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That 10-year deal thing isn't new, its been talked about for a few months now and MS has offered it to all the competitors. Nintendo has always said they'll sign it Valve said no need, we've worked with you for a long while and know you're fine and won't lock us out of Windows (https://kotaku.com/microsoft-activision-call-of-duty-nintendo-switch-steam-1849862479) And Sony threw the deal back and said 10 years isn't enough, it must be an indefinite length of time. They then stopped communicating with MS and started playing Wormtongue to the CMA/EU commissions E: MS just announced a deal with Nvidia to put XGS games on GeForce Now (Including COD if/when the deal goes through). Spinning it as a plan to get COD on more devices through streaming platforms than if ABK was just left alone. https://www.eurogamer.net/live-microsoft-press-briefing-on-activision-blizzard-deal-future and of course they had to get a shot in at Sony for not signing the 10 year COD deal https://twitter.com/eurogamer/status/1628094541382422528 CBD Corndog fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Feb 21, 2023 |
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Feb 21, 2023 17:49
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Edit: yeah I think Eurogamer was off in that reporting. Great get for nVidia at least - and even if the deal falls through Microsoft probably benefits from any incremental gain in cloud gaming anywhere. Anno fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Feb 21, 2023 |
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Feb 21, 2023 21:52
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What's the underlying software on the Switch? Is it windows underneath or a custom OS?
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Feb 21, 2023 22:01
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Bucnasti posted:What's the underlying software on the Switch? Is it windows underneath or a custom OS? It's custom, of course, running on an underwatted Tegra. Some custom language thing of Nintendo. Though if this keeps up, I wonder if the thing that comes after the Super Switch will be akin to the Steam Deck, maybe Chipzilla's second console outing? StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Feb 21, 2023 |
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Feb 21, 2023 22:06
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Tegra is the hardware chipset. The OS is almost totally custom with some incorporation of components of open source OSs. No relationship to Windows. Porting games to Switch is a bit of a pain.
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Feb 21, 2023 23:04
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DancingMachine posted:Tegra is the hardware chipset. The OS is almost totally custom with some incorporation of components of open source OSs. No relationship to Windows. As I understand, the switch runs a fork of bsd. It's likely hacked up a bit, similarly to Sony's OS for PS4, PS5.
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Feb 21, 2023 23:09
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StratGoatCom posted:It's custom, of course, running on an underwatted Tegra. Some custom language thing of Nintendo. I don't see Nintendo moving to x86 if they stay with the hybrid handheld model, it doesn't make any sense. ARM is now powerful enough to compete or beat x86 outright in the Switch form factor
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Feb 22, 2023 01:09
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leper khan posted:As I understand, the switch runs a fork of bsd. It's likely hacked up a bit, similarly to Sony's OS for PS4, PS5. It's a completely custom kernel derived from the one they developed for the 3DS, it's not BSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_software#Open_source_components PS4/PS5 are BSD though yeah, and the Xboxes run some flavor of NT
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Feb 22, 2023 04:34
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I can't bring myself to really give a poo poo about the merger but Microsoft making a public performance out of it is annoying. I would be surprised if Microsoft makes it ten years without closing half the studios they've already acquired. They're literally in the middle of laying off thousands of employees already. This act about putting competitive online FPS CoD on the Switch and cloud streaming as if that's something Activision-Blizzard couldn't have easily already done if they wanted to, or that A-B's value is summed up by CoD in the first place (instead of all the exclusive original IP they're probably going to have their dozen or more AAA teams cranking out as soon as the ink is dry) is ridiculous. Edit: I'm sure Microsoft will actually try to fulfill the spirit of the deals they're touting right now (I just don't think they're actually the deals that matter) but I would laugh if the companies all signed the 10-year deal and then Microsoft immediately split the actually popular parts of CoD off into its own exclusive series with a new name and put a new team in charge of making singleplayer CoD games for everyone else. Randallteal fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Feb 22, 2023 |
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Feb 22, 2023 05:41
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Randallteal posted:I can't bring myself to really give a poo poo about the merger but Microsoft making a public performance out of it is annoying. Well you can thank sony for that.
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Feb 22, 2023 05:47
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MarcusSA posted:Well you can thank sony for that.
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Feb 22, 2023 06:25
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Vegetable posted:Are you really blaming Sony here? As a matter of fact I am.
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Feb 22, 2023 06:28
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few days old and video title is wildly misleading, but these two talk over the details of the CMA scrutiny and raise good points all around, interesting especially wrt how MS doesn't really want to talk about King. worth noting that both of these guys have voiced support for the deal at some point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfaRU_lO8Aw&t=283s
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Feb 22, 2023 06:45
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Even before the merger Microsoft hasn't really been pushing exclusivity much, though mind you they tend to be pretty inconsistent on most things especially in the gaming sector- I think stuff like letting Nintendo access the Rare back catalogue is mostly a concession that they managed to do fuckall but kill the golden goose they paid for. Though with Minecraft they might be able to make a case that they're not going to kill exclusivity for something they bought when they still make money on every platform.
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Feb 22, 2023 12:18
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Idk exactly what this says about the industry but I find it hilarious. Basically “Our old, premium game is making it so that our live titles aren’t earning enough money, so we’re de-listing it or making it harder to find in the store. Please play our live titles instead.” Also I think this is the second time this has happened to this same game. https://twitter.com/Rovio/status/1627956351002443778?s=20 Anno fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Feb 22, 2023 |
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Feb 22, 2023 14:18
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:few days old and video title is wildly misleading, but these two talk over the details of the CMA scrutiny and raise good points all around, interesting especially wrt how MS doesn't really want to talk about King. worth noting that both of these guys have voiced support for the deal at some point. I really like the Bellular team, but god if every thumbnail that put out isn't the worst YouTube clickbait imaginable.
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Feb 22, 2023 14:36
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"Black like a doll's eyeeeeees!"
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Feb 22, 2023 15:00
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Randallteal posted:I can't bring myself to really give a poo poo about the merger but Microsoft making a public performance out of it is annoying. I would be surprised if Microsoft makes it ten years without closing half the studios they've already acquired. They're literally in the middle of laying off thousands of employees already. This act about putting competitive online FPS CoD on the Switch and cloud streaming as if that's something Activision-Blizzard couldn't have easily already done if they wanted to, or that A-B's value is summed up by CoD in the first place (instead of all the exclusive original IP they're probably going to have their dozen or more AAA teams cranking out as soon as the ink is dry) is ridiculous. For Sony, who's MS's opponent in the merger, ActiBliz's value IS CoD. It's a money-printing machine for ActiBliz, and drives Playstation sales in a way that nothing else does. Like it or not, in a lot of ways, ActiBliz is the CoD company, and everything else is secondary. People misunderstand what the tech layoffs are about, it's not that the companies are failing or doing badly, they overstaffed to handle the pandemic upswing in usage since all anyone could do during lockdown was stream stuff, use their pc's, and play video games. The companies are just returning to pre-covid staffing levels.
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Feb 22, 2023 19:44
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We Got Us A Bread posted:For Sony, who's MS's opponent in the merger, ActiBliz's value IS CoD. It's a money-printing machine for ActiBliz, and drives Playstation sales in a way that nothing else does. Like it or not, in a lot of ways, ActiBliz is the CoD company, and everything else is secondary. Pretty sure King has more revenue and less operational cost than Activision.
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Feb 22, 2023 21:31
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We Got Us A Bread posted:People misunderstand what the tech layoffs are about, it's not that the companies are failing or doing badly, they overstaffed to handle the pandemic upswing in usage since all anyone could do during lockdown was stream stuff, use their pc's, and play video games. The companies are just returning to pre-covid staffing levels. is this just idle speculation or do you have some evidence to support this?
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Feb 22, 2023 21:38
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it's actually very normal for every single company to downsize and lay people off during a not-recession with lots of no inflation
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Feb 22, 2023 21:58
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Bucnasti posted:Also said some poo poo like If top talent doesn't want to come back to working on site they should "Do what makes them happy". Top talent: ".... OK."
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Feb 22, 2023 22:05
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:is this just idle speculation or do you have some evidence to support this? Here is an article from CNN on the topic https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/20/tech/google-job-cuts/index.html quote:Google parent Alphabet is eliminating about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, the company said Friday, in the latest cuts to shake the technology sector. (emphasis mine) They've laid off fewer people than they actually hired during the covid pandemic, but note that those categories don't 100% overlap. I had a family member caught in the Google layoffs who was a pre-pandemic employee. Severance is like 7-9 months or something though so it's not too bad overall. Minera posted:it's actually very normal for every single company to downsize and lay people off during a not-recession with lots of no inflation Shareholder-value ghouls love layoffs as a cost-cutting measure but can't do them as often as they like because they look bad to the investing public. An industry-wide trend is a great excuse to do them without that downside. RPATDO_LAMD fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Feb 22, 2023 |
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Feb 22, 2023 22:11
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We Got Us A Bread posted:People misunderstand what the tech layoffs are about, it's not that the companies are failing or doing badly, they overstaffed to handle the pandemic upswing in usage since all anyone could do during lockdown was stream stuff, use their pc's, and play video games. The companies are just returning to pre-covid staffing levels. The layoffs are happening at a time when creative tech jobs in particular are being trimmed in favor of algorithmic auto-generation tools, while the government itself seems hell bent on whipping labor back into line (just look at the railways) because it started asking for more for the first time in 40+ years. I dunno exactly what the next step in suppressing labor would be....maybe start a war? On the other hand we have Japanese companies going all in on staff retention and wage increases. So I guess you tell me, are the layoffs normal? Perhaps, in the sense that it's long been normal in this country to discipline an already immiserated workforce via waves of economic austerity, financial consolidation, and union busting...and equally normal for people to come out of the woodwork and defend such practices. BeanpolePeckerwood fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Feb 23, 2023 |
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Feb 23, 2023 00:36
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Layoffs throughout the economy are also an expected and intentional part of the increase in interest rates by the federal reserve as an attempt to reduce inflation. Not an economist but my understanding is that it makes money a lot more expensive to borrow, which is something mega corporations do all the time for various short or long terms. So they start looking at other ways to make their finances make sense, and layoffs are one of those ways. Not to say other reasons aren't valid but this is an explicit effect of interest rate increases as well. Edit: https://thehill.com/business/3839525-fed-rate-hikes-hurting-tech-firms/ External Organs fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Feb 23, 2023 |
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Feb 23, 2023 00:52
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CottonWolf posted:I really like the Bellular team, but god if every thumbnail that put out isn't the worst YouTube clickbait imaginable. I don't really understand it, I guess they've looked at the viewership metrics and decided it works to do that, but yeah it's really dumb
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Feb 23, 2023 01:06
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:The layoffs are happening at a time when creative tech jobs in particular are being trimmed in favor of algorithmic auto-generation tools Is there any real indication this is the case? I know a lot of people are speculating that these garbage chat bots *could* result in this, but it seems to be in the same vein as self driving cars putting truckers out of jobs.
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Feb 24, 2023 00:57
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Jose Valasquez posted:Is there any real indication this is the case? I know a lot of people are speculating that these garbage chat bots *could* result in this, but it seems to be in the same vein as self driving cars putting truckers out of jobs. No. Layoffs are a result of interest rates.
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Feb 24, 2023 02:41
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Jose Valasquez posted:Is there any real indication this is the case? I know a lot of people are speculating that these garbage chat bots *could* result in this, but it seems to be in the same vein as self driving cars putting truckers out of jobs. I suspect it's more likely to affect artists than writers in terms of games; there's no shortage of Idea People who have a plot in their head but can't draw and I don't think the AI chat stuff can code a game from scratch based on an internal library of bad stackoverflow answers. Apart from that, the big question in games is really going to be what happens when we start getting AI generated voices that you can feed in a million lines of dialogue and an inflection and replace your entire VA budget, and how big a moral quagmire that's gonna be
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Feb 24, 2023 02:50
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:Here is an article from CNN on the topic Additional sources of layoffs include: - Smaller tech companies playing Follow the Leader on MS/Google/SFDC/etc., because those companies are much larger and more successful and therefore must know what they're doing. - Tech companies whose core business saw explicit booms due to COVID - think Zoom, DocuSign, etc. - VC funded tech companies who are now being told to focus on revenue/profitability rather than growth without regard for cost.
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Feb 24, 2023 03:01
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:I suspect it's more likely to affect artists than writers in terms of games; there's no shortage of Idea People who have a plot in their head but can't draw and I don't think the AI chat stuff can code a game from scratch based on an internal library of bad stackoverflow answers. I agree this is a good take. Concept art is in trouble in the very near future, but it's also a pretty small part of the budget for larger titles and big games that care about their art vision are still going to trust at least a couple of human concept artists to be the vision holders. That job might morph into managing the output of image generators as much as actually creating illustrations directly, but would still require a human to do something consistent and distinctive. For indy and AA games it's a no-brainer to use this stuff but I doubt most of those games were paying for dedicated concept artists anyway. Voiceovers is the next frontier and yeah I think it will totally wipe out all VA except for maybe the biggest AAAA games that are paying for starpower (e.g. Cyberpunk with Keanu Reeves). This is probably only a couple years out or so. If anybody knows folks that make their living primarily doing VA, definitely would advise them to start pursuing other skills. This definitely sucks for voice actors but honestly I think it's a great thing for games. Folks who didn't play a lot of games in the 90's don't really understand how much narrative games lost when voice became an expectation/requirement. Going to proc gen voice is going to bring back a lot of fantastic dialogue writing that died back then. The turnaround time/iteration frequency of writing a line, getting it recorded, getting it recorded again in each localized language, incorporating that back into the game, then deciding you need a slightly different line or 5 more lines it totally crippling to the creative process. I am really excited about the positive impact on game quality this is going to have. 3d modeling, animation, and texturing are all in some trouble down the line as well, but I am not sure how far out it is. I don't see any real evidence of imminent breakthroughs here, although there has been a lot of investment in AI to do animations already, it has been mostly in the "make animators more productive/faster" much more than replace them outright. Similar to mocap. Coding seems extremely far off for replacing a meaningful number of full time programmers to me, but I could see it pretty rapidly being incorporated as a productivity enhancing tool to make individual programmers quite a bit faster. I know folks who have already used chatgpt for coding on side projects and experienced very large productivity gains. But those gains wouldn't be accessible if they weren't already professional skilled programmers.
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Feb 25, 2023 00:01
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I wouldn't have expected concept art to get hit. Concept art is supposed to determine what the distinctive look of your game is and that's where you'd need human input the most. It's where small details really matter. You sound like you know this stuff though so I might be misunderstanding you.
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Feb 25, 2023 00:08
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I've worked on a few projects where the "concept art" phase was just a Pinterest board. When it came time to make prototype assets, they just took the pinned images, slapped them together in Photoshop, and extrapolated from there. AI Art Generation is basically an automated process of the same method, and will likely be used to find the "feel" of an art direction for small to medium sized studios.
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Feb 25, 2023 00:28
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To also be fair, I did just trip across the fact that the US Copyright Office revoked copyright of AI-generated art in a comic, so there may end up being some fun legal reasons to not use AI generated stuff in your game from that direction, if "directions provided to a computer to generate output" isn't considered sufficiently novel to protect the output that's spat out.
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Feb 25, 2023 00:35
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No Wave posted:I wouldn't have expected concept art to get hit. Concept art is supposed to determine what the distinctive look of your game is and that's where you'd need human input the most. It's where small details really matter. You sound like you know this stuff though so I might be misunderstanding you. Yeah as I mentioned I still think there is a human or two in this role on bigger projects even after AI is fully adopted, but that role today is more like "Concept Art Director" or just "Art Director". Current projects also employ (either directly or indirectly through contract/outsource houses) several more junior concept artists that literally do things like "hey we want to make a lava-sword you can get in the new volcano quest, draw up a dozen possible takes on the lava sword based on these references from the volcano quest and our ice axe weapon". Those jobs are going away soon.
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Feb 25, 2023 00:35
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:To also be fair, I did just trip across the fact that the US Copyright Office revoked copyright of AI-generated art in a comic, so there may end up being some fun legal reasons to not use AI generated stuff in your game from that direction, if "directions provided to a computer to generate output" isn't considered sufficiently novel to protect the output that's spat out. That's a misleading title though, because the end result is that the work as a whole (including the dialogue and layout etc) is copyrighted. You cannot copy the zarya of the dawn comic book without the author's permission, although you could copy the individual pieces of midjourney art from the panels. You can include uncopyrightable AI art in a game and still sell it for the same reason you could include, say, a copy of the (now public domain) Mona Lisa. It won't poison the copyright of the rest of the work. In fact the February letter they're citing as "revoking" copyright is actually a response from the copyright office saying "OK you've convinced us. You can keep the copyright, just not for the images", after an earlier letter from October that said "whoops we didn't know what midjourney meant, now that we know your comic book was created with AI we are gonna revoke the copyright as a whole. ' You have thirty days to respond in writing to show cause why this registration should not be cancelled' " Both are included in the pdf they link from the article. RPATDO_LAMD fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 00:40
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I never said "the games won't be copyrighted", I said "if copyright doesn't apply to AI-generated output, that might be enough to dissuade companies from incorporating it into their games in the first place". If you make a best-seller of a game with an AI-generated but recognizable character on it and someone else says "oh cool, AI generated, I can slap that character into my billboards for vape pens and booze and there's nothing you can do about it, get hosed", that's probably going to make some companies think twice about going that route in the first place. Even for smaller studios, all it's going to take is one publicized horror story about something AI-generated being "stolen" (which will be ironic as hell and I look forward to seeing it) to start making everyone else think twice about using it as a cheap replacement for artists.
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Feb 25, 2023 01:13
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As a sometimes-3D-modeler I can’t wait for AI to take over UV-mapping and retopo. LOD mesh generation has room for improvement too. Smarter collision mesh or compound collider generation would be nice as well.
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Feb 25, 2023 01:40
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DancingMachine posted:I agree this is a good take. I doubt that complete replacement will be a thing, there will be a long time where these things seek out balance, and also the time people will think more about how to use ML properly as it already caused a lot of backlash with the use without permission of artists. There will be struggles, but its absurd to think of CA to be "gone" in a few years, thats not going to happen. Same for voices, but I think there are different approaches in that sector, like localization which defo could benefit from ML based approaches.
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Feb 25, 2023 01:41
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If your art job can be replaced with a ML algorithm, it's probably already been outsourced to some guys in asia. If you're currently creating textures for rocks, or fire hydrant 3d models, start looking for something new to do. The big problem with these tools is that they can't create anything actually new. They're great for creating another ruined post-apocalypic cityscape, because that's been done ten thousand times already so they have plenty of reference material to work from, but if you describe something completely novel, they just throw their virtual hands up and poo poo out something abstrct. My buddy uses ML art for his board games, and he's able to generate gorgeous art of things like pirates monsters, but when he tried to get it to generate a picture of a specific type of airship that he's envisioning for one of his game it couldn't do it since nobody has ever drawn art of something like that. The other thing they're not good at now, but probably will get better at quickly is consistency, if you have very specific looking props, characters or locations (like most big properties do) the ML tools won't draw them consistently and will require an actual artist to touch up. Also if you're really good at drawing hands, there's going to be plenty of work for you for awhile fixing ML images. 
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Feb 25, 2023 09:14
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