In all forms of entertainment, the aspect of selling commercial art is generally considered a part of the entertainment business. This business as people understand it, has been closing studios, merging properties, removing dedicated servers and providing trouble for people for a very long time now. Yet people fail to really understand how abstract the business and all forms of business really are.

See, when a company is a publicly traded commodity, its possession is broken into equal sized fragments often referred to as shares. An abstract reference to a collective of shares is commonly known as stock. As a company gains or loses money in its ventures, the confidence of said company wanes and waxes in the view of the public. This confidence filters into ‘perceived’ value of shares, which then quickly becomes the actual value of said stock. This is the lifeblood of sustaining companies. The quick transference from economic confidence to perceived value to actual value is not actually guided by any form of real logic or economic reasoning. It has been proven scientifically that the flakey, nonsensical and overreacting behavior of the stock market has connecting with such things as mass hysteria and herd mentality (with a little pheromones throne into the mix).

The economic confidence of a company, as mentioned above, is governed by earnings. Every year, executives and the CEO make an economic forecast for the coming year. This forecast predicts how much money the company expects to make by the end of the fiscal year. Such predictions are considered reasonable and in line with the earnings of previous years. However, if less than the predicted amount of money is made during the year, then it is considered a ‘loss’ by the executives, CEO, and shareholders (ie STUPID). They then cut down the production end by canceling projects, laying off workers and closing studios to reduce the money sink and increase gain.

This is seemingly counter to the fact that said ‘loss’ is not a loss at all, as such money did not exist before the prediction was made. For example, If a company predicted 100 million dollar gain and only made 95 million, then it is considered to have lost 5 million and the company has to let things and people go to make up for it.

Such as the case of the industry. But the illogic goes even farther than that. See, an entertainment company is broken into two parts, the creative section which makes the games, and the management section which contains all the producers, managers, executives and Chairmen. This latter section of a company takes most of the revenue produced by the larger corporation when they actually contribute nothing to the bottom line. They are by classical definition, parasitic, as they drain energy and power from the host while returning little to no benefit.


This economic parasite is everywhere, controlling and trampling the creative department under their ‘leadship’, buzzwords and execu-speak. It is the reason why Free Radical is dead and Westwood was let go. The people in this management ‘culture’ run the industry and our artistic culture. Virtually no executive has any experience with the industry they are knee deep in. They are interchangeable upper management. They are ‘leaders’, raised by the MBA executive ‘culture’ to go out and make money in any field, despite the fact that they have experience or working knowledge of the industry they are in. They’re trolling for profit as quickly as possible, no matter the consequences (short term gain versus long term loss). They are the reason while almost all games are homogenous products. They jump on a trend that sells and jump to the next one as soon as it comes along. They are the reason why big chain bookstores have a wall dedicated to James Patterson, yet shrink the Science Fiction department by 100 books a year. They trade in nonexistent commodities (forecasts) as if they were real, which led to such things as prospects and sub prime mortgages. And we all know too well how that turned out.

And nobody manages to see the unsustainable lunacy that North American economics have created. Nobody listens and almost nobody fights back (I haven’t bought an Activision game since 2003, Doom 3 doesn’t count as it was it just published by them). But people keep buying games and feeding the leeches and nothing ever changes because people sustain what is simply an illogical, unsustainable, stupid and frankly evil system.

You bought modern warfare 2 and that’s how Bobby Kotick, the scum of the industry and indicative of everything wrong with modern commerce, made 35 million in one week period. Congratulations!