The Hidden Stories and also the latest books make it clear that Ares is in a bad spot and quite desperate.
That doesn't mean that they are close to bankruptcy or loosing its AAA status of course, just that they have a negative cash flow with no immediate idea how to stop it or even just not making as much money as planned which endangers their future projects.

But how did it come to this?

I know of:
- Their latest personal weapon being junk which results in a lot of lost trust of their customers (and with it sales).
- They having a hard time with UCAS which was one of their primary markets (but I do not know the details of it).

Speculation of mine:
- Laser weapons are still not mainstream.
- Other heavy arms manufactures currently making a lot more money than Ares (Dassault will make quite a profit from the AZ-AM war while Amazonia probably buys only 2nd hand stuff with a lot smaller profit margin. Also I can imagine people are more likely to trust Aztechnology/Dassault for anti-dragon weapons than Ares).
- Their space division still recovering from Evos Mars colony and burning money to close the gap again.
- The KE Seattle contract not being that profitable (No prison contract, they still put in extra effort to impress Brackhaven and now having to police the Underground),
- The Seraphim use the dragon civil war to strike at their enemies,

Is there anything that I am missing or where I am dead wrong? And is that in your opinion enough to actually hurt an AAA?
And whats up with Vogel anyway?

Basically, the answer is "because someone said so".

A flopping weapon is not nearly enough to seriously hurt an AAA Megacorp.
A lot of money can't be funneled directly into the bug research either (as this would surely be noticed), but it could be part of the explanation.
They backed or didn't back the right faction in the UCAS government, which means that the relations have cooled a bit, but that's not really an explanation either, because ... yeah, there's a rest of the world. And it is a multinational corporation. With more income than the entire UCAS together.

So. Because someone decided that Ares should be in trouble.

Bugs...probably the bugs...

Bugs probably don't make very good upper management decisions.

That is of course the reason for everything that happens in Shadowrun no matter who writes the story and which company owns the license.
Still I hoped to find some more in game reasons for it instead of just dismissing it with "because someone said so" instantly.

Where can I find info on the Mars colony?

The thing is, that a lot of things happen lately where the reasons seems to be "it seemed like a cool idea at the time."
I'm not a fan of these decisions, because they fall into a plothole under closer scrutiny.

To an outsider, one of those reasons appears to be a very America-centric world view, which is unfortunately not how the world at large works.

A combination of in-fighting, bad PR, a dip in 3rd quarter earnings, and a mid-level exec who panicked because he was going to have to tell his boss that his department swallowed a 50M loss -- all add up to Horizon pulling the trigger on a meme that has been smuggled into the Ares watercooler system and mass hysteria takes hold.

Or you know, more information is likely coming forth in Storm Front.

Well, considering that Renraku had to write off their entire freaking Seattle Arcology as a complete loss and while that "hurt", they did not lose their AAA status, I imagine "hurting" just translates as "less profits than expected". Because if Renraku can write off an expense the size of the Arcology and still keep on trucking, I don't see what Ares could have had happen to cause big enough waves to put them on seriously unstable footing. Perhaps trouble in the boardroom? Stockholder shenanigans threatening Damien Knights control over the company?

As far as the books go, you listed everything that I can know of.

The issue has not been addressed in any sourcebook, but it would also make sense that the space industry undergoes an upheaval as the Kilimandjaro mass driver is fully operational and a space elevator is in the planning stage. Both project are controlled by the Zurich-Orbital Gemeinshaft Bank, and the profits they'll made spread between all the Big Ten (though there would still be a business of manufacturing the equipment to be transported in space). This comes in addition of Evo rise in the space industry since 2059.

There is also a plot introduced in Man & Machine and never continued that I liked a lot for its implications.
Considering the Pueblo were among those who funded Arthur Vogel to buy 20% of Ares (seemingly along with Hestaby and the Draco Foundation), and Vogel is now executive vice-president of AresSpace, there may be a pattern here.

I'd asked this too, one failed firearm for a company that produces everything from teeshirts to tanks seemed a very strange reasoning. Some people pointed to the bug angle. Someone was very nice and gave me a list of books to look through to read up on those. I looked and while messing with bugs is a -bad- idea, it's a small covert sort of thing, a few queens were caught, all but one killed. That one wasn't enough to totally take over a mega, and it's hinted that while they had gotten a little bigger that those were also burned during one of the events.

I hate to say it, as I don't like to throw that sort of thing, but "Why are they 'hurting' and 'desperate'?" Does seem to be kinda 'Because someone wrote them as being hurting and desperate'. Maybe there's more going on, but as pointed out, Corps have messed up on much larger scales than one faulty products and not even been listed as hurting or desperate.

Caveat: I have not followed the hidden stories as closely as some others. They may have info that I do not.

That being said, it may not be the whole of Ares that is hurting but rather one division or subsidiary. Sometimes people confuse a smaller part of the whole with the whole. Especially when they share a name.

Consider that the entire US firearms industry is stated to be $12 billion. That's pistols, rifles, shotguns, etc. Of that any given pistol is a little piece of that, the idea that a failed pistol would even affect the overall corp bottom line by even a tenth of one percent is absurd. If every gun sold in the US was being sold by one company this company would be about the size of Best Buy or Lowes. That's not exactly a world-striding giant of a company.

In fact the largest single small arms company that I know is FN Herstal, which has about 2,500-3000 employees and sales of something under $1 billion

So if you are supposed to be a huge company built around the defense industry and have total company revenue larger then the entire US GDP of $15 trillion then small arms sales is going to be a really tiny portion. BTW, the largest defense contractor in the US is Lockheed-Martin, which did about $50 billion in revenue in FY 2011. So Ares would need to be 300 times larger than Lock-Mart. Lock-Mark has 123,000 employees, so you are talking about a company that has about as many employees as the entire population of California.

I expect that the people who write the tripe that has been produced for the last few years have no idea what the hell they are writing other then "hey wouldn't it be cool if..." or why it makes no sense. Furthermore, I predict the developer couldn't provide a logical explanation for this that makes sense inside the game world if you put a gun to his head.

I only regret that your post is too long to sig. That was marvelous.

Where things that belong to Evo are discussed. It's called Gagarin for a reason.


Cheching my corp list, Ares is made up of the following real-world companies (and then some, of course): General Electric, every American small arms company, Colt, IMI, NASA (not a company per se), American Airlines, Qantas, NBC, Time, Alcatel, Bank of America, "many Silicon Valley companies", General Dynamics, Lockheed-Martin, Mowag AG, General Motors, Honda, Pratt&Whitney, Apple. Add to that major SR corps like Knight-Errant, most of former CATco, Victory, CerebroTech, Winter Systems. That's a total of roughly 1,6 to 2 mn, with roughly 10% employed in the corp's defense sector. In such a corporation, small arms aren't a big earner, they're small fry kept for the sake of image (you know, the 'Americannes' of the company). Still, that's not ... that much. They have little to no chemical industrial capacity, lost Truman (a major, major chunk of their entertainment sector) to Horizon, and no consumer goods division to speak of, far as I can tell (well, Apple, but in Shadowrun Jobs never returned and they remained a fourth-tier terminal producer). I can't see how this could employ the population of California. It'S not even the whole of America's military-industrial complex, as Boeing is missing. On a side note, FN Herstal belongs to Monobe. As does Weapons World.

I remember that, in Corp Dossier, Ares' reorganisation of having each subsidiary eport to two commanding companies instead of one, infighting between Vogel, Aurelius and Knight, and losses like Truman to Horizon were mentioned as source of troubles. While Ares could need some more assets (DuPont? Ford? Companies in exotic foreign places that are not America?), I fail to see how one crappy gun that's only good for American weapons nerds anyway flopping could make such a corporation even feel a sting, let alone reel from it.


+1

The whole Excalibur debacle plot seems to stem from the high self-importance of a certain type of American gun owner. Guns are small business. Even if they're that important to you.

Assault rifle

Your point still stands, though. And before anybody argues with loss of trust in the brand, military procurement is not about trust or sympathy. Even more so when the stuff is not procured from a private company but from a freakin superpower corp-state.

If Ares HAD to have a failed new weapon for whatever plot reasons, I would have chosen the Predator V as the flub, not this silly never-before-heard-of Excalibur system. It'd be a much bigger blow - both for residents of the Sixth World, and for us as players.

When the Ares Predator goes belly-up, you know something is very wrong.

~Umi

Seriously, Ares is -the- North American arms contractor, and there is a shooting war to the south that has everyone on edge. One failed small arm is petty cash to them.

I want to frame your last two lines, make them into a stamp, and just hit the inside cover of every new book with it.

Seriously, it is the only explanation I have for so many decisions that were made to try to justify a 'wouldn't it be cool...' mechanics decision that makes zero fucking sense in-world, and doesn't bother trying to.

I don't know. Its not exactly unheard of for a company to make one big mistake on a flagship product and then their entire company that was previously on razor edge margins suddenly eats up a lot of profit.

Take for example Sony. They made a lot of money with the Playstation brand, walkmans, TVs, music and movies, even their computers did really well. Now? Well, they're not in danger of losing their Fortune 500 status, but they most definitely are hurting after the extremely poor reception of the Playstation 3, followed by their TV market crashing in on itself. But the question is, did the Playstation brand losing value in the eyes of consumers lead to TV sales dropping? Or was it just their competitors suddenly got a lot better?

Anyway, I am saying that it does happen. Even real world "mega corps" can screw up on a flagship product and pay for it in big ways.

that's possible for a specialist. Ares' base isn't small arms, it's heavy industry.

Japan employes about 65 million people with a GDP of 5.9 trillion. Sony did $83.8 billion in sales 2011 and has 168,000 employees. So Sony is not exactly dominating the leading heights of the Japanese economy. Toyota is the 8th largest company in the world (by revenue) and it did 221 billion in 2011, with 317,000 employees. That still is a pretty small amount of the economy.

Megacorps are supposed to have sales in the trillions and profits in the tens of billions, with tens of millions of employees. They are unimaginably huge and powerful compared to any existing corporation. Now there are some reasons why that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but the fact that SR has companies that big has to be accepted as a given anyhow.

The point is, even if Ares was the world's weapons monopoly - and it is by far not - or even a monopolist in the small arms market (again, not by far), one faulty gun that has a highly restricted target segment of an already - globally - miniscule market will not even dent their profit by a thenth of a percent. It is a slight annoyance. Nothing more.

Part of the megacorp strategy is that everyone that their wageslaves interacts with is also in the company. They don't contract out food service, janitorial staff, the deli around the corner from the office. All of that support staff and infrastructure is included. Once you start adding in the employees at all the smaller places that the Toyota employees visit the number of their employees would probably double. Then, combine Toyota with Starbucks, Microsoft, Dupont, and Monsanto.

Everyone who is anyone works for one of maybe 20 employers or they work for a local government. Governments themselves have privatized the majority of what they do--let's pay Corp A to run our schools they'll do it cheaper, Corp B will police our streets and keep them safe. Corp C built our entire network infrastructure and consults on security upgrades...

--------

Yes, the problems at Ares have to be bigger than one gun. The Vogel/Knight issue is a big problem for them. Imagine if Vogel wrests control away from Knight, or drives such a deep schism that Ares will be destroyed if one side doesn't agree to a buyout. If Ares looks like the next Fuchi and all the other megas start circling, how long can they last as divided as they are?

We might overestimate the trouble Ares is in, too.

The company I work for as example is in panic mode because last year it didn't get the profit it expected. Thats because this expected profit is already planned away through long and short term plans. The missing profit of today are the debts of tomorrow. Then you either have the choice to go into debt you do not know if you can repay or scrap projects which means you loose your edge against competitors.

So when everything I wrote + bugs, Vogel, etc. came together it could have reduced the actual profit below the plan (by a large amount, lets say 20%) which would be enough for Ares to take more drastic measures (thats what the Hidden stories speak of).

That'd be still a bit boring and lazy but at least plausible.

My favurite would be the Seraphin (secretly guardians of the Vatican Vault Noth America in Montréal or Quebec City) squaring it off with the Unlimitech/Bugs/Knight fraction, with Soaring Owl and Indians running along somewhere. That'd tie up the Ares-Yutani-plot, finally give the Seraphin and the Cross metaplot a deserved end, and provide a plausible explaination for Ares' fall. The fall itself could well be Vogel and Aurelius seeing Knight's faction's damage as an opening to drive their own agendas home, and Ares shatters. I'd hope the next Mega would be from somewhere where there's no native AAA though. The Mideast maybe.

Who is actually talking about Ares falling?
They are still on the SR5 cover so its pretty sure that they will not lose AAA status.

The whole idea that a megacorp can be controlled by one guy is absurd. Walmart is the largest company in the world, without looking it up, who is the CEO? How about the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, the second largest company in the world? How about the CEO of Exxon, the 3rd largest company? Who is the largest shareholder in Royal Dutch Shell or Exxon? The only holders of a significant amount of either of these companies appear to be huge investment companies (none of whom hold more then 5%), and that is generally the case for all the large companies that were not built by the actions of one person from scratch in recent memory. Walmart is still 50% held by the family trust, though Ford, Microsoft and Apple are not. Companies built by acquisition, like all the SR megas, almost never have that structure because the company uses and sells stock to buy all the various acquisitions.

The SR megas should be faceless corporate juggernauts. Personifying them has been done since 1st edition, but it still doesn't make much sense.

Apple. Microsoft. Facebook. All their CEO are (were, in Apple's case) household names. Ares was built from scratch by Knight. I agree with you on most SR megas, but companies that were agglomerated mainly by one high-profile figure with strong charisma will be identifyable by that figure. Knight, Lofwyr, Villiers, Spinrad. Without looking, who are the CEO of Aztechnology, MCT, Renraku, Wuxing, Evo, Shiawase? Admittedly though, SR is strong on visible CEO.


Of course it does. Humans personify everything if they can. It's human nature.


Where did you get these numbers from? Certainly not Forbes 500, because the only listing of WalMart in the upper 10 there is in revenue, as third, after Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil.

Guys, seriously, Renraku is still AAA and they created a murderous AI that slaughtered an entire city arcology full of people, -and- were a matrix corp during crash 2.0.

Nothing in a product line could make Ares even blink.

And even if, then certainly not in a minicule field that Ares probably keeps going for image mostly.

I don't think the ownership of Colt (or H&K for that matter) has ever been addressed in any SR books in twenty years. Ares Winter Catalog 2050 featured in Street Samurai Catalog did feature a Colt product, the Manhunter heavy pistol, but it also featured FN Herstal weapons, while a Monobe subsidiary (recently, Ares Arms catalog in Mil Spec Tech 1 and 2 have also shown Ares sells products from other corporations).

Shadows of Europe mentioned Cross Applied Technologies had a "controlling interest" in Alcatel-Nokia in 2063 (which is below the threshold to make it a subsidiary). It is not specifically mentioned among Cross assets taken over by Ares Macrotechnology (though as far as I remember, only Cross Biomedical and Fleche Armaments were).

California Free State and Rigger 3 listed Lockheed as an independent corporation, and it was never mentioned since. The former mentioned an Ares connection of some sort, with Ares Arms and Knight Errant providing site security. But in any way not something public enough for someone to comment on it, or wonder when someone says Lockheed targets Ares for sabotage and extraction.
The old Neo-anarchist Guide to North America mentions General Dynamics (listed as an Ares subsidiary in Rigger 3) taking over some Lockheed assets in Texas in the 1990ies, but it doesn't seem it meant the company itself.

I disagree on that comparison. Nowadays, states are still running the show, not corporations, and you can give the name of the presidents of the US and Russia and the prime ministers of UK and Israel.
For Shadowrun, you may know the name of the UCAS President, but only because of things she did years before being elected, but most people on Dumpshock, in spite of being SR fans, couldn't give the name of the president of the CAS or the prime minister of Japan in 2074.

Not certain about Colt, but H&K has been adressed in the German add-on to Corporate Guide. It's a nominally independent A-rated corp with very strong Saeder-Krupp influences. I do remember it was a very old book with Colt, but I came across a list of Ares companies somewhere. Ares does sell others' stuff for a commission, though, and always has.


The statement was 'most', so unless noted otherwise I assume it is under Ares' control for now. But you're right, it was only implicitly stated.


I'll have to look that one up, but it was in a fairly recent book. Probably a throwaeay remark, like Regulus JI owning AldiReal.

Might be. However, as I pointed out, a controlling interest means Cross owned less than 50% (but enough to control the corp policy). Unless Cross or Ares somehow acquired more shares at some point (still possible), it cannot be registered as a subsidiary. Otherwise, its results cannot be amalgamated with the parent company, and its facilities cannot benefit from the parent company exterritoriality.

As a side note, when Deutshcland in der Schatten and Shadows of Europe introduced Alcatel-Nokia, the merger of Alcatel and Lucent hadn't taken place yet IRL. So the company had no American feeling attached to it.

Though little to none made it in the final version of SoE, we were to model Ares Global Entertainment after the association of Vivendi-Universal and NBC that was going on IRL around that time. It would have explained why the All-American corp had one division headquarters in Paris, France (it makes even more sense now that Vivendi owns Activision, to think Ares, the leading armament corp, would continue the Call of Duty serie, probably with something like "Call of Duty: Knight Errant Operations").

Fair point.


I've always assumed that to be the case anyway, referring to CoD-ish games. Pity so little of that made SoE though. Anyway, SR is sorely missing a good Paris writeup. A setting sadly underestimated for it's cyberpunk potential.

The Excalibur is a lot of egg-on-face embarassment and a catchphrase that gets kicked around by people who want to get a dig in ... Think of Playstation 3's release, and the phrases "Ridge Racer!", "$599", and "Attack its weakpoint for massive damage," ... the Playstation 3's first year of release was so costly (They lost money on every unit sold) that it erased all the profit that the Playstation 1 and 2 had created in their entire existance. It was a Bad Thing, but the company's still standing.

For Ares, the Excalibur is a clown nose, easy to see, but hardly a threat to the business in and of itslf. Instead, it's a symbol ... there's no way it would have come out of there ten, even five, years ago, but internal issues are getting so bad that someone guided it through in an unworkable state. The three internal factions of Ares are tearing at one another in a civil war and it's getting serious enough that it's starting to effect business. That's the sort of situation that you can't take for long.

A single product failing? No biggie.
A possible bug infestation? Problematic, but still no biggie.
The corp trying to eat itself?

THAT'S the problem.

(As for money issues, the megas have been written at different sizes over time. MCT, for instance, was noted to have around 200 billion in income in the first Corporate Download book, a number that Wal-Mart passed in the real world a while back. Obviously, they should be somewhat larger than that in hindsight.)

As noted, firearms aren't a big market in the grand scheme of things. They're not even a big part of Ares, other than as a 'Rally around the flag" product. If Ares goes down, it won't be because of one stupid rifle, but that could be seen as a giant red flag about what was to follow.

Dunno about a 200 billions income, but Corporate Shadowfiles mentions MCT has a 95 billion nuyen cash flow, which is calculated with revenues minus expenses. This would be about twice that of ExxonMobil, three times Apple, and six times Walmart. Cash flow says little about the actual size of a company. Moreover when subsidiaries trade goods and services between them, and employees spend corporate script in corporate stores. It only means MCT is winning money faster that it manages to spend or invest it.

A company cash flow can be compared to a country trade surplus and deficits, or more precisely, current account (since investments are included in cash flow). China and Germany current account is around 200 billion dollar, US is near -475 billion. Which is another example of how such numbers are not related to economic size.

Of course, Corporate Shadowfiles is a book that also says that MCT full-time military force is company-sized. If you rather assume it ought to have a military on-par with, say, UK, France or Japan, then it's an additional 60 billion dollar strain on annual cash flow.

I think a lot of you are underestimating small arms as a market in the sixth world context. I am not going to make an economic argument, I am not equipped to do so, and I'm not saying small arms rivals aerospace. However, take a moment and consider the setting. The Sixth world has a collective case of post-traumatic stress disorder, they've seen the awakening, the crashes, riots over every other thing with massive casualties, Winternight, bugs, the eurowars and second islamic Jihad, shedim, brazenly violent gangs, the deadly and terrifying new class of criminal (the Shadowrunner) and transhuman enhancement.

Weapons are not for hunters and second amendment enthusiasts any more. They are in holsters and gloveboxes the world over. There are holdouts and light pistols marketed for the discerning socialite, for Ghost's sake. They are attatched to the law enforcement drones that patrol every city. Corporations, mercenary units and even national militaries compete every year in the Desert Wars for contracts, prestige and bloodsport. Everyone is buying guns.

I'm not saying you guys don't have valid points, but there are plenty of reasons Ares is "doing it tough" (for an AAA). Consumer confidence goes down, profit margin slips, buying power goes down, projects get delayed or rushed, they start losing products and personnel to extraction and other Shadow ops.

As for the Excalibur, don't look at it as the root of Ares trouble, or even the straw that broke the camels back. The Excalibur is a symptom of greater troubles within Ares. Knight is focused on heavy industry, bugs, arms manufacture, security contracts, aerospace, etc.. Vogel is more interested in innovating things like biological construction, services rather than commodities, etc. On the former count, MCT and SK are huge competitors and have a lot of resource control, Evo is killing it in space, and there are Amazonian industries doing revolutionary things with biomaterials, corps who invest a lot more in high tech R&D, and at the moment all of these competitors are more unified in purpose than Ares. The Excalibur is a PR issue that exacerbates all other problems. It shows weakness that will spill over into other areas. Governments and mercs will see it as a reason not to renew contracts with Ares/KE or field their weapons and vehicles in the Desert Wars and other theatres. People will shop around for their new pistol rather than just impulse buying a Predator, Lightfire or Crusader. Questions will be asked about whether Knight Errant can really protect us.

I think perhaps Ares is going to push for armed conflict near their own turf (didn't they do that with the Utes?), and get some of that sweet war economy like the one booming down south. Or maybe they'll put their military might into resource acquisition, trying to literally fight for better access to overseas mining operations. We know from the hidden stories that they're going to have some contracts implementing the new Matrix infrastructure, so diversification could also be in the cards.

I think you massively underestimate how much of that takes place today already, and how much more small arms are sold to huge state militaries that are just gone in Shadowrun. Also, it's pretty hard to imagine the (in SR former) US even more armed than today. It's what, 1,5 guns per citizen? How many guns does the average North American citizen have in SR? 20? Even that still means small fry in the global market scheme of things, because guns are cheap and durable (they have to be). Even if you accept that everybody is overarmed as ridiculously (which the setting flat out states is not true), it still wouldn't mean much in terms of a market. Not to rival cars, or aerospace, or consumer goods.

To My Knowledge... Gun Ownership in America is not quite as high as you claim.

You're right, it's "only" 88.8%.

Gun rates about .88 per capita rather than 1.5 per. Still head and shoulders past the next closest. Survey was from 2007.

I don't think I stated explicitly enough that I wasn't just talking about North American gun ownership. I'm suggesting that nearly every country in the world (with exceptions like Japan and the UK) has gun ownership trends that surpass current American gun ownership. Sure, guns are durable, but the SOTA is faster (or appears so from marketing ploys) and guns are fashion now. People aren't going to buy new guns because their old one is getting faulty, they are going to buy a new gun because it is the new flash of watercooler conversation. I imagine the citizens of the sixth world buy small arms like they are iPhones. They don't have to rival consumer goods, they are consumer goods.

Which still is not true.


High Fashion, making that relevant for 1% to 5% of the populace. Niche market if there ever was one.


There's not much in the setting backing this up, honestly.

Hoo boy, guns ins Shadowrun is tricky, just because of shifts in the culture since 1989.

There was a real thought, back in the day, about street gang culture as running rampant, about having to lock away whole city sections as 'feral zones' that would be left to fend for themselves, of societal decay and the rule of law collapsing, how everyone needed to be armed ... take a gander at the Detroit you see in Robocop, for example. As economic realities changed, crime rates dropped (Of course, Freakanomics also ties much of that drop in to other causes), and things seemed to smooth over. Guns were still around, but the idea that you had to go out armed in the city fell away rapidly.

Shadowrun has a few different views on the issue, made more complex by having scores, perhaps hundreds, of authors put their views in the mix over the past 24 years. Is your Shadowurn the kind where everyone wears armored clothing and packs a color-coordinated fashion pistol with every ensamble? Is your Shadowrun one where the populace is unarmed and at the mercy of the gangs? Is your Shadowrun largely today, where some people are armed, most aren't, and crime isn't bad but the media shills it as a huge problem because blood sells ad copy?

That's one of the things that's important to keep in mind... when setting forth how the setting works, you have to remember that your Shadowrun isn't everyone's Shadowrun. This is as true with the authors as it is the players.

Isn't there? Think about Captain Chaos' old And So It Came to Pass chapter. He states something along the lines that people in the fifth world didn't have to worry about getting incinerated by a fireball over a parking dispute. There are guns that law enforcement recommends to citizens for their low rate of fire and ammunition capacity, because the average citizen can own a pistol that can punch through a cop's armour jacket and that is considered a widespread problem. The Predator is a household (stress that word) name. The Excalibur is a PR nightmare, not just among gun enthusiasts, but the general public. Sport rifles are considered by Shadowrunners to be beneath them, because they are for civvies. Simple cross-country drives are considered dangerous because of go-gangs and (para)critters.

It is not a niche when every city has a Z-zone where gangers are using heavy weapons. High fashion always filters down and sets trends in pleb-wear, and the high fashion in Shadowrun has a ballistic rating.

Hermit, if you are going to tell that the setting flat-out contradicts my viewpoint, I think the burden of proof is on you now.

Well, that isn't what the legal structure that SR provides says. Permits, licenses and all that stuff doesn't encourage ownership, it makes ownership complex and expensive and prevents the poor from owning weapons. If people are supposed to all have and carry firearms their shouldn't be all the legal restrictions that SR portrays. Remember how FASA was based in Chicago? SR law on guns is like Chicago, NYC or LA. That's something like 20 million people where there are about 10,000 people who have permits to carry a gun. Does that reflect your view of SR world?

And BTW, the total number of firearms manufactured and imported minus export to the US in 2010 was about 8 million. It was about 9 million in 2009. You just can't base a huge company on selling maybe 15-25 billion in goods every year. Even when you include ammo and accessories you are talking about Best Buy, not Walmart or Toyota.

That is how pricing on all consoles works: The platform gets subsidized and the income is generated with the software sales and licenses.


It should be. But as the story is told Damien Knight is on his way to the soup kitchen because of one faulty rifle, which is what everybody in this thread is getting mad about. And this rifle was not even some extremely advanced high-risk project, it is a bread-and butter weapon without any fancy details.


@Psycho: Ares has a diverse product line and the clout to keep their foothold in markets. So even if guns are convenience items, it is not like everybody will suddenly start buying elsewhere.

Where did you get this impression from?
As far as I see its not "soup kitchen" but "lets open the locker labeled "slightly crazy" to see if we can land the PR coup we need to get back on track".

No, they had to worry about getting shot in the face. At least if they were Americans.


Applies to Shadowrun America (and real America), STILL doesn't apply to Shadowrun everywhere. You repeat yourself.


For protection, yes. And I am not disputing that firearms are more proliferate in Shadowrun than in reality (mostly outside America, in america it seems largely the same), I am, however, disputing everywhere is like the UCAS, and that this makes them more than a niche market.


You may think so. Free country and all. But to humor you: Check out how many guns have an availability of - and a legality of legal. Actually, Shadowrun guns are generally LESS legal and available than guns in the US today.

I agree that the barriers to legal gun ownership are somewhat substantial. That fits my dystopic vision, but that vision isn't that the demand for arms is less, it's that world events have created a substantially more paranoid populace and the megacorps have the guns to sell them. In my view, the populace is not disarmed, but they are certainly outgunned by even small security corps. It's the idea that the citizen can have his gun, but he does not threaten the greater power that can kill him with a remote drone.

I am not saying that every wageslave has a gun in his desk at work. The zoned security and proliferation of sensor systems and armed and augmented sec-workers puts a stop to that. But when he's on his commute, the light pistol in his pocket makes him feel safe when the troll in leathers gets on the train, even if he's not.

The black and grey markets have been covered in Shadowrun before, and it's been stated that megas have a slice of that pie, too. You can get an Ares weapon from a street vendor in Redmond or Puyallup, and while in the eyes of the law it fell off the back of a truck, that isn't really the case. Permits are a factor, and I'm glad you brought it up, but there are a lot of SINless whose existence is an offence that carries a jail sentence, and they are definately buying guns, too.

Economic arguments from 2010 have little standing here, in my opinion. The timeline of Shadowrun diverged before that. If you're talking about today in Shadowrun history, we're basically looking at the decade of the Seretech and Shiawase decisions. Corps and their lobbyists have an even greater ability to set trends and policy.

That just makes no sense. Either you have a populace where assault rifles are widely spread, or you don't.


No. We're looking at the decade of PMCs, Lehman Brothers, and Citizens United. The decade of the War on Civil Rights Terror. The bad news is: no, corps and lobbyists in Shadowrun do not have more influence than in reality. Neither are Shadowrun cops more over-armed and brutal, or Shadowrun governments more draconian, than they are today. They are less. Because in the early 90s, nobody could imagine the world we live in now.