Technically it is... According the original vision for workstation, a computer with >1MB RAM, >1 megapixel of screen resolution, >1 MIPS and costing under 1 Mega cents (10K dollars).
XBOX will be the big validation of the model. They purposefully chose an executive who doesn't know a thing about videogames. The business side is obviously important, but can a videogame company be successful if it's run by bean counting business optimizers? I doubt it, but time will tell.
The new CEO has been praised by consumers to hear their feedback and steer the company in new directions, eg guaranteeing physical disks, defocusing from AI features, etc.
So even if she doesn't know about creating video games, I wouldn't judge her as "a business first gamers last" type of person.
I think I only heard good about her for a very brief period after she took the helm. After that it's been mostly "Xbox is a disaster" with studios being closed, hardware getting more expensive and whatnot. I don't actually believe that Xbox is going to do much with physical media going forwards and they're probably not backing down from AI much either (at least in private). I imagine what happens with Project Helix is going to dictate her legacy (unless Microsoft shuffles her out before that).
What I find weird is that these companies don't sound like they are run by bean counters... The budgets are something that sound absolutely insane if anyone who cared about costs were involved. It more sounds like they are run by empire builders and their legions of micromanaging middle-managers...
I believe that with the budgets but it's crazy we don't see more risks from a creative perspective. In order for the VC model to work, you need to take risks for asymmetric payoffs. In the end, I guess management would rather follow the internal herd and play it safe.
Compare it more to movie production and book publishing. Where we also see a pattern of the big budget stuff being risk averse and the really creative stuff happening downmarket. Often so far downmarket that the creators themselves end up being the primary financiers.
Is it run by the bean counting optimizer is the question.
There are some business people who are bean counters - they understand the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They will get rid of expensive engineers and then be shocked that they can't keep making money with the same version of the same game for all time.
There are other business people who know the usefulness of engineers making new product. However they don't understand the value and will hire too many and so the company will fail because the profit margins are not there.
You need the compromise. Nobody likes a compromise.
isn't XBOX dead already? that's the common sentiment I see.
as the console product line, it's just dead, nobody knows which xbox is the old or the new one, microsoft themselves probably can't figure that out too.
the issue with game execs is not just that they don't understand game development, but software development in general. game execs absolutely love scope creep. then they try to fight the growing scope by adding more people onto the project - when it's common knowledge that makes the project even more delayed. if you can't deliver a project, you have to deliver less, not add employees.
writing this I thought this might be why live service games fare better.
they force the modern agile software engineering into games. the exec gets feedback and kpi's quickly. you could try to scream some sense into them however much you want, but they won't accept that their idea is crap until it's released and the sentiment rating on their dashboard goes down in response.
the exec has absolutely no imagination or domain knowledge. without the constant feedback, they just fly blind because they can't comprehend anything but the numbers in the spreadsheet. in a multi-year development process, until you deliver the project, there's no numbers to steer you. you need an opinionated director, auteur, not an excel monkey.
I assume they don't see themselves as a video game company anymore (although the marketing won't reflect that). They see themselves as a media company with IP to be mined.
This is fascinating and scary at the same time. I dread the future when people will have access to cheaper health insurance with the caveat that all consultations and procedures will be performed solely by AI. Want a human? Pay extra.
This is already happening though, to a point; recently, local GPs have been subsumed into larger health care provider companies, and they have set up systems so that before you can make an appointment, you need to go through a wizard and / or chat interface. Likewise, people are encouraged to go to a website and do some self-diagnosis before calling a doctor - things like "if you have a fever, how high is it and for how long have you had it?"
It's indirectly related to health insurance cost, as we have a GP shortage and they (I presume?) realized a lot of people are making appointments and wasting a GP's time for trivialties like a cough or cold.
I'm pretty sure they already have, or are experimenting with having people go through an AI chatbot first. This is already very much a thing with any kind of customer support. It's not a new development though, the preceding generation was conversational interfaces.
I have already given up the idea of getting heath care. I have top-shelf insurance that has all the preventative stuff included, but it is simply not worth the effort. The quality of care is not even worth my co-pay.
Tell me you've never needed significant healthcare without telling me.
It's never about "ambulances". The bureaucracy will happily call an ambulance for you, as it ends their involvement and absolves them of liability. And the ambulance company is happy to show up, as it's a large billable event. In fact when seeking/obtaining complex medical care, this is one of the failure modes you have to constantly swat away!
As for interacting with the bureaucracy to obtain real care, it's gotten to the point where it's easier to get something done calling a large bank. Navigating the medical bureaucracy is probably on the level of calling Comcast-Warner (although I haven't had the misfortune of having to deal with them for a decade, so I'm sure they've gotten worse as well).
Even before "AI", my standard experience is a multi-level phone tree, multiple mandatory announcements before you can even proceed, then waiting on hold. That merely gets you to an answering service who types a ticket into the computer system. Then you wait a ~day for a nurse to call you back (if you miss answering this call, return to step 1). Then the only urgent appointments are invariably with "nurse practitioners" who throw pre-canned advice at you, as they don't really know what they're doing. That's four layers running interference to keep you away from an actual doctor, who you will finally get to see in a month for a fifteen minute appointment, if you are lucky.
I imagine human consultation could be more expensive, at least in the US, due to liability of human error. Especially if/when AI capabilities in medical procedures becomes clearly superior.
I am looking forward to it! Right now we get doctors who are "qualified", but take you after 20 hour shift with no sleep, and do not even speak fluently in the same language as patient.
And this is on VERY expensive state helath insurance!!!
Humans are irrational. We also value "feeling" safe. Some tricks sell the illusion for those people who can't trust 100% some technologies.
Of course I trust engineering, I know planes are safe: but when there is turbulance and I see a flight attendant just casually walking and not even reacting to it, I feel better.
Humans are still humans.
Of course, culture changes. Colective ideas and institutions adapt. But extremely slowly compared to advances in tech.
Quality of life worldwide has had the biggest increase in the history of humanity over the past 50 years due hundreds of millions, if not more, being lifted out of poverty. Its impossible to separate the role of technology from it.
The biggest change has not been technological, it has been in the attitudes of society. Optimism and enthusiasm have given way to pessimism and fear. I think people realized that if someone invented Star Trek replicators tomorrow and ended scarcity, the first thing people would replicate would be weapons to fight over the energy to power them.
We need something like Omni magazine to return. Something without the cynicism of Wired, but with sharp and stylish images that juxtapose the cool with the intellectual. The kind of thing that has slightly too cool booze ads and half naked people sitting next to interviews of Nobel prize winners and perhaps overly optimistic Science Fiction. We need dreams that are not just the seeds of new nightmares.
We usually get the future we dream of, and I'd like us all to start imagining it to be more like Star Trek and less like Black Mirror.
Be realistic - we've gone from "You, yes you, will be able to do an incredibly new and fun thing with Shiny New Technology™" to "You probably won't have a job or drinking water, your TV and phone are tracking you, all creative work is now worthless, the planet is on fire, AI may kill us all, but buy into our IPO anyway" in less than ten years.
I didn't have kids because I outright didn't want them and I had the freedom to not have to have them, unlike my parents. Conflating birth rates plunging with whatever one, single thing TikTok wants to sell you Zoomer-brand Doom & Gloom on is asinine. But not surprising from someone pretending nonsense like "all creative work is now worthless" has anything to do with anything.
It looks like they wanted to kill most of the reverse engineering by cutting down on low effort recomps. It had got to the point where people who knew nothing of coding were recompiling major games just by throwing tokens at it. I'm neither condemning nor supporting it, just reporting.
Someone on Reddit made a good point. Even a short fence stops most people from treading on your lawn.
In other words, people who try to divide and conquer recompilations will likely still succeed... for now.
I think the core issue isn't the abuse, but the very existence of a service that claims to provide infinite of something. Infinite is always BS because resources aren't infinite.
It's just like "all you can eat" places kicking out people after they've been in the restaurant for a while. We should discourage these marketing tricks because they are always a lie.
Regarding Halloween, we stopped leaving unattended buckets out because of bad actors taking everything. Now we hand out the candy ourselves. Our home no longer provides "all you can grab" treats...
Wasn't there a study about childcare facilities where, after a fee was introduced, late pickups actually increased? Putting a specific price on things can actually make people behave worse than just "be reasonable, please."
We left a bucket out while we were out with the kids. No issue. Had too much at the end of the night, and had to tell the last stragglers to just take handfuls when we got back. Maybe that's a good, quick temperature check on whether your area is high-trust/low-trust.
The US wouldn't take action against the seaweed, unless it was in a fishing boat. Then it'd be ruthlessly assaulted with all seaweed and fishermen slaughtered, while claiming the seaweed was actually drugs.
"Search for the small web" is interesting. I think the closest thing we have of "the Internet that doesn't suck" for me is HN.
The Usenet vibes, "let's talk about the stuff we geeks love before people come to spoil them". A much higher quality than average chat room, even if imperfect and undoubtedly biased to our left brain personas.
So searching on HN is a bit of the "Search for the small web".
Most successful companies and innovative ideas come from middle aged founders and inventors. Silicon Valley loves the romantic notion of a contrarian young adult or even teenager "seeing what nobody else sees" , but they are the exception and not the rule.
However, so is my phone!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer
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