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Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

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Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#151

Post by eightysixfour »

pizza234 wrote: post #111
eightysixfour wrote: post #13

There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go. I'm not saying it didn't happen but the article is just raging at the idea of it happening without presenting any evidence of it. I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management…

> There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go Scott Miller said it himself: > Big day today at Id Software [...] today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go [...] With literally the best of the best coders in the industry.

I like Scott Miller but he doesn't work there and "insider" information after layoffs is almost always part of a PR game by one side or the other. Again, not saying he is wrong, just that a tweet from someone secondhand really doesn't do it for me as evidence anymore.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#152

Post by gruez »

TylerE wrote: post #101
gruez wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

margins can't be compared to interest rates, because it's comparing revenues against costs. Comparing that with interest rates yields nonsensical results. If you want a proper comparison, you'd need return on capital, which requires you to figure out how much capital is in the gaming division.

Why not? If you input $1000 into process A which returns $20, and inputing $1000 into process B returns $30, you'd be insane to invest in process A and not process B, right?

That example only says 3% margin is better than 2% margin, not whether the hypothetical process yields better results than a bond paying 4% (or whatever). If the said process takes exactly 1 year to complete, and requires all the inputs to be provided upfront, then its margins can be directly compared to bond yields, but businesses are rarely that simple.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#153

Post by tapoxi »

branon wrote: post #77
ndiddy wrote: post #19

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…

For me this falls apart on the consumer side of things. UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines. Optimization is especially worse. UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps. I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. Homogeneity of this type is horrible for customers of the gaming sector.

I am not a graphics engineer so I hope someone corrects me, but my understanding is that Unreal uses a deferred rendering pipeline to handle complex lighting, and deferred renderers only work with temporal anti-aliasing.

The FSR/DLSS upscalers are typically superior to TSAA and are a reasonable replacement.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#155

Post by xboxnolifes »

lenerdenator wrote: post #80
eightysixfour wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think this is the wrong diagnosis of this situation. The studios in Microsoft gaming appear to have been given a lot of room to take risks under previous leadership, build passion projects, etc. while letting big franchises sit on the side. Those things ended up being anywhere from abject failures to small successes - where some players and critics loved them - but most don't seem to be commercial successe…

The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk. Sure, you can do well: Skyrim was a big step up from Oblivion, for example. But you can also screw things up (see: Halo), or fall into the trap that Valve has fallen into with Half-Life 3 where the expectations of the public can never be truly met. I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people i…

Making the next wow is not low risk. Making a largescale, successful MMO is probably the riskiest endeavor in video game development.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#156

Post by bcjdjsndon »

0xWTF wrote: post #130

Interestingly, Id was led by John Carmack, who was also a big fan of VR. And Microsoft killed the AR/VR/MR teams a year ago. So, I'm guessing internally there were some leadership hopes that IdTech would help support IVAS and related professional AR systems and when those failed to be adopted at scale, IdTech lost a key sponsor. I'm guessing it's been a rough year of internal advocacy since.

Carmack had left id by the time he got into vr/at, iirc they snagged him from a rocket company?

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#157

Post by kajman »

Lerc wrote: post #117
ndiddy wrote: post #19

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…

This kind of argument has been made since the days of renderware. I have seen a number of projects go from 'We're building our own engine' To 'we should have just gone with $engine_of_the_day' To 'We were so lucky we chose to make our own engine' If you want to make a game like fortnight, the Unreal is your pick. If you want to try something that hasn't been done before you could do worse than rolling your own engine…

> Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.

I loved the old STALKER games, and the wackiness of their engines was a lot of the charm. I ended up buying the new one out of nostalgic dedication and it's probably the worst example of "Unreal slop" I've experienced, having not bought many newer games. I'm sure the butchers running Xbox have run the numbers and think they'll make even more money throwing armies of contractors with allegedly fungible skills at the next Doom games, but I'll leave others to bankroll that while I enjoy games I don't need frame generation for.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#159

Post by chilmers »

It's sad to watch corporate leadership try to fix problems with tactics that will only make them worse. MS bought successful studios who were successful precisely because their of unique technical and design culture. Now they plan to homogenise them into a content-creation blob that will churn out entries for existing franchises, using the same tools and approaches as the rest of the industry. Anything that was special or unique about those studios and their games will be lost, and the result will be a downward spiral of mediocrity that will cause players to lose interest even further.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#160

Post by bayarearefugee »

mock-possum wrote: post #106
londons_explore wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the current trajectory of AI, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.

100% disagree. If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI? I would love to see what a game developer - nevermind released - that way would look like.

> If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI?

The scabs who don't strike?

I'm pro-union and unlike the person you are responding to I'm not sure things are "dead in the water", but I do think software developers had a much better leg to stand on to push for unionization a few years ago than they have now (and, probably, going forward).

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