The last week on Twitter has been really an amazing string of WTF, even by the impressive standards of Elon. It's really funny when you put all the pieces together.
it's important to start at the beginning. Twitter's pretty broke.
Twitter got into this position largely by deciding that getting people to subscribe to Twitter Blue was the future, and would be enough to make Twitter less dependant on Advertising. Remember when they made the hard switch to get rid of old legacy checkmarks? No one converted.
Blue checkmarks were viewed so terribly that Elon Musk forced them on certain selected celebrities -- many of whom then felt obligated to stress to their followers that no, they would not pay for this garbage website.
But this shouldn't be a surprise as Twitter was basically treading water before Elon acquired it -- and immediately saddled the company with $13 billion dollars of debt, which require constant debt servicing (you know, interest payments).
(As an aside, congratulations to the banks who loaned Elon money. You figured out a way to make Twitter profitable, at least for you! Good for you!)
A huge part of the problem is that advertising has declined massively. You've probably noticed that your ads are now less likely to be McDonald's and Acura and more likely to be Cheech & Chong's gummies and various level crap.
Which made it all the more surprising when last week a bunch of blue checkmarked Tweeters reported getting informed they were getting big payouts from Twitter, in the $20K range.
When pressed upon it, Elon stressed that the payouts were based on ads that were served in replies to their threads to other verified members, stressing that content to free users was easy to manipulate.
I doubt Elon's advertisers are paying based on just subscriber views.
This is also funny because a core promise of Twitter Blue is that you won't see very many ads! So Twitter Blue went from the feature that would make ads unnecessary to one where Blue users MUST be shown ads in order to succeed!
Also, if you think this sounds like a pyramid scheme or an MLM... yeah, kinda does! It's a transparent attempt to goose blue subscriptions with the promise that you, too, could be getting $25K checks instead of being one of the greater fools shelling out $8/month.
Over on Bluesky, @ParkerMolloy noted that one certain blue check mark user with 1.8M users had not gotten a check -- and wasn't happy about it. Here are some screenshots she grabbed.
Despite being an unqualified garbage person, the esteemed Mr. Turd2 is an endless source of amusement to me, given that he constantly complains about being treated unfairly by Elon's twitter DESPITE BEING ARTIFICIALLY ALGORITHMICALLY BOOSTED.
Another person in Catturd's circle of MAGA doofuses did a little research and discovered that, no, it wasn't a systematic thing, just checks sent out to a handful of handpicked posters -- mysteriously, posters that interact with Elon a lot.
As @TaylorLorenz reports, they describe this picking of winners and losers as a 'human review'.
As Taylor reports, people who have worked at Twitter in the past and know the numbers at play know that this is all a PR stunt.
So who did Elon handpick for this program? Well, a high profile sex trafficker for starters.
Media Matters (@mmfa) did a pretty good roundup. Surprise, it's all of the right-wing dumbosphere that specialize in racism and homophobia/transphobia that Elon likes to interact with on a regular basis!
The message is clear. If you want to make money from Twitter, be a right-wing influencer who regularly takes a shit on marginalized minorities.
And now, Elon has announced he plans to double these payouts. But as you keep these promises in mind, remember.... Twitter doesn't have any money, and has no interesting new revenue pipelines coming.
All of this feels very much like a publicity stunt to try to keep their key influencers from leaving. But why would they feel the need to do that? Gee, that's a real puzzle.
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If the recent rumors of Broadsword buying SWTOR are true - which I believe by the way - it could be very good for SWTOR. SWTOR still earns considerable money if you’re a small studio like Broadsword. Them investing more in the title frankly makes more sense than EA doing so.
The confounding factor is, of course, the shape of the deal and how big a cut EA gets from any ongoing revenue.
But SWTOR is still a lively game with dedicated spenders, and it gets a boost of users any time new Star Wars content comes out.
Another way to think about this conundrum is that if you were an executive and you had a choice between investing in SWTOR or instead investing in FIFA or Madden, what would you do?
Okay, real talk, let's talk Twitter Blue. A short thread on why this whole misadventure is so stupid and doomed.
I've designed monetization for F2P MMOs. I know about subscription fees, and I know about free options, I know about enticing players to upsell to the sub.
1/
When selling an MMO sub, the important thing to do is to add actual, tangible value to the sub, so that if you're going to spend money in the game, the subscription is the first thing you should buy. Subs are great because they're fairly predictable income.
2/
MMOs have lots of things you can offer subscriptions. Faster levelling, faster mounts, early access to features, lower cooldowns on teleports. US MMOs tend to sell convenience and not power to the sub, because the US audience hates buying power. (This is less true in asia).
3/
Two points I’ll make about this beyond ‘lol crypto games’.
1) In board games and traditional digital games, poop games are ‘cheap’ games. Board games about poop are ‘family fare’ you play with your 5th grader, and you buy them at Target.
Video games about poop are a little rarer, but they’re usually also bargain bin fare aimed at 13 year olds. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is the only one that I can remember having a serious budget. (Maybe the South Park games too, I don’t remember).
So anyway it’s interesting that this is the perceived tastes of the 20-something money-obsessed tech bros.
Once upon a time, there was a thriving social space that was utterly destroyed by capricious management destroying the community's goodwill through rushed and ill-advised changes to meet a ridiculous bullshit deadline. I'm talking of course about the NGE.
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I should note before I begin that I did NOT work on the NGE - or even at Sony. But Austin's a small town, and as such I know many people who did. But I freely accept that my viewpoint from the bleachers may differ from the memories of those who were in the trenches.
Anyway, Star Wars Galaxies was an MMO launched by Sony Online Entertainment in 2003. The game was built by a team led by Rich Vogel and Raph Koster, a team built around the recently laid off Freelancer Online team. (I still want a Freelancer Online badly)