

Honestly this whole situation seems fishy to me (no pun intended) on all sides.
On the one hand, I get where the sentiment I’ve seen all over that this is just the publishers attempting to screw the devs over to avoid bonus payouts comes from, and it may even be true, there’s basically no reason to trust a big company and the ones in the entertainment industry are notorious for trying to avoid paying the people that actually make the stuff they sell.
On the other hand, the 250 million number I see thrown around is a huge amount of money, even if distributed evenly, and if not distributed evenly, would be a huge amount especially for the people at the top (which sound like the people that were fired for the most part?). I could easily see that creating a strong incentive for those in charge of the studio to release something even if it wasn’t ready. And it wouldn’t really surprise me if it isn’t, just given that virtually every major release of late across the industry seems to arrive both after delays and in a seemingly unready state, even the ones releasing in early access. Were that the case, then the move the company made to delay the game and remove people at the top pushing against that would make sense.
The trouble I have is, both these notions (that the publishing company might be delaying the game without need out of financial motivation, thus screwing over the devs, and that the leadership of the development company might be resisting a necessary delay out of financial motivation, which would presumably screw over the customer) seem self-consistent and plausible to me. The publishers claims are probably a bit more suspect given that from what I hear they have a history with scandal like this, but that isn’t really enough to make me feel confident that they have to be the ones being untruthful here, so jumping on a bandwagon feels premature until we have some information that rules out one of the two sides claims.
I’d make some statement about how this whole incident demonstrates the pitfalls of combining capitalist profit seeking with art, but between how many times the gaming industry has been burned by that already and how anti-capitalist lemmy tends to be, I suspect everyone here probably would be familiar with that anyway.
The implication I rarely see explored of the meme that “everyone (presumably excluding the FBI agents) has an FBI agent watching specifically them (and not just a whole group of people, which would presumably mean they were watching someone else most of the time) at all times”, is that half the population would have to be FBI agents.