You’re 100% correct at a sane company. At my employer the hardware team is incentivised to cut costs and impacts to productivity are someon else’s problem. Corporate metrics lead to some pretty hilarious situations.

Not sure, but I would suspect that AI output would likely be very similar to procedural generation output in that it will need some massaging before it can be used as a final asset.

Procedural generation of content in games is by no means a new thing. Even if the end state isn’t completely procedurally generated, odds are a version of the asset was initially and a human touched it up as necessary. When you’re talking about large asset sets (open world and/or large maps, tons of textures, lots of weapons, etc) odds are they weren’t all 100% hand made. Could you imagine making the topology map and placing things like trees in something like RDR2?

That’s not to say all this automation is necessary a good thing. It almost feels like we’re slowly chugging through a second industrial revolution, but this time for white collar workers. I know that I tell myself that I would rather spend my time solving problems vs doing “menial” work and have written a ton of automation to remove menial work from my job. I do wonder if problem solving will become at least somewhat menial in the future.

I started buying games after buying myself an OG play station. Even back then, I remember $40 and even $50 MSRP game prices. Their greatest hits line was discounted to $20. Final Fantasy 7, which remains an all time favorite of mine, was $50 at launch.

Their greatest hits line was generally priced at $20, which offered a way of discounting games after launch. IMO man games in Steam follow a similar pricing strategy these days - high launch prices with discounts later.

Note that I’m not advocating for the digital only model. Not being able to sell your games again is super lame.

See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation

Strategic lawsuits against public participation (also known as SLAPP suits or intimidation lawsuits), or strategic litigation against public participation, are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition

There are many, many variants. The idea is the smaller player can’t really afford to fight in court, so even if the larger actor has shaky legal claims they will still win.

Thanks for the follow up!

Red dead redemption 2 didn’t stop at being pretty. If it did I don’t think we would all talk about it so fondly. Totally agree that it’s a great looking game though.

Thanks for following up! I played the OG halflife when it came out, so I will be sure to check this out.

Let us know what you think of it! It certainly looks like it could be entertaining.

It’s probably significantly more than 10-25 million a year in additional wages given the quality of employees, but it’s still likely pocket change next to things like the marketing budget. I work in a more capital intensive industry (tooling, hard parts, etc), but we still spend a few billion on engineering. Know what else we spend a few billion on? Marketing, amoung many other things. Job cuts always make me chuckle because they’re a, “we’re doing something” but we spend orders of magnitude more on material, facilities, etc.

I am aware of them, but given my general lack of focused fitness I am fairly ambivalent about a fitness tracker. I do spend a decent amount of time chasing my kida outside and take the stairs/park far away at work, but my smartphone does a good enough job at tracking those activities.

A smart watch/fitness tracker makes sense if you’re actively engaging in use cases that they will enhance, but that’s not the case for me right now. I just want an easy way of knowing what time it is and I’ve learned to manage notifications on my phone so the important ones still catch my attention.

I’m also not a proper “watch guy”. I have one watch I wear daily and two vintage watches that don’t run very well and I don’t have the $$ to repair so they sit in a drawer.

Soviet watches are a great rabbit hole. Thankfully, I’ve managed to stay on the sidelines for the most part. I do have a CCCP automatic that will only keep time for more than one day if I wind it, but that’s it. There are a whole bunch of interesting designs out there though.

I bought a mechanical watch about five months ago and honestly, it’s been great. I’ve been through… way too many smart watches over nearly ten years and was getting tired of not getting more than two-three years out of them before something failed. It seemed wasteful. Yeah, standalone GPS tracking and what not was neat, but I nearly always have my phone on me these days. I wore watches, granted Iron Man and not mechanical, all through middle and highschool and ditched them when cellphones really started becoming ubiquitous. It’s funny how I’ve come full circle.

Amazon is also a store, but they have sponsored listings that get preferential placement. Not technically ads, but very similar idea…