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Notes -
Assume that you are Bioware executive - which will worry you more - that I have Dragon Age Veilguard pirated for 72 hours or that I haven't bother actually running it after I downloaded it?
Context: I adored bioware up until the launch of Mass Effect 2 (I disliked the party and character driven aspect compared to the knowledge quest of the first part), though that ME3 was too full of fanservice and had too shitty ending and haven't been seriously invested in them.
Also it is not about the wokeness, just that woke in the last 2-3 years pattern matches way too accurate to cringe and mediocrity.
Presumably, the executive is more worried about you not giving them money than not playing a game they probably don't even care about.
Squeezing maximum revenue out of minimum productivity is the name of their game. The pursuit of "efficiency" started in an intelligent place--"if 39 drops of solder is sufficient for these cans, then 40 is a waste"--but not everyone is smart enough to grasp the difference between cutting fat, and cutting flesh. It's often a lot more complicated than "how many drops of solder," and "being a trusted brand for the foreseeable future" is what (long) shareholders want--not what MBAs are trained to deliver. The modal executive doesn't care if the company goes out of business, the modal executive cares about KPIs. If the company goes out of business, "I made the numbers go up" is how the executive gets a new job.
Boeing, Intel, etc. are in trouble because they became pay pigs for MBAs instead of contenting themselves with keeping up their status as the best actual producers of important goods in their respective industries. Video game companies are much the same.
I don't know about video games, but I think this point is often misunderstood.
Rockefeller didn't start by asking for 39 drops of solder. He asked for 38. When that wasn't enough, he asked for 39.
By the same token, Elon Musk is known to cut all the fat and some of the flesh. Only by cutting live tissue can you be sure that all the fat is truly gone. If you haven't experienced at least some problems due to cutting too many people, then you haven't cut deeply enough.
We've been talking about Musk's management ability, and to prove I'm not sucking his dick I started thinking about the failure modes that will eventually break his personal control of his companies.
His cutting is vulnerable to Yellowstoning, where managers deliberately hurt performance or use cuts as an excuse to avoid responsibility. Right now Musk can personally show up at the office with an audit team to instantly fire a guy he suspects of doing that. But as the org expands and the hierarchies deepen and interlink, internal politics will hurt his ability to excise a bad actor who's spent all his time schmoozing with management.
Worse, his harsh strategies incentivize internal politicking and backchannel dealing among management to mutually reinforce their positions. It's like overusing an anti-parasite drench on a flock: you're accelerating resistance buildup.
(Even worse, the kind of internal politics most effective at subversion through parallel management cadres is the bioleninism of the party that's made him a priority target and allocated massive resources to seizing his companies. I'm expecting some manufactured hysteria along the lines of "Elon Musk Fired LGBT Rocket Scientist Whistleblower For Supporting Environmental Justice Over Rocket Noise Harming Endangered Birds: Harris Administration pledges to arrest him for hate crimes." And if that sounds crazy to anyone, they're nuts for forgetting the exact same scenario played out with Timnet Gebru and google)
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