Author | Lightnews

Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 1d

Biden being Irish American is clearly a factor here but nonetheless still doesn't necessarily contradict my point!

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 1d

You joke but

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 1d

Ecological fallacy. Irish Americans are generally among the most right wing people living in those places.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 1d

The badness of Irish politics is underrated but come on "worse than Irish Americans" is an impossibly high bar

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 3d

And yet!

Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 3d

"No stolen assets" is a fair enough place to draw the line but is that really what people are doing? It's not like everyone's cool with gen AI models trained only on internal/licensed data.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 3d

No. I'm saying there isn't actually any clear distinction between "traditional ML" and "AI".

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 3d

Sure but where's the line?

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 3d

So where's the line?

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 3d

What is the actual principle people are trying to defend here? "Oh it's just traditional ML not AI, that's fine" What are you talking about?

MrNelson007 is Looking For His Wife @mrnelson007.bsky.social · 3d

This seems fine? It’s definitely a different voice but it doesn’t sound like AI to me. There’s reporting that they brought the Chief/Cortana actors back to redo all the lines, and the article that seems to be the source of the AI claims was updated with a retraction.

thegamepost.com/insider-halo...

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 4d

I presume they weren't *trying* to simulate a hallucinogenic experience here but that's sure as hell what they got

K. Thor Jensen @kthorjensen.bsky.social · 4d

Oh my god some fucking tech dingdong posted this on Twitter with the caption "AI games are going to be amazing" totally seriously, you have to watch it. You have to. In full screen.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 4d

All very normal stuff! Nobody *likes* that a Snickers bar is smaller now but you also don't see people complaining about WHINY BABY Snickers-eaters not willing to stump up the true cost of a bar.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 4d

The games industry has largely opted for stealth price rises via a variety of strategies (premium editions, DLC, microtransactions, etc.) in order to limit upfront price increases, though these things are also unpopular of course.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 4d

I have some sympathy for the "whiny babies" argument (some of these people really are whiny babies) but really this is a pretty weird way of looking at things. You can't just berate the audience into paying more.

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 5d

AAA video games should cost $100 on launch. this would still be extremely cheap for the amount of time and enjoyment you get out of them! But an audience of whiny babies has kept them literally at the same price for *two decades* despite both general inflation *and* sector-specific costs rising

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 4d

Does seem that way but then SA won that last one with a squad pretty much entirely over the age of 30 so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 4d

On the other hand though it's Matt Williams making this argument which is a near guarantee that it will turn out to be comically wrong

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 5d

And buying games at full price very much optional! I almost never do it. There is at all times something great available for $30 on Steam.

Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 5d

Including some of my thoughts on the Xbox thoughts on the Xbox profitability story. While "profit margins" for business units are sort of fake, this story does underscore how the games business will always struggle to deliver to kinds of profits that Microsoft is used to.

Game Developer @gamedeveloper.bsky.social · 5d

Report: Microsoft's demand for higher Xbox profits may be behind layoffs, price increases

A demand to hit 30 percent in profit margins may explain Xbox's year of layoffs, cancelations, and price increases.

www.gamedeveloper.com

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 5d

Both true! In fact, both basically different phrasings of the same statement.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 5d

You can read this as either:

> the games industry threw 40,000 people out of work in order to pad its profit margins

or

> the industry took drastic action to correct an unsustainable cost spiral, which it mostly achieved

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 5d

Is the games industry profitable? Yes, and has been throughout the entire recent layoff wave. But profit margins did slide dramatically post-covid as costs shot up but revenue didn't keep pace. Margins have recovered since then, mostly thanks to reduced personnel costs.

A graph showing total games industry costs and profit between 2020 and 2024. Costs rise from 2020 to 2022 then level off. Margin drops from 18% in 2020 to 9% in 2022 then recovers to 14% in 2024. Source: Omdia.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 5d

Trying to do comparative analysis like this just doesn't work when you only have a tiny number of very similar countries with no written constitution.

"It automatically prevents autocracy" obviously isn't true. But it might still be helpful.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 5d

Almost every country has a written constitution so of course it's no guarantee against autocracy. That goes without saying but it's not much of an argument against having one.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 5d

The main point here is absolutely correct - exec compensation is indeed a tiny percentage of overall costs. How have calculated the rest of these numbers though? I've run these figures before for EA (and many of its competitors) and come to pretty different conclusions.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 6d

The American mind cannot comprehend a nice train

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