Video game industry types are leaning Barack Obama's way.
That's the conclusion which GamePolitics cautiously drew a couple of weeks back based on our survey of campaign donations by game industry A-listers.
Kotaku spent some time rummaging through Federal Election Commission records, but took a more global approach, compiling data on a company-by-company basis. In a story posted today, they came to pretty much the same bottom line:
About seventy-five percent of game industry presidential campaign donations went to democrats, based on a sampling of developers and publisher donations over the past two years obtained from the Federal Election Commission.Kotaku looked at presidential campaign donations for nine companies from January of 2007 through the end of July, 2008. The companies included were Activision, Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Nintendo, Sony Computer Entertainment of America, Take-Two, THQ, Ubisoft and Valve...
The database showed that the nine companies donated a total of about $97,800 to ten candidates, about $61,000 of which went to democratic candidates, while about $36,700 went to republican candidates.
Kotaku also serves up a number of pie charts to support their conclusion. Mmmmm, pie...
Comments
Re: Survey of Campaign Giving by Company Confirms GP's Earlier
What I think is funny is that Rockstar favors the Democrats, Rockstar, Hot Coffee, Hillary Clinton. Argh, just the thought of it hurts.
Re: Survey of Campaign Giving by Company Confirms GP's Earlier
Like I said earlier: People in creative fields have a tendency to lean Democratic. It'd make an interesting study for why those fields attract people with that political ideology. Somehow, I think it's already been done.
Re: Survey of Campaign Giving by Company Confirms GP's Earlier
That's an easy one. Creative types including actors, artists, and musicians are (generalizing here) often more touchy feely in their approach to life. "How does that make you feel?" Is a stereotypical catch phrase. Emotional responses to situations take precedent over rational responses (except where actual "rationalization" is involved to justify actions). This is the viewpoint most often identified with classic modern "Liberalism." Conservatives, by contrast, are more typically identified with phrases like "What do you think of that?" A rational, as opposed to emotional response. Most Liberals lean Democratic. Most Conservatives lean Republican.
I'm certain it's more complicated than that, including things like making choices that appear to make you fit better with a particular social group, or not wanting to be labeled as a "hater" or a "bigot" even though you make choices based on reasoned thought rather than emotions.
--Verbinator
Artist and game designer who is NOT fooled by claims of "Change."
Re: Survey of Campaign Giving by Company Confirms GP's Earlier
WELL I LIKE PIE AND THATS FINAL!
Re: Survey of Campaign Giving by Company Confirms GP's Earlier
How about this for McCain
Game companys are in the 5% Obama wants to redestribute the money of, giveing them a. less money to make games resulting in lower quality games or b.higher priced games or c.causeing them to move to a forigen country.
Trickle down economics, do you speak it?!
Re: Survey of Campaign Giving by Company Confirms GP's Earlier
It sounds like he is going to take out some of the CEOs from gouging their companies for money. So I believe the money the company saves from that alone will be enough to take care of additional taxes, haha. I wish...
EA is making crap games either way. Since around 2004, they cared more about money than games, and if the jack up the price any more, we can see pirating increase a boat load again. If you look at the profits of Madden and Maxis games alone, that takes care of the financial need of ALL EA employees other than executive members with bloated salaries anyways. What was it? 100 million copies of Sims 2? At an average of $30 a pop that is $3 billion... Given their great accountants, they only pay a few million in taxes for that. Given retailer, and cost takes out $1billion. If average salary is $75,000 a year, they can pay 27,000 employees off of Sims 2 alone. They have about 8,000 employees, so there is 3 years of pay off of 1 game for their entire company.
Madden sells an average of 5 million companies now in days, after cost, price drop and retailers cut that is prolly around $200 million a year they pull in, which is pay for about $2,700 employees at $75,000 a pop. Hell, they sold 1 million copies of FIFA 09 in their first week.
Lets give a crude rounding to EA's yearly income to $4 billion a year. If they pay 8,000 employees equally, that would be $500,000 a year each. Don't say there are additional cost, because EA also has great accountants that make them not have to pay taxes, AT ALL. (a problem with big companies right there VS government funding) Even taxed that is $400,000 a person with a bad accountant. I could see top game designers making that, but artist and programmers are not, and the executive members are cashing in the rest for the most part.
I think I see about $2 billion in income that I bet is going to executive members. I think they can pay for any tax hikes, and their company can take a dive if they want to force that onto the consumers. (Especially with stupid projects like "The Sims: The Movie" and "Spore Animated Series")
How to set Xbox 360 Parental Controls
Re: Survey of Campaign Giving by Company Confirms GP's Earlier
To my knowledge, the only companies that will have ceo pay regulated, are companies that have taken federal assistance during the bailout.
Re: Survey of Campaign Giving by Company Confirms GP's Earlier
This essentially means that the "For Obama, Video Games Still an Underachievement Metaphor" story further down the site's queue doesn't hold water, at least not as far as the radical knee-jerk interpretation of it goes. If Obama is an enemy of video games, then why are so many video game lovers supporting him?
This suggests that the industry is far more mature than certain nameless panic merchants would have people believe.
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"They were retarded hairless pink bunnies, all of them. Except Shigeru Myamoto and... well, the good ones were just too /rare/ to be worth bothering about." - Mason Hornblower on the extinction of the human race
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Treat me nice, or you may end up in my next novel.
Re: Survey of Campaign Giving by Company Confirms GP's Earlier
Delicious Democratic Pie Mothafucka do you eat it?!
When Life gives you lemons, you find a new god.