They get things wrong at a far higher rate than most of the websites that tend to end up at the top of a web result, and they get things wrong in weird ways that won’t stand out to users in the same way a shitty website will. These probabilistic text generators are much better at seeming like they have the correct answer than actually providing it.

It’s crazy how much money they are losing, and that’s with most of their compute being provided by Microsoft at cost, if not for free in exchange for the use of their models in Microsoft products.

Both they and Anthropic talk about their business as if they’re a software as a service company, but most SAS doesn’t get more expensive to run the more users there are, not to mention their conversion rate of free users to payed users is abysmal. Like, it’s an unsalvageable train wreck of a business model, I don’t see ether surviving more than a year unless they radically change their business models.

As other’s mentioned, probably more a way to fire a bunch of people without having to do so explicitly.

Microsoft seems to be on a warpath this year regarding layoffs. I wonder if maybe they’re trying to compensate for some giant black hole in their budget. Like, keep the costs looking stable even as some specific department balloons out of control without providing commensurate revenue. Wonder what that could possibly be?

Yah, I agree.

At the very least much better optimized, with what length there is focused on meaningful content rather than low effort padding.

Again, it requires market pressure, something that a boom in portable games on less performant devices could cause.

Something like the steam deck or the original switch were probably on the upper end of meaningfully “portable” in that sense, and even they can’t really compete with smartphones on that front. But with the currently available chips/batteries/screens, you cannot really get much smaller without starting to limit the games that can be played on them.

There is a whole other conversation to be had about game optimization and the push in large parts of the games industry towards more power intensive games. If the PC/console games space had an incentive to better optimize for lightweight devices, that could change. Especially if something shifted on the smartphone storefront market that created more demand for better less exploitative games there.

But, they do for mobiles, because mobile app storefronts force micro transactions to go the through them and they take a significant cut on each one. The 30% apple tax for example.

So they have a huge incentive to put F2P slop front and center which other storefronts on other devices don’t. In the context of steam, they do make money on the micro transitions of games that valve owns, but they make more money selling everyone else’s games over all, so they still have a reasons to show those.

It’s not so much saying that other storefronts are angles who love their customer, but more that their incentive structures are aligned differently.

If there were significant shake up in the mobile storefront market, or in terms of how they can make money, there might be a shift in they type of content they push.

How much of it is that no one is willing to pay 20 or 30 dollars for a mobile game, and how much is it that anyone willing to pay is unable to find them, or has just given up on the segment entirely.

Of course the mobile store fronts have no incentive to increase the visibility, because a free to play game is liable to make them significantly more money in the long term due to their cut of each micro transaction.

PC game and console storefronts are full of free to play slop, but they’re not the first thing people are shown, even when they are popular. They make an active effort to highlight quality games, and thus users willing to pay for them can actually find them.

There is a lot to be said of the atrocious design of mobile application storefronts.

It’s a very interesting trend, it seems like companies are convinced that this form factor is the future, that consumers will choose something with a portable option over something stationary.

Like when the steam deck and switch came out, they both did well, I think the switch did well mainly on the grounds that it was the Nintendo device for that console generation generation. But they’ve hardly taken over the market.

I think the console industry kind of just wrote off the mobile market because they were late to the party, despite it being immensely profitable and a huge market segment. It seems now they’re becoming interested in it again, and I wonder if it’s due to there being an unmet demand, people who want to play games outside of their living room, but who are turned off by the state of games on mobile.

Like, the mobile games market is just a swamp, and people who want a more meaningful experience than a time waster puzzle game, or a cash grab gatcha game, are kind of left out in the cold. Maybe this is the legacy games companies seeing an opportunity, all it would take to smash that opportunity is for the mobile phone games market to start being… not awful.

The problem is that for a lot of people it has become a substitute that has filled the void left by the slow destruction of other social organizations and institutions. It’d be easy to say that social media sites like Facebook killed them, but I think they were already throughly hollowed out and made inaccessible by the economic pressure on people to be ever more productive workers and ever more economy driving consumers.

To ask people to dispense with whatsapp, instagram or facebook is to ask them to abandon their ability to be part of communities that matter to them. It’s sort of an intractable problem as it requires whole communities to abandon ship together, which is difficult to do. The solution to the problem is to easy that process and decrease barriers to doing so.

It’s one of those situations where we see how kind people can be, and how indifferent and cruel to that kindness a depersonalized organization can be.

The type of thinking that says “ well, yah, sure users won’t like ads in the start menu, but we need to make money on the unlicensed installs, and they’ll switch to something else if we brick them for not paying, so we’re going to inflict this on paying users as well, because they’re not going to switch.”

Is the same type of of thinking that says “well, this government is willing to sign a huge contract to use our infrastructure, but only if we punish anyone in our organization who speaks out against them, so we’ll just fire anyone who does so. This would be much harder if they were all unionized, but luckily we nipped that in the bud.”

Microsoft’s organizational and incentive structure makes these outcomes inevitable. Profit before people is the rule.

The Streisand effect.

It’s so crazy to me that people will rush out and try and ban tools like these, rather than force car companies to use more secure systems. Like, banning these is futile, they’re not that complex of a device to make, the core issue here is that car companies have fallen over them selves to be “tech forward” to justify pushing further in to the premium price range, but have completely failed to secure their systems.

there probably shouldn’t be a lot of friction for things the player isn’t supposed to be focused on, like say the interface should be unobtrusive and easy to navigate, a player probably shouldn’t have to use moon logic to figure out how to open a door. Things that aren’t the focus shouldn’t require the player’s focus.

but a story driven game should have the player focusing on the story, not actively encouraging them to ignore it!

Players who don’t care about the story would probably be better served by a different game altogether.

the industry has also be caught in the grips of budget gigantism by an influx of investor cash for the past decade.

Outside investors saw dollar signs with the rapid growth of the market, and also huge financial successes like fortnight. So they were willing to put up a lot of funding in hopes of outsized returns. Pressure from investors and management meant appealing to the largest audience possible, and also chasing the latest trends. Despite the huge budgets, the games were unfocused and bad, both from trying to appeal to too many audiences, and constantly changing direction during development to chase trends.

I think that’s kind of the kicker, a lot of studios and franchises got big based on the quality of their story telling, but did poorly with audiences that were just there for the gameplay. The gameplay in these games is there to serve the story, to support it and facilitate it, not to shine by it’s own merits. But if you’re just there for the gameplay and don’t care about the story, then the gameplay will be boring.

So they’ve sanded down the story to make it easier for people who don’t care about it to follow what’s going on, and thus make the gameplay work for them…

But now you have a story built to serve gameplay, and gameplay built to serve the story. Nether is good on its own merits, so no one really likes it.

To me it feels like there is a fundamental dissonance in the video game industry. Where major publishers and studios can’t seem to internalize that there are two things that people might come to a game for; Video games as experiences, narratives, things to be explored; and video games as … well games, a set of mechanics to be interacted with, to be challenged by. This isn’t to say a game can’t be good at both, but many games are weighted one way or another.

Factorio is a truly absorbing gameplay experience, but it doesn’t really have a story beyond what is needed to frame and flavor the gameplay.

“Vampire the masquerade: bloodlines” is a classic of atmosphere, character interaction and role play, but just about everyone who played it will tell you the combat is serviceable at best, and there is one level in particular that most people just remove with a mod because it’s just combat, with no dialog or interactions with other characters.

So many major studios and publishers seem to routinely focus on the wrong elements of previously successful games. Taking the wrong lessons and misunderstanding what made previous title’s a huge success.

People are not coming to your story based RPG to play it mindlessly while listening to a podcast or audio book. If people are doing that, then clearly they’re not coming to it for the story, and the solution to that issue is to write a better story or refocus around what ever they are coming for.

Oh boy, I can’t wait for the thriving trade in VPN accounts made outside of the UK then sold to UK citizens by a third party.

Pot calls the kettle black.

Like, they’re both liars. Both are making unreasonable promises to suck up as much capital as possible.

“No, you see, we promise all this tech is real and awesome. It’s totally another hyper growth market that will drive economic development! Ignore the fact we’re slipping in to recession despite this being a “booming” market.”

The thing is, companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are already profitable, so it could lose them huge amounts of money, with no real meaningful benefit to user retention or B2B sales, but the companies as a whole would still be profitable. It could be a huge money black hole, but they continue to chase it out of unjustified FOMO and in an attempt to keep share prices high through misplaced investor confidence.

Apple’s share price has taken a pretty big hit from the perception that they’re “falling behind” on AI, even if they’ve mostly just backed away from it because users didn’t like it when it was shoved in their face. Other companies are probably looking at that and saying “hey, we’d rather keep the stock market happy and our share prices high rather than stop wasting money on this”.