MudMan

@MudMan@kbin.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Studio CEO Refutes Ubisoft’s Subscription Model Comments⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree that dev to user is best, and I agree that the current greenlight processes for game publishers are pretty busted, no arguments there. I also have bigger issues with the sub model he's not even mentioning.

  In fairness, though, I think for majors with that busted greenlight process the sub model does enable some games to get made that wouldn't otherwise. Some games just don't work at full price and just can't stack up to the major productions but they do get checked out in a sub. For smaller games and devs the sub money can guarantee survival.

  But that doesn't take away that a subscription-dominated market is poorer, the preservation issues or any of the other problems with that being the primary thrust. Tech guys tend to be all-in on things and think they should be THE way because more money is more optimal and if they dominate then that's more money. In reality for a content ecosystem to thrive a multi-window ecosystem is probably best. Also, I want to buy games I can own, and the less they let me do that the more I want it, so... there's that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Confirms Plans To Release Xbox First Party Games “Across All Platforms”, Including PlayStation⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm not sure if you read my comment backwards or you're just agreeing with it?

  Anyway, yeah, I think hte big problem gaming subs have is that unless you have first party ownership over every game in existence you can't do the Netflix thing of pretending to be selling the only expense you're ever gonna need. The way games work you engage with them too long and they cycle around too fast, so even if there is a big pool of games they offer it's just a big fat pit of FOMO and feeling bad for seeing that game you're mildly interested in come and go without actually having played it. I already have a stressful backlog without adding the pain point of monetizing my not getting around to all the games I'd like to play.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Confirms Plans To Release Xbox First Party Games “Across All Platforms”, Including PlayStation⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Kinda. This is the exact opposite of that, in that they control the IP and went out to find an external dev with lots of subject matter expertise to make it.

  On paper I'd say that's better than them buying Relic off of Sega, but then Sega fired a bunch of people at Relic this year, like everybody else, so what would have been better is very much up for debate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Confirms Plans To Release Xbox First Party Games “Across All Platforms”, Including PlayStation⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm not sure who "they" is in this scenario. If it's Microsoft Games Studios... well, yeah, they're a publisher. You just described what a publisher is.

  I think if we're talking about their recent publishing strategy they've certainly been on a bit of a rut. There's still some interesting stuff happening with their IP. They got Relic to make a surprsiingly faithful Age of Empires, people do like Microsoft Flight Sim, that type of thing. But still, yeah, they've made a lot of purchases and we haven't seen new games coming out from most of those to justify those purchases, which does speak to a bit of a struggle to find a direction. That Hellblade sequel looks intriguing, but for a publisher with a lot of fully owned studios that has been fighting claims of monopolistic practices for their high profile acquisitions their output from that stable hasn't picked up pace yet.

  I get it, games take forever to make now. That Hellblade game has been marketed for as long as the Xbox Series has, and that came out in 2020. Still, that itself is a problem. If the big oil tanker is hard to steer you have to plan your turns before you get to the icebergs. I do genuinely hope they get it together, though. That's a lot of talent, IP and potential to let run on idle for too long. Or worse, to fail in the context of a major corporation and stop getting support.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Confirms Plans To Release Xbox First Party Games “Across All Platforms”, Including PlayStation⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  OK, but that's not how reality works, you're making up offenses that nobody has committed because you've decided a particular brand is "bad" while ignoring actual offenses from brands you like and so have decided are "good".

  So no, I'm gonna have to say your hypotheticals don't make their offerings any worse (or better) than Microsoft's or Valve's. Now, the pricing and lack of content? Yeah, we can talk about those. But those don't have anything to do with preservation concerns, lack of ownership or content churn, which are all legit issues with all digital distribution and subscriptions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Veteran Videogame Analyst: Subscription growth has flattened [in video games]⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are valid criticisms, for sure. I was not in the original thread, though, so I don't know how willing to address those he is, but it's a valid point that it's not an all or nothing proposition. You can point out that subs aren't overtaking the market in gaming without implying that they should.

  I'd be more interesting in debating whehter subs are additive or not. I do know of anecdotal mentions of stunted sales on sub-forward releases, but I'd love to see more data about it (and what that means about revenue eventually, too).

  But none of that influences the concerns on preservation one way or the other.

  Honestly, I don't think you're right about the reasons growth has flatlined. I think the sub model just doesn't fit gaming best. The content just doesn't work well with the rotating carrousel of new and new-ish games most subscriptions have. I think Nintendo could be onto something, in the way Netflix was early on, in that you may be more willing to pay a fee to just have access to every single game before a certain point and from the beginning of time, but nobody is gonna figure that one out anytime soon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Confirms Plans To Release Xbox First Party Games “Across All Platforms”, Including PlayStation⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, it has its uses. So do the subscriptions from Ubisoft or EA, though.

  All I'm saying is that the digital distribution outlets that people like and have a good reputation (Game Pass, Steam) still have all the downsides that people love to get mad about in the alternatives they dislike. That doesn't mean you should refuse to use the ones you like, but you should probably keep an eye on the effects it has on the art form and the industry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Veteran Videogame Analyst: Subscription growth has flattened [in video games]⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean... yeah. Turns out that having models and looking at the actual data and analyzing the market tends to land on lukewarm takes. The hot takes are for the press and the trolls.

  FWIW, I don't have visibility on subscription growth at all, so I'll have to take his word for it, but none of that sounds unreasonable.... except maybe for the fact that the hype may make people make bad moves and double down in ways that are harmful, so a degree of fearmongering can be useful, if only as a deterrent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Confirms Plans To Release Xbox First Party Games “Across All Platforms”, Including PlayStation⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Admittedly, that's helped by them doing terribly at selling hardware.

  But also, screw gamepass and the subscription model overall. If we're gonna crap on Ubisoft for their recent foot-in-mouth episode let's be consistent and call all of it out. I'm cool with this as long as I can keep buying these in boxes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Employees Say ‘Sizable Portion’ Of Gearbox-Owned Studio Has Been Laid Off⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You absolutely did not, but keep guessing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Employees Say ‘Sizable Portion’ Of Gearbox-Owned Studio Has Been Laid Off⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes.

  My point stands.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Employees Say ‘Sizable Portion’ Of Gearbox-Owned Studio Has Been Laid Off⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Both of those things can be true at once. I don't know how much the marketing is "stupidity", ideally marketing makes you money. Execs being overpaid is absoutely a thing.

  But even if you took those out games would be very expensive to make. When you have hundreds of people working on something for years numbers start to get very high. Scale is a bitch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Employees Say ‘Sizable Portion’ Of Gearbox-Owned Studio Has Been Laid Off⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If it was all contract work it'd be better, probably. Devs would have representation, like actors or film directors, and they'd sign up for a project at a premium in the understanding that they're getting paid for the downtime after the project ends.

  The kinda shitty part is that everybody is a full time employee but you still get frequent layoffs after projects end. That's the worst of both worlds, especially in the US where there are basically zero mandatory protections. In places with actual labor regulations it's... kinda expensive and self-defeating.

  It is true that the layoffs get reported but the hires do not, so a lot of devs get rehired fairly quickly or start new projects and studios, so it always seems like there are devs getting kicked to the curb when there's a baseline of churn and cycling. That said, 2023 has been a very, very, very shitty year for the games industry for a number of reasons. Which sucks, because it's been a great year for games themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Employees Say ‘Sizable Portion’ Of Gearbox-Owned Studio Has Been Laid Off⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  According to a quick search engine query, EA had 13500 employees as of 2023. He's proposing a $50-150 monthly pay rise, which is... not much of an upgrade.

  Making games is expensive, you guys.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did we give up on insulation?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Bricks used in houses have big air gaps in the middle (which you can also insulate if you want to, both inside and outside.

  That said you can do a lot with mass. I lived in a concrete building in a place with similar extremes and it did keep the heat very well, on account of those walls being half a meter thick. The glass windows were so bad at insulation by comparison that you could sometimes feel a breeze coming from the panels even when they were fully sealed just because the inside air was dozens of degrees warmer than the glass.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games that force you to make hard choices⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Did you miss the "no spoilers, please" bit in the OP? That's a dick move.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don't disagree on principle, but I do think it requires some thought.

  Also, that's still a pretty significant backstop. You basically would need models to have a way to check generated content for copyright, in the way Youtube does, for instance. And that is already a big debate, whether enforcing that requirement is affordable to anybody but the big companies.

  But hey, maybe we can solve both issues the same way. We sure as hell need a better way to handle mass human-produced content and its interactions with IP. The current system does not work and it grandfathers in the big players in UGC, so whatever we come up with should work for both human and computer-generated content.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That's not "coming", it's an ongoing process that has been going on for a couple hundred years, and it absolutely does not require ChatGPT.

  People genuinely underestimate how many of these things have been an ongoing concern. A lot like crypto isn't that different to what you can do with a server, "AI" isn't a magic key that unlocks automation. I don't even know how this mental model works. Is the idea that companies who are currently hiring millions of copywriters will just rely on automated tools? I get that yeah, a bunch of call center people may get removed (again, a process that has been ongoing for decades), but how is compensating Facebook for scrubbing their social media posts for text data going to make that happen less?

  Again, I think people don't understand the parameters of the problem, which is different from saying that there is no problem here. If anything the conversation is a net positive in that we should have been having it in 2010 when Amazon and Facebook and Google were all-in on this process already through both ML tools and other forms of data analysis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm gonna say those circumstances changed when digital copies and the Internet became a thing, but at least we're having the conversation now, I suppose.

  I agree that ML image and text generation can create something that breaks copyright. You for sure can duplicate images or use copyrighted characterrs. This is also true of Youtube videos and Tiktoks and a lot of human-created art. I think it's a fascinated question to ponder whether the infraction is in what the tool generates (i.e. did it make a picture of Spider-Man and sell it to you for money, whcih is under copyright and thus can't be used that way) or is the infraction in the ingest that enables it to do that (i.e. it learned on pictures of Spider-Man available on the Internet, and thus all output is tainted because the images are copyrighted).

  The first option makes more sense to me than the second, but if I'm being honest I don't know if the entire framework makes sense at this point at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of this can be traced back to the invention of photography, which is a fun point of reference, if one goes to dig up the debate at the time.

  In any case, the idea that humans can only produce so fast for so long and somehow that cleans the channel just doesn't track. We are flooded by low quality content enabled by social media. There's seven billion of us two or three billion of those are on social platforms and a whole bunch of the content being shared in channels is created by using corporate tools to make stuff by pointing phones at it. I guarantee that people will still go to museums to look at art regardless of how much cookie cutter AI stuff gets shared.

  However, I absolutely wouldn't want a handful of corporations to have the ability to empower their employed artists with tools to run 10x faster than freelance artists. That is a horrifying proposition. Art is art. The difficulty isn't in making the thing technically (say hello, Marcel Duchamp, I bet you thought you had already litgated this). Artists are gonna art, but it's important that nobody has a monopoly on the tools to make art.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It's not right to say that ML output isn't good at practical tasks. It is and it's already in use and has been for ages. The conversation about these is guided by the relatively anecdotal fact that chatbots and image generation got good so this stuff went viral, but ML models are being used for a bunch of practical uses, from speeding up repetitive, time consuming tasks (e.g. cleaning up motion capture, facial modelling or lip animation in games and movies) or specialized tasks (so much science research is using ML tools these days).

  Now, a lot of those are done using fully owned datasets, but not all, and the ramifications there are also important. People dramatically overestimate the impact of trash product flooding channels (which is already the case, as you say) and dramatically underestimate the applications of the underlying tech beyond the couple of viral apps they only got access to recently.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. The effect of this as currently framed is that you get data ownership clauses in EULAs forever and only major data brokers like Google or Meta can afford to use this tech at all. It's not even a new scenario, it already happened when those exact companies were pushing facial recognition and other big data tools.

  I agree that the basics of modern copyright don't work great with ML in the mix (or with the Internet in the mix, while we're at it), but people are leaning on the viral negativity to slip by very unwanted consequences before anybody can make a case for good use of the tech.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think viral outrage aside, there is a very open question about what constitutes fair use in this application. And I think the viral outrage misunderstands the consequences of enforcing the notion that you can't use openly scrapable online data to build ML models.

  Effectively what the copyright argument does here is make it so that ML models are only legally allowed to make by Meta, Google, Microsoft and maybe a couple of other companies. OpenAI can say whatever, I'm not concerned about them, but I am concerned about open source alternatives getting priced out of that market. I am also concerned about what it does to previously available APIs, as we've seen with Twitter and Reddit.

  I get that it's fashionable to hate on these things, and it's fashionable to repeat the bit of misinformation about models being a copy or a collage of training data, but there are ramifications here people aren't talking about and I fear we're going to the worst possible future on this, where AI models are effectively ubiquitous but legally limited to major data brokers who added clauses to own AI training rights from their billions of users.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  OK, what I'm increasingly getting from this thread is that one-off kinda scammy touristy places get over-reported and maybe mixed up with outdoor stand-alone toilets? Stuff gets presented like "in EU you have to pay for public toilets" in clickbaity travel articles, but it seems to be more like people were in one scammy place that was chargning and that's what gets talked about? Maybe I just don't go to enough tourist traps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Where was this? The times I've been in France I was there with friends and I've been in Paris for maybe four hours in my entire life, but that sounds like it was either in the 90s or you were being scammed in more ways than the toilet.

  I mean, what I can tell you is I'd definitely found a different toilet unless this was a free-standing outdoors latrine and I was in a hell of a hurry, just based on the fee, let alone the squatting toilet thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As fas as I know there's nothing keeping restaurants or bars from charging to use the toilets. Also as far as I know, and I've used public toilets in restaurants and bars in most of the countries you list many, many times over several decades, those are exceedingly rare and absolutely not the norm. That was true 40 years ago and it's true today.

  The type of toilet is a different thing and yeah, until maybe the late 90s a lot of Europe was no stranger to squatting toilets. Honestly, for pubs and places where you're mostly disposing of the drinks you're having, I'm not even sure they're a bad idea. Less accessible and whatnot, but I'm not sure a sit down toilet with a carefully developed patina of beer urine developed over years of sloppy drunken aim is a safer or cleaner proposition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, no, me too. I've peed in a couple of those in just the past few months, and in hundreds in my life, and I haven't paid money once. Like I said elsewhere, the one time I've seen a paid toilet in a place it was a public transportation hub and both I and other patrons seemed full-on outraged.

  Clearly we have experience in different places and it seems like this is a regional thing. I just don't know which regions that is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Right. That tracks with my experience. So when Americans are all weirded out by "paid toilets" in Europe, do they mean those? I always read that as them finding they had to pay for toilets in businesses or restaurants.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I've been in the UK dozens of times and never seen those. I guess I just don't pee out that often, but in the pubs and restaurants I've been to it's never come up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm not entirely sure of the logic of why somebody would be cleaner after paying 50 cents than otherwise. It seems like a move to keep away homeless people, but even then, it's not that hard to secure fifty cents and unless they have a timer going in there, which seems ill-advised, it wouldn't help either.

  In any case, I've only ever seen them in outdoor latrines and rarely in public transportation hubs. They are definitely not the norm anywhere I've been.