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.
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.
Honestly it was just a good game. I saw it attracting both Potterheads and non-Potterheads. (I would not consider myself a Potterhead).
Does it have a bunch of replay value? Not really (neither do a lot of games). But man, that initial playthrough was just really good. It also looks like I clocked 113 hours on the game, so that’s a pretty decent return to me.
Also, despite the source material and the author, it had a lot of very inclusive elements, which were a nice touch.
I love companies swinging between “we have to increase your subscription costs to allow us to offer more great features” and “our customers are excited about our new features so we need to leverage advertising to continue providing them”. Just repeat until everything is loaded with ads AND costs twice as much!
honestly, the thing that gets me here is–who even focuses on Netflix Gaming in the first place? i never hear about stuff dropping in their ecosystem, and so it really feels like an afterthought service to begin with that they’ve bolted onto their main business
Ok no joke, I discovered Dead Cells, one of my favourite rougelike games currently, through Netflix. I was browsing through Netflix mobile, saw that they had a gaming section, and that was one of the first suggested games.
I now own 3 copies of Dead Cells+DLCs (one for every platform I game on). However, I don’t have a Netflix subscription anymore, lol.
They throw a half assed product at the wall without notifying anyone, nothing sticks, so now they’re throwing in ads to recover costs.
I really feel like the C suites of these companies are run by complete morons, without hyperbole. These people are not good at what they’re doing. They just floated to the top during a period where money was free and being bold was more important than being right.
So they walked back the part where they would’ve been sued anyways because it was already in their contract that they couldn’t retroactively charge you unless you renewed/updated. They of course changed it for this update.
“Oops you caught us doing something illegal and bad so we’ll still do the bad part, but we are sooo sorry you caught us trying to do something against our contracts, so I guess we’ll remove that part. See how sorry and humbled we are? Now give us your money.”
Someone finally calculated the cost of legal challenges, I guess. While this certainly saves in developer costs in legal fees, I don't see why anyone would keep their projects in Unity under the new terms, charging a developer based on a metric disconnected from sales is always going to incur unacceptable risk unless the developer has really deep pockets.
I never understood why they even had that clause in their contract. You’re already not allowed to change the terms of a contract after the contract has been agreed (because otherwise what’s the point), you don’t need to independently include wording to say you won’t do it. Equally removing the wording doesn’t allow you to make those changes.
So effectively they had some wording that didn’t give anybody any additional protections, then removed it, thus not removing any protections. They then acted as if that weirdly allowed them to break the law, and then broke the law. Then when someone pointed out that’s not how it works, they backtracked.
It is absolutely amazing that nobody seems to have clicked through to the actual article.
So for all the "just use hall effect sticks" people, the patent is apparently not just for a solution to drift but also a way to add variable pressure to sticks, kinda like what Sony does to triggers.
It took me like fifteen seconds to read deep enough to find that.
For what it's worth, I think it could be interesting, especially if applied in a Nintendo-like way, bur proprietary stuff like that tends to go underutilized. You know, like the triggers on the PS5 controller.
It’s not clear, then, whether developers would be able to change the resistance of the fluid to provide some sort of force feedback, or a resistance similar to that of the triggers in the PS5‘s DualSense controller (for steering in racing games, for example).
For someone who supposedly read the article you seem to be making big assumptions
No, I read the whole thing, including that line, but that's entirely editorializing from the reporter. The quotes from the actual patent are pretty clear, machine translation word soup aside.
You being nitpicky made me go dig up the full patent, which makes it even clearer: "(...) The intensity of the magnetic field can be designated from the application. Thus, it is possible to perform flexible control in accordance with the application".
I don't blame the commenters for not going that extra step, though, that's just me being fastidious. I do blame the reporters focusing on stick drift because mah clicks for not reading the patent properly, though.
EDIT: For what it's worth, I find the idea of a stick being full of ferrofluid or whatever else they're using for this to be... likely finicky and potentially messy and fragile, depending on how much you need in there to make it work properly. This sounds intriguing and weirdly high-tech, but if you made me bet I wouldn't feel comfortable putting money on this showing up on a Switch 2 just yet. Could be wrong, though.
I won’t buy a Nintendo controller again until they’re out for awhile and I know they’re good.
The two I have are garbage and I didn’t even get drift. The stick flick makes a lot of high precision games unplayable. And most of the time I use a third party controller that’s better, more reliable, and half the price.
I mean, that's fair enough, I suppose. Like I said elsewhere I've had more problems with the PS5 controllers than the Switch ones, but my guess is this is luck of the draw. Some people just don't like the Joycon form factor, and that's also fair. I have some wrist issues and split controllers are amazing for my specific issues, so I'm very on board with the design for very specific reasons.
FWIW, I suspect a lot of the issues people report with those things are down to connectivity, not build quality. The BT antenna in those is terrible and it's being power starved to run on their tiny batteries. I've used literally hundreds of Joycon at one point or another and rarely seen legit stick drift, but I've had controllers where in a noisy environment just your hand grip could make the connection get all flaky. What the Switch does in that scenario seems to be to just hold your stick position and call it a day, which isn't great.
I found a comment about the accuracy of the reader combined with a factual difference from the article very ironic and should be elaborated, which you did. +1
For the haptic feedback? No, it's a mechanical screw with a physical stop to keep it from turning at the right time. You can see it disassembled here. The sensor may be a hall effect sensor, I don't actually know, but once again, the patent isn't about drift.
Watching that video gave me flashbacks about how much of a pain in the ass these are to disassemble, too, which is why I have several of these with stick drift issues just gathering dust instead of actually repairing them.
When are publishers going to realize there is only a market for like 2-3 Live service games at any one time?
You cannot underestimate the stupidity of games publishers. I’d be willing to accept that sunk-cost alone is the explanation for this outrageous budget. It probably started out as “what’s $200m for the next Fortnight?” and just went in $5 or $10 million dollar increments from there.
how the fuck is it impossible for me to get a decent, not taken, username in most online games or launchers but these scammers can change their games to whatever the heck they want?
Shouldn’t be hard to implement a check if the game name and other info is already listed in the store somewhere else…
Display name vs actual user ID, right? You can change your display name to whatever but the actual account name will be the same. Kind of insane that Steam lets you change quite so much in one go without flagging suspicious behaviour though.
I just started typing in common video game title words in Steam's search, and I found several games just called "Void". We can extrapolate that scenario out and say maybe a new game is the first one on Steam to be called Void, but maybe there was an old DOS game called Void that came to Steam later after rights issues have been resolved. There's also the very common situation of a remake and its original version both being available on Steam, and maybe different companies own the rights to each one, like Star Wars: Battlefront. Perhaps these and other reasons are why those checks don't exist, but maybe they will now if these sorts of scams become more common.
and there’s no way Rockstar is going to be paying $99 million dollars for just songs.
GTA V/Online produced $8.5 billion in revenue.
I mean, I guess you’re not wrong, (how else could they be milking it for this much money but being cheap?) but it still makes them fucking cheap bastards.
I think it’s really clear that Rockstar is trying to avoid a repeat of past soundtracks and licensing issues and they want these up-front with no royalty payments to make in the future, so they don’t have to keep re-negotiating licensing (and having to remove/replace songs in old games).
I still think this guy was being smart for asking more, even if he asked too much. You’re right, he shouldn’t have high-balled, but he was smart enough to understand getting a percentage or royalties was probably almost assuredly out of the question.
I’m glad Rockstar is taking the route of trying to only get songs that they won’t have to remove down the line. Should be the move forward for all games. Wish same would happen for racing games too. Would rather have knock off brands over delistings.
Actually, yeah I can. Every time a fucking bean-counter makes a living humans life worse at their job to save the company a buck is a great time to blame accountants for doing their fucking jobs.
Accountants don't make decisions, they are just paper bitches for real people along with shit like lawyers and marketing. They just present the numbers to business leadership who makes decisions on which expeses to approve.
If they’re a 1-hit wonder, maybe that’s why they want more up front: In case they gain no new listeners from the GTA 6 soundtrack and continue to be a 1-hit wonder.
It’s like why football players have insane-sounding contracts: Because in the future they won’t be able to make the same kind of money.
Sounds to me like homie was smart and thinking long-term.
I just heard some of their tracks and I feel like it wasn’t a huge loss not being able to hear a Duran Duran or Depeche Mode wannabe band while I’m murdering hookers in GTA6
I don’t see the logic in that though. They can’t really expect to be paid so much more than groups who offer greater recognition. It’s like charging more for the Walmart brand over the name brand product.
I love Lemmy, but the general consensus of “fuck big corpo no matter what” attitude is kinda tiring. This is completely reasonable for Rockstar to reject the counter offer. Not to mention, Heaven 17 is not some big band to begin with.
Agreed. As I understand it, $50k-$100k is on the high end for a TV show to use a clip from a very well known song in an episode. Some band I’ve never heard of being paid $22k for their song to be played in the background of a game might be a little on the low end, so it’s totally reasonable for the band to counter, but it’s also totally reasonable for Rockstar to turn down a 10x counter. Publicly crying about it seems childish. The game is gonna happen with or without your song.
I was so happy he got to return for that Ghost Recon cameo. I was pissed at Ubisoft for a while for replacing him for Blacklist, but then it turned out he couldn’t do it for health reasons and just wanted to keep it hush-hush.
I’m glad he’s doing better now, can’t believe he beat three different cancers.
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