Useless gaming news & chatter

[Paelos]

Biz School attracts and molds people that focus on the politics of a business rather than what that business actually does.

Accounting is an exception.

[Nija]

It's kind of MBA wankery, but it's mostly the poison in the wells of the NW part of the USA.

Amazon, Microsoft, Valve, hell I bet Arenanet has some ex-MS/Amazon/ETC people working there that implemented stack ranking as well. It would explain why the team that created GW2 has virtually abandoned the product.

[Cyrrex]

Since we are talking about Valve, I am just going to say this:  Half-Life 3 is going to come out in X number of years, and it will be meh.  The window of opportunity is well closed at this point, because roughly 20 billion shooters have been released since HL2 and nobody really cares any more.  I mean, it will probably do well enough commercially, but it isn't going to be the one shooter to rule them all like some people still seem to be expecting.  I don't even think HL2 was particularly special, it just didn't have much credible competition.

[schild]

Disagree. Well, not that Half-Life 3 won't be meh, but that the FPS is played out. If something came out with the writing/story quality of Bloodlines or Deus Ex now, with gun/gameplay to match, it would be a big deal.

But no one seems to want to do that anymore. Mostly people just want the Aperture / Black Mesa story to intertwine. Badly. I'm among those people.

[Jeff Kelly]

I've worked for startups in the past and I don't think it's "MBA wankery" in those cases at least not at first. It's more how tech companies start and what kinds of people are in those companies.

It's just that you started off with five people - all of them being engineers - and suddenly you are a real company with payroll and accounting and 200 people and venture capital and no dedicated management staff because you just hired tech people to do cool projects with you. So now you have a company where almost no-one want to manage people or projects because no one wants to be "the bad guy" who tells people what to do or who needs to decide bonus payments or hirings/firings and also because it's much cooler to work on cool projects than to do the dreary day to day administrative stuff like project plans and meetings or making sure stuff gets done.

In those companies you get two things. You get people that carry the title "manager" that don't want to manage and would rather sit in on technical discussions than manage their staff (see John Carmack for reference). Those guys further derail projects because they can't really sit in on every technical meeting only one every other week so when they do they do more harm than good because everyone waits for their input - them being managers and shit - yet their input is crap. They also make things worse management-wise because they don't really want to do management stuff, yet have to.

You also get people who desperately want processes where the company magically "manages itself". Because everyone realizes that you need "management processes" (they've seen that things run not as smooth as they could) yet no one wants to be the one who runs things (much cooler to develop cool stuff). In such cases systems like stack ranking seem to be a great idea because you don't need a guy that decides such things since everyone does a little. Yeah! Problem solved.

All you get though is a system where there is no management and no oversight because there's nobody to manage or oversee things. A system where people are afraid of and despise hierarchy because "management, amirite?" yet desperately want the benefits of a management hierarchy because nothing ever gets done. You also can't push projects because there's no seniority because there's no management - the "you are not the boss of me" syndrome - and you can't really tell people to do stuff as a peer so everything that is boring or dull or unpopular won't get finished.

Usually those companies are years behind schedule on their main project and start a lot of new things that never get finished and sort of peter out. They also usually detonate once their funding runs out or their VC company loses interest. Or the people funding you stage a coup d'etat, oust the founders and install a management structure or sell off the company and the company detonates as most people leave for greener pastures (this company was cool but no longer is).

Unless of course you have that one early success that manages to payroll all of that insanity. Then you get Twitter or Google or 3D Realms or ID or Valve or Square etc.

[schild]

Stack Ranking is absolutely fucking MBA wankery. In fact, it's beyond MBA wankery. It's exactly the sort of practice that would be adopted by someone, most likely an executive or lead, with the most flimsy, rudimentary understanding of how competition in a closed system should exist.

All those other tech company growth issues you described at merely the logical result of hiring a bunch of spergy neckbeards who should be chained to a fucking desk and told what to do by actual adults. Add stack ranking to the mix and you have a disaster waiting to happen, massive success or not.

tl;dr: You need tl;drs. Also, Stack Ranking exists as a horrible thing outside of any other set of problems.

Edit: Also, software companies are really, REALLY terrible at firing dead weight. This is a bigger issue inside tech. The vast majority of employees at any given company are about as necessary as the 500 flavors of Keurig coffee and boutique nut jars from Ye Olde Glasses-Wearing Nuttery in the snack room.

[Jeff Kelly]

Yeah SW companies are bad at managing staff because you'd need someone to actually manage staff and determine who is "dead weight". Just like big corporate bureaucracies fire the bureaucrats last - because the bureaucrats are responsible for the firing - SW companies tend to fire the developers last because management is staffed with lots of ex-developers.

I get where stack ranking comes from. It is MBA wankery. I just think that smaler IT companies find such policies attractive because it seems - at first glance - to be the kind of "we don't really have a hierarchy here, everyone is equal" kind of system that doesn't involve a dedicated staff of "suits".

[Maven]

Biz School attracts and molds people that focus on the politics of a business rather than what that business actually does.

Accounting is an exception.

 

It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to see Accounting mentioned in a positive manner. Third time on this forum too!

[Ingmar]

I don't know any small companies that use it, though, departments are too small at small companies to use it IME.

[Paelos]

Stack ranking sounds perfect for companies with a weak culture and no real leaders.

[HaemishM]

Or in other words, tech companies. 

[Maven]

Pretty much. One of the chief complaints at Blizzard besides a lack of advancement opportunities was a need for stronger leadership.

I don't want to work in tech again. Stack sounds terrible.

[Margalis]

In software methodology shit is basically a religion. Everyone has some exciting new process that makes making games better, only it never does.

[Paelos]

Because they aren't run like real businesses apparently.

Most businesses I've been in are extremely resistant to any change. The idea that a new process could crop up and they'd just run all-in to it on basically a whim is frankly laughable. It's not necessarily a great trait, but it's not a bad one either when it comes to making long-term decisions.

But these are mostly established companies that have been around for 30, 40, or even 100 years. My own company is almost 85 now. The problem for many start-ups is they make the same mistakes as a teenager, but on a grander scale.

[MahrinSkel]

Biz School attracts and molds people that focus on the politics of a business rather than what that business actually does.

Accounting is an exception.

Yes, they are. If it wasn't for the fact that the stats and psych that comes with Marketing is more interesting/useful, I'd probably major in Accounting (even though trying to maintain a scholarship-bait GPA would be harder). Accounting is hardcore geekery with a Biz School flavor, at least as hard as anything in computers (and probably harder at the undergrad level).

As much as more exposure to Biz School is lowering my opinion of MBA wankery (and it was hardly high to start with), it's giving me a new respect for Accounting. I'll probably fill my 300-level electives with Accounting courses. It's actually a very useful skill set.

--Dave

[Maven]

I have an extreme respect for Accounting because, in theory, it gets past all the bullshit out there and provides one of the critical backbones of any business. I tried to launch my own business without the education or interest, and now I feel the true weight of how little an idea I had about the fiscal self-reporting and discipline required for success. Also, it is a great skill anyone should have a basic understanding of that explains a lot of the financial structure of our world. Business majors are required to take basic Accounting.

There was an excellent analogy about the difficulty of game development on reddit. Building a house has plans, a time-tested process, specialized roles (subcontractors), a certain order to things, and a reasonable estimate of the time and cost involved.

Game development is an incoherent,  chaotic mess by comparison. I wish I could find the thread because it did an amazing job of breaking down each role in a project and how they conflict with each other -- especially marketing and development!

[Jeff Kelly]

Construction would be an equal mess if every construction company insisted on making all of the tools and materials necessary to build a house from scratch every time they are contracted to build a new house.

Imagine a construction company that needs five years and 140% of its alotted budget to design and build its own brickworks, their own version of AutoCAD and their own version of a backhoe or crane - each and every time they do a new construction project - while not having an architect or structural engineer (or indeed experienced construction workers) on staff and you are close to how game companies work.

SW enginering suffers greatly from "not invented here" syndrome and the fact that game engines are hard or that company X has already spent man centuries on a working netcode library hasn't stopped most companies from reinventing and reimplementing stuff from scartch in-house. Stuff that then gets thrown away and redone from scratch once the next project rolls around.

The rest stems from the fact that you can't really "see" what SW developers do and so development is constantly struggeling with controlling and project management about project plans and time budgets. If you don't budget ciorrectly and you build a shitty house every idiot can see it. If you build a shitty game it still can look sort of decent and so the general feeling by controlling is that that SW deveolpers over-estimate time when the opposite is generaly true (people tend to under-estimate the time needed for complex tasks).

A general sentiment I hear all the time from administration  is the accusation that we severely over-budget and overestimate time and money needed for completing tasks, when in SW development and engineering the opposite is tru in 90% of the time.

[Teleku]

Relevant to this conversation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azkFz1ZbXyU

[Draegan]

I didn't want to start a new thread and I was already browsing this one. This could be a big deal if the FCC Chariman is actually serious.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/title-ii-for-internet-providers-is-all-but-confirmed-by-fcc-chairman/

[Goreschach]

I'd be surprised to see them just drop something like that.

[Yegolev]

I'm going back several posts, but I submit that in almost any company: everyone already knows who is the dead weight.  Moreso in a company under 100 employees.  A ranking system just means that no one is responsible and thus is still allowed to play air hockey with their buddies because the mechanical system is what fired them.  Basically, it's what schild said: these are children and they need an adult to keep them in line.  Kids secretly crave discipline, even though they might complain (mangement SUX LOLZ 4CHAN) just take a look at how miserable they become when you just let them do whatever they want (aka it's summer break and we are tired of this schedule).

[bhodi]

BTW, Amazon also uses (used?) stack ranking. That and the crazy 'make bezos more money' work hours was why I declined to work there.

[Yegolev]

It's all about the Bezosmins.

[Miguel]

All you get though is a system where there is no management and no oversight because there's nobody to manage or oversee things. A system where people are afraid of and despise hierarchy because "management, amirite?" yet desperately want the benefits of a management hierarchy because nothing ever gets done. You also can't push projects because there's no seniority because there's no management - the "you are not the boss of me" syndrome - and you can't really tell people to do stuff as a peer so everything that is boring or dull or unpopular won't get finished.

A better description of Google I could not have written.

[koro]

In other news:

According to notices posted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the two trademark applications for Overwatch have been suspended due to a trademark filing of Overwatch by Innovis Labs, Inc. which supersedes Blizzard’s trademark application.

http://www.vg247.com/2015/01/10/blizzard-overwatch-trademark/

Whoops~

[Maven]

Not like Blizzard to drop the ball like that. However a name change would be a simple matter. Quset for Glory set the precedent.

[MahrinSkel]

They probably didn't, they took a chance that Innovis Labs (which is not in the videogames business) would not even notice the new filing and they would get their new trademark through the side door (if you don't defend your trademark, you lose it). It's actually pretty common, there are old trademark filings for virtually every common word or phrase, most of them inactive. If you actually approach the prior holders, it's guaranteed they're going to want to be paid off to release it (even if they didn't even remember they had it, or don't actually exist as a going concern), so it's common practice to simply assert the new trademark and see if you get away with it.

--Dave

[KallDrexx]

Apparently they can now track concurrent players of PC Minecraft players with internet access, and off peak they had over 998k players .

That matches dots 2's daily peak (#1 on steam), more than double CS:GO (#2 on steam) and doesn't even count mobile and console players.

Crazy.

[Fordel]

Hardly surprising. Minecraft is legion and I see no reason why it would stop.

[Falconeer]

Considering Minecraft got sold for 2 billion dollars, I was expecting more than 1M concurrent peak users.

[KallDrexx]

Considering Minecraft got sold for 2 billion dollars, I was expecting more than 1M concurrent peak users.

Again, that was off peak and doesn't take in other consoles.  Around April Minecraft had sold 15 million PC sales, 12 million XB360 sales, and 3 million PS3 sales.  Even discounting rise since then, that means the 360 had almost as many sales as PC, which means that number could be double if consoles are taken into oaccount.

Maybe you are just underrating how significant 1 million concurrent users (even peak) is, cause that is pretty massive.

[Falconeer]

No, I am sure you are right. I just can't wrap my head around 2 billions dollars, which is 2000 million dollars. I just can't.

[MahrinSkel]

If they follow typical patterns, peak would be 3 or 4 times that, and total users roughly 5 times that.  Somewhere between 15 and 25 million.  On PC alone, not counting XBox, PS3, or Minecraft Pocket Edition.

--Dave

[Nija]

https://minecraft.net/stats

PC/Mac version
18,114,746 people have bought the game.
In the last 24 hours, 13,832 people bought the game.

[MahrinSkel]

https://minecraft.net/stats

PC/Mac version
18,114,746 people have bought the game.
In the last 24 hours, 13,832 people bought the game.

If you put the total Minecraft players (all platforms) at 50M, and figure that they are on track for >$100M/year revenue for the PC version *alone* (and have already booked several hundred million from it), Microsoft got a bargain. Notch must have insisted on some pretty stringent conditionals in the contract for it to have been that cheap.

Well, they say the first billion is the hardest....

--Dave