Is that so? I can list a dozen of crappy games that manages to sell a lot. Quality is subjective, after all you can see people paying for porn games all the time. With Elon will be similar, if he gives something to satisfy his core audience they will buy it even if the game itself is crappy 

About Concord, where exactly was the support form the target audience (read: Hero shooter players)? Certainly not on internet, the game received pretty bad reactions even in the first trailer way before people started inserting politics on it 

If you want something that was make specifically to be political, it would be something like "The Post" movie. This was a 100% political movie, where the director intentions were made clear since the beginning, he wanted to tell a political story and everyone seemed fine with it (great movie btw), the target audience for the movie showed up in the theaters and the movie was a success, since it was advertised as such 

Concord in other hand was made to be some kind of political statement, it was the target the same crowd who play other hero shooters 

But people turned Concord political somehow. Like... it's a poorer version of Overwatch. This game barely even features a story. If it was something like Metaphor Refantazio which is literally a tale about politics in a semi-medieval fantasy world I would understand but... Concord really? 

No worries, Lol. Understood.

It's definitely not crypto-currency or the metaverse and you work with it so clearly have a better understanding of it than I do. The medical field is one area where I've been a lot more positive about the uses of AI in and largely I just think we can explore all its uses there. I've heard a lot of positive uses of AI in the medical field, a lot of things which help medical professions without replacing them.

It's the tech companies I distrust but that might be because I distrust them on a general basis, Lol. AGI feels like nobody is quite sure when/if it's possible but it just feels like a constant stream of "AGI is right around the corner, continue to invest billions" and it's still not here years later, then repeat the same statement, and investors are investors at the end of the day, I'm not sure how long they're going to wait.

But I could be thinking too narrow, I do agree AI will cause a lot of job losses and yeah, that would be a significant change to many job sectors, albeit a negative change, especially if Governments do nothing to help them which they probably won't but it's exactly why we need more regulations to protect peoples livelihoods and abuse of AI.

In a scenario where large portions of the population are now jobless and skint because AI has taken their jobs, I suppose that would have to cause capitalism to be replaced too, because capitalism relies on an ever increasing growth line, if there's a decline or even stagnant growth the capitalist world pisses itself but who is going to be buying produce when people are jobless and skint? Especially if the Government doesn't help them out.

Ah, well there you go.  If you believe that politics played no part in the development and design of Concord then I'm sure you'll feel the same way about whatever game Elon Musk produces.  

At this point "free" models (the free is relative, but this is for another discussion and unimportant to this one) are judged about a few months behind commercial ones. This has initially a lot to do with the leak of the Llama weights, but independent (from the AI companies) research jumped on it as it gave them a way to research on a similar level and they kept on improving at a rapid rate. Also private enthusiasts helped improving the models. We are at a situation there we may not be able to run a big multilingual model like GPT-4 on a normal PC, but a single language (like english) one works well with only small setbacks towards the big ones. This allows the independent research to do their own stuff on small budgets. And enthusiast always find more ways to reduce computational needs of the models without compromising much of their abilities. Also, all the free stuff works together, while the AI companies keep their secrets from each other, impeding their improvements.

Therefore I think, that the VC-money was needed to kick off the LLM breakthrough, but now it could dry up and research would still be going forward. Also, if big money leaves the AI field, we may see much less hype, but all the researchers now working at the AI companies will flood back into the open research and mingle with other researchers, combining their know-how. So yeah, with or without VC money, I see the field going forward.

This means, that the timeframe to reach human level AGI isn't so much depending on the VC-money, but more on the question if hard technological ceilings exist, that need new ideas to break through, or if all barriers left are soft ones that can be solved by combining known ideas as sc9 and me discussed.

I agree: big companies will always use everything - including AI - to reduce their dependence on human workers and improve their winnings. But that they do already without AI.

I can't stop thinking about the big discussion that you shouldn't compare other games to Baldur's Gate 3. While I agree that small indies play in another league, that year saw also the release of Starfield, Diablo 4, Hogwarts Legacy and Final Fantasy XVI. Clearly Bethesda, Blizzard, Warner and Square have resources to match the ones of Larian and these IPs (with exception of the new Starfield) are big and well-known IPs as well, bigger I would argue than Baldur's Gate or D&D even. The reason why Larian could keep up or as most GOTYs concluded exceed these other products is not down to resources, but to freedom of creativity. And these differences existed without AI. This is a big company problem, not so much an AI problem. AI is just another tool which turns to shit if touched by big corpos.

And the european union isn't that bad in going towards regulation, most discussions seem good. It is only slow.

FTFY.

Hope so because I have precisely zero faith in America doing anything over the next 4 years and if EU does start regulating AI usage I would expect Elon Musk to throw a tantrum and demand Trump retaliates against the EU. We've already had twats in Trumps admin threaten the EU if they're mean to poor Elon Musk, Lmao. Musk has heavy interest in AI, he did that whole performative nonsense about how we should pause AI development for "ethical concerns" a year ago, when in actual fact what he meant was "So I could catch up" because he too is heavily investing in it.

The American Oligarch will make it difficult for EU and UK to regulate things he has interest in, I can only hope Trump and Musk grow sick of each other soon and Trump dumps him to the curb which I would say is quite likely if only because they're both massive egomaniacs and people with big egos don't tend to work well together.

The target audience got review codes.

LOL, I am naturally a bit exaggerating. But I feel sometimes that the american games industry (of bigger studios at least, indies are different) and the american gaming jounalism have built a self-congratulary bubble and ignoring voices outside of it.

Thor of PirateSoftware said, that he likes to listen to AsmonGold and every gamedev who isn't does that at their own peril. Because in his opinion Asmon represents the main gaming audience. You don't need to follow Asmons solutions, but you should see how he feels about things, because many other gamers will have similar feelings. And gamedevs should care about that. I think I agree with that statement.

All this has nothing to do with politics. Every art was always political and always will be. But devs need to be in sync with their audience, not outside in a different bubble. Otherwise they will fail to capture the needs of their audience and over time lose customers.

Probably somewhere around the time he started supporting a guy who told the Pride Boys to "stand back and stand by". Maybe earlier.

Don't you know that if a game fails it's because it's political and games only had politics inserted into them over the past ~4 years? 

Can list countless of reasons why Concord failed but it will always come back to "They/Them" for some. It failed because it was plain average in an extremely competitive market, it was being insulted even before this political nonsense came into play as looking bland and boring, it failed because barely anyone outside of forums knows what it is. It failed because it didn't catch anyone's attention because it's bland. Even if it was good, it would have had a high chance of failure as many other Hero Shooters that were actually decent have crashed and burned.

This is a risk that every GaaS chaser is playing, Concord is no exception and Sony were perhaps stupid to place so much on it. Even good games sell bad if the market is too strong, a painful reminder of this is Titanfall 2 which is brilliant but it was crushed by CoD & Battlefield. This is especially true is todays world of "forever games" where a few juggernauts dominate the market and people are spending all their time and money in those and not bothering to try anything else, the top GaaS are dominating the market and it's a nightmare to break in but once you do, then you've hit the jackpot.

This is why instead of directly competing in crowded markets like hero shooters, I think the focus for companies like Sony should instead be on unique GaaS experiences like Helldivers 2 which have little direct competition but even if your game has little direct competition, it is still being hurt by these forever titles, NPD has spoken more in detail on this that it doesn't really matter nowadays if your game is direct competition or not to something, everything is competing for time now.

This year I've seen practically every game have some form of "woke" accusations thrown towards it, I saw accusations of Dead Rising Remake of being woke for removing the sexy snapshot feature, they soon shut up after it released because they couldn't build a grifting campaign from it, they tried to accuse Space Marine 2 of being woke for having a female commander but they soon shut up and then had the nerve to try to claim it as their own, they tried to accuse Black Ops 6 of being woke but of course the grift can't penetrate one of the biggest IPs in the world.

They always shut up when a game is good and fans love it (Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarök, Alan Wake 2, Dead Rising Remake, Space Marine 2, Black Ops 6) but the single moment there's a bad videogame they will desperately cling onto it because it's now apparently an example of how "woke" caused a game to fail (Concord) but ignore all the dozens of other factors as to why the game failed. Then they'll rip out the indies that nobody has ever heard of and be like "see, failed cause woke" Lol.

Avowed is the next target of the grift because it had "He/Him" pronouns in a character bio screen, but I can't recall these grifters being this angry at The Outer Worlds having an asexual character, in fact she was a fan favourite, there was some moaning but it definitely wasn't big, why? Because The Outer Worlds was good so they couldn't use it in their hate campaign. They just move on from one grift to the next, until they eventually hit a bad game. Complete desperation from a campaign of grifters and people not realising they're being grifted.

Halo is also woke because Chief is apparently feminine looking in Unreal Engine too! Haha. There's no method to the madness, they just throw bait everywhere and hope something sticks and will use any weak reason to target the next game, because their YouTube videos and livelihoods rely on the rage-bait. Keep fishing until they get a catch, if they label every game as woke they'll eventually hit a bad one and it'll give them content for their rage bait Twitter accounts/YouTube videos for the next couple of months.

Yes but that's trying to super simplify it and lump everything under the same label.

See games journalists/journalists and some game devs are actually quite politically charged, and in turn, they feel they need to inject real world politics into all the games they touch, even if it doesn't make sense logically. 

See I love games like Metal Gear, which is very much a game based on military and world nation politics, and Kojima/Konami spend years trying to tell multiple stories from different angles, and people loved the franchise for it.

Look at games like Dustborn, ME A, and Veilguard, games that try to beat you over the head for not getting in line with irl gender politics, which really have very little to do with a game's story or it even being part of the fun factor. You end up seeing these games spending far more time trying to weave in irl politics, that it actually detracts the fun factor, and ends up being a boring/safe played/checlisted slog, and people are finally piping up about that, and they have every right to, because these companies are asking for £70-100 for their product, and said product is either boring to hell/generic or treating it's audience like inhuman filth. 

See there is an actual core difference, but I feel like some of you on here (not aimed at you, Mnem) don't want to approach that subject matter, because you know it can get very, very nasty (as we've seen in the actual irl politics thread, yes it has gotten nasty, and I've little faith some of you on here can admit you got some stuff mixed up or got too carried away with irl beliefs in how we should all think/operate).

All main core gamers want is a good fun game, and if it's basing it's fun factor on telling stories, they need to be more thoughtful and engaging, to actually get the gamer to stop and think, rather than feeling like shit. Metal Gear doesn't make me feel like shit, it treated me with respect (up until 5, when the project got scrapped halfway, and Konami just dropped respect to anyone, even Kojima altogether). Witcher 3 didn't make me feel bad for being white, or not leaning in any particular side, it treated me with respect and allowed me to make my own choices, without beating me over the head. 

You can make good games with politics, you just have to not be so heavily politically charged, that you start injecting your own heavily biased viewpoints, and actually think outside the box, and what your audience would expect do think or what they would do (it's why we've had games reward players for choosing certain actions, or getting the "good" endings in games, and that provides positive reinforcement to the mind of the gamer).