Embracer owns DRG, among other actually good games.
They went on a studio buying spree during covid, thinking investor money can only go up. Which obviously it didn't, and now they have more studios than they can fund.
But instead of doubling down on making good shit, the are doing this.
That makes even less sense. What do you mean by this sentence?
Embracer screwed up and let itself be absorbed into the Microsoft empire.
Embracer is still around, they didn't sell anything to MS. They shut down a bunch of studios to stay solvent, and sold others, but MS didn't buy any.
is like asking a snake why it attacks its prey. It's a fucking snake. That's what it does.
No it isn't. Microsoft makes money. Asking why they shuttered a successful studio is like asking the snake why the fuck it bit off the end of its own tail, and what the hell it thinks it's doing.
If they were shutting Tango down after they forced them to make a live-service clusterfuck that flopped badly, then you might have a point. But this is like if EA would have shut down Dice right after they made BF2, instead of funding BF3.
Embracer screwed up and let itself be absorbed into the Microsoft empire. They have their IP. They care about nothing else.
I feel like you're mixing up some companies, these sentences make no sense in the context of Embracer. Are you talking about Bethesda?
I fully agree. Spotify's payment model has been criticized for years, but they refuse to consider changing it.
AFAIK youtube music works in the way you suggest, where the money from your subscription gets divided up among whoever you listen to.
There are various methods.
Spotify does have a free tier.
But paid accounts can rack up so many plays they can pay for themselves. If you listened to ten tracks, but someone else listened to ten thousand, then your money barely paid for what you listened to, and almost all of it went towards whatever the other user listened to a bunch.
There has also been malware that hijacks legitimate accounts... There's even been recommendation algorithm fuckery to manipulate the relevant tracks into getting recommended/autoplayed for a bunch of users.
Spotify didn't lose a dime. Their cut is fixed.
What each play is worth is determined by how many plays there were in a month, and the income from subscribers that month.
If the "pot" is ten bucks, and people listen to a hundred songs, each artist gets ten cents for each play. If there were a thousand plays, each play is only worth one cent.
This guy didn't make money by taking it from spotify, he made it by taking it from everyone else. Spotify actually has no reason to care, and playfarming scams have been happening for years.
They only get stopped when they get big enough for the giant music labels to notice.
You and me might buy our music on bandcamp, but the vast, vast, vast majority of people still just pay for spotify and never give how it works a second thought.
A moderetely successful indie artist is still likely to make way more having their albums on streaming services, than they are selling them on bandcamp.
you can't really use technological complexity as an excuse to depend on fat middlemen.
Is that what I'm doing? At no point did I say streaming services could be fair and good if only this one issue was fixed. Merely that play farming works by skimming the money from real artists.
Now, I'd also like to ask "wtf", since you are kinda suggesting that it is the artist's that are at fault for not getting the money they need to live, by not using their own websites/bandcamp.
That makes no sense.
Vandeley wasn't always evil. Roxanne, Peppermint, Macaron, Korsica, all wanted the company to do good, and for a long while it did.
Vandeley only became "evil" because Kale mind-controlled Roxanne and made himself CEO.
I don't know how that's anti-corporate. A big part of the plot is that Vandeley grew so successful because it was a genuinely good company doing good things in the world, loved by all, before it became a dystopian world-conquering device at the hands of a villain.
Embracer at least had the excuse of fucking up their capital and shitting the bed in terms of having money on hand.
They were forced to shutter and sell things because they legitimately couldn't fund their operation.
It was still their fault, because they stupidly bought up developers thinking big investor money was coming, which then just didn't.
Microsoft has no such excuse. MS leadership has been asked multiple times why they did it, and they literally haven't said a single fucking word that makes sense.
The "royalty payers" are the streaming subscribers, and they pay the same amount regardless of how much they listen to.
The different streaming services have different payment models, but Spotify at least works by first taking their cut from subscribtion income each month.
Then, the rest is evenly distributed to the plays that month.
By inflating the playcount with bots, this guy gets a bigger share, at the expense of everyone elses plays becoming worth less.
None of the services have some infinite money glitch where more plays just means more money out of nowhere. How much you get for each play is not a fixed amount, It's always based on how much money actually came in from subscribers, so anyone using bots to tilt the scales, is stealing from everyone else.
TBF, this particular loophole doesn't take any money from the streaming services. Quite the opposite, it massively inflates their stats.
And while it does siphon money from the big labels, it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.
Yeah, this guy is in trouble because he stepped on some big toes, but he curb-stomped a bunch of little guys, too.
While there is some truth to this, they did let some studios buy themselves back, including their relevant IPs, like gearbox.
Embracer bought a bunch of studios during the covid gaming bubble expecting investors that then didn't show up. The idiots did intend to do something with all these IPs and studios, but then found themselves without money on hand to actually fund anything.
Now the studios and ips getting sat on are paying the price for that fuck-up.