Month: May 2024

“The Verge reports increased scrutiny from Microsoft’s highest bosses on the Xbox division, after the $7bn Activision merger, causing it to “prioritise high-impact titles”. Worrying words for all the formerly independent studios that Xbox has bought in recent years, such as Double Fine (Psychonauts, pictured) and Ninja Theory (Hellblade). As Kotaku put it in its report on a town-hall meeting held at the company: after buying up studios, Xbox leadership says it doesn’t have the resources to run them”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/may/15/pushing-buttons-big-studio-cuts-indie-developers-animal-well-retro-games

“The four-story, art nouveau villa at Prinzregentenstrasse 61 is one of the most exclusive addresses in the Bavarian capital, a property of more than 1,600 square meters filled with Italian furniture, bronze sculptures and paintings of historic battles. Acquired in 1903 by Prince Alfons of Bavaria as a prestigious aristocratic residence, it was later inhabited by Conrad Röntgen, the discoverer of x-rays. Starting in 2016, the villa served the Wirecard executive as a hub for his secret operations. At least some of the 680,000 euros in annual rent was covered through back channels by Wirecard. At the time, the Russian consulate was located on the other side of the street”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/jan-marsalek-an-agent-for-russia-the-double-life-of-the-former-wirecard-executive-a-7e667c03-6690-41e6-92ad-583d94ba97e0

“Fueled by an obsession with the architecture of his own fame, Donaldson’s process now seems him engineer videos that, while potentially entertaining to humans, do not get uploaded unless they clear a bar set by the YouTube algorithm. In a different context, this calculated approach to videos might raise questions about the value and meaning of his art. Except MrBeast’s brand of hustle culture has become a de facto part of YouTube’s dominant aesthetic”

https://www.polygon.com/24093399/end-of-mrbeast-youtube-era

“The government contends that Burke broke the law by using “compromised credentials”—credentials the streaming service did not issue to him, and that Fox News would not have wanted him to have. This is roughly analogous to saying that he used keys that weren’t his to unlock a door he wasn’t supposed to open. Burke argues that he can’t be expected to divine who is and isn’t “supposed” to open a door, especially when, as here, someone with a legitimate set of keys left them hanging from the doorknob, and invited any and all curious passers-by to let themselves inside and have a look around. A jury of 12 Floridians will get the privilege of deciding who has the better argument”

https://defector.com/tim-burkes-indictment-is-a-political-choice-disguised-as-a-legal-act

“These days, corporate empires have rebranded as “everything companies,” and everything companies tend to proselytize about the efficiencies they achieve. By operating pharmacies, health clinics, and financial services, among many other businesses, a retailer can better accommodate consumers as a one-stop shop. There’s an intuitive logic here. The more Loblaw can harmonize and cross-subsidize across its various business lines, the better it can serve you, right? Loblaw’s ecosystem does indeed aim at harmony, but its interest is in harmonizing market control, which comes at a cost for consumers, who have little choice but to operate within its boundaries, watch their data be harvested and leveraged, and pay more for less. Any economist will tell you that a lack of competition makes it easier for companies to raise prices”

https://thewalrus.ca/loblaw-has-become-an-everything-company/

“That’s what I think this is all about, this reflexive insistence that 2020 is the distant past, that really it wasn’t that big of a deal – if you acknowledge that there was this big political moment, that you and all your friends believed in it, that you yelled and marched and beat a drum for it, and then that moment failed according to its own outsized demands, well, then maybe you’ve been owned. Maybe you’ve been made to look foolish. Maybe you don’t actually exist at a permanent remove from ordinary human frustration and disappointment. Maybe you can fail, can be hurt, can be gotten to. And we can’t have that. So you look at the excess and failure of a passionate moment, when you allowed yourself to get carried away, and you say oh, well, hey. That was so long ago, and it wasn’t a really big deal”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/it-seems-like-the-reckoning-has-become

“Grace sometimes works from Constellation, a space in downtown Berkeley intended to “build the capacities that the world needs in order to be ready” for A.I. transformation. A related nonprofit apparently spent millions of dollars to buy an old hotel in Berkeley and turn it into another A.I.-alignment event space (and party house, and retreat center), featuring “cozy nooks with firepits, discussion rooms with endless whiteboards,” and “math and science decorations.” Grace now lives alone, but many of her friends still live in group houses, where they share resources, and sometimes polyamorous entanglements. A few of them have voluntarily infected themselves with a genetically engineered bacteria designed to prevent tooth decay”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/among-the-ai-doomsayers

“That is to say, she is suggesting a comparison (traditional publishing houses vs self-publishing) when she has no numbers with which to make the comparison. There’s no big self-publishing merger that produced lots of public data to crunch. Against the hard numbers that make publishing look bad, she can only pitch broad waves to conditions in self-publishing. That’s because we simply don’t have the necessary information. But it is a certainty that self-publishing follows a Pareto distribution as well. There is no doubt that the vast majority of people trying to make it in self-publishing are failing. There is no doubt that the vast majority working on newsletters will not have the success Griffin has had. Success in creative fields is hard to come by no matter what the model. That’s always been true of the arts! There’s no halcyon days when most artists made a living, and every reason to believe that creators of all types face”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/publishing-is-designed-to-make-most

“As the day went on, assorted commentators dusted off their “whisper it, but Susan Hall could win” takes – not necessarily because they believed them, but simply because they didn’t want to be the one who’d laughed off the possibility if it happened. That evening the BBC political editor herself tweeted that, “No votes have been counted yet… but it is clear tonight that the race is much much closer than some polls had suggested…” How any such thing could be clear when no votes had been counted was an open question. All that was clear was that a lot of people were saying the race was much closer than some polls had suggested.

And the moment we started to see any actual vote numbers, the narrative collapsed”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/what-just-happened

“The kind of games and studios that are being “rationalised” out of existence here are exactly the kind that we need in 2024: smaller, creatively interesting games that offer alternatives to the increasingly homogeneous gaming behemoths that have been hoovering up money for more than 10 years. Roll7’s releases are exactly the kinds of games that should form part of an artistically as well as monetarily valuable portfolio for a publisher such as Take-Two.

Grand Theft Auto prints money, and the publisher’s executives take home tens of millions every year. Is it actually true now that such a publisher can’t support smaller games, too – even if they win awards and turn a profit? What is the point of having an “indie” publishing label if you’re simply going to buy good studios and shut them down after barely two years?”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/may/08/pushing-buttons-roll7-studio-take-two