That’s a legal statement. I’m referring to the ethical side of things. Legality is simply the set of rules by which we’re currently obliged to play. Lots of things are legal that are fundamentally unethical. Corporate personhood is a lulu.
Which is an indication of how unethical the laws surrounding public corporations are.
Corporations don’t exist to make the world a better place, they exist to make the shareholders a better life. It’s somewhat naïve to think they can exist for extended periods of time purely for the betterment of society, if they claim to be, then they are usually charities or gov’t subsidized. Even Elon Musk will turn into Ebenezer Scrooge if he is in business long enough.
A publicly traded corporation can still be innovative. I think the key is really the personality driving the corporation. The shareholders may have a great amount of influence and exert a lot of pressure for the company to make profits, but it is really down to the people running the company as to whether the profit margin becomes the sole focus. Elon Musk is a prime example of someone who tries to keep innovating and I really respect the things he’s trying to accomplish.
Unfortunately, you’re right, a lot of companies do succumb to the cycle of providing ROI. The top level puts pressure on the lower levels to find ways to increase their profits. Like a king in his castle, they command and expect it to be accomplished. They don’t always provide direction on how to do it. Anyone who fails can just be replaced, and if the bottom levels end up doing something less than respectable, they can claim ignorance…something they can’t do if they themselves provide innovative and meaningful direction from the top. They have a scapegoat that they can promptly fire to show the shareholders that they’re doing their job.
Providing innovative direction to a company ends up being a personal risk. If it fails, your reputation is sunk. Not many CEO’s or even upper level management of any sizable company are willing to take that risk with their careers. It ends up falling to small and/or startup companies to take on innovation. If they fail, they have less to lose and therefore less risk. Many of the larger companies now just scout out these innovative groups and buy them out for their IP if they look promising.
When the upper management puts this buffer between themselves and the riskier side of management, they effectively alienate themselves from their customers. As long as they company remains profitable and keeps their share-holders happy, they have no reason to listen to their customers because their money obviously speaks louder than their words. When it does finally start to affect their bottom line, then you get to see the public relations campaign swing into motion. Without some level of personal risk by the upper management though, it’s really just a hollow gesture aimed at soothing the masses and stabilizing their profits. Once that happens, they’ll stop talking about listening to their customers and start expecting management to find way to increase their profit margin again.
Our lawmakers are usually elected on the premise that they will do things to make their voters lives better in some way. One of those ways tends to be bringing in jobs so that they can have well paid, working citizens, who along with the corporations, pay their taxes. Corporations will, in turn, try and convince these lawmakers to create laws beneficial to their business.
Now, aside from the obvious unethical parts that show up when, say, a lawmaker is taking kickbacks, there are the cumulative unethical effects. A lawmaker could truly mean well, and believe that some of these laws are helping their citizens. but if they end up stifling competition and favor certain businesses over others, they’ll end up destroying the economy as a whole. Many lawmakers don’t always take into account the economy as a whole when they make these decisions. They’re influenced by lobbyists who make compelling (and often short-sighted) arguments as to their benefits. If they don’t receive or research the other side of the story, then they won’t understand the consequences.
Corporations are capable of making the world a better place if they put their efforts towards such things. We just have too many examples of them not trying to believe in such altruism.
I sure hope not, Elon-i-wan Musk-obi is quite possibly my only hope 
What’s naive is thinking that making corporations responsible to shareholders was going to end in anything other than shareholders demanding that the corporations crank out the money. The essential relationship between shareholder and corporation is financial, which is why the relationship is unhealthy.
The laws could be changed to make the shareholders a part of the company beyond simple finance. If the corporation breaks a law, then the shareholders are liable as well. If the corporation gets a community award, the shareholders get a mention as well. And so on. Get married to the corporation for everything that the corporation is and does, and you start to see responsibility.
As for your point, yes, there are many people who are more enthused about bettering society than they are competent at producing any sort of change. If a company’s goal is to better society and it goes out of business, then it isn’t going to elicit much change…
There are piles of family-run companies out there that do a great job of bettering society by providing a service to the community, as well as jobs. They do that without a myopic focus on increasing shareholder value. They just want to serve good food, or build better mattresses or dig straighter ditches. That’s ethical.
This being the difference between corporations and other forms of business.
I doubt it. Or rather, I think he reached that point a while back. These days he’s just spending a portion of his disposable income on making stuff he thinks might be fun to have (and it should be noted that the slowest investment he’s had seems to be $100 million into SpaceX which took a full 6 years to return a $1.6 billion contract).
I mean, the purpose of having money is to make more money, isn’t it?
Or they just want to make a living…
Without NASA (gov’t subsidized) there would be no SpaceX.
If PC gamers had long memories they should have stop playing on Microsoft OS. But monopolies force you to do so. Of course Sony has made errors too in the past, but if you still can use a Windows OS, you can excuse Sony’s past and recognize what is the current truth about them : their marketing approach and console and service proposal is the good one. Thanks to Sony, for free, I discovered last year at least ten more or less indie games that I’d have never played if they hadn’t been placed in front of the scene by Sony. Games like FEZ, or Xcom, etc… and also AAA games like TombRaider, or Batman, etc…
The service of Playstation Now, the PS TV, the PS Plus, etc are, combined, a very strong offer to games consumers like us.
Concerning the second discussion which has began on this topic, about worries on INS gameplay and I:BS, I must say that I can’t wait for the kickstarter to come because of that huge worry about gameplay INS will deliver to players. Of course the graphics and physics are amazing, that’s why I’m here. But since I discovered that The Quest For Earth was not on pipe, my enthusiasm decreased a lot…
The Inovae KickStarter must convince people that under the amzing graphics and the planet landing, there is gameplay to exploit this…
but when you say to people : we made one of the greatest galaxy engine ever, but you’ll not travel into it, you’ll be restricted to a planet, where you can land, if you’re not dead before, but when landed, there’s nothing to do, you can’t go out of the ship, so you will have difficulties to explore the planet… I find it really frustrating. The biggest possibilities ever, reduced to space combats on 0.00001% of the map… (ok maybe a lot of these things are suppositions, that’s what I understood)
I know INS Kickstarter will surprise me, I hope so, but I can’t stop to think that there is a problem… sorry if I’m unfair or too hard, but I follow INovae since 2009-2010 and I hope this studio to be the best indie one ever seen.
Indeed, there has been only one actual gameplay feature revealed at E3, which is that discovering new planets and animals will give you credits. Such a gameplay feature was the entire focus in Beyond Good & Evil, where the player would take photos of animals.
Even within just a single solar system, that percentage can be used just within that context. I mean Battlescape is going to be almost to scale, the whole Infinity MMO could be run within just that solar system. Go galaxy size and people will get their minds blow.
NMS has a different problem, their galaxy may be as huge as Infinity MMO would have, but the star systems are small in comparison.
Even with a “to scale” planet, which is awesome, if it’s only more spaces where get boring, it’s not very useful… the first times will be great : “waaah a tree, waaah a rock, etc…” but after that, what happens ? I mean, personally, the fight system doesn’t interest me at all, I’m just interested on the flight system, the planet landing, that I hope will be awesome in terms of user experience, and I hope that I’ll can explore the planet, but if I can’t make something instead of flying, it confirms the worries I told about on my previous post…
That’s pretty much the bottom line: how does the game play? I would be much more optimistic if they were so enthused about the gameplay that they felt a need to tease it.
There was was another gameplay feature that appeared but was glossed over fairly quickly. Soon after the player landed on an unexplored planet a “sentinel” robot appeared and the speaker mentioned that he’d have to escape as the sentinel was tasked with defending the planet from explorers.
That was quite revealing, it seems to me that they had identified that just exploring in itself did not give satisfying enough gameplay so they added in the sentinels to add some jeopardy to the experience. I’m guessing there will be some story background to justify these sentinels.
That to me says that they have a great engine and are trying now to make an enjoyable game to play on it. The worry is that the best games generally start with a great game idea and then make or choose an engine that can instantiate that game. The exception to that are mods where people think of a better game experience for an existing engine.
I think too, and it’s right to say that it reveals some directions about the gameplay. There’s a not so old trilogy that experienced this sort of problems (find a gameplay around planet discovering) and it’s Mass Effect. When you do it on ever landable planet of the Milky way it’s very repetitive but for me it stands a good experience on memory
In the E3 demo, when he jumped to the very distant star, the first thought for me was… wait there is a starbase… he doesn’t even mention it or act surprised… so they are all occupied?.. sentinel appears, doesn’t seem surprised by that as well… all planets with life have sentinels?.. The whole galaxy is occupied?
It all sounds so managed. Like a writer adding anything to his work just to get his intended goal, no matter how unrealistic or forced it sounds.
No it isn’t, but the space is not empty… of course he’s not surprised, he made it…
There’s a lot of videos and gameplay (even a tech demo of the engine posted above), where you can find there is no sentinels or starbase.
Console, console, console, console. I’m not sure you’ve noticed, but focusing so strongly on the console market isn’t how game publishers win back trust from the PC market. That would have been like Ford making up for the Pinto by producing excellent snowmobiles.
Yes, but the point is that he was making a live presentation. Supposedly moved to a random star without knowing what will be there… except the species upload point(confirmed by Gamespot). So from that I expected him to report on what is being discovered. Such as: “Ok, so we are at this yellow star, that has five planets and is occupied by a faction as we can see from the starbase.”.
Anyway no one has posted the E3 video as others might not deem it worthy to search for:
Gamespot preview:
He also stated that he had 3min for his demonstration and judging from how bad the “twine” guy was shaking his nerves were probably also going through the roof, a massive show like that turns even the most experienced speakers into a puddle of goo. I mean even the executives were missing their lines in many of the presentations.
Remember Keith juggling his sentences in a presentation to a class of a geeks a few years back?
What is this you hath spake of?
There was a presentation Keith made a few years back at some uni or something, somebody posted a link on the old forums, @JB47394 maybe?
Thanks for the videos, @Pendrokar.
The Gamespot preview only cements my belief that it’s another Spore. Survival, building up assets, procedural options for ships and weapons, exploration, and even a shared game world that’s single player.
The only twist is that players are supposed to reach the center of the galaxy for some reason. So there’s an over-arching goal for all the players. I don’t believe Spore did that.
I have no interest in such a game, but single player games never have held much appeal for me.
I recall the video, but I didn’t post it. My recollection is that the presentation and audience were mismatched, resulting in a certain degree of awkwardness.