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Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

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Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#581

Post by Grombobulous »

inigyou wrote: post #471
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org. I'm trying to think of a Microsoft acquisition which has been a success. Nothing comes to mind.

Minecraft didn't get shut down yet, only enshittified. I believe it's still very profitable due to the enshittification? I heard they sell skyblock maps for $8

I don’t fully agree with this because the original experience (Java version, private servers, 100% free content) is still extremely popular and the same as it always was.

I think it would be enshittification if Microsoft said “sorry, you now have to rent servers through us and all content comes from our content shop,” but that’s not the case.

Merely offering a product that has a bad value is not enshittification.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#582

Post by pdpi »

Cpoll wrote: post #283
munificent wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry. The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Players like some amount of familiarity, but they want new experiences. Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of…

> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. I think this is a bit of a myth. Unreal gets this criticism a lot, but it's usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look. To that point, it's probably a lot cheaper to configure Unreal or Unity into a unique "grain" than it is to develop your…

In the photography world, there's a similar story around the colour you get from straight-out-of-camera jpegs.

Unless you shoot Fuji (where their absolutely incredible film emulation engine is one of the big differentiators), most serious-ish photographers shoot raw rather than jpeg, and do their own processing after, so the sooc jpeg look is largely irrelevant.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#583

Post by tclancy »

wpm wrote: post #495
tclancy wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why villainize her specifically? Seems like the whole division has been in limbo for a decade. Maybe there are good reasons, I am uninformed on the matter, but hesitant whenever a woman gets run over in tech fora.

Because she is literally the head of Xbox and signed off on this plan Being a woman doesn't make her not responsible despite being the ultimate decision maker in the division, nor should it shield her from criticism.

That's my question reworded: she wound up being in charge of this particular sinking ship at this particular point in time. Did she hole it below the waterline personally or no?

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#584

Post by Ekaros »

ActionHank wrote: post #276
markus_zhang wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't lower end rigs. But I think Satisfactory has been reasonably well optimised outside extreme cases... So certainly with effort it can be made to work.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#585

Post by cyber_kinetist »

flohofwoe wrote: post #547
midnightclubbed wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure, if you restrict what can (and can't) be done in shaders you can optimize buffer layouts and rendering passes, not allow things that explode shader permutations/switching or explode shader instruction count and kill occupancy. The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.

> The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials. ...which is a good thing tbh. No game needs hundreds or thousands of custom materials.

I think it can actually be a bit better in terms of artistic consistency to have a fixed set of materials you can work with in a given game. Very important if you want any sort of stylized rendering!

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#586

Post by superxpro12 »

inigyou wrote: post #472
sailorganymede wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing that annoys me. They have the Fallout series hostage and moves like this sadden me because I can't expect the next game to particularly great when stuff like this happens.

You can make a fallout game yourself if you don't call it fallout.

This is atomfall, is it not?

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#587

Post by pfdietz »

embedding-shape wrote: post #577
pfdietz wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can view the horrific performance of MSFT's gaming division as an example of successful anticompetitive behavior. It is not in any way sustainable, as demonstrated by their slash and burn actions now.

And you're arguing that FTC should only act against potentially successful anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior? Who cares how high the chance of "success" (from Microsoft's POV), shitty behaviour is shitty behaviour, regardless or not if it's successful.

Yes, let's penalize entities for pre-crime. What could possibly be wrong with that? /s

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#588

Post by thewebguyd »

pfdietz wrote: post #587
embedding-shape wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're arguing that FTC should only act against potentially successful anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior? Who cares how high the chance of "success" (from Microsoft's POV), shitty behaviour is shitty behaviour, regardless or not if it's successful.

Yes, let's penalize entities for pre-crime. What could possibly be wrong with that? /s

Prosecutable anticompetitive behavior doesn't require success or not. Antitrust law forbids "attempted monopolization" doesn't matter if the monopolist succeeds or not. Its about intent and systemic harm, and slash and burn tactics does often run afoul of antitrust laws. Its structural risk to the market, not precrime.

The FTC's role is to block mergers where the effect "may be substantially to lessen competition, or tend to create a monopoly." Merger review by design is predictive.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#589

Post by filoleg »

formerly_proven wrote: post #459
teamonkey wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unreal’s limitation is that it doesn’t know how a shader will be used until it actually tries to render it on the target hardware. This is a trade-off to gain flexibility and rendering performance. The engine has to compile shaders on the fly when it is first used, which is fine if the shader is simple, but nowadays that usually is not the case. There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime pla…

Console vs PC is a red herring since UE games still stutter on consoles, people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway. You can read Unreal's own blog posts on this and they'll actually explain that this is mostly down to their material system (and game logic/scripts reaching into it) being designed to create nearly infinite shader variations on the fly in response to arbitrary world/game state…

> [...] people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway

This is just plainly not true anymore, as far as the current gen consoles (PS5, XBox Series X) go.

I just searched for every major/notable PS5 game built on UE5 specifically (i.e., no UE4), which wasn't super difficult, given there are 31 of them. I might be missing a few, but that sample should be representative enough.

TLDR: 28 out of 31 UE5 games on PS5 have a performance/60fps mode, making it a ~93% share.

P.S. For posterity, here is the list of games I used for this sample:

> Fortnite, Marvel Rivals, The Finals, Tekken 8, The First Descendant, Clair Obscur, Lords of the Fallen, Remnant II, Immortals of Aveum, RoboCop, Black Myth: Wukong, Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill f, Wuchang, MGS Delta, Oblivion Remastered, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Hellblade II Enhanced, Mafia: The Old Country, Talos Principle 2, Jusant, Still Wakes the Deep, Cronos, Until Dawn post-patch, Banishers, Fort Solis, Layers of Fear, Quantum Error, ARK, and The Casting of Frank Stone

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#590

Post by thewebguyd »

toast0 wrote: post #376
thewebguyd wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry could have been in a better place already if the DOJ hadn't allowed Microsoft to buy up all these studios. I have near zero hope we'll see any meaningful antitrust action in the future either without a complete overhaul of the incentives in politics. Xbox div's annual revenue is $23 billion. Its big enough to be its own company and sit upper-mid pack of the F500 on its own. It'd be the number 3 or 4th to…

> The industry could have been in a better place already if the DOJ hadn't allowed Microsoft to buy up all these studios. Yes, but it's not the DOJ's job to tell Microsoft when they're lighting their money on fire. There's no unfair competition from this kind of thing. It wasn't any different when leather companies or old media would buy up studios and run themselves out of business. Microsoft buying out studios coul…

The acquisitions don't have to be successful to run afoul of antitrust laws or to be anticompetitive. Slash and burn often does violate the law.

Firing thousands of people and closing studios reduces the overall capacity of the industry to produce diverse, competing games. Just because Microsoft is Microsoft and is incompetent doesn't mean the rest of the industry and consumers don't lose out on what those independent studios could have created on their own.

In terms of antitrust/whether the FTC should have allowed the mergers is purely predictive. Microsoft looking like idiots from it has no bearing on whether the behavior of buying them up itself is anticompetitive.

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