• Hey everyone, staff have documented a list of banned content and subject matter that we feel are not consistent with site values, and don't make sense to host discussion of on Famiboards. This list (and the relevant reasoning per item) is viewable here.
  • Do you have audio editing experience and want to help out with the Famiboards Discussion Club Podcast? If so, we're looking for help and would love to have you on the team! Just let us know in the Podcast Thread if you are interested!

Discussion Worst business decisions ever.

CastletonSnob said:
What are the worst business decisions you've ever seen?

Blockbuster passing on Netflix has to be up there.
Click to expand...
Following on that, after Blockbuster closed all the US stores, here in Mexico the franchisee tried to save it and renew it by adding a digital offer but of course they were so behind technology that catching up to any other streaming service at that point was impossible and just keep selling movies and games. After a couple of months they sold all the stores to big corp which where supposed to save it and rebrand it to B Store

7cMtZl2.jpg


This happened in march 2016, they closed all the stores in october of the same year.
 
0
maybe I'm just salty, but muskrat buying twitter seems up there.

not even is just buying twitter overpciced with your own overvalued stocks as colleteral questionable--but that creates a situation where you need to make twitter even more profitable to maintain wealth and muskrat just cannot help himself and actively makes Twitter worse (both for end user and bottom line). The man is actively destroying his own wealth.
 
Last edited:
Nickelodeon passing on Adventure Time, which would become a huge hit for Cartoon Network, and one of the best and most influential cartoons of the 2010s.

Nickelodeon also passed on Ed Edd n Eddy, which also became a hit on Cartoon Network.

And just in case you thought Nickelodeon’s decision making regarding which shows to pick up couldn’t get any worse, they passed on Phineas and Ferb, which became one of Disney Channel’s biggest hits.

Now, you can say that AT, EEnE, and P&F wouldn’t have been the same show or wouldn’t have been as successful on Nickelodeon, but that doesn’t change the fact that Nickelodeon passed on those shows, and they became HUGE hits for their competitors. It also doesn’t change the fact that Nickelodeon passed on those shows, and instead picked up OBJECTIVELY terrible shows like Fanboy and Chum-Chum, Breadwinners, and Planet Sheen.
 
The Fingerpoke of Doom, combined with revealing that Mankind won the WWF Championship, not realizing how over Mankind was. That 1-2 punch was the beginning of the end for WCW.
 
0
Easily, blackberry not taking the iPhone seriously and thinking it was a toy no one would buy. They had the smart phone market in their hands and allowed it to all slip away.
 
0
Rare selling itself to Microsoft, and Microsoft thinking it was getting Donkey Kong out of the deal.

Silicon Knights leaving Nintendo because of Wii and the Blue Ocean strategy then accomplishing nothing for a decade besides getting countersued into oblivion by Epic Games. Then, Nintendo started focusing on the exact kinds of games Silicon Knights was known for.

Any small company that partnered with Amazon only to have their ideas stolen by Amazon and ultimately getting driven out of business as Amazon undercut their prices and rigged search results.
 
Apple had a golden unicorn with the Macintosh but every single fucking thing went wrong with it

1. The price kept ballooning due to development hell, scope creep, and most egregiously that Super Bowl commercial
2. In order to have early software, they partnered with some unscrupulous companies, one of which kept unnecessarily asking complex implementation questions that naïve and excitable engineers happily answered. You can probably guess which company that was.
3. Lastly, that same company had Apple's allegedly fantastic internally-developed BASIC environment killed as part of a contract, leaving their most critical feature out of their hands.

Was there any timeline in which Apple maintained marketshare of personal computing? Probably not. They sure did make run into some serious trouble in this one, though.
 
0
Catsylvania said:
Rare selling itself to Microsoft, and Microsoft thinking it was getting Donkey Kong out of the deal.
Click to expand...
Just want to say this isn’t quite true - the story comes from a MS executive touring the Rare studio, seeing a DK poster and going “huh, we own Donkey Kong now?”

The terms of the actual buyout were very clear (and they’d have to be with that kind of money). One change that did in fact happen is the DKC characters were owned by Rare, and Banjo was owned by Nintendo. With the buyout, that reversed.
 
Mekanos said:
Just want to say this isn’t quite true - the story comes from a MS executive touring the Rare studio, seeing a DK poster and going “huh, we own Donkey Kong now?”

The terms of the actual buyout were very clear (and they’d have to be with that kind of money). One change that did in fact happen is the DKC characters were owned by Rare, and Banjo was owned by Nintendo. With the buyout, that reversed.
Click to expand...

I'm not really sure it was the "DKC characters" that were Rare owned as much as it was just the DK64 originals specifically for some reason.



Seems like everything from DKC1-3 was always Nintendo owned.

EDIT: Like, Diddy and even Krunch were 100% owned by Nintendo prior to the buyout.

 
Last edited:
Mekanos said:
Just want to say this isn’t quite true - the story comes from a MS executive touring the Rare studio, seeing a DK poster and going “huh, we own Donkey Kong now?”.
Click to expand...
It’s funnier the other way. I reject your reality and substitute my own.
 
0
Square Enix releasing Final Fantasy XIII for Xbox 360. Talk about alienating the Japanese market and shooting themselves in the foot.
 
The solo cup company sinking themselves spending a billion dollars acquiring their main competitor just so they could get the rights to that wavy 90s cup design


Also shoutout to RCA for killing themselves trying to put video on vinyl for 40 years

 
Enron's power plant in India is probably the worst in recent times. I believe that shitshow was the biggest skeleton on their closet when they started being investigated. The plant still hasn't turned a profit 23 years later, correct me if I'm wrong.

Euro Disney, and the Hong Kong park to a lesser extent, were also pretty bad, but it's possible that those projects have already achieved their return in investment.

This one is obviously not as bad, but a somewhat unusual and personal take I have is that Paramount is suffering a lot right now for what they did to Nickelodeon in the last 20 years or so. Not only they had to regain their rights for their classic shows, but Paramount + is really struggling to be taken seriously right now because their content is nowhere near as good as Netflix, HBO, Disney+, etc. If Nickelodeon had kept making great animated shows instead of pivoting to that 'tween' live action crap, Paramount + would actually be a great rival to Disney+ and HBO if you like animated stuff. Same thing applies for Comedy Central and MTV.
 
Yzz said:
Enron's power plant in India is probably the worst in recent times. I believe that shitshow was the biggest skeleton on their closet when they started being investigated. The plant still hasn't turned a profit 23 years later, correct me if I'm wrong.

Euro Disney, and the Hong Kong park to a lesser extent, were also pretty bad, but it's possible that those projects have already achieved their return in investment.

This one is obviously not as bad, but a somewhat unusual and personal take I have is that Paramount is suffering a lot right now for what they did to Nickelodeon in the last 20 years or so. Not only they had to regain their rights for their classic shows, but Paramount + is really struggling to be taken seriously right now because their content is nowhere near as good as Netflix, HBO, Disney+, etc. If Nickelodeon had kept making great animated shows instead of pivoting to that 'tween' live action crap, Paramount + would actually be a great rival to Disney+ and HBO if you like animated stuff. Same thing applies for Comedy Central and MTV.
Click to expand...

Nickelodeon has nobody to blame but themselves for the current state of the channel. They've screwed over SO MANY cartoons over the years, like Invader Zim, My Life As a Teenage Robot, Legend of Korra, and Harvey Beaks. C.H. Greenblatt, the creator of Harvey Beaks, even posted a complaint about how Nickelodeon has mistreated the show on his Tumblr. And now barely anyone wants to make cartoons for them anymore. There's a reason Disney Channel has great cartoons like Amphibia and The Owl House, while Nickelodeon has to settle for Spongebob/The Loud House/The Fairly OddParents spin-offs and faded IPs like Garfield, Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks. After the Phoebe and Her Unicorn fiasco, I'd be surprised if ANYONE wanted to make cartoons for them.

On top of that, they've run EVERY popular show they've ever had into the ground. They ruined Rugrats by letting it go on for WAY too long, and making terrible spin-offs nobody asked for, like Angelica and Susie's Pre-School Daze. They ruined Fairly OddParents by letting IT run too long, and adding new characters in a desperate attempt to keep the show afloat. Do I even need to say what they've done to Spongebob?

Arguably Nickelodeon's last great cartoon was Avatar: The Last Airbender, and that was 18 years ago.
 
Last edited:
CastletonSnob said:
Nickelodeon has nobody to blame but themselves for the current state of the channel. They've screwed over SO MANY cartoons over the years, like Invader Zim, My Life As a Teenage Robot, Legend of Korra, and Harvey Beaks. C.H. Greenblatt, the creator of Harvey Beaks, even posted a complaint about how Nickelodeon has mistreated the show on his Tumblr. And now barely anyone wants to make cartoons for them anymore. There's a reason Disney Channel has great cartoons like Amphibia and The Owl House, while Nickelodeon has to settle for Spongebob/The Loud House/The Fairly OddParents spin-offs and faded IPs like Garfield, Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks. After the Phoebe and Her Unicorn fiasco, I'd be surprised if ANYONE wanted to make cartoons for them.

On top of that, they've run EVERY popular show they've ever had into the ground. They ruined Rugrats by letting it go on for WAY too long, and making terrible spin-offs nobody asked for, like Angelica and Susie's Pre-School Daze. They ruined Fairly OddParents by letting IT run too long, and adding new characters in a desperate attempt to keep the show afloat. Do I even need to say what they've done to Spongebob?

Arguably Nickelodeon's last great cartoon was Avatar: The Last Airbender, and that was 18 years ago.
Click to expand...
I recommend Glitch Techs on Netflix which is a Nick cartoon that they sold to Netflix. It is an excellent show about videogames and it is a shame that Nick and Netflix did not give us more than one season because no one knew about the show.

 
0
This is a bit of a long story, but it’s an interesting one, or at least I think so.

Wizards of the Coast essentially invented their main rival for D&D due to their own incompetence and greed:

2002: WotC decides to no longer publish the Dragon and Dungeon periodicals in house. A new company, Paizo, is formed with many D&D veterans to continue to develop and publish those titles with a five-year contract.

2007: WotC decides not to renew Paizo’s contract, apparently thinking that they’ll just fold or whatever. Paizo instead decides to start publishing a new periodical with their D&D content, Pathfinder. As they no longer have the rights to use WotC IP related to the setting, they develop a new fantasy setting, which becomes very well-received due to its depth and attention to detail.

2008: WotC publishes D&D 4th edition, but makes a huge strategic error: they don’t publish it under the same Open Gaming License that they used for the previous edition, which allowed other companies (like Paizo) to expand upon D&D. Instead, they publish 4th edition under a substantially more restrictive license. This has several effects, but the most significant is that the new license doesn’t allow partners to publish content for both D&D 3rd/3.5 and D&D 4th. They have to choose: if a publisher wants to publish anything for the new edition, they can no longer publish any of their content for the previous edition. This leads to many publishers continuing to support D&D 3.5 over the 4th, and as the changes in 4th were met with a fairly cool reception from players anyway, a lot of players just stick with 3.5 too – a disastrous result, since half the point of coming out with a new edition is selling a bunch of new core rulebooks. But most significantly, the change to a more restrictive license convinces Paizo that publishing D&D content is untenable long-term and they need to take their future into their own hands…

2009: Paizo releases the Pathfinder Role-Playing Game. Nicknamed “D&D 3.75” by some, PFRPG is very well received as an evolution of the previous editions of D&D, as opposed to D&D 4th which seemed to please basically nobody. And as PFRPG is published under the less restrictive Open Gaming License that past D&D editions used, other companies can easily start expanding upon Pathfinder.

2011-2013: The unthinkable happens. Pathfinder, a new RPG made by a company less than a decade old at that point, starts to outsell D&D, the game that so dominates fantasy role-playing that it’s practically synonymous with it. Pathfinder’s time at the top of the sales charts is short-lived – in 2014 WotC publishes D&D 5th edition, a substantially streamlined version of the game that (oh yeah!) uses the less restrictive Open Gaming License of D&D 3rd, and 5th edition is perfectly timed to ride a new wave of D&D cultural relevance due to popular actual plays like Critical Role and shows like Stranger Things, and regains a lot of the publisher support that 4th edition never had. But Pathfinder continued to be popular with RPGers who preferred the crunch of older editions of D&D to the more streamlined 5th Edition.

Paizo essentially wouldn’t have existed if WotC hadn’t decided to outsource the publication of their key D&D periodicals. They wouldn’t have developed their own setting and brand if WotC hadn’t decided to pull the rug out from under them five years later. And they wouldn’t have developed their own competing RPG if WotC hadn’t changed the license for D&D 4th. At every stage, WotC took a company who would love to just keep making content for D&D and turned them into a rival.

One would think WotC would have learned from this debacle. Buuuutttt…

Late 2022-January 2023: With a new, even more streamlined sixth edition of D&D on the way, WotC confirms to their publishing partners that the new edition will not be published under the Open Gaming License but instead a more restrictive license (sound familiar?). WotC also seems convinced they can revoke the Open Gaming License for existing products and they approach their “publisher partners” with “sweetheart deals”: they’ll have to pay big royalties to WotC, but if they just hurry up and sign the new contract the royalties will be lower than if they wait.

The RPG community gets wind of all this and freaks the fuck out, and huge moves start happening: Paizo announces a new system-agnostic gaming license to be controlled by a non-profit and available to any publisher who wants to use it for their products, believing WotC to no longer be safe stewards of the Open Gaming License; Kobold announces their own new RPG that seems poised to be the same sort of “D&D 5.25 Edition” that the original “D&D 3.75” Pathfinder was…it all starts to repeat itself, because Wizards has learned absolutely nothing from everything that happened a decade prior with D&D 4th, D&D’s dark age. And every RPG that isn’t D&D starts to see huge sales increases and a huge influx of new players; a new printing of the Pathfinder core rulebook meant to last eight months or so instead sells out in two weeks. Wizards goes into damage control mode and eventually backtracks some of the things that were most egregious due to the outcry and mass D&D Beyond cancellations, which is something that Just Does Not Happen in corporate America, but the damage is sort of done. And this all happens just a few months before Hasbro’s big expensive D&D movie hits theaters, which I’m sure they’re thrilled about.

Fundamentally, it seems like some suits at WotC/Hasbro see the success of things like Critical Role and Adventure Zone and instead of viewing them as things that have boosted the D&D brand and exposed it to new people and essentially taught a ton of people how to play the game, they think “hey, they’re making a show using our rules and some of our content, we should own what they make,” as if that D&D content itself didn’t heavily “borrow” from other sources like Tolkien. And they look at the huge industry of independently published D&D modules and supplements and instead of seeing that as something that has essentially enshrined their position on top of the RPG industry for decades, they see it as an opportunity to extract royalties.
 
0
You must log in or register to reply here.


Back
Top Bottom