> What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.
Lik Sang was awesome back in the day for procuring accessories like classic XBOX controller to USB adapters that weren't dodgy duct tape jobs. Hard to believe they were forced out of business by Sony two decades ago.
They had all kinds of weird stuff which the big makers didn't want to exist - adapters to use Xbox controllers on Playstation and every permutation you could think of.
All the big console manufacturers sued them. Said it was about modchips (and maybe it really was). Sony bore the most guilt.
The gaming industry is a little less wonderful these past 20 years.
Indeed. I find myself going back to older games anymore. Aside from maybe looking forward to GTA 6, I can't say I'm terribly interested in many modern titles. It's becoming more soulless.
I maybe should have phrased that better since I do understand their announcement around disks and removing the movies is a reason why they are the current target.
I just find it hypocritical, people keep saying they are going to move to xbox or pc next gen and its like. Their policy is exactly the same. You have the same risk and not really ownership.
And I am not defending Sony, they have a long history of getting cocky with their consoles and pulling some shit. But in this particular case they are following the trend that we allowed by going all digital on PC and buying digital games on consoles.
Sony isnt going to be the one that changes this, the only way to expect change would be targeting all of them including Valve. But everyone, like this article, just seems to gloss right over that and seem to imply its only Sony that is the problem here.
On consoles in general, backing up digital media (if even possible) requires full-system exploits, thus bypassing DRM, and decrypting them also requires breaking DRM
Woah, we're not talking about cracking your games. I think every console from at least the last two generations has supported copying game files to external/removable media.
Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct. Copying doesn't matter if it doesn't produce a usable backup.
If you remove the DRM, then you do actually own the thing for practical purposes. And non-ownership of things you buy is unjust, so entertaining the law here is silly.
> Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct.
Don't move the goalposts.
The only thing I am conceding is that conceptually it still ownership if you own the encrypted bits but they work fine with some other hardware that has the keys to decrypt them. I can backup my games on one playstation and play them on another.
Otherwise, we agree ideologically. At the same time I'm rhetorically supporting the point at the top of the thread that this has been a problem long before Sony decided to go digital. I am copyleft and anti-drm and whatever else you can imagine. It doesn't change the fact that there's a precedent that consumers will purchase drm games that require a rootkit to run under ambiguous terms that make it clear they don't own the bytes and it's a true observation that for some reason people allow this to happen on PC but when Sony does it it's the end of the world. I think to make progress here you need to address the root of the issue legally, not attack Sony for doing what society has condoned for decades.
You can't back up your encrypted bits on one machine and use them on another without constant permission from Sony though. Other hardware doesn't have the keys to decrypt them (actually this is it's own issue: it's obviously a very monopolistic, anticompetitive move that you can't run a PS5 game on a commodity PC because of their encryption). As far as I know, Valve's "DRM" just calls into a dll that asks Steam whether you own it, and you can just give it your own implementation of the Steam API dll that says you do. Or many titles on Steam don't have any DRM at all.
There are reasons to criticize Valve (gambling, microtransactions, "achievements"), but they seem to be too busy making money to want to do DRM.
You can’t back up your games on one PC and use them on another without constant permission from Value either. It’s the same and that is all I’m trying to point out. DRM is a red herring, the real problem is the phone home always online bullshit.
Both Valve and Sony run a completely legal video game platform service. There are minor differences here and there, of course… but this is 100% a general intellectual property law problem, not an instanced technical implementation issue.
Let's put the actual numbers in front of people: 1,924 out of 43,179 games, or 4.4%, as of today (according to PCGamingWiki) are DRM free.
The vast majority check whether you've purchased the game at runtime. If you stick to only indie games and the one off AA or AAA with no license check on Steam then sure thou-art-holier.
I think the argument is more precisely made by saying: on Steam, while the platform supports DRM, the decision is up to the publisher whether or not a game will use it and at least that provides the option for consumers to speak with their wallet and play only DRM free games. On Playstation it's all or nothing, you have to reject the entire platform/ecosystem if you want to avoid DRM.
At large, the problem still remains that our society allows DRM in the first place and if people want to avoid it then they need to be principled activists.
> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy... but it is easily removed
And it takes about 2 seconds to find the removal tools on github. So you can treat Steam's DRM as basically non-existent. This is unlike consoles, which require kernel exploits or hardware modifications to bypass.
So we agree that Valve, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all operate platforms that support DRM. Wonderful!
I'm not interesting in bickering over who's DRM is the easiest to remove XD
In the US it's not piracy to make archival backups of digital media that you own in the first place, anyway. Even so, nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA (except for your rights under the DMCA to create archival copies) regardless of whether you backed up the media with or without the DRM.
To put it plainly your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software. I think that's an issue that should be solved, we likely agree, but let's not pretend that the situation with Steam is somehow healthy for society whereas with Sony it's not just because the DRM is slightly easier to circumvent.
> nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA
Correct, that right is innate.
> your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software
It does. Not even morally, but legally. Sony litigated this and lost, but bankrupted the emulator developer in the process. Emulators and compatible hardware and software have been consistently ruled legal. It is only the bypassing of copy protection that is not.
And if you're not interested in the feasibility of asserting your rights by removing the DRM, then naturally you'll never understand why people consider Valve and Sony materially different.
I've done my fair share of reversing, modding, rooting, jailbreaking. Asserting my rights is very interesting to me, which is why I think you're missing a fair bit of nuance. I ran this discussion through Astra to check my own recollection and it came to the point that: "copying proprietary firmware and circumventing DRM are separate questions".
The Connectix case doesn't establish a right to circumvent DRM to play games that you "own". It only provides fair use protections for emulator developers.
The Bleem case (the one where the president said the litigation bankrupt them) has to do with game screenshots in comparative advertising.
And probably most apropos, irrespective of whether DRM is used or not, there is no protection in the DMCA or other US code that allows you to circumvent an authentication check in order to play a game. So "just remove the steam dll load command, it's trivial" exposes you to the same level of legal liability as "ugh I have to strip the Sony DRM then crack my copy of <sony exclusive>".
If you look at what's happened recently, there are narrow regulatory exemptions, issued in 2024 and codified at 37 C.F.R. § 201.40(b)(19) that cover, among other things, restoring personal local play of lawfully acquired complete games after required authentication-server support ends. Other provisions permit preservation by eligible libraries, archives, and museums, including limited circumvention of console software. They do not establish a general personal right to jailbreak any console or decrypt any purchased game.
Very respectfully, I think you're conflating a few different things here. I very much wish the world was as you are trying to assert. But my own understanding of US law and case law and a check against Astra don't corroborate your claims.
How do you backup game files from a console, to an external drive/location that you own; and ensure the validity of that backup will still be usable on the console later?
It's not, though. Their ToS is the same. They reserve to right to deny you ownership of your games. Only Sony has been stupid enough to actually do it.
Every ToS in the world is designed to screw the signee over as much as it possibly can, so you'd need to go live in the woods if you wanted to escape it, but there is a tangible difference between how much companies actually abuse the provisions in their ToS. I don't know how you can say "Microsoft reserves the legal right to drill a hole in my skull" and "Sony is actively drilling a hole in my skull" are `exactly the same`.
So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too?
Instead of actually trying to fix the issue we just hope that Valve never has to do the thing they are legally allowed to do because we agreed they could.
I honestly don't care who has done what, I don't care what company is supposedly better than another company.
Overnight Valve, Microsoft, whoever could just as easily remove access to a bunch of digital purchases.
How about instead we just don't excuse any of the companies?
Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.
Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight.
The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to me that all of this is focused on Sony. And frankly I don't have a good solution here, but just arguing that one TOS is better than another because one company hasn't done the thing yet but could is not a good argument.
How many times have we seen management change, companies being bought, whatever and suddenly something really bad happens.
I am just getting really frustrated by Sony this, Sony that. Boycot sony, etc when if all we do is move to another platform with the same policies do we really expect anything to change?
We are in the most emotionally driven period of human history to date where reasoning takes a back seat. It's super frustrating but once you realize this instance isn't a one off you can start to focus on the bigger picture. I'm not saying this makes it less frustrating, but perhaps it'd help you to cast things in a new light. You're mostly talking past people who are dunking on Sony right now, because they are more interested in riding the emotional wave than actually making sense of the situation. Never mind that owning a physical disk has pretty much been dead for the better part of a decade or two anyway with day 1 patches and online activations. GIVE ME PHYSICAL DISK. To be 100% honest I think people want to put games on their shelf and look at them and any whiff of an argument is just people grasping at something, anything, rather than something based.
People did risk assessments with VMWare and we see how that turned out.
Things can change, just because you make your risk assessment doesn't mean you should ignore that there is still something in that contract that could turn on you just as easily.
Should we go back 10 years, maybe the risk would have been the same. Did Sony do any of these things then, but the policy was the same. How about 10 years from now, just because of your "risk assessment" doesn't mean that Valve is suddenly safer, just just means so far they have been safer.
I am not saying don't use Valve, but there is zero reason to believe they could not just as easily do this.
Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same. The argument is that the risk posture is the same. You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value, which is an individual value judgement and thus incredibly far from an assumed fact. Some people do care about posture more than value and different people weight value differently as I'm sure your thousands of assessments have uncovered.
In any event, I think with all the data you'd see that Value has also removed games from its platform. So I'm not sure the value gap is even as wide as you seem to be implying.
>Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same.
please re-read the part i quoted from the parent, where they say it's the same risk.
>You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value
i did not say "the only thing that matters" anywhere.
you, and the parent, are reading something into my comments that i have not written. the only thing i said is that the risk is not the same because sony has a pattern of behavior worth considering.
To be clear, you never owned the games, you own the disk that contains the games. The right they are reserving is to revoke your legal access to the games you're licensing. They can't repossess the disk, but they can deny you the right to use what's on it. Obviously digital-only also exists, in which case you own literally nothing. All that remains is the contingent access that they legally have control over.
To be clear, when I use the phrase "deny you ownership of your games", I'm talking in Common English, not legalese. We don't actually have to normalise this. Legalese aside, the social contract for decades has been that you own your digital purchases. Now that the social contract is being violated, we certainly should be striving to enshrine it in law via regulation, which would also render any amount of ToS legalese to be worth as much as digital toilet paper.
I think you're under-appreciating the importance. It's not just pedantry. This has been true since EULAs have existed. And it's kinda insane that people think owning a disk gives them ownership of the intellectual property contained on it. You've always been given a license. The difference is that you can often transfer that license by selling the physical copy of a game whereas most digital licenses are exclusive.
The ability to deny ownership does exist these days. Sony can push an update that bricks your Playstation.
So this whole thing is actually an argument over whether games should be made available in a form that allows license transfer (which I support) or not. But it's a fair point to argue that for any actual benefit the remedy has to be applied globally, not just to Sony.
Like the other commenter said, we don't have to normalize this. A reasonable jury can and should find that Sony pushing an update to intentionally brick Playstations is criminal destruction of property, regardless of what some EULA says. And we can make it very clear in the law that that's the case, and prosecute any individuals involved.
Sony can add a signature to a list and your game stops launching even if it's a physical disk is the point. We should fight back legally and prevent publishers from trampling on the rights of individuals to use bits they paid money to presumptively own. If I buy a digital asset nobody should be able to take that away from me. You can stop selling it but it shouldn't be allowed to be disabled in the field. Seems like something our society could agree on and legislate 100%.
The problem is that ownership is itself a legal fiction, so it's kind of necessarily legalese. It's interchangeable with "legitimate control" in common parlance. IE if I break into your house and throw you out of it, I don't suddenly own your house. Even though I'm in possession of it, the control I have of it isn't legitimate. Ownership is the guarantee that your possession and control of something can be defended by our society's conflict resolution mechanisms, in this case that's the legal system.
While socially we might disagree with the law on the validity of licensure in this context, that changes the domain a bit. I do have ultimate control over the games I've purchased on Steam, regardless of the law's opinion, even though they're technically licensed. I back up every game I buy, away from where Steam could be able to know to delete it or even discover it. If my legal license is revoked, I still have control over the bytes. With a steam emulator I can still access most of them (and the remainder can be fixed by setting an LLM about cracking them) but this isn't legitimate in the eyes of the law. Practically speaking it doesn't matter in the slightest what the law thinks on this matter.
Now let's consider that the rhetoric here generally includes Steam's arrangement as a perpetrator of "you will own nothing". But given the above, that's a hard circle to square. In your proposed notion of ownership, ostensibly I own everything I bought on Steam. With a little bit of technical literacy (and the money for storage, which is easier said than done these days) it can be true of anybody. It's only in the eyes of the law that I don't actually own anything, and the DMCA probably has plenty to say about it.
So do we use the legal definition, or is it merely the possession of the software and means of access that constitute ownership? It's exactly this edge case which is why I insist on this pedantry. Otherwise the violation of ownership at the hands of Sony begins and ends with the fact that it's not an open platform with software freedom. I'm very amenable to making that be our standard here, of course, I think at minimum the freedom to do as you please with a personal computer is an ethical and moral directive.
Perhaps what we as a society need is that what you actually buy is a "license to download". Upon being in possession of the bytes, you own them. For as long as you maintain the integrity of those bytes, they're yours. Of course, redistributing them to other parties would constitute an IP violation, but that's not a problem to concern a storefront. If your license is revoked, what you are actually losing is the ability to download.
I suspect LLMs would actually struggle significantly with doing it consistently if given purely as a prompt instruction, but you could always constrict the sampling to force words that create a legitimate chain or fine tune / RL in some signal that would assist with it.
You are right that this is hard from a prompt alone, but for a slightly stranger
reason than the obvious one. The model never sees columns. It sees tokens, and a
token can be one character or nine, so "make this line 80 wide" asks it to run a
hidden tally over pieces it cannot count by looking at them. Any slip early in a
line compounds, and there is no backspace key to reach for once it is committed.
That said, the failure is not total. A model can lean on a learned feel for line
length, pick shorter or longer synonyms to land close to the target, and rewrite
a sentence when it overshoots. It will not be perfect every time, but it lands a
lot more often than pure chance would suggest. The sampling trick you mention is
the real fix: mask each token that would push a line past the limit, and force a
newline the moment the count hits the mark. That converts a fuzzy instruction to
a hard constraint with zero training. Fine tuning helps too, but mostly sharpens
the same internal counter rather than replacing it. This reply is a small proof;
if any line here is off by one, feel free to consider your point demonstrated...
> I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there
I don't know about China but this was the opposite of my experience in Thailand. The majority of public toilets I encountered had an attendant you had to pay for access. Shopping malls / hotels / other places were you were already paying to be there were the exception of course.
In every part of Thailand I've been to outside BKK, there's a gas station almost every few kilometers on every major road. Almost every gas station has a public restroom that's open 24/7, unattended. The ones that don't have a public restroom are typically right next to a string of restaurants that have a restroom you can use during the day for free if you ask.
For the most part, yes, but I've gone much longer stretches without seeing a gas station in the US. To be fair, there's also no point in building gas stations at regular intervals in the desert or the many other long stretches of nothing across much of the country.
I've driven from Mukdahan to Kanchanaburi to Trang provinces so my experience is not centered around the major cities at all. I don't know what poor luck or exotic adventures you may have had, but I never once struggled to find a bathroom.
Kind of a loose interpretation of "hotel" - but on Mt. Fuji the huts charge to use toilets unless you're a guest. Not unreasonable, though, given the amount of people coming through and the lack of plumbing. And the last time I was there, most of the huts still worked on the honor system, with a little box at the toilet entrance to leave payment.
Not that I don't believe you, but don't take that to be a common occurrence in Japan at all. By and large, Japan is a safe haven of clean and comfortable public restrooms. There are always exceptions, of course.
Oh, I don't think it is--haven't lived there but have spent some time for conferences and surrounding time. However, just pointing out, it's not unheard of.
Last year estimated spend was $380 billion and this year it's $680 billion [0] just for the big five. Given global projections through 2030 being as high as 7 trillion [1], OPs comment seems at least the right order of magnitude.
> This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year. Sure, this is going to a corporation, but that's more money than most people could possibly dream of earning in ten lifetimes.
That actually seems... tiny? Xbox is nearly 17,000 employees. That's like $8k in profit per employee. That's worse than big box retailers and like 1/100th of what is common in big tech and (to the letter's point) far worse than their biggest competitor.
Like sure at least you can say they aren't losing money, but Nadella can't be looking at that after just spending 75 billion on Activision Blizzard and be happy with it as the status quo.
EDIT: BTW these numbers you quoted from OP are quarterly, not annual
I agree that at some point you do, but again I think the fact that Sony Playstation is doing this with larger annual revenue, less studios, AND better margins is an indicator that it isn't the problem here.
With due fairness, these are two different sets of leaders and two different strategies.
A lot of the strategy you outlined -- buying all these studios, replicating netflix, giving away day one games, raising game pass -- was a strategy put in place by Phil Spencer. Phil pushed for this investment with the promise it would pay off later for MS. He's talked publicly about having to convince Nadella to put up ungodly amounts of cash for these investments and about how the bar for expected return was very very high. It seems like it clearly hasn't worked out to Microsoft's expectations or they've lost patience for waiting, and Phil has now "retired to spend more time with his family" (i.e. been fired).
Now Asha is here and presumably has a mandate to fix this and get back the profit margins that were expected from xbox. Sarah Bond, the xbox president, has resigned, and with this letter it seems the previous Xbox COO is out too. There is clearly a huge shift in Xbox leadership happening and it shouldn't be surprising that Asha -- who is known as a business-driven executive and not a 'gamer' -- is going to be reverting a lot of previous strategy decisions.
My 2c is that Phil's strategy made sense on paper, but I don't think they were able to manage this many studios in practice: nearly all the studios they bought have failed to produce the number of games expected on time or on budget. It also turned out that overly cheap gamepass would cannibalize their business and overly expensive gamepass turned away subscribers. I think the netflix model isn't something you can speedrun and execution of it turned out to be very hard and expensive. Maybe it would've worked out with more time but it seems Nadella didn't think so anymore.
I never understood the esteem Phil Spencer was held in, seemingly both by fans and industry insiders. I never understood Phil’s strategy.
Buy a plethora of studios. Pay an order of magnitude over the odds for the big ones - just to be sure you get them! ‘Rescue’ smaller ones of questionable financial value - as part of Xbox they’d somehow be successful enough to justify the price paid. Heavily manage the studio heads - but, uh, also give them total creative freedom - and allow them to make niche games. Sell hardware at a loss - but also make the games available on all platforms. Don’t allow any software that takes advantage of your most powerful hardware, because it also has to run on the other, less powerful console you are also selling. Also, the future is streaming! But, uh, maybe not!
Not just the strategy, but almost every aspect of the ‘strategy’, was incoherent - as current management is very close to outright saying.
I’ll admit to being ‘out of gaming’ for that era (I’m a pandemic gaming-returner), but I wasn’t aware of that. Was his reach bigger than his official title?
Wikipedia doesn’t show him in an ‘overall leader’ role until 2014, a year into the relatively disastrous Xbox One era.
He was very visible, giving interviews to the mainstream press and presenting games on stage at E3 as early as 2010. I'd also argue that while he wasn't the top dog of all things Xbox from 2009 to 2013, Head of Microsoft Studios is still a pretty big deal and arguably the quality of games matters more than the hardware. Also keep in mind that he rolled back a lot of the - from the perspective of the core gaming audience - disastrous Xbox One launch (TV focus, Kinect bundle) after taking over. There's an argument to be made that Xbox the console wouldn't have survived this long without him. That said, he caught a lot more flak in recent years and IMHO deservedly so.
IIRC Xbox had been criticized for quite a while at that point for having very few exclusive/first-party games worth buying an Xbox for. I always assumed this move was to try and fix that problem.
The (an?) incoherency with that is that this was happening at the same time as the ‘everything’s an Xbox’ strategy that saw them produce games for other platforms too.
That was a side effect from ABK acquisition, they bought studios that traditionally were cross platform, the year long acquisition discussion always promised not to touch them in that regard.
So you end up with this schizophrenic way that XBox became more of a publisher than a console brand, with a leadership used to cross platform (Sarah Bond), thus ‘everything’s an Xbox’ pivot for the "curve must always go up".
To be fair to Phil Spencer, this was the strategy across the industry right after COVID. Remember the shopping spree Embracer Group went on between 2020 and 2022? I think we were in an e-sports & live service bubble that has now popped.
Which games of their output were Xbox exclusive? They were basically transitioning into a publishing house with no real hardware impact. In fact what did Phil in finally was trying to sabotage the hardware brand itself with the 'This is an Xbox' campaign. I said out loud when I saw the first ad, 'Phil will get shitcanned for this.'
Acquiring a game studio only makes sense if you see a way to make it grow either by providing capital or better management. E.g. Activision acquired Treyarch in 2001 for $20M, which was probably 4-5x of its annual profit at the time. Seeing that very few people played (or even heard of) Die By The Sword or Draconus you could imagine that there was still a room to grow so there was a good chance you break even on your investment even sooner than 5 years and start making profit for yourself. Treyarch, who did not need to do the sports games contracts anymore and could hire more people, proceeded to making Spiderman and, later, CoD. I believe Spiderman alone made way more than $20M spent in the acquisition.
Buying Activision for 20x of its annual profit, on the other hand, makes zero sense. ABK was not lacking capital, had the same MBA management Microsoft has and did not have much room to grow, Blizzard alone had 5K employees. Their IPs had long time since plateaued or had been in decline already. What was Microsoft plan to increase profit? Switch everyone to Teams? Put more people to work on CoD and release 2-3 CoDs per year, hoping they all will sell as well as the annual CoD? The more realistic path to return of the investment could come from increasing Xbox's share of the market by making their newly acquired IPs Xbox exclusive. But they did not do even that.
IMO, at the time, it was to buy ABK and make CoD an Xbox exclusive. That clearly didn't play out when everyone screamed about it being (rightly!) anticompetitive, and so they had to resign themselves to accepting that day 1 gamepass exclusive was going to be their way to get people to switch over from PS. That also didn't work.
The 'K' part of ABK was also probably going to be their way to drive mobile into Xbox as well with their 'everything is an Xbox' push at the time.
Even if they had made it exclusive, $70B is too much for this. CoD sales would fall - not everyone buying it would go out and buy an Xbox, Xbox hardware sales would raise. Let's be optimistic and say every CoD player (including ones who already bought Xbox ) goes out and buys another Xbox and then buys 2 xboxes in the next generation. So it's ~20M more Xboxes sold. To break even on this investment in 10 years MS has to make ~$2400 from each console sold over lifetime ($68B - 10*$2B annual profit = $48B over 20M extra units). Of course, if each sold Xbox made that much money they would not sell them for $400, they'd pay you to get one.
Yeah, they could have spent the money on founding new studios. With that sheer amount of money you could pretty much poach any talent you wanted too, but it wouldn't be as obviously anticompetitive.
Instead, they paid way over the odds for IPs that seem past their prime.
IMHO, there is no room for a 70B investment in games at this time. The industry is mature and won't be growing any time soon, at least in the West. There had been a rush of investors founding new studios and propping old ones in the past decade but the vast majority of those had already been wiped out. And all of those were probably just a fraction of what Microsoft had spent just in this acquisition.
Another crazy deal like this is the EA's buyout, I wonder if it will come through or the investors will eventually realize that they are not going to see their money ever again.
Phil and the likes were too hands-off on these studios post-acquisition. They got too complacent enjoying steady paychecks over years of delays while working on their niche games that only highlight their artistic vision over generally fun gameplay. That's where they failed. The Activision/Blizzard acquisition and GamePass fumble were just a nail on the coffin
Yes, I agree. I empathize with Phil in spirit on it. He's a real gamer and tried to create a space for the developers to do their own thing and create what they want. But it doesn't seem to have been great business.
I remember the glowing praise at the time for the policy of being hands off and allowing studios to cook. Gamers all over the world were very happy about that approach. Unfortunately it looks like many studios do in fact require hands-on management to make tough calls and keep things moving. I'll remember this next time studios complain about management interference.
We already saw this during the Kickstarter era where all the temporarily confused AAA studios sold themselves as having been held back by unreasonable publishers all this time only to produce the most bland and still unfinished games now that they were funded directly by fans.
You need two different types of management. You need the creative type who understands what customers want and ensures that is what you deliver. You need the financial type that understands profit margins.
If the company lacks either, or either gets too much power they are in trouble. Creative types will spend too much money on things that are nice but won't deliver enough value and so the company goes bankrupt. Financial types don't understand what customers want and optimize away all the expensive creative value the customers buy.
Note that the above applies to every type of company. Exactly what "creative" means is different for different industries, and some need it more than other (how much innovation do you need in soap?...). It always applies though so you need to ensure you get both types in leadership positions even though they don't like or understand each other.
Yeah, cool, but right now they're axing idsoft, which was anything but "artistic vision over fun gameplay". What they did also pretty much kills idtech as a viable engine.
Now with all these layoffs, most likely the numbers will change, but how many are aware that Microsoft actually owns a big chunck of well known studios?
One reason is that from the public eyes they kept their names and independence from Microsoft/XBox branding.
Undead Labs has shipped nothing
Compulsion shipped South of Midnight topping at ~1600 players on Steam
Ninja Theory has shipped Bleeding Edge and Hellblade 2
and
Double Fine shipped Keeper and Kiln.
It's a net positive that these studios and this culture is gone.
I am sure that food was amazing.
It's on the publisher and owner to guide studios in a direction that makes money. That's literally their purpose. If these studios aren't releasing anything and they aren't making money, that's on Microsoft. So things aren't better if these studios are gone. The same people who managed this mess for ten years are still there. If you're not going to do anything to ensure these studios actually do what you need them to, I don't understand what the point was of acquisitions.
It was a risky bet that became even higher risk when MSFT spent ~$80 billion dollars rolling up game studios near the peak of the historic COVID gaming bubble. They bet it would greatly increase Game Pass sub growth. Instead, Game Pass sub growth slowed down. At the time I thought it was a reasonable plan - but not at the prices MSFT was paying for content. Then the DRAM drought killed hardware sales to gamers forcing the issue.
They were the cheapest DVD player you could buy for a while, and they were also the most available DVD player. That changed fairly quick, but at launch they were your best value. (though dedicated DVD players generally had better controls)
I certainly enjoyed gaming their rewards system for years on a series S. $300 for the box, maybe spent $40 over roughly 4 years for gamepass. It was nice while it lasted!
I totally agree. Being able to buy three-year cards for gold and then convert them to GP for $1 was an absolutely killer deal in terms of bang-for-buck. I stopped renewing once they closed that 'loop-hole' personally, I only play a few games a year (and usually ones that are on sale) so full price game pass just never made any financial sense for me. I already spend less than that per month and play whatever I want.
So, Phil gets a golden parachute, and all the studios that got bough up because of him will be "set free" if they're lucky and disbanded if they're not. Yay for capitalism...
I don't really blame the researchers here but this is yet another article that is happy to have a clickbait headline which any reasonable reader is going to assume will include a picture of "treetops glowing".
At least personally I scanned the article for it and only found the picture at the top, which I was then frustrated to learn that's just a lab photo, and I came here wondering where the actual image is of it in the field so I found OPs comment helpful to indicate that the suggestion there would be a beautiful picture of glowing canopy somewhere is basically a result of editorializing.
I have to believe that what we're seeing is a minority opinion that feels like their uniquely backwards logic justifying this is somehow worth sharing as if its new and insightful, while the vast majority of us think "holy crap, that's horrible" but aren't adding it because of course that's already been said and there just isn't any more nuance needed.
“Structural violence” sounds like a religious concept, like original sin. Your beliefs are your own, but they don’t entitle you to murder someone, just like we don’t let fundamentalists murder gay folks, no matter what their religion tells them.
No, it’s bullshit people made up so they can justify taking their hatred and bitterness out on those they disagree with. It’s the logic of a coward and a small mind. If you lack the ethics to keep you from wanting to murder people you disagree with, just say so openly. You’re fooling no one.
We do some similar work with hotspot analysis but (as a Canadian company) are more focused on Canadian data where the government already does a fair bit of false positive detection and filtering. It generally gives pretty clean data and we can scrub historical data over time like this: https://imgur.com/a/gCJGzqd
The dataset includes US coverage but it's not filtered the same way and FAR more noisy, so I appreciate efforts like this. We haven't got there yet but if you were looking for something deterministic and automatable the Canadian gov's process is potentially worth learning about.
They also produce perimeter estimates based on the hotspots which we can extract and put into a physics-based fire growth model like Prometheus or FARSITE to estimate future fire behaviour based on forecasted weather. This gives very actionable and deterministic estimates of future fire behaviour. We also have worked on a risk model that determines the likelihood of that future fire growth interacting with various assets on the landscape (urban interface areas, power lines, fuel pipelines, forest inventory, etc) and calls out high risk areas. One thing we've been wondering if where LLMs fit into any of this (if at all) so appreciate seeing what others are doing.
Thanks, this is really helpful. That filtering/perimeter pipeline is exactly the kind of deterministic path I'm interested in learning from, especially for pushing more of the false-positive reduction upstream before the model gets involved at all.
My take so far is that models seem most useful in the contextual triage step and in synthesizing multiple sources into a structured assessment. But most of the system around that is and should be deterministic.
The physics-based approach you're describing makes a lot of sense to me for spread prediction - different tool for a different part of the problem.
If there's a public writeup on the filtering process you'd recommend, I'd love to take a look.
Happy to help. This is the official methods description for the Canadian gov's FM3 data, it's probably the best place to start although the details are mostly covered in much longer publications that require some digging: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/background/dsm/fm3
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.