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Comment by bdw5204 | Hacker News Reader

Related: The gaming division of Warner Bros. is also planning to double down on "live service" games following the failure of the Suicide Squad game rather than single player games like their highly successful Harry Potter game.[0]

I wonder if Warner Bros. increasingly sees their gaming division as a potential source of tax write offs and are just intentionally wasting money like the Atlas Shrugged character Francisco d'Anconia[1] to ensure Uncle Sam never sees a cent in tax revenue from them. Otherwise, the behavior of this company seems to be objectively insane.

[0]: https://gamerant.com/warner-bros-focus-shift-live-service-ga...

[1]: https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/a/atlas-shrugged/char...

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The live service craze reminds me a lot of the WoW clones that got made in the years following WoW's success. As with MMOs, I think an average person's ability to interact with multiple live services is limited. Keeping up with more than 2 or 3 "seasons" or "battlepasses" is usually impossible unless you have the kind of free time that only kids in school have. Also just like with MMOs, the quality and quantity of new content generally depends on revenue coming in. This sets up a very strong "winner take all" dynamic where the most popular games can ship large, frequent content updates while smaller games often dwindle and die off. It seems like there's little room for modest success with a live service unless you're catering to a niche genre or audience.

Its actually worse than that: in their mind, Suicide Squad was a "traditional" AAA style game with a live service component (because it has a campaign of some kind), they are planning on doubling down on the Helldivers/Payday 3 style live services that only work as live services with no campaign or story mode.

I don't discount the probability that spite drives a lot of these counterproductive decisions. But if they are giving up income simply in order to pay zero tax, that is itself objectively insane. Which again, I'd not be surprised by.

As Seinfeld would say: do you even know what a tax write off is? Hiring someone to burn money just to pay less tax makes no sense. You don't get back the money you burned.

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