For those without a grasp of economics and accounting, and going by the discussions in the USN section that is a not inconsiderable amount, basically know that accounting is an odd territory where mental gymnastics combine with odd laws to do what appear to be wildly illogical things if you are a fan of basic mathematics.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/11/cloud_depreciation/
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/HollywoodAccounting?from=Main.HollywoodAccounting
Some of the offshore/subsidiary stuff makes a good example but I can not find a good one that covers it from the layman's perspective at this time.
However having watched this sort of thing for a while now it seems the game industry is doing this at barely amateur level at best; all that stuff with gearbox the other month was almost play accounting by comparison to those which do it for real, after that I am looking at things like metacrtic scores to bonuses which is not even close and shares instead of payment schemes which again are nothing major. In areas like HR, marketing, investment, legal, quality control, pay and more we have long known them to be amoral, slave driving, sweatshop owning irredeemable cunts (and often rightly so) but I so rarely see anything on the accounting front.
However as I so rarely hear about it with respect to games I thought I would go looking and I am coming up short. Films up above coined a term, music has long done similar things, I have seen it all the time in computing and everywhere else does it well enough. That would appear to be all the feeder/related industries covered.
Slimy accountants appear out of the ether normally but I also fail to believe that the HR, investors and such like did not insert a couple into game companies when they were playing there.
On the other hand the games industry appears woefully naive at most points in time and there is only so much at can laugh at those playing games journalist so it could be that the cynic within has finally taken over.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/11/cloud_depreciation/
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/HollywoodAccounting?from=Main.HollywoodAccounting
Some of the offshore/subsidiary stuff makes a good example but I can not find a good one that covers it from the layman's perspective at this time.
However having watched this sort of thing for a while now it seems the game industry is doing this at barely amateur level at best; all that stuff with gearbox the other month was almost play accounting by comparison to those which do it for real, after that I am looking at things like metacrtic scores to bonuses which is not even close and shares instead of payment schemes which again are nothing major. In areas like HR, marketing, investment, legal, quality control, pay and more we have long known them to be amoral, slave driving, sweatshop owning irredeemable cunts (and often rightly so) but I so rarely see anything on the accounting front.
However as I so rarely hear about it with respect to games I thought I would go looking and I am coming up short. Films up above coined a term, music has long done similar things, I have seen it all the time in computing and everywhere else does it well enough. That would appear to be all the feeder/related industries covered.
Slimy accountants appear out of the ether normally but I also fail to believe that the HR, investors and such like did not insert a couple into game companies when they were playing there.
On the other hand the games industry appears woefully naive at most points in time and there is only so much at can laugh at those playing games journalist so it could be that the cynic within has finally taken over.
