When asked who his target audience for his games was, Takahashi answered that he was. “I make games that I feel satisfied with, so I’d like people to play them if they want to,” he replied. “I guess I probably should make games while thinking about the target audience, but I’ll work on that in my next life.”
Psychonauts 2 happened because Microsoft bought Double Fine and said, “How much time/money do you need to finish your game?” And basically gave it to them.
Hell yeah, I’m happy they did! That game was an absolute delight to play, just like the first one. The people at Double Fine really knock it out of the park!
Literally watched an interview with Tim Schafer, they ran out of Kickstarter money and Microsofr saved the day. Look it up before calling me out please.
No one saved the day, they fund raised before, everyone does, many people found publishers if needed after running out of croudfunded money. There is no saviour here.
Was Kickstarted for all consoles, they ran out of money, Microsoft bought them and left everything as-is, just gave more money. Go watch the interview about it.
There’s a common thread between a lot of the missteps listed here and Embeacer group’s recent troubles. The idea that you could fund 230 Spiderman 2’s for the same price as buying 1 Activision-Blizzard-King really drove the point home to me.
The problem (in my obviously uneducated opinion) is that when you spend so much money in acquisition, especially of established companies, you’re neither funding nor rewarding innovation. You spend $70B on ABK and some randos in suits get a huge payout that they invest in oil or crypto or whatever. Spend $70B on talent and early career devs and you could unleash a tidal wave of creativity and experimentation.
True. These mega-deals are rarely about games, it's more in the realm of finance. In fact it doesn't really matter if it's games, films, cars, saucepans, it's all about the financial side. And as a consequence in order to make good on that investment these companies end up producing the blandest, widest-appealing pap, the complete opposite of innovation. However, the breathless way these stories are reported by a media, both specialist and mainstream, which is more concerned with business "success", means we're told it's a very good thing, when it clearly isn't.
There were more sports cars in the parking lot in the PS1 era than there were in the PS4 era
What a struggle. Should we then have tripled the prices so the poor publishers could afford 2 sports cars instead? Or, hear me out, just play indie games that’s higher quality and doesn’t have a useless middle man.
You can‘t deny it did boost Jennifer English‘s career to a high degree. You could say it‘s not all about her role as Shadowheart alone but it definitely helped kickstart her online presence. She went from voicing children side characters to being one of the most prolific and recognizable voices in gaming within two years and I doubt her role in Expedition 33 where she was heavily featured in promotional material was the last we‘ve heard of her.
This isn’t about me or my perception. I am saying this because she said so herself and the Imdb Page you linked tells the same story. She broke her mold with Shadowheart and now she is getting much bigger and more diverse roles. But feel free to tell me about a game prior to BG3 where she took center stage for marketing like she did for Expedition 33.
What story do you think her imdb page tells? Because she has consistently done 2-3 roles per year since 2022. And a lot of those are games that have been in dev a long time. Like, that covid stretch is likely what led to consistently getting 2-3 releases each year since '22.
Also… is she major marketing for E33? I don’t watch a lot of commercials these days but mostly if ANY VA is involved it is Cox or Starr. Like, I think Alice Duport-Percier (the singer of Alicia) has gotten more face time across the various youtube ads and what not than anyone else (and rightfully so. That song contributes so much to the Vibes of such a Vibes based game).
But either way: That doesn’t actually change the point. The BG3 VAs pretty much all knocked it out of the park. And that isn’t translating to meaningful increase in roles.
Which has come up a lot over the years. Very few VAs see major success even after bringing EVERYONE to tears with how good of a performance they gave. And the Troy Bakers (and Laura Baileys) of the world are a whole different argument.
Just to add on. A twitch streamer I semi-regularly watch is also a pretty successful VA and she has talked about this in the past. People might say that she MADE a game with her performance but that doesn’t translate to future castings. So she can be in mobile trash one year and a GOTY contender the next and still get roughly the same bookings and checks per year.
Which is probably why so much of the BG3 cast were super eager to work with Digital Extremes. Partially because DE and Reb are awesome. But mostly because live service games area potentially a great source of stable income since they’ll need a few lines every year for N years.
Hard to talk about it without getting into spoilers, but Gustave (Cox’s role) was very much a leading face of the game in marketing, and I strongly suspect that was solely because they thought the game would sell better with a male lead.
Those roles are tiny. Like I don‘t even know why you‘re so strongly against the idea that she wasn‘t that big before. You literally just have to look up her actual roles.
And yes she was a major factor of the marketing campaign. Again, you just have to look up the trailers.
She literally talks all the time about how she doesn’t get any offers all of the sudden. She probably did at least once in one of her last four streams. She just has become pickier with what she auditions for. But she still has to audition like everyone else.
She just has become pickier with what she auditions for.
Most actors in gaming are certainly not becoming pickier with AI looming at the horizon so this is a strong sign that she is in fact doing very good. Certainly better than voicing Child #5 in Original Sin 2. And that’s literally the entire point I’m trying to get across here.
I’ve no doubt she’ll continue to do well, but I’m not sure BG3 directly helped her get the role, other than making her voice recognizable to people. I read an article that said that Sandfall did blind voice auditions for E33. They didn’t even know they’d chosen Charlie Cox until after the fact.
Yeah, apparently the director and writer of E33 were actually playing BG3 at the time of the casting. But they didn’t recognise her voice at all. They just knew that they had found the right one for the role.
It’s also saying something that they cast Andy Serkis and didn’t use him for performance capture. That was all done before the voice recordings. Recording over already finished performance was an entirely new experience for him.
She probably did more work on BG3 alone than all previous works combined though. The experience alone boosted their performance immensely. Neil Newbon compared his 4 years at the studio with 4 seasons of shooting a TV show and his role was about the same size as Jennifer‘s. BG3 wasn‘t just any job. Especially not for her. Anyone who actually follows her can attest to that. To say it didn‘t change the trajectory of her life and career takes some serious ignorance.
I suspect that Nintendo is offering them more than enough money for exclusivity to make it no longer ‘questionable’ for Supergiant, at least from a financial perspective.
It’s no different from Hades 1. It was exclusive to PC and Switch at launch, then released for other consoles 11 months later. If it worked out for that game, I don’t see why it wouldn’t for this one.
Hardly inevitable. I'm broke af, the economy is collapsing, so not spending money on Nintendo is the easiest possible choice.
Literally not buying something you don't need is the easiest form of protest.
I mean, it is and it isn’t. On one hand, yes people will probably lose their jobs with these tools supposed to filled the gaps.
But that doesn’t mean the AI tools are actually anywhere near as competent as a human, and it will result in watered-down, anodyne, and to be more blunt, just boring art and writing.
Corporate will use the tools because they’re “good enough,” but we all know they’re really not good enough. They’re just one more way to cut costs at the expense of user experience and employee workload (the employees that are left being expected to do more work).
Bingo. AI is shockingly good at building simple things, helping with direct questions about items. It cannot replace humans in its current state.
At this point it’s CEO bluster just like the blockchain, where the suits are talking about technology like they personally handcrafted it while the actual engineers are sitting in the back of the room thinking “uh, there’s no way it can do that”.
I think we’re going to see a couple hilarious cycles of some shit thinks they can replace humans with AI, fail spectacularly, and then quietly go back.
I honestly don’t think they’ll even quietly go back. It’s clear “customer service” is becoming something that isn’t considered a return on value, so they’re shutting them down all over. Customer service will be the number one thing replaced with AI and they won’t go back on that.
Customer service for the last 20-30 years has absolutely been nothing but a shield for corporations to hide behind while screwing their customers. Low paid phone jockeys have to deal with people furious at being fucked over by conglomerates like Comcast. There is no way to contact anyone further up the chain, and that is deeply purposeful.
They record all the phone calls, but they refuse to learn anything that benefits the customer from them. All they do is deploy psychological tricks to try to get the customer to be happy while not actually rectifying the problem. It’s always a purposeful half-measure that has been deeply researched to calm people down and accept the big unlubed dildo in their ass like they should.
So yeah, the “customer service voice” will be long gone to be replaced with increasing shitty “customer service AI” with no human to talk to, and if you get lost in the shuffle and put in a digital black hole, well, “go fuck yourself” is clearly what they’ll be telling you. They already pretty much do this (especially Google) but it will become increasingly pronounced and difficult.
Clawing back anything that corporations have stolen from you will increasingly become an exercise in total futility as you’re stuck in an endless AI loop that refuses to give you options that actually address your issue.
It’s within literal months that leaps are occurring that defy most expert expectations and predictions.
While yes, creative writing is not part of the target of where models are improving right now (and there are IMO clear mistakes being made with foundational models contributing to that poor performance), we’re probably less than one dev cycle from the best AI outperforming an above average video game writer with institutional integration of the models.
And really, people thinking this is going to put writers out of business are missing the true value add for publishers.
You’ll see the same amount of writers as before. What will change is the amount of writing.
Being able to have a core writing team do the normal work they do of writing out main and side quests and then feeding all that writing into a model spitting out side NPC dialogue fitting in with the events taking place allows developers to make their world come alive in ways previously only accessible to the largest budgets in the industry like RDR2.
This also allows games that are successful to transition into more of a live service product without needing to have a massive audience.
For most live service games, you need as many people as possible playing to justify dedicating resources to continued development, or you need a subscription fee. But niche products with a dedicated fan base which aren’t overly popular are too small to justify continuous content development.
With AI that equation changes. More games have the opportunity to keep players engaged longer for continuing adventures when a smaller team can use generative systems to flesh out the product.
Everyone praises No Man’s Sky for their continued development with a team of about a dozen putting more and more content out, but the other side of the coin is that they can only successfully deliver updates that feel weighty because they are leveraging procgen to extend their efforts.
Imagine the next version of FF online where not only is there a core main story everyone experiences, but there are also individualized stories woven into it that are shaped around your interactions. Where every NPC can be spoken to and any one of them might lead to your next individualized adventure. A world that feels at once epic and shared with millions of other players while also personal and unique just for you.
Even if the individual writing wasn’t as planned out as world event scenario writing from lead writers, I’d sure as hell prefer to spend $16/mo on a world with little repetition and endless adventures than a world that only has a hundred hours of story every year and is mostly running the same things over and over in between waiting for small bursts of content updates.
AI makes perfect sense for any live service provider, and Square Enix has one of the most successful live service products to date. Of course they are going to be investing into it as it rapidly improves.
For every job that AI kills, you need at least 2 techs to train the AI. This isn’t meant to say “go get a job as an AI tech if you’re worried about job security” it’s more of a “businesses will see the obvious lack of ROI and vision and refuse to implement it”.
Which is also what the last CEO of Square Enix rode on. This is either investor appeasement or indeed improvement of quality with these tools or, and far more likely both buzzwords and producing crap to cut costs.
It absolutely is. Although, putting aside the obvious ethical debates, I will say that least AI has some practical uses. Crypto-currency and NFTs felt a lot like a solution looking for a problem, and while that can be true of some implementations of AI, there are a lot of valid uses for it.
But yeah, companies rushing to use AI like this, and making statements like this, just screams that they're trying to persuade investors they're "ahead of the curve", and is absolutely indicative of a hype bubble. If it wasn't a hype bubble, they'd either be quietly exploring it externally and not putting out statements like this, or they're be putting out statements excitedly talking specifics about their novel and clever implementations of AI.
Hence the reason to try and get yuzu and the other emulators to stop being out there. They know theyre just hosing their customer base and needed to try and minimize the damage they will do to themselves
Game preservationists have long argued that a move to a digital-only future will cause games to be lost forever if proper preservation measures aren’t put in place.
There are already scores of online-only titles that can no longer be played either due to their delisting or servers being shut down. In some cases, game discs serve only as physical entitlement keys to be able to play the digital version of the game, meaning if the digital store itself shuts down in the future the disc will become useless.
Once again, the key to preservation is DRM-free, not physical media. We were already headed toward a future with no physical media for games, and these tariffs will only accelerate that. They may be a similar accelerant in the death of consoles.
videogameschronicle.com
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