I highly doubt this is going to convince anyone. Blizzard's been relying on the good will of its whales for years now, it's hard to imagine anyone else with serious enough Stockholm Syndrome to buy into D4 at this point.

I suppose it would be silly to point out that for that price, you could buy the actual game 3 or 4 times over...

@mattwoahyeah: Why refute when you can ad hom?

Shinra isn't really analogous to real-world corporations at all. Shinra is a de facto government entity with its own military force, and it exists in a world where every village is effectively an independent entity. They can get away with everything they're doing because there is no government to regulate them. In real world capitalism, no company would EVER be able to wield the kind of power Shinra does. In western democracies, there are government regulations to prevent the worst and most destructive business practices from taking root. In oligarchies or unregulated capitalist states, there's still a government that will step in to prevent a company or its executives from getting too powerful.

The mechanics of Battlefront 2 hold up perfectly, I don't know what you're on about.

@esqueejy: History shows that unions work when the people forming unions have training and skills that makes them difficult to replace. That's what gives them the power to bargain collectively. If they don't have those, they can and will be replaced by anyone a company can find off the street, because companies hate unions. Or the company will start outsourcing its labor to foreign markets, which is especially prominent in tech. Sorry to break it to you, but unions are not a catch-all solution to labor problems.

@esqueejy: That's a reasonable way of looking at it. Even if a business practice is widely hated, all it takes is a sizeable amount of people who buy it anyway for it to become normalized. But then, it works the other way too. Failure to innovate and over-reliance on such a practice can lead to audience abandonment, which is probably what we're seeing now.

@esqueejy: That might work if there weren't thousands of aspiring programmers willing to take their place at a moment's notice. Unions are all about bargaining power, and you can't force corporations to the table when you have no leverage.

It's not hard to understand. Bloated budgets, planning that isn't as tightly controlled as it ought to be, focus on short-term profits at the cost of long-term stability, this is what drives the visual media industries these days. You can't maintain that business model indefinitely, eventually you hit a limit to what you can do financially and then you have to start scaling back. We're seeing it with major Hollywood studios, it's no surprise that AAA isn't far behind.

I doubt it'll come out as long as they can still milk GTA Online.