Oh boy! Can’t wait for my grandchildren to use AI to customize the sponsorship logos on Cyborg-Messi’s Jersey or change the hue of the football pitch to a slightly more artificial green in EA Sports FC 2077!
You misunderstand. Larian is the company that made the BG3 video game, and they haven’t laid people off.
However it’s a licensed game. Baldur’s Gate and D&D are IPs that are owned by a company called Wizards of Coast. And Wizards is owned by Hasbro. Hasbro is forcing layoffs at Wizards, specifically on the D&D team because it doesn’t print money as efficiently as say, Magic the Gathering does.
The people at Wizards, i.e the people who actually make D&D are no doubt passionate wonderful people. But Hasbro (and probably some of the Wizards management) are awful corporate parasites determined to suck every last penny from their properties.
They don’t give a shit how loved a product is, if it’s not making $100M per year then it’s basically worthless to them and they won’t fund it. So layoffs happen.
Please do not tell me that anyone is surprised that a triple A game studio laid off most of their employees as a reward for a job well done.
Please. Please tell me everyone has figured out that nearly all large game dev companies are pure fucking evil.
EDIT: Welp, thats what I get for making an ill informed post after 36 hours on the road before passing out in my motel, yep, I probably should have read the article.
The headline here on lemmy is unreadable gibberish with BG3 in the title. It could as well be
Layoff 5blagagasjjee Swen shgrwaaahahaaaa Baldurs Gate 3 dacghgfrtf gone. Click here for ads.
So i get where he’s coming from. On the other hand, once you start reading the ads with some content in between it becomes clear immediately that this is about the IP holder, not the game studio.
‘There’s almost nobody left’: CEO of Baldur’s Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke says the D&D team he initially worked with is gone, due to Hasbro layoffs
Same Lemmy title as the article. You know exactly who’s talking (“CEO of Baldur’s Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke”), about whom (“the D&D team he initially worked with”), what happened to them (“is gone”) and who is to blame (“due to Hasbro layoffs”).
As far as titles go, it’s pretty good at telling you exactly what the actual article is about. Sure, you may need basic knowledge about how a licenced product works, and that BG3 is under the D&D licence. It would be rather hard to fit all that in a title.
Off-topic, but when I mentioned this in a different thread, an actual answer I got is basically the fediverse is really similar to reddit - how can the culture be any different?
Anyways, if the fediverse starts to become Reddit 2.0 I think it would be high time to go.
You…You might want to consider reading the article.
Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, who own DnD. Larian, a completely separate company, got the rights to make BG3 from Hasbro. Hasbro laid off nearly everyone Larian Studios worked with at Wizards of the Coast.
What? No. They’re saying that Larian, a completely independent company, worked with a team from Wizards of the Coast. Wizards of the Coast is owned by Hasbro. Hasbro laid off 1100 employees from Wizards of the Coast. Many of those employees were on the team that worked with Larian to make BG3.
Larian Studios had literally nothing to do with this. Larian did nothing wrong.
Game developers seem to be very afraid to change core features or the story of the game in a major way (even if the actual work would not be too extensive) after release. But there are enough examples where games improved a lot after release.
Sure, the initial impression of the game might be ruined, but that is more a consequence for the producers that most often where responsible for the rushed release, than for the gamers or developers, of the game is fixed afterwards.
Its insanity, Unity is a good product. There is a place for it in reality. In any sane world this product would have continued to operate how it was and it would have benefited people. But since profits are attached everything will have to be ruined eventually. Unreal is next to bat.
That’s really well said and an underrated comment here. In a sane world, Unity would “make a living” just fine. Another user commented on where they spent their margins, and my bet is that it’s on bullshit. Executive compensation should be first to get slashed, and if anything they should concentrate on keeping the “golden goose” or core development team alive.
Allowing leaders to use profits however they wish has been a disaster. I don’t know if it was codified into law, but when companies had to invest in R&D, and they had to invest in employees before drinking their own koolaid the world was a better place. Employees were taken care of, average people could thrive. Now its an open feeding trough everyone else is exempt from. The modern world only thrives with checks and balances, its proven that without them the powerful cannot be trusted.
I would say, being even more pedantic, that the game uses a blockchain (which is just a different type of database) to record in game digital asset ownership. This game could have been made with a normal db taking that roll and would probably run no differently.
He is mentioning and using a blockchain over a normal db for no other reason that it probably helped to secure funding in 2017 as it was a massive tech buzzword at the time.
It could, sure, but I’m positive the only reason he’s making it is because of blockchain. I seriously doubt Pete was rolling around a game idea for online real estate separately and just threw blockchain in as a way to get funding.
Oh boy can’t wait to have cups that burn a hole right through their coolers
I’d really love it if we’d just have a generation or two where they focused on making cpus more efficient and less hot rather than ramping power every generation , same with gpus
This only got bad with the most recent generation of CPUs. AMD 5xxx series is very efficient as demonstrated by Gamers Nexus. The Intel CPUs from 2500k to idk, 8xxx series? were efficient until they started slapping more cores and then cranking the power on them.
Yes the second thing about cranking power and cores is what I’m talking about.
Also, as far as gpus, the 2000 series was ridiculously power hungry at the time, and it looks downright reasonable now. It’s like the Overton window of power consumption lol.
I dunno, I ran a 2080 on the same PSU that I used on a 2013 build, a 650W seasonic. Got some graphs? Power consumption didn’t seem to jump that bad until the latest gen.
My current 3090 is a power hog though, that’s when I’d say it started for Nvidia (3000 series). For AMD, 7000 series CPUs, and I’m not really sure for Intel. 9900k was the last Intel CPU I ran, it seemed fine. I was running a 9900k/2080 on the same PSU as the 2500k/570 build.
As for as the 2080 goes, like I said, it was big FOR THE TIME, and power hungry FOR THE TIME. It’s still reasonable especially for today’s standards
As for as the last two gens, 3000 and 4000 series, they are known to draw more than their rated power requirements, which, for their min recommended psu wattage, 3080 was 50 watts more than the 2080 (750w), and 4080 was 100 w more than that (850w)
To add to that, both of these gens of cards, when doing graphics intensive things like gaming, can overdraw power and have been known to cause hard shutdowns in pcs with PSUs that are even slightly higher rated than their min rec. Before these last two gens you could get away with a slightly lower than rated wattage PSU and sacrifice a little performance but that is definitely no longer the case.
And sure, the performance to watts used is better in the 3080, but they also run 10+ degrees hotter and the 4000 series even moreso.
I just hope the 5000 series goes the way of power consumption refinement rather than smashing more chips onto a board or vram fuckery like with the 4060, like I’d be happy with similar performance on the 5000 series if it was less power hungry
The 7 series are more efficient than the 5 series. They just are programmed to go as fast as thermals allow. So the reviewers that had really powerful coolers on the cpus saw really high power draw. If instead you set a power cap, you get higher performance per watt than the previous generations.
Having the clocks scale to a thermal limit is a nice feature to have, but I don’t think it should have been the default mode.
Intel became less efficient because of how long they were stuck on 14nm. In order to compensate to beat amd in performance mindshare, they needed to push the clocks hard.
Overtime, cpus have been sitting closer to max clock, defeating the purpose of overclocking to many, where adding 1GHz was not out of the ordinary. Now getting 0.5GHz is an acheivement.
I felt the same when the current-gen CPUs were announced, but when I looked closer at AMD’s chips, I learned that they come with controls for greatly reducing the power use with very little performance loss. Some people even report a performance gain from using these controls, because their custom power limits avoid thermal throttling.
It seems like the extreme heat and power draw shown in the marketing materials are more like competitive grandstanding than a requirement, and those same chips can instead be tuned for pretty good efficiency.
Yeah I’m talking about Nvidia and Intel here, but tbh ryzen 4000 cpus run pretty hot, but they also optimized ryzen quite a bit before they changed to this new chip set, which makes sense to me. Seems like Nvidia and Intel are worried about what looks good power wise on paper rather than optimization sometimes.
AMD uses 290/390 to compete with Nvidias 970, people buy Nvidia, shoulda bought a 390 meme is born after the 3.5 gb vram controversy happens. AMd mocked for high power consumption.
AMD releases 6000 series gous to compete with Nvidias Ampere line, uses a notibly significant lower power draw, people still buy Nvidia.
That’s because Nvidia still has the leg up on rtx, but that doesn’t mean Nvidia shouldn’t be thinking about it. I’m not talking about what the market directs them to do, I’m talking about what I hate personally
I mean they did this generation technically. All of the rtx 4000 cards sans the 4090 are fairly efficient… only because nvidia moved the names of the gpu for each tier thats not the halo card.
Point is, you cant have everything and people generally prioritize performance first. Because efficiency has rarely gave either gpu company more profit gpu wise.
If you cared about efficiency, Nvidia answer to people would be buying their RTX 4000 SFF Ada(75w ~3060ti perf) or RTX 6000 Ada… if you can afford it.
It’s interesting that this comes out during the FTC vs Microsoft case.
As much as Google shot itself in the foot, as usual, this also shows the anti-competitive landscape in gaming. One of the biggest issues Google had was convincing AAA studios to develop games for their “console”. Meanwhile, Microsoft is solving that by buying studios like Zenimax, Mojang, and soon Actiblizz. If you own the studio, they’re guaranteed to develop for your console, and they may choose not to develop for any competitor’s consoles.
But it has always been that way, with first party titles and exclusives , even purchasing studios like Rare or Psygnosis, its not like a brand new situation that developed right after Google announced Stadia.
If Google had done even any research, I would have started by looking at the PS1 launch and how Sony broke into a market then dominated by Nintendo and Sega with their exclusives, they would have secured a multi year pipeline of AAA titles before launch.
This is a mess Google could have completely avoided with some basic research and discussion with the remaining independent studios. Instead they launched and assumed that they could fix this shit later, rather than making an informed decision on if they actually had a real chance.
its not like a brand new situation that developed right after Google announced Stadia
No, but it’s telling that one of the world’s richest companies ran into this problem. It’s pretty typical of Google to be arrogant and not understand the market they were trying to break into. Also typical of them to give up when it turned out to be a hard problem to solve. But, still, they chose to give up rather than make what (for them) would have been a reasonably small investment to buy a few AAA studios.
It seems to me that to have been successful in this attempt they would have either had to become a major console manufacturer with their own exclusives (maybe not a market they wanted to be in) or to be the junior partner working with another console manufacturer, where they controlled the server side and the other company controlled the client-facing and studio-facing side. But, Google rarely does partnerships like that. You’re right that it really seems like they didn’t go into it with their eyes open. They seemed to just arrogantly assume that their technological superiority would be enough to disrupt consoles without having to do what everybody else did.
But this is a situation of their own making, anybody even remotely cognizant of how Sony and Microsoft entered the market, even Steam has lessons to share, would have been aware that they needed that pipeline of AAAs, and exactly how expensive AAA titles are to make. Its usually public record how much one of the manufacturers paid to buy studios as well, the order of magnitude of cash needed to properly enter the market are hardly secret.
Either they thought they could bully their way into getting them or they thought they didn’t need them, which is even worse, way way worse. They could have spent the money the others are in this space but didn’t, this is the main reason this fell on its arse. They can moan all they like about the price of admission but they could have afforded to pay it if they wanted or lobbied to change it before hand rather than wasting a few billions on this.
It will be very interesting at the level Apple pitch their new gaming service if the rumors are true. Do they go after the mobile lite eco system that Netflix is cobbling together or do they go all in?
I’m honestly amazed that anyone could have completed it more than once already. I’ve played it every day since Friday and I feel like I’ve barely got out of the opening seconds of the game.
another article said a ng+ run is about 90 minutes. so it seems if you just wanna complete loops, the post-game is a much different pace than your first run
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