Steam is available in over two hundred countries and you think 100 employees is enough to manage that? To do the account support, billing support, vendor support, user content moderation, technical support, hardware partnerships, server management, platform development, legal compliance, business development, web development, database management, HR, accounting…etc in multiple regions and in every respective language? One employee per every two countries?! Figure it out.
Steam claims they’re available in over two hundred countries. Do you really think that one employee for every two countries is enough?
Translation: They outsource a lot.
Edit: Lol, downvoted by people too dense to realize you need way more than 100 people to operate in over 200 countries with as much business as they do. OFC they outsource a lot. Your local Walmart has 100 employees.
You deserve the downvotes here, just wanted to make that clear.
No information about Alpha Centauri 2? I posit an AC quote then:
“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.” -Commissioner Pravin Lal, ‘U.N. Declaration of Rights’
Exactly. And the entire reason I like to kill stuff in video games is that I have zero desire to do it in real life.
Right, but cynics like ourselves need to jump on the proof that we were right to spread our jadedness to the masses.
Seems like his job was to “manage” the community in the control sense.
The whole article was poorly written honestly, but yeah, that part really felt off. If the only thing they care about is money, then by nature our only real means of protest is to affect their money.
Agreed, pre-orders are a thing after all…but it’s possible that it still works too often and also that gamers are becoming a bit more jaded about marketing. I don’t buy anything till the Metacritic and Steam reviews are out, and I only watch gameplay videos any more cause who cares about the cut scenes? I’m sure I’m not the only one. Consumers eventually learn their lessons but then a new crop of consumers comes up.
Counterpoint: Call of Duty 27 should be out soon.
As a white middle-aged guy who spent most of my youth waiting tables for a job…No.
I agree with this, but we give them till the age of 21 to practice and develop those skills. The entire argument is not letting gaming companies introduce gambling to kids before their brains have fully developed.
You’re intentionally dumbing down the topic to make your point sound better. You’re simply describing the binary, whether addiction could be present or not. There are so many more obvious factors to consider. Addiction rate of users, personal and social impacts of that addiction, intensity of addictive behaviors, frequency of use in addicts, target demographic, marketing etc.
There’s a reason gambling has a minimum age requirement, and loot boxes are a way around that to make money by letting children gamble.
In counseling, we call those process addictions. Internet gaming, sexual addictions, gambling, shopping etc. are all process addictions. Psychological addiction isn’t precise enough as any chemical addiction could have a strong psychological component as well, and almost always does because addictions create habits of use and habits are difficult to break. Also, for instance, we might have to ditch our drinking buddies when we have alcoholism because being around them triggers our urge to drink psychologically.
This is the same as Trump saying he was just challenging the results of the election.
Namely, nobody is trying to prosecute him for his legal challenges…and nobody is complaining that games are too entertaining. They are bold strawman arguments that most people see through immediately. “Complete bullshit” is now a common argumentative tactic.
Arizona State Univeristy self-imposed a ban from going to a bowl game this year in college football to address their recruiting violations…they’re 2-7 on the season…same vibe.
I guess, but I honestly thought he would be better at pretending to make good decisions.
Been saying it for a while, but his plan was to run it into the ground all along. Who is he buddy-buddy with in public? The Saudi’s and the Russians, who both have an interest in seeing Twitter burn to the ground. He started by laying off people, not paying their bills, and making stupid brand decisions. This has been the plan all along and there’s really no other logical explanation. 44 billion is nothing to the Saudis and Russian oligarchs if it takes away a key tool for organized dissent and the spread of western ideals.
Hey, you make a lot of great points and thanks for the perspective and depth of engagement. I think “paying vendors for services you don’t want to run internally” is exactly outsourcing. With the ubiquity of big cloud services though, I hesitate to call that outsourcing even though it fits that definition. Maybe cause that’s more about the hardware than the people, I dunno. I checked real quick and seems like they do have their own data centers but use AWS and others as well around the world.
I think I may have a different default definition of outsourcing than others though after working tech support in the US for bigger companies through other smaller outsourced companies in the US. A lot of people probably assumed I meant overseas as in outsourced tech support to India. I agree with your scaling estimates and most everything else you said. Someone’s gotta design dem summer sale logos too though lol. Cheers.