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Lights... Camera... ACTION!!: A Hollywood Quest

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    • Magoose said:
    Hi Magoose here one of the guys helping Duke.

    So we have some bad news.

    The quest has been canceled as duke does not want to write it anymore.

    I'm going to ask if I can take over for it, because I like this quest, and it would be a shame to kill it
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    TBF, Mags, you have been doing a lot of the heavylifting for the quest, so this will be in good hands. :)

    To be clear to everyone, this is just me burning out on imagination of the quest, since my muse has been hitting me over the head a lot with so many different ideas that I just can't find myself too interested in this.

    I'll still hang out here, though, since this still does have a sepcial place in my heart.

    I'd like to thank you all for making this a wonderful experience while it lasted.

    I'd also like to thank @Magoose, @Fluffy_serpent, and @Martin Noctis for doing so much to help prepare and write this quest. I couldn't have done it without you all. :D

    I'll see you all around.

    With so many regards, Duke William Of.
     
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    • Nova_kaiser said:
    Well it's your plan but I'm afraid they will pulll a Toho on us and defect after we bail them out. I think a better option is taking a networking action and contract a couple of games for us and if the partnership is good we can buy them out and incorporate them like we did with Sunrise. The profits should keep them afloat.
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    Fanhunter696 said:
    I am with @Nova_kaiser , I would rather avoid another Toho situation...

    I would personally just buy them straight up and avoid future headaches...
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    The difference between Sierra On-Line and Toho s is twofold.

    First, Sierra On-Line has existed at best for three years, and was started not by people whose sole interest was in making profit, but by a married couple who wanted to expand on the medium for game creators and actually tell stories and share them while maintaining a high degree of quality in both software and creativity. Heck, during the OTL Crash they also nearly went under and still refused the chance to partner/merge with another company that would have surely saved them and their employees because theirwork was crap and they knew it would harm their quality.

    Second, we are bigger than them. So the moment they try anything, is the moment we bury them. Besides, this is not a gift, it's an investment, meaning we should be at least getting part of the company and they are answerable to us in some way.

    If we're still iffy about them, we could just buy them as well and keep them as a subsidiary with plenty of freedom like we did with Sunrise or Ardmore.

    What do you think @Kaiser Chris?
     
    Honestly, I'm getting kinda tired of Toho getting used as an excuse to not work with companies and just buy everything that fucking moves. Like, I get it, but we've had more than enough positive interactions and partnerships with other companies that it really is just paranoia at this point.
    overmind said:
    If we're still iffy about them, we could just buy them as well and keep them as a subsidiary with plenty of freedom like we did with Sunrise or Ardmore.
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    What would they handle as a subsidiary? We already have Lucasarts and we just bought Sega(both the Japanese and American assets) and we haven't really figured out how they're gonna be distinguished from one another, unless we end up merging them, but that seems like a bad idea to me, so what would we do with them if we bought Sierra and kept them as a subsidiary?
     
    overmind said:
    If we're still iffy about them, we could just buy them as well and keep them as a subsidiary with plenty of freedom like we did with Sunrise or Ardmore.
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    This would be my favored approach, but I can see that an investment would work here as well.

    Schehera Zade said:
    What would they handle as a subsidiary? We already have Lucasarts and we just bought Sega(both the Japanese and American assets) and we haven't really figured out how they're gonna be distinguished from one another, unless we end up merging them, but that seems like a bad idea to me, so what would we do with them if we bought Sierra and kept them as a subsidiary?
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    We let them handle game development with Sierra as a subsidiary brand

    Microsoft and Sony own lots od Game development subsidiary studios, and they manage well enough
     
    Schehera Zade said:
    What would they handle as a subsidiary? We already have Lucasarts and we just bought Sega(both the Japanese and American assets) and we haven't really figured out how they're gonna be distinguished from one another, unless we end up merging them, but that seems like a bad idea to me, so what would we do with them if we bought Sierra and kept them as a subsidiary?
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    I assume that, like our other subsidiaries, they handle work on their own (Sunrise is certainly doing their own thing aside from what we're giving them) or just handle the game ideas we pass over to them.

    I mean, it's good that we have bought Sega and LucasArts is going to be stronger for it, but we are not going to be the only ones doing games for our console. One of the reasons Nintendo won the Console War against Sega was because they had the help of Third Party Developers...and the reason Sony was able to rise so well was because Nintendo disregarded the opinion and wants of said Third Party Developers.

    We just need to make sure that greedy and unscrupulous companies don't get their hands on iconic franchises that will then turn them into hollow shells of what they were. (Looking at you EA! Bethesda!).
     
    Fanhunter696 said:
    We let them handle game development with Sierra as a subsidiary brand

    Microsoft and Sony own lots od Game development subsidiary studios, and they manage well enough
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    Personally, I think that's just bloat, but it's ultimately whatever. Would they exclusively be handling our game development? Surely not, especially with the Sega assets we have, so I assume they'd handle the development for certain kinds of games? Which ones would those be? I'm not super familiar with Sierra as a company.
     
    Yeah, I think people aren't realizing that Toho is not going to be the same situation we face with every company. Keeping in mind the vast difference in work culture and leadership between Sierra and Toho, our circumstances were different for both. With Toho, when the deal fell through we were an up and coming studio that had some talent, but only had a handful of films in its library and a couple of tv series with some neat production subsidiaries. We weren't considered to be a titan on top of Hollywood, we were just a really talented and lucky studio whose main asset was Star Wars and being stupid rich. Universal and Disney were true established giants, and Toho is one of Japan's leading entertainment companies.

    Fast forward to August 1982, we are arguably in contention for the top studio in Hollywood and are one of the most lucrative companies in the United States, we have a massive cultural reach and impact, we have Marvel, Polaroid, Sunset, Dreamworks and Hanna-Barbera under our network. Bruce is the leading shareholder in Apple. Our channel had a tremendously strong debut. Bruce is one of the richest men in the world as a billionaire. His wife is the owner of the Lakers and is cofoudining a new football league in addition to being a multi-platinum artist.

    We have all of this and facing us is Sierra who are a husband and wife duo making point and click adventure games with the business just one bad day from bankruptcy and likely having had to exprience some layoffs recently. Either we do good work with Sierra, or they go out of business, it's very low risk for us.

    Sierra by all historical accounts is a decent company, their only flaws being a few bad business decisions and not being able to keep up with the different trends in gaming popularity. If Jim trusts Sierra then that's as good a mark as any.
     
    overmind said:
    I assume that, like our other subsidiaries, they handle work on their own (Sunrise is certainly doing their own thing aside from what we're giving them) or just handle the game ideas we pass over to them.
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    overmind said:
    They mostly focus on graphical adventure game series. We can use them for Click and Point games as well, who should be popular now, and would remain as such for the foreeable future.
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    But why would we outright buy them then in that case? If we aren't really gonna do anything with them(or just occasionally do stuff with them), they aren't sufficiently distinguished from our other gaming labels, and they're smaller than the other labels/brands we have at our disposal... why would we even bother with them? I was under the impression that we were reaching out to Sierra because people were interested in the heads for their programming ability, at least, that was my impression, but the current trajectory here seems a bit pointless. Almost all of our other seemingly redundant subsidiaries had purpose. Sunrise was for creating anime and assisting in distribution of our animation within Japan and Asia, Dreamworks makes our western animated movies, Pixar is for CGI, Skywalker Sound is for improving sound quality for film, THX is for improving the sound equipment on the side of the theaters themselves, etc. If anything, this is like the Hannah-Barbera purchase, where we really didn't need them and they serve as more of just a brand, but even then it doesn't really apply. Hannah-Barbera can serve just fine as our TV Animation branch to further the division of labor amongst our companies, and Sierra isn't anywhere near the same kind of brand power as HB. Everything we'd be doing with Sierra, we can do with LucasArts and Sega, especially because Sierra's brand of games is literally just OTL LucasArts. I guess that's fine, since it means LucasArts can focus on other IP, while Sega focuses on Sega properties and serves mostly as an isolated brand separated from LucasArts, but it still seems unnecessary to me. I don't understand why we'd buy them unless we were to fold them into LucasArts. To me, it makes the most sense to just keep working with them as a third-party developer and not purchase them as a subsidiary.
     
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    The thing is. When talking about consoles, long term we need to consider how they will separate themselves from computers. Right now, price point and specs are easy hits to make, but as shown IRL, won't be able to hold. After all, it's looking like that while PlayStation technically won, it's gonna be a short lived one as the whole point of getting a console has been effectively lost through tech marching on and Microsoft pivoting to a game subscription service while eroding away the last point of getting a console, console exclusives.

    The likely last survivor and winner by default looks like it very well could be Nintendo, by sheer dint of their focus being in angles that differentiates themselves from gaming PCs.
     
    The thing is in a normal world I would be more open to partnerships but in this proto-cyberpunk timeline quite literly anything is one or two bad dice throws away from blowing up, betraying us or worse. So buying things is a way in preventing the worst from happening. And still I'm not against a patnership with Sierra I'm just against with throwing money around for no reason, so let's just contract them to make a couple of games and if they're good they can stay afloat and maybe bought by us in a couple of years.

    Themarineguy said:
    The thing is. When talking about consoles, long term we need to consider how they will separate themselves from computers. Right now, price point and specs are easy hits to make, but as shown IRL, won't be able to hold. After all, it's looking like that while PlayStation technically won, it's gonna be a short lived one as the whole point of getting a console has been effectively lost through tech marching on and Microsoft pivoting to a game subscription service while eroding away the last point of getting a console, console exclusives.

    The likely last survivor and winner by default looks like it very well could be Nintendo, by sheer dint of their focus being in angles that differentiates themselves from gaming PCs.
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    This point is 40 year too early. From the '80 to '20 consoles were very profitable and populer because people could just go to a store pay 200 dollars and have a good machine that plays good games with no fuss or BS and evey couple of years you just need to buy a new one. With PC's you need to upgrade, they're more expensive and complex (For the avererge consumer) so why make it difficult for yourself.
     
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    So…

    Do I interject and say something?

    Nah I won't because I will wait till 84 for the next crazy bullshit to occur.

    Nova_kaiser said:
    The thing is in a normal world I would be more open to partnerships but in this proto-cyberpunk timeline quite literly anything is one or two bad dice throws away from blowing up, betraying us or worse. So buying things is a way in preventing the worst from happening. And still I'm not against a patnership with Sierra I'm just against with throwing money around for no reason, so let's just contract them to make a couple of games and if they're good they can stay afloat and maybe bought by us in a couple of years.
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    Listen this wacky world still is a might but more realistic then others that the dice have created in my long writing stuff.

    Also be compleatly honest you all have fun with the crazy bullshit the dice and I come up with. It's the perfect kind of popcorn fun we all need to destress
     
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    Schehera Zade said:
    But why would we outright buy them then in that case? If we aren't really gonna do anything with them(or just occasionally do stuff with them), they aren't sufficiently distinguished from our other gaming labels, and they're smaller than the other labels/brands we have at our disposal... why would we even bother with them?
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    Schehera Zade said:
    and serves mostly as an isolated brand separated from LucasArts, but it still seems unnecessary to me. I don't understand why we'd buy them unless we were to fold them into LucasArts.
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    Here is the thing , a lot of our investments and subsidiaries that we bought didn't followed any sort of great plan, we did it because it was cool and we have more than enough money to afford it... We did it with Polaroid, we tried with Kodak and Delorean, and we will keep doing this stuff mainly because we can afford it...

    Besides that, for those people who want to save iconic brands and companies videogame studios are a literal gold mine, so we are going to buy plenty of studios in the future...
     
    Magoose said:
    Listen this wacky world still is a might but more realistic then others that the dice have created in my long writing stuff.

    Also be compleatly honest you all have fun with the crazy bullshit the dice and I come up with. It's the perfect kind of popcorn fun we all need to destress
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    I'm not complaining. It keeps it fresh. Sometimes I just want to play it safe.
     
    Fanhunter696 said:
    Here is the thing , a lot of our investments and subsidiaries that we bought didn't followed any sort of great plan, we did it because it was cool and we have more than enough money to afford it... We did it with Polaroid, we tried with Kodak and Delorean, and we will keep doing this stuff mainly because we can afford it...
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    Irrelevant. I specifically outlined subsidiaries that were seemingly redundant with each other, like our various animation studios. Delorean, Polaroid, or Oatfield don't do that, and so they aren't relevant to the point I raised.
     
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    Schehera Zade said:
    But why would we outright buy them then in that case? If we aren't really gonna do anything with them(or just occasionally do stuff with them), they aren't sufficiently distinguished from our other gaming labels, and they're smaller than the other labels/brands we have at our disposal... why would we even bother with them? I was under the impression that we were reaching out to Sierra because people were interested in the heads for their programming ability, at least, that was my impression, but the current trajectory here seems a bit pointless. Almost all of our other seemingly redundant subsidiaries had purpose. Sunrise was for creating anime and assisting in distribution of our animation within Japan and Asia, Dreamworks makes our western animated movies, Pixar is for CGI, Skywalker Sound is for improving sound quality for film, THX is for improving the sound equipment on the side of the theaters themselves, etc. If anything, this is like the Hannah-Barbera purchase, where we really didn't need them and they serve as more of just a brand, but even then it doesn't really apply. Hannah-Barbera can serve just fine as our TV Animation branch to further the division of labor amongst our companies, and Sierra isn't anywhere near the same kind of brand power as HB. Everything we'd be doing with Sierra, we can do with LucasArts and Sega, especially because Sierra's brand of games is literally just OTL LucasArts. I guess that's fine, since it means LucasArts can focus on other IP, while Sega focuses on Sega properties and serves mostly as an isolated brand separated from LucasArts, but it still seems unnecessary to me. I don't understand why we'd buy them unless we were to fold them into LucasArts. To me, it makes the most sense to just keep working with them as a third-party developer and not purchase them as a subsidiary.
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    List of acquisitions by Electronic Arts - Wikipedia

    Acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
    You buy studio's with good people in them. They get stability, money and connections, the buyer gets a studio who makes games for them. Every big company does it, Nintendo being the exeption.
     
    Okay, everyone made some great points about Sierra, so for now since they are partnered with us anyways, I'll take it out and put this instead:
    -[]Pray: It had been a long time since you went to Mass. You wish for the Lord to give you strength. DC: ???
    --[] Pray for a safe and happy time for you and your family in Monaco.

    Might not seem like much, but considering Grace dies of a car crash in September, I think having some divine help would be good so we avoid a Bruce Lee situation.
     
    Kaiser Chris said:
    Okay, everyone made some great points about Sierra, so for now since they are partnered with us anyways, I'll take it out and put this instead:
    -[]Pray: It had been a long time since you went to Mass. You wish for the Lord to give you strength. DC: ???
    --[] Pray for a safe and happy time for you and your family in Monaco.

    Might not seem like much, but considering Grace dies of a car crash in September, I think having some divine help would be good so we avoid a Bruce Lee situation.
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    I'm never against an action to pray. Then again, I'd have thought to use the option to headhunt another prospect for our Video game company.
     
    Yeah I'd rather do more videogame stuff while the crash is happening. I'm not against praying but we probably have a better use for the action economy right now.

    Edit Ooh it's not videogame related and I'm not sure we should do it this turn but I just thought of an idea we can do for our tabletop rpgs. Since we have cash to burn how about some fan made supplement contests? Winners get a cash prize and a free copy of your adventure signed by Bruce. What do you think?
     
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    What is going on in Star Wars:
    D100 => 100

    Um this requires an omake.

    Um sweet Lord... George, Steve what are you doing... STOP!

    You can't just get all of ILM working on everything for a month and do that!
     
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