Okay I (don’t, actually but whatevs) understand how you can do some tax-swindle capitalist-bs with unrealised stuff but how are they making money from “retiring” games (and is it the same scam as with the animated shows that you can only watch now if you sail the high seas?)?
I honestly don’t understand the math of not releasing movies and un-releasing games. People say tax purposes but I’d think streaming is essentially pure profit, hard to imagine not being able to make 20% of your money back or whatever credit you get for taxes.
You clearly have no idea what a tax write off is. If you get 50$ profit spend 25$ on your business and pocket 25$ you pay taxes on your pocketed 25$ not the companies expenditures. That is a tax write off. A “company” doesn’t pay taxes.
The second part of this comment doesn’t make a lot of sense.
My understanding is that the tax system allows for the declaration of depreciation in assets as a business expense. This is fine for assets with transparent market valuations.
The part where this system could be abused is in willfully withholding the release of a movie, overvaluing the expected revenue, and then subsequently declaring the lack of revenue as a depreciation in assets which is then declared as a business expense to reduce the tax burden.
A clearer example of this, with very obvious fraud, might be:
I paint a picture, spending about an hour of my time and 30$ of paint and canvas.
I then organize a silent/shady auction for my painting, and secretly bid $1,000,000 for my own painting
Then I decide to not pay for it and at the same time I decide to retract the sale instead of opening it up.
On paper I have a $1,000,000 asset that has been depreciated by $1,000,000 which allows me to deduct $1,000,000 from my other taxes.
So obviously this example was fraudulous. It’s possible that the expected revenue on the cases involving movies was estimated transparently and was fair, because of market forces.
You can’t write off expected future profits. That would essentially make income taxes meaningless. You can use a depreciation schedule for movies that you’ve produced and spread your tax savings out if you want(and you can avoid doing that by cancelling the movie all together and claiming it on your taxes now as a deduction), but that only matters when you’re actually making future money for the movie that you want to reduce your tax burden on. WB is losing a hell of a lot of money in the future to save money right now.
They are losing money on streaming. It was so bad that they took their cash cow HBO and grouped it with their streaming divisions to improve their financial report. WBD is making insane decisions because their #1 goal is to increase free cash flow to pay off their debts, whereas most companies’ #1 goal is to “increase shareholder value.”
You got the production company that pays $100 million to make a movie. The production company is owned by a studio. Production company licenses the movie to the studio that owns it for $200 million. But it’s all the same ownership and no money changed hands. It’s just on paper. So now the $100 million movie cost $200 million. Then the studio licenses out the movie to the marketing company, which the studio also owns, for $300 million. Again no money changed hands and the value is all on paper.
Do that a couple more times and that’s how a movie that literally cost $100 million and made $500 million at the box office “barely broke even”.
Might be off on the layers, but I heard that description of movie accounting years ago.
Exactly. I left that part off since I thought it was already a long description. But completely true. Can’t pay out an actor that takes a percentage if it never made any money on the “official” paper.
A big part is also residuals, they don’t want to have to keep paying actors, directors, and others involved with production, after the fact on a losing property. If there is zero income there are zero continued payments.
It exists, but isn’t 1 year. Closer to 20 I think? There are also deals that require constant usage, like Sony’s hold on spiderman. Quick search says 5 years 9 months for them to hold on to it.
Back to copyright, there was a game Wizards of the Coast acquired from Gygax’s company that a neonazi and one of Gygax’s sons tried to use claiming WoTC abandoned it. It was blatantly racist so one of the few times people were rooting for WoTC to win. WoTC hadn’t made a new game, but claimed they were still selling manuals digitally.
It could be trademark, certainly isn’t copyright. Trademark is use it and defend it, or lose it. Common trademarks that were lost are kleenex (tissue) and band-aid (bandage). Patents vary somewhat by industry, but in the computer world last 20 years. I think copyright is up to life of the creator plus 70 years, or 70 years if it’s owned by a company. This is why we hear about JRR Tolkiens kids having lawsuits about stuff related to LoTR, and why Steamboat Willy only recently went public domain.
Yeah. I’ve heard multiple times how entire careers are made supporting abandonware. The US military I believe pays microsoft millions a year to add security updates to their own version of Windows XP so old software can keep working.
This picture is kinda wimpy. Zaslav had led the company through a total stock drop of almost $16 per share yet his comp has gone up almost 100% based on the figures I’ve been able to find. Granted he’s not getting the lucrative options he started with but that doesn’t seem to stop the other comp from going up.
My hatred of WB goes back to when the purposely released a completely broken Arkham Knight game on PC. It has only grown more recently, I really wanted to watch that Acme vs Coyote movie. I hope to see a leak one day maybe.
No, you don’t. Games can include online-checks via company servers. If those shut down, some of your games cannot dial home anymore and will not start. Then you got useless discs lying around.
Piracy solves that issue, so for this kind of situation, the only way is piracy. I know some people like to stay within legal limits but that’s not a fair playing field at all for the consumer.
I didn’t say anything about purchasing the media only that a physical copy is the only way to ensure you retain access. Online checks are trivial to bypass (see: them being bypassed constantly.)
How do you back up the games you’ve pirated if not to a physical media? Further “physical media” doesn’t mean “only dvds” but means “hdds” as well. Some of you people are just so eager to argue and correct someone you don’t even think about the comment you’re replying to, have fun with that.
edit: I’m not arguing against piracy, I’m arguing for making backups and not assuming that torrent (or infrastructure to activate software) will always be there. Unless you control the data (physically) it’s not yours.
discs are a personal archiving solution (quite a bad one too, unless you’re into m-discs n stuff) and do not solve the data accessibility issue (copying it is labor intensive and needs human interaction, in contrast to a torrent)
That’s what in saying, you store it on media you control. If you need to migrate it every decade or so to avoid loss/degradation so be it. Unless you physically have that data it’s not yours and access can be lost at any time.
Agreed, a single physical copy can easily be lost.
Making physical copies often requires cracking/piracy. E.g. in my jurisdiction it’s illegal to circumvent “functional” copy protection, even though the right for a private copy is written in law. The problem is courts consider DVD’s long broken copy protections functional.
This is why in my opinion physical copies and piracy/cracking go hand in hand. The former isn’t possible without the latter.
E.g. I bought Lego Star: TCS again on Steam, because it was less work than getting rid of the copy protection on the disk.
Just a side note that M-DISC exists which is essentially a blue ray disk with a claimed longevity of a thousand years (strong emphasis on “claimed”. there’s a lot of controversy around it)
but yes the only way to retain access is piracy as it allows people that didn’t have the media to get it
Thanks for reminding me I need to try mdisc. I have multiple redundant backups but don’t trust any of them for long term. (Hard drive, SSD flash, USB flash)
My carefully burned DVDs are going bad after 15 years just like you said. (They were checked for pio errors at time of burn using only verbatim azzo 100 year media and stored in my basement in black dvd cases.)
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by magazine, feel free to expand. I’ll answer the party I can though… I back up certain media to an additional hard drive, but not everything. Some movies, all music, and some old comic books and magazines (Savage Sword of Conan, and it’s like).
Every bit of physical media I have is also backed up digitally, because I don’t even watch physical media anymore.
I dont really have a point to make, just writing out my thoughts.
Magazine is just the nomenclature in the fediverse, this is a “magazine” not a subreddit.
I back up pretty much everything, I guess a lot of the confusion is based on my phrasing, I was considering a RAID in your closet a physical backup while obviously the media there is being stored digitally.
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