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Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

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Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#271

Post by mschuster91 »

ptx wrote: post #242
ryandvm wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is unionization gatekeeping? I honestly don't understand what you mean. I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.

The basic principle is everyone gets the same pay, meaning if you are someone who wants to put in a lot of work to rise up quickly, it won't happen.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#272

Post by anthonypasq »

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…

giant corporations arent interested in hiring skilled artisans or artists. it doesnt matter how skilled your team is with idTech, the chances of success for any video game are just vanishingly small and inconsistent.

it feels to me like the AAA game industry is like hollywood except the budgets are higher and there are even lower chances of success. i mean theres literally multi hundred million dollar games that essentially made zero dollars. Even shitty blockbusters make some money.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#273

Post by lenkite »

epolanski wrote: post #233
sdenton4 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Volkswagen Group (and in general German manufacturing) profits slumped by ~50% because of banning Russian gas and stringent U.S. import tariffs. The increase in gas costs made German manufacturing uncompetitive compared to China.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#274

Post by mghackerlady »

gruez wrote: post #72
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…

>It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans. Can we extend this elsewhere? Are tech companies' decision to use popular programming languages (eg. python) or software (eg. postgres) part of some dastardly ploy to make programmers "a replaceable commodity ... rather than a cohesive team of skilled…

why else do you think Javascript is used for everything these days? It's not because it's good, it's because you can teach it to a brain dead 12 year old that can then be hired to build everything from web apps to, at this rate, a very bad OS kernel

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#276

Post by ActionHank »

markus_zhang wrote: post #265
LarsDu88 wrote: post #63

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.

However, is it easy to work with an undocumented IDtech engine? Even a previous generation, say Rage? I think it’s very hard.

How many UE5 games run even remotely well? I've not played one.

Doom runs like butter on the switch.

Might be hard to run, I don't know, but at least it was well made.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#277

Post by anthonypasq »

sph wrote: post #260
Lerc wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m new to game dev and been developing a 3D engine for my game after dabbling with Godot. I read a lot of opinions on whether it is a good idea and it all boiled down to ‘my god, no, don’t write your engine. That said, I did and I am sure glad I did invest 3 years on a framework I know like the back of my hands’ and that told me exactly what I wanted to hear. It’s like the whole AI debacle, really. If your goal is t…

so you agree then that no professional game developer should make their own engine right? because their job is to ship a product.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#278

Post by BikiniPrince »

mjr00 wrote: post #104
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…

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…

It’s a little simpler than that. The games that use this engine have poor sales and no one is even buying idTech. There isn’t any reason to keep them around when Microsoft is losing 64 cents on every dollar. They chopped every unprofitable studio and cast several to their own budgets. Presumably they are going to sell off the mediocre studios and IP.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#279

Post by sph »

markus_zhang wrote: post #265
LarsDu88 wrote: post #63

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.

However, is it easy to work with an undocumented IDtech engine? Even a previous generation, say Rage? I think it’s very hard.

The entire 2000s FPS scene was built on variations on the Quake Engine. And it got us Half-Life.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#280

Post by anthonypasq »

datakan wrote: post #213
kcb wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What unsuccessful game does Blizzard have?

All of them. Diablo is dead. They can't capitalize on StarCraft. All they have left with WoW is micro transactions for old users. Overwatch has been a disaster for years. Blizzard hasn't had a win in a very long time.

lol
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