• @bullshitter@lemm.ee
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    102 years ago

    Brands inherently has no value. It’s the people that make these decisions. and after the management changes , people expect the same amazing product again but new management wants is profit.

    • @empireOfLove@lemmy.one
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      2 years ago

      Except… its not. Basically nothing changed for InBev. That lip-service marketing thing only generated extraordinairlly loud conservative screeching from 1% of their customer base, that ultimately amounted to a small downward jump in their stock price that hasn’t moved since.

      Doesn’t count when compared to the likes of Unity who have quite literally alienated every single user of their product.

      • Alto
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        102 years ago

        They have seen a legitimate downturn in sales across all their brands, with Bud Light suffering the most, however that’s been the case with pretty much all beer brands in general. People are just drinking less beer.

        • @empireOfLove@lemmy.one
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          2 years ago

          Yeah, thats overall market trends affecting sales, not a result of their choices or marketing “oops” (that wasn’t even an oops, nobody other than inbred homophobic fag-haters gave a rats ass about that campaign)

          What people don’t understand is how absolutely fucking huge AB InBev is. Just scroll through their list of subsidiary brands for a second. They have over 400 individual brands under their control, they don’t give a damn if you stop buying Bud Light. Guarantee almost every single conservative boycotter switched to another beer brand owned by InBev and didn’t even realize it lmfao. They were never in any danger.

          • @bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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            102 years ago

            Guarantee almost every single conservative boycotter switched to another beer brand owned by InBev and didn’t even realize it lmfao.

            My uncle was literally complaining about Bud Light being “Woke” while drinking a Space Dust at a family gathering when all this was still fresh lol. I chose to not say anything for comedy reasons lol

          • Alto
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            72 years ago

            Im from the STL area, have a couple friends that work there. They’ve pretty much confirmed exactly that. In fact, there was a short spike in sales revenue because half the ones switched to more expensive InBev brands.

            Probably not unexpectedly, BL saw virtually no downturn in sales in STL

        • @bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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          82 years ago

          Are people drinking less beer, or just more local/craft beers? Because my experience has been the latter. I honestly don’t know anyone under the age of 40 who regularly drinks the “big name beers”, not when they have other options at least.

          • Alto
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            2 years ago

            Talking to said friends that work at InBev, it’s less beer in general. Gotta remember that the core customer base of beer companies are people knocking back 12+ most nights of the week. Those people are (literally) dying out and (thankfully) are not really bring replaced.

            Also have to remember that a fairly large portion of “local” craft breweries, at least in terms of sales volume, are owned by corporations like InBev

            • @bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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              52 years ago

              Also have to remember that a fairly large portion of “local” craft breweries, at least in terms of sales volume, are owned by corporations like InBev

              This is a fair point, I was a bit dissapointed when I learned that my go-to beer that I thought was from an (admittedly large) craft brewery was just an InBev subsidiary (Space Dust)

      • @_Mantissa@lemmy.world
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        202 years ago

        Im still boycotting them from the Hong Kong stuff back in '19/'20. I really miss hearthstone but fuck them.

      • andz
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        52 years ago

        They completely botched the WotLK server situation launch as well.

        I waited for that shit for years, and me and many others couldn’t play no matter how much money we were willing to spend to do so. I don’t know if they ever fixed the servers, but back in December they were still a hot mess.

        Also, to a lesser degree, SC2.

        They certainly lost a loyal customer in me, at least.

    • M137
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      62 years ago

      Seriously? They’ve been one of the most shitty companies for years. They’ve been on the top of the most talked about and widely shown because of all their bad decisions. How does anyone who has even a remote idea and interest about this not know that?

    • The Picard ManeuverOP
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      362 years ago

      Well this year was overwatch 2, which was pretty much the same game but wrapped in skeezy monetization, with the excuse that they needed to drop a sequel (and delete the original) for their new PVE content. Then a few months later, they announced they weren’t even going to do the PVE content, but they were keeping the new monetization.

      • @FUCKRedditMods@lemm.ee
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        232 years ago

        Seriously fuck them to death for this. And their “new maps” is just like the same fucking maps but at nighttime or daytime instead! OoO what a sequel! The company deserves to crash and burn.

        Also I PAID for one of the call of duty games and after a year they one day just said I can’t play it anymore because they ended support for older versions of windows, of course they also refused to refund me. I didn’t buy “one year” of gameplay I bought the fucking game. Never making that mistake again.

        Just relentlessly fucking greedy and shitty. It’s a shame people enable this bullshit by spending $30 on character skins and paying out the ass for lootboxes. We need to answer them with the loss of our business. I did my part and uninstalled all their IP and refuse to give them another dollar of my money ever again until/unless I see a 180 in their policies and practices.

        • TrenchcoatFullOfBats
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          62 years ago

          I didn’t buy “one year” of gameplay I bought the fucking game.

          That right there is the root of the overall problems we’re seeing: licensing, and the increasing willingness of assholes with MBAs to use licensing as a weapon to increase profits.

          When you pay your money, you’re not getting anything but the right to use the thing for as long as the company decides to let you keep using it. They take your money AND they retain the right to revoke or change the license whenever and however they want.

          The only way to win this kind of game is to a) not play it, and/or b) take to the high seas.

      • @ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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        72 years ago

        They took the dev team away from hots (only blizzard game/moba worth playing) so they could work on their pve

        • The Picard ManeuverOP
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          52 years ago

          Maybe? It’s all blurring together for me. It was at least this year that they cancelled the PVE stuff.

          • @bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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            32 years ago

            That’d make sense, I just remember visiting my brother in-law around christmas last year and he was playing it and telling me about the controversy about it being the same game.

            But yeah everything blurs together lately, don’t know if it’s because everything is so chaotic, or just because I’m getting old lol

        • @Demuniac@lemmy.world
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          72 years ago

          Well nothing in particular, I’ve been done with the rate of MTG product releases for a while now, hate the universe beyond as for me it damages the feel of the game significantly, and the overall price increase is just rude at this point.

        • @snor10@lemm.ee
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          72 years ago

          Despite previous promises that they would not, they did something similar to Unity and tried to retroactively change their Open Gaming License to force creators of Dungeons & Dragons derived products to give up ownership of their products unless they pay exorbitant sums.

          They also sent the Pinkertons to intimate a guy who got shiped some unreleased Magic the Gathering cards by accident.

    • Polar
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      52 years ago

      Whats wrong with Brother? Bought one of their toner printers recently. Doesn’t require any bullshit drivers, borderline malware software, or even genuine toner cartridges.

      Shit was up and running within 60 seconds and prints/scans on Windows, Android, Mac, Linux, (and maybe iOS idk) without any additional software.

      • @Sweetpeaches69@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        They released one of the worst DLCs for the highest price ever in Total War: Warhammer 3. Instead of backing down when called out by the community, they doubled down. This has killed almost all good will, after a long series of whoopsies by them.

        They haven’t been patching their flagship title (Total War: Warhammer 3) because they’re throwing all of their staff onto ‘Hyenas’, which is an upcoming battle royale likely to die on release. They only have one person part time on bug fixes in their flagship game.

        Also, their soonest upcoming game is Total War: Pharoah, which when polled only 7% of people said they’d purchase because the setting of bronze age Egypt is boring in terms of unit variety to most. It is also just a complete reskin of Total War: Troy. The latter of which was a cheaper ‘saga’ title–you bet your ass they’re charging full price for Pharoah, though.

          • @Sweetpeaches69@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            Oh, it was pretty wild. Globally, their past DLCs have always been top 3 on steam at least day of release. This last one only rose to #17. It was insane to see so many people boycott it. I’m curious to see how Pharoah does.

            I’m just sad because I want Total War: Warhammer to succeed because it’s my favorite game series. On top of that, the developers, liasons, and artists are great. It’s just a shame the suits and executives opted to destroy everything for the almighty dollar.

  • @DrDickHandler@lemmy.world
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    222 years ago

    This is such a fucking post. Activision-Blizzard is drowning in cash because people continue to buy their garbage. Diablo Immortal was a great move. OP is completely clueluess.

  • @F04118F@feddit.de
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    382 years ago

    Red Hat (Enrerprise Linux) & HashiCorp (Terraform) closed the source of their products in different ways, also fucking over their community of clients and contributors, though their reasoning seems slightly more sane than “no more free money, aaargh!”

  • Dame
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    412 years ago

    Unfortunately and admittedly, we are the problem. These companies know that people pay for convenience and stick to what they know. If we were less likely to do so companies would have to raise their standards. Take Twitter for example, even with Musks over inflated numbers other sources indicate there’s still hundreds of millions of Twitter users. They see all of the things Musk has done and it hasn’t buried his business thus they are now taking pages out of his book.

    • @Rekliner@beehaw.org
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      Agreed on convenience being enough for most people. Unity isn’t going anywhere. They are priced above Unreal now but they have the market share to justify it. There are a million other game engines with newer approaches than “coke and pepsi” but they take more work and there’s less community to pull from. There are just so many assets and abilities pre built in those game engines that allow a young developer to be productive. If you don’t need all of that then you have a wide pick of frameworks to apply your code chops to. I’d love for Godot to become Dr Pepper but it’s got a long way to go for even that slot. If unity had done this in a year or two from now it might be a different story but it takes a long time to reach a status like Blender, and even Blender isn’t the go-to for industry professionals. I love LibreOffice but I’ve never worked at a company that is willing to tolerate those little rough edges.

      Twitter is still the centralized place for a mainstream figure/organization to engage from. They have all researched mastodon and the like, opened accounts, and can’t get the same engagement. It takes people more work to find their accounts in other places and most lay-users just aren’t going to put in the effort. They’re only in it for the lulz. This may reach a critical mass someday like with myspace but any alternative still needs a central point to funnel them to. Reddit doesn’t benefit from centralization the same way and I think Lemmy/ap will scratch the itch for major topics, but it’s still harder to grow smaller communities that aren’t risa.

      Blizzard has been being blizzard for years, that’s not just a 2023 thing!

      I wish it was different. We all hate nodding to authority. But there’s a certain momentum that carries with popularity and they can surf that on their enshittification for years to come.

    • @zbyte64@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      112 years ago

      I just think people shouldn’t be chided for doing what is convenient when so much of our economy is attention based. Kind of like hating the players instead of the game.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
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      2 years ago

      Blaming individuals for not performing collective consumerist acts against corporations is liberal bullshit that only excuses corporate wrongdoing.

      EDIT: To spare other people from having to read the smug corpo clown buffoonery beneath this post, I’ll put the most relevant part I wanted to stress up here instead:

      The eight hour day, the end of widescale child labor, the concept of minimum wage, and much more that improved the lot of the working class and of society as a whole were not the products of “vote with your wallet” nonsense. Slavery wasn’t abolished in the United States (it still isnt if you count the prison system, and you should, but stay with me here) by cotton buyers coming together to only buy “ethical” cotton.

      • Dame
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        22 years ago

        It’s not liberal bs. It’s lazy thinking on your part and people are agreeing with you to shuck accountability. None of the services are essential services. We could easily drop them and it have nearly zero material impact on our lives. Spare me the BS. Just say you’re too lazy to pull away from comfort. People vote with their dollars all of the time. It’s also not liberal, there’s been conservative stances against businesses and corporations as well. As humans some of the biggest influences we have in society is our votes and our dollars. Quit being lazy and just state you’re fine with things as long as it doesn’t disrupt your comforts. That’s better than calling it “liberal”

        • UlyssesT [he/him]
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          2 years ago

          It’s not liberal bs

          It is.

          It’s lazy thinking on your part

          No, blaming individuals for not coming together in some magical way and putting all the responsibility on them for what corporations do is your lazy thinking. Next you’ll say that blood diamonds are entirely the fault of people buying them and not the DeBeers corporation enforcing artificial scarcity with them while performing atrocities at the same time, with the implication that atrocities just happen until a magical moment that people stop buying the artificially scarce diamonds, and because that is materialistically highly unlikely in the present system, that just allows smuglords like you to shame the masses while at the same time feeling idealistically superior to them while doing nothing.

          We

          Stop saying “we.” You are licking the boot and blaming the masses for not being as enlightened as you so you can feel superior to them.

          Quit being lazy

          Quit being a smug liberal bootlicker. smuglord farquaad-point

          • Dame
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            12 years ago

            It’s not liberal then what do you call conservatives that make the same decisions? You’re just weak. I love how you gloss over the protections of your comforts. It’s not lazy thinking to hold businesses and government accountable. How tf do you think we do that? People have protested, use their votes and used their dollars. YOU are the lazy one. I’m glad we live in a different world because people and those that agree with you would still have us in the slave days and civil rights wouldn’t be fought for at all. You do understand it was peoples protests, voting and their dollars that forced many of the major movements of the world right? Not people just waiting for businesses and governments to magically do the right thing. Having people ban together despite their comforts is not magical nor lazy. You are just weird.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]
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              2 years ago

              You’ve already showed your whole ass and at this point there’s no meaningful way to continue replying to you. Continue tooting your self-aggrandizing horn of self-superiority and roll around on a unicycle like the corpo clown that you are. 🤡

              For anyone else reading this far, remember this: the eight hour day, the end of widescale child labor, the concept of minimum wage, and much more were not the products of the “vote with your wallet” masses-blaming clownishness you see above this post. Slavery wasn’t abolished in the United States (it still isnt if you count the prison system, and you should, but stay with me here) by cotton buyers coming together and only buying “ethical” cotton.

            • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
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              102 years ago

              Conservatives are liberals based upon the meaning of words. Do you know what liberalism is? It’s not gay rights and lattes.