Comment on Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days agoNone of that changes or even addresses what I said in the comment you are replying to.
Yes, a corpo flex often involves throwing a ton of money and manpower at something…
Yes, Skyblivion development will probably continue… doesn’t change the fact that Bethesda just did a giant corpo flex on them.
The… whole … point of a corpo flex … is to showcase that you have a disproportionate amount of legal and monetary power, and you can use that to humiliate upstarts.
Have… you never worked in a large corp? Or… studied how they make business decisions?
Have you ever worked in software development?
doctorfail@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’ve done all three: worked in corps, am a dev, and have done some games dev early career.
When you dev something, it’s a miracle anything works. All modern software is a giant Jenga pile. When a large project rolls out the door, the feeling is never “oh wow let’s flex on these peasants”, it’s more like “my shit sucks oh god when will it break but try it out and see what you think”.
If I was on the Bethesda team, I would actually be very interested in trying to get feedback from the only other group of devs that remotely know what it’s like to do something similar. What approaches did they take? What’s similar? What’s different? Did the choices that other team make lead to a better product? How much more elegant is their code?
The only people who ruin goodwill like that are overzealous IP lawyers.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
… And why didn’t Bethesda do this with the Skyblivion team?
Why didn’t they offer to at least pay them temporarily as contracted consultants?
Because management is full of themselves and maniacally, socio/psychopathically profit driven.
You can’t say they weren’t aware of the Skyblivion project, they literally coordinated a publicized action with them as part of their release schedule.
…
Game dev in particular, and even software dev generally, in America, at least… is absolutely chalk full of situations where one person or team or whatever’s work is either stolen, or fought over, or someone claims credit for a whole bunch of stuff they didn’t actually contribute nearly anything to, or make a whole big show of some streamlining effort that actually just cripples or eliminates the proverbial one dinky jenga block from the xkcd comic, and then all the blame for a whole bunch of other idiots’ plans, who never even consulted with the jenga block maintainer, well that guy or gal gets utterly blamed for all of it.
As well as of course all the NDAs and IP type bullshit where nothing even resembling what you did as a contractor or for another company can be used elsewhere, and become massively succesful, without a massive legal and financial threat.
… The actual devs, yes, did their work most likely without ‘lol lets fuck over these upstarts’ in mind.
That was in the mind of upper management and c suite though, guaranteed.
They don’t talk about that infront of the servants, I mean employees, I mean, who cares really, we’ll drive them nuts with crunch OT and then lay them off anyway, gaslighting them for the entire development cycle that that won’t happen.
…
Your instinct as a senior dev to reach out comes from a reasonable and good place.
But upper management and c suite is concerned with maximizing profit and business strategy, and in game dev, these folks have a long, stories history of routinely being as ruthless, cutthroat, duplicitous as possible.
It is warfare to them.
…
And I am not just pulling my credential check out of my ass here as some kind of gotcha style rhetoric, I also have worked in game dev, in software dev, in db admin and data analyst roles, for large corporations.
Though I do truly appreciate that you actually have the relevant credentials, and are talking from your own actually relevant experience, so I want to thank you for that, for actually having the conversation.
My experience has been almost entirely upper managers and VPs and the Board consistently doing the exact opposite of what actual developers suggest, request, or warn about, and then just slyly or sometimes quite brashly blame everyone else for causing the fuckups they were warned their plans would cause.
They think they are Gods and everyone else is a contemptible, digusting, unfortunately unavoidable part of doing business… and if a truly royal fuckup happens, they’ll turn on the people that built the corporate ladder they climbed without even a blink.