meheleventyone

Sort of but games are phenomenally expensive to make at the BioWare end of the spectrum and in some ways that poisons the process because leadership are always trying to guarantee a return often based on poor signals. This causes a lot of development churn, burns people out and results in a bunch of turnover both as people get let go and replaced but also from people getting fed up. One troubled project I worked on had a complete change in creative leadership at least twice and a complete reboot of the direction once. Under those circumstances you lose all the magic and either become a factory rehashing the next series in a franchise or make something quite turgid.

Companies at this scale also see individual developers as cogs which whilst true to a point misses the importance of both the group of individuals and their social fabric have in making a great game.

Which is a long winded way of saying yes it’s the developers that made a commercial flop but that might have been the best result possible in the circumstances. And the buck with setting those circumstances stops with the executive team.

It’s more the other way around and there are a lot of hobbyists who think they want to make a living out of it but would be a lot better off actually keeping it as a hobby. Most people don’t want to make the creative compromises a commercial product needs nor do they really want to run a business.

That's a weird way to make assumptions about someone else when you don't have a defence.

Why would they need to take a cut in that fantastical case? They'd just own the agents and take 100%. Not to mention AI at this level of advancement would probably have a decisive lead in many areas leading to mass unemployment which would likely crash the game playing parts of the economy so might be it's own undoing. Valve need customers with disposable income.

> Why though?

Valve takes a 30% cut of all sales through their platform which is responsible for the majority of their revenue. This is dependent on it being a mutually beneficial relationship for developers and a near monopoly on PC customers eyeballs.

Fantastical examples aside Valve is still dependent on developer good will. The balance of that to the near monopoly is a much more valid point about how far Steam can strain that relationship.

The correct comparison isn’t him working by himself but with a similar sized cohort where distribution of revenue was fairer. Co-ops are a thing as are the productivity benefits of working with others.

Even if you don’t like the concept of co-ops it’s fairly easy to ask yourself if you would you be more or less motivated if you shared more in the success of a company rather than it being sucked up by shareholders?

So any use is good as long as it saves money. There are no tradeoffs or reasons not to use it?

Even getting it to write less obtuse English isn't enough IMO. It seems to have real issues with structuring documentation in a way that makes it easy to follow. Also it's a real demon for leaking its context as implicit assumptions into documentation.

There’s way more to making a game deterministic than slapping in a fixed point library which isn’t strictly necessary in and of itself.

I’ve been a professional engineer in games for 24 years and can safely say this idea that things aren’t hard anymore is silly. Programming games has definitely got less unpleasant as tooling is much better but the actual mental problems are tough as ever.

You might be mistaking the sheer variety of games and that some are really quite simple for all games being easier to make.

Also there is a huge effort to optimise the game for retention, LTV and UA arbitrage.

These are not the fun details but they are details none the less and whilst LLMs will probably be more useful here the insights that drive their actions are the taste humans provide.

Even that might be subject to shifting market trends as his audience ages eventually but it's definitely been a nice sticky niche.

It's a combination of all those things really. There's also a lot of people in commercial game development that get stuck in their thesis of success when the market has moved on.

In particular I'd say right now it's really hard to look at any given game that has commerical potential and spot the winners across any size category. There is a glut of supply that tends to exentuate the hit driven nature of making games as gamers latch onto the next viral success whilst at the same time making it hard to have multiple hits. Back in the day competition was less and money could buy a scope and technology advantage. Both of which are ideas that no longer really apply.

> Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.

There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.

The US started the war though and have very recently been targeting civilian infrastructure as well. So by your logic should be replacing it.

No, it’s a combo of a post-covid slump in spend, western markets becoming saturated and an assumption from the majority of industry that wouldn’t happen. Essentially games revenue has grown incredibly over the past twenty years and it’s now crunched to a halt.

Then layer in some incredibly bad bets like Game Pass for XBox and audience tastes shifting away from splashy big budget releases making them an “inevitable” success. It’s left middle aged execs heads in a twist.

In a broader view discoverability is the big problem for everyone. People are hoping in the short term that reducing budgets and scope will save things but all that will do is make the discoverability problem worse. So everyone’s hot under the collar for codev, offshoring, “the Hollywood model*” and so on without looking at the downstream effects of everyone doing that.

AI has largely impacted games by sucking all the available money away and the discoverability problem has made what little is left extremely conservative.

* - This has been a thing for at least three decades now in games despite the obvious collapse of this model and Hollywood.

Have you ever considered that the high cost of contribution and low cost of moderation is why Wikipedia is successful?

Inverting it would destroy any open contribution system. See open source projects blanket rejecting AI generated PRs as an example. Basically trying to restore sanity when contribution suddenly has very small cost.

What? Brave New World is Huxley’s famous dystopian novel. Like many dystopian novels it is presented as a utopia to begin with that unravels to expose it’s horrors as the plot unfolds.

He did write a utopian book called Island.

Just so were clear here the CSAM acronym stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material. Some Anime gets caught up because there is a lot of dubious visual depictions of that.

Yeah I got given one by work and we make fresh sourdough pizza every Friday now. Absolutely great if you have the space for it.

If you like food you should do both! There are plenty of things it's hard to cook at home or impractical to keep all the different things you need. A good example is ironically a really simple food. Pizza needs temperatures most domestic ovens aren't nearly hot enough to provide in order to make a quality result.

Restaurants also provide an opportunity to eat foods you've never experienced before which really helps cooking similar things at home as you have some idea of what the end result should be like. And the beauty is that this often doesn't have to be expensive to be good.

It's like any creative hobby you need to develop both craft and taste.

> On one end £9 of labour cost for a plate of asparagus seems deeply inefficient and unrealistic, particularly when the cost of ingredients that also include (hard) labour is £2.

Presumably the staffing cost is the front of house staff as well as the actual cooking and then the cost of employing someone to wash dishes, clean the restraunt and so on. Then compared to growing asparagus which seems to largely come from countries with substantially lower wages. Restraunts have always been infamously low margin businesses though.

I think that's just to have the domain complete their name.

Fighting games usually run peer to peer either with deterministic lockstep or rollback both of which are managed on the client. For actual gameplay at most there’d be a relay as a server. But almost certainly a bunch of ancillary services to support matchmaking and so on.

I think you're probably castrophizing the impact with statements like "it'd be impossible for a manager to ever become technical again" because that's not the likely outcome as I understand things. But yes people who stop programming for an appreciable amount of time do find it harder to pick back up again.

You're misrepresenting the potential problem. It's more along the lines of using AI stops you exercising the cognitive processes you would doing things yourself and those encompass skills, knowledge and brain function that can atrophy. For an extreme example you can look at cognitive decline in the elderly which can be mitigated by taking part in activities that are cognitively stimulating.

They could make it work like rewarded video ads in mobile games. Block progress until you watch the ad. Then as dutiful engineers people can consume ads to support the business and avoid being laid off.

More seriously for software engineering it’ll just cost a lot.

Yeah in a lot of cases it's much better to use integers and a fixed precision as the absolute unit of position. For games it's just that the scale of most games works well with floats in the range they care about.

Russia pre-invasion of Ukraine probably said something very similar.

You realize you’re essentially building a false dichotomy? I work in video games where code really is a means to an end but still see that authorship is important even if that code is uuuuugly due to it being the expression of the game itself. From that perspective I’m neither worried about craft or product but my ability to express myself though code as the game behaves. Although if you really must have only two categories I’d be in camp one.

As such AI is a net negative as it would be in writing a novel or making any other kind of art.