I just found out that Bitreactor let almost everybody go from the Zero Company before it launched, which might be why my computer is so hot. Now there are lawsuits and countersuits and tons of reasons to discuss things that aren't one of the best outings the setting has ever had. If it isn't too painful, I hope they like the dumb comics we made. I think the one that goes up Friday is even better.
Just… philosophically, this thing that keeps happening - where amazing work is produced and then the teams that made it are nuked from orbit - is an ugly, deformed version of the system. That's what I'd like to think. But if the system keeps doing it, over and over, it begins to look like a form of arbitrage. Still ugly, but now veering into caustic and dangerous because its second and third order effects expand into the future.
One of the things that Game Pass did for Microsoft's internal studios is to decouple performance from reward, the sorta thing Bethesda's Pete Hines was talking about before he "retired." I assume the bargain for developers here was meant to be stability of employment. Welp! I don't know what these lawsuits are about, it's possible it's way more complex than it seems like; it might be that they didn't have anything in the hopper. But let's say that you do get funding, and that funding isn't canceled, and your game comes out and it fucking kicks ass and moves units: reward should be the outcome. That is how progress functions. If we have any interest in a future that is better than our present, we decouple those things at our peril.
(CW)TB out.
