Well it’s also not just Act/Blizz but that 1900 is also part of Zenimax and Xbox. They cut 1900 positions across Microsoft Games as a wholeThis is very true. There are always redundancies when it comes to mergers and acquisitions. Usually not in the areas of core competencies, but often in support staff, where just because you merge two companies, doesn't mean you need two corporate finance departments, two corporate HR departments, etc. etc.
1,900 out of 17,000 is still a pretty large number to just be merger/acquisition redundancies, unless they are going very aggressively.
But it does check out. My acquaintance in the company is in software development, and has noted that his group is unaffected.
At least as much as they know
With the sheer quantities, I wouldn't be surprised if this is more than just redundant support staff resultant from an acquisition though.
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Microsoft Lays Off 1,900 Activision Blizzard And Xbox Employees
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Furious_Styles
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Agreed. Just like these "pay $X for this version of the game to get X days of early access" just straight up exploiting people's FOMO impulse.
sharknice
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This is very true. There are always redundancies when it comes to mergers and acquisitions. Usually not in the areas of core competencies, but often in support staff, where just because you merge two companies, doesn't mean you need two corporate finance departments, two corporate HR departments, etc. etc.
1,900 out of 17,000 is still a pretty large number to just be merger/acquisition redundancies, unless they are going very aggressively.
But it does check out. My acquaintance in the company is in software development, and has noted that his group is unaffected.
At least as much as they know
With the sheer quantities, I wouldn't be surprised if this is more than just redundant support staff resultant from an acquisition though.
When the company I worked for got sold to another they told everyone as the deal was happening what our severance package would be if we ended up getting cut. This is partially to get people to stay, but also just sort of industry standard "2 weeks notice" type thing. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that happened here too, but even if wasn't large payouts are pretty much the norm for companies like Microsoft.
I was actually very disappointed when I didn't get cut and get a big severance package. As an experienced software developer it just would have meant paid vacation and double paychecks.
Losing your job probably does suck for some people but I think a lot of people would actually would prefer it when they the severance packages they probably will.
People raging on someone else's behalf when that person doesn't feel victimized at all is pretty sad.
Flogger23m
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That sucks. Though I assume they had some bloated projects.
DukenukemX
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I'm sure the games they'll make will be top notch quality, and not end up like Rare ware.
Can’t get much worse than Act/Blizz was already doing?I'm sure the games they'll make will be top notch quality, and not end up like Rare ware.
DukenukemX
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Has Microsoft ever taken a studio or IP and made it better? Best thing I could hope for is that World of Warcraft gets ported to Xbox and its subscription is tied to Game Pass. What could go wrong is that World of Warcraft gets dumbed down so that it can be played on consoles with gamepads, while a new game like StarCraft Extreme is exclusive to Xbox. I don't mean PC and Xbox, I mean just Xbox. Microsoft didn't buy all these studios just so that PC users could benefit from this. At some point you'll see all future titles from these studios become exclusive to Xbox.
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M76
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I don't think AI in its current form can replace any significant roles in game development, if anything it creates more jobs. Support staff however is another thing entirely I can see how it can cause some redundancies there.
AI isn't making anyone's job obsolete unless that person's skills are incredibly rudimentary.
dogDAbone
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DukenukemX
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There's no evidence of this but PalWorld might have extensively used AI, but this is going by the creator having a love affair with AI in the past. The success of that game is mostly due to Pokemon ripoff, but the cost to make it was really low compared to other games.
This will depend by what we mean by rudimentary, recent AI did beat teams of experienced oncologists at detecting cancer, did beat big experienced team with a giant supercomputer at predicting meteo.
If it make half of the plane pilot obsolete because one by plane get considered enough, will we say than literal airline pilot's skills were incredibly rudimentary ?
M76
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That is just a leap of imagination from deluded nintendo fanboys. Just because someone praised AI doesn't mean everything they do is made by AI. And even if AI was used in the creation of palword what then? It is not the smoking gun they think it is.
Either way there is zero evidence of AI being involved, in fact there is counter evidence as the creature concepts existed in trailers published long before generative AI became a thing.
M76
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That is rudimentary, AI is looking for patterns, as it can detect smaller and more nuanced things than a human can, but you still need the doctors and meteorologist to verify what the AI has burped out as depending on the settings it can be ways off. It is useful as a pre-filter, it won't entirely replace doctors. Even if it can be tuned to be so reliable that you no longer need a verification for false positives, it still can't do the surgery itself.
The tasks that AI can take over are rudimentary indeed. But as soon as something unexpected and or unprecedented happens you will want a human in the pilot's seat.
If a doctor looking at result-radio to make cancer prognostic is considered rudimentary or real time translation during UN type event than yes, I almost feel the definition to some will continue if a computer can do it, it is, making it circular and always true.
And went it will with robot arm, we will call those surgeons skill rudimentary.
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Nasty_Savage
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My personal opinion is Blizzard is sitting on 10-15 year old game play models people are tired of. WoW for instance is new art and reskins with the exact same formulas they’ve used forever. They seem to spend more time in creating art for bag junk and 15 different currencies per expo than explaining how a Hunter can out heal a Shaman in PVP. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Flogger23m
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Honestly it is even worse if they intentionally ripped off Pokemon designs. Which they clearly did.
M76
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But it is rudimentary. It goes beyond the scope of a forum post to explain fully why AI is good at this type of stuff. But the TLDR version is that there is a giant amount of historical data that can be fed into the AI model as learning material. There is no critical thinking involved, just recognizing the patterns that differentiate healthy patients from cancer patients. Same goes into translation, you can feed the AI translations of historical documents, and it can translate any context that was amply sampled in the data. But it won't understand something new that didn't have samples of in the training data. It will likely give an incorrect translation of it. Same goes for weather, there are records of historical weather data going back decades, just as with cancer patients it's a game of recognizing patterns, rudimentary as in doesn't require critical thinking.
A surgery requires on the spot decision making, and has a lot of unforeseeable variables. I doubt an AI can fully take over any time soon. Some of the sub-tasks under the supervision of a physician maybe. I'm not saying an AI will never be able to fully perform complex tasks, I'm saying what we currently have is not yet capable in my opinion.
Why is it that when people say no offense they usually do mean to offend? Anyway just saying I don't understand anything is meaningless. I don't claim to know all the ins and outs of AI research, if you think I made a mistake or something I said is incorrect then be specific. I'm always willing to learn.
M76
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Even worse implies that using AI is bad in of itself which I don't agree with.
I don't have a horse in this race as I think pokemon and palworld are both trash that I wouldn't play even if all other games were taken away from me.
I often say originality is overrated, but some of palworld's creatures clearly look like slightly altered pokemons. If all of it's creatures are copies of pokemons, then I think it is morally questionable. I'd say if it is less than 25% of the creatures then I'd let it slide.
As for whether it can be considered IP infringement legally, I'm glad I'm not the one who needs to figure that out. But I doubt we will ever know the answer to that, as even if they sue this will most likely go into an out of court settlement.
I mean, they both obviously came from the image of an Anubis.
So they ripped off ancient Egypt, I guess
Flogger23m
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AI is fine if the end results are okay. I believe we'll end up seeing not so good AI voice acting and whatnot. Though I suppose when it comes to really small budget games, it would either be no voice acting or AI voice acting. In which case, AI can certainly be helpful as voice actors are expensive and one of the hardest things for smaller studios.
Certainly more than a few. The problem isn't so much the shapes, but the overall art style and whatnot.
As mentioned above, it is quite a few designs. And it is more than just the general shape/outline, but also the overall art design.
Of course Pokemon themselves are based off of animals and other real things so there can occasionally be some overlap. But the designs are still a bit too similar, especially with the art design. The poke ball rip off animations also are highly questionable.
The rest of the gameplay is quite different. Even the company name is Pocket Pair, clearly inspired (maybe too heavily) from the name Pocket Monsters (Pokemon in the US).
Gameplay looks very different, but I would think Gamefreak would probably have a case for the designs of the creatures.
Your not wrong but it exactly right either.
Take for example an open world game, modern engines allow for huge environments but populating them is another thing entirely.
Up until recently you would need full teams to place trees, rocks, water, scale things, test the lighting, verify there aren’t holes in meshes that you can get stuck in or pass through or cause weird rendering mishaps that tank performance, a whole laundry list of jobs. And that’s all before you actually start placing resources, events, quests, objects, or bosses.
Now an AI is able to build that environment, they have algorithms for verifying mesh integrity, and AI has progressed to a point where it can very capably fill in random events, encounters, and loot drops.
Starfield was the 0.5 beta of their procedural generation system and they proved it’s viable, just not good at that iteration. The AI tools they have now make that system look like utter garbage in comparison.
So the new AI backed tools have taken a series of jobs that took whole teams of dedicated workers and their associated support and reduced it down to a handful of more specialized people (that cost slightly more). So it’s a case of give 8 people a 20% pay raise and training and cut 30+ others completely.
Additionally to further this the process of manually adjusting lighting and colours and textures and meshes for non ray traced systems requires whole teams that an AI workstation can bang out unsupervised over a weekend.
Expect to see games that when not playing with raytracing enabled looks like old school potato mode. For years you’ve read comments about how the Ray Traced on and off versions look almost identical, that was the point. You now have an automated process that replaced the hard work of whole art departments. Now studios can spend $50k on a workstation and 2 people to run it and remove whole departments in their place.
Epic and Nvidia have been building tools and environments for the past 6 years whose whole job is to automate the work of huge teams so they can be accomplished by small teams. It’s now reached a point where it’s both a proven and widespread tech set and the industry is shifting accordingly.
It’s not terribly shocking to anybody I know still in the game industry they have been screaming for years that development costs have greatly exceeded the price they can charge and that inflation has gone out of control. Epic and Nvidia have been working with them to build the software and hardware they need to reduce development costs, and those costs are people. Salary is the most costly part of software development.
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It can be in many case but it does not need to be, it is able to find pattern to infer stuff that human does not understand how it does it and human cannot do or that took humans a doctorat to do like what AlphaFold pulled off.
If your jobs was to discover how a list of protein would fold and alphafold get one day good enough to do all of them, it would be hard to say that it was a rudimentary, it was about the work of a full doctorate to do.
A bit like calling the meteo 7 days in the future rudimentary.... that seem pushing it, it is decade over decade of superbe budget of people with fancy degree building that science, using complex model running on 200 millions supercomputers, or at least rudimentary being used in a different way than what I have in mind when I read it.
DukenukemX
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I think it's more important that we can humor the idea because it is in the realm of possibility. Just look at the Taylor Swift images that she's upset about. Something that would have taken a lot of skill and time can now be done in seconds. Something that would have taken a huge team of people years, can now be done with a handful of people in maybe a few months.
https://www.breitbart.com/entertain...nerated-sexually-graphic-taylor-swift-images/
The problem is that people don't want to pay a monthly fee. I stopped completely playing classic WoW because I beat the Litch King. My guild decided to take a break since we've been playing since classic TBC. I don't plan to come back to Cataclysm Classic because everyone knew it sucked. People quit when level boost was introduced in classic TBC, and people quit when WOTLK introduced the Token. As expansions like Cataclysm were introduced, they put more time wasting mechanics into the game. At no point did Blizzard think to roll back these changes. People like me who have the itch to play WoW will go back to private servers.
View: https://youtu.be/xy89LRQ9muw?si=B7PsUNcfqU8KwTnn
This seems pretty good to me, and it's funnier than the original dub. The person had this to say.
"For anyone who found this vid through the Asmond clip about DubGate, I have a question for you. I hear people talking all the time about AI redubs being a threat to shitty VA's (which makes me happy of course), but bar myself and a few others I collaborate with, I never actually see anyone do them, or even small demos.
I do AI voice-overs full-time now, but If people want this Re-Dub ball to get rolling, drop links to other channels where people are doing this stuff so I can link up and share datasets with them. Again, I hear people talking about it a lot, but I don't often see anyone doing it, and I know that doing it absolutely spot for "something" would be a lot faster if I could spread the workload. Bar Dragonmaid, what's a popular anime that has a shitty dub that needs cleansing?"
View: https://youtu.be/wdPlLa5kfIA?si=c9muhBAHi3LxN9mR
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M76
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Since palworld's creature designs existed before publication of any generative AI models it is hard to humor the idea.
Creating a few fake images is very different than creating a game. Generative AI lacks consistency. It can do vague concepts very well, but if you want it to do a very specific thing then it all falls apart. For example if you do 10 images of whoever, the images will all look different as if they were different people. Even if you used a model specifically trained to always give you a person with Taylor Swift's face you can't get consistency in other features unless the AI is hyper specific trained to mimic everything. But that would probably take just as much skill and time as making a fake without AI.
So at this point AI is only good for memes, and to upset celebrities with low skill fakes and not much else.
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M76
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Rudimentary is not meant as a dismissal. It is meant that the AI is incapable of higher level thinking or problem solving. There are various fields where it can offer advances or never before seen possibilities. I'm all for using AI wherever it is viable. But the people using chatgpt to write their papers clearly don't understand how it works.
Armenius
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Final Fantasy XIV works just fine on consoles. I don't see why World of Warcraft can't make the transition to consoles without losing any of its so-called complexity. Besides, both the Series X|S and PlayStation 5 fully support keyboard input. Hell, I played Final Fantasy XI on my Xbox 360 with a keyboard. The 360 version looked and performed a lot better than the PC version, which is why I played it on the console.
Which is extremely laughable because the actual images, not the mosaic censored snips that Breitbart shows, are still obviously AI. AI still has a big issue with hands, number one, especially when they come into contact with something else. The proportions of her face are also way off due to the way AI learns how heads and faces are shaped. That is why I find it hilarious that these are all of a sudden an issue when AI images of her that are just as good have been floating around the internet for a couple years at this point.
sharknice
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I'm sure blizzard has considered bringing WoW to consoles multiple times. They probably determined it wouldn't make them more money.
On PC they get 100% of the cut, on consoles it would have been 70%. Some people would switch from PC to console, losing them money. WoW was so big they could have come out behind.
But now that Microsoft owns them maybe it comes to Xbox.
M76
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Even the PS2 supported keyboard+mouse input, but it's pointless as long as developers ignore the option. SONY and MS should require studios to add support until then it is as if it didn't exist.
Some games performing better on console is just the result of bad PC ports, Japanese studios are the most notorious offenders at this, so it doesn't surprise me one bit that any FF is more optimized on a console.
But because it tend to do the task in such a different way than the human do, the human jobs lost could have those aspects.
Take the meteo prediction better than our best simulator running on giant supercomputer example, does the people making the earth atmosphere models-simulator, making-maintaining those super computer were doing something that require no higher level thinking or problem solving ?
Was being able to find how a protein fold or trying to predict it did not require higher level thinking or problem solving ? AI can find pattern by looking at a 150k dataset sample and generate from it a model that has millions of different "plan" or dimension predict stuff without using high level thinking an replace human worker that were able to do the task with much less training and raw compute power because they were able to use high level thinking using a very different strategy, a bit like a plane can fly without having the list of ability birds have.
Armenius
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The new president at Blizzard seems to be saying the right things, but she has a deep corporate background. Lets see how this plays out.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...a-faries-is-former-call-of-duty-nfl-executive
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...a-faries-is-former-call-of-duty-nfl-executive
She is all I need to hear. RIP Blizzard.
DukenukemX
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For a game to properly use GamePad, would have to make sacrifices to work on KB+Mouse. I'd imagine the reason it wasn't ported to console was because the game was far too demanding for console, plus keyboard and mice users would have an advantage. Imagine being in Iron Forge back in 2006 on a Xbox 360. The lag would be incredible. Also, FFXIV is going to cater more to Japanese market which means they have an incentive to make sure it works on console. The west has traditionally been more about playing games on PC, though I hear Japan has recognized the PC and started to migrate over.
If you just depend on AI and AI only to generate art, that's going to not have the greatest results. But if a human guides it, and isn't stupid then it's a huge time saver. If it was just a photo, then you could clearly tell. But in a video game where you have thousands of assets, I doubt anyone would notice. Is Palworld using AI? The debate lives on.
It's different now, because Microsoft wants Blizzard to push Xbox as a platform, which means port WoW over to Xbox. Not Playstation, but Xbox specifically.
If they port to Xbox then Microsoft won't take 30% of their own sales.
Exactly.
So the entire team working on the Blizzard survival game got axed according to some posts, Microsoft took a look at the state of the game and basically said "you were paying people to work on this... Jesus you're all out, the team, the supervisors, the people who signed off on continuing to fuel that dumpster fire the lot of you, pack your shit and get!"
6 years of funding a full development team just done and gone with nothing to show for it.
Looking at the financials and the player numbers WoW is floating that whole company.
Note:
Odyssey (the survival game) was Minecraft meets Rust, which they started in 2017, it still isn't ready for release and already feels super old and dated.
Odyssey had at least 200 people full-time dedicated to it.
The various Overwatch professional teams have also recently voted to no longer do Overwatch, so the Overwatch League is dead now that's done and those players will be moving to other titles.
6 years of funding a full development team just done and gone with nothing to show for it.
Looking at the financials and the player numbers WoW is floating that whole company.
Note:
Odyssey (the survival game) was Minecraft meets Rust, which they started in 2017, it still isn't ready for release and already feels super old and dated.
Odyssey had at least 200 people full-time dedicated to it.
The various Overwatch professional teams have also recently voted to no longer do Overwatch, so the Overwatch League is dead now that's done and those players will be moving to other titles.
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