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- Hacker News
- We need Dwarf Fortress creator to lead Butlerian Jihadby profstasiak
- The number of dickovers[1] this website pops up while you're trying to read the article is truly astounding. I gave it my best shot, but after the third one i figured I'd probably gotten enough of the gist of it and gave up.by chias
- The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.by daemin
- In the first paragraph:
> While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper
And the linked article is about revenue going up YoY, not profit. And then it says:
> It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right
Xbox in their own earnings report said their revenues dropped by 7% YoY.
Yeah OK, I guess games journalist are as bad as they've ever been.
by square_usual - When we've used software to disrupt other industries to deliver more with fewer people we called that a good thing. And it is, because consumers tend to win. Games are a hit-driven business, so they're going to feel the squeeze faster than, say, SaaS, but it's coming for all of us. Software is now being disrupted. Reap the whirlwind.
I worked at a (very) well known media company in Hollywood during the Netflix disruption. This really doesn't sound all that different from a Hollywood exec mocking internet media in the early 2000s. People are trying to understand it and leverage it. Quality is bad. Then one day you wake up and it's taken over, because it kept improving. Setting aside the debate on AI use in the creative process, even if models never get better there are years of optimizations to be done on the tools/business side.
As a gamer, I'm actually excited for it. I want more diversity in games beyond what the current indie scene provides. If we can give smaller teams the horsepower to make what was considered AAA 5-10 years ago I will be quite happy as a consumer.
by madrox - Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse?
Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.
- Love this quote, seems to apply to all software these days and maybe business generally: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."by QuadrupleA
- 1. Human attention is a finite resource.
2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever.
3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media.
You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually.
Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone.
Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
by munificent