Will the next Call of Duty be impacted?
Asking the real questions here.
Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
151–160 of 322 posts
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#152FAO: 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…
Mini-mills.
AI isn't going to jump in there and do you another Sistine Chapel or Godfather.
You have a restaurant, it needs some random Chinese/Italian/Mexican artwork. Are you going to buy a poster? No way, just generate it and hang it up.
You have a kid who needs to be entertained. Do I get a team of 200 to write me Frozen, world class singers to sing the songs, and animators? No. We'll start with our own 5-minute Peppa Pig style cartoon.
Your widget shop needs a website. Do you go to Getty and find a shot of happy couples or landscapes taken by a professional photographer? No, nobody cares if your happy family has 7 fingers on each hand. Generate the photo, plonk it on your website.
As AI swallows the cheap, low-risk stuff, it also gains scale to do higher forms of art. Someday your detective story with weird sweaters and cops with a fcked up home life will also become AI generated.
Eventually it will climb mount impossible.
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#153I keep hearing of huge lay-offs. I wonder, is this the result of LLM’s making everything just so much quicker to code develop? I mean as soon as ChatGPT 3.5 came out, it was the first question on people’s minds so I am guessing that it’s all related and with each advancement in AI there will be more layoffs. Maybe the future consists of multibillion-pound companies which only have 1 staff member (the cleaner) to get…
I would not blame LLMs for the current wave of layoffs. Maybe in the future, but these are more likely corrections from all the hiring and growth we saw during the pandemic.
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why it it strange to cater to a demographic and not stranger to shotgun everyone into liking something?
I don't think there's that kind of singleminded focus in other entertainment industries, is there? Only a few movies or streaming shows are that pigeon-holed; usually the broader the demographics, the better. I would say comic books are more teen-boy-focused, but oddly the majority of the enthusiasts I've met were women (a classic Marvel fan, someone who had artier stuff like Alan Moore, and my sister who collects Ar…
Sports is men. eSports is men. From this logic we can understand why.
YouTube is mostly men. Porn caters to men.
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#155Earlier 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
Baldur's Gate 3 was in development for nearly six years even with asset reuse and basically being the only thing that Larian was working on. And that isn't even taking contractors into account (BG3 credits around 2300 workers).
I don't think you're making the point you think you are.
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
As a grown ass man who played Vikings/rnrr/superman/War1/War2 / War2BNE /SC1/ SC1X/{basically every released and unreleased blizzard title including alphas}, I really really wish I could see a successor game that doesn’t have pinups of women that look like they have yoga tights and crop tops for armor. It would be nice to have a game that’s a bit less thirsty.
Hear, hear
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#157Ouch, first Disney/Pixar, now Microsoft / Activision Blizzard
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Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Shouldn't these companies be able to issue stock to get some cheap capital to continue growth/hiring? Yes, but then the stock price would go down, which obviously isn't allowed.
? Not allowed. It is done all the time. Companies can issue new stock. or? are you being sarcastic about c-suit not wanting 'stock price to go down'? which could be a consequence of issuing new stock?
The latter for sure.
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, engineers have been very much at the top of every layoffs list these past 24 months. Not sure who is speaking to you.
Do you have information on this particular acquisition though? Layoffs made post-acquisition are totally different from business climate layoffs. A major part of acquisitions is eliminating redundant positions/teams. You don't need two HR or accounting departments, and the new combined department isn't going to be twice as big. Whereas if they intend to keep putting out games at the same pace, there are little to no…
Reached out to some of my friends over there and it seems like news of impacted divisions is just started to roll out. But at least at the time I'm writing this comment engineers think they could be impacted and are waiting to hear if they are.
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#160"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 :)
As long as they don't fire the Starcraft 2 intern I am good.