Jimquisition: The Unholy Trinity Of Blind Greedy Bastards

PunkRex

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Abnaxis said:
...

I've never even heard of Clash of Clans. Is it a big mobile title or something?
I've seen the blonde looking warriors pop up in a few adverts but not actually seen the game itself, is it a stratergy game like Civ?
 

Cerebrawl

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PunkRex said:
I've seen the blonde looking warriors pop up in a few adverts but not actually seen the game itself, is it a stratergy game like Civ?
Maybe Civ as envisioned by Zynga. It's more like those old kingdom war browser games, I don't remember any of their names, but the basic premise is you have limited energy, use it to find new land, build stuff, recruit soldiers, and raid other players for their resources/land.

Except CoC is heavily cash shop based and the top players have to spend hundreds of dollars a week to stay at the top.
 

Canadamus Prime

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Jun 17, 2009
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MorganL4 said:
canadamus_prime said:
I want to know how this happened. How is it that people who know nothing about video games ended up running video game companies?
We live in a world of professional CEOs. If you were a great CEO of a shampoo company, and were able to double sales of X shampoo then it makes perfect sense (In the current world that is Corporate America) that you would be just as good running a company that has traditionally made RPGs. The idea is this, because you market shampoo, people like the ads for the shampoo and like the social stature associated with said shampoo, they buy the shampoo and use it. Thus if you market the game well, people like the ads for the game, and like the social stature associate with the game then you have done your job. The fact that shampoo is a bunch of chemicals put into a bottle and shipped out, whereas a game is a piece of art created by a collective group and then copied over a million times for resale doesn't really enter into the equation.
But isn't it the responsibility of the CEO to familiarize themselves with the product they are trying to sell?
 

Joseph Wallace

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I'm just glad I am getting back into table top gaming! I just got done putting together a set of space marines for warhammer 40k and it cost a couple hundred bucks for sure but in the long run even though its a small part of an army this money will be well spent for the next few years as I will continue to play and build this up over time and keep it all without fear of game going off line and I will actually own all my stuff at the end of everything so I can enjoy it till the day I die if I like! I am seriously considering quitting being a video gamer and I have been one for 30 years! I cannot give Jim the credit for me wanting to quit video gaming though this is something I have been watching unfold with all this pay to play crap. Although the video Jim put up a couple or so weeks back that explained that these pay to play games that are created for "whales" actually made me feel a little sick inside to know that all we are is just some fat and dumb cash grab instead of an actual human being. I have been trying to play a game recently called lionheart tactics and its real disappointing to see that it not only has the 100 buck option but all your heroes and weapons and promotion stones are bought randomly almost slot machine style! you could have a warrior hoping to get him gear and upgrade him to the next tier and dunk all your money into the game and never get his things! If only people with lots of money had lots of brains cause its only the idiots that feed into this with their monies in the first place is why this exists!
 

Nixou

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But isn't it the responsibility of the CEO to familiarize themselves with the product they are trying to sell?

What? Are you implying that company executives should behave like hard-working, dedicated employees?
Get out of here you bolshevik!
 

Big_Isaac

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May 24, 2012
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Me seeing the title of the episode:
"soooooooo, EA, Activision and... uhm... Capcom/MS, maybe?"

Me after seeing the episode
"Ah, so it's games, not devs. Cod, Candy Crush and... what the hell is Clash of Clans?"
 

IamLEAM1983

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Aug 22, 2011
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OHMIGOD! HE'S REFERENCED HYDRA WITHTOUT HAVING SEEN THE NEW MOVIE! NERD RAGE! CEDRIC IS NOT CYRIL! MORE NERD RAGE!

Silliness aside, what I'd really like to know is what Mister Sterling plans to do once his little lectern-slash-podium thingy runs out of space for his Miniature Fantasy Space Brigade-slash-Super Sentai-slash-whatever.

Aaaand, just so I'll be on-topic, it's amazing what being a gamer can come to mean if you're part of the subset that simply won't touch anything by King, Supercell or the yearly CoDbro Juice Infusion Maker. The big three can bash their heads in trying to fuse these three games into a kind of marketing and casual-dominating motherlode, I'll just be right over there, playing my 4X games, my Skyrims, my Hotline Miamis and my Minecrafts.

Besides, there's nothing particularly clever about the Freemium model, not when half of them are so shoddily implemented you can just circumvent the limitations by fiddling with your iDevice's clock. Ever since my parents discovered that little trick, they've been fooling themselves into thinking they have King utterly and completely defeated.
 
Oct 20, 2010
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hentropy said:
SilverStuddedSquirre said:
hentropy said:
Yeah I thought you already sorta knew all this stuff, Jim... I don't work in games but I am a student of the broader IT systems industry, and they TEACH this stuff as part of the business curriculum. Appeal to large audiences, appeal to demographics with money, growth is everything and if you're not growing you're losing. Whole assignments based around trying to sell unpopular monitoring and other features as important services. In information systems in general, there have been quite a few situations where I've been asked with new and creative ways to collect data from people. Social media is not viewed as a tool, but as the most direct way to collect information to tune business and marketing strategies.

The reason why those three are the models for success is not because they are good games, but because they've done everything "right" when it comes to marketing, growth, and siphoning as much money out as possible.

To be fair, my school does teach a variety of approaches, and niche audiences are taught to be just as potentially profitable, but you're also basically taught "look at the rest of the industry and do what works."
Just for fun, could you ask your Teacher's opinions about whether or not teaching outright Deception and methods for draining the Soul out of any and all Industries is personally satisfying? Is there a set amount of income at which it is considered appropriate to just toss all integrity out the window and utterly shit all over the customers whose very dollars are providing your supper? I would LOVE to hear an answer to that at the Teacher's level.

Also, could you ask said teacher's opinion of what directly amounts to plagiarism? I hear that Plagiarism is a bigg NO NO in academic circles.
Again, to be fair, it's not so much about what the teachers (keep in mind that there are multiple business classes and they all focus on the aforementioned aspects), it's about what businesses are looking for out of big-picture IT employees and marketers. It might seem strange or superbad that a marketer or CEO in the games industry has never worked in games before and know little about them, but that's the way it works in every industry. If you're a marketer for a produce company your job is not to know about every intricacy of the produce industry, your job is to market the product to the people the higher-ups want you to market to.

This is why executive decisions and the "tone at the top" is so important. Some companies just turn their marketing over to the marketing department and let them drive marketing, using a lot of employee and industry expert feedback to craft the best message. Some CEOs will try and direct marketing themselves and not bother to involve anyone who actually know the audience at the ground level, which is how you get Dead Space's "your mom is going hate it" commercials. You might hate what Clash of Clans stands for, but you have to admit that the commercials (which play quite frequently) are quite effective at appealing to multiple audiences. Your job as a marketer is not to make the game or even care about the quality of it, your job is to get people to download and buy it.

The difference between a disconnected, "soulless" company like EA and a company most people love like Valve is that Valve simply knows its audiences much better because the people at the top are gamers and experts themselves.
I see your points, and thank you, but you didn't really address my questions.
I understand that what is being taught IS what the businesses want. Which to go from the Games Industry, is people as skilled as possible in the art of Deception, Plagiarism, and the desire to Monetize Teens and Whales for the retention of Virility. Also if you know how to Silence people Opinions or Reviews of your product so that only good reviews can be read this is a bonus.
I am curious to know a Teacher's moral standpoint on this. Or even your own opinion on the fact that this is what IS if not WILL be taught in said curriculum given the way these Businesses operate? Unless of course, it's too late and HYDRA already has your College (University?) on lock-down.
 

garjian

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Strazdas said:
garjian said:
I just pictured a scene in my head...
Asking a room of these executives to list their top 10 favourite video games, and if they can't even think of 10 to list, telling them to get the fuck out.
Remember, they're not allowed to use the internet to help, so I'd expect this to be a real challenge for them.
i never bothered with making top lists myself. i would need to think real hard to list top 10 movies and i saw literally over 3000 of them. I only played 125 games (yes, i count) so the list to pick from would be shorter, but still coming out with top 10 instantly would not be easy, unless i would just be stating random games that i remember first, which i guess would technically work for situation, but wouldnt be fair. not everyone is obsessed with listing their things as favourites.
The point was them being able to name 10 in the first place, not how difficult they would find it to select them.
It's "Name 10 games" in disguise.
 

Aardvaarkman

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Jul 14, 2011
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MarsAtlas said:
And the Bible isn't an entertainment franchise. Thats just being facetious.
You didn't say "entertainment franchise" - you said "fictional franchise." And the Bible is both fictional, and the biggest literary franchise of all time.

So, I really don't understand how it's facetious to include the largest fictional franchise of all time among "fictional franchises." Hell it would also qualify as as an "entertainment franchise" because it has entertained so many people over the Centuries.
 

aliensmurf

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I like to watch this show because it makes me think. Normally I do not fully agree with Jim, but I do love his point of view. In this episode I was completely with him, until he said hail hydra! Why do people use a meme when they have no connection to the meme :(?
Still why does he want a shoe?
 

hentropy

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SilverStuddedSquirre said:
hentropy said:
SilverStuddedSquirre said:
hentropy said:
Yeah I thought you already sorta knew all this stuff, Jim... I don't work in games but I am a student of the broader IT systems industry, and they TEACH this stuff as part of the business curriculum. Appeal to large audiences, appeal to demographics with money, growth is everything and if you're not growing you're losing. Whole assignments based around trying to sell unpopular monitoring and other features as important services. In information systems in general, there have been quite a few situations where I've been asked with new and creative ways to collect data from people. Social media is not viewed as a tool, but as the most direct way to collect information to tune business and marketing strategies.

The reason why those three are the models for success is not because they are good games, but because they've done everything "right" when it comes to marketing, growth, and siphoning as much money out as possible.

To be fair, my school does teach a variety of approaches, and niche audiences are taught to be just as potentially profitable, but you're also basically taught "look at the rest of the industry and do what works."
Just for fun, could you ask your Teacher's opinions about whether or not teaching outright Deception and methods for draining the Soul out of any and all Industries is personally satisfying? Is there a set amount of income at which it is considered appropriate to just toss all integrity out the window and utterly shit all over the customers whose very dollars are providing your supper? I would LOVE to hear an answer to that at the Teacher's level.

Also, could you ask said teacher's opinion of what directly amounts to plagiarism? I hear that Plagiarism is a bigg NO NO in academic circles.
Again, to be fair, it's not so much about what the teachers (keep in mind that there are multiple business classes and they all focus on the aforementioned aspects), it's about what businesses are looking for out of big-picture IT employees and marketers. It might seem strange or superbad that a marketer or CEO in the games industry has never worked in games before and know little about them, but that's the way it works in every industry. If you're a marketer for a produce company your job is not to know about every intricacy of the produce industry, your job is to market the product to the people the higher-ups want you to market to.

This is why executive decisions and the "tone at the top" is so important. Some companies just turn their marketing over to the marketing department and let them drive marketing, using a lot of employee and industry expert feedback to craft the best message. Some CEOs will try and direct marketing themselves and not bother to involve anyone who actually know the audience at the ground level, which is how you get Dead Space's "your mom is going hate it" commercials. You might hate what Clash of Clans stands for, but you have to admit that the commercials (which play quite frequently) are quite effective at appealing to multiple audiences. Your job as a marketer is not to make the game or even care about the quality of it, your job is to get people to download and buy it.

The difference between a disconnected, "soulless" company like EA and a company most people love like Valve is that Valve simply knows its audiences much better because the people at the top are gamers and experts themselves.
I see your points, and thank you, but you didn't really address my questions.
I understand that what is being taught IS what the businesses want. Which to go from the Games Industry, is people as skilled as possible in the art of Deception, Plagiarism, and the desire to Monetize Teens and Whales for the retention of Virility. Also if you know how to Silence people Opinions or Reviews of your product so that only good reviews can be read this is a bonus.
I am curious to know a Teacher's moral standpoint on this. Or even your own opinion on the fact that this is what IS if not WILL be taught in said curriculum given the way these Businesses operate? Unless of course, it's too late and HYDRA already has your College (University?) on lock-down.
Well, nothing is really industry, specific, and that includes games. There's nothing about monetizing whales or any of that nonsense in the previous Jimquisition. Nothing, however, is really taught as the "right way" to do something. I think it's just getting as many techniques as possible. From an IT perspective, the main tools we have is data, so you can't really blame people from wanting to find ways to come up with more. It's not just that, however, you HAVE to know how to utilize big data to keep competitive. At the same time, you also have to be aware of privacy concerns, and being considered one of the "good" companies in people's eyes can be its own large benefit. Packaged goods, in particular, isn't an industry that is built around a lot of customer goodwill, people want to buy the stuff and have it work once it's opened. It's largely the same with fast good, Walmart, etc. Those companies will exist so long as they offer low prices, and them being "evil" behind the scenes is something the vast majority of their consumer base won't care about.

Video games, however, are much different. Even from a theoretically perspective, these CEOs and marketing departments fail, because they should know that a multimedia video gaming experience is much different than those other industries. They also don't understand the makers of Candy Crush and Clash of Clans' business model. They're not in it for long-term viability, the reason why they want to make as much money as possible right now is because it won't be too long until something else comes along and knocks them off, or the whole industry bubble will burst. A proper strategy for a AAA game industry is to generate fandoms around your product, and increase the relationships with them. You can get valuable feedback and data organically, rather than trying to find new ways to collect metadata and derive what is often wrong conclusions from them.

You mention deception, plagiarism, etc., but those things have legally distinct meanings. No one "owns" the tower defense genre, nor should they. The only way you can "plagiarize" a game is if you straight-up use their assets, code, or copy the same exact game in most ways. You still have trademark trolling, of course, but that's sort of the opposite of plagiarism. You could say that light deception is pretty much what all marketing and advertising is based around. You're not legally allowed to knowingly advertise something that is false, however. I'm not a marketer nor do I want to be, and we're certainly not taught to outright lie. I don't think that monetizing whales is what is taught or what will be taught. General strategies which don't seem so bad without a specific context is taught, the problem is that they are applied to video games without considering context, audience, or industry. That is what should be and is taught, for the most part.
 

Flunk

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It's not just video games that has this problem. Marketing departments are the scourge of many industries. They don't have any contact with the customers, they don't know the product and they don't understand why games sell.

It's not marketing as a whole that's to blame, it's bad marketing. Mindless self-analysis without anything else and without understanding.

P.S. Your new background is nice.
 

Requia

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Apr 4, 2013
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Jim: While I haven't complained, I don't regularly watch your videos because you only say exactly what I want to hear. So it's not necessarily people that *don't* like what you're saying complaining about that.

Though this didn't fill my momentary desire for righteous rage, it was just fucking depressing.
 

KazeAizen

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And this is where you have to give Nintendo credit. They know exactly what they want to be. They want to do their own thing. Make their fun games and systems and are trying really hard not go fall into the trap that these other companies did. I mean there was an investor that made news earlier this year. Saying "What if they could pay $.99 to make Mario jump just a little higher?" He didn't see anything but dollar signs and those dollar signs came from games like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans. Criticize them or their console all you want. You can't deny that Nintendo has stuck to its guns, unmoved for longer than anyone else, they're reaching out to indies these days and sure they may be late to the party but in terms of company practices I still say the worst thing they do is region lock and shut down youtube content. Which yeah is pretty bad but compared to trying to make money for money's sake and imitating games like the 3 mentioned in the video that's a pretty small crime. No company is ever innocent. We do have to at least acknowledge the AAA companies that haven't traded us in for an extra yacht.
 

Requia

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What I don't get though, is why. Gamers aren't some secret society you ahve to join to find out about. All you have to do is turn on the freaking internet and gamers will tell you way way way more than you ever wanted to know about games.
 

Requia

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K12 said:
Is it weird that I've never heard of Clash of Clans before this video, and I've never played Candy Crush and have never owned a Call of Duty game. I have failed as a gamer!
I haven't completely failed, I have a copy of Modern Warfare 2!

(That has never actually been inside my xbox and I dunno where it came from, but I have it).
 

KazeAizen

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IamLEAM1983 said:
OHMIGOD! HE'S REFERENCED HYDRA WITHTOUT HAVING SEEN THE NEW MOVIE! NERD RAGE! CEDRIC IS NOT CYRIL! MORE NERD RAGE!

Silliness aside, what I'd really like to know is what Mister Sterling plans to do once his little lectern-slash-podium thingy runs out of space for his Miniature Fantasy Space Brigade-slash-Super Sentai-slash-whatever.

Aaaand, just so I'll be on-topic, it's amazing what being a gamer can come to mean if you're part of the subset that simply won't touch anything by King, Supercell or the yearly CoDbro Juice Infusion Maker. The big three can bash their heads in trying to fuse these three games into a kind of marketing and casual-dominating motherlode, I'll just be right over there, playing my 4X games, my Skyrims, my Hotline Miamis and my Minecrafts.

Besides, there's nothing particularly clever about the Freemium model, not when half of them are so shoddily implemented you can just circumvent the limitations by fiddling with your iDevice's clock. Ever since my parents discovered that little trick, they've been fooling themselves into thinking they have King utterly and completely defeated.
Seriously the Hail Hydra thing had me on the floor. The fact that his own color scheme is basically the same and that new banner in particular made it even better. I have an idea. Since Hugo doesn't want to be the Red Skull in any future Marvel movies can we have Jim do it in some capacity? I mean its like he's been leading his own army for years with that set up. We could call in Angry Joe who actually has an army :p

Now my silliness aside. The only game I've seen that has a really good Free to play model is League of Legends. You could argue DoTA but DoTA actually has resources and a mighty big company to back it. Riot, while not small anymore, still doesn't quite make bank like Blizzard or Valve and the fact that they've been able to make so much money on a free to play game is just awesome. I mean you literally only have to pay for cosmetic stuff. To get the other stuff you could argue is a grind but they set the game up in such a way that it doesn't feel like it. Have limited champs? Don't worry we will give you about 7 or so a week to play for free. With a roster of well over 100 characters they could keep that up for a long time and you'd always get to try a new champ thus the experience doesn't seem as boring. Not too mention the game is just damn damn good. You don't get bigger than WoW or Starcraft 2 in the online world by being shit.
 

Strazdas

Robots will replace your job
May 28, 2011
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Rabidkitten said:
What happened to Angry Birds, and World of Warcraft?
world of warcraft is declining, besides, copying it has failed spectacularry. Angry Birds is kidna forgotten. its a very old game with speeds of mobile gaming going on and it has created the 3 star rating system that everyone still uses needed or not.

PunkRex said:
Abnaxis said:
...

I've never even heard of Clash of Clans. Is it a big mobile title or something?
I've seen the blonde looking warriors pop up in a few adverts but not actually seen the game itself, is it a stratergy game like Civ?
do you know Travian? its similar.
It is kinda similar to CIV in a sense, but real time with buildings taking time and online only.


Cerebrawl said:
Maybe Civ as envisioned by Zynga. It's more like those old kingdom war browser games, I don't remember any of their names, but the basic premise is you have limited energy, use it to find new land, build stuff, recruit soldiers, and raid other players for their resources/land.
Travian is a well known example i believe. It was the Clash of Clans before Clash of Clans. it was massive money factory for the company.

canadamus_prime said:
But isn't it the responsibility of the CEO to familiarize themselves with the product they are trying to sell?
words "Responsibility" and "CEO" does not go into the same sentence. Unless before the first one there are words like "lack of" or "no".
 

MorganL4

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May 1, 2008
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canadamus_prime said:
MorganL4 said:
canadamus_prime said:
I want to know how this happened. How is it that people who know nothing about video games ended up running video game companies?
We live in a world of professional CEOs. If you were a great CEO of a shampoo company, and were able to double sales of X shampoo then it makes perfect sense (In the current world that is Corporate America) that you would be just as good running a company that has traditionally made RPGs. The idea is this, because you market shampoo, people like the ads for the shampoo and like the social stature associated with said shampoo, they buy the shampoo and use it. Thus if you market the game well, people like the ads for the game, and like the social stature associate with the game then you have done your job. The fact that shampoo is a bunch of chemicals put into a bottle and shipped out, whereas a game is a piece of art created by a collective group and then copied over a million times for resale doesn't really enter into the equation.
But isn't it the responsibility of the CEO to familiarize themselves with the product they are trying to sell?
Logically? Yes. In practice? No. It is the responibility of a CEO to increase the stock price. Whatever has to be done to achieve that goal should be done, if a CEO doesn't think product familiarity is important then they won't bother.