It really is a bloodbath in the tech sector. I don’t understand where these thousands of people are even going to go considering major companies are on hiring freeze
My pipe dream is a bunch of new indie studios forming out of all these layoffs and kicking publisher‘s asses on sales with new competent and passionate games.
…But I guess they‘d then probably sell to those publishers again and repeat…
The largest factor is lack of capital, which is something everyone is enduring due to the SVB collapse. This is a giant recession of the entire sector and I don’t see how it corrects any time soon.
While breathing is cool, I have some hope that it will start correcting this year or next.
The big thing is that the raised interest rates have helped to prevent a real recession. So the real question is when can they come back down. I hope it starts this year even though it’ll likely take years to go back to what they were pre-pandemic, if the go that low again.
It was pretty bad for a long time, but once they started letting users make their own hats and body models and shit, it got absurd. At least the games are usually just ripoffs, but the user-made catalog is just full of straight up model rips. I don't understand how they're not getting sued to oblivion for openly making money off of copyrighted material like that.
I don’t need to remember it. I’m in the middle of replaying Baldur’s Gate 1. But that was more of a complicated math formula to derive something that we can do much more simply. The hope and fear thing not only reminds me of that scam curriculum in Donnie Darko, it also doesn’t feel like an interesting tactical layer; it does the opposite by interfering with initiative in a way that I’m not a fan of.
It’s rooted in the light/dark side of the force from Star Wars tabletop, and kind of inherent to Star Wars is making out everything in the world to be light or dark as though it’s that simple, but hardly anything in life is.
I don’t think any designer has ever said it is from Star Wars, and it most definitely does not use them as Light Side/Dark Side or imposed morality. It’s inspired by the Genesys rpg system of degrees of success/failure and has narrative effects like “Yes, but” and “No, however”.
I’d seen it written up in other articles as coming from Star Wars, so perhaps it was that writer that was mistaken. I’ve watched them play, heard the rules explanations and such, and “yes, but” and “no, however” to skill checks aren’t solving some problem I’ve had in other systems.
Sure, it’s not solving anything, but IMO it’s fun giving the GM a tokenified response currency even though you pull off a success. I’ve seen a fair amount of backlash, but just feel portraying the dice mechanic as Star Wars is miles off base, when it adds a narrative prompt for success/failure (D&D does this with nat20/nat1).
I’ll grant you I’m not typically the GM. From your perspective, do you see it making things more interesting as a GM? Because as a player, it’s less up my alley, and the GM’s response currency without that system is whatever they want it to be, because they’re the GM.
It does, I think. It powers “lair actions”, gives powers like interrupting turn sequence, making multiple moves in sequence. When the GM has a pool of currency players can see, there’s an unsaid acknowledgement things are going wrong/badly, which helps fuel collaboration in the storytelling aspect. I can say that someone fails an attack, but on a fail with fear they miss the attack AND leave themselves open to a harsh counterattack, or perhaps lose their weapon. I can do all of this off the cuff in D&D because ‘GM said so’, but then the players can feel an adversarial relationship instead of collaborative, which is so much more encouraged in Daggerheart.
All entirely subjective, and at its core it’s still heroic fantasy same as hundreds of other systems and if you are put off by rolling two dice for metacurrency, it’s likely not for you.
That interrupting turn sequence part is the one that upsets me the most, and I’m not fond of the extra drag on pacing that the "yes, but"s and "no, however"s can have over time. If they are putting their weight behind it, I hope it’s resonating with others, but if they intend to ever replace their D&D with Daggerheart, I wouldn’t be thrilled with the substitution.
It comes from the FFG Star wars RPG system and its method of creating multiple success/failure conditions. It’s an entirely independent system to the light/dark side force mechanics.
That’s fair if it’s not solving a problem for you, but it does add something new that resonates with a lot of people (at least it did for me). I’m speaking from the Genesys side so I don’t know how daggerheart handles it, but I absolutely loved it. I found it made skill checks more collaborative, my table would suggest ideas for how to interpret the roll, and having more to ‘explain’ got people more descriptive in how they talk about their actions. We went from ‘I take a swing. Nope, that’s a miss’ to ‘failure with advantage, ok I go in with my axe but I can’t get through this guy’s defenses. For my advantage, I want to hook this guys shield with my axe so the next attacker gets a boost die to hit’.
It does make checks more involved, but I prefer fewer, more impactful checks as a general rule anyway.
I can see why the comparison to Genysis would exist now but I don’t think it’s a very worthwhile comparison to make in how they play out and are used in each system.
It’s interesting and it seems like a good change for people that have done a lot of d&d but it’s probably not going to be a complete replacement for 5e. It seems good for short campaigns but it only has one book out for now.
Tbf, a lot of people misjudged it, including Larian. I don't think a lot of people really believed the "choices and decisions matter" would work as well as it did. Prior to release, I read an article that talked about how it was gonna be neat that the in-game news would update based on your actions. Like, that was the noteworthy function to discuss about the game. "NPCs might talk about your actions in passing to each other".
Did Microsoft underestimate it more than others? Sure. But pretending like every corporation, including Larian, didn't underestimate it a whole lot is a bit crazy.
Edit: and isn't the game Divinity: Original Sin II? Did it have other names in other international markets?
Edit: this was submitted as a response to https://lemmy.world/comment/3615435 but Kbin didn't seem to actually tie them together. It shows me that it was written as a reply on Kbin, but seems to have lost connection to the comment hierarchy.
The degree of success couldn’t be predicted, sure. But larian is not a new studio, BG is a big ip, DOS2 was a big success, the witcher 3 was a tremendous success, and the game was in early access for 3 years so you could very easily gauge how it was going.
If a decider can’t see that coming at least as a significant possibility, they’re all clowns who don’t deserve more than the lowest wages.
Except virtually everyone got it wrong still. Even the head of Larian thought it'd top out at 100k max. That's currently it's average now with it's max being more than 800% higher.
BG is a big IP, but it's never had this level of success. Look at Diablo III's release (similar IP with a long break between games). It had better advertising campaign and still kind of became noise fairly quickly. Game news sites barely covered BG3 until it hit it big.
Microsoft definitely undershot, but it was likely basing it on a lot of the aggregated news as well. It had barely any coverage prior to its official release. This is usually a sign that the game will be mediocre.
Larian is a big studio but its last expected game from its really only known IP was cancelled after being put on hold for four years (granted BG3 was also being developed during this time). It's biggest games prior to this got at least partially funded on Kickstarter (not a knock against KS, but it's not generally seen as the sign of a strong studio to exec-types).
I don't blame an executive for not seeing this coming.
Executives obviously didn't see this coming. But neither did game journalists or even gamers.
Its a mistake in hindsight, but with what everyone generally knew at the time, it was the expectation of most.
There is a difference between misjudging the success and betting on the failure.
Did you read the paper? BG3 was assessed far below just dance or let’s sing ABBA! It was at the very bottom of the list!
I bought the game blind a year before release. Not to test it but because I knew were I was going. Of course I had big fears about it because many games pretended to be BG successors and I didn’t want to get my expectations too high. But I didn’t know anything about it because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
The information was there. I don’t know why journalists to whatever didn’t saw it coming but I was prepared for it being a big thing for me. It is litteraly their job to assess whether a game will work or not. They bet on failure. They couldn’t be more wrong, and I don’t think there was any sign of failure.
It was expected to be a second release after being a Stadia exclusive. This isn't judging quality, just impact.
Edit: and let's not pretend by adding "far below" when it was in the same group. And the ranking isn't even totally based on expected sales. The asking prices and the levels aren't in order. You're misinterpreting one quote entirely incorrectly and trying assuming too much from a chart.
I think it’s just an interesting story since we have actual internal emails from Microsoft that we wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the justice department’s lawsuit to stop the Activision buyout.
I'm well aware of that. That's why I named it. They said "Divinity of Sin 2". I was asking if they meant Divinity: Original Sin 2 and if it went by a different name in other markets. I thought that was clear. I'm not sure how you got to think I was asking what it is.
I honestly don't know how that interpretation was possible in the given context. It was mentioned in direct response to someone saying "Divinity of sin 2" and I corrected it.
Humans using past work to improve, iterate, and further contribute themselves is not the same as a program throwing any and all art into the machine learning blender to regurgitate “art” whenever its button is pushed. Not only does it not add anything to the progress of art, it erases the identity of the past it consumed, all for the blind pursuit of profit.
Me not knowing everything doesn’t mean it isn’t known or knowable. Also, there’s a difference between things naturally falling into obscurity over time and context being removed forcefully.
And then there’s when its too difficult to upkeep them, exactly like how you can’t know everything.
We probably ain’t gonna stop innovation, so we mine as well roll with it (especially when its doing a great job redistributing previously expensive assets)
If it’s “too difficult” to manage, that may be a sign it shouldn’t just be let loose without critique. Also, innovation is not inherently good and “rolling with it” is just negligent.
Where did the AI companies get their code from? Is scraped from the likes of stack overflow and GitHub.
They don’t have the proprietary code that is used to run companies because it’s proprietary and it’s never been on a public forum available for download.
Stable Diffusion uses a dataset from Common Crawl, which pulled art from public websites that allowed them to do so. DeviantArt and ArtStation allowed this, without exception, until recently.
Devil's advocate. It means that only large companies will have AI, as they would be the only ones capable of paying such a large number of people. AI is going to come anyway except now the playing field is even more unfair since you've removed the ability for an individual to use the technology.
Instituting these laws would just be the equivalent of companies pulling the ladder up behind them after taking the average artist's work to use as training data.
How would you even go about determining what percentage belongs to the AI vs the training data? You could argue all of the royalties should go to the creators of the training data, meaning no one could afford to do it.
How would you identify text or images generated by AI after they have been edited by a human? Even after that, how would you know what was used as the source for training data? People would simply avoid revealing any information and even if you did pass a law and solved all of those issues, it would still only affect the country in question.
Literally the definition of greed. They dont deserve royalties for being an inspiration and moving a weight a fraction of a percentage in one direction…
If AI art is stolen data, then every artists on earth are thieves too.
Do you think artists just spontaneously conjure up art? No. Through their entire life of looking at other people’s works, they learned how to do stuff, they emulate and they improve. That’s how human artists come to be. Do you think artists go around asking permission from millions of past artists if they can learn from their art? Do artists track down whoever made the fediverse logo if I want to make a similar shaped art with it? Hell no. Consent in general is impossible too because whole lot of them are likely too dead to give consent be honest. Its the exact same way AI is made.
Your argument holds no consistent logic.
Furthermore, you likely have a misunderstanding of how AI is trained and works. AI models do not store nor copy art that it’s trained on. It studies shapes, concepts, styles, etc. It puts these concepts into matrix of vectors. Billions of images and words are turned into mere 2 gigabytes in something like SD fp16. 2GB is virtually nothing. There’s no compression capable of anywhere near that. So unless you actually took very few images and made a 2GB model, it has no capability to store or copy another person’s art. It has no knowledge of any existing copyrighted work anymore. It only knows the concepts and these concepts like a circle, square, etc. are not copyrightable.
If you think I’m just being pro-AI for the sake of it. Well, it doesn’t matter. Because copyright offices all over the world have started releasing their views on AI art. And it’s unanimously in agreement that it’s not stolen. Furthermore, resulting AI artworks can be copyrighted (lot more complexity there, but that’s for another day).
It’s a tool that can be used to replicate other art except it doesn’t replicate art does it.
It creates works based on other works which is exactly what humans do whether or not it’s sapient is irrelevant. My work isn’t valuable because it’s copyrightable. On a sociopath things like that
What gives a human right to learn off of another person without credit? There is no such inherent right.
Even if such a right existed, I as a person who can make AI training, would then have the right to create a tool to assist me in learning, because I’m a person with same rights as anyone else. If it’s just a tool, which it is, then it is not the AI which has the right to learn, I have the right to learn, which I used to make the tool.
I can use photoshop to replicate art a lot more easily than with AI. None of us are going around saying Photoshop is wrong. (Though we did say that before) The AI won’t know any specific art unless it’s an extremely repeated pattern like “mona lisa”. It literally do not have the capacity to contain other people’s art, and therefore it cannot replicate others art. I have already proven that mathematically.
TF2 was great before they increased the player limit (I think that was before it became free to play?). It was a hero shooter with strategy and synergy. It became a spammy farm fest with too many items and too many players for what the maps were designed for.
No company “only realizes” anything when it comes to their financials. They had forecasts for the entire year, and accountants keeping track of that shit on daily basis. Every CEO gets together with their CFO on the regular. They know exactly where the company is headed financially, and they prepare what they are going to say to their shareholders quarterly.
Layoffs like this are always planned. The fact that they aren’t capitalizing on the Unity fuck-up to make up the difference shows their ineptitude.
Easily. Aside from the first party titles, there’s literally no reason to get a Switch 2. Everything else is objectively better on a PC handheld (especially the Deck).
Serious question. Do ANY of those have track pads? Because so far those seem to be something that only the deck has and I find them to be its most important feature.
There are thousands of games that come out every year, even after filtering out the asset flips and hentai games. A handful of those will have kernel-level anti cheat that make them incompatible by design. Fewer still will be pushing minimum specs that are too hefty for the Steam Deck to handle. So the thousands of remaining games are your use case for the Steam Deck, which tends to be cheaper than its competition and comes with a better OS. A device like those Android ones are fine for emulation, but you’re not playing newer releases on it, and newer releases are far, far, far more than just AAA games with hefty system requirements; it’s also Mouse: P.I. for Hire, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, Warside, Descenders Next, Dispatch, and on and on.
The Ally, Legion, Claw and Win 4 are all more expensive than the Steam Deck. The Odin 2 and Pocket 5 are not, but they don’t run steam, so you can definitely not play all the same games as the steam deck
This is exactly why we have these issues like we’re dealing with with the Switch 2. Console gamers are only focused on hardware and exclusivity, they’re not focused on the operating system of the device, the build quality of the product itself (including the ergonomics), nor do they care about the company that produces it beyond their basic fanboy tendencies.
Steam Deck’s competitors might have slightly better hardware or a higher resolution, but none of them are right to repair friendly. None of them have custom software literally designed for the product, and none of them have the sort of ergonomics that the Steam Deck has. Not to mention the fact that Valve is an American company, which might not be important to everybody, but it is important to me. They’re also a company that has proven themselves to be largely consumer-friendly.
While I’m not dissing anybody who does make the choice to go for an Ally or a Legion Go, the problem I have is that those devices are literally just another hardware company jumping on a band wagon. The Steam Deck completely revolutionized the way that we play on PC. Sure, it took inspiration from the original Switch. There’s no question about that. But that doesn’t mean that Valve was just jumping on a band wagon the way that ASUS and Lenovo are doing.
Valve literally spent years working with Linux developers on software that makes Linux gaming truly viable in order to create devices that allow you to run virtually any game on a handheld that you fully own, are allowed to put any game on (including games from other launchers, which they didn’t have to allow) and you’re fully allowed to self-repair it if any issues arise. Meanwhile, companies like ASUS and Lenovo treat their customers more like smartphone suckers customers, not to mention the fact that they went the cheap and easy route of just using Windows, which isn’t optimized for a device like these. And guess what? Lenovo is bending the knee to the Steam Deck supremacy by allowing you to get a version with SteamOS in the future. That alone proves that Valve is one step ahead of their competition.
To summarize all that I said, the reason the Steam Deck is so good is not just the hardware, it’s not just the screen, it’s the fact that it’s a very capable device at the hardware level, combined with very, very good software and a very consumer-friendly company behind it all.
Yep! When you open the Steam menu, you can access a full-featured desktop mode. It makes the device virtually limitless outside of the software issues you mentioned. And I agree entirely that it’s ridiculous to see these companies ignoring Linux the way they do.
I picked up a Nintendo Switch because of it being a handheld. I wouldn’t have picked one up otherwise, since I had skipped generations of Nintendo consoles preferring Sony due to Nintendo games being too high. But, with the Steam Deck where I don’t even need to repurchase “Deck versions” of games the handheld component isn’t a selling point of the Switch to me anymore.
It’s how copros talk now, they saw “Leaks” are spicier than “Reveals”
It’s just what they do, they co-opt our langauge and misuse it. Plenty of restaurants around here claiming their cheap menu items are “Hunger Hacks”
When no they aren’t, as a hack would be a manipulation of loopholes to get a result not intended by the person who made the rules, a cheap item menu clearly listed is not a hack.
There’s a lot here, and yes, the total addressable market for the Steam Deck is currently less than either Switch will sell in a single quarter, but the video game market is a very different thing now than it was in early 2017. The Switch was the only game in town; now it’s not. Live service games make up a significant amount of what the average consumer wants, and those customers largely play on PC for all sorts of reasons. The Switch 2 is no longer priced cheaply enough that it’s an easy purchase for your child to play with, abuse, and possibly break. The console market in general is in the most visible decline it’s ever been in, also for all sorts of reasons, and those handhelds from Sony and, at least, Microsoft are likely to just be handheld PCs as well.
Development on blockbuster system sellers has slowed way down, which comes hand in hand with there just not being as many of them, which makes buying yet another walled garden ecosystem less appealing. This walled garden has Pokemon and Mario Kart, so Nintendo’s not about to go bankrupt, but if we smash cut to 8 years from now and the Switch 2 sold more units than the Switch 1, I’d have to ask how on earth that happened, because it’s looking like just about an impossible outcome from where we stand now.
Also, there’s this quote:
But, although Microsoft has now been making Xbox consoles for over 20 years, it has consistently struggled to use that experience to make PC gaming more seamless, despite repeated attempts
Look, I’m no Microsoft fanboy. Windows 10 was an abomination that got me to switch to Linux, and Windows 11 is somehow even worse. The combination of Teams and Windows 11 has made my experience at work significantly worse than in years prior. However, credit where credit is due: Microsoft standardized controller inputs and glyphs in PC games about 20 years ago and created an incentive for it to be the same game that was made on consoles. It married more complex PC gaming designs with intuitive console gaming designs, and we no longer got bespoke “PC versions” and “console versions” of the same title that were actually dramatically different games. PC gaming today is better because of efforts taken from Microsoft, and that’s to say nothing of what other software solutions like DirectX have done before that.
Still, the reason a Microsoft handheld might succeed is because it does what the Steam Deck does without the limitations of incompatibility with kernel level anti cheat or bleeding edge software features like ray tracing (EDIT: also, Game Pass, the thing Microsoft is surely going to hammer home most). Personally, I don’t see a path for a Sony handheld to compete.
live service games make up a significant amount of what the average consumer wants, and those customers largely play on PC for all sorts of reasons
You are leaving out the elephant in the room: smartphones.
So, so, so many people game on smartphones. It’s technically the majority of the “gaming” market, especially live service games. A large segment of the population doesn’t even use PCs and does the majority of their computer stuff on smartphones or tablets, and that fraction seems to be getting bigger. Point being the future of the Windows PC market is no guarantee.
I don’t think the people gaming on smart phones are the same demographic that would compete with the Switch 2 or a handheld PC. It’s not a lot of data, but take a look at how poorly Apple’s initiative for AAA games on iPhone has been going. There are more problems with that market than just library. The PC market has been slowly and steadily growing for decades while the console market has shrunk.
I am vastly oversimplifying a lot, but… Perhaps mobile gaming, on aggregate, is too shitty for its own good? It really looks that way whenever I sample the popular ones.
I suspect it’s more that the time people can and do spend playing phone games has just about zero overlap with PC games. You play phone games while on the bus or on the toilet, you play PC games while at home behind your desk.
I think a huge reason so many people with a Steam Deck also have a Switch is that the Switch had a 5 year head start. Hades did really well on Switch, but I can’t imagine anyone choosing that version of the game if they had a Steam Deck, and the same applies to Doom, The Witcher 3, etc. I have a Switch and a Steam Deck, but I haven’t used one of those machines in years.
Really wild to go from this vibe at the end of the seventh generation of consoles to the one we’re at now. For me, and many other people that like high quality gaming experiences, mobile games have completely vanished.
polygon.com
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