Yes siree, the excitement never stops!

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • Yeah this is because (if we limit the scope to multiplayer games), the gaming world is sooooooo used to basically minor niche hit or mediocre games that are not actually that fun and engaging that when an /actual/ hit comes along, everyone’s brain explodes.

    A decade or two ago you would actually fairly commonly have multiplayer games that were actually hits, actually had broad appeal, that had actual continuous sustained growth from actual organic recommendations.

    That hasn’t happened in such a long time that its now practically inconceivable.

    In the last roughly 5 years, barring an occasional indie hit with actual staying power, Multiplayer games have been so lackluster, flawed, exploitative or all of those combined for so long, promoted by giant marketing campaigns and hype machines, that everyone has just gotten used to new game come out, its not that great, but NEXT GAME SOON!!!, buy, rinse, repeat.

    An actually good multiplayer game with wide, broad appeal is now so nearly totally unimaginable to the basically intelligencia and managers and CEOs of the video game world that the very language of describing video game popularity has morphed to accommodate the expectation of expensive mediocre garbage that is thrown away when the next flashy bauble comes along.





  • As a person who used to work at MSFT:

    I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.

    They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

    The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

    Itll probably take half a decade.

    For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

    Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

    I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.

    We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

    Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

    Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

    The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.


  • MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.

    Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

    The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.




  • Also by this guy’s correct logic, Deus Ex is more truly an RPG than FF7.

    Good luck explaining that to a JRPG fan without them becoming either manic or passive aggressive though.

    Dont get me wrong, FF7 is a great story… but… as with nearly all ‘RPGs’… youre not really role playing, as role playing involves meaningfully being able to … play… the role you want… for your character(s).

    Nearly all RPGs are more like role insertion: you are this character and this is how their story goes.

    The Witcher and Mass Effect series both attempt to avoid this… though I’d argue that the Witcher series pulls this off far more convincingly.

    Oh and of course Cyberpunk 2077, which is actually a great game now that its had years to get fixed up.

    These 3 are still ultimately linear stories, but at least choices in decisions you make or things you do or do not do can have pretty significant impacts on the grander world / main storyline.

    Hell, Kenshi is a better role playing game than most linear story ‘RPGs’ too, though you’ll likely need a few dialogue expansion mods for this effect to become more obvious/convincing.






  • Youre looking at this from the perspective of the consumer, not the business side.

    I dont disagree at all that YT streaming is not up to par with Twitch.

    But theres no immutable law that says ‘there must be an easy to use internet video streaming site.’

    I think that Amazon shifting toward Twitch needing to be more soley responsible for its own profitability will reduce its growth in user count, and eventually, as with so, so many other online websites with huge upkeep expenses but very little income stream… this will inevitably lead to death of the service/site.

    I could be wrong about the amount the growth slows down by, but yeah I certainly wouldnt expect Twitch to be around, at least not without huge amounts of monetization compared to what there is now, in 5 years.


  • Giant tech firms are actually /notorious/ for investing huge amounts of money into basically experimental/risky ventures, and then pulling the plug.

    Google in particular… Stadia, Google Places (or whatever was the name of their attempt at out Facebooking Facebook).

    MSFT has done this a bunch… even a lot of non really ‘Tech’ huge corporations do this as well, with increasing regularity since the Mergers and Acquisitions trend started in the 80s.

    The way they are able to do this is that they have core business branches that are able to functionally internally subsidize these risky ideas, with the math on it all only making sense if the risky idea that needs to be subsidized can remain subsidized until it either turns a profit on its own, or is absolutely essential to a syngergistic business plan between other business lines under the same corporate banner.

    However… as a large multi faceted business such as this faces as economic downturn?

    Generally what happens is all the top management starts getting nervous and wants all of their sort of sub businesses to be more self sufficient.

    Now Twitch in particular is basically a burning money pit, a black hole.

    Amazon acquired because they assumed it would keep growing rapidly.

    But… when you start making the average Twitch user have to pay more money, view more ads, etc, to use the site, this functionally starts a death cycle.

    Making Twitch have increased responsibility for its own profitability necessarily slows down the growth. And the growth rate is required for running Twitch to make sense in the long run.

    Tl:dr: Yeah, they saw a path to profitability, overall, for all of Amazon, and now that path includes more monetization for Twitch which will necessarily lower the growth number of Twitch, which makes that original overall profitability plan look more like it doesnt include Twitch than including Twitch.


  • Just popping in here to toot my own horn:

    I called this happening when whatever his name is, Twitch CEO man, gave the public speech/stream being very, very appreciative of Amazon for their support.

    When you do /that/ it means your business model is a failure.

    EDIT

    https://sh.itjust.works/post/12652127

    (no clue if this is somehow against some rules or some kind of lemmy instance feud, but heres the thread with my original post)

    Anyway, Twitch is quite likely to ultimately basically kill itself with this move, and Amazon will either spin the employees off into existing Amazon sub sections, possibly but not likely do some nonsense like keep the twitch brand name but dramatically re orient the site, or, most likely, just slowly lay off more and more twitch employees and formally pull the plug, while retaining the brand rights and web url, all that kinda stuff.

    I give it about 2 years before one of those scenarios comes to fruition. Could be faster if insanity twitch drama gets even more insane than normal.


  • Yes it is true that the seeds of the oligarchs that would emerge were sewn by inadequacies of the former Soviet system, but

    1. Dear god is that complicated, difficult for non Russian speakers such as myself to get a thorough grasp on without a good deal of research, and not something I feel I could approach accurately and correctly summarize.

    2. I didn’t want to do the Putin thing and explain the entire history of Russia, I figured starting at the collapse of the Soviet Union is a decent starting point for giving at least an incredibly brief but hopefully accurate bit of historical context focusing on Russia under the leadership of Putin.