Category Archives: Commentary
Live Service
In “researching” my Concord post, I came across this IGN article in which analysts were asked why the game failed. One answer in particular was extremely interesting in a state-of-the-industry way:
“Live service games have a high failure rate,” Deane said. […] But while the risks are big, so are the rewards. It’s no secret that many of the highest-earning games in the market today are live service games. According to our data, only about 16% of the total revenue of the games market now comes from traditional full-game sales. Publishers are going to keep chasing that 84%.”
On the one hand, it shouldn’t be that shocking, right? Fortnite, Genshin Impact, GTA Online, Call of Duty, every MMO, and almost every mobile game are all live-service titles. Fortnite by itself generated an estimated $5.7 billion in revenue in 2023, for example. That’s per year. Genshin is another billion per year, GTA Online (aka GTA5) is approaching $9 billion lifetime revenue, and so on. Also, apparently Call of Duty mobile hit $3 billion total revenue in only four years and is now officially where the majority of CoD players are. Oh, and I guess Minecraft is also a live service game too? Another $300 million or so.
On the other hand: Jesus fucking Christ. 16%?! What the goddamn shit? Holy mother of god.
Ahem. Well, there you go. That’s the state of the industry right now. Or I suppose been the state of the industry longer than I’ve been paying attention. If you’re interested in just making like, a game, you’re competing over literal scraps. “Why are there so many live service games these days?” Right now I’m amazed there are still regular games. Of course, 16% of $350 billion is still $56 billion, but that’s much less than, say, $294 billion. And of that much smaller number, you are competing across all the available genres of regular games. Good thing development costs aren’t too prohibitive…
Cut the Concord
Statistically, you have never heard of it, but Sony is shutting down their new Overwatch-like hero shooter called Concord. After two whole weeks. On Steam, Concord apparently never broke 700 concurrent players at launch. The writing was probably on the wall from earlier when the open beta population was worse than closed beta – plus it launching as a $40 B2P in a sea of F2P competitors – but the sheer scale of the belly flop is shocking nonetheless. It is rumored to have cost $200 million, and for sure has been in development for eight (8!) years.
And now it’s gone.
You know, there are people out there that argue games should be more expensive. Not necessarily because of the traditional inflation reasons – although that factors in too – but because games costs more to make in general. Which really just translates into longer development times. And yet, as we can see with Concord along with many other examples, long development times do not necessarily translate back into better games. There is obviously some minimum, but longer isn’t better.
And yet, we have these industry leaders who suggest MSRP should be higher than the now-standard $70. To be “priced accordingly with its quality, breadth & depth,” as if any of that is really knowable from a consumer standpoint prior to purchase. We have reviews, sure, and Concord score a 70 from IGN. What does that tell you?
The overall way games are made is itself unsustainable, and an extra $10-$20 per copy isn’t going to fix anything. Indeed, there seems to be a blasé attitude in the industry that a rising MRSP will lift all the boats instead of, you know, causing the ones on the periphery to slide down the demand wave curve. Suppose GTA6 is released at $80. Is the argument that a consumer’s gaming budget will just indefinitely expand by an extra $10/year? Or will they, I dunno, just spend $10 less on other titles? Higher prices are certainly not going to expand the market, so… what?
As far as I can see it, the only reasonable knob to turn appears to be development time and nobody seems able to do it. I’m not trying to handwave away the effort and brute labor necessary to digitally animate mo-capped models in high fidelity. Or creating and debugging millions of lines of bespoke code. But I am asking how long it does take, how much of it is necessary, and how often these visually stunning games fall flat on their faces in the one function of their intended existence, e.g. being fun.
Throwing more money at the problem certainly doesn’t seem to be working.
The Forever Sigh
A few months ago, I was very interested in The Forever Winter, the post-apocalyptic extraction shooter.
After reading this PC Gamer article though, my interest has dropped precipitously:
Then there’s the water situation. This is the most essential resource, and when my hub runs out completely the area is reset, costing all of the practical and cosmetic enhancements I’ve made, and my inventory will be gutted. Even before then, when it’s critically low, some services become unavailable. And this all happens in real-time.
“One of the things that actually came up in our beta, that we’re keeping, is that the water level has real-time degradation,” says Gregg. “If you and I log off with 10 days left and you come back three days from now, you’ll have seven days left, even if you haven’t played. It’s a hardcore game, you can build up a large surplus, but that is actually part of our co-op: to make sure people help each other.”
Good fucking luck, chief.
The great irony here is that I praised them before for basically being concept artists following through on their vision way outside the norm. Not many other devs would put spacesuit-wearing flame-thrower units using American flags as hoods into their games, nevermind the battle-tanks covered in corpses as camouflage. That’s cool! If you go grimdark, go all the way.
Having an expiration timer count down even when not playing though? That’s not “hardcore,” that’s just fucking stupid. I don’t even care how easy water is to get in-game, because that is irrelevant. What is the design attempting to accomplish? Because by default, what this tells players is that any break from the game may as well be permanent. Meanwhile, the people who are playing the game aren’t even affected by this “hardcore” feature. Ask the Icarus devs how that shit worked out for them.
I guess we’ll see how it plays out. The Forever War will be in Early Access at the end of September.
Blarghest
The last time I officially joined Blaugust was back in 2015. Back then, the conclusion I came to was that it wasn’t really worth the effort: posting every single day for a month did not meaningfully increase page views. I’m not trying to chase page views per se, but you can’t become a fan of something if you don’t know about it. Discoverability is a real issue, especially if you don’t want to juice SEO metrics in suspect ways. So, on a lark, I decided to rejoin Blaugust nine years later (e.g. this year) to at least throw my hat back in the ring and try to expand my (and others’) horizons.
What I’m finding is not particularly encouraging.
More specifically, I was looking at the list of participants. I’m not going to name names, but more than a few of the dozen I’ve browsed thus far appear to be almost nakedly commercial blogs (e.g. affiliate-linked), AI-based news aggregate sites, and similar nonsense. I’m not trying to be the blogging gatekeeper here, but is there no vetting process to keep out the spam? I suppose that may be a bit much when 100+ people/bots sign up, but it also seems deeply counter-productive to the mission statement of:
Posting regularly builds a community and in this era of AI-slop content, our voices are needed even more than we ever have been at any point in the past.
Ahem. The calls are coming from inside the house, my friends.
[Fake Edit] In fairness, after getting through all 76 of the original list, the number of spam blogs did not increase much. Perhaps a non-standard ordering mechanism would have left a better first impression.
Anyway, we’ll have to see how this Blaugust plays out. I have added 10-20 new blogs to my Feedly roll, and am interested to see where they go from here. Their initial stuff was good enough for my curiosity. The real trick though, is who is still posting in September.
Bad Romance
Avowed is an upcoming Obsidian game that is, perhaps unfortunately, being more defined for what it’s not. As in, not Skyrim, not Baldur’s Gate 3, and so on. Instead, it’s… basically The Outer Worlds set in the Pillars of Eternity universe. Which is a thing they can do, I guess.
But one of the things the developers intentionally left out is causing some discussion: romance options.
Yeah, we decided to forego full romance paths in Avowed. It’s something that we thought very hard about, and we talked about it as a narrative team. I think if you’re going to invest in romance, everyone who’s writing them needs to be absolutely, fully bought in. And the other thing you need to do is make sure that if you’re going to provide that path, that you’re balancing that with an equally meaningful and well-developed, non-romantic path because you never want players to feel that, “Well, the only way I really get to know this character or really get to form a meaningful bond with them, is if I commit to romancing them, which maybe isn’t something I want to do.” So, for all of those reasons, we decided to forego romances, specifically in Avowed.
For the record, this is generally how Obsidian rolls anyway. Fallout: New Vegas didn’t have romanceable companions, the original Pillars of Eternity didn’t have any, and The Outer Worlds teased a bit but didn’t have any either. At some point though, you have to wonder if it’s more a philosophical viewpoint, personal preference, or… a lack of experience.
On Reddit however, the thread turned into a deeper commentary on romance options in games more generally. The topic did give me some pause, as the two “camps” were not necessarily in direct opposition. On the one hand, you had people who said:
That’s the best you can really expect, I think. In order to craft a mature, believable romance in a video game you’d need to spend a game’s worth of writing on top of whatever the actual game is.
And then you have people who respond elsewhere:
And I say it’s a cop out. Speaking as somebody who has devoted at least 10,000 hours to FNV.
Fallout 4 would have been a worse game without its paper-thin, gender-transparent romance. Because it nonetheless added a layer that those companions really benefitted from.
I would say both things can be true at the same time. Crafting a believable game romance is difficult, and yet a paper-thin attempt is often better than nothing. Now, obviously, no one really wants it to be paper-thin, and a lot of this is predicated on the devs being able to craft companions that you care about to begin with. We’re also kind of hand-waving away what counts as a “believable romance.”
Anyway, there are some baseline improvements all devs can make who do include romance in their games. For one: how about not having the relationship start at the last Save Point before the final boss? It’s a fairly common trope in basically all media, and I understand the function, e.g. it allows players to head-cannon their own happily ever after. And, sure, sometimes whether two characters get together is the entire plot; basic relationship maintenance is much less exciting. But I would really like to see more attempts like Cyberpunk 2077 wherein you have more interaction with your bae over time. With some RPGs that might end up too complex – imagine having to script hundreds of branching combat dialog depending on when and with whom you are smooching – but even the little gestures would make things feel more grounded in-game. Again, like with Cyberpunk’s little chat messages and such.
The one argument against romance options I do not respect though is the whole “it’s usually just a checklist of dialogue choices, a quest then fucking,” therefore why even bother including it. There might be a broader conversation to be had about how media depictions of romance may lead some to incorrectly believe real-life relationships are a matter of putting in enough gift tokens until sex pops out or whatever. But also… no. As someone else more elegantly countered:
That’s fucking cute but… isn’t literally EVERYTHING in ALL Obsidian games can be boiled down to a checklist of dialogue choices, quests, then the result. Like everything because, it’s a fucking video game? Does Obsidian even portray anything ‘truly’? Does the Outer Worlds even portray space faring economics true to life? Does New Vegas portray humans living in a nuclear shithole true to life? Does Pillars of Eternity portray island piracy, gunnery combat true to life? Is Avowed combat true to life?
Games are gamified with game mechanics, news at 11. Love bombing an NPC with gifts until they marry you is indeed not realistic (although…). But it’s not as though the player often has any choice in the language of action available in the game. You cannot wink, joke with, twirl your hair, casually touch the shoulder of, or any of the myriad of ways we clumsily indicate and/or reciprocate romantic interest IRL. If the only way you can interact with the game world is pressing E and picking a dialog, then yeah, those are the parameters on how romance happens.
Can devs do romance better within the confines of the medium? Absolutely. I really appreciated in My Time at Sandrock how there was a clear dialog option which indicated your romantic interest with an NPC, which opened up more flirty dialog later; that would prevent the sort of (now infamous) misunderstandings with Gale in Baldur’s Gate 3. Going further, my idealized “solution” would be for the player to be able to select in a menu somewhere that you are romantically interested in character X, and then subtly enhance all your interactions (body language, etc) towards that character. That may alleviate some of gift-spamming and perfect dialog choice concerns and help the relationship progress feel more natural. Or as natural as you can do via a controller and game menus.
And, yeah, writing deeper characters with more interesting personalities works too. Obviously.
Obsidian is, of course, free to sit things out if their writers aren’t feeling it. I haven’t played Pillars of Eternity 2, but I’ve heard the romances there were especially bad, and thus the devs may be feeling it’s not worth trying again. It’s also true that not every narrative needs or is appropriate for having romance options. But I do think it’s okay to be asked about romance in any game focused on developing “meaningful bonds” between characters with dialog choices because that is a thing that happens. And many players, myself included, enjoy it even if it’s at or below trashy romance novel levels. Sometimes especially if it’s at that level.
As to whether Avowed works without it, we shall see.
Forever Winter
Going to be adding Forever Winter onto my list of games that look cool that I’m probably never going to actually play:
I say that because it’s being described as a “co-op tactical squad-based survival horror shooter.” I have zero interest in playing with randoms anymore, let alone in a scenario that allows for an entirely novel way of griefing, e.g. making too much noise and getting caught by AI horrors.
Conceptually though? Game is Badass with a capital B.
While the above trailer looks amazing, it was actually this video that hit hardest:
In short, it seems like most of the people that are working on the game are concept artists that finally get to implement their concept art. A battle tank draped in bound, naked corpses? Flamethrower troops in spacesuits with American flags draped over their face? Yes, please. Granted, I did not quite see any of those in the gameplay reveal trailer, so who knows if they actually follow-through.
It will be interesting to see how the game ultimately shakes out. I’m a big fan of grimdark, post-apocalypse looting. Having to be weary of getting into fights that are impossible to win is also compelling. But there will need to be a real trick on how that translates into long-term fun. Will there be a story mode or overall plot? The trailers seem to indicate you may end up fighting “bosses” eventually, which provides something of a “why” to grind out whatever resources. But if the whole of the game lends itself to not attacking things, and possibly punishes you for doing so, it will be tricky to land the transition without feeling like the game itself turned into something else. Sort of like when you have a stealth game that suddenly has a stealth-less boss fight (Deus Ex: Human Revolution), or a traditional FPS with an annoying stealth level (too many to mention).
Regardless, I will be following Forever Winter with interest.
Guarded About Veilguard
There was an Xbox Game Showcase 2024 recently that revealed a lot of trailers for upcoming games. One of those trailers was for Dragon Age: Veilguard, formally known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. You can go ahead and watch it yourself first:
Now, the trailer is getting mercilessly shit on by Reddit. There are a lot of Dragon Age: Origin uberfans still kicking apparently (of which I am one, technically) that are appalled at “what the series has become.” Which is funny, considering Origins came out in 2009 and the series has spent more time being something else than it ever has as Origins. All the complaints about EA destroying Bioware is similarly asinine considering A) by all accounts Bioware does this to itself, routinely, and B) who is still even at Bioware 15 years later? That is a topic for another day, though.
Most of the criticisms seem to be leveled at the trailer’s Marvel and/or Fortnite crossover energy. It reminded me more of the D&D: Honor Among Thieves trailer, honestly, but I get it. Dragon Age started out as a sort of gritty, grimdark fantasy RPG and that has… mellowed over time. But it did get me curious about trailers for the prior games.
- Dragon Age: Origins – “Warden’s Calling” and “Sacred Ashes.”
- Dragon Age 2 – “Destiny Extended“
- Dragon Age: Inquisition – “The Breach“
I don’t actually expect you to watch all those, but the summary is: most are pretty damn similar, minus the Borderlands-style name introduction. Yes, there is less blood and more… rizz. The thing about trailers though is that they don’t really matter. It sucks when they suck, for sure, and can definitely dampen the enthusiasm and hype. And, yeah, they can also be indicative of a truly terrible game. But it also goes the other way, right? There are plenty of trailers better than the game they represent, or misleading at best. Just think about the best parts of any of the Dragon Age games to you, and then point me towards where that is represented in its trailer.
I’ll start:
That’s right, Scout Harding. The worst part about Dragon Age: Inquisition was that you couldn’t romance Harding, and now? A decade later you (presumably) can. Game on.
Unsustainability
Senua Saga: Hellblade 2 recently came out to glowing reviews and… well, not so glowing concurrent player counts on Steam. Specifically, it peaked at about 4000 players, compared to 5600 for the original game back in 2017, and compared to ~6000 for Hi-Fi Rush and Redfall. The Reddit post where I found this information has the typical excuses, e.g. it’s all Game Pass’s fault (it was a Day 1 release):
They really don’t get that gamepass is unsustainable. It works for Netflix because movies and tv shows can be made in a year or less so they can keep pumping out content each year. Games take years to make and they can’t keep the same stream of new content releasing the same way streaming services do.
Gamepass subs are already stagnating, they would make more money if they held off putting new exclusives on gamepass like movies do with putting them in theatres first before putting them on streaming. (source)
Now, it’s worth pointing out that concurrent player counts is not precisely the best way to measure the relative success of a single-player game. Unless, I suppose, you are Baldur’s Gate 3. Also, Hellblade 2 is a story-based sequel to an artistic game that, as established, only hit a peak of 5600 concurrent players. According to Wikipedia, the original game sold about 1,000,000 copies by June 2018. Thus, one would likely presume that the sequel would sell roughly the same amount or less.
The thing that piqued my interest though, was the reply that came next:
Yeah, even “small” games like Hellblade and Hi-Fi Rush, which are both under 10h to complete, took 5/6 years to develop. It’s impossible to justify developing games like these with gigantic budgets if you’re going to have them on your subscription service.
I mean… sure. But there’s an unspoken assumption here that these small games with gigantic, 5-6 year budgets would be justified even without being on a subscription service. See hot take:
Hellblade 2 really is the ultimate example of the flaw of Xbox’s “hands off” approach to game dev.
How has a studio been able to take 5 years making a tiny game that is basically identical to the first?
How did Rare get away with farting out trailers for Everwild despite the game literlaly not existing?
Reddit may constantly slag off strict management and studio control, but sometimes it’s needed to reign studios in and actually create games…
Gaming’s “sustainability problem” has long been forecast, but it does feel like things have more recently come to a head. It is easy to villainize Microsoft for closing down, say, the Hi-Fi Rush devs a year after soaking up their accolades… but good reviews don’t always equate to profit. Did the game even make back its production costs? Would it be fiduciarily responsible to make the bet in 2024, that Hi-Fi Rush 2 would outperform the original in 2030?
To be clear, I’m not in favor of Microsoft shutting down the studio. Nor do I want fewer of these kind of games. Games are commercial products, but that is not all they can be. Things like Journey can be transformative experiences, and we would all be worse off for them not existing.
Last post, I mentioned that Square Enix is shifting priorities of their entire company based on poor numbers for their mainline Final Fantasy PS5 timed-exclusive releases. But the fundamental problem is a bit deeper. At Square Enix, we’ve heard for years about how one of their games will sell millions of copies but still be considered “underperforming.” For example, the original Tomb Raider reboot sold 3.4 million copies in the first month, but the execs thought that made it a failure. Well, there was a recent Reddit thread about an ex-Square Enix executive explaining the thought process. In short:
There’s a misunderstanding that has been repeated for nearly a decade and a half that Square Enix sets arbitrarily high sales requirements then gets upset when its arbitrarily high sales requirements fail to be met. […]
If a game costs $100m to make, and takes 5 years, then you have to beat, as an example, what the business could have returned investing $100m into the stock market over that period.
For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline. Can the game net a return higher than this after marketing, platform fees, and discounts are factored in?
That… makes sense. One might even say it’s basic economics.
However, that heuristic also seems outrageously unsustainable in of itself. Almost by definition, very few companies beat “the market.” Especially when the market is, by weight, Microsoft (7.16%), Apple (6.12%), Nvidia (5.79%), Amazon (3.74%), and Meta (2.31%). And 495 other companies, of course. As an investor, sure, why pick a videogame stock over SPY if the latter has the better return? But how exactly does one run a company this way?
Out of curiosity, I found a site to compare some game stocks vs SPY over the last 10 years:
I’ll be goddamned. They do usually beat the market. In case something happens to the picture:
- Square Enix – 75.89%
- EA – 276.53%
- Ubisoft – 30.56%
- Take Two – 595.14%
- S&P 500 – 170.51%
And it’s worth pointing out that Square Enix was beating the market in August 2023 before a big decline, followed by the even worse decline that we talked about recently. Indeed, every game company in this comparison was beating SPY, before Ubisoft started declining in 2022. Probably why they finally got around to “breaking the glass” when it comes to Assassin’s Creed: Japan.
Huh. This was not the direction I thought this post was going as I was writing it.
Fundamentally, I suppose the question remains as to how sustainable the videogame market is. The ex-Square Enix executive Reddit post I linked earlier has a lot more things to say on the topic, actually, and I absolutely recommend reading through it. One of the biggest takeaways is that major studios are struggling to adjust to the new reality that F2P juggernauts like Fortnite and Genshin Impact (etc) exist. Before, they could throw some more production value and/or marketing into their games and be relatively certain to achieve a certain amount of sales as long as a competitor wasn’t also releasing a major game the same month. Now, they have to worry about that and the fact that Fortnite and Genshin are still siphoning up both money and gamer time.
Which… feels kind of obvious when you write it out loud. There was never a time when I played fewer other games than when I was the in the throes of WoW (or MMOs in general). And while MMOs are niche, things like Fortnite no longer are. So not only do they have to beat out similar titles, they have to beat out a F2P title that gets huge updates every 6 weeks and has been refined to a razor edge over almost a decade. Sorta like how Rift or Warhammer or other MMOs had to debut into WoW’s shadow.
So, is gaming – or even AAA specifically – really unsustainable? Possibly.
What I think is unsustainable are production times. I have thought about this for a while, but it’s wild hearing about some of the sausage-making reporting on game development. My go-to example is always Mass Effect: Andromeda. The game spent five years in development, but it was pretty much stitched together in 18 months, and not just because of crunch. Perhaps it is unreasonable to assume the “spaghetti against the wall” phase of development can be shortened or removed, or I am not appreciating the iteration necessary to get gameplay just right. But the Production Time lever is the only one these companies can realistically pull – raising prices just makes the F2P juggernaut comparisons worse, gamer ire notwithstanding. And are any of these games even worth $80, $90, $100 in the first place?
Perversely, even if Square Enix and others were able to achieve shorter production times, that means they will be pumping out more games (assuming they don’t fire thousands of devs). Which means more competition, more overlap, and still facing down the Fortnite gun. Pivoting to live service games to more directly counter Fortnite doesn’t seem to be working either; none of us seem to want that.
I suppose we will have to see how this plays out over time. The game industry at large is clearly profitable and growing besides. We will also probably have the AAA spectacles of Call of Duty and the like that can easily justify the production values. Similarly, the indie scene will likely always be popping, as small team/solo devs shoot their shot in a crowded market, while keeping their day jobs to get by.
But the artistic AA games? Those may be in trouble. The only path for viability I see there is, ironically, something like Game Pass. Microsoft is closing (now internal) studios, yes, but it’s clearly supporting a lot of smaller titles from independent teams and giving them visibility they may not otherwise have achieved. And Game Pass needs these sort of games to pad out the catalog in-between major releases. There are conflicting stories about whether the Faustian Game Pass Bargain is worth it, but I imagine most of that is based on a post-hoc analysis of popularity. Curation and signal-boosting is only going to become increasingly required to succeed for medium-sized studios.
Gaming News Roundup
Square Enix stocks tumble on news that FF16 and especially FF7 Rebirth have not met sales targets. Which would normally be concerning… if not for the fact that these games are still Sony exclusives. Which, as a strategy, appears to be changing going forward.
In response to the tumbling profits, Square Enix announced what it calls “Square Enix Reboots, and Awakens”, a three-year plan for rebooting for long-term growth. This involves a rethink across all parts of the business, but the highlight is a “shift to a multiplatform strategy.” Square Enix said it will “aggressively pursue a multiplatform strategy that includes Nintendo platforms, PlayStation, Xbox, and PCs.” […]
As part of this multiplatform push, Square Enix said it will “build an environment where more customers can enjoy our titles in regards to major franchises and AAA titles including catalog titles.” The suggestion in all this is mainline Final Fantasy games will ditch PlayStation exclusivity going forward, although Square Enix has yet to announce specifics beyond Final Fantasy 16’s upcoming launch on PC.
It really boggles the mind sometimes, how stuck in the past these game executives can be. Helldivers 2 has been a breakout smash hit, with a large portion (possibly majority?) of the playerbase being on PC; it was significant enough for the Steam review-bomb campaign to work in any case. PC receiving ports in general has improved over the years for sure, but the fact that it takes ages is moronic. It’s been over fours years and PC still doesn’t have The Last of Us 2. Horizon: Forbidden West just came out on PC like two months ago. FF7 Remake took almost two years. Ghost of Tsushima took four years. God of War: Ragnarok probably won’t be out till 2025.
Speaking of ports, Ghost of Tsushima has beaten out God of War for the top spot on the Steam concurrent user spot for Playstation single-player games, at 77k and some change. Helldivers 2 sits at 457k, by the way. I’ve heard some chatter on Reddit about how this demonstrates that Sony’s “strategy” works, e.g. only releasing games on PC after a long-ass time. I mean… I guess? Unless there is some presumption that people bought PS5s just for this game, or that PS5 owners will buy it again on PC, I think this simply demonstrates Sony delayed a solid boost of revenue for 4 years for no reason.
Fallout: London is a fan-made Fallout 4 mod that is essentially an entirely new Fallout game. You may have heard some stories about how its original April release was delayed due to the “surprise” next-gen updates to Fallout 4 that Bethesda released a few weeks back. Well, it appears that the mod is back on track to be released… sometime. Soon™! The real news though, is how the modders somehow convinced GOG to host the 30-40GB files. This was needed, as Nexus Mods has an upper size limit. These fan projects usually get killed by the suits right before release, so the fact that not only will this thing (presumably) come out, but the fact that GOG is hosting the files is extraordinary.
Valve is working on what appears to be 6v6 MOBA-like Overwatch game called Deadlock. Now, I understand that Valve has a unique sort of “structure” over there, wherein developers basically just stew in a petri dish until games extrude through the biofilm… but, really? This is whatever actual game developers still left over there have chosen to spend their time on? Christ. I guess it’s at least something, as opposed to whatever George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss are doing. Finish your fucking stories!
This AI Ain’t It
Sep 11
Posted by Azuriel
Wilhelm wrote a post called “The Folly of Believing in AI” and is otherwise predicting an eventual market crash based on the insane capital spent chasing that dragon. The thesis is simple: AI is expensive, so… who is going to pay for it? Well, expensive and garbage, which is the worst possible combination. And I pretty much agree with him entirely – when the music stops, there will be many a child left without a chair but holding a lot of bags, to mix metaphors.
The one problematic angle I want to stress the most though, is the fundamental limitation of AI: it is dependent upon the data it intends to replace, and yet that data evolves all the time.
Duh, right? Just think about it a bit more though. The best use-case I have heard for AI has been from programmers stating that they can get code snippets from ChatGPT that either work out of the box, or otherwise get them 90% of the way there. Where did ChatGPT “learn” code though? From scraping GitHub and similar repositories for human-made code. Which sounds an awful like what a search engine could also do, but nevermind. Even in the extremely optimistic scenario in which no programmer loses their jobs to future Prompt Engineers, eventually GitHub is going to start (or continue?) to accumulate AI-derived code. Which will be scraped and reconsumed into the dataset, increasing the error rate, thereby lowering the value that the AI had in the first place.
Alternatively, let’s suppose there isn’t an issue with recycled datasets and error rates. There will be a lower need for programmers, which means less opportunity for novel code and/or new languages, as it would have to compete with much cheaper, “solved” solution. We then get locked into existing code at current levels of function unless some hobbyists stumble upon the next best thing.
The other use-cases for AI are bad in more obvious, albeit understandable ways. AI can write tailored cover letters for you, or if you’re feeling extra frisky, apply for hundreds of job postings a day on your behalf. Of course, HR departments around the world fired the first shots of that war when they started using algorithms to pre-screen applications, so this bit of turnabout feels like fair play. But what is the end result? AI talking to AI? No person can or will manually sort through 250 applications per job opening. Maybe the most “fair” solution will just be picking people randomly. Or consolidating all the power into recruitment agencies. Or, you know, just nepotism and networking per usual.
Then you get to the AI-written house listings, product descriptions, user reviews, or office emails. Just look at this recent Forbes article on how to use ChatGPT to save you time in an office scenario:
The article states email and meetings represent 15% and 23% of work time, respectively. Sounds accurate enough. And yet rather than address the glaring, systemic issue of unnecessary communication directly, we are to use AI to just… sort of brute force our way through it. Does it not occur to anyone that the emails you are getting AI to summarize are possibly created by AI prompts from the sender? Your supervisor is going to get AI to summarize the AI article you submitted, have AI create an agenda for a meeting they call you in for, AI is going to transcribe the meeting, which will then be emailed to their supervisor and summarized again by AI. You’ll probably still be in trouble, but no worries, just submit 5000 job applications over your lunch break.
In Cyberpunk 2077 lore, a virus infected and destroyed 78.2% of the internet. In the real world, 90% of the internet will be synthetically generated by 2026. How’s that for a bearish case for AI?
Now, I am not a total Luddite. There are a number of applications for which AI is very welcome. Detecting lung cancer from a blood test, rapidly sifting through thousands of CT scans looking for patterns, potentially using AI to create novel molecules and designer drugs while simulating their efficacy, and so on. Those are useful applications of technology to further science.
That’s not what is getting peddled on the street these days though. And maybe that is not even the point. There is a cynical part of me that questions why these programs were dropped on the public like a free hit from the local drug dealer. There is some money exchanging hands, sure, and it’s certainly been a boon for Nvidia and other companies selling shovels during a gold rush. But OpenAI is set to take a $5 billion loss this year alone, and they aren’t the only game in town. Why spend $700,000/day running ChatGPT like a loss leader, when there doesn’t appear to be anything profitable being led to?
[Fake Edit] Totally unrelated last week news: Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia are apparently bailing out OpenAI in another round of fundraising to keep them solvent… for another year, or whatever.
I think maybe the Dead Internet endgame is the point. The collateral damage is win-win for these AI companies. Either they succeed with the AGI moonshot – the holy grail of AI that would change the game, just like working fusion power – or fill the open internet with enough AI garbage to permanently prevent any future competition. What could a brand new AI company even train off of these days? Assuming “clean” output isn’t now locked down with licensing contracts, their new model would be facing off with ChatGPT v8.5 or whatever. The only reasonable avenue for future AI companies would be to license the existing datasets themselves into perpetuity. Rent-seeking at its finest.
I could be wrong. Perhaps all these LLMs will suddenly solve all our problems, and not just be tools of harassment and disinformation. Considering the big phone players are making deepfake software on phones standard this year, I suppose we’ll all find out pretty damn quick.
My prediction: mo’ AI, mo’ problems.
Posted in Commentary, Philosophy
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Tags: AI, ChatGPT, Dead Internet Theory, Large Language Models, Luddite, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?