This is key, I think, to Microsoft’s plan with the next gen Xbox. A consolized prebuilt pc with solid specs, no need to fuck with GPU shenanigans.

You don’t spend 8 billion dollars on a company to then shrink their market. Microsoft was never planning on making any of these properties they bought fully exclusive. The transition to third party you’re seeing now has been in the making for 5+ years at this point. Youre all just looking at this through the old console war lense when they’ve been over that ever since Gamepass released and they realized they make more money putting that on everything (larger market) than playing the exclusives game (smaller market)

Yeah you said it. Sony did not make them release the game for the PS4 and yet they did and it had lots of issues. Hence they did not optimize well for previous gen

I don’t think that’s true, the game ran very well on Series X on release. I know because I sunk like 90 hours on it in the first week. It ran like shit in all last Gen hardware including PC, because people with the then new 30 series Nvidia graphics cards were also reporting the game ran fine. I think CDPR just did not optimize it at all.

Nope. Not at all. It’s literally just an ROG Ally with an Xbox skin.

The ROG Xbox Ally is just a an Xbox branded PC. It can already play Helldivers 2. The Meta Quest is just a Meta Quest with a different color so no, unless it’s also playable via Xcloud (game streaming).

Re: Meta Quest, doesn’t play Xbox or Pc games natively at all. It has an Xbox app that allows you to stream from your Xbox or play through Xcloud. All Meta Headsets can do this.

That is to say that none of these Xbox branded hardware can play games that you own on your Xbox unless they are Play Anywhere titles.

This has nothing to do with the Series S. Helldivers is a fully Sony owned IP. I suspect Xbox asked for this as a show of good grace in exchange for Halo.

This is the greatest news this year so far.

Most of these arguments were made for computers back when they were gaining popularity fyi.

The people outsourcing their thinking to LLMs weren’t gonna do much thinking in the first place. And honestly once you use them for a while you quickly realize what their good uses are and what are their limitations and thinking is not its strong suit. But it’s great at sorting large data and making it digestible. Or writing corpo copy that was devoid of meaning anyways.

Remember that a hammer can kill a person just as well as it can build a house.

Now I agree that it is annoying that it is being shoved into everything without any good reason, but the market will sort that out. What you are seeing is everyone rushing into a nascent market before it ossifies and shakes everyone except one or two winners. In 10 years I’m sure LLMs will be more like you have one that you plug into every service you use and it will be provided by one of a handful of companies who are the only ones capable of profiting from this because of the economies of scales it requires to work. Ergo not very different from every other tech rush that has happened in history.

LLMs are tools, simple as. Being a Luddite, screaming and kicking and crying over them is not gonna make it go away any more than boomers crying over computers have managed to make computers go away.

What you are describing has nothing to do with the tool. It’s dishonesty which is different.

The idea is that instead of commissioning the cow on the field, you go to the AI and ask it for that and it gives you a cow in the field. If you claim you made it, you are lying but that would be true even if you paid an artist and then claimed the same.

So with AI made art you’ll say “this art was made by an Ai” and no one will be confused as to who takes the credit, because it belongs to the algorithm.

Have you ever made art in your life? Because a big part of art is mimicking. Like 98% of it is mimicking. I draw, write and have dabbled in making music and playing instruments. You can’t learn these skills without mimicking. And most artists don’t ever do anything truly original, that’s a rarity and even when it happens you can trace the influences to other artists if you know how to look.

You could argue that AI has not developed its own style yet but that’s bullshit too imo because everyone knows the default AI art style when they see it, so that means that AI has a distinctive style. Is it unique? Maybe not, but neither is the art style of most artists or writers or even musicians.

Analysis of over 15M+ bodies of water finds that water is wet.

Art has no rules my man.

You can do all kinds of mental gymnastics you want but there’s no difference between an artist looking at Frank Frazetta’s art and basing their style off of it and an AI doing the same thing. You might not like it, but it’s the truth.

Do I think the art has the same value? Not necessarily. But I also never thought that all art has the same value. There has always been trash production line art and good art.

But also I have to say that I’ve already seen some people use AI as a tool for art and make some really cool stuff that I don’t think any other artist would have made and it’s more unique than most of the stuff out there. You can use it as the tool it is or complain and cry about it to no avail.

The chef example is especially good since most chefs are just following recipes and altering simply a few things here and there. AI essentially does the same thing. Honestly like no one has come up with a good argument to change my mind that the way AI operates is exactly how humans learn and create new things. If you’ve engaged in art you know that you are always imitating and taking from the art you consume to make your own.

So what you are saying is that it has a purpose. Also if an artist is inspired by another artist, and they have a generally similar art style as the artist they are inspired by, are they stealing? Was HP Lovecraft stealing from Lord Dunsany when he imitated his style? Where all those monks that transcribed Greek works stealing from the Greeks?

I will say that most AIs are unethical because they have been trained on pirated works. But an AI trained on publicly available works (ie news articles, blogs etc) and movies, books and music for which access to was paid for is as ethical as you or me emulating an artist or building on an idea that we read to create something new. And if that’s unethical then all human art in history is unethical because all artists are inspired by other artists, no one creates in a vacuum.

I mean people enjoy crack and I’m not gonna tell em it’s good for them.

There’s two ways to live life: my way and the objectively morally wrong way. If anyone disagrees with me: my answer is my muscle flex. You cannot see it but I’m a 140lbs 5’10 manlet king with 14% body fat and well read in literature and philosophy. So basically imagine Plato flexing to win an argument. That’s me.

Just in case. Much better games in the indie and AA segments these days.

It’s already outdated for that because the hardware is weak. If what you want is AAA games, just buy a ROG Ally Z1E, it’s much better for your use case. Buy it used.

But I do need to point out that AAA games are trash and you should reflect on your life choices if that’s all you care to play.

I mean you could make a studio where there is no manager (how does that work I’m not sure) and you’d still need to make financial forecasting if you want the studio to be an entity that continues to exist. Like I don’t understand your logic here, the only other alternative is to make everyone’s salary contingent to sales and then the pie is divided evenly like in a coop model but that means a lot more of the financial risk is shouldered by the devs and you probably don’t get paid until the game releases.

Like what is a proper alternative that: a) pays you a salary while the game is being developed b) accounts for the risk inherent with not knowing the future?

I mean if you think a system doesn’t work well it’s because you are able to identify why it isn’t working well and can visualize somewhat of an alternative. If that isn’t the case then you cannot be fully sure that there is a better way to do things, and maybe the system is working as well as it can be given the environment the system needs to operate in.

I’m not a dev myself so I can’t speak too much about the pov of being a worker in the industry and the issues you describe with credits. But from a management perspective the problem is that it is simply not possible to accurately predict which games will have a long tail. So if you plan for a long tail and the game isn’t received as well as you expected, what happens then? The game makes a loss. The studio might need to close because they overcommitted resources to the project etc. it’s much safer to assume that all the sales will happen in the first 6 months and forecast for that, and if the game turns out to be more successful than expected then that’s free money basically from a planning POV.

The intention of live service games is pretty much that, creating games that will purposefully and predictably have long tails, but the problem is that even if a game is designed to have a long tail it doesn’t mean that it will find an audience that will give it the momentum needed in the first place.

As for bonuses being tied to reviews or sales, they both have pros and cons. Maybe it should be a little bit of both, because well received game might make lackluster sales while a badly received game might make crazy sales numbers (most AAA games).

As for getting review bombed or getting panned by influencers. That is always a risk in every industry. I find that most games get the reception they deserve, For example a lot of people want to frame the latest Dragon Age for flopping because of chuds, but that is not in fact the case, because those same chuds probably sunk hundreds of of hours into BG3 which is by all chud metrics also a “woke” game. So the problem, very often is the quality of the game. Chuds are more than willing to put up with politics they don’t like in games when the game is objectively (subjective to the expectations of the intended audience) good.

What should be the norm then?

If we’re going to criticize the way things are done, one has to offer an alternative that is better.

Btw I’m not saying that the current way is necessarily the best way.