georgeecollins

I am so glad someone said this! I get really mad when a PR person writes the word content in the press release for my company. We don't create content.

To me "content" means you don't know what you are making or you are very embarrassed about it. We make art or entertainment that people pay for.

In general there are two axis I think about in media. One axis is originality, the other axis is durability. Very unoriginal is a transcription of information everyone already knows. Investigative reporting that reveals new information is very original. A creative story is original.

Durability is how long the thing will have some value. They can put the Wizard of Oz in Sphere today. A Tik Tok video will probably be forgotten in a day or two. You could call that "quality" but that's harder to define and measure.

Value is created in being as original and durable as possible. Platforms want you to be the opposite-- that's the slop they call content.

The most expensive appliances (particularly stoves) are the ones with no LCD screens. "Smart" TVs are often cheaper then dumb ones. People have learned that software does not always make things better. Anything that has code in it I assume will last for about three years. In practice that's a little less then the average but a safe assumption.

Thanks, I subscribe.

I am not saying drones are everything. My point is, where is the war in which steel is critical ?

They found a use for them but no reason to build anymore.

If machine guns were useful against drones Russia would be winning in Ukraine.

Check out Russia's Black Sea fleet to learn the fate of your navy sitting by your shores.

Let's imagine a hypothetical symmetrical war between two modern countries. One can disable the other's satellites and maintain their own fleet. The other can't get access to any third parties' satellites.

You aren't going to send your steel navy out when one side can see you from space and you can't, almost regardless of the numbers. Your big army of steel tanks is useless against a bunch of drones directed by distribute satellites.

Really? There is a large war going on right now and the key material is chips. Drone don't use a lot of steel, neither do missiles or modern airplanes.

Yes you need artillery and particularly shells. But you are so much more limited by the capacity of your munition factories that how much steel you have would not be an issue. One of the main things you would need for a new munitions factory is trained workers.

The World Wars were wars of mass mobilization and industrial capacity. People went into the first thinking cavalry was important, the second thinking battleships still mattered. My point is I have no idea what the next great war might be like, but thinking the winner will be who chugs out the most tanks in five years may be looking in the rear view mirror.

In the US that's farming. The "family farm" which is rare ends up being the justification for tons of agribusiness subsidies.

The good news is the USA produces lots of food.

Ford has them. What it has meant for Ford-- and will probably mean for Facebook-- is that Zuck's heirs will control the company, for better or for worse.

The common justification for this is that for a media company (NYT) you want a person or family to take responsibility for the editorial content, not a pure profit seeker. Facebook has it both ways and typically denies it has editorial control.

IMO, the flaw of markets is that they are short sighted. Sometimes this allows states to outmaneuver them with a longer view. Current exhibit A: China. Historically state intervention has been worse in the long run. But who knows. If we went into a depression a lot of people may think state intervention is a better system, as many admired the USSR during the Great Depression.

100% this is great advice!

I feel the opposite way. My time gets more expensive and games are-- adjusted for inflation-- the same price. I know most people don't feel this way.

Lots of PC games have a $100- $200 tier where you get merch or all the DLC. That's probably aimed at people like me. The point is, if your business is games you make games for the people who will buy them. No game is more fun than a compiler, even the free ones.

Sorry I did not reply with an example earlier, but InvaildorTaken just provide a perfect one. I was talking to some of the creators of this game last week. They are the people who made some of the biggest hits at Blizzard. They are super proud of that game and IMO it's really good. You can nitpick it, but you can nitpick hit games too.

Did not sell enough to justify the cost.

Really? I did great just alternating between "grind" and "lay low". Retired with $4.8m at 25!

> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells,

That is exactly how I perceived the game industry to be before I worked in it. Now I know that there are many objectively excellent or even innovative or influential games that do not sell, or also do not sell well enough to support their development costs.

The framing of "a professional game developer.. job is to ship a product" is very indie. Places like ID, Bethesda, Volition (RIP) etc.: like a hundred people worked on the product and many did not own shipping the product. When you have tech team of 10 - 30 people whether you should make your own engine was more of a question. Lots of very popular games are made on their own tech.

Also, like what do you mean by engine? Minecraft was made with LWJGL.

> The best moment to unionize wad 20 years ago.

Sadly true in the USA. The number of people working in games is dropping like a rock. Maybe in Europe.

Not the OP, but Scott Miller said "most if not all" coders at ID were laid off. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/xbox-layoffs-july-2026

I hope the industry will be in a better place in a few years. There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture.

Free rein is bad management by definition. You don’t need a manager to have free rein.

I’d be curious what you think the changes in dev culture are. I have worked for or with a lot of these studios and to me they have different cultures. But I could be missing the forest for the trees. MSFT has one culture that imo lacks a creative vision.

The thing to understand here is the risk premium. Tesco is less risky on many levels. It also does not live inside a tech company that has really high gross margins.

Nothing against aluminum foil here, but we make lasagna at home all the time in a square ceramic baking dish.

Sure, 3% is terrible. But the point is you spent a fortune buying all these studios-- aka key strategic intellectual properties-- and then you manage them badly. Then you just sell or shut them down at their absolute bottom and you end up just destroying value.

Older forms of media understand this. WB loses money and its still really valuable because people see the potential of Batman, Harry Potter etc.

IP studios are really valuable because they can drive attention to your platforms. Try starting a premium streaming service or a console without IP. But you can't manage it like tech. It's not going to grow all the time and returns are uncertain.

MSFT could be in the XBox as a platform business. They could have a few in house studios to prime the platform pump. Once it started being a content business they got lost.

Exactly! And while a well off person may have a memory of a time in their life when they were not doing well (like in school, starting their career etc.) that can be misleading. You tend to end up like your parents more then was true three or four generations ago for many reasons: tax policy, less physical mobility, people tending more to marry with similar levels of education or income.

People debate how much social mobility there is in the US, but it seems pretty clear that the trend has been toward less mobility. The founding fathers of the US did not want to replace one aristocracy with another. Obviously there are some who think the change makes sense-- not me.

I have an old Osborne 1 that worked the last time I plugged it in-- years ago. I would be shocked if the 5 1/4" discs are still readable. If they aren't, or I wanted to add some new software (like a better compiler) is there a place where I can find CPM boot disks etc? It would really be fun to write some C or Pascal or even (less fun) BASIC.

Sorry if this sounds crazy.

Just came here to mention that "Eccentric Orbits" the book about the creation of the Iridium system is an amazing book. It's a business heavy book so probably more interesting to people trying to start business or do deals, as opposed to space fans.

It is a problem because people will talk about what AI can do implying that an LLM can do that thing, making it seem like a pure LLM can do almost anything. On the other hand people will say AI will never be able to do X because an LLM can’t do that thing well natively. AI has become too vague of a term to be useful.

That you have bought several houses in the USA makes your experience represent 0.01% of homeowners. Most people in the USA only buy one.

Quake III Arena was super fun!

I think the point is that Quake (1) came out within months of Activision launching Mech Warrior 2, Blizzard doing Warcraft, and even a couple years before Valve did Half Life. And Quake / Doom were so much bigger.

They had terrific success but if you were handicapping US video game companies in 1995 it would be like EA, iD (and maybe Sierra Online!). Point is they were way ahead at that point.

I think it is a positive for an employer to ask for an SAT because it tells me right away I don't want to work for them. Once (a long time ago) I tried to upload my resume to apply for a job. The web page started asking me very basic questions, like a basic aptitude test. I was out. Tell me you do not know how to find and evaluate talent!

Tell me you have never bought a house in the US without telling me you have never bought a house in the US.

I think by making a comparison between today 1900 I wasn't expecting to get on the slot car track of all the bad economic policy of the last couple generations. I agree with you completely about the rent seeking, the protection of the wealth of old people at the expense of future generations, the gatekeeping of expensive accreditation. Amen to all that.