CarbonScored [any]

Are we having an argument? Most likely I’m not trying to be a meanie, but I’m just struggling to understand / effectively communicate with yah.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 28th, 2023

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  • 1 - Movie Games are not an American company.

    2 - Yes, there’s no law saying “jail the guy who does not make the profit”, but by a variety of implicit and explicit contractual and legal obligations, it’s still true. If the goal of the company is make money and you are neglectful in that duty, you are in legal breach of your duty.

    If a Director of a publically floated company was proved to have deliberately pursued moral good over the best interest of the company, they could be fired, sued to oblivion, and possibly subject to criminal charges, depending on context. Extra liabilities and duties to which directors are held will also often be specified as part of the employment contracts.

    Fiduciary duty is a very real thing and breaching it is absolutely punishable by law.


  • As a public company, they are legally obligated to pursue maximum returns for shareholders. Given that suing a successful game could potentially bring in more profit than focusing on their own game, there’s definitely an argument to be made that they are legally obligated to at least investigate the possibility.

    Still absolutely fucked, but yeah, it is illegal for a public company to not pursue profits. It’s also possible their contracts obligate them to investigate, though if that’s the case, they presumably could waive such a thing with agreement from the developers.


  • I was alive and played games during that era, so I am aware! I’m very personally aware how much work we crammed from a tiny slow processor and a few kb.

    And though we probably wouldn’t describe those games as ‘poorly optimised’, there’s still absolutely huge room for optimisations. As you say, compilers have gotten a lot better, and we have better algorithms and data structures. In Quake especially, they basically did have order-of-magnitude gains by writing some parts in assembly. And they’ll have undoubtedly have written most of those parts very imperfectly.

    I may be skirting the bounds of reality more than you, by talking about what’s ‘theoretically possible’ compared to what’s possible by today’s knowledge and human practices. We agree there’d be some graphical compromise, maybe we’re just disagreeing over details of the scale of that compromise and the hardware that would be ‘permittable’ by this scenario.