Game News 2.0

Until people make a stand this will continue. If every outlet that is reporting on how brutal the companies are acting refused to cover their games. If every player refused to buy their games. They wouldn't be long changing their ways.

But unfortunately, the next game from Activision, Sony, Microsoft etc etc will get full coverage on all these sites and sell plenty of copies boosting profits and validating the job cuts.

To make it worse, Jim Ryan is leaving Sony in the next few weeks (think the end of March). So chances are they made the layoffs now so whoever comes in next technically isn't to blame for the layoffs.

What a horrible industry it's become for those working in it. The layoffs over the past 12 months have been absolutely horrendous. Hard to see what it'll take to fix it.

Taking some sort of boycott measure to try and make future games sell worse and force another round of layoffs isn't going to help anyone.

It's almost every single studio in the industry, and they're not doing it for fun. I know there's the argument that Microsoft / Sony / Epic etc are big enough to take the hit, and they are, but they're not charities and they can't fund teams that aren't making a profit forever. Layoff packages there are usually at least pretty decent, unlike the fate of many developers at smaller studios like Die Gute Fabrik who just close down.

There's just not enough money to go round right now. Investment funds are no longer putting money into the industry so you can't really start developing a game without deep pockets of your own, while ever bigger games cost too much to make and are too cheap to buy. Microtransactions and live services have tried to fill the gap but there's been a justified backlash against those.

I think there's an inevitable realignment coming towards more "double A" style games because the industry is just not sustainable as is. For every early access breakout indie success there are thousands of failures and for every AAA success there is a gamble of hundreds of millions behind it that would lead to absolute disaster if it didn't achieve mega numbers.

The reality is people cannot afford all these games and all these digital subscription services. When you're cutting back video games has got to be the easiest chop to make. You can still play your library and can pick up cheaper games with just a bit of patience (and when you're getting a better quality game through patches its a no brainer). And evidently, free games and cheaper AA games are scratching the itch for a lot of people.

I read human excretion as a DLC first and though who the hell wants that. 😆

The big con in this is that they released it into the public domain so that we could be used to train it. You can see that in the answers it gives you and when you guide it by saying, no 2+2=4 not 5 it says, I'm sorry you are right, 2+2 does equal 4. Then it sticks this information in its database.

We are all helping trillion dollar companies refine their algorithms and populate their databases for free.

It's like the recaptcha sign in validation. Pick all the pictures with a bus. People don't realise we're just training the AI to better recognise buses.

In older times it was all text based for training OCR engines (software that scans documents and converts to word docs etc) when digitising paper documents was big money.

From their point of view. AI in games is the perfect way to train their software by gamifying what are extremely tedious tasks that they can't hire people to do.

I always wonder what if anything will ever make me fall out of love for gaming. Am I really going to be gaming in my retirement (physical well being permitting) because that idea fcuking rocks and makes me look forward to being old.

But I think AI in gaming is going to be that thing that makes me say, nah not loving this anymore.

Hold onto your old consoles and physical disks lads and ladies. We're going to need them. Old games before AI ruined everything are going to be how we play in the future.

I do think that anyone that looks to make money off an emulator is looking for trouble to be fair. Especially on a currently selling console. Its the passion projects that I always hate seeing attacked. Especially the ones working hard to keep older games that haven't been ported to modern systems available to newer generations.

I've no problem admitting that I'm interested in this area, but just don't have the time/skill to really dig into it, but I know enough and was able to get things like the n64 dev kit software which was fascinating to pour over.

I think Nintendo have to do this really when monetization is happening, but to be fair, this could be much more widespread, there are tons of other, free emulators out there that are mostly left alone.

That's hella trash.