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Angelus on 16 July 2025
Mnementh said:
Angelus said:

I didn't say any of that actually

I said you're yelling at a cloud for moving with the wind. In a room of 10 people that can't change it any more than you can. I don't like people losing their jobs their jobs either. I think AI is gonna lead us to confronting some pretty serious issues that we as a society have shown to be VERY bad at dealing with at the best of times, and utterly inept at the worst of them. You're just fixated on a microcosm, while underselling the actual problem because you're determined to just say "fuck this." 

Your particular brand of bitching about this is going to accomplish exactly nothing, and if someone goes away from here and parrots your nonsense all they're taking away from that, at best, is "oh wow, guess MS is really dumb for betting this hard on AI. Guess that's gonna really bite them in the ass, cus it sure sounds shit. Can't ever replace good hard working folk, no sir..."

Cool. Definitely getting the right point across there. But it's ok, right? Cus AI is overhyped. Not a big deal overall, really. Just MS are kinda being dickheads about it atm. They'll get over it after it loses them a bunch of money in the long run and we keep talking about what asses they are for going down this road.

It's actually a legend that was spread by Reagan and Thatcher and took some time to take root. But by now I see it everywhere: "it is like it is, we can change nothing". I think differently. Society is formed and shaped by people and we could change the economic, societal and political system, if we wanted. AI is just a technology, but how it affects people is up to us, shaped by decisions we make. Or you know powerful people if we let us lull into a sense that it is "above our paygrade". So yeah, I don't know about the yelling at clouds stuff. Maybe we are the wrong target audience for Ryuu's yelling, but I don't think the yelling itself is pointless.

Maybe read past the first sentence 



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Barozi on 16 July 2025

GP Ultimate ran out about 10 days ago. So far I don't miss it other than THPS 3+4. Rest of the month doesn't catch me either.

Trying to complete some of my owned games. Recently finished Sniper Elite 5 plus DLCs. Plenty of stuff left to play.



Machiavellian on 16 July 2025
Ryuu96 said:
Machiavellian said:

From a game you never played, I am still at a lost as to why you believe it should come to market.  Its good the people are still there, maybe they are put on to something else, but I am still wondering why we should care when a game gets cancelled especially since it did not even make it to a stage where it could be presented.  On countless times, I have seen troubled games or games that have been in development for a long time reach the market and just fail.  When do you make the decision to cut your losses especially GAAS games when the market already have a lot of big hitters out there.

What logic is it to say that people can't be excited for a game that they've never played? That describes every single currently unreleased game, so nobody can be excited about any upcoming games because they've not yet played it? They shouldn't believe they should come to market because they have not yet played them? That logic is very odd.

I'm willing to bet the only reason people are still there is because either the union is making it more difficult for Microsoft to just straight up lay people off or because Microsoft is just totally clueless and cancelled a game without thinking about what comes after for the employees, I'm leaning towards the former since even the employees don't know what their future is right now, when Arkane Austin was shutdown it was immediately known that some were being sent elsewhere to other projects.

We don't have to defend every single decision Microsoft makes, and speaking of Arkane Austin, when they were shutdown, Matt Booty gave some bullshit answer about how the resources would be diverted to other critical projects, such as Zenimax upcoming new IP. Only for a year later for Microsoft to cancel that upcoming new IP, they're totally clueless on what they're doing.

I was excited for the upcoming new IP because we already heard rumours prior to the cancellation about it which sounded cool, I was excited because I love The Elder Scrolls Online and it being a very solo friendly online title, that is what I loved about it and if that was the case for their upcoming MMO then I would have played that too.

Then after it was cancelled we got even more information about the project and it sounded awesome, unlike with Perfect Dark, there is not a single insider who said that the game didn't sound and look cool, every single person who has leaked info about it has only had praise for it, even the fucking executive leadership team at Xbox was banging on about how amazing it was.

Why else am I annoyed? Because it was a braindead decision. ZOS is one of Bethesda's most profitable studios, they've successfully supported an MMO with great content for over 10 years now, if any studio has proven that they deserve a chance to take a "risk" with a new IP then it's ZOS. This is a studio that was bringing in big profits and a studio that was according to all reports running on schedule.

If you're going to cancel a project from one of the most profitable studios across XGS/BGS that didn't do anything wrong then that just tells me you've became incredibly risk averse as a company and anything is on the chopping block the next time that Microsoft wants to divert some more money to AI, it tells me that anything you announce at E3, I'm going to think has a chance of being cancelled.

And I would argue there's an opportunity to provide Destiny some competition considering how much of a fuck up Bungie is lately.

They've basically also said to ZOS that TESO better remain popular for another 6-10 years otherwise you're getting shutdown next, because if TESO popularity starts dying down, then they're screwed, there is no way around it, they can't just spin a project out of thing air, because Microsoft just cancelled their last one which was only a few years from release.

So basically a combination of the game sounding awesome based on rumours, the fact that ZOS is dead if TESO popularity starts dying down and what it says to every other Xbox studio that one of the most profitable Xbox studios isn't allowed to take a chance. It's utterly naïve to believe that any Xbox studio is safe under Microsoft now.

Its not about being excited for a game, it's the belief it should come to market when you have not played it, those are very different things.  I have been excited about a few movies I seen trailers for but when the movie came to market and I watched the movie it was trash.  My point is that the game evidently was troubled.  It was still in preproduction after what 5 years.  The game evidently had some huge issues it was not meeting.  With that said, at what time do you believe someone should pull the plug because things just isn't moving.  How much money and investment do you continue for a game when it probably already over budget. 

We forget a lot of times that making games is a business and its a risky business because you really do not know a lot of times what will be successful and what will not.  Just because MS the parent company has a lot of cash does not mean the Xbox and gaming department isn't under stress to not be profitable.  I believe Phil stated this a few times.  The days of MS splurging money like mana from heaven is long gone.  The games department now needs to stand on its own and operate like any other department with a budget and profit margin.

From Perfect Dark, Everwild and this MMO from Bethesda Online, all were troubled games.  When is the time to pull the plug when you can see that things are not coming together.

Also, I am not defending MS, I just do not believe every game should come to market just because it had a pretty trailer or something.  A game should come to market because it is a good game and that it will be successful for the market it made for.  When a game goes over its budget, the success for the games decreases a lot.  It then needs to really hit the market hard or it bombs.  

Also to your last point, yes, TESO should remain popular because what is the result of it not staying popular.  If gamers leave the game, then the game doesn't generate money and if it's not generating money, it has failed as a product.  Games are a business so a product not making money is a drag on the resources of the department. Making games is not a charity so the team should have some type of incentive to keep the game going.  If you believe that a company should spend endless amounts of money because they have it to keep something going that isn't profitable that isn't how business work.  The teams need to continue to believe in what they are doing and produce quality product that gamers want to continue playing and spending on.  Yes its a hard balance but its a balance that needs to be done and done well.

Last edited by Machiavellian - on 16 July 2025

konnichiwa on 17 July 2025

Hmm a (very) good sale is up now, some games never have been on sale..

Wanted to pick up more but picked up so far
-Croc
- Like A Dragon Pirate Yakuza






Ryuu96 on 18 July 2025

I can’t open LinkedIn without seeing a new post from a Microsoft employee who lost their job in the company’s latest round of layoffs. Around 15,000 jobs have been eliminated at Microsoft over the past couple months — the biggest cuts at the company in more than a decade.

I’ve spoken to more than a dozen Microsoft employees in recent weeks, and everyone is concerned about the company’s direction in this AI era. Morale is at an all-time low, and employees are worried that regular layoffs are simply the new normal.

Sources tell me that Microsoft’s leadership team had the choice between reducing investment in AI infrastructure for the upcoming financial year or deeply cutting its headcount and operating expenses. It’s very clear what route Microsoft chose.

These layoffs have been both broad and brutal. While you’ve likely read the headlines about the impact on Xbox games studios, Microsoft’s other cuts go far deeper and are part of a bigger plan to restructure Microsoft around AI tools.

Microsoft has laid off technical specialists, business strategy experts, and product managers. The sales side of Microsoft, which is responsible for businesses adopting its latest technology, has been hit particularly hard. Even AI and cloud sales teams have seen cuts, and account managers across a variety of Microsoft products have lost their jobs, too.

Microsoft’s layoffs have also impacted roles internationally, where an AI operations manager in Portugal proved susceptible to Microsoft’s latest reductions. Some employees even discovered they had lost their job while on vacation, and one was laid off twice in around six months.

This doesn’t mean MS is necessarily reducing headcount overall, as employees like Patrick Lyons are being forced to apply for other roles. That could mean Microsoft’s headcount might actually be similar this year to 2024.

Experienced veteran employees were also cut recently. Former engineering manager HongQiao Li had spent nearly 21 years at Microsoft prototyping the early version of Copilot in Office, before the latest cuts. Trinh Tran, a senior partner technology strategist, had dedicated 23 years to Microsoft while building solutions for the company’s cloud business and championing accessibility. Business strategy expert Darron Inman joined Microsoft in 1996 and is “disappointed that I didn’t quite make it to the 30-year mark.”

Forza Motorsport developer Turn 10 Studios was also hit hard by Microsoft’s cuts. One source described the layoffs as leaving enough people behind to keep the game up and running. It looks like Turn 10 will simply be a support studio for the Forza franchise, so I doubt we’ll see another Motorsport entry from the team.

Microsoft has also cut its Xbox user research team in half. It’s a key team that focuses on ensuring quality across Xbox games, the platform, and developer tools. Without user research teams, Microsoft could have more games shipping in a poor state like Redfall. The Xbox cuts have impacted community managers, designers, and branding experts, too.

“Using AI is no longer optional” inside some parts of Microsoft, as Julia Liuson, president of Microsoft’s developer division, proclaimed in an internal memo recently. Microsoft is reportedly now asking some managers to evaluate employees based on how much they use AI tools. Judson Althoff, Microsoft’s chief commercial officer, even boasted — in the same week that Microsoft slashed jobs — about the company saving more than $500 million last year in just its call centers thanks to AI.

To top off the mishaps, principal developer lead Mike Matsel posted a sloppy, AI-generated “Xbox Graphics is hiring” image on LinkedIn, with a monitor’s display on the wrong side. Microsoft has been regularly posting AI slop to its corporate blogs for more than a year now, without a care in the world about how bad the images look, so it’s not surprising to see more employees following along.

This AI slop is generated by the same tools that Microsoft is trying to convince businesses to use. The company is still struggling to sell its $30 per user, per month Copilot subscription, and the layoffs that have impacted Microsoft’s sales teams are part of a broader restructuring effort to bring in more technical salespeople to better demonstrate AI tools to businesses. To that end, Microsoft is reportedly replacing traditional salespeople with “solutions engineers.”

The atmosphere inside Microsoft is now very different from just a decade ago, when Microsoft was considered cool again and Satya Nadella had just been promoted to CEO and overhauled the company’s culture to embrace a world beyond Windows. That culture change saw Microsoft make some huge acquisitions like LinkedIn and GitHub, and saw it really capitalize on the shift to cloud computing. Now, Microsoft risks creating a culture of fear as it pushes employees to adapt to the promises of AI, where surprise “performance-related” job cuts can happen at any time, all because it’s in an uncertain AI race that’s costing tens of billions of dollars.

Microsoft’s Constant Layoffs Risk Creating a Culture of Fear | The Verge

    Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 18 July 2025

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    Machiavellian on 18 July 2025

    So is it the tool that is the problem or is it the user using the tool. If I write a program and its buggy as well but I used Visual Studio, is visual studio the problem or would it be me. The reason I ask this question is because lately I have been using a lot of AI tools out their especially the coding ones. What I have found is that you get out of the tool the best if you know what you are doing. This ideal that AI tools is this magic box where I give it some detailed commands and it pump out perfect results is of course fiction.

    The statement about the graphic job in Linkedin is a perfect example.  Is it the AI tool the issue or the person who used the tool, did not get a perfect result and then did nothing to fix the issue which if you have any simple ability could have been done with just MS paint.

    I can assure you that AI tools today can get you about 95% of the way and usually the rest has to be done by someone experienced. I will also tell you that you can accomplish a job that would usually have taken a team of developers to do a few years that now you can do within days. Its easy to say "MS, how dare you use this tool, its going to kill jobs but the reality is, if you are not using the tool than you are missing out on a huge portion of productivity. If one developer can now do and create what it took a team to do, I am not sure what you do about that as a company. I even wonder if the company I work for will retool their whole enterprise front end using AI tools and then bolt on the backend with a few devs.

    While we are concentrating on MS, I believe this is going to be a real big industry problem way quicker than anyone is prepared for. You can believe a lot of CEO/CTOs are contemplating these very decisions now. I already seen a previous company I use to work for get rid of a lot of developers and now pushing AI solutions as their biggest products.



    Mnementh on 18 July 2025
    Ryuu96 said:

    Sources tell me that Microsoft’s leadership team had the choice between reducing investment in AI infrastructure for the upcoming financial year or deeply cutting its headcount and operating expenses.

    They had to choose? I don't believe it. You tell me this company:

    Could not afford investments in AI while keeping their employees?



    3DS-FC: 4511-1768-7903 (Mii-Name: Mnementh), Nintendo-Network-ID: Mnementh, Switch: SW-7706-3819-9381 (Mnementh)

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    10 years greatest game event!

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    Ryuu96 on 18 July 2025
    Mnementh said:
    Ryuu96 said:

    Sources tell me that Microsoft’s leadership team had the choice between reducing investment in AI infrastructure for the upcoming financial year or deeply cutting its headcount and operating expenses.

    They had to choose? I don't believe it. You tell me this company:

    Could not afford investments in AI while keeping their employees?

    They could but they don't care, investing into AI and laying off employees is better for the Gods of infinite growth and their stock.

    Bare in mind as well, OpenAI is losing billions every year which Microsoft is a major investor in, CoPilot is a joke that few care about and struggling to sell, it too is almost certainly losing money, they're planning an extra $80bn investment into AI for 2025, the vast majority of it will very likely not result in any profits, which will therefore hit their operating margins, so they "have" to make cuts elsewhere.

    Of course they don't "have" to make the cuts, they'd still be filthy rich and make billions in profits but that's capitalism for you. Tom is just pointing out the fucked up decision making inside of Microsoft that is happening where they think it has to be a choice. Investing into AI will hurt their profit margins, so they cut back elsewhere.

    After they've spent $80bn and received little profits, they will likely spend even more tens of billions in 2026 for further little profits. The costs of AI are enormous, nobody has a good business model for it yet, and it has hit a ceiling in technical ability without further massive, loss-leading investment, so Microsoft will be spending tens of billions every year on AI, which will obviously hit their profit margins, which means they'll "have" to make cuts elsewhere to make up for the losses due to AI otherwise profit margins go down.

    Confirms what we all knew anyway, the cuts had nothing to do with performance. That's modern Microsoft for you though. If AI is successful then everyone is getting laid off. If AI is a bubble that bursts then everyone is getting laid off. If your business unit independent of AI is performing well and bringing in profits, you're still getting laid off for AI. If you don't use AI in your work, you're getting laid off for not using it. If you do use AI in your work, you're getting laid off to replace you with that AI.

    Microsoft 2025: Whatever You Do and However Well You Do It, You're Still Getting Laid Off.

    Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 18 July 2025

    DroidKnight on 18 July 2025

    Stop purchasing or supporting anything Microsoft so the rest of the 220,000 plus employees can be laid off as well.



    ...to avoid getting banned for inactivity, I may have to resort to comments that are of a lower overall quality and or beneath my moral standards.

    crissindahouse on 18 July 2025

    I can just repeat myself that there are much better companies like Valve which can shit money (around 10 billion revenue) and still never even started to employ people and always worked with the bare minimum so that they also can't throw them out after some years lol. I guess like $30m of revenue per employee is just not enough to justify some investments and if you never give someone the opportunity to start a career in your company you can also never hurt that person with a layoff ! 

    And gamers still love Valve even if everyone playing their few games hates that Valve gives a shit about their own games because Gaben only cares about taking billions from gamers for buying stuff like Counter Strike weapon cases.

    Who cares about millions of cheaters and even support for the games itself if you can squeeze every penny out of your userbase with some keys and cases! The Steam marketplace is even better than the stock market after all! A win win for everyone.

    PRAISE LORD GABEN!

    Last edited by crissindahouse - on 18 July 2025