Nobody did that by hand even before Gen Ai was invented. Even before photography or computers, there were techniques to get textures without manually drawing them. The splotches, for example, could be accomplished by shaking the brush at the canvas.
It did get maybe 90% there in a minute which is faster than a person would do it. Not a perfect tile, maybe take a few more interations. But not awful for cobbled together in a minute, and if your job is to come up with 50 or 100 different textures, still better than doing it by hand.
But as I noted, there are also already royalty free libraries for this stuff as well.
I don’t think you know anything about texturing. Even if you eventually got to a point where it gave you something usable it’s not going to be consistent.
If you’re job is to create 100+ textures and you’re only able to get 90% of the way there for each variation, you’re fucked. You can create infinite variations of a texture with procedural once your initial setup is done. AI couldn’t even get a basic bitch texture right how is it going to deal with more complex textures?
Not at all wrong, just showing what can be done with virtually zero effort and time.
I could most likely perfect it in a few minutes more, still a fraction of the time of doing it by hand. I’m not extending a proof of concept to win arguments on the Internet. 😉
But as I noted at the bottom of the comment, which apparently nobody bothered to read, there are ALREADY royalty free libraries for this kind of thing. So it also has to be faster than searching libraries that are already there.
Of course that action is it’s own time sink as anyone who has gone looking for “the perfect font” can tell you.
Someone skilled in Substance Designer can also do that in minutes. And then you have a file that can generate an infinite number of variations that look artistically consistent including normal maps, roughness maps etc.
Will the end result of this be panacea for the indie Dev? Essentially all the major producers end up killing off all their talent by forcing AI, and those folks now form their own indie studios and make the games we actually want.
The question is who funds these theoretical new studios? Indie studios more often than not have to make deals with the devil so they can eat. Then, even if their game is a smash hit, the investors take the lion’s share of profit and still control the actual devs by the purse strings. This society is sick.
If you were to listen to the internet, it would seem that AAA studios are be on their last gasp, with indie devs dancing on their graves.
The reality is that, aside from the big indie game of the moment (think Silksong or Expedition 33, if you want to count the latter as indie), most gamers don’t care or don’t even know indie games exist in the first place.
I have a few gamer friends (each of whom spends a few hours daily on games), and only one of them plays maybe one indie game per year, and only those who manage to breach through his bubble via influencers and streamers.
Ehhh I know a lot of people that play indie games, but generally they only play one or two genres of them. Part of it is that the terminology gets confusing because people mean different things. Like, other than baldur’s gate, I couldn’t tell you the last western AAA game I played. But I played FF7 rebirth which is definitely AAA but not what people are always talking about when that talk about AAA sinking. There are also tons of studios that you probably wouldn’t call AAA but you also wouldn’t call indie. Like, I probably play more games from Falcom than any other studio. They’re not huge headcount-wise or cutting edge technology-wise but they’ve been consistently making games since the 80s. I think a lot of people don’t bucket those types of developers in their heads at all.
Indie devs don’t need to reach mainstream mindshare to become successful. An indie team that’s stays small and nimble doesn’t need to reach a million unit in sales. Like how many mainstream gamers have heard of Tiny Glade a game that made a few million dollars created by two people.
I justified it as a games rental. I mean I easily paid $5 to rent a game for the weekend in the 90s. Paying 12 bucks to rent games all month long wasn’t bad (for PC).
But the price they’re charging now, I may as well buy the games I do play, rather than paying for the subscription. The problem for Microsoft is that money is gonna be going to steam instead of them.
I don’t feel good about not having the ability to do what I want with my games; the idea of games being “mine” goes away if I cannot buy, sell, resell, loan, copy, backup, modify or destroy it.
I’m not sure how a digital gaming subscription service can compete with that no matter how cheap or how good the library is or how long the service is proposed to exist.
I definitely see this. I think, at least the way I’ve used it, it’s replaced rentals for me (I miss video stores). I’ve picked it up 2-3 times, each time to play a specific game and cancelled at the end of the month. I’ve absolutely saved money that way, and didn’t really care about owning the content I was getting it for.
Don’t take this as an endorsement though. I don’t think that’s the intended use, and I doubt it would last if everyone did the same. Besides the price hike takes it out of that reasonable territory for the rental idea, at least for me.
Yeah, I’ve got so many more games than I have time to play them that there’s never a need to play full price for anything. I wishlist em and pick them up when they’re on sale less than £10
Yeah. I might break my rule for phantom liberty, it’s reduced to £17 at the mo. I’m enjoying cyberpunk so much I might make an exception here! But I’ve still got plenty in my backlog.
While I wouldn’t say it is crucial by any means, it is a fun piece of DLC. I put over 400 hours into Cyberpunk before I got the DLC though, so that may have been why I was okay with purchasing it! Either way, it does make me happy to see someone enjoying the game! :-]
Lately, I’ve only been buying indie games. I can’t justify dropping $70-$80 on one game and even when those games go on sale they’re usually $40-$50.
If you read reviews and do a little research you’ll find that there are actually a lot of really cool indie games and you can get multiple games for just a fraction of the cost of double or triple A games.
That’s just a computer. If you’ve heard about the steam deck, you can set up a pc to be basically the same but more powerful and permanently hooked up to a tv.
Yeah, I know that this is just a computer. From a skill point of view I have no problem to assemble it and set it up. The thing is I work in IT and spend the whole day on the computer. I do not want to administrate any system in my free time. That’s something I love about consoles. I’m aware they limit the possibilties, but they also low maintenance. I never actively installed system updates on my Xbox Series X, it is just done in the background. I turn it on and play. In worst case I need to install a game update. I have a store interface where I can buy and install games with pressing a few buttons. Inside the game, I do not need to play around with the graphic settings to find what runs best. If at all, I need to decide between graphics and performance mode. That’s what I love about consoles and do not want to have a gaming PC.
Consoles have obvious limitations, but they make it much easier if all you want to do is play.
I do not want to administrate any system in my free time.
Do you have a computer you use at home? How much time exactly do you think it takes to manage a personal computer?
I have a store interface where I can buy and install games with pressing a few buttons.
Seriously, look into a steam deck. The interface is very console-like and you can have it on a normal desktop if you want. Or don’t, you already seem pretty convinced that you only want a console.
I second this. The Steam Deck is the best console and a really cheap gaming PC at the same time. You can emulate and use it for other programs without needing to mod it like you would a console and even though it’s linux, it’s so easy to use. You don’t really need to use the desktop mode for much if you don’t want to, but it’s not bad at all. I’ve switched to Bazzite as my only OS for my main computer because of how much SteamOS has impressed me.
I haven’t subbed to gamepads for years because I knew this would eventually happen. Gamepass was designed to get people used to not purchasing games and instead letting them come to them. Subscribers now have to chose between paying even more each month or losing access to the library of games available to them.
I learned after a few months of game pass that most of the games that looked interesting actually weren’t. It’s no big loss, and it’s cheaper to just buy the few games I actually want anymore. Doubly true now.
Gamepass only ever made sense to people who had time to play or dabble in a sufficiently large amount of games per year and felt the need to play some new titles soon or immediately instead of waiting. Otherwise, eventually your total subscription costs would outpace the total cost to purchase what you played, especially if purchased on sale at a later date. And the value gets worse if you ever replayed a game (s).
I’ll never really understand the excitement about this service. It was always a Trojan horse.
Everyone who isn’t stupid knew that they were renting access to something they could be getting for free. The business can raise fees whenever it wants, and you’re stuck either paying the higher rates or cutting your losses and having nothing to show for the money you wasted.
Renting is a scam and only morons think otherwise. Hopefully some of them grow up after seeing this, but I doubt it.
For me, when the Switch 1 came out it was just nice to have everything on the device and you never had to do the most heinous thing of taking a moment to put a cart into the device.
But more and more I buy one to two games a time and focus on those, so that issue is largely not a thing any more.
For me, with the Switch 1, I was worried about wanting to play a game but oh no it’s back at home. Happened a bunch of times with my 3DS.
But then I bought a case that had card slots in it, and that concern wasn’t much of a concern anymore. Then the pandemic happened, and I never really left home anyway, which meant it mattered even less. So now I have a few digital games that are super annoying to share.
Family Share works really well in my experience. It worked better when I could change the users more frequently but this model is still works pretty well.
Is there a way to share a single game and use your library still?
I share my library with my son and when he’s using a game my whole library is unavailable to me, unless something has changed (or I’m old and ignorant … also likely)
Microsoft, like Google, is now a user-data driven company and they have already made loss/profit ratio analysis on this long before they released the price increase. They’re absolutely banking on people cancelling but making up the difference and then some from the people who stay.
For a thought experiment let’s consider how many subscribers they were reported to have in Feburary: 34 million. Let’s assume that everyone is paying for the highest tier to make the math easier. So current income would be 34 million user x $20 a month and thats $680 million a month. New income of 34 million users x $30 a month is $1.02 billion. The difference is $340 million a month. Let’s divide that by $30 a month. That gets us about 11,333,333 users. So they can hemorrhage over 11 million users and still break even. To make sure, let’s subtract 11 million users. That gives us 23 million users. 23 million users x $30 a month is $690 million a month, a cool $10 million a month above current profits.
For final context, 11 million users is roughly 32% of their entire subscriber count. They can afford to lose a third of the people subscribing and still make money.
The math doesn’t bode well for us who vote with our wallets.
One could imagine that conveniently, Microsoft’s online support pages and the amount of support staff were designed to only handle hundreds of thousands of cancelations at a time.
I’m not a licensed math surgeon, but I think your math is wildly optimistic in favor of Microsoft due to how the subscription totals are actually distributed per price tier.
I don’t doubt that they did a lot of math to figure out an acceptable level of churn for this change, I just don’t think it’s nearly as generous and wide as you’re calculating.
There probably is a very real churn limit that they’re trying to avoid, and my hunch is that there exists a breaking point that could be hit with an aggressive and sustained boycott / cancellation spree, but again, I’m not a math surgeon so I could be wrong. That’s just my gut feeling.
And it gets even better. Instead of up to 33% leaving, say 50% of that group convert to Premium instead of Ultimate. That isn’t any lost revenue since the price is going up to what Ultimate used to be. So that cushions their numbers even more.
Now factor in the cost savings from a lower server load and less staff to run the back end, and possibly the smaller licensing\use costs for the games available to play since less people would be accessing those games.
The same math is there too. They can afford to loose one third of new subscribers to get the same amount of money.
But their new customer acquisition cost wont get higher at the same pace and they get more valuable customers whose payback period will be shorter.
Also i dont think its relevant here, but less customers means less operating costs, so they will most likelly save some money on customer service and behind the scenes things like server upkeeps etc., but i dont think these make real difference here.
Also if for some reason things start to go bad they still have option to create “a budget version” for the people who see the normal subscrition as too expencive.
Netflix Spotify Disney and Amazon proved that price hikes are effective at increasing profits even despite the loss of subscribers. Capitalism baby.
I think the only time collective cancellations actually hurt one of these companies was that time Jimmy Kimmel made fun of the president and it took an estimated 1.7M ex-Disney Plus subscribers.
Maybe, but in the Kimmel case there could have been other reasons too. Like Hollywood people not wanting to make business with a company that would just cancel contacts when they have opinions on public. Disney needs those people, arguable more than subscribers.
IMO, consumer boycotts don’t really work in general, here it might have worked, but it is also possible it worked for other reasons.
Consumer boycotts are pretty much the only strategy guaranteed to work, the only exceptions being Facebook and Google, as they’re the only businesses I can think of that are both primarily B2B, and can operate on speculative liquidity
Turned off my recurring billing. I’ll have about 3 months then it’s bye bye. I have been a customer since 360, but now will probably sign up for Playstation Network for the first time.
That’s a good callout - treating these game rental services more like we do with streaming video services by subbing to one for just a few months, then dropping it for another.
Oh I’m sorry, did Playstation start charging 30 bucks for their service? Oh, it’s actually CHEAPER than Xbox even was? Oh and it’s a massive back catalog of PS games I haven’t played due to being on Xbox? Fuck me right?
I don’t have a backlog of PS games due to mainly playing Xbox for the last 20 something years. That’s why subscription services can make sense, you play through games you’ve missed out on. Kind of like sub hopping for tv streaming, you build up a back log, sub for a few months then move to the next.
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