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Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: How LucasArts Fell Apart

« on: October 03, 2013, 11:16:34 AM »

I'm afraid that this happens everywhere, not just in the games industry. With any commercial business, the main goal is to make money for the shareholders (and it's not good enough to simply make a profit, there must also be year on year growth). Often people at the top are lawyers/accountants and likely also risk averse to spending money on something that may be great but unproven (or in this case, not in line with the branding or direction they want the company to take). They also tend to look at visible obvious costs, but fail to consider lost opportunities or hidden costs.

And often they look for short term gains in order to make themselves look good for their end of year bonus, neglecting the long term good of the company, and even leaving a mess for someone else in the future to clean up, when they have long moved on. It basically comes down to greed and selfishness.

Modern corporate culture. They are now so obsessed with quarterly profits and cutting overhead to he point that they are perfectly willing to sell off the long range viability of the company. In other words, converting a company's future to year-end bonuses for the greedy "takers" at the top.

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Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: How LucasArts Fell Apart

« on: October 02, 2013, 03:38:36 PM »

So basically whenever a gamestudio gets sold or turned into stock, the creator at the top get a shit-ton of money but Wall Street winds up raping the studio to death in a misguided attempt to shake/save money out of it that inevitably fails and only winds up gutting the gaming studio and turning it into a shadow of its former self.

As I said earlier, Ken LOST money on the deal. The deal was a scam that he had little control over. And it was CUC, not Wall Street.

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Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: How LucasArts Fell Apart

« on: October 01, 2013, 12:07:19 PM »

The Coles said in an interview that the Williamses transferred their business to another state to avoid paying as much tax... did that have anything to do with it?

Not at all. Besides, the whole of the the company was not moved to Washington. The Oakhurst facility was still in use beyond any control by Ken Williams. The Oakhurst facility had still contained their development arm (as Yosemite). Chainsaw Monday did not occur until both he and Roberta were gone. Sierra had become a rather large entity that was also a publishing house for other developers. There was a need for the publishing arm to be in a less out of the way place.

At the time of the sale Ken may have still been CEO, but as mentioned earlier, Sierra had become a publicly traded company. He may have had some influence, a lot of it was out of his hands.

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IQ Chat / Re: Why.... Blackthorne?

« on: July 28, 2013, 12:50:15 PM »

It's no secret that I'm a huge Star Trek fan.  I wear the Trekkie title like a badge of honor.  My favorite series has been Deep Space Nine due to its more..."human" stories.

It was rather obvious to me where you got your user name from, especially with the avatar you use, but then I was familiar enough with all five of the series to recognize it right away.

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Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: Kings Quest IP

« on: July 11, 2013, 12:53:39 PM »

Telltale lost the license a while back. I am just as happy that they lost it. I do not think that they would have done it justice.

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Banter and Chit-Chat! / Space Oddity

« on: May 15, 2013, 04:18:05 PM »

A nice treatment of an old standard

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo</a>

3 Likes