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[Cthulhu]

Actually. Fuck this. I'm not even done. I'm pissed the fuck off. Every single day these shitstain devs find more ways to ruin my hobby.

Why in the bloody fuck is everybody celebrating giving charity to this guy's family to begin with?

Let me point out several things.

1. He was the executive producer at one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. Under no circumstances was he not well off.
2. WB has excellent healthcare benefits.

What the fuck? Why does he need donations?! All the medical bills would have been covered! He would have life insurance! Executive producer!!!!!!!

Are we going to donate to Kanye West when he dies?

Give the money to actual cancer research or something. Hell, give it to Toady One. He helped the world so much more than this executive producer of microtransactions has ever done.

WB should give all of its money to the poorest person it can find.  So should you, actually.  And everyone else.  Fuck that dead guy, cause he had money, or something?  Fuck him.

I dunno, maybe I'm some kind of scumbag or a devil, but I find the outrage at this whole thing completely unrelateable.

[Chiefwaffles]

Everyone knows that once you make over $100,000, you become physically unable to have any kind of problems with money.

 

Give the money to actual cancer research or something. Hell, give it to Toady One. He helped the world so much more than this executive producer of microtransactions has ever done.

I...
Oh my god.
I must have not realized that being associated with microtransactions in any way fundamentally decreases someone's worth as a human being.

[ZebioLizard2]

Wow this thread ended up becoming so horrifically toxic.

[Dunamisdeos]

Is it really hard for you to discern the difference between "give all your money to the poor" and "actively misleading folks to profit off of their death"?

[Smitehappy]

How I imagine it went:

Dev Team Member 1: We're all very upset that our friend and co-worker died. He deserves to be remembered by our team and as someone who contributed to this game we spent so much time together making.
Dev Team Member 2: I know, let's put him in the game so he'll always be part of this project!
Dev Team Member 1: Great idea! Let's go get approval from our manager so we can commit some assets and get this done!

*Later*

Dev Team Member 1: So that's our idea, we want to put him in the game.
Manager: I like it! But we have our dev cycle packed pretty tightly as is, especially this close to launch. To be able to assign resources to this, I'm going to have to justify the cost to upper management because it will effect their team utilization and they're pretty touchy about that this late in development. They are after all a business, and any addition to the game's code-base right now has to go through QA assets. Our QA team is already being pushed hard making sure the game's launch isn't a buggy mess, which would be a launch disaster, especially with our increased PC sales.

*Later still*
Manager: Great news team, I managed to convince upper management to allow us to do this as long as we compensate the team development hours by making it a small DLC. Since it's a relatively small line item and they can book it under as a charitable donations for tax breaks, they offered to commit over half of the sales to his family as a show of condolences for the first two years of the game's life! Since the majority of sales in a game are in the first 2 years, this should be a good chunk of the DLC's purchases! Only in America though, since it'd be prohibitively expensive to set up the legal framework for overseas donations and the budget can't justify it. Still, it's nice to know we managed to memorialize our friend and colleague. Surely everyone would appreciate a company with no legal or moral imperative to do this helping us achieve this, and they definitely won't ruin this with a weird cynical idealism where a family suffering a tragedy is bad for receiving a momentary condolence despite not being a poor, 3rd world cancer survivors.

[umiman]

"prohibitively expensive"

Huh, somehow a tiny indie studio can donate 100% of the proceeds of their charity DLC from all across the world. Wow, how weird.

"can't justify it"

Another completely different indie company did it again? Three times in fact?

"over half the sales"

I mean, it has to be completely impossible not to take a small cut right? I mean, no one minds if we dip into the funds a little if it's the name of charity right?

"no legal or moral imperative"

Guess that's what happens when a company isn't more interested in taking a loss on the charitable donations and instead using the figure as a tax write off. Man, I'm sure they really couldn't find a way not to take 30% of the cut as well as all the money from any sale not done in 44 states of the US. Too difficult. Gotta keep the money instead.

------

Over the last decade Warner Brothers has done nothing to deserve your justifications or sympathy. They repeatedly go out of their way to screw you over as many times as they can. Why do you want to defend their practice? Just because they associate "charity" onto it? Even though it's clear as day that they're misleading you with that term to try and win back some of that goodwill that they've lost? I haven't even touched on how they're the foremost architects of preordering, DLC, and season passes. A disease we now consider routine today.

If it were any other company, you could make the argument that they were just dumb and it was a horrible misunderstanding. But this is Warner Brothers.

Let me remind you this is the company that refused to fix the unholy broken mess of Arkham because it admitted it was too busy working on the DLC.

This is the company that forced Youtube to introduce mandatory disclosure after it was revealed they paid a bunch of people to review Shadow of Mordor positively and told them not to disclose that they were. Then at the same time using DMCA claims to shut down anyone who wasn't paid off.

But of course, if you still feel that this deserves your cash. That you want to support this gigantic mess of DLC. That you believe the gaming world is better off when charitable DLC just so happens to also pad the pocketbooks of the company while giving them a nice tax writeoff. Then I cannot stop you. After all, many of these so-called charities also exist in the real world, more interested in profit than actually helping anyone. They profit off of your guilt and compassion and use the term "charity" like it's some kind of invincible shield.

Or you could cherry pick my thoughts, decry me as being incompassionate (this is true though), and completely miss the point of everything. Whatever makes you happy. Let me also point out that I'm doing my best not to directly insult any of you guys. All my vitriol is pointed solely at these scumbags who continue to destroy what I love and manipulate the populace into actually supporting these absurd acts.

-----------

You don't have to take my ramblings on the matter either.

Here's Totalbiscuit's thoughts: https://youtu.be/cVM5g4MFnzs

Sidalpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsyHwpyVPDQ

[Aklyon]

I remember that shadow of mordor shenanigans. They were acting like they wanted to make sure no one knew their game was bad, except their game was not actually bad and the whole thing just ended up looking suspicious as heck over nothing.

[Smitehappy]

Big Text Box

I'm not sure this conversation is going to go anywhere. You're clearly more invested/angry about this than I'm capable of reciprocating so I'll just end with my major points for anyone reading this and they can decide if they agree or not:

• Smallers developers/publishers creating 100% charity DLC is nice. This DLC not going 100% to charity/the family because the decisions are made by a massive publisher with multiple factions/people in charge (who's ultimate goal as a company is to make money) is less nice, but still nice. The fact that something could be MORE nice doesn't mean the nice they did is now not nice.
• A group of peopling getting to put their friend/co-worker in a game as a memorial and pass some money to the deceased's family is also nice. Even if the family isn't poor.
• Just because a large publisher, which is controlled by multiple people/factions and not a monolithic single conscious bent on being evil for profits, has done stupid/bad stuff in the past doesn't negate the fact this is nice

So yeah, it's a group of people looking to remember a friend and the business realities that come with getting it done in a large game development environment. I think it's cool a member of the team who died during development is memorialized in the game. I'm neither outraged nor moved to tears and I disagree with people sensationalizing this.

[nenjin]

There's nothing to sensationalize. The facts are exactly as they stand. One of the nastiest publishers out there is making money hand over fist off a dead man's back, on a game they've already fucked with to make money hand over fist.

It's like at WB someone went "Man the internet is really pissed about MTX. Not sure we can do anything more to rile them up."

Another VP went: "Hold my beer."

This is what happens when major publishers think they have a mega hit on their hands: they look at the current model of what's acceptable and start wrenching on it to see what they can spend some of that hype on to make more money.

[Teneb]

Remember friends, corporations don't donate. They invest.

[Chiefwaffles]

Right. It'd be naive to think that companies as a whole do things like this purely put of goodness in their hearts.

But that doesn't matter.
Their self-interest benefits others, and I personally don't have any meaningless purity test for how exactly others are benefited.

[lordcooper]

If only they could mandate one death per project.

[Zangi]

If only they could mandate one death per project.

'Hire' someone with incurable disease.  Make sure they'll expire before release.

[Chiefwaffles]

"Warner Bros. insists it won't profit from the Shadow of War Forthog Orc-Slayer DLC"
Seems to be this quote, specifically:

"Neither Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment nor Monolith Productions will profit from any sales of the Forthog Orc-Slayer DLC regardless of the territory in which that DLC is sold."

Just relevant. I have no idea why they'd state that the money would only go to the family in most of America earlier if this is the case, but this does seem to be a pretty definitive statement. Make of it what you will.

[Egan_BW]

Uh, then where does the money go? Directly to valve's hoard?