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Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

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Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#71

Post by loregate »

safog wrote: post #52

FAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs. It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work. Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be ama…

True, it's good as a one shot generator to then get a bunch of results and decide which to keep. Once you have to modify the generated result you usually also don't have layers or context to easily modify it anymore, so you end up wasting if not more time than if you would've done it yourself. This doesn't apply to everything though and it's good at prototyping and getting a general idea or feel for the thing that you're trying to make.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#72

Post by reaperman »

pimlottc wrote: post #60
safog wrote: post #52

FAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs. It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work. Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be ama…

FAO?

"For Attention Of" https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fao#

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#73

Post by zelias »

iammjm wrote: post #8
AlexandrB wrote: post #6

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/

Having spent some time watching showmatches for both games, my observation based on current 1v1 development is that Stormgate is intended to appeal to a wider audience whereas Zerospace targets the more "hardcore" RTS fanbase.

In any case, I expect them both to be good. I'll probably spend too many hours playing both of these games.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#74

Post by blackmesaind »

usrnm wrote: post #49
ramesh31 wrote: post #23

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.

Larian Studios has 450 employees, and BG3 completely blows any other modern RPG out of the water in terms of the sheer amount of fun content inside the game

Many of the assets were reused from previous work (DOS 1/2). They did put in an insane amount of work over a very extended period, though.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#75

Post by pohuing »

oblio wrote: post #54
aaomidi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the advances in AI, I really hope coop vs AI gameplay will be made better.

I don't think there are any advances in real time AI. We're still stuck with the same bad AI from the late 90s. Oh, or if there is better tech, nobody really uses it, everyone focuses on multiplayer because $$$.

The world's best starcraft players got smashed by Deep minds AlphaStar a while ago. The only way to win was by limiting the apm. Turns out with perfect control you don't need very complex strategy.

One of the games if you're interested in an anaylsis: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nbiVbd_CEIA

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#76

Post by adamrezich »

xnorswap wrote: post #30
iammjm wrote: post #3

"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…

people need to get used to the idea that brand-name recognition doesn't mean anything anymore once said brand no longer represents what it once did. very few game development studios perpetuate the internal mindset they became known for, as its constituent developers get ship-of-theseus'd out. sure, you might have some fans of the old brand now working there, but merely being a fan of something doesn't necessarily confer the ideology and mindset of those who created the thing you were a fan of. as time goes on, you get to the point where studios hire fans of the latter-day output of the studio, rather than the earlier stuff, such that the studio drifts farther and farther away from its former identity. then, especially after a massive corporation like Microsoft buys the studio out completely, the studio becomes a mere husk of its former glory—completely different people with an entirely different mindset continue to wear its skin.

perhaps after more of this corporate downsizing continues to occur, people will start small, passionate studios again, and this time maybe some of them can effectively gatekeep when hiring so as to perpetuate a brand identity/mentality going forward—but I doubt this will happen in any significant way.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#77

Post by ohhnoodont »

mikeortman wrote: post #19

It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?

It's the case for all large tech companies. Headcount increases in software engineering projects result in diminishing returns per-individual, but the increase is still there (if managed correctly). For example a 100 person team may not be 10x as productive as a 10 person team, but they may be 5x as productive. A 1000 person team may only be 3x as productive as 100. And so on until you have many thousands of engineers that can slowly move mountains and maintain massively complex and interwoven systems.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#78

Post by oblio »

solardev wrote: post #50
asylteltine wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just played Diablo 4 season 3 (which launched a couple days ago) for a bit, and sadly I have to agree. It's such an empty, soulless game. Reminds me of Starfield, regurgitated sameness. Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc. are all so much better, and made by tiny studios (though sometimes backed by Tencent, like with PoE). With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thi…

> With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol.

I have bad news for you :-)

The trend with more automation is for more sameness, not less, unfortunately.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#79

Post by HideousKojima »

AlexandrB wrote: post #6
iammjm wrote: post #3

"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 :)

> 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

And even if they did, after they failed so miserably at remastering an RTS they'd already made I don't trust them to make a good one from scratch. Nor do I trust them not to screw over the mapmaking and modding communities after the license changes they made in SC2 and WC3 Reforged

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#80

Post by yreg »

iammjm wrote: post #20
two_in_one wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't compete with artists, they are more about text.. (Large Language Model)

No, the art that LLMs are generating is already amazing and getting better each month. There's even LLMs that generate whole videos.

That's not LLMs.
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