Yeah, the comparison in the article with Facebook looks like trash. Tencent peaked in January, bumbled around a lot and slumped back down to Nov 2017 levels. Facebook meanwhile lost every penny of its value in the last week, but is still as higher than the April low.
These are not at all comparable and putting them on a chart together isn't credible.
While this is true, Tencent also owns major shares in a ton of the games that might be considered among the most popular, as well as minor shares in many of the companies they don't control.
Arena of Valor, most popular mobile MOBA game; 80m daily players as of Dec 2017 and I believe it's currently the biggest game worldwide despite mostly being popular in China (I think there are even stories of politicians delaying press conferences to finish a match lmao) - developed and published by Tencent
Fortnite - Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games
Clash of Clans - Tencent owns ~85% of Supercell
PUBG - They're working on acquiring 10% of Bluehole, developed PUBG mobile, and managed the (hugely successful) China release
This is completely ignoring their significant shares in Tesla, Snapchat, etc. And the fact that they're like, not an actual investment firm and have their own business, including WeChat, QQ, and their AI lab. League's decline in popularity is certainly bad for them, but relative to their entire operations it's only a small hit. This recent drop in market value is, in my opinion, better attributed to the doubts over tech stock valuations due to Facebook and Twitter.
When I used to play MotherLoad, the world was still a bright place, full of possibility. I was on track to finish from a prestigious high school, accepted into a prestigious university, and obviously going to end up pretty comfortable in life.
Little did I know, that within me I had the seeds of mental illness growing. Perhaps, one of the signs, if I only knew to pay attention to it, was how "addicting" games were to me. I think the world back then just thought a lot less about those things, if you could still manage to be outwardly successful.
No one worried about what it meant that some kids finding a vibrant, "safer" environment in video games, than in the real world.
Sometimes I upvote things purely for their literary quality.
I have no knowledge of "Motherload," nor any interest in modern games. But those few lines about your (your character's ?) interaction with it, makes me want to know how this story unfolds.
I loved that game. I wrote a copy of it for desktop in c++ at the end of high school:
https://github.com/Sytten/MineDeeper
Please don't judge my code quality I was 16 at the time :)
No offense, but that comment goes to show US centric HN is. This is like valuing Microsoft based on XBox sales, only that it plays an even smaller role.
Yes, they do, QQ being exhibit A. But League of Legends was supposed to be their first major step into the larger world of 100 million player+ games, worldwide. Riot has yet to produce another game, and their seat atop the gaming market is now gone.
It wasn't their biggest money maker, but it was their biggest money maker outside of China, and investors really liked the idea of global growth.
pubg was bound to be a flash in the pan. i don't know how they would be able to fix it short of completely reworking it. 10 minutes of looting, then rip after getting shot from across the map
Measured in revenue, it has to be Fortnite: Epic is apparently printing money to the tune of $100MM/month from it. And anecdotally, over the course of just a couple months it certainly seems like every single person under the age of 18 in the United States started playing it.
depends on what sphere you're looking at. the overwatch league is poised to take over in the esports scene while fortnite is gobbling up the casual playerbase.
note that this is north america focused, i have no clue about europe, south korea, or china.
Sure, they're a pretty successful company. I bet it's a decent buy long term.
Though, if you use ethics in some form to guide your investment choice, you may want to consider whether supporting creators of social credit systems conflicts with your ethics. Maybe it doesn't, but.. it's worth consideration if you are guided by such things.
There’s a lot of things wrong where I live (The USA), including guantanamo bay, invasion of Iraq. I may not support any of those things, but I still contribute to taxes and function in society. Choosing to freeze oneself is entirely impractical, even if some parts of one’s society is immoral.
That being said, the ethics you mention is not universal. The social credit system may be controversial, but generally a detached western viewpoint is hardly one who can speak to the morality of it on behalf of Chinese people. The only thing objectively inmoral is imposing one’s own moral standards and viewpoints on others.
"The only thing objectively inmoral is imposing one’s own moral standards and viewpoints on others." So the only really moral thing is to a) think that there are no universal moral standards b) universally apply this moral standard of no universal moral standards.
You have a great mind to be able to hold both of these thoughts at once, and be able to sincerely express them both in a single sentence. I assume then that you would not have a problem with an Afghani policeman who recently immigrated to your country raping your kids, because that is morally acceptable in his culture [1]?
Does divestment from a corporation actually provide an incentive for the corporation to change its behavior?
Maybe if you were boycotting their IPO. But the mechanism of influence is much less clear if you're just declining to buy their stock secondhand on the exchanges...
I have no stand on "social credit systems" since I don't know enough about them. On the other hand, I really hate people virtue signaling especially with questionable stands just so they could feel morally superior. I'm going to buy tcehy tomorrow just because.
I went out of my way to couch that in 'if this plays a role in your decisions' to try to avoid this impression. Some people are straight looking at the financial figures, and others have an ethical component to their investment. The comment was for that second audience.
That said, I'm not sure how viable this third approach is, of basing investment decisions upon the emotional response to perceived interpretation of a single stranger's anonymous internet comment.
On the surface it looks somewhat like an equivalent of including ethics in the decision making process, if one were to boil ethics down into simply an emotional response. I'm sure a lot of people see things that upset them as 'wrong' and things they approve of as 'right', without evaluation of any independent standard.
But however one interprets ethics, it doesn't really factor into this third process because it's not based on the company, it's based on a reaction to an individual (or more likely, a categorization of an individual). This is just putting your money where your 'hate' is (perceived virtue signaling by stranger), without consideration of the company.
This type of decision making process opens the potential for a lot of manipulation of the decision maker. Maybe in a few years an advertising program will pick up on this in some form of behavioral analysis of the decision maker's internet activity. Perhaps it interprets similar comments and then tracks it to actual decisions, creating an archetype of the personality that can be driven in such a manner.
Then it starts the targeting. Maybe at first it promotes some posts but not others into the decision maker's field of view to ensure an appropriate pre-disposition. EG, if virtue signaling is the trigger, it identifies and promotes these to put the decision maker into a rebellious state of mind. Then it forces the trigger with some specific advice designed to gain a similar reaction to what it has seen from this decision maker in the past.
Not to bring social credit back into it, but by way of comparison, the above is only a mildly dark pattern in algorithmically driven social and psychological manipulation. It's also probably a lot less likely to occur in the next decade.
My buy was a protest buy just as much as your protest non-buy. Of course it's emotional. We are just protesting the different things.
"...without consideration of the company." So now investment is based on company's performance? Where is the ethical standard?
Manipulation of people's emotion has long been used in investment. Just an example, you have used guilt with ethics to manipulate people from investing in a company.
I get that it is a protest-buy, but it's not in relation to the company in any manner. It's in relation to an anonymous internet stranger. You can base your decisions on anything you like, it's a free country, but this is kind of like making investment predictions by staring at the clouds.
They earned $6 billion in profit in 2017. They were sporting a ~$580 billion market cap. Paying near 100 times earnings for a business whose growth is rapidly slowing, is not a great idea typically. They've massively pulled future returns forward. More likely, in seven or eight years when they have an optimistic best case scenario $20-25 billion in profit, they won't be worth a lot more than their 52 week high. Multiple compression always comes for stocks like these eventually.
That's very accusatory. I'm just trying to make a nice experience for users.
As I said the GIF version would use more bandwidth, so if browsers force me to use GIFs instead of an HTML5 videos it's making things worse for the user by that metric.
If you want to browse an internet without images (or GIFS, or HTML5 gifs) I think you should be able to but I don't think that's what most people, including myself, want.
Aside from that though video autoplaying is part of the spec. I think that browsers not following specs properly has made the web a much worse place overall. Browser incompatibility has significantly hindered the web as an application platform.
It's not binary. I can name _many_ governments far less corrupt than China. Humans will always be corrupt to some degree; the amount and type of corruption present in a government is what makes all the difference.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. My point is that China is amongst the worst actors in the world. The fact that corruption exists elsewhere doesn't create a moral equivalence.
