Jim Sterling / James "Stephanie" Sterling / James Stanton/Sexton & in memoriam TotalBiscuit (John Bain) - One Gaming Lolcow Thread

[Corn Flakes]

This is an idea I've been rolling around in my head for a while, but now I have some actual numbers I thought I'd put it out there.

BlizzAc currently has 9,080 employees, according to Google. So if you were to take that 30,000,000, minus the 2,000,000 of his actual salary, and spread it out among all employees in the company they'd each get an extra $3083 a year. Certainly nothing to sniff at, but given the average salary (again according to Google) of a BlizzAc employee is between 80-90k, it's really not a huge amount relatively speaking.

Basically what I'm driving at is, while 30 million is an outrageous amount of money for anyone to get paid, redistributing it among all the workers (which I'd assume is what Comrade Jim wants) would basically result in little more than a Christmas bonus on top of what is already a very good salary.

Anyway, I'm not sufficiently married to this idea yet, so feel free to pick it apart as you see fit.

Two thoughts:

1 - Does that number account for all the people working for ActiBlizz through outsourcing contracts? Because if it doesn't, there are a lot more people in there to dilute those 30mil.

2 - 3k means a lot more to a support rep making 5-digits a year than to a coder making 6. I'm sure Jimbo and his ilk would make some cock-eyed argument that the bonus should be proportionally larger the lower your salary. Of course, I'm sure he would then argue that women and POC and women POC and True and Honest Women should get a larger cut still. Because reasons.

P.S. Why the fuck does Jim keep wearing that dumpy bouncer's jacket in his videos? It looks awful, even by his standards.

Jim's fashion sense has always been questionable. It worked with the character he was playing, but he still looked like a spaz. Add to it the scientific fact that a man trooning out takes a massive pently to their fashion sense and... yeah, don't expect him to look anywhere near good presentable.

 

[Oliver Onions]

1 - Does that number account for all the people working for ActiBlizz through outsourcing contracts? Because if it doesn't, there are a lot more people in there to dilute those 30mil.

I can't find anything indicating whether that figure includes freelancers, but since these numbers come from finance reports my very hazy memories of doing accounts in high school suggests you'd probably put commission or seasonal work under a different expense than salaried employees, since it's a much more fluid figure depending on whatever irons you currently have in the fire.

What I did find, however, is that the actual more recent figure is 9,500 employees as of 2020, so that bonus is down to $2,950; or an extra $245 a month which, given a large amount of those employees will be living in the California area, probably covers one trip to Whole Foods.

2 - 3k means a lot more to a support rep making 5-digits a year than to a coder making 6. I'm sure Jimbo and his ilk would make some cock-eyed argument that the bonus should be proportionally larger the lower your salary. Of course, I'm sure he would then argue that women and POC and women POC and True and Honest Women should get a larger cut still. Because reasons.

I have no doubt that's how Jimothy would want it distributed, but we both know that in reality were this already unlikely situation to actually occur, the higher amounts would go to the more skilled/experienced/accomplished employees, so Jim would still be bitching about 'muh capitalism' because an instantly replaceable janitor isn't getting paid the same as the senior programmer actually making the games that are the reason anyone has a job there.

 

[Tanner Glass]

I guess as a consumer I'm just not seeing the bigger picture.

I mean, I certainly wouldn't mind that... There is a lot of creativity in the indie scene that you just don't see in triple-A games. I don't care if it's cliche anti corporate sentiment to say it, it's just true.

There's also (and I hate to say it, mind you) a lot of creativity in the Triple-A scene that indie games cannot come even close to matching and is the major advantage to Activision's massive size. I'm referring to esports, even though I'm not a fan - indie developers simply do not have the capacity, the money, the size, the staffing, or the community to grow out any kind of "real" esport/tournament scene/big competition and it's changed the landscape of gaming to have done so.

Activision has, over the years, sunk way, way more into $30,000,000 into the following.
- Overwatch league - a multi-year league spanning 20 teams, with explicit player contracts, benefits, and salaries
- Call of Duty league - the same, although newer.
- Countless World of Warcraft tournaments - from Mythic+, World First Raid races, to a gigantically complicated Arena World Championship
- Several world spanning tournaments for Starcraft 2, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm

I get it, esports aren't really for everyone, but it is something that larger studios (like Acti) have been able to really push that have driven modern video game tournaments from "30 guys in a single hotel room playing for $250 and 3 packs of cigarettes" to "a sold out arena of 60,000 people, millions watching on stream, and millions in prizes" and it's really hard to imagine a bigger impact on video games as a whole.

Video games are so massive, for example, people like Jim Sterling can make entire careers out of just talking about them and other can make entire careers out of just playing them. This is not something that could have happened without this explosive growth in the video game sector (by Activision and other huge companies).

 

[Oliver Onions]

Video games are so massive, for example, people like Jim Sterling can make entire careers out of just talking about them and other can make entire careers out of just playing them. This is not something that could have happened without this explosive growth in the video game sector (by Activision and other huge companies).

Is that a good thing, though? I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but I think there comes a point where things start expanding for the sake of themselves more than the benefit of the consumer or the quality of the product being made.

For example, without the budgets big movie studios have there's no way practical or visual effects would ever have advanced to the point that made films like Terminator or Jurassic Park possible, but we're now at the stage where so much money is thrown at these projects that they've become bloated, committee-driven sludge; utterly obsessed with spectacle over all else because they're so desperate to get seats filled and make back their money.

Similarly I think we hit the ideal point for AAA video games back in the PS2 era, where large amounts of capital allowed the creation of groundbreaking games like MGS2, but also gave companies like Capcom the scope to take risks on a bunch of ideas (like RE4 being scrapped and restarted like 4 times, one of which going on to become Devil May Cry).

Now, though, we've reached the point where a single game costs so much to make that a lot of these companies only want safe bets. So yeah, we're getting some of the most technically impressive games ever, but they're all so stagnant and samey that I'd still prefer to play indie stuff or games from 20 years ago, with the rare odd exception (usually from Capcom).

To put it more simply: How many AAA games did you play in the 8th-gen that were open-world with light RPG elements and a bunch of pointless filler activities vomited onto the map? I find it harder to think of games that didn't fit that description.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

Man Jimbo has a straight-up hate boner for 'capitalism' for no real fucking reason. He just bitches ad moans about Corporate exects making money. Do they make too much? Probably but that has less to do with capitalism and more to do with corporatism.

Also, I am noticing, especially in this video, he does not say WHAT the execs do to earn the cash... He asks why but never actually answers it or just says, "they do nothing." I think he will ever answer his own question because it (as Tanner Glass said above) will make some sense as to the compensation execs receive if he describes their actual tasks.

Lastly, he has no real answers. His videos are just a revolving door of the issue but never a solution. I know he references some faggy "co-op game publishing" concept in this video then trots away from it to show images of guys throwing money around. But it would be legitimately interesting to have him look into these ideas if not for a fresh topic. But we all know it would just devolve to him whining and showing more dumb stock footage purchased from a company that takes a cut of the transaction to pay an executive.

What Jim doesn't get is that the executives manage the whole process of their company's work. They are the managers of the managers and have to be aware of all the aspects of their company's projects and make financial decisions about investing in those projects. For instance, Games Workshop's former CEO Tom Kirby, treated the company as a producer of miniatures first, game company second. Bad rules, increasing miniature price, and killing off Warhammer Fantasy was dragging the company down, with rumors that he was trying to sell the company to Hasbro. The current CEO, Kevin Rountree has massively improved Games Workshop, with a focus on fun, strategic games with beautiful miniatures. Stock price and revenue has risen as a result, demonstrating the difference in leadership.

I do get some of Jim's complaints. It does seem weird that a person who did not work on the creation of a video game gets boatloads of cash, because without the developers, the executives have no product to sell. But these executives are the ones allotting the finances for each team. They have to determine how much money to put into a game and essentially guess how much they will make back. Their pay is a reward for correctly allocating resources. A developer, whose entire skillset is based around computer programming, most likely will not allocate resources efficiently.

 

[Bland Crumbs]

Man Jimbo has a straight-up hate boner for 'capitalism' for no real fucking reason.

Jim is a whiny bitch. His reason is likely that he hates his position in life(hence the trooning) and knows he will only go down from where he is which is why he is becoming more and more vitriolic toward capitalism. That is not everyone's reason for hating capitalism but I suspect it is Jim's.

I am not well versed on Jim Lore has he ever had a real job? I kind of doubt it or if he did it was strictly entry level and brief. This means he does not understand how business works. He seems just dull enough to believe everyone is like him: Wake up, eat more than a small village, spend one or two hours screeching autistically at a camera, eat another town's worth of food, get the edited version of the tirade back, start uploading, eat another dozen or two pounds of food, and rage on Twitter that his video is not being loved enough.

He compares his income with evil CEO income and believes his value is equal therefore he deserves more and gets angry that the world has not provided it to him.

 

[Pizdec]

Jim's argument is 100% retarted.

Bobby Kotick isn't "just" the CEO of Activision, he literally built the company from the ground up once it was about to go bankrupt. He took a bankrupt company and built it into the juggernaut of a company it is today (worth about $70,000,000,000 dollars). How the fuck else could you possibly compensate someone who has generated $70billion dollars of value? How on earth do you do a "Capitalism is bad" when you're highlighting Bobby Kotick - a man who literally created a gigantic video game empire that employs thousands of people making an average of six figures? How the fuck is that a failure - it's one of the biggest success stories anyone has ever heard of.

People like Jim, who get crowd funded by the people and not from their own ad rev or working part time to keep bills paid seem to forget that success is not easy when people want to constantly shit down your neck and find ways to make your life hell while you do what necessary and best to keep things going. It's also people like Jim who forget that Pol Pot, a rich kid who went to study in France, thought communism is great, and felt that genocide through the hands of teenage kids was the best course of action to achieve it.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Is that a good thing, though? I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but I think there comes a point where things start expanding for the sake of themselves more than the benefit of the consumer or the quality of the product being made.

For example, without the budgets big movie studios have there's no way practical or visual effects would ever have advanced to the point that made films like Terminator or Jurassic Park possible, but we're now at the stage where so much money is thrown at these projects that they've become bloated, committee-driven sludge; utterly obsessed with spectacle over all else because they're so desperate to get seats filled and make back their money.

Similarly I think we hit the ideal point for AAA video games back in the PS2 era, where large amounts of capital allowed the creation of groundbreaking games like MGS2, but also gave companies like Capcom the scope to take risks on a bunch of ideas (like RE4 being scrapped and restarted like 4 times, one of which going on to become Devil May Cry).

Now, though, we've reached the point where a single game costs so much to make that a lot of these companies only want safe bets. So yeah, we're getting some of the most technically impressive games ever, but they're all so stagnant and samey that I'd still prefer to play indie stuff or games from 20 years ago, with the rare odd exception (usually from Capcom).

To put it more simply: How many AAA games did you play in the 8th-gen that were open-world with light RPG elements and a bunch of pointless filler activities vomited onto the map? I find it harder to think of games that didn't fit that description.

I don't want to turn it into a AAA vs. Indie argument - just that big companies are a boon to the video game ecosystem and not a hindrance. Larger companies however are much better at creating and driving innovation and I think a lot of Indie games are "downstream" of that innovation.

I would go so far as to suggest that AAA titles and Indie titles share a much more symbiotic relationship than people realize. These larger companies are also where some of these innovators get to cut their teeth as well. It's easy to say AAA bad, but without AAA we'd be missing entire games and genres and I don't think anyone realizes the true ramifications of that. Larger developers spent a lot of time making the "Earthbound" series, for example, which laid the foundation for "Undertale". Same with "Harvest Moon" and "Stardew Valley", "Megaman" and "Shovel Knight", "Castlevania" and "Bloodstained", "Tony Hawk Pro Skater" and "Every Skating Game that Came After", "Metal Gear Solid" and "all kinds of wacky shit".

There are a lot of derivative games - it isn't just an AAA thing. How many indie horror games are there that are "inspired by PT"?

 

[JJLiautaud]

He's probably talking about co-operative development houses, which have been successful with relatively small, indie projects in the past. But these solutions just don't scale up very well. Like, at all. (I'm going to paraphrase an old post here.)

That system works just fine for small projects. That's how most indie games are made, even if they don't use the pretentious labels: the entire group has input on the game and a financial stake on it. The biggest differences from what you'd normally expect from a standard dev team are that everybody is paid the same no matter their position, and in theory the project doesn't have a Lead Developer. There may be someone with the title for PR purposes, but ideally all the aspects of the project are discussed by the entire team and voted on.

I say ideally, because as with basically every "anarchist" system ever a hierarchy quickly forms and someone's opinion ends up swaying the others' and they take unofficial lead of the project. It's usually not a problem with very small teams, but as things go larger the system breaks down. Take Dead Cells' developer, for example (emphasis mine):

They know that management style works fine for small projects, but if they want to bring in more people they need to set up a proper corporate structure. And that's where Jim's autistic screeching about capitalism runs face-first into the harsh realities of management: businesses and corporations aren't structured the way they are, with hierarchies, departments and different pay grades, simply because "muh capitalism". Labor is divided and managers appointed because that's how shit gets done.

Here's an example my geography teacher in high school liked to use: the Pyramids of Giza.
View attachment 2140535

These things weren't built for profit. In fact, they were a massive sink for the government's tax revenue. Some people even speculate they operated as a way to redistribute wealth and create jobs when the Nile was flooded and farmers were out of work. And there's good evidence that the workers were well-fed and paid a reasonable wage for their work. These monuments were built literally thousands of years before the concept of capitalism was even codified. And guess what? The workers were split into work teams, the teams had leaders, they all carried out different tasks, they all reported to officers (managers), and it was all done under the watch of an overseer (possibly an architect) in charge of the entire operation. And if you didn't work, or if your work was subpar, you got thrown out.

Why? Because the purpose of an enterprise is to get shit done. Whether that shit is "making ass-loads of money" or "building the world's most bangin' headstone", the principles of operation are the same.

To drive the point in even further about Egypt and capitalism, the pyramids were built almost 2000 years before the invention of currency in modern day Turkey.

 

[Oliver Onions]

I don't want to turn it into a AAA vs. Indie argument - just that big companies are a boon to the video game ecosystem and not a hindrance. Larger companies however are much better at creating and driving innovation and I think a lot of Indie games are "downstream" of that innovation.

I would go so far as to suggest that AAA titles and Indie titles share a much more symbiotic relationship than people realize. These larger companies are also where some of these innovators get to cut their teeth as well. It's easy to say AAA bad, but without AAA we'd be missing entire games and genres and I don't think anyone realizes the true ramifications of that.

I'm not saying they're bad or we'd be in a better place without them, and I don't share Jim's retarded view that cAAApitalism is inherently awful and needs to be stopped. I just think the exponential growth of AAA budgets have put a stranglehold on innovation because very few savvy business men are gonna have the balls to take risks on a project that could sink the company.

The only significant innovation I've seen come out of AAA in the last 10 years is how to convince people to pay $60 for a blatantly unfinished product.

Larger developers spent a lot of time making the "Earthbound" series, for example, which laid the foundation for "Undertale". Same with "Harvest Moon" and "Stardew Valley", "Megaman" and "Shovel Knight", "Castlevania" and "Bloodstained", "Tony Hawk Pro Skater" and "Every Skating Game that Came After", "Metal Gear Solid" and "all kinds of wacky shit".

All those inspirational franchises you mentioned are at least 20 years old. What AAA IPs can you name me from the 8th gen that have really set the world on fire and driven the innovation that inspires people? Because all I can think of is battle royale and live service games, both of which have only spread like a cancer and ruined otherwise potentially good games.

There are a lot of derivative games - it isn't just an AAA thing. How many indie horror games are there that are "inspired by PT"?

I know you're not dumb enough to not be able to see the distinction between a derivative work and a carbon copy. There's a difference between something like Soma which clearly took inspiration from P.T. and games that literally just copy the spooky hallway simulator beat-for-beat. You can't look at most of Ubisoft's games compared to what they used to put out and tell me you don't see what I'm talking about: they're the EXACT same game re-skinned; it's basically a AAA asset flip.

That doesn't mean they're all bad games in a vacuum, but there's very little innovation or creativity found in AAA anymore, because they're too expensive and too complex to take the big risks they could in the PS2 days, and a lot of that is down to the retarded notion that big shiny graphics are what make games good; a philosophy almost entirely exclusive to AAA because they're the only ones who can afford them.

 

[RudeRoasts]

In very simple terms, you throw bags of money at the guy so someone else doesn't throw bags of money at him and poach him from your company. Or, if your guy is a founder and majority shareholder, so he doesn't sell the company to someone else with a lot of money bags.

And it's not like the money just vanishes either. Kotick is guaranteed to be investing that money in something. Companies, art, high-end cars/yachts/spaceships/whatever, all sorts of investments are available to him. Very rich people very rarely let their liquid assets go idle.

Most of Kotick's "pay" is really just Activision stock. Capital invested into his own company.
Despite being supposed "pundits who know this stuff", you'll never hear that from the games media.

It's just like people who think Bezos has "too much money". The reality is that a lot of the wealth of these CEOs and shit is not liquid cash. The taxes alone would be killer to that shit, and even then, you couldn't feasibly spend it all. And if it was liquidated, a lot of people would be out of work.

 

[Tanner Glass]

I'm not saying they're bad or we'd be in a better place without them, and I don't share Jim's retarded view that cAAApitalism is inherently awful and needs to be stopped. I just think the exponential growth of AAA budgets have put a stranglehold on innovation because very few savvy business men are gonna have the balls to take risks on a project that could sink the company.

The only significant innovation I've seen come out of AAA in the last 10 years is how to convince people to pay $60 for a blatantly unfinished product.

All those inspirational franchises you mentioned are at least 20 years old. What AAA IPs can you name me from the 8th gen that have really set the world on fire and driven the innovation that inspires people? Because all I can think of is battle royale and live service games, both of which have only spread like a cancer and ruined otherwise potentially good games.


I know you're not dumb enough to not be able to see the distinction between a derivative work and a carbon copy. There's a difference between something like Soma which clearly took inspiration from P.T. and games that literally just copy the spooky hallway simulator beat-for-beat. You can't look at most of Ubisoft's games compared to what they used to put out and tell me you don't see what I'm talking about: they're the EXACT same game re-skinned; it's basically a AAA asset flip.

That doesn't mean they're all bad games in a vacuum, but there's very little innovation or creativity found in AAA anymore, because they're too expensive and too complex to take the big risks they could in the PS2 days, and a lot of that is down to the retarded notion that big shiny graphics are what make games good; a philosophy almost entirely exclusive to AAA because they're the only ones who can afford them.

I'm not going apples to oranges, but yes, AAA games can get put into a "franchise mode" and suffer some creative/innovation issues. If those examples are too old, however, I'll grab some new ones that were spearheaded by AAA studios.

- Taking older games and updating them to "modern" standards. This is actually something that has huge potential and already has some major innovation successes under it's belt (FF7 Remake, RE2/RE3 Remakes).
- Relaxing of IPs leading to "semi-indie" games such as Sonic Mania, Streets of Rage 4, and River City Girls.
- A push into VR - costing a huge pile of money to drive the industry forward culminating in Half Life : Alyx.
- A gigantic push to take competitive video games from "punchline" to "multi billion dollar industry"

To your point, I think Assassin's Creed is stale and not very good - but AC isn't every franchise. God of War was excellent - Monster Hunter : World was amazing. Resident Evil is actually good again - and so on. Also Horizion : Zero Dawn was great - as was Death Stranding (I know not everyone liked it, though). I'd put Control up there as well, and there's probably some that I'm missing.

I think innovation is a problem for both AAA and Indies just because there hasn't been much (outside of VR and controller feedback) hardware innovation to play off of, but I think AAA will get there first, but there's definitely innovation there - and innovation can and needs to extend outside of the game itself.

 

[Emperor Julian]

So how many weeks in a row has he made the same fucking video?

 

[Corn Flakes]

So how many weeks in a row has he made the same fucking video?

I think the last time Jim had an independent, original thought, TotalBiscuit was still alive

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I've said it multiple times, there is no Capitalism in the west, shit there might be more capitalism in China than any western country.
Currently there is no real competition, you either work for the few massive global corporations or try to get them to pick you up, with maybe the only exception being niche markets. Any "choice" you see where you need to make a purchase is just an illusion since most of what's on the aisle belongs to branches of the same one or two corporations.
Even worse, it's not even a true capitalism end point of "corporations rule everything", the ties of politics and governments are stronger than ever and used specifically to kill any competition and get bailout from any economic misadventure.

Jim isn't complaining about capitalism ruining gaming. He's just ass mad he wasn't born to the modern oligarchy.

 

[Chilson]

Even worse, it's not even a true capitalism end point of "corporations rule everything", the ties of politics and governments are stronger than ever and used specifically to kill any competition and get bailout from any economic misadventure.

You think companies ever created monopolies by themselves? Fuck no, monopolies are not the birth child of capitalism and never have been.

Its the horrifying creation of governments having way too much power and corporate lobbyists giving the R&D handies in the back room for more regulations that fuck over small businesses. Which is what fuckers who "hate capitalism" want more of because their retards.

 

[Druveer]

Old comic but obligatory, many of them agree with this
View attachment 2133594

Those men were:

A: Making fun of him.
B: Talking to someone else.
C: Probably don't even exist.
I saw this on twitter today:

They care more about dogs than they do about children.

 

[Judge Dredd]

This is an idea I've been rolling around in my head for a while, but now I have some actual numbers I thought I'd put it out there.

BlizzAc currently has 9,080 employees, according to Google. So if you were to take that 30,000,000, minus the 2,000,000 of his actual salary, and spread it out among all employees in the company they'd each get an extra $3083 a year. Certainly nothing to sniff at, but given the average salary (again according to Google) of a BlizzAc employee is between 80-90k, it's really not a huge amount relatively speaking.

Basically what I'm driving at is, while 30 million is an outrageous amount of money for anyone to get paid, redistributing it among all the workers (which I'd assume is what Comrade Jim wants) would basically result in little more than a Christmas bonus on top of what is already a very good salary.

Anyway, I'm not sufficiently married to this idea yet, so feel free to pick it apart as you see fit.

P.S. Why the fuck does Jim keep wearing that dumpy bouncer's jacket in his videos? It looks awful, even by his standards.

There was a company that actually did this. Redistributing profits from either a big project or a year of profits. I forget which company it was (I don't think it was a games company, might have been amazon) or the exact numbers.

I remember there were lefty news articles raging about it because the take home bonus for the employees was something like $38. ie. Basically nothing.

As it turns out, millions of dollars divided among almost a million people results in a small cut per person.

I think innovation is a problem for both AAA and Indies just because there hasn't been much (outside of VR and controller feedback) hardware innovation to play off of, but I think AAA will get there first, but there's definitely innovation there - and innovation can and needs to extend outside of the game itself.

Innovation is one of those things that gamers demand but don't have a solution for.

Ask people, especially older gamers, to pitch a game idea they would consider innovation, and they'll either give no answer, or throw out the kind of derivative idea they were complaining about.

 

[LemonParty]

Those men were:

A: Making fun of him.
B: Talking to someone else.
C: Probably don't even exist.
I saw this on twitter today:
View attachment 2144000

They care more about dogs than they do about children.

It's harder to have sex with your dog if it's neutered; that's probably what the Huffington Post was going for with that article.

 

[Shaka Brah]

Innovation is one of those things that gamers demand but don't have a solution for.

Ask people, especially older gamers, to pitch a game idea they would consider innovation, and they'll either give no answer, or throw out the kind of derivative idea they were complaining about.

I think when people say "Innovation" they really mean "Diversion."

People want games that aren't like the cookie-cutter templates of modern AAA titles, and gamers (often older ones) hearken back to the days when games had features that were unnecessary but fun to use, or were made utilizing technologies that are simple but get cut due to laziness.

I would definitely like to see "derivative" ideas from great older games brought back when they can be done so well today, like the expansive linkage between Maxis games in the Sim Copter/Streets/Sim City days where Sim City served as a map editor for those other games. Or dynamic terrain deformation in Populous 3, which was rendered on a toroidal world that gave the illusion of a globe and could be played on a Windows 95 PC.

When people complain about a lack of innovation they just mean that major game companies are phoning it in and ticking boxes for some focus group rather than doing something neat. Or that they've abandoned the (completely functional) solutions of the past for a more sanitized gameplay environment to push entries out the door, like reduced terrain interactivity or removing features between installments (for example the new Battlefront games not having vehicles you can get in and out of, even though main-franchise installments have them).