5 ms·

It's astounding to me how these articles and videos get passed around without some cursory fact-checking. EA's revenue at the end of the last fiscal year was n

It's astounding to me how these articles and videos get passed around without some cursory fact-checking. EA's revenue at the end of the last fiscal year was nearly five billion dollars. I do believe the $800m quote about FIFA is correct, but that puts it at around 20% of total revenue, not the 80% or so this article asserts. Don't ever assume that Some Random Guy On Youtube has his numbers correct. If CGP Grey (or someone as respected) does a video about this, he/they will probably get it right, but I don't trust many others to do this kind of analysis without getting the numbers wrong. To further highlight the silliness of the original video, it includes some assertions about the cost of game development - EA has claimed it's going up, the author notes that EA's publicly available R&D expenses have gone down in the last four years, therefore the cost of developing games has gone down. This is a completely false claim, because the number of games EA has released has gone from 20+ per year to less than 10. The cost per game has gone way, way up. (I'm not going to take a position on loot boxes here because I spent seven years working on games that had them and I don't want to get into that debate right now.)

QAPereo 9y ago
(I'm not going to take a position on loot boxes here because I spent seven years working on games that had them and I don't want to get into that debate right now.) And yet, that's the core of the piece, and that core is pretty well articulated and damning. Edit: I just want to add that on a personal level, I avoid any game with these manipulative elements in them. I love the idea of for example, For Honor, but the mechanics are perfectly tuned to abuse the player. Who has time in their life for that nonsense? I'll just play another CDPR game.
- swivelmaster 9y ago
  And yet the argument is underpinned by financial data and analysis that is wrong. Basically, if you (not YOU you, but rather the impersonal 'you') want to have a discussion about the morals and ethics of loot boxes, fine, but don't try to back it up with false claims. Using numbers in a moral argument fools everybody into thinking that there's more certainty around the situation than there actually is. At best it's misleading and at worst it's malicious and dishonest.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    The argument that the companies are lying about how unfairly they’re being enriched, and claims about the abusive, addictive nature engineered knowingly into loot boxes and similar Skinner Boxes are really quite separate. You’ve only addressed one, and refuse to touch the other more interesting (and titular) part of the piece. I can understand why, given that your livelihood depends on said practices. Edit: Just to add a quote from the article, Note: I’m going by the claims of the video. I still haven’t dug into the EA financials myself.
    - swivelmaster 9y ago
      My livelihood no longer depends on said practice. I have mixed feelings about it, but this is Hacker News so I have some expectation that if we're going to be discussing stuff like this, we're at least going to start with the right facts.
  - grossprophet 9y ago
    "Using numbers in a moral argument fools everybody into thinking that there's more certainty around the situation than there actually is. At best it's misleading and at worst it's malicious and dishonest." You owe me a new irony detector. This one just blew.
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  CDPR mistreats it's employees to such a degree, I can't support a company like that. I cannot comprehend how someone can be okay with abusing employees by not okay with "abusing" a willing customer offering money for something.
  - greymeister 9y ago
    I use Amazon services even though I would never want to work there. Companies can be very pro-consumer while having poor practices with their employees.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Is it worst there then in other gameDev companis?
    - jasonlotito 9y ago
      Yes.
grossprophet 9y ago
"It's astounding to me how these articles and videos get passed around without some cursory fact-checking." So lets do some in the article. "In 2012, about 17% of EA’s revenue came from stuff like loot boxes and season passes. This year, about 45% of their revenue did." That paragraph talks about revenue, while this paragraph discusses profit; "In 2012, EA made $76 million dollars, and in 2017 they made $976 million. The kicker is that we know $800 million of that comes from FIFA, which means all the rest of their games combined earned the other $197 million."
- swivelmaster 9y ago
  The last sentence is just completely wrong though. You can attribute revenue to a source, but not profit. They don't break out p&l for individual business units, let alone games.
  - foxyv 9y ago
    Unless they maintain cost centers and do cross business unit accounting.
    - swivelmaster 9y ago
      Public companies often report at the minimum level of detail required by regulations. Ever major game publisher knows how much money they spend at every studio and on every service, but they don't have an obligation to report with that level of specificity to the public.

QAPereo 9y ago

(I'm not going to take a position on loot boxes here because I spent seven years working on games that had them and I don't want to get into that debate right now.) And yet, that's the core of the piece, and that core is pretty well articulated and damning. Edit: I just want to add that on a personal level, I avoid any game with these manipulative elements in them. I love the idea of for example, For Honor, but the mechanics are perfectly tuned to abuse the player. Who has time in their life for that nonsense? I'll just play another CDPR game.

swivelmaster 9y ago
And yet the argument is underpinned by financial data and analysis that is wrong. Basically, if you (not YOU you, but rather the impersonal 'you') want to have a discussion about the morals and ethics of loot boxes, fine, but don't try to back it up with false claims. Using numbers in a moral argument fools everybody into thinking that there's more certainty around the situation than there actually is. At best it's misleading and at worst it's malicious and dishonest.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  The argument that the companies are lying about how unfairly they’re being enriched, and claims about the abusive, addictive nature engineered knowingly into loot boxes and similar Skinner Boxes are really quite separate. You’ve only addressed one, and refuse to touch the other more interesting (and titular) part of the piece. I can understand why, given that your livelihood depends on said practices. Edit: Just to add a quote from the article, Note: I’m going by the claims of the video. I still haven’t dug into the EA financials myself.
  - swivelmaster 9y ago
    My livelihood no longer depends on said practice. I have mixed feelings about it, but this is Hacker News so I have some expectation that if we're going to be discussing stuff like this, we're at least going to start with the right facts.
- grossprophet 9y ago
  "Using numbers in a moral argument fools everybody into thinking that there's more certainty around the situation than there actually is. At best it's misleading and at worst it's malicious and dishonest." You owe me a new irony detector. This one just blew.
jasonlotito 9y ago
CDPR mistreats it's employees to such a degree, I can't support a company like that. I cannot comprehend how someone can be okay with abusing employees by not okay with "abusing" a willing customer offering money for something.
- greymeister 9y ago
  I use Amazon services even though I would never want to work there. Companies can be very pro-consumer while having poor practices with their employees.
- watwut 9y ago
  Is it worst there then in other gameDev companis?
  - jasonlotito 9y ago
    Yes.

grossprophet 9y ago

"It's astounding to me how these articles and videos get passed around without some cursory fact-checking." So lets do some in the article. "In 2012, about 17% of EA’s revenue came from stuff like loot boxes and season passes. This year, about 45% of their revenue did." That paragraph talks about revenue, while this paragraph discusses profit; "In 2012, EA made $76 million dollars, and in 2017 they made $976 million. The kicker is that we know $800 million of that comes from FIFA, which means all the rest of their games combined earned the other $197 million."

swivelmaster 9y ago
The last sentence is just completely wrong though. You can attribute revenue to a source, but not profit. They don't break out p&l for individual business units, let alone games.
- foxyv 9y ago
  Unless they maintain cost centers and do cross business unit accounting.
  - swivelmaster 9y ago
    Public companies often report at the minimum level of detail required by regulations. Ever major game publisher knows how much money they spend at every studio and on every service, but they don't have an obligation to report with that level of specificity to the public.