• @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    314 months ago

    Yes, how generous of WB to allow it to be released slightly before binning the whole thing for a tax writeoff. How dare we not properly consume and obey!

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        34 months ago

        If anybody actually knew they probably wouldn’t be allowed to do it in the first place.

        Hollywood accounting, where everything is made up and the points don’t matter!

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          34 months ago

          So it’s just a meaningless phrase you included in your post? People keep saying that but I have yet to see a single explanation of how it’s actually good that something failed for the company that made it.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            54 months ago

            Sorry, I must have missed the “no fun allowed” sign, but I’ll bite. WB has now shitcanned 3 fully completed or nearly completed films. Then they claim the films are literally worse than worthless, and report all expenses incurred as loss, which lowers their tax burden. This is obviously a system designed to protect business when struggling, but it’s a pretty clear example of abuse. The film/media industry in particular has a long and storied history of manipulative, abusive accounting, and there is essentially an entire cottage industry of legal experts who specialize in the art of bending the laws and threading the loopholes for maximum exploitation. There are enough legal smoke and mirrors that film productions can and do fudge absolutely everything remotely financial, often drastically inflating or deflating officially stated costs.

            Another part of the problem is how damaging this kind of behavior is to the creators and production staff themselves. When a studio bins something like this everybody loses, except for the corpo leeches moving the beans around. Movie production can have a lot hanging on royalties. Imagine you do a job on a film for a token amount with a royalty component. Then a suit decides he can get a bigger bonus literally burning your movie instead, and suddenly you’re out all that time invested and never receive proper or fair compensation for your work. The accountants can say, “Oh, this movie needed effects work, we only paid them with a few pizzas and a promised 1% royalty, now let’s project ourselves some massive sales and extrapolate to claim 20 million spent on effects!” and suddenly it’s money for nothing (and the chicks for free?) when the taxman comes around and listens to the sob story of burdensome expenses. Again, this kind of shenaniganry has decades of experience weaseling out of nearly all significant oversight or regulation and the corruption is systemic.

            This also really sucks for everyone involved, even if they actually do get fully paid, because even a single movie can be several years of work that suddenly became a worthless, unverifieable void on a resume. Truth is, it’s easy to rant for hours about the shady stuff going on.

            Bringing it back around, the WB games arm hasn’t been very good for people either. They’ve been shoehorning in predatory microtransactions and forcing battlepass style games-as-a-service mechanics in numerous games lately. I realize the devs themselves have no control over these kinds of additions forced from above. However, the catch-22 is that success for these games would only reward and reinforce the MBAs interjecting buzzwords and pulling the strings. So either the devs lose, and their game gets tossed, or the players lose, since management smells blood in the water and doubles down on profiteering mechanics in the next game. Unfortunately, rather than apply critical thinking and conclude that these toxic elements relate to the game’s unpopularity, they took to the media playing the world’s tiniest violin, vaguely gesturing that the poor devs worked so hard to make good games but the consumers are bad for not supporting them.

            This also sucks, which feels bad. Therefore, I leveraged a sarcastic inference relating two morally dubious, greed-driven examples of poor behavior by a wealthy international megacorp trying to paint itself as a victim. Such attempts at humor are sometimes used to make bad feelings turn into slightly less bad feelings, lightening a mood or delivering some modicum of mirth. In some cultures, it might be called a “joke”.

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              14 months ago

              Sorry, I must have missed the “no fun allowed” sign

              Don’t get me wrong, I’m just curious how it works because I keep seeing it mentioned, and it’s just frustrating that nobody ever explains it!

              Then they claim the films are literally worse than worthless, and report all expenses incurred as loss, which lowers their tax burden.

              Yes I get that part, but I don’t get how they are better off with that? If a company has a profit of 10 million, then they burn 2 million on a manufactured loss, they only have to pay tax on 8 million of profit. Makes sense. Let’s say the imaginary tax here is 50%. They could have got 5 million after tax, but after this maneuver they only get 4 million after tax. So it doesn’t make sense. What am I missing?

              Your comment is spot on but doesn’t answer my question.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    214 months ago

    They should just fucking cool it with the superheroes. I know it was mostly Disney who milked the genre to death but at this point I have immediate fatigue when presented with yet another piece of comicbook media.

    Make something else, try again with superheroes in 5-10 years.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      234 months ago

      I think you are getting it wrong. They tried to sell this game to people who loved Batman Arkham series. And they were simply not interested in a live service, looter shooter, with a terrible story. They always loved a story-driven single player superhero game, which this is not.

      Number of people interested in, what is at most a mediocre looter shooter are minimal at best. So, of course, it failed.

      • @Voroxpete
        link
        English
        64 months ago

        Yeah, the target audience for this has been happily buying superhero games for a while.

        This is just a really bad superhero game.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      154 months ago

      The issue was not that Superheroes are milked. It’s the gameplay isn’t fun and no one wants GaaS.

      • Altima NEO
        link
        fedilink
        English
        1
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        Yeah, and actual good super hero games are free and far between. It’s not a market that’s been oversaturated yet, weirdly enough. You’d have thought there’d be a ton of avengers games, but we only got that one garbage one.

    • Ogmios
      link
      English
      134 months ago

      They can’t make anything else because the creative types who can actually come up with interesting and compelling new ideas don’t get along with the business types that aggressively invaded the video game industry the instant it started making lots of money.

    • @Ummdustry
      link
      English
      5
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      The thing is if you do that the other guy will just make a super-hero film in 4-9 years, collecting all the hard work you spent making the genre scarce again.

      People kept making westerns for as long as they just barely made any money, I’m sure the same will happen with ‘capeshit’

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      24 months ago

      I stopped giving a fuck at like avengers 2 or 3. That was like 10 years ago, but they keep making em.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      14 months ago

      I’m okay with superhero movies, they just gotta do two things:

      1. Stop making shitty movies.

      2. Put a little nuance into the story.

      It’d be pretty cool to see a Doctor Doom movie that focuses on threats against Latveria and acts more as a political intrigue. Victor is loved by his people, imagine seeing him in a good light.

      How about a Harley Quinn movie centered around her sociopathic tendencies, delusion, and abuse by the Joker? Throw in some cool fighty bits, but from her perspective, with some of the old intrigue between her and Nightwing or Batman.

      The problem is they keep going back to the same tricks. Then when they try to do something different it’s just garbage. Poor cgi, poor writing, bad taste.

      Run with one of the old man Batman timelines. Kill Superman. Show Spiderman as less a quirky kid or awkward young man and give us more of his brilliant scientific knowledge. Some of my favorite moments were Tony working on something, the montages in his garage and him figuring out something new.

      It’s there. Just gotta stop being dumbasses about it.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      124 months ago

      Everyone else thought it looked like shit at first sight, I don’t know what they were expecting.

      Maybe they should let developers make fun games instead of trying to land the next big cash-cow.