Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain ManYou mentioned your son is a business owner. Tell me, would he continue to pay a team of employees who are costing his company literally more than they're worth? Would he cut his own salary in order to keep them around? I suspect the answer to both questions is no.

I suspect he'd get them to do something else that wouldn't cost the company more than they're worth. Probably he isn't stupid enough to hire a team of employees to do money-losing stuff in the first place. But I'm definitely sure that if he managed his company into a money-losing situation and really had to cut employees, he would tighten his belt too--he would not tell the remaining employees "Yeah, you know those guys we had to let go to save money? I took their salaries for myself, actually three times that, because screw that 'saving money' stuff."

Okay, so that's the fantasy version of running a business. In reality, it's often not possible to move unproductive employees into a more productive role, and things can change that can cause a potentially profitable department to become a financial anchor dragging down the rest of the company, and when that happens, you gotta cut people loose. That's just the way it is.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain ManLike I said, if increasing profits was as easy as handing out raises like candy, then everybody would be doing it.

Funny nobody told the CEO that. How are you managing to not see that your argument is utterly inconsistent?

Look, there's two basic kinds of bosses of a company. There's the kind that people who wish our system worked as advertised think about: People like my son-in-law, who started from nothing or not very much and built up a business from nothing and who know it inside and out. They do exist, there are even quite a few of them, although they tend to be the bosses of small companies. And then there's the kind that was born either rich or well-to-do, went to a prestigious university and got an MBA. They know how to schmooze with other rich, connected people and how to maximize stock price next quarter so they can make a bunch of money from their stock options. They know a bit about how to move money around in companies. They know nothing about the specifics of any given company or how its business actually works, because they have been taught that money and people are completely universal and exchangeable and the specifics of the business don't matter if you know how to move money. They tend to move from company to company, often in quite different kinds of businesses because they think the specifics don't matter. And when they lay people off, it is usually because although in the long run those people probably contribute to the bottom line, in the short term dumping them will goose the stock price because most of the investors are ignorant and they only see (reduction in expenses == bigger dividends next quarter, or money plowed into share buybacks). And that second kind, is the kind that give themselves $26 million-a-year raises. And they are the kind that are most influential in the economy.

Also the kind that gives you situations like Boeing, where the product goes to shit because of all those years getting stratospheric stock prices from the visionary cost-cutting. Of course by that time a few people have made a stack of money--all the layoffs and outsourcing and elimination of quality control did create that result, so in that sense it wasn't stupid. But it wasn't good for the company, or the workers, or the customers, or the people who got killed in the planes, or the murdered whistleblowers.

You are generalizing to a ridiculous degree.
CEOs of large corporations are not all clueless rich kids just as small business owners are not all virtuous. Furthermore, you don't know anything about why the layoffs happened in this specific case, but that's not going to stop you from accusing the CEO of being evil. I doubt it was an arbitrary decision. Most likely he had other managers and company accountants advising him and answering questions -- How long have they been working on this game? How much money has it cost us so far? How much longer until it's ready for release, and how much more will it cost? What are the projected sales? What is the expected profit? -- and then he made the best decision for the company based on that information.

You mentioned your son is a business owner. Tell me, would he continue to pay a team of employees who are costing his company literally more than they're worth? Would he cut his own salary in order to keep them around? I suspect the answer to both questions is no.

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Quoting: emphy

Quoting: Mountain ManWhenever I hear people talk about "game preservation", it always sounds suspiciously like, "I want free games."

Because, of course, no one ever spent anything on the re-releases on steam/gog or the evercade cartridges.

Except we're talking about emulators, which is something else entirely. More often than not, using emulators to "preserve" games is just a thinly veiled excuse to pirate software.

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Whenever I hear people talk about "game preservation", it always sounds suspiciously like, "I want free games."

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How dare Nintendo protect its intellectual property!

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain ManPeople who assume that if CEOs were paid less, then the workers could be paid more, have a rather simplistic and naive understanding of how business and the economy works.

And yet, going by history it seems to work out in practice. Look at places and times where the CEOs are paid less, and you find workers who are more prosperous and have better working conditions.

Perhaps, but there's no hard and fast rule that says better paid employees are necessarily more profitable employees. If raises were guaranteed to increase profits, then every company would do it, but it's rarely as simple as that, and the harsh reality is that sometimes layoffs are necessary to keep a business solvent.

I think I'd want to claim that when times are tough enough that layoffs are necessary to keep the business solvent, the CEO should not be increasing his pay by more than the money the layoffs save. Really, how hard is this?

And that's before you even get to the part where the people laid off were not just costing wages, they were presumably making the business money, whereas a raise to the same CEO, as a reward for business failure so far, is unlikely to cause more money to exist in any way. So if you lay people off, you may have a net gain if it was a money-losing area, but it will be smaller than the money saved on salary unless the idea of hiring them in the first place was an example of lunatic incompetence in the first place. So the CEO raise, which is pure loss, isn't just several times as large as the savings, it overwhelms them to a ridiculous degree.

But I guess it's justified because the CEO, from his yacht, makes the tough decisions and takes risks--what if his decisions led to the company going under and he had to make do for a while on just those 26 million smackers? Oh, the humanity!--while ordinary employees laid off face no risks at all . . .

Look, you can vilify the CEO all you want and pretend that running a multi-million dollar company is done from a yacht while casually sipping martinis instead of being hard work that requires decades of business experience, but the fact is, giving himself a raise isn't what led to the employees being laid off, and if keeping the employees was likely to turn a profit for the company, then they would still have a job. I've been on the receiving end of layoffs before, and yes, it sucks to lose your source of income, but I also recognize that businesses aren't charities, they exist to make money, and if they're losing money keeping certain people on the payroll, then good business says it's time to let them go. Like I said, if increasing profits was as easy as handing out raises like candy, then everybody would be doing it.

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Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: Mountain Manand the harsh reality is that sometimes layoffs are necessary to keep a business solvent.

But it doesn't look good when the CEO (or his Board) gives himself a $20 million raise/bonus at the same time. Instead, it looks like the CEO is terminating employees simply to justify padding his own pockets. This leads one to question his ethics.

I don't suppose there are many CEOs who care how some people might interpret it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain ManPeople who assume that if CEOs were paid less, then the workers could be paid more, have a rather simplistic and naive understanding of how business and the economy works.

And yet, going by history it seems to work out in practice. Look at places and times where the CEOs are paid less, and you find workers who are more prosperous and have better working conditions.

Perhaps, but there's no hard and fast rule that says better paid employees are necessarily more profitable employees. If raises were guaranteed to increase profits, then every company would do it, but it's rarely as simple as that, and the harsh reality is that sometimes layoffs are necessary to keep a business solvent.

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People who assume that if CEOs were paid less, then the workers could be paid more, have a rather simplistic and naive understanding of how business and the economy works.

Let's put it this way: if an employee's salary exceeds the amount of income he generates for the company, then there are two options: 1) Reduce his salary; or 2) Terminate his employment. The CEO giving up a raise to pay the employee more, therefore making the disparity between his salary and his value to the company even greater, is perhaps the worst decision in this case. You can extrapolate this to an entire studio.

That's just the reality of being an employee, you are always at the mercy of someone else, which can kinda suck sometimes. The only way out is to start your own business and work for yourself.

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For what it's worth, Fallout 4 looks and runs amazingly well on my LCD Steam Deck. While I can get a solid 60 frames per second, it only gives me little more than an estimated one hour of run time on a full battery. If I dial it back to 30 frames per second, it gives me an estimated two hours, and by tweaking the power settings, I can stretch it out to nearly three hours. Not too shabby.

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