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"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total." 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)
Sorry what?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming? The difference between AAA and the rest is not so much in quality these days, but sheer quantity . Quantity of NPCs, artwork, music, items, skills, vehicles, levels, etc. etc. And it takes a small army of artists/designers/PMs to do all of that stuff, not to even mention the actual dev team.
That sort of thing seems really ripe for LLM/AI disruption?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it hadn't replaced much yet since it's hard to make consistent high quality art
LLMs don't compete with artists, they are more about text.. (Large Language Model)
Now, I get faster turnaround and more choice/control in a self-service fashion. Do the resulting images hit the exact same highest possible high notes that a $20 or $50 piece of fiverr would? No, but they're usually 95+% as good and I get them in 2-3 minutes and can rev them as much as I care to.
I used to work in games; for game artwork, I suspect that creating custom in-house tooling may allow N/3 artists to do the same work as N artists could back in 2010. If it's even 3N/4, game studios will make that investment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming? The difference between AAA and the rest is not so much in quality these days, but sheer quantity . Quantity of NPCs, artwork, music, items, skills, vehicles, levels, etc. etc. And it takes a small army of artists/designers/PMs to do all of that stuff, not to even mention the actual dev team.
That sort of thing seems really ripe for LLM/AI disruption?
"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total." 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)
It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I need Starcraft 3 badly :) I do too, but I don't think Blizzard are going to be the ones to make it[1]. [1] https://playstormgate.com
Have you already seen Zerospace?[1] I think it also looks great and there are some SC/SC2 pros involved in making it [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/
What made SC interesting, like most Blizzard IP of the time, was also the well written story lines with amazing character arcs, that kept people invested, and not that it was a strategy game of space marines versus organic aliens versus energy aliens. They even made sure to give story-time to the regular units as you unlocked them, not just the heroes.
There were a lot of other similar strategy games at the time, and they all flopped (anyone remember Submarine Titans?). The first alpha release of SC was also mocked for being basically "Warcraft in space" so Blizzard had to step up and make SC special, and they did. The second game was less impactful than the original, but still good and memorable due to the story.
Maybe I'm out of touch with modern gaming, but I don't see how this can succeed. If I want to play SC I can just get the real deal, and not just something that looks like it.
The RTS games market is relatively small and niche nowadays and already saturated with quality established franchises from the past, so Zerospace would need to bring some new kick-ass revolutionary ideas to the table and not be just be "copy my homework but change it a bit" variant of SC.
"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total." 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)
Be careful what you wish for, the soul of Blizzard is long dead. You can see this with Diablo 4, which is a completely soulless ARPG. With the latest season 3 launched yesterday, it's just not a fun game and it's clear that whatever processes and people they have at Activision Blizzard, they haven't got something in place that lets someone say, "Wait, shouldn't this be fun?". While D3 had it's fair criticism at launc…
what was that saying, "embrace, .." I forgot the next part
There's a lot of weird criticism of MS there but this is the first time I've seen them criticised for not doing EEE?
I'm saying they are exactly doing EEE, at a corporate level
This extinguishing of a bunch of taken-over staff might be a natural consequence of the 'merger' (duplicate roles and all that), but the embrace itself was totally invalid if you ask me.
"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total." 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)
The blizzard you know is completely dead. No one from their classic games is around. No one who made Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc is around. Those games were made as a labor of love.