I don’t think you do get it. You own it all, it doesn’t matter how much you sell it for or what you’re owed, the point is ITS YOURS TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT WITH. Some dude who likes your woodworking skills walks past, sits on your chair - does he now get a say in what you do with that chair? No he fkn doesn’t. Its your chair.
I really do fail to see how someone who I actually think is smarter than me is failing to grasp this. EHG/Last Epoch - person, thing, mystery, riddle or rhyme - its not yours bro, it never will be. They can do whatever they want with it. The fact you sit here on some moderately heightened horse saying they should have been forced into bankruptcy just makes you (at least to me) look like a bit of a lunatic.
I’m saying that in a situation where it is a individual contract this situation couldn’t even happen. Nobody would pay for taking over badly handled work for such an extreme remuneration.
It all comes from the value of holding an IP for future unrealized potential and it all comes from company value being tied to goodwill (small g). Without those 2 being in play the value wouldn’t have been 96 million, it would’ve been substantially less. Probably 5? 10? Something like that I imagine.
That would reflect the ‘actual worth’ of the product itself, which is what Krafton acquired after all, right? That hence would be a ‘reasonable remuneration for the effort’.
So if I spend once again… 100000 and create and outcome of let’s say 20000… am I owed more?
Ok so we’ve gone from you knowing where all there money is being sent and seeing their financials to accurately estabilshing the value of a gaming studio on which all your information gathered has been taken from “the internet”
Bro you are owed whatever someone is willing to give you. You are not owed what you spend, you are not owed “market value” you are not owed “appraised value” you are owed what someone out there is willing to pay for your product wether it’s more or less than the original cost. If you brought a bitcoin for 65k and then the market dips to 30k I’m guessing you would try sell it on an exchange with the same arguement telling the exchange you paid 65k and that’s what you’re entitled to? Bruh.
Lets just hold this arguement which you clearly lost a grasp on for a minute and circle back to this point - EHG/Last Epoch is not yours, it doesn’t matter what they spent, what it’s worth in your eyes, how bad you think it is, wether you think it should be shut down and bankrupted. It is NOT yours, you have no say and you sure as fk don’t own Krafton so what they paid 96 million for is none of your business.
You sit on these forums as if you’re on some kind of board or own stock/shares and are demanding they answer to you. Get over it man. It’s an ARPG if you don’t like the company or the game which is apparent you really don’t then just move on.
If you’re here because you’re lonley and love a chat then that’s ok too I’m more than happy to engage but I just merely request you stop always seeming so negative and put a fkn smiley face in your comment just once.
You still don’t get the premise here. That’s still not what I’m speaking about.
I’m talking about ‘fairness’ and not ‘what we are expected from former situations to be the outcome’.
So I’m asking you now. What do you think is a fair price solely to acquisition the product.
My argumentation line for the thought project is that we need to remove 'unrealized potential* as much as possible to achieve that. But it is something that’s ingrained in corporations, which is what causes a tons of problems as a side-effect.
IP’s have ‘unrealized potential’, stock prices are all based on ‘unrealized potential’, company acquisition is hence also based on ‘unrealized potential’.
Remove that all in your mind and tell me… what would be the actual price a individual would get for a similar work as what EHG did? mind you, solely to run the product, not to own the IP.
They put years into the game - you can’t value that. You can value they sold over 3 million copies before 2025 the year Krafton brought it. You can value that the average cost according to google was USD 34.99 which is 105 million USD which if you then take basic maths is actually a 9 million dollar loss at 96 millon.
Honestly bro it doesn’t matter how you argue this point.
This point is not even valid - who cares what Krafton paid, who cares what EHG is worth, like why does any of that make you excited? Tell me - instead of arguing write one of your insanely well grammarized posts on why all of this information is so important to you personally. I’m very intrigued.
I’ll say it then clearly: Nobody gives a single shit what someone else puts in terms of efforts into something when it comes down to a business. That doesn’t bring money in, that’s the metric for a hobby.
Also you’re avoiding my question 3 times in a row now. I asked it repeatedly. ‘What do you think the actual value of the product is? Solely when looking at it as a product?’. I haven’t even asked for a deep-seated explanation, a baseline one at best. And there is nothing coming, you’re still arguing about some concepts which have nothing to do with clear-cut logic rather then emotions.
Ok if I was to walk into the city today see a business in a shop, it had 7 employees, they showed me their books - income/loss/profit etc and their forecasts I would then have a rough idea.
I don’t know what premises EHG operate out of, I don’t know their rent, I dont have their income/true profits/losses, I dont know their exact head count or their forecasts so how in the fuck (excuse the swearing it was called for) I would value that - even the first paragraph which I made up, I wouldn’t really have a rough idea because I was an infrastructure engineer/technical lead who changed careers and now works for himself doing IT and Insolvency recruitment, I don’t even do my own wages I have an accountant. How would I know? What are your credentials? What makes you a business evaluation expert?
I’m not talking about forecasts either. I’m talking about seeing what the studio is, how many employees it has, what exactly the product is as a result to the customer and how much it costs roughly every month. Hence the place, the employees, the product itself and the assets you’ll acquire.
Then think about how much money they roughly make a month, you can make a estimation for that… versus they money they pay solely for upkeep.
And then as the last thing think about how much money you’ll need to spend before the product even provides you a single cent in actual profits.
And then you get a rough ballpark for ‘how much could I give them reasonable to take this out of their hands, with the work I’ll have to put in to make it successful’.
Nothing more, nothing less. We don’t need to talk about ‘how much effort they put in!’, that’s meaningless. We don’t need to talk about ‘but the employees!’ that’s also meaningless. We don’t need to talk about ‘the projections!’ same in that case.
You as a person want to run the studio, think solely what it’s worth in assets, what you need to spend to make it run, how long it’ll take to make a profit. Then base your value on that number.
No need for all the stuff around. Any person which works actively in a trade is able to make those projections as a estimation. That’s the absolute basic to be able to plan your own business.
Your investment of $96m & the desire to “get it back”. No sane person or company would spend a large amount of money & then immediately shut the thing down without there being some other form of upside that is valued at at least a similar or higher amount. And it’s not like EHG has an IP or invention or something that makes it impossible for other companies to successfully launch arpgs (& Krafton owning it & then shutting it down makes it impossible for other arpgs to make money).
But they aren’t IRL. Stop confusing your personal desires with reality.
I used to be the FC for a dental chain. What you’re saying is just wrong.
Why? You’ve just said that companies can own other companies. You finding it odd is a you thing.
No, that is a change of ownership, which you’ve just said gives rise to re-evaluation.
The historic datapoint is baked into the price.
Not necessarily, depends on the Ts & Cs of the sale contract.
Steam is not Gabe Newell, to say so is a falacious argument & ridiculous.
Up to the value of his investment in the company, yes. Ignoring braking the law.
Yes & no. He is still the CEO, which is a position that bears responsiblity, he’s just not the owner, which is a different position that bears responsibility.
You know you give me grief for using emotive terms? Yeah, that.
And I could state for a premis that gravity doesn’t exist. You can make up whatever rules you want for your arguments, doesn’t mean that they bear any resemblance to reality.
Again, that isn’t how current law works. You can say whatever you want, but that doesn’t make it real, or particularly useful.
And if you haven’t licensed it from Disney, they’ll sue the ever living shit out of you. Please, try it.
That’s called licensing in this scenario & you don’t have to. Do you think IP is a patent? Even then someone would have to license it from you to use it.
You do know this isn’t how it works IRL don’t you?
Not really, they’re just different.
If you want to just make shit up & then argue as if it were real, that’s your choice, but it’s not how it works in reality.
That makes them an asset, not a product. Two specific words with specific meanings in this context. You can’t change them because you want to.
It really doesn’t. You’re just having difficulty getting your head around them.
Again, not how it works in reality.
But that’s entirely made up. Hence, not useful. Clownish perhaps? I’m all for thought experiments, but not when they diverge radically from reality & you confusing them with reality.
And this is why the thought experiment really isn’t useful. It’s just too diverged from reality.
Doesn’t matter. Owner’s risk is limited. By definition.
Nobody outside of EHG/Krafton knows this. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Again, why it’s not useful. I have a thought experiment where I’m the most attractive man on the planet & every woman’s really hot & they all want me. Is that a useful thought experiment? Not really.
Why do you say that?
There would be some form of time limit to it, based in law (or the original owners dieing).
Not quite. The employees create the IP & the product, the company owns it because that’s part of the contract of employment.
Yes, that’s the thing I was referring to.
Not all of them, no.
The latter.
A fraction of what you said you’d provide. If you wasted lots of material & have relatively low “sales”, you’ll go bankrupt. Your customers don’t owe you more because you ruined a load of materials.
Pretty much.
Given your original wood-based example, if you bought €100k of materials & produced €10k worth of saleable product, you get €10k. That’s the “market value” of what you actually produced. You being bad at woodworking & wasting €90k of materials is on you & you have historically been very “git gud scrub”. So yeah, git gud, buy €100k of materials & make >>€100k worth of saleable things. It’s not rocket science.
1 : I have no idea how many copies they sell per month
2 : I have no idea how many MTX they sell per month
3 : I literally just told you I dont know their accurate head count (please read properly it’s your self proclaimed strength)
4 : Assets again I said I don’t know where they operate, do they own the building, are they all working from home, are all their devices company devices? They have at least 1 data centre I know of - how much space do they rent, how many racks and servers, how much b/w do they purchase
5: You’re starting to seem very desperate
6: I honestly just want to hug you
When have you lost the line of me still talking about the thought experiment and wanting you to engage with it? I can simply not say anything at all since I know what the limitations in reality under the current state are. So what’s a ‘potential situation’ argument for when you don’t move into the potential? I don’t need fact-checks unless I state facts which are wrong, then I need a reprimant
No u!
Care to explain or just throw stuff out?
Not in the thought experiment, which is still the thing I’m arguing about.
Once again, differentiation between reality and thought experiment.
Reality: They pay for the company, they own the company. Officially nothing happens as it’s still ‘the same’. Business as usual.
Thought experiment:
You cannot sell the entity. Hence you can only sell the product. For that the evaluation has to happen.
50,1% ownership, he’s the majority owner. Who can tell him ‘no’? If there is a singular leader and nobody can stop that person from doing things (inside the legal framework obviously) then Steam is formed after his view. It doesn’t matter if his view is to micro-manage everything or to let people come to him to tell him what the optimal outcome would be and him listening to their expertise. He can say ‘no’ to everyone and do whatever if he so desires.
Sure, and if he drives the whole product into the ground in a manner which is ‘just’ mismanagement,… what does he personally have to pay?
No risk = no responsibility. Something that’s been quite lost. He can ruin the company entirely if Krafton just does nothing and lets him do it, causing 100 people to loose their jobs worst-case… and he’ll still have gotten his salary, just no bonus.
Well, then you cannot do a thought experiment and only blindly follow rules without expanding your horizon through ‘what if’s?’. They are a necessity and the more you do the better you can argue for actual topics when there is a decision to be made. That’s not related to the topic even, that’s a universal thing for every area of life.
It’s only moving on with snapping back to the actual situation rather then keeping the discussion in the set-up premise, which I was curious for the answers but seemingly won’t get. Hence not interesting.
Well I dont see anyone currently typing so I think we’re all done and the title of this thread has offically been renamed to “Well done Kulze you learned”
hahah omg, stopppp typing you know thats a joke bro
Ok, so from what I understand, your position is that whenever there is a leadership change then the company should change it’s name, because it’s no longer the same. The core has been changed.
So Microsoft shouldn’t be Microsoft anymore once Bill Gates left as CEO (and would change names 20 times after that), Apple should have changed name once Jobs wasn’t CEO anymore, etc.
It is, after all, the exact same thing, as the core has changed. Whether because it was sold or because they were replaced makes no difference.
Judd can do the same. What stops him? He can even decide to go full P2W gacha. People have change of hearts. And notoriously did in the past.
After all, just take a look at Wolcen. No leadership changes, no selling of the company, and yet the end result was the same.
In fact, you and others were defending that Judd should just shut down the company rather than selling. So why would that be an issue to you?
It is not. A corporate entity is treated as a product. Which is owned by one or more individuals. And which can then be traded or even disposed of (shut down).
A corporate entity is ALWAYS owned by someone.
It is not. An entity is ALWAYS a product. Microsoft is a product. Zara is a product. The local bakery is a product. They have owners and they can be traded like any other products.
Whether your entity product produces physical products, digital products, digital services or just intelectual services doesn’t change anything. It’s still a product.
Why would they be on the same hierarchical level? Does that mean that EHG, a gaming studio, was inherently on a higher hierarchical level as Unknown Worlds Entertainment, a gaming studio?
Does being owned by an individual or an entity change your hierarchy?
What would have happened if instead of Krafton buying it, it was instead Bill Gates that decided to fork over 100M and be the new owner of EHG. Does the fact that it’s an individual change anything?
Marvel, Sony and Spiderman would like to disagree. As would dozens of other examples of IPs being sold.
Again, no. Every entity is always owned by someone. Krafton is owned by someone. Thus, when Krafton buys EHG, EHG is now owned by the owners of Krafton. You just have a longer chain to follow until you reach the owners.
An entity can also create a new entity. They’re still owned by the owners of the original entity. For example, Blizzard created Blizzard North. Blizzard still existed. Blizzard Norh was owned by Blizzard, which means they were owned by Blizzard’s owners.
However much someone values it. If you try to sell it to person A he might say it’s only worth 10, but person B might see some artistic value in it, for example, and think it’s worth billions.
Every product has as much value as people give to it. That is why you get plenty of products being sold for way more than just cost+markup. Like iphones. Or Michael Jordan snickers. Or any painting by a famous artist.
So if someone looks at your products and decide they’re worth bilions, they’re worth billions. If no one decides your product is worth more than 10, your product is worth 10. Even if it cost you 1 million to produce.
In the case of EHG, Krafton decided that the EHG studio was worth 100M. Probably because of all the great ideas they had with LE, along with the potential LE has of becoming a great game, potentially even a great IP. Or potentially for some future game as well.
The point is that Krafton bought EHG, a studio. Not LE, a game/IP. Thus they get what EHG produces, which is game development. The fact that they also get LE is just a factor in how much the company is worth, just like how many cars the company owns is another factor.
Again, using your example, you spent 1M creating shoddy carpentry work. If someone looks at it and thinks it’s worth 1B, it’s not fair? Why not? It’s the value they give to it.
No, the position in this thought experiment is that it’s not based on the CEO, it’s based on the owners, which could only be individuals and not companies on top of that.
Which makes up the whole premise.
Because he’s not owning it? So he has no control in that regard?
If you own 0% of the shares you have 0% of the decision power for it. You can say ‘I wanna disband the company’ and the owner just says ‘no’.
It’s a puppet position in terms of decision-power. There is no weight behind it, and potentially even communication is controlled. We don’t know, we cannot know as it’s not available as information from the outside.
Unlikely but possible, wouldn’t be the first time after all.
So ‘no’ he cannot. Imagine having decision rights over things not belonging to you, that’s not how it goes outside of specific legal situations.
Also don’t conflate topics together again, you love doing that.
Then you’re ill-informed. Obviously not ‘through the bank’ but a ‘thing’ cannot be sued, a thing cannot enter contracts, a thing cannot own property, in the US companies are also under constitutional rights protected for example and they company has religious freedom.
Also the definition is ‘corporate personhood’.
A corporation is distinct from the shareholders, hence owners. If it fails their private equity is protected, they have limited liability, hence are seen as separate ‘entities’ rather then it being a thing under the responsibility of the owner/owners.
It can as a struct keep existing even if the owners die.
That’s very very much ‘treatment as a person’.
Sure, they cannot vote, they have no privacy protection and can’t call for the 5th in the US. But that’s primarily it.
Just because a company is owned doesn’t mean it isn’t treated legally as a person.
Depends on the used definition. If you include ‘system’ as a product then yes. Otherwise no.
Could be another language barrier here as a ‘product’ in my country has to be tangible. And a company is intangible. A system would be a service here. The software for a system a product.
Once again, premise of the thought experiment.
Individual (person) cannot be owned by other individual (person) uppermost hierarchy here as they have the ability to own everything below it.
Right below is corporation (entity) which hence is on the same layer as any other corporation (entity) and hence cannot be owned by one.
Below that is goods/services/contracts and so on. Which have no concept of ownership included anyway.
The argument is that the hierarchy is not allowed to shift, hence it can only be owned by individuals. This also includes that ownership of entities through stocks can only happen by individuals, never by companies.
Then you fail to adhere to the framework of the thought experience much like Llama did, so also not interested as it’s not relevant.
Bingo!
And on what is the value perception based?
In the EHG example it’s based on unrealized potential on stock price, on unrealized potential through future projections and on unrealized potential on brand value itself. 3 unrealized potentials raising the functional value upwards.
With them best possible removed you have only the future potential on direct income rather then stocks and brand power included. Hence merit basis mostly. That means assets already existing, the investment needed to make it profitable and the time needed to make it profitable.
This is a massively lower number then the unrealized potential provides.
Since stocks can be acquired and sold and their value not hinged on total asset value but on speculative measures they can be pushed up/down respectively with management of public perception.
Hence you create value out of ‘nothing’ which then isn’t ever realized as a ‘failed measure’ is hard to prove to be market manipulation. And this is a serious problem actually, but also not directly part of the topic.
Though it is what creates stock bubbles, prime ones are the housing market and the AI market being two well-known bubbles. Housing through artificial scarcity which pushes individual prices upwards and the AI bubble is because the overestimation of the short-term impact of the technology is leading companies and individuals which aren’t well informed to pay for the stocks at massively overestimated prices.
A big reason why speculative measures on a stock market are extremely detrimental. Which is why stock prices are actually better suited if they’re falling under a regulation to be only allowed to be sold for realized total assets on a market. Hence a regulated market which mandates the value on asset estimation.
Which is different from owning goods directly, which are tangible rather then another meta-struct to allow more actionable methods.
No sane person would do it.
But it’s commonplace in corporate trading.
So before answering your question I wanna ask you to think about the ‘why’ there.
As for the quesiton itself: If a idiot is so brainless to do it then they can. But it wouldn’t ever be the close to the norm. With stocks it is the norm.
There is not a single law upholding sueing an item. Only a product liability lawsuit.
Sure, you can state you wanna sue, but it’ll be dismissed in court right away.
And my guy… you shouldn’t state ‘shot down’ when both Llama and DJ failed utterly to stay even in the framework of the example. Also it’s kinda hard to be ‘shot down’ when the answers don’t even relate to the topic stated.
Unless you say ‘but no! Because banana!’ is a viable way to ‘shoot someone down’ when they talk about income for example. It was the same quality a large portion sadly.
Also you shouldn’t throw stones when sitting in a glass-house. You made a opinion and defended something while at the same time stating ‘I got no clue what the situation is’. That’s not quality argumentation, that’s just a sign of a lacking thought process for that specific topic.
You’re still open to inform yourself about estimated monthly costs, estimated monthly revenue and the actual estimated asset value of the company to make a informed argument. My number was actually fairly high set there to account for the potential future revenue it can potentially provide, which is already including unrealized value into it hence.
I obviously meant that Judd could have not sold to Krafton and instead shut down after a week. Or Krafton could buy it and shut it down after a week. What is the difference?
In fact, as I mentioned, shutting down the company is what you wanted instead of selling to Krafton. So again, what’s the difference who makes the decision to shut down?
What you seem to not grasp is that there is always an owner making the decisions. Krafton is an abstract concept that doesn’t make decisions. The owners of Krafton do. So nothing changed except that EHG was owned by Judd and Co and now they’re owned by Krafton’s owners.
It’s not legally treated as a person. It has a special status in between them. But a company cannot exist without an individual or individuals owning it. When a company is bought by another company, they are now owned, for all intents and purposes, by the owners of the company that bought them.
A company is not a person because one of the fundamental principles is that you cannot own a person. However, a company cannot be not owned. It has to be owned. Because only property (physical, intelectual or otherwise) can be traded.
When you sue a company, you are simply using a legal simplification. The people responsible for that company (or responsible at that time) are very much on trial when that happens. And if necessary, they will even do jail time.
So the owners and CEOs are very much still fully responsible for the actions of the company.
Just because most use legal loopholes to evade those responsibilities doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Probably. Product is simply something that can be traded. You give something and get something in return.
Whether a product is physical, digital or intelectual doesn’t change that it’s still a product.
Why not, though? An entity has a special status between both. They’re treated as a person in some regards, mostly for convenience. But they’re still a product and thus can be owned. Even by other products.
But this fails when you realize that, for all intents and purposes (even legal ones), the owners of EHG are now the owners of Krafton. Not Krafton itself. Their owners.
This is true of anything. That’s the whole basis of the value of art. Or of anything, really.
Milk only has the value that people attribute to it. If you have enough people disliking milk, then milk is worthless. If you have enough people that consider milk as a high value product, then milk becomes more expensive or even a luxury item. Even though the cost of producing milk hasn’t changed at all in either case.
Same for any product.
I’m all for thought experiments, but not when they diverge radically from reality & you confusing them with reality.