Right now, my social media feeds are full of people mourning layoffs, both on the journalism side, with the sudden closure of Game Informer today, and on the developer side, with Wednesday's layoffs at Bungie. But, uh, at least some CEOs are doing okay? On this week's episode of Aftermath Hours, we're real pissed about that.
Luke, Chris, and I start by discussing the Bungie layoffs, which saw 220 people lose their jobs and other people and teams shuffled around into parent company Sony. According to Game File's Stephen Totilo, Bungie had "repeatedly missed financial targets promised to Sony and had been losing money since the release of February 2023’s Destiny 2 expansion Lightfall."
As Jason Schreier reported today, many of those affected by the layoffs put the blame on CEO Pete Parsons, "saying he had failed to take accountability for his own bad bets and that he’d been overly optimistic in his communication with the staff." But one thing Parsons didn't fail to do is spend over 2 million dollars on classic cars, apparently winning over a dozen cars on an auction site. We all know CEOs are ghouls, but now one example of their ghoulishness is on display for all to see.
Next, we talk about how, instead of getting a new Sonic & Mario Olympics game, we got a crummy mobile game with an NFT attached. This leads us to reflect on the Olympics games of our youths, and also how bad the battery life on the Game Gear was.
Then, we move away from bad news to rave about games we're enjoying: Luke, with excellent city-builder Cataclismo, and me, with excellent comedy platformer Thank Goodness You’re Here.
Last, we answer some reader questions, discussing what game genre we’d like to resurrect, how both we and our pets would do in the Olympics, fake cubes, a horrible new AI device we can’t believe is real, and what the Rashomon of games would be.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can buy some fancy cars, and then sit outside shitty CEOs' houses revving the engines really loud.
Here's an excerpt from our conversation:
Chris: It was like two million on classic cars and motorbikes since [Sony] bought the studio in 2022. And that exists everywhere, you know what I mean: talk about wealth, I mean Gabe [Newell of Valve]. But Gabe's not doing that stuff, or he's better at hiding it.
Luke: I wrote a blog just before I left Kotaku about Gabe's submarine. He spent god knows how much money on his very functional billionaire submarine which is excellent and does genuine scientific work. But that ain't cheap! Pete Parsons does not have Gabe money, Gabe's on a different level.
Chris: That's James Cameron money, that's that good money. That's "you own a marketplace" money.
Luke: The money's going straight to you; it's not getting diluted among shareholders.
Chris: [Parsons buying cars] just seems tacky. Also just generally, where does the money go and who does it go to?
Luke: In this case, like I said, all these people spend their money on weird things--they're rich! [Parsons] was a rare example where we got to see it, like we got to actually see what this dude spends his money on. It was like, "aw, man." I like cars! I would probably have multiple cars if I was that rich.
Riley: That's a fun question. What's the weirdo thing I would spend my money on if I was a billionaire executive?
Luke: How about I'm gonna come up with a really left field suggestion: I'd keep my staff employed.
