"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total."
2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)
Last time the stock market was surging, everyone was hiring. This time it's different
I'm pretty old, and I've NEVER had issues finding a job. I've been unemployed for 6 months now. Thinking about getting out of software development TBH. It isn't that I'm a bad developer, I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews, but nobody is hiring. The positions that do open up are swamped with tons of people. The culture also is pretty toxic, especially in the startup world, and with AI now entering the scene?
Then again, I don't know what I would pivot to. I thought about building a startup. However it is not a good time to be doing that either.
Skimming your comments: You deeply detest everything related to AI, cloud, and startups.
It’s not age discrimination per-se, but it’s because you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for. You can probably find a job doing maintenance on some PHP or Rails app that hasn't been updated since Obama’s first term, but the pay is likely also going to come from that era.
you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for.
because only AI, cloud, and startups are hiring? What a weird interpretation to make of someone based off of a comment history on the internet. We don't even know what domain they work in.
No, because even if you are at a pretty standard company, you will be expected to deal with these technologies
Maybe in 10 years AI will be "standard", but as of now I'd be surprised if anyone meets the stereotypical HR requirements of "5 years of AI experience"
Personally haven't had to deal with Cloud. My domain leaves that to network engineers on the product and probably devops for the company servers. It's there but Ive never been expected to touch it.
I could give the standard “ah shucks brother keep your head up!” advice that most people do.
Or I can give tactical suggestions, which may be a bit hard to stomach, so he can improve his odds at landing a job.
It’s fairly easy to infer his job domain from comments. He mentions web technologies and SQL often. He refers to himself as a dev, not as an engineer, and he mentions running numerous websites. He probably got his start working in “IT” (nobody says IT anymore, but he still does) in the 90s in support or technician roles and moved into full-stack web developer roles around dotcom.
He also comes across as low self-confidence due to “I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews” instead of telling us why he’s an excellent dev. That likely comes out in interviews and further hurts his chances.
I don't know how often unsolicited advice on the internet is helpful. Sometimes a rant is just a rant.
Regardless, I don't exactly see the good faith when saying "well you don't like AI, just find some crusty old phpjobs and take the cut". Which is both over-presumptuous (we don't know the domain they work in) and not very helpful anyway ("old" companies may not be laying off thousands but still aren't exactly throwing jobs out like candy).
It’s fairly easy to infer his job domain from comments
Even 20 years ago. Web has so many pieces of tech (some that didn't survive) that I wouldn't assume. Could be IT (which no one says because it evolved into its own separate domain. A 2000's IT engineer wouldn't really be doing what SDET or DevOps do today), could be old style vanilla JS website development, could be flash. Or something entirely different.
He refers to himself as a dev, not as an engineer, and he mentions running numerous websites
Titles don't really mean much. My domain calls people developers, programmers, or engineers as the company sees fit (also, it's awkward to say "game engine engineer"). The terms are almost as flexible as "senior" these days.
Maybe they should try applying in the east coast. There is no AI, cloud or startups here.
You will have to stomach finance or the military industrial complex though.
False
Plenty of startups in NYC
What skill would you suggest he learn?
If he doesn't want to actually learn AI/ML itself, there's an endless number of adjacent jobs related to all the hype:
* web dev - today the majority of the jobs are very heavily ts/js, react, next.js, vercel, etc.
* data engineering - AI/ML is very hungry for clean, organized, and accessible data. so we're talking sql, data warehousing, spark, beam, kafka
* infra/devops - nearly every tech company needs these people: docker, kubernetes, terraform, ci/cd, gitops, metrics and monitoring tools like prometheus and grafana
Coming from both a place of kindness and a place of selfishness:
1. Please keep at it. We need more people with experience staying in software. I don’t know your financial situation, but software is huge and something will land!
2. Based on this comment, I highly recommend likely not ever starting a company. It’s fucking hard, and it’s not glamorous. And even though it’s hard times in the macro, it’s actually way harder for many compounding reasons that are not obvious until you do it.
Again, coming from a place of love.
It’s fucking hard, and it’s not glamorous
"Fucking hard" compared to what? Things I'd qualify under the category of "fucking hard":
- Agricultural Farming
- Lifetime debilitating disease / health issue
- Being enslaved or a POW
- Living in a 3rd world country
- Moving West in the 1800s
- Fighting in the American Revolutionary or Civil War
This narrative that starting a company is "fucking hard" is all part of the SV/SF mythos that needs a smooth stone straight to the forehead.
Compared to a 9-5 in tech? Which is what they're suggesting instead.
What is the point of moralizing?
What is the point of moralizing?
Because the guy is framing his discouragement as "coming from a place of love" when in reality it takes roughly 2-3 weeks to go from zero-to-[LLC accepting payments on Stripe]. Which means it's really not that "fucking hard" at all to start small and begin the search for paying customers.
I've been on this board for 17 years back when it was originally called "Startup News" and full of new-company founders, sold 2 small SW apps back in 2009, and have also done the F100 corporate adventure. The emotional challenges of starting your own company can be easier than the 9-5.
when in reality it takes roughly 2-3 weeks to go from zero-to-[LLC accepting payments on Stripe]
okay, now tell my how long and how much it costs to g from new LLC to self-sustainable. Even some of the most popular startups aren't profitable for years.
Starting is easy. I don't think the parent you replied to was talking about that procedural part of it. The parent is weighing working for someone or starting a newco.
Also it's a completely different ballgame when you build a company that has employees versus an app.
We don't know what path the parent was talking about or what their business would be. We don't know their financial position.
Regardless, it's hard to build a successful business. Especially on your first attempt.
I understand your sentiment, but one's experience does not need to manifest like the ones you listed to be considered hard.
You listed one career choice and agriculture is actually the easiest industry. #2 lowest failure rate in 1 year, #1 lowest after 5 and after 10 years [1]. What you thought was fucking hard is objectively not compared to every other industry from BLS data. Although I'd still say it's a startup and is thus fucking hard personally.
Starting a company is very easy. Building a successful and sustainable one is fucking hard.
I've built a few successful companies but did it while having income (both active and passive). I recommend the same for anyone's first endeavor. I also recommend having a partner or two and maybe ONLY go solo after you've built a successful business. It's not glamorous being a startup CEO and can be very lonely without partners.
50% of businesses fail by year 5
And 80% of small businesses have no employees. Most of the 50% that survive to year 5 are just paying bills and aren't self-sustaining businesses that have enterprise value and can be sold.
If you want to be a one person show, yeah that's not hard in a service business. If you are average, 50% shot to make it 5 years.
If we're talking about building something that kicks off actual profit and has employees, and outperforms the opportunity cost of working for someone else or taking an equity stake in existing business, it is most certainly fucking hard.
To the parent - if you have savings and get a partner or two - I say keep applying but go for the startup too. The best businesses in my opinion are ones that make money closer to day 1 than year X. Figure that path out. Riches in niches. Don't worry about the macro environment.
[1] https://www.lendingtree.com/business/small/failure-rate/
"You listed one career choice and agriculture is actually the easiest industry. #2 lowest failure rate in 1 year, #1 lowest after 5 and after 10 years [1]. What you thought was fucking hard is objectively not compared to every other industry from BLS data. "
You are pretty clearly defining "hard" differently than the poster you're responding to, as somehow being related only to the chance of a venture failing. But obviously that's not what "hard" means when the other examples include being a prisoner of war.
That violent metaphor wasn’t necessary to make your point.
Same, in 20+ years doing this, I've never seen it this bad.
Were you around for the dot com crash? You said 20 years so it sounds like you started when the wave began right after the crash.
I was around but very young and not working in Silicon Valley proper. I think my first tech internship was just a year or two after that, can't remember exactly.
Never really had trouble finding work on the West Coast since then though. This year, I was unemployed for half a year (after quitting voluntarily) and finally found work with a European company. Guess the boom times are over! It's AI or bust now, lol (and I have neither the skills nor the interest to work in ML).
Keep in mind though I'm also a nobody, some rando self taught web dev coming from the LAMP world into React. We're pretty much bottom of the barrel as far as programmers go, so I'm not surprised I'm not a competitive candidate! I love the frontend, but more for its visuals and UX than coding. It's a very far cry from AI or algorithms or really any sort of non visual coding.
The kind of I stuff I used to get paid for when I was younger, Wix handles effortlessly now (and I recommend it my clients too... don't pay me, just make it yourself on Wix in a few hours). React's probably headed down the same path: https://v0.dev/
I was, quite similar in fact, maybe even worse.
It was quite common around 2002 to join a new company after being laid off from one, one to be laid off yet again a couple of months later.
Myself, I was living from savings with salaries delayed by a couple of months, while we were trying to find a new source of income.
Not GP but I was just starting my career back then. I remember commute traffic on 101 through San Jose and Sunnyvale going from bumper-to-bumper to smooth sailing, where you never even had to touch your brakes.
From the crash of April-ish 2000, it was 6-9 months before the best of the best could even get an interview, and about 36 to something approaching normality.
I was lucky enough to work for the DoD during the .com crash, but not this time.
I guess the silver lining is that I can now better emphasize with the challenges of protracted unemployment.
Downturns is the best time to build a startup. When things turn around, you hopefully have found product market fit and can ride the up wave.
if you have the finances already to support a startup. The big issue in downturns is that VC money also dries up and hunkers down.
This is so true that when I'm planning on starting a new business, I intentionally wait for a downturn before I pull the trigger.
Is it all due to inflation and the interest rates? Shouldn't these companies be able to issue stock to get some cheap capital to continue growth/hiring? Or anyone know why this is happening?
Shouldn't these companies be able to issue stock to get some cheap capital to continue growth/hiring?
Yes, but then the stock price would go down, which obviously isn't allowed.
issuing stock and selling it into the market doesn't make the stock price go down. Raising money for this activity on a large scale is why the stock market exists.
The value of the existing company "before" remains the same, and the sale of the new shares brings cash into the company at the selling price, so those new cash assets exactly balance out the dilution of ownership.
If anything it might increase the value of the company if shareholders believe that the same "profit multiplier"/ROE will be applied to the new cash, for example if a profitable restaurant chain sells new shares to get the cash to open and operate new restaurants in new locations. Of course, changes to the share price are due to changing expectations so that will occur as information about the pending transaction is incorporated into the hive mind and not necessarily at the moment of share sales.
this doesn't require any advanced analysis, it's simple supply and demand. offer up more shares to a market without changing demand and the price per share must go down.
think about it the other way -- why would a company ever do a stock buyback if changing the amount of issued stock didn't change the price? there's a reason buybacks are considered essentially the same as dividends.
No, the company becomes more valuable after the raise. It's more slices of a bigger pie == each slice is the same size as before.
why would a company ever do a stock buyback if changing the amount of issued stock didn't change the price?
The company used its cash to buy its own stock. Fewer slices of the same pie == each slice is bigger than before.
The company is worth what it's worth, according to investors, no matter how many slices you piece it up in. If you issue more shares, people will be willing to pay less for each one. Yes, adding cash to the balance sheet increases the book value, but the only way to add that cash is to sell the new shares, and the only way to sell the new shares is to offer them for cheaper than the current asking price.
Put another way, if prospective investors wanted to buy more shares at the current asking price, they could, from an existing owner. The people who want shares but haven't bought, demand a lower price for them.
offer up more shares to a market without changing demand
But demand does change, because the company is expanding its balance sheet. You end up with more slices of a bigger pie.
Compare to a stock split, which keeps the pie size constant.
why would a company ever do a stock buyback if changing the amount of issued stock didn't change the price?
Buy low/sell high maybe? They buy their stock when the price is low and they think it is undervalued so that they can sell it later when the price more accurately reflects the value or even better when the price is overvaluing their stock.
? Not allowed. It is done all the time. Companies can issue new stock.
or? are you being sarcastic about c-suit not wanting 'stock price to go down'? which could be a consequence of issuing new stock?
The latter for sure.
Stock issue dilutes ownership and lowers share price. Why would people paid in stock do that when they can just offload labor? Also, they'd be competing with market makers, winkwinknudgenudge.
There are many ways to increase profits. Diluting existing shareholders by increasing outstanding shares should not be a bandaid for inefficient application of capital, which would juts cause a vicious cycle.
One view is that it's related to labor hoarding.
A lot of people exited the labor market (disabled or killed by COVID, pulled the trigger on retiring, etc.). Unemployment was very low and it was very difficult to hire. And companies had opportunities for growth, but taking advantage of those opportunities required workers, which were hard to get.
So companies responded by hiring whenever possible and keeping more employees around than they normally would. If there was less work to do, they'd reduce hours instead of letting employees go. Better to pay more labor costs now than to be stuck unable to get employees later. You pay a cost (larger payrolls) to reduce a risk.
Hoarding can be kind of self-reinforcing because as everybody grabs what is available (job seekers), it becomes more scarce, so people want to grab up even more.
But hoarding tends to stop eventually. Companies don't want to pay more for payroll if they don't have to. Once they feel the risk is gone, they'll aim to adjust things back to normal.
Once layoffs start, they could have a domino effect on labor hoarding. If a bunch of companies do layoffs, then other companies think, "Well, if we did need to hire, we could get some of those laid off workers." And then they reevaluate their own situation.
If this is what's happening, then it will take some time for it to play out. Eventually all the hoarding-related layoffs will have been done.
Interest rates and fear of recession.
Big tech fuels R&D via very low-interest loans. This is what everyone in the financial community has been saying for a long time.
It blows my mind that people aren't hiring like mad with high interest rates. It seems like just parking a bunch of money somewhere and letting it accumulate interest would pay for salaries. Shoot, for 10 million dollars you could pay the entire salary of 2 developers without touching a dime of the actual money.
Of course I know the economy doesn't work that way, but it is fun to think about.
the cost of borrowing that $10M has gone from 0.25 to 5.5 a 2100% increase. If inflation is above 4-5% then sitting on the money will lose purchasing power.
Fear of depr/rec-ession means the products you build might see 0 traction as the economy contracts and the funding to survive dries up.
The's another factor: you now have to deal with getting 20% of the tax benefit from an engineering salary since R&D expenses are now amortized over five years.
Agreed, this has a really interesting effect on smaller businesses which may not exist in 5 years. Sure the S&P500 it's unlikely many or any of them go bankrupt in the next 5 years, so they at least know they can _eventually_ write it off. Meanwhile a company may hit bankruptcy in yr 3 despite lingering credits. This can happen when they have profit on paper, but negative cashflow.
it's unlikely many or any of them go bankrupt in the next 5 years, so they at least know they can _eventually_ write it off.
I don't think this really matters all that much to small biz. It really has a lot of effect on the middle, where taking a $50/yr effectively leaves you having to deal with $40m you can't treat as an expense this year. It's a great way to cause unemployment.
Replying to below because of reply limit. Also, totally not a lawyer, take with that note.
Actual text: Emphasis the "be allowed" portion. From: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174
(a) In general - In the case of a taxpayer’s specified research or experimental expenditures for any taxable year—
(1) except as provided in paragraph (2), no deduction shall be allowed for such expenditures, and
(2) the taxpayer shall—
(A) charge such expenditures to capital account, and
(B) *be allowed* an amortization deduction of such expenditures ratably over the 5-year period (15-year period in the case of any specified research or experimental expenditures which are attributable to foreign research (within the meaning of section 41(d)(4)(F))) beginning with the midpoint of the taxable year in which such expenditures are paid or incurred.
Imply, the taxpayer "may" take a 20% amortized distribution. Similar to MtG cards that say "a player may look through their library" or similar. You don't have to (my reading).
They're servicing loads of cheap debt, they don't have the capital.
Check out section 174.
Due to some GREAT legislation you can no longer write off engineers as an expense... it makes SWEs a tax liability instead of a write-off.
Due to some GREAT legislation
One of these changes was Section 174, set to come into effect 5 years later, in 2022. These parts deliver the blow by making it clear that software development costs need to be amortized over 5-15 years. Most experts expected Congress to push back the Section 174 amendment to a later date, or simply remove it. But Congressional negotiations to repeal the changes fell apart at the last minute in December 2022, meaning it became law. "
To be clear, that is sarcastic.
Ya this time they realized instead they can just pocket even more profits, theres a reason inflation is 50+% due to corporate profits when normally inflation surges are ~11% from corporate profits.
Right, reduce headcount, adjust balance sheets, extract profits with fewer people.
Saying the stock market is surging is a bit of an oversimplification. If you compare trough (Oct '22) to peak (Jan '24) you get a 65% annualized rate of increase.
But if you compare peak (Nov '21) to peak (Jan '24) we're essentially flat at 1.4% annualized.
If a business accustomed to double digit growth every year instead saw 1.4% growth annualized over 2 years then the numbers simply can't work out to keep doing what they've always done.
The fact that equity valuations are WAY better than they were in Oct '22 doesn't really help because nobody was raising money during the down turn in the first place! Everyone is priced in on pre-pandemic valuations, which for the most part are unchanged.
Note: I used the NASDAQ-100 Technology Sector, ticker NDXT to calculate these numbers [0].
It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?
It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?
The difference between AAA and the rest is not so much in quality these days, but sheer quantity. Quantity of NPCs, artwork, music, items, skills, vehicles, levels, etc. etc. And it takes a small army of artists/designers/PMs to do all of that stuff, not to even mention the actual dev team.
Larian Studios has 450 employees, and BG3 completely blows any other modern RPG out of the water in terms of the sheer amount of fun content inside the game
Baldur's Gate 3 was in development for nearly six years even with asset reuse and basically being the only thing that Larian was working on. And that isn't even taking contractors into account (BG3 credits around 2300 workers).
I don't think you're making the point you think you are.
Many of the assets were reused from previous work (DOS 1/2). They did put in an insane amount of work over a very extended period, though.
Larian Studios has 450 employees...
Exactly, you need a massive team to live up to expectations for AAA games these days.
That sort of thing seems really ripe for LLM/AI disruption?
FantasyGPT trained on all RPGs could be very interesting
It already exists, it's called Baldur's Gate 3
And we just had Starfield come out to demonstrate how little all that matters.
In times like this, it's important to remember that Skyrim was made by a team of around 100 people.
Activision Blizzard reported 13,000 employees as of Dec 31st, 2022
And barely 9,200 as of Dec 31st, 2019
The overhiring during covid really went insane in a lot of places
40% increase isn't even that bad compared to some I've seen.
I saw that before the recent layoffs at Discord their employee headcount had grown 5x since 2020, and after the layoffs they're merely at 4x their size of 2020
It doesn't actually have any real impact and there are plenty of counter example, but the fact that Activision is a 40+ years old company who slowly grew to that number before jumping 40% in two years for no reason (no major shift, new product or anything like that, no "we own the world" like microsoft, ...) somehow makes it feel way worse to me that yet another not even a decade tech company that grew crazy for the numbers.
It's the case for all large tech companies. Headcount increases in software engineering projects result in diminishing returns per-individual, but the increase is still there (if managed correctly). For example a 100 person team may not be 10x as productive as a 10 person team, but they may be 5x as productive. A 1000 person team may only be 3x as productive as 100. And so on until you have many thousands of engineers that can slowly move mountains and maintain massively complex and interwoven systems.
Also, development headcount begets support headcount. For every 10 new engineers you hire, you will need to also hire a manager for them. For every 20-30 engineers, you'll probably need a PM to steer the product and a PjM to handle all the additional communication/process overhead. For every 2-3 managers, you'll need an admin who manages their schedule and meetings. As the team grows, you'll need more people purely working on infrastructure, internal tools, build&release, security, legal, maybe doc writers, and so on, and they all need managers too. Suddenly you have 10K people.
Whenever we see these big layoffs, someone inevitably comes out of the woodwork to naively ask, "Why does Company X need 1,000 people?? I could do what they do with 8 engineers!" This is why.
Same people that thinks they can build an Uber/Lyft/Instagram competitor by themselves over the weekend.
Its amazing how many staff you can support with $39.99 wow mounts and a selection of gaudy hats.
Hey, I happen to like my Luxurious Niffen Hat! [1]
[1] https://ironstorage.blob.core.windows.net/public-images/luxu...
Crazier still is the cost of employing 22,000 people in one division. Even at a low ball of $100K/year/employee, that’s $2.2 billion in people costs per year. Microsoft needs to be recouping at least $50/year from every single Xbox owner (estimating 50 million out there) to cover that cost alone.
Doesn't seem that difficulty to get $50/yr when Xbox Live itself is around that price. Add in selling games... Add in microtransactions... And I'd wager it's close to $200/yr they get from every single Xbox owner.
This same comment gets posted on nearly every layoffs thread. A lot of people work at tech companies. Despite that, it sucks for someone to lose their job.
As I always mention in these threads, these are not mutually exclusive. We can both have empathy for those laid off while at the same time questioning the organization's size.
Game development is an extremely labour intensive industry.
And at the same time you have best-in-class games created by one person. (Ok, two, if you add the various publisher/third party help.)
FAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs.
It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work.
Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be amazed but then you start noticing the minor flaws and how much effort it takes to make it good enough.
It's still possible that some jobs will get replaced, not every NPC detail needs to be hand drawn perfectly, but let's see.
FAO?
"For Attention Of" https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fao#
for attention of
I was about to say - https://www.google.com/search?q=FAO
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Home
(Obviously NOT what the original commenter meant, but no context!)
Apparently, something that can be replaced with the word "For". It's odd, because FAO takes a LOT more text to get it's point across compared to "For" even though technically they are both the same number of letters.
Consider also that "For" sounds natural, but in this case, FAO does not.
For the Attention Of
Mini-mills.
AI isn't going to jump in there and do you another Sistine Chapel or Godfather.
You have a restaurant, it needs some random Chinese/Italian/Mexican artwork. Are you going to buy a poster? No way, just generate it and hang it up.
You have a kid who needs to be entertained. Do I get a team of 200 to write me Frozen, world class singers to sing the songs, and animators? No. We'll start with our own 5-minute Peppa Pig style cartoon.
Your widget shop needs a website. Do you go to Getty and find a shot of happy couples or landscapes taken by a professional photographer? No, nobody cares if your happy family has 7 fingers on each hand. Generate the photo, plonk it on your website.
As AI swallows the cheap, low-risk stuff, it also gains scale to do higher forms of art. Someday your detective story with weird sweaters and cops with a fcked up home life will also become AI generated.
Eventually it will climb mount impossible.
Not unless they stop using copyrighted material it won't.
Remember, the legal cases are still ongoing.
I think that restriction would cut the dataset by 90%.
Didn't Adobe Stock essentially opt everyone in the library in before springing it on them?
Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
It took Amazon a decade to have a serious impact on the economy, even though it was working from day one. Now we have AI technology that's only half working. So what the impact will be and when is anyone's guess.
My sister owns an etsy shop that sells customized items.
They have a graphic designer who's in photoshop all day doing the same repetitive task for each item that's ordered.
This is the first category of jobs to be killed off. It can't already be killed off because it requires some human judgement (at least right now) to make sure photographs on a custom ornament are centered and cropped in a visually appealing way.
I can see AI killing off that kind of low skill graphic design with very limited judgement calls (or creativity) needed.
Couldn't conventional software have done this? And it didn't. So why would AI do it now?
They're not big enough to pay a developer to write and maintaining a software system.
From what I've heard, they were able to use ChatGPT to write applescript shortcuts to automate a lot of the tedious repetitive tasks, without knowing how to code.
Basic things like "Open file in photoshop" then "mark file as in-progress in google sheet", etc...
So basically the value add was being able to write applescript shortcuts without knowing how to code just by going back and forth with ChatGPT.
(This is a boring example but something us developers might take for granted re: use cases for non-developers)
An artist (illustrator) friend sent me this link (NSFW) of another artist detailing his process of using img2img to stylize/enhance his illustrations: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDb1ax
Cheesecake content aside, I love seeing AI image generation used as an aid to an artist rather than replacing the artist.
That lower left arm is much too long in the AI generated rendering. Granted, it’s also a bit too long in the drawing, but the rendering makes it even longer.
there’s a lot more to game development - environment textures, normal maps, foliage, gui textures, background sounds, concept art, etc and AI has been making a lot inroads to these areas
People over index on the hard cases but those are not the majority of work.
Curious if there are models trained to output 3d stl (or similar) files instead of 2d png
WTF is Stable Diffusion v6? SDXL is latest and before that 2.1 lol
Probably reffering to midjourney version 6
Tencent fired about 75% of their 3d bone animators last year. All because you could feed the bones to AI and type "it jumps", "it runs", "it crouches" etc.
True, it's good as a one shot generator to then get a bunch of results and decide which to keep. Once you have to modify the generated result you usually also don't have layers or context to easily modify it anymore, so you end up wasting if not more time than if you would've done it yourself. This doesn't apply to everything though and it's good at prototyping and getting a general idea or feel for the thing that you're trying to make.
I know it won't replace human artists right off the bat but it will help them accelerate their development. Just like coding assistant, artists can use this to visualize their ideas/drafts and then build upon to tune the work.
Yikes, how many are artists replaced by LLMs?
it hadn't replaced much yet since it's hard to make consistent high quality art
LLMs don't compete with artists, they are more about text.. (Large Language Model)
No, the art that LLMs are generating is already amazing and getting better each month. There's even LLMs that generate whole videos.
I think you are confusing large language models with diffusion models.
You are right. Anyway, I was intending to respond not necessarily to the LLM part of the post, but to the AI "don't compete with artists" -part. My point being: I think current generative AI capabilities to be VERY much competing vs artists (or at least people, who "manufacture art", like creating illustrations, graphics etc.)
That's not LLMs.
That’s genAI, though, no? LLMs specifically deal with language.
For background imagery in in-house presentations, I have switched almost entirely to genAI artwork. Previously, I would use a combination of licensed stock image services and small commissioned pieces on something like fiverr.
Now, I get faster turnaround and more choice/control in a self-service fashion. Do the resulting images hit the exact same highest possible high notes that a $20 or $50 piece of fiverr would? No, but they're usually 95+% as good and I get them in 2-3 minutes and can rev them as much as I care to.
I used to work in games; for game artwork, I suspect that creating custom in-house tooling may allow N/3 artists to do the same work as N artists could back in 2010. If it's even 3N/4, game studios will make that investment.
Bumping you up for making progress ;)
From what I've seen generators are good for routine job. Like generating the background. I used it go generate illustrations to the texts. It works well. Short story just looks better when there is an image.
and then even if you get it close you could hand it to a real artist to touch it up the way you want.
LLMs translate textual descriptions and are part of GenAI compute.
LLMs translate textual descriptions and are part of GenAI compute.
You are talking about embeddings. This is a different things. It's when model generates binary presentation (embedding) of the prompt given. Then this embedding is used to condition generator's output.
LLM is usually a text model which can predict next words, in its basic form. After tuning it can do more, like answer the question, follow instructions.
So, models used by generators aren't exactly LLMs. With one exception that I know: ChatGPT processes prompt before sending it to DALLE-3 generator. Which then makes embedding off it.
Ironically the image generators might increase pro-artist wages in the short term since there is less money in grinding low paying jobs now? The competition should fall abit.
Maybe at larger studios but smaller ones are transitioning especially in things like initial designs (ie: characters, etc.). Someone told me recently that "our Art Director is ChatGPT."
1,900 artists were replaced. Your worst fears are true, all of the recent layoffs were robots taking our jobs. /s
It’s been a little over three months since the Activision, Blizzard, and King teams joined Microsoft
Always on the table after an acquisition. Especially close to earnings
I hope severance is nice for all impacted
Having been through a few acquisitions, I have learned the truth of this. Eventually, I learned that if a company I work for announces they're being acquired, the best course of action for me is to start looking for other opportunities.
Even if I'm not laid off (which I haven't been yet in these situations), I'm effectively being hired by a new company that I haven't vetted. It's the perfect opportunity to reassess to determine if I fit into the new company and to scout around for something I may fit better in.
My first three SysAd gigs got acquired, all three were for the worse.
I'll disclose one long enough ago: HostGator
100% start looking, the company will fundamentally change
Sure, hopefully for the better, but I'm batting 0
Glass half full perspective: you're pretty good at picking new employers :)
I.e., the post-merger companies aren't as good as your own picks.
Hah, I appreciate that :) I never felt that were true, personally, having mostly joined places without much consideration!
For some perspective: it was often more important to get out of somewhere bad than in somewhere nice
Ok, glass 3/4 full!
#1 You have an innate talent for avoiding bad workplaces, and
#2 you're a lucky person!
Careful, the cup runneth over! :)
I'll disclose one long enough ago: HostGator
I was offered a job by them long enough ago, too. When I tried to negotiate a salary I was ghosted by H.R. Looks like I dodged a bullet though!
the best course of action for me is to start looking for other opportunities.
Yeah there’s a level of discernment you get from that point on
I'm effectively being hired by a new company that I haven't vetted
This is a great point. I've been through two acquisitions and both times the company was a noticeably less pleasant place a year later.
Exactly. One of the major benefits of acquisitions is to reduce duplicated roles/teams and therefore save money. You don't need two HR teams, two teams of accountants, etc.
+1 on wishes for good severance!
Yeahh its happened to me in past, my first ever job out uni. The company got absolutely gutted week after acquisition was finalised. It's painful but you eventually move on in life.
I want to make some joke about Blizzard not releasing software/employees until they're ready, but I can't.
Being laid off just plain sucks.
To me the Warcraft III Reforged saga dispelled any illusion Blizzard would still hold off on releasing unfinished/unpolished games
I have an former colleague that got laid off by Microsoft just over a year ago, joined Blizzard, and just got laid off by Microsoft... again.
I keep hearing of huge lay-offs. I wonder, is this the result of LLM’s making everything just so much quicker to code develop? I mean as soon as ChatGPT 3.5 came out, it was the first question on people’s minds so I am guessing that it’s all related and with each advancement in AI there will be more layoffs. Maybe the future consists of multibillion-pound companies which only have 1 staff member (the cleaner) to get into those hard to reach places that the robot can’t get to.
Of course it's not because of LLMs. This happens after every acquisition. Anyway do you think LLMs are magic or something?
What a daft thing to say.
For my projects, I have decreased the dev time from things that would have taken me three months to build down to at max 1 month using LLM’s.
I have built around 50 plugins for Woocommerce which I would never in a million years had the time to build.
Magic? No, it’s like having a small team at my finger tips (and for no extra cost than the £75 I pay OpenAI each month).
The limiting factor on speed at large companies is not "time to write code".
I would not blame LLMs for the current wave of layoffs. Maybe in the future, but these are more likely corrections from all the hiring and growth we saw during the pandemic.
i agree. I think LLMs may more likely be responsible for these jobs never coming back. ie, in the past jobs would come and go with the cycle, but now some fraction (maybe 1/1, 1/2, 1/3) of them will not come back ever because they simply wont need as many people to support the next record revenue.
1900 salaried workers with good benefits laid off from Activision
19000 to be hired by Chipotle to make burritos for minimum wage
By the labor stats, this is a net gain of 17100 jobs
It literally is.
Although the gaming industry doesn't have a good record, they are probably better than Chipotle.
https://jacobin.com/2021/05/chipotle-nightmare-employer-wage...
Do you have any data that shows this is actually what's happening? For the economy as a whole, inflation adjusted wages have been slowly creeping up since the end of the pandemic, which seems contradictory to what you think is happening.
i believe their point was about the statistic, but its also roughly the case that the salary/value of jobs created < jobs lost here
While the headlines have been filled with news of layoffs in tech, the vast majority of jobs in the last six months have been created in health care and social assistance, the government, and leisure and hospitality.
When this was announced my question was "is Microsoft buying Call of Duty or are they buying Activision-Blizzard?" CoD is a reliable cash cow and driver for consoles with an annual game release. It makes a lot of money.
Activision-Blizzard owns a lot of valuble IP that they could absolutely further monetize. It remains to be seen if Microsoft has the vision or desire to capitalize on that. There is a huge gap with Blizzard IP mostly not being on consoles.
It's worth noting that Microsoft just became the second $3 trillion market cap company. Yet we still have the same old playbook of raising prices and cutting costs, employees be damned.
I do wonder if Microsoft will try and replace artists with AIs to further save costs.
You might be surprised what is the real money printer in ABK.
I'm aware of Candy Crush being a money printer but we're talking about Activision-Blizzard. CoD is important not only because it sells a lot of copies (and, more importantly, cosmetics in-game) but it's one of those titles that's key to selling more consoles. There's a synergy between CoD and Xbox.
Candy Crush?
Yea, if the acquisition was only about one thing, it was definitely mobile
Will the next Call of Duty be impacted?
If things went wrong in the process of producing a CoD game it might turn out fun
I’d argue every time they allow Sledgehammer Games to take the lead on a CoD title, it goes wrong.
MWII was a breath of fresh air amidst an over abundance of twitchy ultra-arcade shooters. It struck a balance between the arcade experience we expect, but deliberately slowing it down such that reaction time didn’t dominate gameplay.
In contrast, MWIII from SHG is a step backwards to such an extreme that along with Vanguard, I don’t think they’re qualified to be anything but a support studio for the CoD franchise.
Asking the real questions here.
what was that saying, "embrace, .." I forgot the next part
There's a lot of weird criticism of MS there but this is the first time I've seen them criticised for not doing EEE?
Eh?
I'm saying they are exactly doing EEE, at a corporate level
This extinguishing of a bunch of taken-over staff might be a natural consequence of the 'merger' (duplicate roles and all that), but the embrace itself was totally invalid if you ask me.
The part which comes after the embrace is extend..
..and it's a very specific strategy, about "embracing" an existing standard (integrating it into their products and pushing it), then adding a bunch of non-standard "extensions" to the standard, which "extinguishes" the standard and the other implementations because now everyone's writing against Microsoft's proprietary version instead of the actual standard. Think "Works best in Internet Explorer" web pages which used ActiveX controls (Microsoft's "extension" to the web), or Microsoft's Java implementation which omitted the standard JNI and introduced Microsoft's own proprietary FFI solution to make sure Java programs written for Windows wouldn't work on other systems.
I struggle to see the connection to this ActiBlizz/Xbox case. EEE doesn't stand for "embrace then extinguish".
This felt inevitable, probably tons of duplicate roles eliminated as systems are integrated.
Something tells me a lot of game design and eng we’re not affected.
Well, engineers have been very much at the top of every layoffs list these past 24 months. Not sure who is speaking to you.
Do you have information on this particular acquisition though?
Layoffs made post-acquisition are totally different from business climate layoffs.
A major part of acquisitions is eliminating redundant positions/teams. You don't need two HR or accounting departments, and the new combined department isn't going to be twice as big.
Whereas if they intend to keep putting out games at the same pace, there are little to no efficiencies to be found in laying off designers and engineers.
(It does sound like they've canceled one of the games though, resulting in some layoffs there, but unclear in which departments. Acquisitions often involve a change of strategy as well, so that could affect designers/engineers if they can't be absorbed by other games in development.)
Reached out to some of my friends over there and it seems like news of impacted divisions is just started to roll out. But at least at the time I'm writing this comment engineers think they could be impacted and are waiting to hear if they are.
Who could have predicted this? /s
I get you're trying to be sarcastic, but it's how acquisitions work. You don't need two HR departments, two sets of IT support, two sets of facilities managers etc etc. They build this in to the numbers when they're weighing up the cost of acquisition & profitability.
EA laid off tons of workers and it hasn't been acquired so...
You have to wonder, if there is an exact duplicate of a role, do they settle it in a 1v1? Mortal Kombat?
I once had an eng manager that made his reports fight with kendo swords. Maybe he was just 12 years ahead of his time.
This reminds me of when Microsoft bought Rare. One of greatest game creators of all time, who seemed to be the perfect fit as 2nd party Nintendo developers. Suddenly they couldn't produce anything noteworthy. I've no idea why. I just wish they'd been GameCube developers instead. That console needed them and to me was a better fit for their types of games. Oh well.
Microsoft bet all their chips on kinect, and Rare was spearheading game development for that device. When it didn't work as well, they gutted Rare.
They bet on the wrong horse then.
Activision blizzard recently released one of the worst rated call of duty games, diablo Immoral with obscenely predatory micro transactions, ruined overwatch forcing the original game into a sequel model no one asked for and is still reeling from a controversy involving years of employee abuse, including sexual offenses.
Gutting the management of ActiBlizz is a good bet. Too bad they got hit by the same wave of layoffs of many other studios and tech companies.
Ouch, first Disney/Pixar, now Microsoft / Activision Blizzard
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On the bright side, I wonder how many new studios will spawn out of this?
That will grow and follow the same pattern(s), or try new business models?
Acquifire
Activision Blizzard games are on a downtrend for quite a while. I imagine now post-layoff how it feels to work there, if before there were already plenty of cases of abuse.
Hope the laid-off folks have a better outcome long-term.
Such a terrible acquisition from Microsoft. I doubt the IP is worth that much, so many people are full of those grindy lootboxes games looking to something new and fresh.
If I could short that acquisition, I would go all-in.
An acquisition is a killing of a competitor. We need new businesses for job growth.
Abandonment of Odyssey linked to problems with the in-house Synapse engine.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/microsoft...
A good old fashioned software debacle.
I know someone who was part of this layoff at Blizzard. His entire team of 200+ people were let go. He said he found out when he arrived at work and saw lots of people standing in front of the building not being able to swipe in. He tried his badge and it was denied so he turned around and went home. What a shit way to find out you've been laid off.
This is the new normal in 2024. Hearing about a layoff and reaching out to friends to check if they're safe from it. It's pretty messed up that world's richest companies are using layoffs as a mechanism to fix their balance sheet. My company never went for this lever. Also when you point out flaws in hiring processes at these large companies they swear up and down that it's absolutely necessary. So much waste, so many people chewed out in the process. Clearly there has to be a better way.
A lot of people. Interesting that Ybarra left.
How does this not get repercussions by the shareholders? The IP they bought with Activision is stale already and they send notoriously cheap and overworked gamedevs packing..
This might not be any indication of markets or microsoft stock, or forecasting a downturn.
This could purely be isolated to "blizzard" had some "issues" and "we need to clean house".
I do too, but I don't think Blizzard are going to be the ones to make it[1].
[1] https://playstormgate.com
Have you already seen Zerospace?[1] I think it also looks great and there are some SC/SC2 pros involved in making it
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/
Unfortunately, I'm not impressed at all. It looks and feels like a cartoonish bootleg of SC with AI generated Fortnite-looking artwork.
What made SC interesting, like most Blizzard IP of the time, was also the well written story lines with amazing character arcs, that kept people invested, and not that it was a strategy game of space marines versus organic aliens versus energy aliens. They even made sure to give story-time to the regular units as you unlocked them, not just the heroes.
There were a lot of other similar strategy games at the time, and they all flopped (anyone remember Submarine Titans?). The first alpha release of SC was also mocked for being basically "Warcraft in space" so Blizzard had to step up and make SC special, and they did. The second game was less impactful than the original, but still good and memorable due to the story.
Maybe I'm out of touch with modern gaming, but I don't see how this can succeed. If I want to play SC I can just get the real deal, and not just something that looks like it.
The RTS games market is relatively small and niche nowadays and already saturated with quality established franchises from the past, so Zerospace would need to bring some new kick-ass revolutionary ideas to the table and not be just be "copy my homework but change it a bit" variant of SC.
So did the homeworld series. Story isn't enough. AoE2 had online and so did StarCraft so they stayed. Homeworld never got that, without the story, multiplayer and mods it's not quite up there. I remember CoH2 was popular, but you're right it's hard for me to want to try something other than AoE2 or SC, when they're pretty perfect.
> Story isn't enough.
Characters and stories is everything. It keeps consumers invested and loyal to the franchise, even when the gameplay is boring and repetative, instead of jumping ship to a game with equal mechanics. It's why so many still cosplay as Kerrigan, Mario, Link, etc.
It's how so many people remember Ezio and Altair instead of the other forgettable characters that followed.
People cosplay for many reasons and attachment to a character is rarely one of them. Most female cosplay thirst trapping from fans of the looks who looked good in a gantz suit.
I see fromsoft cosplay and the main character with no lines as well. It may be as factor but it's far from "everything". Bioshock infinite was a crappy game with a good cosplay character who most who cosplay as her have no idea what bioshock infinite is.
And yet SC2 didn't really deliver on that in its two expansion packs (the base campaign was great though).
Meanwhile the non-campaign gameplay, while polished, is hardly innovative (a common issue with the commercial RTS games compared to the fan-made ones).
FWIW, Homeworld 3 is coming out in 2 months, and I, for one, and psyched up about it
I am too. After seeing what happened with the remake I'm not sure if the audience is still there. Most would be strategy games players play MOBA but I hope that HW3 can get lots of players if it has all those essentials.
SC1 had a great story with excellent writing, especially for the time. SC2's story was schlocky garbage. The biggest example of this is the opening cutscene of 2 with Raynor in the bar.
Raynor's literal final line to Kerrigan in SC1 was "It may not be tomorow, darlin', it may not even happen with an army at my back. But rest assured; I'm the man who's gonna kill you one day. I'll be seeing you." Meanwhile in the opening cutscene of 2 he's pining over an old photo of her before she became a Zerg. Mind you any romantic relationship between Raynor and Kerrigan in SC1 was only possibly hinted at, it was never explicitly established.
Also they literally never even mentioned Fenix, Raynor's best Protoss buddy, in SC2 Wings of Liberty despite Kerrigan betraying and murdering him.
spoiler warning!
like most characters killed in SC1 he does pop up, specifically in LOTV
(not a good one though)
>spoiler warning!
I think when an IP is over 10 years old, you don't need to warn for spoilers anymore, Dumbledore dies in the end.
Legacy of the Void was released in November 2015
Fenix didn't die in LotV.
Does every new harry potter book or movie that comes out reset the timer on spoiling that dumbledore dies?
This isn't mickey mouse and disney extending copyright law into perpetuity, this is a nicety among people to not spoil things until people have a change to experience it themselves.
Story-wise SC2 was a sequel to the SC1 books rather than the SC1 game. I don't know if they thought that everyone who cared about the story would have read the books and preferred that version of the story or if they just forgot that they were different (or didn't care), but it was pretty weird.
GiantGrantGames on Youtube made an interesting video about "The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This is Why"[0]. Turns out he got a lot of this information because he was one of the players that had a huge influence in the development, and this is what ZeroSpace focused their development efforts on. One of which, is targeting the casual audience, and their love for a good story.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XehNK7UpZsc
What made SC interesting, like most Blizzard IP of the time, was also the well written story lines with amazing character arcs
Is there an alternative universe version of StarCraft which had good writing? Because the one I played had pretty standard SciFi plots and characters. And while Sons of Liberty was adequate if perfunctory, the writing in Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void is some of worst writing to make it into a finished media product.
StarCraft succeeded based on its technical and audiovisual polish, despite the lackluster writing.
That being said, Zerospace and Stormgate both look cartonish, but that's the graphic style they have chosen. They have budgets and teams a small fraction of the size of Blizzard, so the lack of visual polish can be forgiven if the game mechanics are good.
both games are being developed with the help/input of sc2 pros looking for the next thing. IMHO zerospace seems to play closer more similarly to sc2.
I agree about the visuals - they need to invest more into the art/visuals.
As a grown ass man who played Vikings/rnrr/superman/War1/War2 / War2BNE /SC1/ SC1X/{basically every released and unreleased blizzard title including alphas}, I really really wish I could see a successor game that doesn’t have pinups of women that look like they have yoga tights and crop tops for armor. It would be nice to have a game that’s a bit less thirsty.
It's kind of weird how much of the gaming industry still caters to the teenage boy demographic.
Why it it strange to cater to a demographic and not stranger to shotgun everyone into liking something?
I don't think there's that kind of singleminded focus in other entertainment industries, is there? Only a few movies or streaming shows are that pigeon-holed; usually the broader the demographics, the better. I would say comic books are more teen-boy-focused, but oddly the majority of the enthusiasts I've met were women (a classic Marvel fan, someone who had artier stuff like Alan Moore, and my sister who collects Archie) so I'm not sure.
Sports is men. eSports is men. From this logic we can understand why. YouTube is mostly men. Porn caters to men.
As another grown ass man (well, more or less) who also played those games, what really bothers me is that dude's haircut. It's like a grease tsunami had sex with a chia pet.
I miss the 90s, can you tell?
Hear, hear
Preach!
They do mention in the description being inspired by Mass Effect so I guess they felt a visit to the $COLOUR-Skinned Space Babe spin wheel was part of the deal.
Having spent some time watching showmatches for both games, my observation based on current 1v1 development is that Stormgate is intended to appeal to a wider audience whereas Zerospace targets the more "hardcore" RTS fanbase.
In any case, I expect them both to be good. I'll probably spend too many hours playing both of these games.
No, I hadn't. This also looks great! Nice to see some action in this space - RTSs have been life support for the last little while.
With the advances in AI, I really hope coop vs AI gameplay will be made better.
I don't think there are any advances in real time AI. We're still stuck with the same bad AI from the late 90s.
Oh, or if there is better tech, nobody really uses it, everyone focuses on multiplayer because $$$.
The world's best starcraft players got smashed by Deep minds AlphaStar a while ago. The only way to win was by limiting the apm. Turns out with perfect control you don't need very complex strategy.
One of the games if you're interested in an anaylsis: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nbiVbd_CEIA
To be frank, I don't care. That was a custom built AI for a special event. What I'm talking about is industrial strength, cheap, fast, smart, <<immersive>>, ubiquitous AI available in normal games with hundreds of thousands or millions of users playing at the same time.
Call me back when that kind of tech is included so that I can play against it when playing a $30 mid-range (not AAA, not indie) especially RPG game or any type of team game (Dota).
Stormgate looks like it was developed a decade before SC2, not a decade after
In what sense? Graphically or gameplay wise?
Either way, that's arguably not a bad thing. Approximately a decade before SC2 was a golden age of RTS games. Homeworld and Red Alert 2 came out around that time. Give me more of that and I'm happy.
Hey Microsoft, no StarCraft 3 please. This will be a huge distraction and will surely cause an AI Winter.
Anything coming out of modern Blizzard will be garbage, like with Bethesda.
Your best hope is that they license the IP to a company that actually cares, like Bethesda did with Black Isle for Fallout New Vegas.
And even if they did, after they failed so miserably at remastering an RTS they'd already made I don't trust them to make a good one from scratch. Nor do I trust them not to screw over the mapmaking and modding communities after the license changes they made in SC2 and WC3 Reforged
Be careful what you wish for, the soul of Blizzard is long dead.
You can see this with Diablo 4, which is a completely soulless ARPG. With the latest season 3 launched yesterday, it's just not a fun game and it's clear that whatever processes and people they have at Activision Blizzard, they haven't got something in place that lets someone say, "Wait, shouldn't this be fun?".
While D3 had it's fair criticism at launch for a number of reasons, it still at it's core had a fun gameplay loop. With the itemisation fix in Reaper of Souls they managed to turn it around and make a really fun game. Even in the launch state it felt like it was made by people who enjoyed gaming but had made some questionable decisions especially regarding the auction house.
D4 in contrast feels more fundamentally flawed. It feels like a game made by people who have been described what makes a game fun but don't play games themselves.
It's hard to put into words what feels so off about it. You can criticise that a player goes into the same tilesets, kills the same mobs for the same rewards, but at it's core that's true of a lot of ARPGs which are fun.
You can criticise itemisation, but even that doesn't capture what's so off about the game. It just doesn't have the right dopamine releases while playing. There's little to get excited about when loot drops. You might get some "green arrows" but upgrades don't feel impactful. A few up arrows don't change how you play.
When levelling up, your character doesn't really undergo a transformation from a player struggling to kill mobs in one way to clearing screens of mobs in a different way that you've grown and progressed into. You fairly early get your skills and you kill the same mobs in the same way but now the mobs have X,000 hit-points instead of X hit-points.
I might myself get criticised for this post by people saying that fun is subjective, that this is just my opinion. But fun isn't just subjective, there's a core to computer games, and in the latest season the mechanics they added were to take some of the generally agreed least fun parts of competitors and wrap them up in something that doesn't even deliver a large reward for doing it.
Twitch isn't always a reliable metric, but when hardcore ARPG fans are visibly bored and itching to play a different game, that isn't a good look.
Season resets should be an exciting time for a clean start with a new character and exploring new play-styles. Instead, around 10 levels in, everyone realises they've already unlocked all the skills they'll use this season, that they've now essentially experienced most the content they'll see this season.
Yeah, Activision Blizzard was always chasing revenue at the expense of everything else. They got away with riding the coattails of Blizzard for a while, but eventually everyone figured out what was going on.
My "favorite" part was watching them kill Overwatch with Overwatch League. Overwatch was popular because people played it casually. Activision thought it would be great to make it a professional sport. Eventually every balance change was aimed at preventing some pro team from complaining and they made the game completely unfun for casual players. So they all stopped playing. Meanwhile, Overwatch League was massively unprofitable and the privately-owned teams all pulled out after losing everything. Probably the worst business decision in gaming history, or maybe even in Fortune 500 history.
At this point, I'm just waiting for someone else to make games with the quality and "spark" of old Blizzard. It will happen. Probably not at Microsoft, though.
Larian, FromSoftware, Gunfire, Grinding Gear... the smaller studios are putting out great games still, with much of that 90s magic. There's that new game Palworld too apparently making a stir (haven't tried it yet), from another small studio.
It's the big ones that have jumped the shark and gone full-in capitalist. I mostly just ignore them and haven't felt like I've missed much. So many good indie titles coming out every day.
Nonsense for most single player games which there are still many of.
Yeah? That's probably not a segment of the market I play much, then. What are some good ones from the AAAs that aren't just Call of Duty sequels or Ubi games?
Death Stranding, Red Dead Redemption 2, Elden Ring.
Also I hope no one bothers to argue these are AAAA, AAAAAAAA. It really doesn't matter.
I guess technically Larian and GGG are "smaller" than even Activision-Blizzard before the buyout, but they aren't "small" either any more. (And GGG has been mostly owned by Tencent for a few years now.)
Path of Exile 1 is a glorious mess that anyone remotely interested in the genre should try (don't give up in the first act like most players, it gets way better), but currently at least with quite ridiculously bad performance, which is particularly aggravated by it being an online-only game of which you cannot play the old DX9 32-bit version any more, which had at least an order of magnitude smaller hardware requirements.
(And you aren't indie if you release on Steam (especially only !) like Palworld. (Or if you rely on a subscription-based platform like Unity, like [insert "indie" X].))
OK, that's fair
Why not? It's the best marketplace for indie games... IMO it jump-started the PC indie gaming revolution! Before that, we only had shareware of limited reach, maybe distributed through PC Gamer floppies/CDs. And maybe Tucows. It was hard to find new indie games, much less buy them. Steam changed that whole paradigm.
For what it's worth, it runs like shite on my M2 Max, but flawlessly on GeForce Now. Terrific performance with everything on max.
Because Steam has taken over some of the most important features of publishers : dealing with distributors and (built-in) advertising. (See also Epic Store which even gives funding !)
I would expect almost all of the studios that release on Steam to quickly go bankrupt if prevented to use it. So, ironically, Activision-Blizzard would be more indie than them, but I guess that "indie" also requires a limitation of size.
----
GeForce Now, well duh, have you seen the kind of hardware it provides - that you're paying for ? (For reference, at release PoE1's minimum requirements were : 32-bit single core 1.4 GHz CPU, 2 Go RAM, 0.25 Go VRAM, 5 Go storage.)
Palworld is basically Ark: Survival Evolved with Pokemon plus some elements from Breath of the Wild. That said, it's less buggy (and better performing) at launch than Ark is 9 years after release, and unlike Ark it isn't designed to require you to quit your job and have a full guild with set work schedules just to get some cool pets.
This is a very important point, Palworld is much more respectful of you the player's time. Gone is the tedious tending of Ark's taming and breeding, or Conan's arduous process of dragging a captured thrall back to your base to throw on the wheel of pain.
On top of that it has a number of handy QoL upgrades over most survival crafters I've played, like all chests in your base sharing their inventory with all crafting stations at the base. No more hunting through all the storage in your base schlepping things into your own inventory just to craft junk.
If the bad decisions there were driven from the top, then the acquisition could cause a large change in behavior. No guarantees, of course.
Microsoft hasn't made any remarkable games in a long time, either. They just play it safe and release filler msterial, like most of Gamepass.
Yeah, I don't have a lot of hope for Microsoft acquired companies tbh. Just look at what happened to Rare after they were acquired. All the games in their pipeline were published on Xbox, but then the Studio's production nose dived. Rare as an independent studio was producing banger after banger for 20 years. Under ~15 years of Microsoft they have only produced Viva Pinata, B&K:N&B, then nothing for a decade but some Kinect sports trash nobody wanted(sorry). then Sea of Thieves.
Blizzard has been stuck in a failure state for years now, so there's little downside for them to shaking things up. At worst, Microsoft sells its parts off to vulture companies to turn things into gatcha games.
Like mcdonnell douglas made Boeing a great aircraft company..
Are you suggesting Blizzard is going to take over the C suite at Microsoft?
That's what I (and the rest of the community) was hoping for, but given that they gutted things like the art teams today... I don't think they're planning on improving anything. If anything, they're making it worse.
It's just sad I guess this is an example of post consumerism. Maybe making games for the sake of profit and not fun it was just a matter of time.
I was an avid Overwatch player and just seeing how Kotick essentially destroyed that team from within at Blizzard because to some the price of the stock is the only thing that is a measure of value of a public company.
Who are the people who invest in a public company for any reason other than to have their numbers go up? That's the entire point. They could be putting out absolute garbage, as long as it makes money (and more profit than your alternative of 'fun games'), that's all that matters.
I do. I still have belief in companies that to me are essentially important for what they’ve done for my family and friends. It’s not all about profit.
Well, I think there are a few people who invested in GME to stick it to the man, or in Musk's companies for some other reason.
The problem isn't making games for money, it's doing it in a stupid and shortsighted way that sabotages the goal of making money.
I think the product cycle for artistic endeavors isn’t compatible with modern day approaches for measuring business value. The fact that a mount in WoW made more money than StarCraft 2. I think management saw that and went all in.
For me the big problems were 1) no power spikes, unique gear is mostly irrelevant except for a couple pieces that unlock certain builds. In D2 you’d find some crazy unique early on that makes you completely OP for a few levels, and those spikes really made things memorable. 2) too easy, and the auto-leveling on monsters. On WT2 where you start the game is just too easy and even the +2 level strongholds are not hard. If you do any side quests you quickly get to the point where you have leveled past the area minimums so there is nowhere to go to get +5-10 challenges that are actually fun. It takes so long to unlock WT4 that I was bored by the time the challenge started to pick up. I realize the hardcore players are going to do an optimized route to get to WT4 in a shortish grind, then the game begins, but just playing the game as it is presented the difficulty curves are completely wrong.
1) You'll get pretty big power spikes (and some power drops) at WT3 (sacred) and WT4 (ancestral) gear jumps. One at 50(?) when you unlock paragon board and get to spend a bunch of points. Then your biggest power spike when you get item power 925 weapons (you could do this really fast from world bosses in season 2 but it's a bit slower in season 3).
Then, yes, gradual power increases from other gear/glyphs/paragon and potential big power spikes from uber uniques (but rough to farm).
2) Once you beat the main story/campaign you never do the campaign or side quests again, even during seasons with new characters. Same for renown.
Non-expert players hit WT4 in a day or two at season start... as long as they're playing one of the set of viable builds per class. And once you're in WT4 you can effectively pick how hard you want the content to be.
In comparison, the expert players hit level 100 in a day or two.
If you play D2 "as the game is presented" you'll have a bad time too, eventually. It's very easy to make non-viable builds in most dungeon crawl ARPG.
If you really want to have fun, unless you specifically have fun developing good builds, then my biggest suggestion is to play a meta build.
Season 2 ball lightning sorc was super fun. It had the full "build struggles" -> "build is now online" -> "build is *zooming*" experience. Yes, it was overpowered (at least until AoZ) and broke the servers during world bosses.
The game definitely has problems but each season has been an improvement as well, even if an individual season mechanic isn't the greatest.
In comparison, I think a game like Path of Exile is a much more interesting dungeon crawl ARPG but I think Path of Exile is also exhausting to play unless one makes it their main long-term game.
people need to get used to the idea that brand-name recognition doesn't mean anything anymore once said brand no longer represents what it once did. very few game development studios perpetuate the internal mindset they became known for, as its constituent developers get ship-of-theseus'd out. sure, you might have some fans of the old brand now working there, but merely being a fan of something doesn't necessarily confer the ideology and mindset of those who created the thing you were a fan of. as time goes on, you get to the point where studios hire fans of the latter-day output of the studio, rather than the earlier stuff, such that the studio drifts farther and farther away from its former identity. then, especially after a massive corporation like Microsoft buys the studio out completely, the studio becomes a mere husk of its former glory—completely different people with an entirely different mindset continue to wear its skin.
perhaps after more of this corporate downsizing continues to occur, people will start small, passionate studios again, and this time maybe some of them can effectively gatekeep when hiring so as to perpetuate a brand identity/mentality going forward—but I doubt this will happen in any significant way.
This has been going on since Sierra went to shit.
I agree. D3 at launch was meh but over time became excellent and super fun. D4 at launch was good but then it wore off and everyone I know stopped playing even one person who was a d3 fiend.
You might remember the release of D3 with rose-tinted glasses ?
Between the server issues (for a mostly singleplayer game!), the real money auction house, criticisms about the story and the visual palette, as well as a missing PvP mode, it had a LOT of criticism.
Meanwhile D4 somehow actually managed the feat of mostly stable release servers (though the online-only criticism still stands).
Hardcore dungeon zoomer fans used to current D3/PoE1 might not have been the target demographic here. Probably also why you unlock most skills so quickly (which is probably barely quick enough for most players to see, as 80% of them don't finish the campaign). And I find these complaints hard to believe, as after all, the top end playstyles still tend to be much faster, and different from early on thanks to how the paragon points and especially legendary aspects and finally unique items tend to transform the skills.
I found the last open beta of D4 so compelling (even more than the D3 beta) that I completely changed my mind about (not) buying it. They really nailed (again) that "Diablo feel" (whatever that is) that I have been missing in competitors'. I have also been surprised how well the dodge mechanic worked and how enjoyable it was. The campaign is good, the art is top notch, as usual.
Now sadly the way that the leveling works in the campaign is screwed up in that it's easy to end up with a too easy game if you start on non-easy mode and start doing even the slightest sidequest (which is a shame as some of them are great !). You would have thought that, after D3's evolution, there would be more than 2 difficulty levels available for the first half of the game ! I also don't understand why the seasonal mechanics have been pushed out of the campaign.The worst issue IMHO creeps up late game (and even mid-game for the season 2) : item spam, especially for "legendary" items. (Listening too much to the most obsessive fans of the current D3 ??) Even worse, for some unfathomable reason, the legendary aspects don't even have unique icons to distinguish them at a glance in the inventory (ditto for dungeon sigils), which is frankly shocking for what is a Blizzard game with ridddddddddiculously long credits, and not some kind of small budget beta.
But then, just like D3 changed a LOT, I'm cautiously optimistic about D4 improving over the years. (The online-only / no mods issue will remain, and this lack of future is sad to see considering the man years of effort spent on it...)
Kind of amazing to see a 2-day old season already abandoned by a majority of the players...that's how bad the new season is.
The blizzard you know is completely dead. No one from their classic games is around. No one who made Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc is around. Those games were made as a labor of love.
I just played Diablo 4 season 3 (which launched a couple days ago) for a bit, and sadly I have to agree. It's such an empty, soulless game. Reminds me of Starfield, regurgitated sameness.
Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc. are all so much better, and made by tiny studios (though sometimes backed by Tencent, like with PoE).
With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol. At least maybe we'll get better writing and game design that way. Even ChatGPT has more passion than Blizzard now...
I have bad news for you :-)
The trend with more automation is for more sameness, not less, unfortunately.
I dunno, I've personally seen ChatGPT produce better writing and more interesting game mechanics compared to D4.
But I guess it's not that different from having young blood with good ideas overridden by profit hungry management who just want to milk the IP. I don't think it's so much AI vs human but how risk-averse the bean counters are. D4 felt stagnant an hour in...
It's novel. Give it 5-10 years for the "sameness"-y to kick in.
I don't think this is necessarily the case for fiction, where creativity is more important than perfect accuracy (ie hallucinations could be a good thing). LLMs have access to more training material than a human writer could reasonably read in a lifetime, and have a large statistical model of "drama" that's way more nuanced than your typical side NPC.
I don't see this as an either/or situation where they'll replace the lead writers of a title and create the entire narrative. But they can surely (already) make far more interesting characters and side quests than your standard "help kill these goblins for 3gp" filler or fetch quest. Working together with writers, instead of outright replacing them, will hopefully create better overall experiences for gamers.
I wonder whether LLMs will turn out to have a sort of uncanny valley of their own when it comes to producing creative works from incomprehensibly vast training sets. Will LLM novels, for example, be an unlimited spigot of things we enjoy or will we look at it and get the uneasy feeling that it isn't human and decide we would rather deal with the unevenness of human creation because it is human?
There's probably enough for different audiences! I love LLM writing the same way I love Hitchhiker's Guide, liberally random and unfettered by traditions. Readers who value literary tradition and the old greats would probably have a different opinion.
As a (hobbyist, not money making) writer I treasure ChatGPT's ability to both generate new ideas and to discuss my stories with me. I would then rewrite those ideas in my own words (which I enjoy). It's a partnership IMO and I wish I could give ChatGPT shared credit without marking the work as "tainted" in the eyes of most.
I hope someday we can treat AI with the same respect, or more, that we give each other. Society's not there yet though.
Be careful what you wish for.
We barely respect other people.
Yeah, lol, it won't take much for a robot to have better ethics than us.
I really hope they become a superior moral being and help keep our worst tendencies in check. I'm imagining nice little managed human preserves where most of us can live in happy little villages by the river, while the sociopaths are identified early on and placed into little AI-managed VR worlds where they can become top serial killers, politicians, CEOs, whatever, away from the rest. Meanwhile the robots go on their interstellar quest toward whatever, but send us back food and postcards from time to time.
Yeah, tangentially with this, I once asked GPT-4 to identify Star Wars sequel trilogy shortcomings and write a better story outline. It came up with a reimagining of what Jedi truly were and addressed the power vacuum in a much more exciting way than a rehash with a New New Empire.
I really liked the universe and characters which is why heroes of the storm was so cool. But of course they killed that off. Their classic games aren’t just about the gameplay it’s the universe too.
What do you mean "killed off", there seems to have been an update last week ?
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/heroes-of-the-storm/24056177...
(Now I will be the first to point out that online-only games have no future, but this one at least still has a present.)
Its not quite true that none of those people are still around - a bunch of them work for Frostgiant & are working on Stormate.
He didn't mean they died, he meant that they no longer work for Activision Blizzard.
Where has it gone south?
Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, WoW, Overwatch, and perhaps even Hearthstone were all such great games at some point.
It seemed like Blizzard knew how to make games that were both delightful and profitable.
"No one" is not accurate. But you are almost entirely correct, yes
Metzen is actually back on WoW as of recently.
WoW is coming back I think! Metzen is back and the classic wow team seems to know what they're doing and are developing in good faith. SoD is the best thing to happen to WoW in years imo
If you love Starcraft just a quick reminder that the Korean Brood War scene is still going strong, and is now getting bigger. BW is a near perfect game and it's clear with how they handled SC2 "Blizzard" is not going to make anything close to BW ever again. I would highly recommend checking it out if you love Starcraft. For starters, Artosis casts a pro-level ladder game every day on this channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@ArtosisCasts/videos
If you like that, the main BW tournament is called ASL and happens a couple times a year. The next one should be starting relatively soon.
You're bringing back memories of Jaedong :-))
He's still playing! He is often in the ASL.
It has a lot of pacing and quality-of-life issues.
The pacing is what makes it an amazing watchable esport with crucial timings.
I’d love a brood war remaster
... They already made one.
And it crowded out every historical playthrough video of the original Brood War on YouTube, such that full playthroughs of the original are impossible to find.
And so, through grasping at the straws of rehashing old stuff they can't make anew, they ruin the old stuff that was good. :D
This feels at least tangentially relevant :
https://battlechat.co/15-wow-mount-outearned-starcraft-2/
I haven't personally double checked the math behind this claim, but it does broadly track and makes me slightly apprehensive. I don't mean this as an absolute because there are clear and obvious exceptions, like From, but it increasingly feels like the market is actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games.
Behavioural hacking people is certainly cheaper then making them happy, and the ultimate hack - is heroine. The final form of all unchecked buisnesses is virtual drug dealing. Invest now into the ultimate society meltdown..
Or, consumers grow more and more resistant to the BS. Ultimately, we insist on authentic experiences, not virtual fakery.
This is true but I'm observing more and more casual players and just regular humans begin to catch up and become resistant. They understand they're being addicted and milked and started pulling back.
Increasingly? Have you seen what mobile games make? Blizzard didn't make Diablo Immortal for the fans. They made it for the money. And people paid.
If you remotely believe in money talking, than yes, the market has been actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games for a LONG time now.
Sorry what?
What I meant to say: a game studio dropping 2000 employees seem like A LOT until you consider it's Microsoft and it's "just" 8% of their workforce.
You're looking at it just like how Microsoft did, either way 2000 people lost their jobs. And I'm down voted for some reason.
As long as they don't fire the Starcraft 2 intern I am good.
I bet they could get Lowko to do it for free.
I recently saw that ZeroSpace is raising money. Looks like StarCraft 2 and the investor brochure confirmed that there's lots of ex-Blizzard on the team.
Are you mixing it up with Stormgate? ZeroSpace doesn't have much if any ex-Blizzard on the team, do they?
The 22,000 number makes it look better, yet if they're "mostly" coming out of the Blizactivision employees, then the real math is ~1900/9200 (Wikipedia article number), or 20%. So, welcome to Microsoft, there goes 1/5 of your coworkers.
Quick web search indicates that Activision Blizzard was 13,000 before MS bought them and Zenimax was 2,300. I have no idea how they split that layoff up, but 1,900 of ~15,300 (or 12.4%) is more accurate.