They had literally just gotten the green light to expand Blackbird's team and gotten positive and enthusiastic feedback about it.

Microsoft explicitly stated the cuts were not performance based and that they are pivoting their business strategy as a company. They have made several cuts to that exact effect over the years to a lot of their games and subsidiaries. They have simultaneously publicly pushed AI and game pass.

It seems very obvious that Microsoft doesn't really want to make much in the way of new games any longer. They want to buy up IPs, put them on game pass, and concentrate on building out AI guided experiences in their existing IP. A new engine for creating games, which was one of the things that attracted them to Blackbird and why it was taking them so long, doesn't fit into that vision.

It's not just about "will this make money." It is also about "does this fit my brand," and "which brand strategy will make the most money."

Blackbird was likely to have made money or they wouldn't have been expanding it's budget right before they suddenly canceled it and it would not have been a project they were internally excited about. Which is what they were when ZOS met with them last and it is why they were all shocked by the sudden job loss.

The problem with it, at least as it seems to me based on actually available statements by both parties, is that it no longer fit into their brand strategy and they no longer believe new game creation engines that rely on creatives are needed because AI will be replacing that. And they believe investing into AI will be more profitable than investing into creatives.

As one tech CEO put it, to paraphrase, AI is always available, it never needs to eat or sleep, and it doesn't need benefits.

And that's frankly an alarming mindset for all people because the scale of job loss that this can create if left unregulated and unchecked is unprecedented.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Microsoft explicitly stated the cuts were not performance based and that they are pivoting their business strategy as a company. They have made several cuts to that exact effect over the years to a lot of their games and subsidiaries. They have simultaneously publicly pushed AI and game pass.

The bottom line is if they thought Blackbird had a good chance of being successful in what they predict the market to be when it is released, they would not have cancelled it. This cannot be argued. The fundamental reason they make games is to profit from them.

The market it targets has stagnated in growth and become saturated, while at the same time the cost to develop games is increasing, it is no longer worth the risk to them.

No one ever knows whether or not a title will be successful or what obstacles may arise during development. So it is always a calculated risk. In between the time it was greenlit and the time it was cancelled, obviously the factors in the calculation changed.

Again, this isn't a Microsoft only thing. It is not a recent thing. It is a long term trend in the game industry that has many factors including economic, geopolitical, market and audience shifts, development costs, and more. It cannot be so easily summarized:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022–2025_video_game_industry_layoffs

I don't know if you read the news, but there is an INCREDIBLE amount of economic uncertainty right now, especially how it relates to consumer spending. As a result, pretty much every business is more risk averse than they were even a few months ago.

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

As one tech CEO put it, to paraphrase, AI is always available, it never needs to eat or sleep, and it doesn't need benefits.

And that's frankly an alarming mindset for all people because the scale of job loss that this can create if left unregulated and unchecked is unprecedented.

As a 30-year full-stack developer who uses "AI" every day, I don't know what these people are smoking. I have to fight with it to get it to do even simple things most of the time, and half the time it looks right, it's still wrong in subtle ways. I'm good at what I do because I understand the problem domain intimately, and can ask the right questions. Coding the answer is a relatively small part of the solving the problem. And yet I'm worried that I, too, will be made redundant because some middle manager thinks I am replaceable with a Copilot subscription.

This really seems like the way of things: unbridled 'progress' for progress' sake without the safety rails of logic keeping it in check. I know there have already been lawsuits because some HR AI bot has hallucinated some refund or other thing to a disgruntled customer, and then the courts ruled that if the company's putting all their trust in AI to fix things that they are then beholden to promises that the AI makes.

Things will keep going like this until something big happens. I'm talking that some company has their wonderful AI solution make one tiny little hallucination that ends up costing the company billions. Once a company is seeing that cheaping out on labor by trusting a machine bites them in the backside to the extent that no human ever could, then we'll see people come around to AI as a tool instead of AI as a replacement.

Jurassic Park still said it best: "You were so concerned with whether or not you could that you didn't stop to think whether you should."

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

As one tech CEO put it, to paraphrase, AI is always available, it never needs to eat or sleep, and it doesn't need benefits.

And that's frankly an alarming mindset for all people because the scale of job loss that this can create if left unregulated and unchecked is unprecedented.

As a 30-year full-stack developer who uses "AI" every day, I don't know what these people are smoking. I have to fight with it to get it to do even simple things most of the time, and half the time it looks right, it's still wrong in subtle ways. I'm good at what I do because I understand the problem domain intimately, and can ask the right questions. Coding the answer is a relatively small part of the solving the problem. And yet I'm worried that I, too, will be made redundant because some middle manager thinks I am replaceable with a Copilot subscription.

I've seen AI make so many mistakes even as a low level user. I had it keep insisting once that I didn't have a period at the end of my sentence when it was right there. It took three times to correct it.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

They had literally just gotten the green light to expand Blackbird's team and gotten positive and enthusiastic feedback about it.

Microsoft explicitly stated the cuts were not performance based and that they are pivoting their business strategy as a company. They have made several cuts to that exact effect over the years to a lot of their games and subsidiaries. They have simultaneously publicly pushed AI and game pass.

It seems very obvious that Microsoft doesn't really want to make much in the way of new games any longer. They want to buy up IPs, put them on game pass, and concentrate on building out AI guided experiences in their existing IP. A new engine for creating games, which was one of the things that attracted them to Blackbird and why it was taking them so long, doesn't fit into that vision.

It's not just about "will this make money." It is also about "does this fit my brand," and "which brand strategy will make the most money."

Blackbird was likely to have made money or they wouldn't have been expanding it's budget right before they suddenly canceled it and it would not have been a project they were internally excited about. Which is what they were when ZOS met with them last and it is why they were all shocked by the sudden job loss.

The problem with it, at least as it seems to me based on actually available statements by both parties, is that it no longer fit into their brand strategy and they no longer believe new game creation engines that rely on creatives are needed because AI will be replacing that. And they believe investing into AI will be more profitable than investing into creatives.

As one tech CEO put it, to paraphrase, AI is always available, it never needs to eat or sleep, and it doesn't need benefits.

And that's frankly an alarming mindset for all people because the scale of job loss that this can create if left unregulated and unchecked is unprecedented.

My experience in the corporate world that has software as its product is that the people who make the decisions have no clue how the software works, how complicated it is, or how valuable experienced workers are. All that would be fine if they trusted the highly paid professionals that they hired to do the work, but instead the decision-makers only see dollar signs and use that as their guide. I am afraid they are just following AI because it is so trendy right now. Everyone is talking about it so it must be the next big thing. Indie games have shown that creative games can sell, if they are done well. I guess everyone has forgotten about that. They assume that people will play something that is regurgitated by a machine. Not sure that is the kind of game I want to play.

katanagirl1 wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

They had literally just gotten the green light to expand Blackbird's team and gotten positive and enthusiastic feedback about it.

Microsoft explicitly stated the cuts were not performance based and that they are pivoting their business strategy as a company. They have made several cuts to that exact effect over the years to a lot of their games and subsidiaries. They have simultaneously publicly pushed AI and game pass.

It seems very obvious that Microsoft doesn't really want to make much in the way of new games any longer. They want to buy up IPs, put them on game pass, and concentrate on building out AI guided experiences in their existing IP. A new engine for creating games, which was one of the things that attracted them to Blackbird and why it was taking them so long, doesn't fit into that vision.

It's not just about "will this make money." It is also about "does this fit my brand," and "which brand strategy will make the most money."

Blackbird was likely to have made money or they wouldn't have been expanding it's budget right before they suddenly canceled it and it would not have been a project they were internally excited about. Which is what they were when ZOS met with them last and it is why they were all shocked by the sudden job loss.

The problem with it, at least as it seems to me based on actually available statements by both parties, is that it no longer fit into their brand strategy and they no longer believe new game creation engines that rely on creatives are needed because AI will be replacing that. And they believe investing into AI will be more profitable than investing into creatives.

As one tech CEO put it, to paraphrase, AI is always available, it never needs to eat or sleep, and it doesn't need benefits.

And that's frankly an alarming mindset for all people because the scale of job loss that this can create if left unregulated and unchecked is unprecedented.

My experience in the corporate world that has software as its product is that the people who make the decisions have no clue how the software works, how complicated it is, or how valuable experienced workers are. All that would be fine if they trusted the highly paid professionals that they hired to do the work, but instead the decision-makers only see dollar signs and use that as their guide. I am afraid they are just following AI because it is so trendy right now. Everyone is talking about it so it must be the next big thing. Indie games have shown that creative games can sell, if they are done well. I guess everyone has forgotten about that. They assume that people will play something that is regurgitated by a machine. Not sure that is the kind of game I want to play.

Yeah. I think this might end up as big of a bust as VR because it will be a bunch of shovelware that nobody wants to play. Flooding the market with awful games has harmed the game industry before.

I do think AI is the future for a number of things but I'm not convinced it is for creative stuff

spartaxoxo wrote: »

They don't need game engines. They need AI.

!!! I don't think AI is going to impact game development the way you think it is.

AI is a blanket term for a lot of different technologies that relate to machine learning. They will affect game development in a multitude of ways from assisting coders to produce and manage code more efficiently. They will enable artists to create more detailed assets at a faster rate. They will allow for new forms of generative storytelling not yet seen in mainstream games.

All of these things are currently happening to different degrees across the gaming industry and other forms of content creation.

And all of them would have been applied to Blackbird at some level.

Game engines aren't going anywhere and the first stages of all of this will be iterative until there's a breakthrough revolutionary title -- which will happen. I've seen this process play out over and over again.

You're applying very general comments from Microsoft very specifically. We only have leaks and rumors from biased sources. Actions speak louder than words, and in this case the words are all whispers.

ImmortalCX wrote: »

You severely underestimate what is possible.

I don't think I do. I said specifically "the first stages of all of this will be iterative until there's a breakthrough revolutionary title -- which will happen.

It's not going to happen overnight, and until some breakthrough titles show everyone else the way, it's going to be very iterative as everyone tries to best harness what's available -- and for generative content, in an affordable way. We're not there yet.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Desiato wrote: »

You're applying very general comments from Microsoft very specifically. We only have leaks and rumors from biased sources. Actions speak louder than words, and in this case the words are all whispers.

I'm literally applying comments and leaks made by both MS and this dev team to greater public. It could all be PR. But there's no evidence of that and MS didn't have to say anything at all. A lot of times when companies do layoffs they simply decline to comment. They don't go out of their way to say it's not about performance and talk up the business organization strategies they're excited about.

Additionally, I'm not evaluating this in a vacuum but one that looks at other things MS has done for the past couple of years.

Microsoft hasn't commented on Blackbird specifically. They gave a PR statement on the entire layoff which was, of course, very general. The actual specifics vary situation to situation as it affected multiple titles, studios and 9000 employees!

The ZOS union has commented specifically, and a journalist has reported what some affected members said to them -- highly biased.

They obviously did not cancel any titles they thought had a strong possibility of earning them profit. They felt their funding was better spent elsewhere.

p00tx wrote: »

This is really disappointing news. Stocks are up for Microsoft, so there's no financial reason this should be happening, unless shareholders are just demanding greater dividends/payouts/whatever (would NOT be surprised). The art and content creation for this game have always been impressive and I'm sad to see those people go. That's a big loss for this company, and I hope they realize that.

I've already commented on this before so won't do the whole thing again to avoid boring people but this simply is not how big groups make decisions. Whether a product makes money is not in itself determinative. The question is does it fit with the rest of what they're doing, is it an efficient use of their resources, are there better things they could do instead, where are they trying to get to longer term. As @spartaxoxo rightly says, Microsoft could make toothpaste and make money from it. Doesn't mean they're going to or that it would be a sensible use of their capital and time.

MS stocks being up, incidentally, likely has everything to do with their positioning in the cloud (Azure) and their attempting to gain first mover strangleholds by their deals with OpenAI and others while massively investing in the computational power (and electrical power) necessary to do this while they still can.

If you want the opposite example, for years Sony, once arguably one of the absolute biggest brands on the planet with their electronics the thing everyone wanted in their homes, allowed its divisions to operate as standalone silos whose every move got in the way of the rest. They made money, in the short term. But the longer term result? They lost their way in electronics, they missed the switch to digital media, etc. It took them about 20 years to right the ship.

ImmortalCX wrote: »

My point is that the pace is likely faster and the scope of improvements greater than you anticipate.

How do you know? I've read Slashdot every day since 1997, so I've been following the development of machine learning since at least 2008 and talking people's ear off about it since. I have always expected it to be revolutionary to the point of some semblance of what some call the singularity.

ImmortalCX wrote: »

Desiato wrote: »

ImmortalCX wrote: »

My point is that the pace is likely faster and the scope of improvements greater than you anticipate.

How do you know? I've read Slashdot every day since 1997, so I've been following the development of machine learning since at least 2008 and talking people's ear off about it since. I have always expected it to be revolutionary to the point of some semblance of what some call the singularity.

Huge difference between artificial general intelligence and ML.

It's all part of the same process. One step gets us to the next.

Another corporation who has monstrous compensation at the top who cut off blood flow to the vital components lower in the work chain. Didn't Europe implement a law that states CEO types can't make more than X percent of the average worker? Let's do that already.

Einar_Hrafnarsson wrote: »

The signs of decline have been obvious for a while. It is sad but things are out of Players control. I don't think ESO will be online for to much longer. Ill give it 2-4 Years before end of Service.

Do you think the servers will even be functional a year from now?
Then there is Solstice which was a very mediocre and threadbare update, and aside from the new crown store items, the game feels like it is approaching maintenance mode too.