I wonder if MS will jump the gun on the next gen early. Game Pass finally seems to be starting to deliver the steady stream of new releases they promised all those years ago, but it's happened too late in the gen for them to make the ground up. A new console might put them back in the spotlight again, especially if it's more reasonably priced than Sony's ridiculous PS5 Pro.
I'm still happy with my Xbox, and have never really been tempted to jump ship to PS5 - 90% of what I play is available on both platforms anyway. But I'd like to see them pick a strategy and stick to it, and I hope that involves selling consoles and making games.
That's interesting. I was in CEX yesterday and wondered why the couple of Series X's they had were marked up at RRP.
I think the best hope for Sony is that they'll be kept in check by Steam/Steam portables and the upsurge in mobile gaming some regions have seen.
Seems like they are in stock some places (Argos) but they seem to have discontinued the All Access program. The links to it are all dead or not updated, lists several retailers who pages don't have the correct links etc.
All a bit odd.
Quite surprised this hasn't become a thing in the specialist press. Normally, those fuckers are all over that stuff. Probably too busy making up nonsense about Switch 2.
They have been leaking the Xbox Handheld Stuff this week.
I enjoyed that, especially the photoshopped Game Gear folks used to illustrate the story.
That would be a dream personally! The ones I saw all used mocked up green and black ROG Ally's. Which also looks good.
I have my Ally docked and working as a console/PC on the TV in the bedroom now as been getting that set up last week and played Yakuza 0 on it for about 4 hours yesterday, and feels like that could be a good angle for also marketing a handheld Xbox device with GamePass.
Just put XCloud on Switch 2. Job done.
I see that BDS have asked everyone to avoid Microsoft products. That's certainly enough to sway me from Xbox to PlayStation if I were buying one. Although who knows when/if I'll be buying either again.
Not sure this is the correct thread for this, but had the Xbox Handheld (which I get was just leaks at this stage) just looked like a regular Rog Ally and Ally X but with Xbox theme and branding, then I would have been really excited. However, the form factor of the one leaked is not a nice looking gadget. It looks well janky and like some odd JoyCon grip holder.
Another mad round of layoffs at Microsoft. Alongside all the job losses, Everwild (Rare) and the new Perfect Dark have been cancelled.
There’s a lot of negative opinion online about this, although these two feel like games from the mad days before Xbox got their act together. They’re Halo Infinite-era vapourware, made when big announcements at E3 were all the rage. Now that we’re getting an actually impressive flow of games on Game Pass, the cancellation of these two might just be the final farty tailwind of a bygone era.
Got to wonder if Rare are done for now though. The level of corporate mismanagement over the last ten years with all these acquisitions has been mad.
Losing Perfect Dark hurt, that teaser/conceptwhatever they showed looked a great direction to go in. Hopefully Rare find their feet. @_@
Phil Spencer should be fuckin' ashamed of himself. Prick.
I believe he's making his fucking exit as well soon, just burnt everything to the ground and left
MS really do have the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, don't they? Finally, after years of promises, they're finally getting a steady stream of great games out, cloud gaming is coming together, and Game Pass is better than it's been for years… and now this.
Fundamentally I think it's that they're not a gaming company at heart and they see gaming as just a revenue stream. Someone high up has looked at the money they make from Call of Duty and decided that they don't need all this other stuff that doesn't make as much money. That's probably all there is to it. It was the same even back in the Xbox 360 era when they decided to turn their incredibly successful and beloved console into a Kinect machine because all the money was in the Wii. They're fundamentally hopeless at this stuff.
It's utter cultural vandalism stuff. Hacking their way through development teams with no regard for the history or skills that are being lost—or the impact of these kinds of cutbacks on the people left behind. Morale's got to be in short supply.
Gaming is a creative art form, and any studio (like any director or actor) is only as bankable as their recent work. Rare gave us Sea of Thieves 7 years ago. Unless you're Rockstar, dropping one great game every 7 years isn't a viable business model. Lots of brilliant legacy studios have churned out utter horseshit in recent years. Or vastly watered down versions of their marque titles.
Whether this is due to the waves of pressure to slap loot chests in or make every game a battle royale (or whatever the gaming flavour of the month is) I don't think many of these bigger, more illustrious, studios have a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining. Death Stranding 2 and Clair Obscur this year show what a dollop of vision/creativity and boundary pushing can deliver in the hands of smaller teams who are actually building interesting things.
And who can argue with someone higher up in MS realising that apart from handheld hardware (with the ROG partnership and maybe a future handheld Xbox) having a big power hungry box under the TV/monitor clearly isn't the future of gaming, apart from, possibly, PC die hards. MS are a software company, always have been. The Xbox is a slight hardware positive blip in a sea of mediocrity and missteps over decades.
And now they've killed Forza Motorsport!? What the hell is going on over there?
Microsoft have committed to investing something like $65 billion into the death cult of LLM infrastructure; that money needs to come from somewhere and Satya Nadella (may his toes never be un-stubbed) doesn't care where, so long as it's not his compensation package.
And now they've killed Forza Motorsport!? What the hell is going on over there?
Is it much of a draw these days? It's been churning out increasingly dull track racers for years while its main rival Gran Turismo goes from strength to strength. FM7 snuck out with hardly anyone even noticing, it seems.
Forza Horizon is continuing and that's where all the action is.
I'm kind of with Mr Party Hat I think. MS has been hanging on to stuff like Forza Motorsport, Halo, Perfect Dark and Gears of War for far longer than it really should have done. A clear-out of these ancient brands is overdue. I wish they hadn't done it in such a brutal way, though.
Microsoft have committed to investing something like $65 billion into the death cult of LLM infrastructure; that money needs to come from somewhere and Satya Nadella (may his toes never be un-stubbed) doesn't care where, so long as it's not his compensation package.
AI has largely done for music now, the current gen of generative AI music is largely indistinguishable from the real thing. As people have said, how long until Spotify simply replaces all the real artists with AI generated music you'll barely be able to tell the difference from? Why bother paying royalties. Film isn't far behind. Games not far behind that. In, what, 3 years or so, you will probably be able to generate a Gears or Forza at home. Maybe even sooner. Entire creative industries are going to be picked off, one by one, by tech bros who don't give two shits.
And sure, you can be a carpenter or electrician, but if you have total economic collapse who are you serving and how are they buying your services?
We are galactically fucked. It's UBI, live events/connection, rethinking capitalism and a completely new way of doing human civilization, or a massive war.
The LLM bubble is going to burst. It's unsustainable—everyone in the space is hemorrhaging cash in a desperate land grab but there's still no use case for it that people are willing to pay for at a price that covers its costs. Microsoft have had to force their own people to use LLMs because even the people making it know that it's useless horseshit.
Honestly I don't buy the "you'll be able to generate your own movies" hype either; there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that anyone knows how to get around the fact that LLMs don't have object permanence, are incapable of understanding context (or, in fact anything), and cannot have intent. They can just about cobble together a single shot that looks okay if you don't study it too hard.
I'd disagree with that. "still no use case for it that people are willing to pay for at a price that covers its costs"
It's absolutely transforming virtually every middle management, coding and procedural task. I pay the GPT fee because I can't afford not to now. If they crank it ten fold I'll still continue to pay it. It's going to wipe out entire professions. A lot of professions are entirely tractable LLM problems. The object permanence is completely solvable, and there are plenty of methods to do so. You can already see this happening in extended video content on social media (with repeating characters). Yes, its all prompt engineering and tech stacks, but I don't buy that the complexity of what it's trying to replicate is intractable. GPT 4.x's deep learning research capabilities are astounding. I have it triaging and finding cancer targets, prioritising them, assisting in molecular design and then analysing the results. I then do lab validation of a lot of its output. Years of work can be bypassed in an afternoon. And work that contains novel insights in new disease types, where no previously published literature exists. So it's not (just) stealing shit, it's reasoning (or giving the impression of reasoning) based on data and context. It can make mistakes, but there is an eerie progression in its capabilities, even in the last 3-6 months. We're firmly into the "what is human intelligence anyway?" question. Maybe it's just LLMs all the way down.
The market is overheated and overvalued yeah, but it's not a crypto bubble. This is like a rush to stake the claim to be the google of the next 30 years. Few winners, enormous rewards for those who make it, blasted wasteland for everyone else.
Terrifying.
Still, I'd like to see an AI paint a Space Marine.
They might not be able to paint minis but they can certainly colour stl files
