“Greed is not the issue here” - actual dragon sitting on literal pile of gold.
Billionaires are greedier than dragons. The richest greediest dragon in all of fiction is Smaug, and he has an obscene amount of wealth. I’ve seen estimates of his wealth ranging from 5 billion dollars of gold on the low end, all the way up to 15-20 billion dollars of gold on the high end.
However, Smaug is an incredible outlier. He’s basically the Musk of Dragons. The absolute most gold you’ll find on a dragon in any video game or ttrpg is 5 million gold pieces. That’s only if RNGesus smiles on you, and rolls as high as it could. The average is more like 3.5 million gold pieces of wealth.
1 gold piece = ⅒oz of gold. So we are looking at 350,000 - 500,000 oz of gold for the upper 50% of all red elder worms. Any other dragon type doesn’t hoard that much.
That comes out to a real world value of between $800,000,000 to $1,200,000,000. That’s for the richest dragons out there.
Most dragons aren’t billionaires.
Therefore, billionaires are literally greedier than the anthropomorphic caricaturization of greed from legend, namely dragons. The greediest fictional thing we could come up with isn’t greedy enough to accurately portray these people’s mental illnesses.
Shadowrun probably throws these assumptions off a bit. Dunkelzahn’s net worth is hard to pin down but I think the listed cash dispursements in his will exceeded 1 billion nuyen, plus all the real estate and the establishment of several foundations, several items of extreme power and a number of ‘wishes’.
Lofwyr owns a AAA megacorp that he assembled out of purchases made within about 30 years of waking up. My personal he’d cannon is that he ate Musk at some point in this process.
Even the less well known ones have serious stock portfolios and including multiple point shares in megacorps. Dragons took to business rather well as soon as they worked out what share certificates were.
Fair enough. Never played Shadowrun, and didn’t know there were dragons in that system.
I would be curious what year it is set in, and how inflation may affect their currency value vs current real world currency values.
2050s for 1st edition, I think current edition is 2070s. Dragons started waking up in the early 2010s though. There has also been significant geopolitical upheaval, especially in the Americas and Europe. The general assumption is that a nuyen being about 1 modern dollar is about the right ballpark.
Wow! Thanks for the perspective!
It’s probably worth highlighting that, despite the clickbait headline, this guy has not been affiliated with Sony or Playstation for almost twenty years, and these days he’s mostly an investor on multiple middleware and outsourcing videogame-adjacent companies.
Also, to his credit, what he’s actually saying is that he’s optimistic that people and the industry will rebound fairly quickly and may need to bridge themselves over to the next gig somehow. The other thing he apparently proposes is “go lay on a beach somewhere”. But he’s not saying that you should go be an Uber driver if you lost your games industry job, he’s saying it’s likely that your games industry skillset will remain valuable and you’ll find something else soon-ish.
I hate that media keeps making me do this and defend people I disagree with. I think there’s an interesting debate here about whether the gig-fire-hire-repeat flow of the games industry is good or sustainable, and about what alternatives there are. But if you go and clickbait this hard I’m kinda forced to point that out first and now we’re all arguing about what was said and not about the underlying issue.
Thank you for pointing that out. I don’t think his opinion a wrong on a fundamental level, but I agree that his choice of words makes him seem more depreciative than his intent is.
Let them eat cake
Lemmy in a nutshell. In like one post. Print it out, hang it on the wall, you never need to log in again.
Christ what a soulless anti human, and these people infest and run AAA companies. Would explain the rot behind those companies for the last 2 decades.
It’s people like this asshat the reason why I rarely play an AAA game anymore and the few I play are always the pirated version.
You’d be misplacing that anger. He hasn’t been part of a AAA studio or publisher in decades, and as far as I can tell his last venture involved investing in and shutting down some edutainment dev in Malta.
I guess “money guy for a bunch of middleware companies” didn’t get nearly as many clicks as “exSONY BOSS PLAYSTATION MAN”.
Even if he isn’t part of the gaming industry, we can’t pretend he’s the only one thinking like this (hence my comment “people like this asshat”). This kind of assholery is the reason the AAA industry is like this.
People like him, not him specifically.
It’s crazy how the 1980s mafia bust-out strategy for squeezing a business dry used to be the thing a district attorney would level RICO charges against.
Now its the preferred strategy of hedge funds run by the children of those district attorneys.
drive an Uber or whatever, go off to find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.
Shockingly tone-deaf.
When I was laid off, my savings were running very low after about 3 months until I was able to get another job.
Absolutely no way I would be able to take a year off to go to the beach. It’s like he doesn’t realize we all aren’t CEOs.
cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.
Cheap place… Lol
Close to the beach!? LMFAO
This ghoul isn’t even from our reality and they’re trying to tell us to chill out. Stick to your own dimension where housing is affordable, especially with any proximity to a beach…
What? Don’t you all have a beach house and million in the bank?
What a piece of shit.
Corporate greed is a reason. But it’s not the only one. The other reason is they’re not making games people want to play. Look at Dustborn and Concord.
Death of hosts not the result of excessive bloodsucking, says literal parasite.
No self awareness whatsoever
Sony’s EX president is the one who should be driving ubers.
When was the last time he was even in charge of anything? Who cares what his opinion is? He should fuck all the way off.
This is the opening to John Scalzi’s Starter Villain. Great book for anyone interested in a humorous look at late stage capitalist supervillains.
People are going to start taking out the guillotines…
Oh thank goodness…
