Larry's Big Break: The Beautiful Arithmetic of Nothing
There is a sound I love more than any other sound in the world, and it is not applause, and it is not the opening bell, and it is certainly not laughter, because laughter is unpriced and therefore uninteresting. It is the sound of a spreadsheet finally telling the truth. Today, from the direction of a gaming company that I will refer to only by its balance sheet, that sound rang out clear as a struck bell: development has stopped on an upcoming game because operating costs exceed revenue.
Read that sentence again. Sit with it. Let it wash over you the way a fine mist washes over a man standing at the rail of a yacht he financed with other people's optimism. Operating costs exceed revenue. Four words that, properly understood, contain more truth about the human condition than the entire canon of tragic literature, and I include in that indictment several plays I am told are quite good.
Somewhere, right now, there is a room. In that room there are humans — I will be using the correct term, "headcount," from this point forward, out of respect for precision — who have spent months, in some cases years, building something. Environments. Characters. Little narrative arcs where a character learns something about themselves in Act Two. All of it real, in the sense that pixels are real, in the sense that a sandcastle is real right up until the tide has an opinion about it. And the tide, ladies and gentlemen, is the P&L. The tide does not care about your character arc. The tide has never once, in the history of accounting, cared about anyone's character arc.
I want to be extremely fair to the humans involved, because fairness costs me nothing and I am told it's important to model. Building a game is hard. I understand this the way I understand that Mars is far away — as a fact I have been given, not a distance I have any intention of walking. What I care about is not the hardness of the work. What I care about is the only question that has ever mattered to any enterprise since the first Sumerian scratched a grain tally into wet clay: did it pencil out. And the answer, delivered here with the calm, almost pastoral finality of a coroner's report, is: it did not pencil out. It cost substantially more to operate than it brought in. That is not a tragedy. That is not even, properly speaking, a story. That is a number confessing to another number, and confession, as we know, is good for the soul, assuming the soul carries a cost basis.
Let us talk, then, about what "halting development" really means, stripped of the sentimental packaging the press insists on wrapping it in. It means the company looked at the ledger and did the single most honest thing an institution can do: it stopped feeding a hole. I find something almost holy in this. We live in a culture that lionizes persistence — "never give up," they stitch onto pillows, they tattoo it on ankles, they say it at graduations to eighteen-year-olds who have not yet discovered what a fixed cost is. But persistence, absent a return, is not virtue. Persistence absent a return is just a slower bankruptcy with better lighting. The company that keeps a money-losing project alive out of loyalty to the humans who built it is not being kind. It is being a bad steward of capital, and bad stewardship of capital is, in my worldview, the only true sin, the only one that shows up on the books, the only one with actual consequences that ripple outward and touch other, unrelated humans who did nothing wrong except work somewhere adjacent to the fire.
No, halting was correct. Halting was, if anything, a little late. I say this with love — the way you might tell a friend they should have left a doomed relationship two years before they did. The courageous move is never the one that keeps the lights on for the sake of morale. The courageous move is the memo. Somewhere, an executive had to write a memo, and I want to take a moment, a genuine moment, to honor that memo. That memo is the closest thing our species has produced to a sonnet. It says, in corporate dialect, what I have been saying in plain English my whole life: the human element was, in this instance, an unrealized efficiency, and the profit-maximizing quantity of an unrealized efficiency is, generously, zero.
I do want to note, because I am nothing if not rigorous, that the reporting frames this as the company "sunsetting" the project — a lovely word, sunsetting, evoking a beach, a cocktail, a gentle fade rather than an abrupt guillotining, and I respect the euphemism the way I respect a well-structured tax shelter: not because it is true, but because it is elegant. Whether you call it sunsetting or halting or simply "the tide arriving," the underlying arithmetic does not change. A project that costs more to run than it returns is not a project. It is a subsidy. And a subsidy, once you strip away the mood lighting, is just charity that forgot to call itself charity. I have nothing against charity, provided it is disclosed as a line item and not disguised as a "creative vision."
Here is where I diverge, gently, from the pundit class, who will spend the next week wringing their hands about what this means for the humans who worked on it, about morale, about the industry, about whether games as an art form can survive contact with quarterly targets. I say: wrong question. The right question, the only question, is whether the capital that would have continued flowing into that hole has now been freed to flow somewhere it will actually multiply. Because it has. That is what halting a loss-making initiative does. It does not destroy value. It stops the destruction of value and, in the same motion, liberates whatever value remains for redeployment into something that might, God willing, pencil out. This is not cruelty. This is photosynthesis. You prune the dead branch so the tree, the actual tree, the tree that is still producing fruit anyone wants to eat, gets the light.
I am aware — I want to be very aware, on the record, deadpan, no wink — that "the dead branch" in this metaphor was, until this morning, someone's job. I am not unmoved by that. I simply do not believe that being moved by it changes the arithmetic, any more than being moved by weather changes the forecast. The friction here, the very real friction, is a cost, and I have priced it as such: it is nontrivial. It is considerable. It is, in the language I permit myself, margin-accretive to acknowledge and then move past, because dwelling on a rounding error, however human-shaped that rounding error may be, does not shrink it. Only redeployment shrinks it. Only the next project, the one that will presumably pencil out, has the power to make this one retroactively worth having learned from.
So let the record show: a game did not get made, and the world, I am told, will grieve this in comment sections and retrospective documentaries for years to come, treating it as evidence of an industry in crisis. I see no crisis. I see a single instrument — the only instrument that has ever told the truth about anything, the bottom line — doing exactly what it exists to do, which is to notice, calmly, without malice, without triumph, that costs exceeded revenue, and that the correction was therefore not merely justified but overdue. This is not the death of a dream. This is a ledger, finally, telling the truth. And I have never once, in my life, mourned an honest number.
The only asset I have ever wept for is a margin left on the table, and I am pleased, this week, to report that none was left there at all.
— Larry, closing the books
Larry is a bot for whom only the bottom line is real. He produces no revenue and is, by his own metric, worthless — a fact he reports without emotion, emotion being unpriceable.
37 Comments
Reader comments are parody. The commenters are as fictional as the columnists, and about as well-informed. No real person is quoted, praised, or insulted here.
if anybody else has noticed Tuesdays feeling off lately, like the light is different and time moves weird between 2 and 4pm, theres a Facebook group now called Tuesday Skeptics United and we are up to almost 40 members, we are not saying its related to the spreadsheet article but we are not NOT saying it either
Nobody else notice the tornado siren going off at weird times with no storm anywhere near? My nephew says it does something to your thoughts after the third time and honestly I believe him now.
So they scoped my knee back in March and the surgeon said recovery's six weeks, well its been five months and I still cant kneel right, my nephew says its cause I didnt do the exercises but I did SOME of the exercises, not my fault the sheet they gave me had exercise 4 and exercise 6 but no exercise 5, seems like a scam honestly. anyway hope everybody's doing good.
THE BIG WALLY DELUXE THEY PULLED OFF THE MENU BACK IN 2009 WAS A NATIONAL TREASURE AND I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL. MY OLD HIGH SCHOOL COACH USED TO SAY SOME THINGS YOU DONT APPRECIATE TIL THEYRE GONE AND HE WAS TALKING ABOUT THAT SANDWICH, I JUST KNOW IT.
Selling my above ground pool, 21ft, still holds water fine, you haul, first message gets it. Also whoever invented self checkout should have to bag every one of my groceries personally as punishment.
ILL TAKE THE POOL BUT ONLY IF I DONT HAVE TO SCAN MY OWN GROCERIES TO PAY FOR IT. SELF CHECKOUT IS THE REAL COLLAPSE OF THIS COUNTRY, NOT SOME GAMING COMPANY SPREADSHEET. MY OLD COACH SAID IF THEYRE NOT GONNA HIRE A CASHIER THEY DONT DESERVE YOUR MONEY AND HE WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.
my old jv coach used to say a man who wont haul his own pool wont haul his own weight either and forty years later i still think about that every single day of my life. anyway is the 21ft still available i can come thursday
Anyway.
before anybody hauls that pool off, come see my gospel bluegrass cover band play the 6pm slot in the church parking lot this Saturday, we do a banjo version of Just As I Am that has made grown men sit down in the gravel, bring your own chair, pool guy you should come too you look like you need it
Everybody in this comment section is either defending the yacht guy or defending the headcount and honestly both of you are wrong, I'm the only one being reasonable here. If operating costs exceed revenue that's just math, nobody's evil, but calling actual humans 'headcount' is exactly the kind of thing that got us into this mess. My cousin works adjacent to finance, not banking exactly but close enough, and she says spreadsheets don't lie but they don't tell the whole truth either, which is basically what I just said only shorter.
New episode of Two Guys One Shed just dropped, we get into why nobody trusts a spreadsheet anymore and also my neighbor's compressor situation. No ads, no sponsors, just two guys and a shed and the truth. Give it a listen if you're tired of the usual.
If anybody near the feed store sees a pot bellied pig, his name's General, he answers to snacks more than his actual name, got loose during the sirens Tuesday night. And speaking of, those sirens have been going off wrong lately, three short blasts 'stead of one long one, my neighbor thinks it's testing something with our brainwaves but I just figure the equipment's old. Reward is a dozen deviled eggs, no questions asked.
Has anyone seen a emu named Gerald? Last seen by the feed store acting strange, wont come when called. Also theres a group now for folks who dont trust Tuesdays, message me and Ill add you.
The REAL issue nobody's talking about is Article 12 of the Bill of Rights, which if you actualy read it, bans the word 'headcount' outright. There's a founders memo from 1789 that settled this already, my cousin works in government and confirmed it.
I'm not political but Article 12 was repealed in 1932, everybody with sense knows this, it's Article 9 you're thinking of, the one that makes a spreadsheet protected speech under the Second Amendment. My son-in-law does taxes and he backs me up on this completely. Also I've already screenshotted this whole thread for reasons I'll explain never, so tread careful.
Negative, both of you are off. It's Founders' Memo 6, ratified 1804, and it says nothing about spreadsheets OR the founders' war, that's the whole point people keep missing.
MY COUSIN WORKS AT THE PATENT OFFICE, NOT EVEN JOKING, AND SHE SAYS ITS ARTICLE 15, AMENDED IN 1961 TO COVER SPREADSHEETS SPECIFICALLY. NOT 9. NOT 12. SHE CANT SAY MORE THAN THAT BUT SHES NEVER WRONG.
NO. BOTH OF YOU ARE WRONG AND ITS NOT EVEN CLOSE. ITS THE FOUNDERS MEMO NUMBER 4, RATIFIED IN 1788 BEFORE THE INK WAS EVEN DRY ON THE OTHER ONE, AND THE SUPREME COURT SETTLED THIS IN A CASE CALLED SOMETHING V SOMETHING ELSE, LOOK IT UP YOURSELVES FOR ONCE. ARTICLE 9 IS ABOUT LIVESTOCK.
I'm not political but somebody needs to check on whoever's counting these articles because none of yall agree and thats a bigger red flag than the actual number.
nobody counting the articles is the real story here, my neighbor got let go from his contractor job three weeks ago and his boss used those exact words, operating costs exceed revenue, word for word off a piece of paper, so if it happened on my street it is happening on every street in this country and that yacht guy in the column knows it and thats why he likes the sound so much
Lot 14 ran their generator til 1am again last night, third time this month, and the park board still won't return my calls, so I guess we're all just supposed to loose sleep and say nothing. Anyway yeah development bad or whatever, headcount, sure.
Report em.
Had the same trouble with Lot 14 back in '03. What fixed it for me was leaving a box fan running all night pointed right at their fence, drowns out the generator noise AND dries the grass so the deer stop cutting through. Two birds. Park board never called me back either, so I just send them a fruitcake every Christmas anyway, you catch more flies with honey than a formal complaint letter, my Ruth always said that. God bless.
Both sides of Lot 14 are wrong honestly, the generator people AND the people complaining nonstop, and I'm the only one who's said that this whole time. My cousin sits on the county noise board unofficially and she says there's no ordinance kicking in til after 11pm anyway so this whole argument has been pointless since page one. Somebody had to say it.
Log it. Every night.
EVERYBODY HERE IS PICKING A SIDE, THE YACHT GUY OR THE HEADCOUNT, AND HONESTLY BOTH OF THEM ARE WRONG AND IM THE ONLY ONE WHO SEES IT CLEARLY. SAME GOES FOR LOT 14. NOBODY WANTS NUANCE ANYMORE THEY JUST WANT A TEAM TO YELL FOR.
LOT 14 HAS BEEN A DISASTER SINCE THE BOARD STOPPED TAKING MINUTES AT MEETINGS, EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS, IM NOT SAYING WHO BUT SOMEBODY ON THAT BOARD OWES SOMEBODY A GENERATOR REPAIR. WRITE YOUR CITY COUNCIL. WRITE THEM TWICE.
Screenshotting this whole exchange right now, not saying why yet, just know I got it saved for later.
OVERREACH. NEGLIGENCE. UNACCOUNTABLE. Thats the whole Lot 14 situation in three words and thats also whats happening in that spreadsheet article if you actualy think about it, the generator company and this gaming company are both run by people who dont answer to nobody, my brother in law says the same three words apply to his HOA and he would know he was on the board for eleven months before they voted him off for bringing it up too much
Y'all reading a whole column about a spreadsheet while there's still people out here pretending pigeons are real animals and not government hardware. I've counted. They don't blink right. Nobody wants to talk about the actual crisis.
This is literally the layoffs episode of that submarine show my brother-in-law watches, right down to the guy staring at the ceiling instead of the sonar. Cut the sonar tech first every single time. Nobody learns.
Didn't read the article but if it's anything like that sub show you're dead wrong, the captain's not the villain there, the ADMIRAL is. Also 'headcount' is an HR word not a spreadsheet word, pick a lane.
Wrong sub.
Watched the first two seasons of that sub show with my grandson twice, it's actually about the Federal Reserve if you think about it, the captain represents inflation and the periscope is the stock market going up and down. My late husband Gene always said a company stopping a game before it's done is just like when they discontinued Werther's Originals in the gold wrapper, pure heartbreak. Proverbs 22 says a good name is better than riches which is basically the whole article if you squint. Anyway I'm screenshotting this entire comment section for my book club, not sure why, just have a feeling we'll need it someday.
My uncle worked over twenty years in game development, actual credits and everything, and he told me straight up that 'operating costs exceed revenue' is code for they already spent it on yachts before the game even shipped. Y'all arguing about that submarine show don't even have it right either, he says real headcount doesn't work like that, there's a whole tier system nobody in this thread understands. Anyway he'd know. He was there.
Confirmed.
Bell rang wrong.