and over time everything converged on mostly Intel with AMD/ARM in there to mix it up. Now we see companies swinging back to the old days where each will have their own CPU's. To me its a return to vertical integration and exposes all of us to a new era of lock-in.
> They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW.
I don't follow, even in the air quotes monopoly context. Could you elaborate? I thought anyone can make a game, even that specific type of game and reach a paying audience quickly if it is good. Aren't the game engines for CoD and WoW actually owned by different companies? Eg: Unreal Engine is owned by Epic/Tencent.
I guess they have a legal monopoly on their intellectual property? But I do see a lot of sloppy uses of the word monopoly that just seem to be autopilot.
There was no need for inverted commas in the GGP post. Intellectual property is precisely a government-granted monopoly under specific rules. Nobody else can make a Call of Duty game: they have a monopoly on the market for Call of Duty games.
Yeah, but having a monopoly over their own IP isn’t in any way noteworthy. I took the scare quotes to mean that they had pseudo-monopoly in the broader space (WoW -> MMORPG, CoD -> console FPS).
I’m not sure I agree with them, but stating that they have a monopoly over their own IPs is so obvious and uninteresting that I find it hard to believe that’s what they were going for.
It's interesting in the sense that as a consumer of CoD games, you're not getting any innovation from Activision. You're just getting a new bottle every couple of years. Compare that to Apple, where arguably you're not just getting a new bottle: if you're in the ecosystem, you're getting an M1, air pods, a watch, lidar on your phone, the opportunity to spend 3 figures on a "pencil", whatever. Very different approaches.
I think it's because of incentives. For-profit companies are incentivised to maximise profits. There might be resistance against doing so in unethical ways at the start but as the company grows it becomes harder to control until eventually it just does whatever is most profitable, limited only by laws (most of the time). Any CSR or ethical decision becomes a PR stunt to distract from the unethical behaviours.
A lot of not-for-profits also fall into this trap unfortunately as they try to maximise revenue or as they become bloated with administrators.
I think at the founder level - trying to start B-corps, keeping them small-mid and embedding ethics deeply into the culture is the way to go but that is quite different from startup culture.
Also because almost every other tech company (Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, etc.) make their products at the exact same Foxconn factories. Apple just gets the biggest headline.
It doesn’t absolve Apple but it explains why the headlines don’t stick. There is nothing unique about Apple in this regard and they don’t claim to make the phones anywhere else. Who makes their products are made isn’t even part of their corporate messaging.
Xbox Series X and S Manufacturer: Flextronics and Foxconn
Nintendo Switch Manufacturer: Foxconn
Sony Manufacturer: PlayStation 5 In-house (my mistake on them). PlayStation 3 and 4 were both made by Foxconn assisting.
But it also applies to others:
Google Pixel 5 Manufacturer: Foxconn
Kindle Manufacturer: Foxconn (Fire Tablets are made in Hong Kong by Quanta due to AOSP Anti-Fork rules)
Nintendo DS Manufacturer: Foxconn
Modern Nokia / HMD Global Devices Manufacturer: Foxconn
Xbox 360 Manufacturer: Foxconn
AMD Threadripper TR4 Socket Manufacturer: Foxconn
And so on. Apple, Foxconn. Because almost everybody uses Foxconn.
So when you see those articles about "Apple factory suicide nets," calling it the whole tech industry's contract manufacturer of choice would have been more apt.
I can’t find how many people worked at Foxconn at the time, but right now it’s employing more than the population of any of the smallest eight US states. Wikipedia’s list of suicide rates by state is from a different year than the population, but it looks like those states are about 5 times the population-adjusted rate that Foxconn had.
Wikipedia also says that China’s national suicide rate is difficult to study due to political concerns, before saying the WHO says it was 9.7/100k in 2016. That would mean you should expect closer to 126 suicides per year (in Foxconn’s current workforce), rather than the 14 in 6 months that made the news.
Steve Jobs was actually asked in an interview about Foxconn, and while he said suicides are horrible, they aren’t out of line with the general population statistically. Even though that was widely considered unfeeling.
Maybe you read "designed in Japan" on the box, similar to how Apple likes to print their neat "designed in Cupertino" line on the package.
I read somewhere that 40% of all (consumer) electronic devices worldwide go through Foxconn. Pretty much everyone uses them. Don't see a proud "made in USA" or something like that on the website? Foxconn, most likely.
No, most people don't have access to casinos. Likely they would spend it on other luxury goods like bar visits, clothes they don't need or more games. Its just a way for games to extract more money from the market without providing any more value than before.
The thing with games is that the box price is extremely under what consumers value them, so selling consumers small bits of the game as micro transactions is the way games extract their actual market value. It doesn't deliver more value than before, but the current monetization better represents the value it delivers to consumers.
That’s a good theory, but everyone I know that’s worked with game microtransaction data says the majority of money comes from a few “whales”.
Some whales clearly suffer mental health issues (just from looking at the timing and amount of the transactions). The remainder are almost exclusively money laundering of some sort (usually converting stolen credit cards to game assets that can be sold for real money).
Do you think worker-owned businesses can mitigate this? After all, one of their pluses is supposed to be that the workers can choose to prioritise things other than profit.
Not the parent, but I have a thought on this. While workers would be able to prioritize things other than profit, I don't think they would. From an economics analysis, we're really just redefining profit as benefits to all corporation members instead of to the owners. Imagine a middle manager has to choose between hiring a factory that is cheap but has a bad rights/ecological/legal record and a factory that will be more expensive, but is proverbially clean . At a top owned corporation they have no personal incentive to maximize profits, but if they own part of the company, their own compensation will increase if they take the less ethical option.
Note: I generally think a distributed ownership model for a company leads to better health and production in the long run, but this is probably a case where it's worse. When incentives are distributed, and those incentives are perverse, you just have everyone bearing the pressure to enact unethical business prectices.
This is to a large part due to worker owned business being unable to attract capital. A capital giver wants ownership or at least tcomaprable influence as consequence. At that point they aren't worker-owned anymore.
Generally however I think worker-owned companies are unlikely to take risk but value the workplace of current workers over future workers. (i.e. closing a department in order to build a new market will be delayed)
> Ocean Spray is an American agricultural cooperative of growers of cranberries and grapefruit headquartered in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. It currently has over 700 member growers (in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, Florida, British Columbia and other parts of Canada, as well as Chile). The cooperative employs about 2,000 people, with sales of $1.2 billion in fiscal year 2013 and accounts for 70% of North American cranberry production.
Apparently Huawei has an interesting ownership structure that may partially approximate this? Unfortunately I never bothered to try to find out in more detail.
Here is a link for those like me that had a vague recollection of the name, but had forgotten most of the details (assuming that you meant “Andersen” rather than “Anderson”):
There definitely is. However, we must remember that we are enjoying a standard of living unimaginable only a few hundred years ago.
I think the system has some inherent flaws, but it has still served us extremely well.
By and large I think the top level execs of these companies are sociopaths. Not the classic ones that are obvious and ultimately cross too many people. No these people are on a spectrum of being able to understand human emotions and feel them just enough to easily fool standard humans. However their 90% goal is money and that blinds them over time to things like customer loyalty, fair product for a fair price, innovation and it just becomes a money press to them and then they lose customers and throw their hands up and declare well that's just the way it is completely forgetting how their founding products and innovations got them there.
> I think company founders are often great, idealistic people. People who genuinely want to make the world better.
> When they step aside, however, the people who take over after them tend to be terrifying: zero empathy creatures who favor profit maximization over any and all human cost.
Seems to me like this has more to do with going public. When a company starts being treated as a money-printing machine, and its actual business is nothing but the implementation details of that machine, it either crumbles or it becomes a destructive force. Almost all companies whose products thrive and/or have a net positive effect on society have somebody at the helm who cares about what the company is actually doing. At a public company, investors are the ones at the helm, and they usually just want money. The company tends to switch from value-creation to value-extraction. If their dominance is entrenched enough that innovation and quality aren't very important anymore, they become vampiric. If it isn't, they slowly whither away.
I think you're taking for granted all the benefits to society provided by those profit-seeking public companies. The baseline is all of us starving to death with no possessions or food except what we can grow ourselves or scrounge, not the local supermarket/retail/etc. stores always being there to provide for our needs efficiently.
The baseline is nature. Society has pushed the effective baseline so low that countless people are absolutely miserable, and we're slowing losing our connection to the natural world, to our detriment
Bobby Kotick was accused of exactly the sort of behavior in the current Activision/Blizzard allegations in 2007, by a flight attendant on his private jet.
I'm a big fan of Blizzard products, played the original Starcraft when I was younger and still play some of the more recent games. It's blatantly obvious for a long time Blizzard has been sitting on its' laurels and not innovating.
The linked article does a great job of pointing out the major Blizzard mistakes, but I'll add one more: Blizzard's storywriting ability has fallen off a cliff. I love Blizzard games because of their great stories, but for years now the storylines have become muddled and clearly written by their D-team.
The writing in WoW nowadays truly is appalling. Playing a horde character, I spent the entire expansion forced to perform actions that made no sense internally and were the opposite of what I would have liked to do.
There is zero player agency and zero empathy. Quests were garbage and made no sense.
I’m a player who has played wow since beta sixteen years ago and I am finally at the point where I am giving up.
Fellow beta player here, I never cared about the overall story (although I like jokes and good scenes / subplots when they happen), but the design, timegating, and a large chunk of the art in SL killed the game for me. So it's really a disaster in all areas.
I disagree. Both Starcraft and Diablo I had good writing.
For me the decline came with Warcraft 3. Both the visuals and story of this game were shit.
And after that WoW became juggernaut and for some reason Blizzard decided that only pre teen david Eddings fans are their audience and never bothered to check the real demographics afterwards. Such a juvenile writing could only be achieved deliberately.
Think of it from the perspective of a zero empathy creature who favours profit maximisation over any and all human cost. What are they going to do with their life? What would need to happen for them not to end up in charge of companies?
This is a standard thing that has been happening for centuries as people try organisational structures that rely on good people being in charge. Turns out that there isn't a divining rod to identify bad people in advance, but they do tend to be hard workers who try hard to get in to positions of power.
>This is a standard thing that has been happening for centuries as people try organisational structures that rely on good people being in charge.
Honestly, if your organizational structure relies on good people do be in charge, you've already lost. The trick is so that people in power never have too much power, and don't have the power to destroy it. It can be a simple system like requiring 3 keys of 3 people to launch a nuclear strike, or something way more complex, like the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution.
When creating the structures, you have to think of it like a video game designer to a degree. You have to always keep in mind how would a bad actor hack this to his or her advantage, then remove whatever it is you find.
I think that's how you get to the top of an organization (besides creating it like a founder). You have to be a pretty cold individual, and it's not about making games or Coca Cola. It's about consolidating your power as you rise to the top of a large corporation and build people who are loyal to you. These guys have no vision about what a new game should be like. They want to get bigger, they WANT to make bigger deals and bigger markets. That's why they want to open up into China at all costs.
I quit at exactly the same time, but from Starcraft 2. I think many corporations do this, but with Blizzard it was particularly egregious. I also pin some blame on the CCP, which is a power-at-all-costs machine, rather than a profit driven one. For me, Blizzard was on a disappointing but tolerable money grabbing path before Blitzchung.
> I think company founders are often great, idealistic people. People who genuinely want to make the world better.
I used to think like that, but I now think that's a skewed view of the world that I used so that I could feel better about it.
I don't have any doubts that some founders "genuinely want to make the world better", but I now believe that they are just the minority. Most founders are just after the fame and money—some are even adept at putting on a facade so that you would happily give them money. There is nothing wrong with that, it's just not the world that I would like to live in.
Quitting Blizzard meant giving up my primary source of entertainment at the time, and having a lot less contact with some dear friends since then. It wasn't easy, but the right choice for me was clear: I am unwilling to support a company that silences/punishes people for promoting human rights. I won't even touch their free-to-play games any more, since that helps populate their servers.
I'm not sure what my point is here. Maybe just to acknowledge that it's somehow comforting to know I'm not alone. Thanks for sharing.
The most impressive part is that Blizzard managed to give everyone a reason to hate them. For you, it is international politics. For others, it is about employee treatment. Others may have something against loot boxes and microtransactions. And for most, it is simply the massive drop in quality of their games.
Concerned about ethics? Blizzard bad. Who care about ethics, I just want good games? Blizzard bad. They don't seem to have any idea about their core market, they can't even do damage control properly. I understand that shareholders want profit but here, it is as if Activision wanted to deliberately destroy the Blizzard brand. I don't know about how shareholders think, but a once well respected brand like Blizzard must have some value.
The one Blizzard game that I was fond of more than any other was Warcraft III. It holds a special place in my heart because I saved money for several months to be able to buy it for myself. It was a big deal to me. And wow, that game was everything I had hoped it would be when I finally got it.
A couple of years ago Blizzard thought they’d re-release the same game with updated graphics to cash in on the nostalgia. If it had been even half decent I would have bought it. But it was an unplayable mess. They couldn’t even release a playable version of a game that already existed. That’s when I knew Blizzard had died. I’m done with them.
I’m sure they’ll survive for a long time with their CoD and WoW, but I want nothing to do with them.
At some point as you’ve noticed the ones that rise to the top excel at consolidation of power and expanding influence, by projecting success and gaining a network of support by carving out influence to cronies.
Part of this is because it’s necessary: The skills for building and running a small company isn’t the same as for a large one.
But this is where things fall apart: The same skills that took the small org to a large organization is also more rewarding and remains more rewarding
than the core skills and values that was fundamental to the business in the first place.
The few orgs that succeed tend to keep someone who could be or was part of the core workforce calling the shots.
Even this isn’t a guarantee of success though (disruption). Sun Microsystems didn’t lose their way, but they didn’t adopt.
Does it feel "right" giving money to a company that would side with the American killings of civilians for oil and profit? Just trying to understand how morals work.
I think it is possible that many people who start new companies are also passionate about making a difference in a specific field and that is what pushes them to go through the trouble of starting a company from scratch.
The people who take over from them, on the other hand, are likely people who don't quite have the same level of passion and who see success purely in monetary terms.
Your delta by itself doesn't really matter to anyone but yourself but all those deltas add up over time and I think accelerated. Bad reputation gets around. I swore them off myself.
My theory is this: founders want to build something. They are creators. Their motivation is building something new / cool / useful. The second generation of leadership is motivated by power / money. They don’t create. They climb ladders built by creators. The difference in motivation is not subtle. The outcomes are generally positive in the first case and sociopathic in the second.
Unless it is continuously and actively minimized with explicit countermeasures, large organizations tend to degrade into filtering sociopaths into top positions.
The tendency to prioritize financialization over product also doesn't help.
As you mention, once both the founders are gone and the organization is large, watch out...
I'd rather have a western company obey the CCP enough so that they can make money in the largest nation in the world than see them give the Chicoms the middle finger and be kicked out. If they get barred from of China, Chinese gamers will just have to play games by some "Yes man" company that grovels at the feet of the CCP.
By building up a reputation in China, Blizzard would over time gain leverage to expose Chinese gamers to Western products and build a relationship that benefits everybody.
This kind of dilemma is actually something I see a lot in many situations. Someone thinks that the larger organization is wrong, so they disobey the rules and get fired. Then, some "yes man" is hired and no improvement is made. People should remember that the only way you can do good and potentially get changes to be made is to not get fired in the first place.
> By building up a reputation in China, Blizzard would over time gain leverage to expose Chinese gamers to Western products and build a relationship that benefits everybody.
That’s been the US’s policy towards China for decades, and it hasn’t worked out the way we expected. Rather than Chinese consumers demanding western freedoms, we’ve gotten western companies doing whatever the Chinese government has wanted.
My point is not necessarily that western products have the capacity to create demand among the Chinese for a western lifestyle. Whatever the goal is (profits, maximizing freedom for the Chinese, whatever) withdrawing from China completely does the opposite of helping to achieve that goal. It's a bad strategy anyway that you look at it. Pulling out of China completely is the sort of thing that only sounds good when you are in the moment and acting out of pure emotion.
I don't understand why a game company is expected to have an opinion about international politics, outside of "we don't want our platform to be used for politics."
It's bad enough that Facebook mods are now in charge of deciding what constitutes the truth; don't also conscript game companies into fighting idealogical battles with foreign states.
Politics isn’t _really_ a thing that you can pretend doesn’t exist and operate in isolation/ignorance of it.
You can’t pretend it doesn’t exist (see the “no politics in my video games/comics please” argument used by some gamers) because it a part of, as much as a function of, any given culture. This doesn’t mean of course, that we require every company to lay out some kind of political guidelines that they’ll support/abide by, but it does mean that when something happens culturally, and the politics “rears its head” that something will need to be done, or some position will need to be made.
Companies ignore the vast majority of political events and issues. Consider a hypothetical startup where all employees are working too many hours to keep track of current events: recent political/cultural developments will necessarily be missing from company policies and products.
Being ignorant of politics isn’t the same thing as being able to operate in that state.
Imagine your hypothetical team had been (over)working on a game which was all about the “valiant mujahideen freedom fighters in Afghanistan fighting off the Soviet Union” when 9/11 happened?
Or they started working with the likeness of any of Prince Andrew, Rolf Harris, Kevin Spacey, etc. before they became personae-non-grata?
Just because some politics is trivia doesn’t make it all trivia.
Postal was published after the Columbine shooting and did well enough to warrant a sequel. I can't imagine a less justifiable premise.
The United States has large numbers of contrarians and free speech supporters - they even enjoy constitutional protections. Neither the free market nor the state obstructed Postal's success.
I believe both of my two examples are vastly less politically acceptable in America than mass shootings, mainly on the basis that nothing changes in the USA as a result of mass shootings while things did in fact happen as a result of 9/11, and that child abusers have always been in the category of “villains so evil we don’t need additional explanation”. There’s a reason why you have political cartoons like this: https://images.app.goo.gl/dRaH47BbaKAjJt116
(And that’s just the USA; the rest of the world isn’t like America, ignoring politics in other countries can get your games banned for reasons that would never hold up in America because of the First Amendment)
The point, I think, is that we were expecting them not to have an opinion about international affairs, but Blizzard went out of there way to take a pro-CCP position.
> don't [...] conscript game companies into fighting idealogical battles
Quite right; China conscripted Blizzard into helping them fight an ideological battle, and I think that's reprehensible.
If you continue to operate under the status quo without comment, then you are implicitly supporting the status quo.
For example, if you follow Chinese laws by banning anyone from your platform who criticise China in any fashion, you are upholding the Chinese status quo.
Now, you can say "that's the fault of the law, not of me". To which I would ask, do you actually expect laws to be the arbiter of morality? By that logic then anything immoral should be made illegal (libertarians reading this should be frothing at the mouth at this notion).
Of course, you could argue that it's not the law that ought to arbite morality, but the customer. In which case, why would you not understand why customers would expect game companies to have an opinion on politics, and pressure said companies when said opinion is unpalatable? You just (hypothetically) said you expect them to be the arbiters of morality.
I think company founders are often great, idealistic people. People who genuinely want to make the world better.
When they step aside, however, the people who take over after them tend to be terrifying: zero empathy creatures who favor profit maximization over any and all human cost. Does anyone know why this happens?