241–250 of 628 posts
It’s painful to watch this because the recipe for success at Microsoft is so obvious. They’ve just been fumbling the ball for so many years that it’s catching up to them. And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.
What is the recipe?
2) ...
3) profit!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the current trajectory of AI, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.
Yup. I was one of the self-taught software "engineers" from the 90s. I enjoyed making more money than I deserved for my special interest and for the duration of my career I was very much against software engineering unionization as it seemed to mostly be gatekeeping for a lucrative and enjoyable line of work. Now I'm 40+ years old and my job has morphed from designing systems and writing code to sweet-talking LLMs in…
Don’t sell you company to Microsoft then
$2.93 trillion market cap....layoffs Bizarre incentives we have created
Those are de facto separate organizations.
Microsoft, one the world's greatest monopolists, bequeaths a game engine monopoly unto Epic Games, in one the biggest corporate blunders of all time. If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.
What monopoly did they gift? IdTech hasn't been licensed to external companies in over 15 years, and several major versions ago. The last non-Id release on IdTech was Brink in 2011.
Microsoft's game divisions make money through making games, so opening up the engine itself would've been conducive to their goals (cultivating an ecosystem of devs and even contractors familiar with the tooling).
idTech rendering is more competitive with Epic's Unreal technology than Unity and Godot.
They should simply open source it if they fire the devs. Else the engine and future support for the games built on it are essentially being tossed into the trash.
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With the current trajectory of looms, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water. - Someone in the early 19th century
Yeah I think the 19th century was a little bit different than today. Unions only work as far as you, the worker, are irreplaceable. Plumbers, electricians, etc. -- all that work has to be done "here and now." You can't just instantly teleport a bunch of Indian plumbers to fix a broken water main in downtown New York. Those tradeworkers have actual leverage. And, to your example, what is feasible to outsource (either…
"The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), commonly known as the First International [...] was founded in 1864 [...] The preparatory Address of English to French Workmen, drafted by trade union leader George Odger, articulated the need for international cooperation to prevent the importation of foreign workers to break strikes:
A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labour, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labour, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians and others to do our work at a reduced rate of wages [...]"
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…
You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times. For most of the 90s and 00s, your game engine, specifically idTech in this case, was a competitive advantage. Doom and Quake/2/3 all represented massive technological jumps over their predecessors and were way ahead of their competition in terms of looks. Games like Unreal (Tournam…
After entering games with naive expectations of the wild west of the 90s, I would recommend other programmers not enter the AAA space, if compensation and job security are concerns. Indie game development looks like great fun, but don't expect any low-latency programming.
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Why is that? Companies still need employees, and ai makes it more obvious than ever that workers need to organize together for their rights.
Unions have 33% voting power in Volkswagen board. Germany has very strong labor protecting laws. Replacing line engineers and operators is very difficult. Volkswagen is firing 100k employees in Germany none the less. The idea that you can successfully unionize in software..in US..Where you could simply retain a small number of staff key members pay them very well and put them on a mission of outsourcing and milking t…
Unreal Engine has become a commodity, and it is easier to recruit people with experience - even CD Projekt Red gave up. The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda. I would not include Cloud Imperium here because they are forever in a beta state with no clear ship date in the future for their two games.
Is Ubisoft's Anvil still alive or is it just in an unknown status after they cancelled a few upcoming titles?
That said, Capcom is still doing their own thing via RE Engine...
Not sure about any others...
Much of the gaming industry outside the indie space has stagnated, making sequels that don't offer much outside of slight increases to graphical fidelity and the odd thematic switch.