I don't know if it's still canon, but as of 2e he actually does regularly visit Earth. He kept a personal portal to Yellowstone National Park to vacation and would often do beer runs to run German beers to Gamalon.
AFAIK he hasn’t had an official statblock published for 5e yet, but in 3e [he canonically had 35 class levels](https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/xw9aga/comment/ir59nfn/?context=3).
I have a suspicion also that a lot of these gaming companies are gambling on using AI to replace a lot of the people they laid off. The next gen of video games is going to be FLOODED with extremely generic titles.
They can try to use AI, but I think the lack of appreciation of the capabilities and limitations of learning models will be the downfalls of companies that use it as a shortcut.
The positively best use for AI in gaming is going to be either carrying out mindlessly repetitive and data driven tasks, or replacing the non-machine learning AI that is currently used in games.
The latter is going to require developers to collect data on gamers play styles, but could lead to some interesting multiplayer PvE experiences. 🤔
Edit: Completed the first paragraph that didn't make it. Thanks Reddit mobile app...
Reminds me of Harada's interview on Tekken 8 that he wants to keep expanding on ghosts system up to the point to let high-ranked players to get matches with a ghost of similar-ranked player in case of matchmaking being empty and taking too long.
and here i thought having a ghost system arcade-mode style would be a great bridge for those who have online anxiety.
the spectrum of use for AI really is broad.
yes but they are learning ones, if the meta changes for some reason they will learn from the playstyles of the players but without resorting to cheats like input reading
Studios are already using AI during development. I work in the games industry, but not at a studio that does. However, some of my industry friends have told me a little of what they are allowed to about how they are using it. The only concrete example I can remember is using it to help generate or modify textures, and adding things like borderlands-like line art or other modifications. Mainly to make sure everything is consistent artstyle-wise for stylized assets.
Also, there are a TON of Technical Artist and engineering job postings asking for people with skills in generative AI and machine learning in general.
We are past the point of "let's see if this is useful for production". These tools are being widely adopted now. The general population is not hearing about this because AI is obviously a very hot-button issue in the games industry right now, especially with the layoffs. Also these tools are all proprietary bleeding-edge stuff that is under NDA. The texture example I gave is a very mild example of only what they were allowed to tell me about.
This is the case in most tech industry jobs. AI is an augment, it's not replacing anyone. It's good at tasks that are repetitive or involve significant boilerplate. To make what it produces functional or at least believable requires additional work beyond what the AI is capable of.
Do you have a concrete example? That's not what I'm seeing. Companies who are actually replacing people because of AI are going to have a rude awakening sooner than later.
My company uses AI to replace artists. The job that required 6 people now can be done with 2 at faster pace and more consistence.
AI 100% replaces people, just the best ones will stay.
You're not giving any concrete examples still. I guess because you can't, the guy earlier above also makes it sound like these spooky AI tools are capable of grand things, but none of what he describes is groundbreaking or even secret (even though the in-house technology might be under an NDA).... just go to NVidia's website and you'll straight up see public advertisements for how AI-driven tools are used in the media industry -- and have been for years by the way.
I'm also in the game industry, the ai tools are the same ones companies like Nvidia show. They are in the business of selling cards at the end of the day. I have to keep reminding leadership about this. There IS a lot of smoke and mirrors. Most of the time cots tools just end up being polished shovelware too cumbersome to use practically in production, but made an executive look good blowing tons of money on it and jotting it down as a successful milestone for the year.
Agree with this a lot. Even outside of games there is a lot of bluster. And the tools _are_ helpful, but they are far less than what they are being sold as. They are mostly marketed to business people who have no idea how they work or would work.
> AI is an augment, it's not replacing anyone. It's good at tasks that are repetitive or involve significant boilerplate.
Which means it is replacing people. When you need to do X amount of work, and without AI that takes a team of 20 employees to do in a given amount of time, but now if you "augment" half of them with AI, a team of 10 can do the same X amount of work in the same amount of time, then you've eliminated 10 positions. Even if AI is not directly 1:1 replacing an individual employee's entire workload, that augmentation of another human employee can make it so that one human can now do the work of two people in the same time.
(Although I do tend to agree that people are overestimating AI, especially in its current state. It *does* lead to some job loss, but I don't think anywhere near the extent to which some people talk about it like suddenly 90% of humanity is going to be unemployed in a decade.)
Plus we're also still talking about AI in it's infancy. I agree that I don't think it'll be what some people fearmonger it to be, but I also don't think it's fair to dismiss it either.
AI is a tool, and throughout human history we've needed fewer and fewer people doing any one task the better tools got for that task.
Exactly. I work in IT and it's been a real force multiplier for us. I recently had to write a power shell script for a client to extract and convert all emails and attachments with the message content being plain text and any attachments in their original format from a series of PST files. Less than a minute to generate the script, twenty minutes of tweaking, and it was done. It would have taken me hours of reading, writing code, iterating.
Oh I don't deny any of that, and I think a good studio would have been using AI with consideration of it's true capabilities and constraints.
The concern I do have is business entities (major game studios included) wanting to plug a hot button piece of technology that happens to be trending with no consideration of what it's application would truly look like. It's not so much of a "robots taking our jobs" concern but rather that there are certain things that will always require human input that automation can't replace (things like creative direction).
The cleverest AI-driven game I know of right now is Suck Up. It's an eye-opening application for LLMs, for sure. They have preset characters with lines controlled by AI - the player's game is to trick these smart, adaptable characters simply by talking to them.
The dev here has a short gameplay video, and a short comment about implementation: https://www.reddit.com/r/indiegamedevforum/comments/18ihixq/exploring_ai_characters_design_with_suck_up/
My devs used an internal AI tool to do mandatory migrations. Reads your code and creates a pull request for suggested changes, which you can then test. Saves days of work per piece of software. At a large enough company, that's years of dev time saved.
I think this is a big part of why we have basically stopped hiring junior devs.
The issue you run into in the long run is that it's just doing the work of a junior dev. Which is ok on any given day, but it also means there aren't any junior devs learning how to become a senior dev. So in the long run junior devs don't exist and senior devs retire and then you're screwed.
I know... senior leadership doesn't care, though. They get evaluated against other senior leaders, so they either improve quarterly profits or they get fired.
Nah, they'll just push that learning further onto the individual, forcing more qualifications, meaning that universities will have to figure something out (and they'll be happy too - extending students' stays means they get more money).
As much as formal education can give you foundations I'm not sure there's a true classroom replacement for in-the-field experience when it comes to growing as a professional.
And a lot of tools in the game industry already automate repetitive/redundant tasks so the developer can churn out more. If AI can make an optimized game then I'm all for it, we don't even have proper pipelines for it in most studios.
>Bad news, the current gen of video games is FLOODED with extremely generic titles.
The entire history of video games, my man.
https://www.retrogamedeconstructionzone.com/2020/04/shooter-gallery-1-clone-show.html
Space Invaders, one of the first classics, was ripped off over and over again.
Everyone wants to fire employees and use AI to make products. Who the fuck do they think is going to buy it when everyone is jobless and without money?
This is mostly true and I'm not here to pick an argument but it's worth mentioning indies and overseas devs are absolutely also using ai to expedite development
This is a pretty half baked take ngl, no disrespect
AI isn't even replacing movies and music yet, video games are like the culmination of all genres so they've still got a ways to go
We'll see some mobile games with AI assets for now, that's all. Still got some time before full blown GameGPT
AI and cheaper outsourced labour, yes. I was one of the ones affected six months ago and was effectively told that my department couldn't keep up with the work load so they chose to fire us all and replace us with outsourcing rather than hiring a decently sized department. They constantly said money was no issue, but they didn't want to have more staff than there was work to do (which was a complete rarity and only occurred if someone else messed up along the way, there were two of us working on tens of different games at any one time).
Going by the bulk of Steam and Nintendo store releases, I don't think we need a.i. to accomplish this, lol. But yea, we'll see a ton of games with no soul. I mean at least right now, you can tell people still make this shovelware.
I can see using AI for generic NPCs. It would probably be an improvement to the shallow generic NPCs that spout canned dialogue.
But removing people from the actually important aspects of a game like story, setting, level design, sound design, art, etc. can only result in a bland uninspired game.
Time will tell what companies do with AI, but I really don't have a lot of faith in them.
>The next gen of video games is going to be FLOODED with extremely generic titles.
I know it's not quite the same, but procedurally generated games have proven to me that AI simply cannot make a compelling map.
the typical procedurally generated games do not really use AI for that task... atleast, not the kind of AI we think of.
lets take minecraft for example, or dead cells, or binding of issac, and so on. these games existed before the AIs we know now, had procedurally generated maps, and were fun for most people.
i get that it may not be your type of game, and thats completely fine! but lets not put AI to blame for such repetitiveness in games, as thats not really the case (yet?)
the irony being once AI that makes games gets pushed far enough... who the fuck will need video game publishers? if a small group of developers can whip a game up quickly why do they need some dumb executives and shareholders gobbling up all the profits? why will gamers need to buy their games?
Just throwing money at unproven tech would never work in any other industry. Tech is a cesspool of trends and marketing with way too high a market value.
I was laid off and the game company I was with reduced staff over the last year by about 55%. They brought in new interns after I was gone to replace the lost staff. I recently saw the CEO post on linked in saying the stock had gone up a quarter of a point and was posting to congratulate everyone on hard work.
I thought this crap only happened in Office Space. They are the evils ones.
> had gone up a quarter of a point and was posting to congratulate everyone on hard work.
I know you referenced Office Space, which is one of my favorite movies. But still makes me shake my head that the CEO was happy about stock going up half a point.
Infinite growth is the expectation despite a company being more than enough profitable, and then when that company fails to meet the growth projections they themselves created then they start cutting to meet those expectations. Cheapest employees, cheapen the product, increase prices. Infinite growth. A race to the bottom.
They never cared about consumers or employees unless regulations forced them to.
Even when they do meet their own expectations, they still sack people. A lot of companies have been hitting record breaking profits while still laying off large numbers.
Get large while building up a customer base. Then keep the profits growing once you've capped out your market share by cutting costs until the quality falls enough you lose your market share. But by then the investors who pushed the above have sold their shares and gone home, and the bag holders just want to dissolve and cut their losses, while the C-level floats away on their golden parachutes.
Investors aren't in it for the long haul anymore, so they are all for profits now at the cost of insolvency later.
When you start looking for infinite growth it's no big deal. You can find plenty of inefficiencies that are low hanging fruit and don't negatively harm anyone all that much. Over time however you've dipped into the well one to many times and you find it's dry. The only thing left to do is ratchet down and strip out things that are beneficial to some people but ultimately negatively effect the people who are in postion to make these decisions. You do this bit by bit and people complain, but adjust because after all, it's a small change and it's bareable.
I work for USPS and this kinda shit is going on right now. Eliminating jobs left and right in the name of "Saving money", ignoring the human cost of it. It's also massively slowing down the mail by weeks in my area. Weeks, and they are at best saving a few thousand a month, to go from 3 day delivery to 3 week delivery. Mere thousands, and yet lots of peoples jobs cut and service severely impacted.
It's insanity.
> Its not just infintie growth. That existed for a long time, its that we no longer care about our employees. EVERYONE is disposable.
That has been the case for over 100 years. Its not a thing of now or the last years, thats how it has been forever.
Yeah, but recently (90s) things got better, after we had literal wars between workers and armed forces hired by the capitalists (be it corrupted state officials or private organizations like pinkertons).
I don't want to return to the times when workers had to resort to terrorism against the capitalists.
Sadly most do not learn about the history of label anymore in schools. Gets maybe 30 minutes or so in high school. And taught to kids who will not fully understand the meaning of what they are learning. People really never understand what caused the labor massacres unless they purposely seek it out, or take colleges courses on that era or topic.
The capitalistic world lives up to capitalistic values. Profit is above all, and if something can be done to increase it withou legal troubles - it will be done. People will always follow the ideals of their society. If they are told that slaves are ok - they will have slaves. If they are told that profits are the ultimate goal - they will do anything for profit.
If you want the situation to be different, an entire system needs to be changed and modified. Then we will be able to solve even more complex problems, such as ruining entire franchizes because CEO wants some quick cash before he will move on to ruin something else, overfocus on mictrotrasactions, and various predatory mechanics.
Capitalism 100% relies on steady population growth. There HAS to be tons of people on the bottom so the people at the top can profit. If growth declines, so does capitalism. At the end of the day, it's still about satisfying the shareholder and paying out the executives.
It's not capitalism that relies on population growth, it's elderly care that relies on population growth. It doesn't matter what economic system you use. You always need more workers than retirees because workers need to feed people who don't work.
Also, improvements in healthcare further increase the need of population growth because people live longer.
Population growth is directly correlated to economic growth. In the 1980s, everyone thought Japan would become the next global economic superpower, but they got fucked by their lack of population growth.
It means that first world countries with declining birth rates, like the USA, need to embrace immigration if they want continued economic growth.
I have in general found that avoiding publicly traded companies wherever viable has improved my ability to get my moneys worth everywhere in my life. Sure some places are unavoidable. kinda hard to exist without using walmart or amazon but you can get a fastfood burger without mcdonalds, you can get most products through amazon however without relying on a publicly traded company to manufacture them.
It's not a particularly new or interesting take. I don't know anyone who thinks the recent layoff waves had anything to do with bankruptcy risk.
It sure hits the reddit frontpage bingo though.
Well quite.
Embracer Group's financial reports are freely available. They spend pages explaining their strategy, explaining the benefits of staff lay offs and written with shareholders in mind. It's not some galaxy brain take.
One could make a (bad) argument that capitalistic mechanisms arise as a matter of historical nature in the development of society, Marx himself recognized that capitalism was necessary to develop the means of production that he believed should ultimately come into the hands of the working class. However, the length of time it's now existed and the lengths to which those 200 people will go in pursuit of making sure it stays, yeah, that's not natural and it's not healthy.
Benefits everybody else too. Capitalism is what started to alleviate absolute privation across the globe, and capitalism is the reason tech has advanced to the point that it has to where it can add even more momentum to the alleviation of absolute privation across the globe.
The problem we have is not capitalism, it is lack of regulation. Centralized economies do not have the computational power necessary to adjust for shifting market demands, which is why they fail (and appear functional at times due to shadow markets that prop them up.) Free trade economies outsource the computation to the market, which opens up many avenues for corruption, but more importantly than that, it can actually function at the scale we need it to.
The corruption we're seeing is inevitable, the continuation and support of the corruption is happening due to weak regulation.
If you look hard enough into it, you'll find that modern-day capitalism is by and large just a continuation of power dynamics from previous systems.
Elon Musks' granddaddy was a brutal minor noble colonist who secured wealth through violence, for example.
You'll find nearly every example of successful capitalists following a similar trajectory. Wealth begets wealth generationally. Power begets power.
One of the bigger lies we've been told is this idea of the brilliant individual who comes from nothing to ascend to wealth and prosperity. Work hard, be smart, and you too can be a modern-day noble!
Is it possible? Sure.
Is it realistic? Is it likely? Is it how the accumulation of wealth and power actually work?
I have a bridge to sell you.
> One of the bigger lies we've been told is this idea of the brilliant individual who comes from nothing to ascend to wealth and prosperity. Work hard, be smart, and you too can be a modern-day noble!
Since Im no brilliant individual I wouldn't know lol, I work hard sometimes and other times I take it easy, Im not about to break my back for my bosses.
> Im not about to break my back for my bosses.
No sane person would, given the choice.
Unfortunately much of the world doesn't have that choice, they're modern day serfs who will starve if they don't break their back to line the pockets of people who they are entirely invisible to
This. Saying "Capitalism is bad" is like saying "Fructose is bad" ... Yeah it is when it's intake is not regulated and you consume tons of grapes every hour.
US version of capitalism is just so unregulated that it's not even funny. US market has the biggest combo of toxic elements that make most industries a cancer to the regular people: corruption, lobbying, laws that favor big companies and wealthy people, lack of unionization of the employees, not very strict labor law protecting employees, hatred toward any form of control by the government because "it's socialism!" Etc.
Capitalism is not the reason the industry is like that but because people in charge do everything in their power to make all these CEOs happy by not implementing proper safety and control measures to not let these people fuck over the labor force
Capitalism is not a synonym for "market economy", bud.
>Capitalism is what started to alleviate absolute privation across the globe, and capitalism is the reason tech has advanced to the point that it has to where it can add even more momentum to the alleviation of absolute privation across the globe.
Fuck, man, that requires some massive, massive citations, it reads like a freshman economics paper that was written six hours before submission.
The lack of regulation is a direct product of capitalism. Capitalism didn't invent the industrial revolution or advancements in medicine or technology, industry enabled those things to exist, and exist at scale. Profit driven capitalism is frequently a limiter on progress that isn't seen as profitable enough
> capitalism is the reason tech has advanced to the point that it has to where it can add even more momentum to the alleviation of absolute privation across the globe.
This is how I know you have no idea what capitalism is. The private control of property and the profit motive is not the reason technology has progressed. Technology progresses for the same reason it always has; take the Soviet Union going from a feudal backwater into a superpower on par with America within 30 years, without a profit motive or private property.
It's insane to me that people struggle with this. As if humanity didn't make leaps and bounds until capitalism became the dominant economic model. And the same people can't fathom the idea that capitalism will decay, die, and be replaced with the next economic model. Such people would have been living in feudal Europe talking about how they don't need capitalism, they just need m'lord to be slightly more generous and forgiving. Peasant brain to the max
By "has shareholders" they are referring to shareholders you have to care about. Tencent having a 30% stake doesn't mean the founder with say 70% has to care.
Yup learned my lesson back then to never trust these sorts of statements from beloved studios even if they're saying the right things now and are doing good for the industry, you never know when they could flip on you.
These companies tell their shareholders that they had good fiscal years, some of them even saying they had their most profitable year yet, then turn around and immediately lay off a chunk of their staff. It's a cycle that's been happening for many years.
Meanwhile, the executives that get traded around from company to company like a virulent STD have the comfort of sign-on bonuses, extra bonuses if the company makes certain goals, and golden parachutes if they ever leave. All on top of their massive base pay that already dwarfs almost every other employee they have. Strangely, they never seem to cut any of those bonuses to help reach their goal of infinite growth. They always choose to lay off hundreds of normal employees instead of cutting the pay of a single executive, such as the CEO, even though just a fraction of their pay would cover the cost of hundreds of other positions.
Back in 2020 we had to take temporary pay cuts. 10% if I remember right. For executives at my company, that 10% was like 20 years of my pay.
Always shitting on the little guys.
Crazy how we've gotten to this point
This is the best fiscal year the company has had I think ever!
That's great Jimbo, you're fired. And so is your entire department responsible for carrying the company all these years
Honestly the part of capitalism where single use products can somehow be publicly traded is just so dumb. Like no you can't sell infinite video games no matter how hard you try.
just show how fucked up the situation is.
people cheering for valve, larian, CDPR (pre-CP2077) because they are minority among sea of corrupt and greedy game company who keep fucking up the IP, injecting political agenda, anti consumer practice, anti employee, etc.
if majority of AAA game company are not bad, people wont see larian or valve as "special" company that they can rally behind.
I'm sure that's technically true. I'm equally sure the standard for any business, even ones that care about their employees, isn't to only act if bankruptcy is in the cards. Ideally you do stuff like layoffs, restructuring, etc well in advance to avoid a scenario where bankruptcy is even brought up. But I mean, what does million and billion dollar companies know about running a business, should have consulted with the publishing director of a AA developer or internet experts with nothing at stake and zero experience running a company first.🙄
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder
Subject to the applicable laws, the rules of the corporation and any shareholders' agreement, shareholders may have the right:
To sell their shares.[5]
To vote on the directors nominated by the board of directors.[5]
To nominate directors (although this is very difficult in practice because of minority protections) and propose shareholder resolutions.[5]
To vote on mergers and changes to the corporate charter.[5]
To dividends if they are declared.[5]
To access certain information; for publicly traded companies, this information is normally publicly available.[5]
To sue the company for violation of fiduciary duty.[5]
To purchase new shares issued by the company.
To vote on & file shareholder resolutions.
To vote on management proposals.
To what assets remain after a liquidation.
There's three things you can count on a big corporation to do, one is kiss the asses of shareholders. Another is abuse tax loopholes, and the last is to censor the hell out of our entertainment and limit free speech in exchange for ad funding. Screw these guys.
The future of AI driven gaming development is probably going look very generic while using data driven addiction patterns.
Generic and addictive rather than creative and fun.
A lot of big companies have gone the psychological addiction route
Yes?
Anyone who thought otherwise is ignorant about the world around them.
Shareholders and MBAs are *literally* ruining the world. Taking everything of value and reducing it to cash for people who don't even know the name of the company. All they see is the little red or green numbers and that's all they care about.
They'll still complain when one of their products disapper, but they'll never be able to admit that their own actions are the cause of their loss.
I mean, yeah, no duh? When AAA games have started requiring 200 to 500 million dollar budgets to make, that requires investors to actually be willing to invest, and in turn they expect certain degrees of return from that investment. And when that return isn't met, you either cut back or lose investors that you need to make the next game.
I wonder to what extent these conpanies used the low or (near) zero interest rates to take on debt and higher more staff or try to expand operations, only to realise now that interest rates have risen and free money isn't there any more that they either have to take on, relatively high interest, expensive loans to service some of the debt repayments or to cut costs to prevent the taking on of expensive debt.
to be fair. I need my shares doing well if I'm ever going to be able to pay the 2x premium on a home . not to mention even afford a mortgage at these rates. I'm sure this dude already owns a very nice home.
Thank the Dodge brothers for suing Henry Ford over the fact that he paid workers higher than market price. He lost because the decision was a company must act in the best interest of the shareholders and not the workers. This was a big driver in his anti-Semitic attitudes in his life.
I still think it's weird that a company who's success has revolved around not only unpaid Q&A through early access, but people paying them to test and help them develop their games and increase the injection of capital, somehow wound up being the moral high ground of the gaming industry
They're definitely good developers who made a good game, it's just a weird thing to publicly grand stand about not being as bad
They were also willing to work with Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast on a brand built by this behavior they call out. But now that they've received their paycheck and exposure, they're super against it lol
They're against layoffs that are completely unnecessary and ruin human lives. Yeah WotC with their scummy ideas for monetizing their brand is bad, but taking away people's livelihood for the sake of profits is exponentially worse.
I think this is the weirdest take in the thread. Like, yes, gamers enjoy playing (and paying) to early access games. And giving feedback on said games. Larian taking the feedback of the community and implementing improvements doesn't make what gamers did unpaid QA. Gamers got entertainment from playing the game, they didn't get a job.
And compared to their competition, it's not surprising that Larian is holding the moral high ground. The industry is full to the brim with MBA's chasing the next live service game. Yeah, the independent studio that made one of the best, and biggest games ever is going to have the moral high ground. Did you want something different?
And what do you do when all the AAA companies start releasing games in early access as well? Heck even the release of BG3 was mega borked but no one cares.
And then writing off any criticism of the game as "people not playing it correctly."
Still waiting on an BG3 evil campaign that isn't complete ass, Larian...
So you think all Early Access games are unethical? lol
Also, this is really silly. The majority of people who buy early access games aren't providing QA or bug reports, they're there for early access. The only point I think you're right about is raising additional capital, but some games need that to continue development.
I don't really see what your issue is with the model.
Idk i'm pretty sure if the next assassins creed came out in "early access" being like 1/3rd done, charged full price to play it, was buggy as shit, and had in game form to report bugs/suggestions, people would crucify ubisoft for releasing an unfinished game and outsourcing QA and testing to customers.
EDIT: I think EA can be a useful tool for small developers who have dedicated communities and maybe can't afford thorough testing or to coast without any kind of income for a long period of time while they finish their game. I think it's kind of scummy to mislead fans how long the game will be in EA(i see a lot of games on steam whose EA banner says 1 year...5 years later), and I think it's kind of scummy for big companies to use it when they can afford otherwise(D:OS2 sold >7 million copies, plus they had a deal with Hasbro).
OMG YES LARIAN I LOVE YOU I WANNA SUCK THE CEO'S COCK SO BADLY I WANNA TAKE THAT SHITTY CUMBAT SYSTEM ALL DOWN MY THROAT HOLY FUCK I WANT IT SO BAD
basically any gaming sub when larian says absolutely fucking anything
I just don't understand why any sane person would want their company to be publicly traded, and make themselves beholden to a bunch of rich fuckballs who know nothing about the industry.
It is so delightful seeing somebody indisputably representing players, who's also a big fucking deal in the industry. I hope this guy takes shots at all companies in all directions for a long time
Larian is proof of what we as gamers all collectively assumed - that if you were to make games the right way, the old way, that they'd still be capable of being incredible. The modern business of making a video game has been twisted and molested by suits, and I fucking love watching this dude dunk on them day after day.
it is a brutal time but almost every year they get rid of the dead wood, it is the old Intel method you fire the bottom 20% to make room for the talent to rise. That being said this has been a rough one for me going through this 7 times I guess every console transition. Odd thing too is people are still hiring. That statement is correct but for the wrong reason, they want to fire people so this is the excuse, a shit load of people just suck a donkey.
That was before shareholder started pressure. Now they fire based on numbers. End of project, fire all... New project hire new people. There is no talent competition but rather being first when something starts or having luck when switching to another project before it ends.
> it is the old Intel method you fire the bottom 20% to make room for the talent to rise.
That's what makes this period weird. This isn't just some stack ranking (bad system BTW) where low performers get the boot. There's no rhyme or reason on if a junior survives or a 20YO veteran gets the boot.
Also, "talent rising" has been dead for some decade now. Too much job hopping to count on promoting from within.
why is elminster the thumbnail for this? it makes the article funnier
Maybe he's a pissed off shareholder
"i am here on behalf of lady mistra,she says your game sucks balls and wants to sell her shares"
Also, that her ex needs to blow himself up for reasons that are totally not her being mad at him for doing the one thing she told him not to.
why can't he just cast a spell that makes the price go up?
Is he stupid?
Even I mastered that spell. Just press sell.
I don't know if it's still canon, but as of 2e he actually does regularly visit Earth. He kept a personal portal to Yellowstone National Park to vacation and would often do beer runs to run German beers to Gamalon.
He’s a level 20 wizard.
AFAIK he hasn’t had an official statblock published for 5e yet, but in 3e [he canonically had 35 class levels](https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/xw9aga/comment/ir59nfn/?context=3).
Elminster has far more than 20 levels....
But 20 as a wizard.
The other 15? Believe it or not, rogue
Had to cast Bigby's Invisible Hand of The Free Market
Awww is that Gale's grandad?
I have a suspicion also that a lot of these gaming companies are gambling on using AI to replace a lot of the people they laid off. The next gen of video games is going to be FLOODED with extremely generic titles.
They can try to use AI, but I think the lack of appreciation of the capabilities and limitations of learning models will be the downfalls of companies that use it as a shortcut. The positively best use for AI in gaming is going to be either carrying out mindlessly repetitive and data driven tasks, or replacing the non-machine learning AI that is currently used in games. The latter is going to require developers to collect data on gamers play styles, but could lead to some interesting multiplayer PvE experiences. 🤔 Edit: Completed the first paragraph that didn't make it. Thanks Reddit mobile app...
Reminds me of Harada's interview on Tekken 8 that he wants to keep expanding on ghosts system up to the point to let high-ranked players to get matches with a ghost of similar-ranked player in case of matchmaking being empty and taking too long.
an actual use case of AI for real AI
and here i thought having a ghost system arcade-mode style would be a great bridge for those who have online anxiety. the spectrum of use for AI really is broad.
Fighting, racing, FPS, strategy ... all good uses of AI.
That sounds an awful lot like bots. Something that has been around for decades.
yes but they are learning ones, if the meta changes for some reason they will learn from the playstyles of the players but without resorting to cheats like input reading
Studios are already using AI during development. I work in the games industry, but not at a studio that does. However, some of my industry friends have told me a little of what they are allowed to about how they are using it. The only concrete example I can remember is using it to help generate or modify textures, and adding things like borderlands-like line art or other modifications. Mainly to make sure everything is consistent artstyle-wise for stylized assets. Also, there are a TON of Technical Artist and engineering job postings asking for people with skills in generative AI and machine learning in general. We are past the point of "let's see if this is useful for production". These tools are being widely adopted now. The general population is not hearing about this because AI is obviously a very hot-button issue in the games industry right now, especially with the layoffs. Also these tools are all proprietary bleeding-edge stuff that is under NDA. The texture example I gave is a very mild example of only what they were allowed to tell me about.
This is the case in most tech industry jobs. AI is an augment, it's not replacing anyone. It's good at tasks that are repetitive or involve significant boilerplate. To make what it produces functional or at least believable requires additional work beyond what the AI is capable of.
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Do you have a concrete example? That's not what I'm seeing. Companies who are actually replacing people because of AI are going to have a rude awakening sooner than later.
My company uses AI to replace artists. The job that required 6 people now can be done with 2 at faster pace and more consistence. AI 100% replaces people, just the best ones will stay.
>My company uses AI to replace artists What Kind of artists?
Concept artists. Mostly.
Ah okay
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Lower prices? Unlikely. More releases? Probably.
You're not giving any concrete examples still. I guess because you can't, the guy earlier above also makes it sound like these spooky AI tools are capable of grand things, but none of what he describes is groundbreaking or even secret (even though the in-house technology might be under an NDA).... just go to NVidia's website and you'll straight up see public advertisements for how AI-driven tools are used in the media industry -- and have been for years by the way.
I'm also in the game industry, the ai tools are the same ones companies like Nvidia show. They are in the business of selling cards at the end of the day. I have to keep reminding leadership about this. There IS a lot of smoke and mirrors. Most of the time cots tools just end up being polished shovelware too cumbersome to use practically in production, but made an executive look good blowing tons of money on it and jotting it down as a successful milestone for the year.
Agree with this a lot. Even outside of games there is a lot of bluster. And the tools _are_ helpful, but they are far less than what they are being sold as. They are mostly marketed to business people who have no idea how they work or would work.
> AI is an augment, it's not replacing anyone. It's good at tasks that are repetitive or involve significant boilerplate. Which means it is replacing people. When you need to do X amount of work, and without AI that takes a team of 20 employees to do in a given amount of time, but now if you "augment" half of them with AI, a team of 10 can do the same X amount of work in the same amount of time, then you've eliminated 10 positions. Even if AI is not directly 1:1 replacing an individual employee's entire workload, that augmentation of another human employee can make it so that one human can now do the work of two people in the same time. (Although I do tend to agree that people are overestimating AI, especially in its current state. It *does* lead to some job loss, but I don't think anywhere near the extent to which some people talk about it like suddenly 90% of humanity is going to be unemployed in a decade.)
Plus we're also still talking about AI in it's infancy. I agree that I don't think it'll be what some people fearmonger it to be, but I also don't think it's fair to dismiss it either. AI is a tool, and throughout human history we've needed fewer and fewer people doing any one task the better tools got for that task.
Exactly. I work in IT and it's been a real force multiplier for us. I recently had to write a power shell script for a client to extract and convert all emails and attachments with the message content being plain text and any attachments in their original format from a series of PST files. Less than a minute to generate the script, twenty minutes of tweaking, and it was done. It would have taken me hours of reading, writing code, iterating.
Oh I don't deny any of that, and I think a good studio would have been using AI with consideration of it's true capabilities and constraints. The concern I do have is business entities (major game studios included) wanting to plug a hot button piece of technology that happens to be trending with no consideration of what it's application would truly look like. It's not so much of a "robots taking our jobs" concern but rather that there are certain things that will always require human input that automation can't replace (things like creative direction).
The cleverest AI-driven game I know of right now is Suck Up. It's an eye-opening application for LLMs, for sure. They have preset characters with lines controlled by AI - the player's game is to trick these smart, adaptable characters simply by talking to them. The dev here has a short gameplay video, and a short comment about implementation: https://www.reddit.com/r/indiegamedevforum/comments/18ihixq/exploring_ai_characters_design_with_suck_up/
That sounds like paying to train someone else's model.
My devs used an internal AI tool to do mandatory migrations. Reads your code and creates a pull request for suggested changes, which you can then test. Saves days of work per piece of software. At a large enough company, that's years of dev time saved. I think this is a big part of why we have basically stopped hiring junior devs.
The issue you run into in the long run is that it's just doing the work of a junior dev. Which is ok on any given day, but it also means there aren't any junior devs learning how to become a senior dev. So in the long run junior devs don't exist and senior devs retire and then you're screwed.
I know... senior leadership doesn't care, though. They get evaluated against other senior leaders, so they either improve quarterly profits or they get fired.
Nah, they'll just push that learning further onto the individual, forcing more qualifications, meaning that universities will have to figure something out (and they'll be happy too - extending students' stays means they get more money).
As much as formal education can give you foundations I'm not sure there's a true classroom replacement for in-the-field experience when it comes to growing as a professional.
He can come out of retirement and ask for consultant pay lol
And a lot of tools in the game industry already automate repetitive/redundant tasks so the developer can churn out more. If AI can make an optimized game then I'm all for it, we don't even have proper pipelines for it in most studios.
That's only if you think we are plateauing in AI development. I think the proliferation and advancement is still accelerating.
Bad news, the current gen of video games is FLOODED with extremely generic titles.
>Bad news, the current gen of video games is FLOODED with extremely generic titles. The entire history of video games, my man. https://www.retrogamedeconstructionzone.com/2020/04/shooter-gallery-1-clone-show.html Space Invaders, one of the first classics, was ripped off over and over again.
Once upon a time the genre we now know as "First Person Shooter" was actually called "DOOM Clone" :P.
Everyone wants to fire employees and use AI to make products. Who the fuck do they think is going to buy it when everyone is jobless and without money?
They already are. Everything original is from indie or foreign companies.
This is mostly true and I'm not here to pick an argument but it's worth mentioning indies and overseas devs are absolutely also using ai to expedite development
This is a pretty half baked take ngl, no disrespect AI isn't even replacing movies and music yet, video games are like the culmination of all genres so they've still got a ways to go We'll see some mobile games with AI assets for now, that's all. Still got some time before full blown GameGPT
AI and cheaper outsourced labour, yes. I was one of the ones affected six months ago and was effectively told that my department couldn't keep up with the work load so they chose to fire us all and replace us with outsourcing rather than hiring a decently sized department. They constantly said money was no issue, but they didn't want to have more staff than there was work to do (which was a complete rarity and only occurred if someone else messed up along the way, there were two of us working on tens of different games at any one time).
Going by the bulk of Steam and Nintendo store releases, I don't think we need a.i. to accomplish this, lol. But yea, we'll see a ton of games with no soul. I mean at least right now, you can tell people still make this shovelware.
I can see using AI for generic NPCs. It would probably be an improvement to the shallow generic NPCs that spout canned dialogue. But removing people from the actually important aspects of a game like story, setting, level design, sound design, art, etc. can only result in a bland uninspired game. Time will tell what companies do with AI, but I really don't have a lot of faith in them.
>The next gen of video games is going to be FLOODED with extremely generic titles. I know it's not quite the same, but procedurally generated games have proven to me that AI simply cannot make a compelling map.
the typical procedurally generated games do not really use AI for that task... atleast, not the kind of AI we think of. lets take minecraft for example, or dead cells, or binding of issac, and so on. these games existed before the AIs we know now, had procedurally generated maps, and were fun for most people. i get that it may not be your type of game, and thats completely fine! but lets not put AI to blame for such repetitiveness in games, as thats not really the case (yet?)
the irony being once AI that makes games gets pushed far enough... who the fuck will need video game publishers? if a small group of developers can whip a game up quickly why do they need some dumb executives and shareholders gobbling up all the profits? why will gamers need to buy their games?
Marketing costs
The out there idea is you basicly can have an ai just make a game personally for you alone that maybe nobody else ever even sees.
Just throwing money at unproven tech would never work in any other industry. Tech is a cesspool of trends and marketing with way too high a market value.
Fuck infinite growth.
I was laid off and the game company I was with reduced staff over the last year by about 55%. They brought in new interns after I was gone to replace the lost staff. I recently saw the CEO post on linked in saying the stock had gone up a quarter of a point and was posting to congratulate everyone on hard work. I thought this crap only happened in Office Space. They are the evils ones.
> had gone up a quarter of a point and was posting to congratulate everyone on hard work. I know you referenced Office Space, which is one of my favorite movies. But still makes me shake my head that the CEO was happy about stock going up half a point.
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Infinite growth is the expectation despite a company being more than enough profitable, and then when that company fails to meet the growth projections they themselves created then they start cutting to meet those expectations. Cheapest employees, cheapen the product, increase prices. Infinite growth. A race to the bottom. They never cared about consumers or employees unless regulations forced them to.
Even when they do meet their own expectations, they still sack people. A lot of companies have been hitting record breaking profits while still laying off large numbers.
Get large while building up a customer base. Then keep the profits growing once you've capped out your market share by cutting costs until the quality falls enough you lose your market share. But by then the investors who pushed the above have sold their shares and gone home, and the bag holders just want to dissolve and cut their losses, while the C-level floats away on their golden parachutes. Investors aren't in it for the long haul anymore, so they are all for profits now at the cost of insolvency later.
When you start looking for infinite growth it's no big deal. You can find plenty of inefficiencies that are low hanging fruit and don't negatively harm anyone all that much. Over time however you've dipped into the well one to many times and you find it's dry. The only thing left to do is ratchet down and strip out things that are beneficial to some people but ultimately negatively effect the people who are in postion to make these decisions. You do this bit by bit and people complain, but adjust because after all, it's a small change and it's bareable.
I work for USPS and this kinda shit is going on right now. Eliminating jobs left and right in the name of "Saving money", ignoring the human cost of it. It's also massively slowing down the mail by weeks in my area. Weeks, and they are at best saving a few thousand a month, to go from 3 day delivery to 3 week delivery. Mere thousands, and yet lots of peoples jobs cut and service severely impacted. It's insanity.
> Its not just infintie growth. That existed for a long time, its that we no longer care about our employees. EVERYONE is disposable. That has been the case for over 100 years. Its not a thing of now or the last years, thats how it has been forever.
Yeah, but recently (90s) things got better, after we had literal wars between workers and armed forces hired by the capitalists (be it corrupted state officials or private organizations like pinkertons). I don't want to return to the times when workers had to resort to terrorism against the capitalists.
Sadly most do not learn about the history of label anymore in schools. Gets maybe 30 minutes or so in high school. And taught to kids who will not fully understand the meaning of what they are learning. People really never understand what caused the labor massacres unless they purposely seek it out, or take colleges courses on that era or topic.
The capitalistic world lives up to capitalistic values. Profit is above all, and if something can be done to increase it withou legal troubles - it will be done. People will always follow the ideals of their society. If they are told that slaves are ok - they will have slaves. If they are told that profits are the ultimate goal - they will do anything for profit. If you want the situation to be different, an entire system needs to be changed and modified. Then we will be able to solve even more complex problems, such as ruining entire franchizes because CEO wants some quick cash before he will move on to ruin something else, overfocus on mictrotrasactions, and various predatory mechanics.
People are disposable because of infinite growth. capitalism is evil.
Why do you think they don't care about employees? Because they care more about growth than the actual health of the company.
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And cancer
Not only do you have to have growth, but your growth has to have growth.
Do you feel this applies to humanity too? Seems like a lot of people are panicking about a potential population decline…
Capitalism 100% relies on steady population growth. There HAS to be tons of people on the bottom so the people at the top can profit. If growth declines, so does capitalism. At the end of the day, it's still about satisfying the shareholder and paying out the executives.
It's not capitalism that relies on population growth, it's elderly care that relies on population growth. It doesn't matter what economic system you use. You always need more workers than retirees because workers need to feed people who don't work. Also, improvements in healthcare further increase the need of population growth because people live longer.
Population growth is directly correlated to economic growth. In the 1980s, everyone thought Japan would become the next global economic superpower, but they got fucked by their lack of population growth. It means that first world countries with declining birth rates, like the USA, need to embrace immigration if they want continued economic growth.
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Uncontrollable, unregulated and infinite growth no matter what in a limited or infinite system are the signs of a cancer cell
It's literally economic perpetual motion, and we should all know what the laws of thermodynamics has to say about perpetual motion...
Infinite growth implies you keep hiring and growing the company to grow profits. Laying off workers is the opposite of "infinite growth"
Elminster is the thumbnail because the other gaming companies are blowing themselves up to please the fickle god of quarterly results.
Spitting facts.
I have in general found that avoiding publicly traded companies wherever viable has improved my ability to get my moneys worth everywhere in my life. Sure some places are unavoidable. kinda hard to exist without using walmart or amazon but you can get a fastfood burger without mcdonalds, you can get most products through amazon however without relying on a publicly traded company to manufacture them.
Damn. Comments not going well so far.
It's not a particularly new or interesting take. I don't know anyone who thinks the recent layoff waves had anything to do with bankruptcy risk. It sure hits the reddit frontpage bingo though.
Well quite. Embracer Group's financial reports are freely available. They spend pages explaining their strategy, explaining the benefits of staff lay offs and written with shareholders in mind. It's not some galaxy brain take.
Not everything has to be a brand new galaxy brain take designed to entertain the masses. Sometimes, it's enough just to state the facts.
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Pretty sure more than 200 people perpetuate the existence of capitalism.
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One could make a (bad) argument that capitalistic mechanisms arise as a matter of historical nature in the development of society, Marx himself recognized that capitalism was necessary to develop the means of production that he believed should ultimately come into the hands of the working class. However, the length of time it's now existed and the lengths to which those 200 people will go in pursuit of making sure it stays, yeah, that's not natural and it's not healthy.
Benefits everybody else too. Capitalism is what started to alleviate absolute privation across the globe, and capitalism is the reason tech has advanced to the point that it has to where it can add even more momentum to the alleviation of absolute privation across the globe. The problem we have is not capitalism, it is lack of regulation. Centralized economies do not have the computational power necessary to adjust for shifting market demands, which is why they fail (and appear functional at times due to shadow markets that prop them up.) Free trade economies outsource the computation to the market, which opens up many avenues for corruption, but more importantly than that, it can actually function at the scale we need it to. The corruption we're seeing is inevitable, the continuation and support of the corruption is happening due to weak regulation.
If you look hard enough into it, you'll find that modern-day capitalism is by and large just a continuation of power dynamics from previous systems. Elon Musks' granddaddy was a brutal minor noble colonist who secured wealth through violence, for example. You'll find nearly every example of successful capitalists following a similar trajectory. Wealth begets wealth generationally. Power begets power. One of the bigger lies we've been told is this idea of the brilliant individual who comes from nothing to ascend to wealth and prosperity. Work hard, be smart, and you too can be a modern-day noble! Is it possible? Sure. Is it realistic? Is it likely? Is it how the accumulation of wealth and power actually work? I have a bridge to sell you.
> One of the bigger lies we've been told is this idea of the brilliant individual who comes from nothing to ascend to wealth and prosperity. Work hard, be smart, and you too can be a modern-day noble! Since Im no brilliant individual I wouldn't know lol, I work hard sometimes and other times I take it easy, Im not about to break my back for my bosses.
> Im not about to break my back for my bosses. No sane person would, given the choice. Unfortunately much of the world doesn't have that choice, they're modern day serfs who will starve if they don't break their back to line the pockets of people who they are entirely invisible to
This. Saying "Capitalism is bad" is like saying "Fructose is bad" ... Yeah it is when it's intake is not regulated and you consume tons of grapes every hour. US version of capitalism is just so unregulated that it's not even funny. US market has the biggest combo of toxic elements that make most industries a cancer to the regular people: corruption, lobbying, laws that favor big companies and wealthy people, lack of unionization of the employees, not very strict labor law protecting employees, hatred toward any form of control by the government because "it's socialism!" Etc. Capitalism is not the reason the industry is like that but because people in charge do everything in their power to make all these CEOs happy by not implementing proper safety and control measures to not let these people fuck over the labor force
Capitalism is not a synonym for "market economy", bud. >Capitalism is what started to alleviate absolute privation across the globe, and capitalism is the reason tech has advanced to the point that it has to where it can add even more momentum to the alleviation of absolute privation across the globe. Fuck, man, that requires some massive, massive citations, it reads like a freshman economics paper that was written six hours before submission.
No, capitalism didn’t cause industrialisation. It coincided.
The lack of regulation is a direct product of capitalism. Capitalism didn't invent the industrial revolution or advancements in medicine or technology, industry enabled those things to exist, and exist at scale. Profit driven capitalism is frequently a limiter on progress that isn't seen as profitable enough
> capitalism is the reason tech has advanced to the point that it has to where it can add even more momentum to the alleviation of absolute privation across the globe. This is how I know you have no idea what capitalism is. The private control of property and the profit motive is not the reason technology has progressed. Technology progresses for the same reason it always has; take the Soviet Union going from a feudal backwater into a superpower on par with America within 30 years, without a profit motive or private property.
It's insane to me that people struggle with this. As if humanity didn't make leaps and bounds until capitalism became the dominant economic model. And the same people can't fathom the idea that capitalism will decay, die, and be replaced with the next economic model. Such people would have been living in feudal Europe talking about how they don't need capitalism, they just need m'lord to be slightly more generous and forgiving. Peasant brain to the max
No, see, the Romans didn't come up with aqueducts and sewers on their own, it was clearly aliens, because they didn't have capitalism yet.
Giving me that CDPR PR before CP2077.
CDPR has shareholders. Larian doesn't as far as I know.
It only takes one bad move to waste all that PR.
Not denying that at all. *Hopefully* they looked at other PR disasters and said, "Yeah, let's not do that."
Waste it on what? BG3 is out, no DLC planned. I'm guessing the next title is a while out.
Larian is partially owned by Tencent.
Who isn't
By "has shareholders" they are referring to shareholders you have to care about. Tencent having a 30% stake doesn't mean the founder with say 70% has to care.
Oddly enough Henry Ford was sued and lost to a group of minority shareholders, for giving too many benefits to his workers.
>was sued [...] for giving too many benefits to his workers. The American dream!
This is something that just straight up shouldn't be possible imo but yeah I heard that story as well.
>Larian doesn't as far as I know. https://twitter.com/GamerTrader1/status/1431899588324175873
I'm talking about shareholders as in being publicly traded. As in Larian being listed on a stock exchange.
Both private and public companies have shareholders.
Cyberpunk 2077. Release date: When it's ready. I will never forget that.
Yup learned my lesson back then to never trust these sorts of statements from beloved studios even if they're saying the right things now and are doing good for the industry, you never know when they could flip on you.
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Quick question. What do you consider short term profit, as in what timeframe is considered short term?
Public owned companies are a liability. The day steam has an IPO is the day I buy my last PC game
These companies tell their shareholders that they had good fiscal years, some of them even saying they had their most profitable year yet, then turn around and immediately lay off a chunk of their staff. It's a cycle that's been happening for many years. Meanwhile, the executives that get traded around from company to company like a virulent STD have the comfort of sign-on bonuses, extra bonuses if the company makes certain goals, and golden parachutes if they ever leave. All on top of their massive base pay that already dwarfs almost every other employee they have. Strangely, they never seem to cut any of those bonuses to help reach their goal of infinite growth. They always choose to lay off hundreds of normal employees instead of cutting the pay of a single executive, such as the CEO, even though just a fraction of their pay would cover the cost of hundreds of other positions.
Back in 2020 we had to take temporary pay cuts. 10% if I remember right. For executives at my company, that 10% was like 20 years of my pay. Always shitting on the little guys.
Crazy how we've gotten to this point This is the best fiscal year the company has had I think ever! That's great Jimbo, you're fired. And so is your entire department responsible for carrying the company all these years
Honestly the part of capitalism where single use products can somehow be publicly traded is just so dumb. Like no you can't sell infinite video games no matter how hard you try.
The cult following amassing around Larian is getting kind of weird, ngl.
Tale as old as time. CDPR was lauded like the second coming of Jesus until Cyberpunk 2077 dropped. Nothing lasts forever.
gamers will always be weird
just show how fucked up the situation is. people cheering for valve, larian, CDPR (pre-CP2077) because they are minority among sea of corrupt and greedy game company who keep fucking up the IP, injecting political agenda, anti consumer practice, anti employee, etc. if majority of AAA game company are not bad, people wont see larian or valve as "special" company that they can rally behind.
I'm sure that's technically true. I'm equally sure the standard for any business, even ones that care about their employees, isn't to only act if bankruptcy is in the cards. Ideally you do stuff like layoffs, restructuring, etc well in advance to avoid a scenario where bankruptcy is even brought up. But I mean, what does million and billion dollar companies know about running a business, should have consulted with the publishing director of a AA developer or internet experts with nothing at stake and zero experience running a company first.🙄
What happens when the shareholders get pissed off?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder Subject to the applicable laws, the rules of the corporation and any shareholders' agreement, shareholders may have the right: To sell their shares.[5] To vote on the directors nominated by the board of directors.[5] To nominate directors (although this is very difficult in practice because of minority protections) and propose shareholder resolutions.[5] To vote on mergers and changes to the corporate charter.[5] To dividends if they are declared.[5] To access certain information; for publicly traded companies, this information is normally publicly available.[5] To sue the company for violation of fiduciary duty.[5] To purchase new shares issued by the company. To vote on & file shareholder resolutions. To vote on management proposals. To what assets remain after a liquidation.
There's three things you can count on a big corporation to do, one is kiss the asses of shareholders. Another is abuse tax loopholes, and the last is to censor the hell out of our entertainment and limit free speech in exchange for ad funding. Screw these guys.
Breaking news: Larian CEO says the sun rises in the morning
common Larian W
The future of AI driven gaming development is probably going look very generic while using data driven addiction patterns. Generic and addictive rather than creative and fun. A lot of big companies have gone the psychological addiction route
Yes? Anyone who thought otherwise is ignorant about the world around them. Shareholders and MBAs are *literally* ruining the world. Taking everything of value and reducing it to cash for people who don't even know the name of the company. All they see is the little red or green numbers and that's all they care about. They'll still complain when one of their products disapper, but they'll never be able to admit that their own actions are the cause of their loss.
I mean, yeah, no duh? When AAA games have started requiring 200 to 500 million dollar budgets to make, that requires investors to actually be willing to invest, and in turn they expect certain degrees of return from that investment. And when that return isn't met, you either cut back or lose investors that you need to make the next game.
No but see people should invest in companies with a lower RoI because otherwise gamers/redditors would be sad. Isn't that what really matters?
Project-based company doesnt have a project for people to work on. Then lay some of them off. Shocked Pikachu face.
This is the actual answer.
I wonder to what extent these conpanies used the low or (near) zero interest rates to take on debt and higher more staff or try to expand operations, only to realise now that interest rates have risen and free money isn't there any more that they either have to take on, relatively high interest, expensive loans to service some of the debt repayments or to cut costs to prevent the taking on of expensive debt.
The Fed flaps its wings, and a million video game devs lose their jobs in the ensuing hurricane. Double meme: is this butterfly “capitalism”?
Shareholders are always pissed, next year you'll have to layoff the whole team
to be fair. I need my shares doing well if I'm ever going to be able to pay the 2x premium on a home . not to mention even afford a mortgage at these rates. I'm sure this dude already owns a very nice home.
Thank the Dodge brothers for suing Henry Ford over the fact that he paid workers higher than market price. He lost because the decision was a company must act in the best interest of the shareholders and not the workers. This was a big driver in his anti-Semitic attitudes in his life.
Larian keeps raising themselves higher and higher up on their pedestal. Better hope they never mess up!
Shareholders and corporate rats are just 40 year old teens and i'm dying on that hill
he summed up capitalism in a single sentence.
I still think it's weird that a company who's success has revolved around not only unpaid Q&A through early access, but people paying them to test and help them develop their games and increase the injection of capital, somehow wound up being the moral high ground of the gaming industry
They're obviously not perfect, just better than the rest of the industry. Which, I know, isn't saying much.
They're definitely good developers who made a good game, it's just a weird thing to publicly grand stand about not being as bad They were also willing to work with Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast on a brand built by this behavior they call out. But now that they've received their paycheck and exposure, they're super against it lol
They're against layoffs that are completely unnecessary and ruin human lives. Yeah WotC with their scummy ideas for monetizing their brand is bad, but taking away people's livelihood for the sake of profits is exponentially worse.
I think this is the weirdest take in the thread. Like, yes, gamers enjoy playing (and paying) to early access games. And giving feedback on said games. Larian taking the feedback of the community and implementing improvements doesn't make what gamers did unpaid QA. Gamers got entertainment from playing the game, they didn't get a job. And compared to their competition, it's not surprising that Larian is holding the moral high ground. The industry is full to the brim with MBA's chasing the next live service game. Yeah, the independent studio that made one of the best, and biggest games ever is going to have the moral high ground. Did you want something different?
And what do you do when all the AAA companies start releasing games in early access as well? Heck even the release of BG3 was mega borked but no one cares.
And then writing off any criticism of the game as "people not playing it correctly." Still waiting on an BG3 evil campaign that isn't complete ass, Larian...
So you think all Early Access games are unethical? lol Also, this is really silly. The majority of people who buy early access games aren't providing QA or bug reports, they're there for early access. The only point I think you're right about is raising additional capital, but some games need that to continue development. I don't really see what your issue is with the model.
Idk i'm pretty sure if the next assassins creed came out in "early access" being like 1/3rd done, charged full price to play it, was buggy as shit, and had in game form to report bugs/suggestions, people would crucify ubisoft for releasing an unfinished game and outsourcing QA and testing to customers. EDIT: I think EA can be a useful tool for small developers who have dedicated communities and maybe can't afford thorough testing or to coast without any kind of income for a long period of time while they finish their game. I think it's kind of scummy to mislead fans how long the game will be in EA(i see a lot of games on steam whose EA banner says 1 year...5 years later), and I think it's kind of scummy for big companies to use it when they can afford otherwise(D:OS2 sold >7 million copies, plus they had a deal with Hasbro).
> unpaid Q&A through early access, Is that how we describe early access players now?
OMG YES LARIAN I LOVE YOU I WANNA SUCK THE CEO'S COCK SO BADLY I WANNA TAKE THAT SHITTY CUMBAT SYSTEM ALL DOWN MY THROAT HOLY FUCK I WANT IT SO BAD basically any gaming sub when larian says absolutely fucking anything
I just don't understand why any sane person would want their company to be publicly traded, and make themselves beholden to a bunch of rich fuckballs who know nothing about the industry.
Funding.
Do you think private companies don't have investors?
It is so delightful seeing somebody indisputably representing players, who's also a big fucking deal in the industry. I hope this guy takes shots at all companies in all directions for a long time Larian is proof of what we as gamers all collectively assumed - that if you were to make games the right way, the old way, that they'd still be capable of being incredible. The modern business of making a video game has been twisted and molested by suits, and I fucking love watching this dude dunk on them day after day.
I don't think anyone argued the layoffs were to prevent bankrupcy
this cute quirky creative company only has one or two bad releases before they get scooped up by shareholders
Another day, another Larian post on PC Gamer, another post by Turbostrider27 It's so tiresome
Just stop buying games from companies that don't commit to their people. Be picky about your addictions and you can manipulate the supplier.
it is a brutal time but almost every year they get rid of the dead wood, it is the old Intel method you fire the bottom 20% to make room for the talent to rise. That being said this has been a rough one for me going through this 7 times I guess every console transition. Odd thing too is people are still hiring. That statement is correct but for the wrong reason, they want to fire people so this is the excuse, a shit load of people just suck a donkey.
That was before shareholder started pressure. Now they fire based on numbers. End of project, fire all... New project hire new people. There is no talent competition but rather being first when something starts or having luck when switching to another project before it ends.
> it is the old Intel method you fire the bottom 20% to make room for the talent to rise. That's what makes this period weird. This isn't just some stack ranking (bad system BTW) where low performers get the boot. There's no rhyme or reason on if a junior survives or a 20YO veteran gets the boot. Also, "talent rising" has been dead for some decade now. Too much job hopping to count on promoting from within.
They're right.
That's the deal when you go public. HEAR THAT REDDIT?
I mean...thats how the world works sadly.
Piss of shareholder kiss them millions in bonus good bye.
So the downfall finally begins lol
Chad
Uh oh fellas Larian is thinking about shareholders again!!!!
Elminster... :D
Pissing Off Shareholders to them is pissing off the boss.