On the bright side, I wonder how many new studios will spawn out of this?
Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
271–280 of 322 posts
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same, in 20+ years doing this, I've never seen it this bad.
Were you around for the dot com crash? You said 20 years so it sounds like you started when the wave began right after the crash.
I was around but very young and not working in Silicon Valley proper. I think my first tech internship was just a year or two after that, can't remember exactly.
Never really had trouble finding work on the West Coast since then though. This year, I was unemployed for half a year (after quitting voluntarily) and finally found work with a European company. Guess the boom times are over! It's AI or bust now, lol (and I have neither the skills nor the interest to work in ML).
Keep in mind though I'm also a nobody, some rando self taught web dev coming from the LAMP world into React. We're pretty much bottom of the barrel as far as programmers go, so I'm not surprised I'm not a competitive candidate! I love the frontend, but more for its visuals and UX than coding. It's a very far cry from AI or algorithms or really any sort of non visual coding.
The kind of I stuff I used to get paid for when I was younger, Wix handles effortlessly now (and I recommend it my clients too... don't pay me, just make it yourself on Wix in a few hours). React's probably headed down the same path: https://v0.dev/
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs don't compete with artists, they are more about text.. (Large Language Model)
LLMs translate textual descriptions and are part of GenAI compute.
> LLMs translate textual descriptions and are part of GenAI compute.
You are talking about embeddings. This is a different things. It's when model generates binary presentation (embedding) of the prompt given. Then this embedding is used to condition generator's output.
LLM is usually a text model which can predict next words, in its basic form. After tuning it can do more, like answer the question, follow instructions.
So, models used by generators aren't exactly LLMs. With one exception that I know: ChatGPT processes prompt before sending it to DALLE-3 generator. Which then makes embedding off it.
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is necessarily the case for fiction, where creativity is more important than perfect accuracy (ie hallucinations could be a good thing). LLMs have access to more training material than a human writer could reasonably read in a lifetime, and have a large statistical model of "drama" that's way more nuanced than your typical side NPC. I don't see this as an either/or situation where they'll replace t…
I wonder whether LLMs will turn out to have a sort of uncanny valley of their own when it comes to producing creative works from incomprehensibly vast training sets. Will LLM novels, for example, be an unlimited spigot of things we enjoy or will we look at it and get the uneasy feeling that it isn't human and decide we would rather deal with the unevenness of human creation because it is human?
There's probably enough for different audiences! I love LLM writing the same way I love Hitchhiker's Guide, liberally random and unfettered by traditions. Readers who value literary tradition and the old greats would probably have a different opinion.
As a (hobbyist, not money making) writer I treasure ChatGPT's ability to both generate new ideas and to discuss my stories with me. I would then rewrite those ideas in my own words (which I enjoy). It's a partnership IMO and I wish I could give ChatGPT shared credit without marking the work as "tainted" in the eyes of most.
I hope someday we can treat AI with the same respect, or more, that we give each other. Society's not there yet though.
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs don't compete with artists, they are more about text.. (Large Language Model)
For background imagery in in-house presentations, I have switched almost entirely to genAI artwork. Previously, I would use a combination of licensed stock image services and small commissioned pieces on something like fiverr. 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? N…
Bumping you up for making progress ;)
From what I've seen generators are good for routine job. Like generating the background. I used it go generate illustrations to the texts. It works well. Short story just looks better when there is an image.
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
So did the homeworld series. Story isn't enough. AoE2 had online and so did StarCraft so they stayed. Homeworld never got that, without the story, multiplayer and mods it's not quite up there. I remember CoH2 was popular, but you're right it's hard for me to want to try something other than AoE2 or SC, when they're pretty perfect.
> Story isn't enough. Characters and stories is everything. It keeps consumers invested and loyal to the franchise, even when the gameplay is boring and repetative, instead of jumping ship to a game with equal mechanics. It's why so many still cosplay as Kerrigan, Mario, Link, etc. It's how so many people remember Ezio and Altair instead of the other forgettable characters that followed.
And yet SC2 didn't really deliver on that in its two expansion packs (the base campaign was great though).
Meanwhile the non-campaign gameplay, while polished, is hardly innovative (a common issue with the commercial RTS games compared to the fan-made ones).
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#277Last time the stock market was surging, everyone was hiring. This time it's different
Check out section 174. Due to some GREAT legislation you can no longer write off engineers as an expense... it makes SWEs a tax liability instead of a write-off. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
Due to some GREAT legislation
One of these changes was Section 174, set to come into effect 5 years later, in 2022. These parts deliver the blow by making it clear that software development costs need to be amortized over 5-15 years. Most experts expected Congress to push back the Section 174 amendment to a later date, or simply remove it. But Congressional negotiations to repeal the changes fell apart at the last minute in December 2022, meaning it became law. "
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, Activision Blizzard was always chasing revenue at the expense of everything else. They got away with riding the coattails of Blizzard for a while, but eventually everyone figured out what was going on. My "favorite" part was watching them kill Overwatch with Overwatch League. Overwatch was popular because people played it casually. Activision thought it would be great to make it a professional sport. Eventually…
Larian, FromSoftware, Gunfire, Grinding Gear... the smaller studios are putting out great games still, with much of that 90s magic. There's that new game Palworld too apparently making a stir (haven't tried it yet), from another small studio. It's the big ones that have jumped the shark and gone full-in capitalist. I mostly just ignore them and haven't felt like I've missed much. So many good indie titles coming out…
I guess technically Larian and GGG are "smaller" than even Activision-Blizzard before the buyout, but they aren't "small" either any more. (And GGG has been mostly owned by Tencent for a few years now.)
Path of Exile 1 is a glorious mess that anyone remotely interested in the genre should try (don't give up in the first act like most players, it gets way better), but currently at least with quite ridiculously bad performance, which is particularly aggravated by it being an online-only game of which you cannot play the old DX9 32-bit version any more, which had at least an order of magnitude smaller hardware requirements.
(And you aren't indie if you release on Steam (especially only !) like Palworld. (Or if you rely on a subscription-based platform like Unity, like [insert "indie" X].))
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#279Earlier 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/
Unfortunately, I'm not impressed at all. It looks and feels like a cartoonish bootleg of SC with AI generated Fortnite-looking artwork. 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 stor…
What made SC interesting, like most Blizzard IP of the time, was also the well written story lines with amazing character arcs
Is there an alternative universe version of StarCraft which had good writing? Because the one I played had pretty standard SciFi plots and characters. And while Sons of Liberty was adequate if perfunctory, the writing in Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void is some of worst writing to make it into a finished media product.
StarCraft succeeded based on its technical and audiovisual polish, despite the lackluster writing.
That being said, Zerospace and Stormgate both look cartonish, but that's the graphic style they have chosen. They have budgets and teams a small fraction of the size of Blizzard, so the lack of visual polish can be forgiven if the game mechanics are good.
Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty old, and I've NEVER had issues finding a job. I've been unemployed for 6 months now. Thinking about getting out of software development TBH. It isn't that I'm a bad developer, I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews, but nobody is hiring. The positions that do open up are swamped with tons of people. The culture also is pretty toxic, especially in the startup world, and with AI now ente…
Skimming your comments: You deeply detest everything related to AI, cloud, and startups. It’s not age discrimination per-se, but it’s because you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for. You can probably find a job doing maintenance on some PHP or Rails app that hasn't been updated since Obama’s first term, but the pay is likely also going to come from that era.
>you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for.
because only AI, cloud, and startups are hiring? What a weird interpretation to make of someone based off of a comment history on the internet. We don't even know what domain they work in.