waterfowl

I implore anyone wondering what's going on in the game industry to watch the System Shock 2 credits: youtube.com/watch?v=TKRJEC… just a bunch of nerds doing what they love. meanwhile, modern game companies are full of people who hate games, and don't even play them.

@neogiu_ @EzekielYoder I wouldn't be surprised if indie studios don't want AAA devs. They're indie for a reason.

@EzekielYoder I've always worked for indie, having AAA veterans in the competition just makes it harder lol even if I did solo dev it'd be nearly impossible to reach an audience it's dire

feels like I won't ever find a gamedev job again at this stage horrible shit

@draginol we need anti toxicity measures in the algo.

The toxicity online seems to be getting worse. Just reading my morning socials and seeing post after post insulting and attacking people whether it be Anthropic, people at Microsoft, people making some game, or just someone who posted a thing they’re working on. It just wears me down. It’s not a new phenomenon but it is getting worse.

@BloodEcho3601 @grok likely the context windows are killing you. Don't do long chats.

SuperGrok is disappointing. I only use normal chat, no images or anything. Talked for just 2 day and I'm already at 90% of my weekly quota. Used to be daily reset, now it's weekly and feels like a rip-off. Please give chat more limit or bring back daily resets. @grok

@elonmusk also black and white VFX or sprite sheets / timelines for particle effects would be incredible. Image models are very bad at this currently

@elonmusk as a solo game dev, let me give some input - AI image gen is best for concept art and roughing out ideas for UX / UIs / 3d models / textures. So some kind of concept art oriented mode would be great, where it gives you multiple roughs, then you choose one to build out

Grok will be able to call Imagine as a tool in agentic mode for image/video generation. As Imagine keeps improving, this will be amazing for game developers!

@MoshiMoshiMoan the fact jim can jog in place after falling down and exploding like a ceramic pot last year is nuts.

A better question is how is a crippled terminally ill man more physically fit than you.

@Grummz I'll also add, doom the dark ages was a giant fucking flop. I love doom 2016 and eternal, never touched dark ages. It went in the wrong direction.

New numbers are in and they are brutal. 136 axed at id Software, programmers and QA decimated. This is her first big mistake at Xbox. I'm in favor of her other moves so far, her direct X involvement, her staffing cuts and studio closers. This one is a miss, probably related to her lack of gaming experience. Id Tech was genuinely some of the best out there and could have benefitted the whole studio. Source: Game Developer

@KeystoneDrone @Grummz microsoft brought her in because she chops heads off. I remember a college lecture from Jordan Peterson, talking about a guy who knew like this - he genuinely enjoyed going into companies and firing thousands, it was his job and he loved it. Some people are better at doing it

@Grummz Microsoft brought her in b/c she's young and objectively attractive. Gotta have the cute girl boss CEO give out free Xbox consoles and hype up the retro logo. Get the customer base on board. Then WHAM she can drop the layoff hammer. The classic bait and switch: Xbox edition.

@Grummz yeah, the other cuts I agree with, but this one hurts. Id didn't need this. That said, those senior software engineers cost a lot, and my guess is they're going to retire the idtech engine soon in favor of, ugh, unreal.

@PaulTassi Paul, every time I think you might be getting better, you go and post something that's utterly delusional. Being tired of blatant tokenism and race swaps is not racism. It's people seeing what these studios are doing (award baiting), and knowing it comes at the cost of integrity.

The Odyssey backlash is transphobia and racism under the guise of "historical accuracy." That's it.

@dpoddolphinpro this shit is so depressing. I genuinely never thought I'd see spaceX be ruined like this

SpaceXAI is not SpaceX. SpaceXAI is a re-brand of xAI, which owns X (X the app, not SpaceX). X is a subsidiary of xAI (now SpaceXAI), and SpaceXAI is a subsidiary of SpaceX. Hope that clears things up!

@yuanjohn01 @antirez what is this delusional post? There are no current export controls on US models, US companies do release open weight models, and as far as I know all US services are open for chinese to use, whether it's frontiers or platforms like hugging face

I am currently in China. Given the U.S. restrictions on Chinese models and various government export controls, Chinese open-source models are essentially providing technical convenience to the U.S. for free, without the U.S. having to provide any commercial compensation in return. This situation is extremely lopsided. The U.S. is consistently able to maintain a competitive edge through its closed-source strategies. Under these circumstances, China has no choice but to consider restricting overseas access to its cutting-edge AI models.

If that happens Europe is officially fucked.

@ludydev @antirez that's like saying a farmer not being reliant on a tractor company and instead using horses is better off despite being at a massive disadvantage. It simply isn't true. AI is a massive force multiplier for talented people

Honestly, zero dependency on external frontier AI models means having no leverage points held against you. Focusing on robust classical computing, local systems optimization, and core industrial software might actually prove to be a much more resilient and advantageous play in the long run. No dependency, no leverage.

@JFunkleroy @RazorFist xbox was ran into the ground. Check that, the game industry as a whole was ran into the ground, making garbage that nobody wanted to play

@RazorFist She even did her best to not close studios and saved a lot of people's jobs. The current tally from Xbox is every dollar they spend, they lose 64 cents. This woman has been handed a bomb and she's actually doing good.

"Thanks for the memories, but your focus group slop and pet hipster projects sold a combined 12 copies. Time to sell some actual games now."

@MoshiMoshiMoan I was in support of garbage like double fine being let go, but this one is just bad. Id made good games.

*buy up every game studio *fire everyone Interesting strategy you have there Xbox

@ayv4zyan the fact I got locked out in the middle of a coding session when my credit usage was at 34%, because it updated to the new system and immediately shoved me at 100%, is fucking insane. I'm canceling grok and just getting cursor

The problem is not the pool. xAI’s new Grok limit system could have been a great idea. A weekly shared pool across Chat, Build, Imagine, Voice, etc. actually makes sense. A developer may want most of their usage in Build. A creator may want Imagine. A researcher may want Chat/DeepSearch. Flexibility is good. The problem is not the pool. The problem is that the pool seems to have arrived with much worse effective limits, less transparency, and more pressure to top up or upgrade. Before this, SuperGrok felt generous. I almost never hit Grok chat limits. Build felt usable. Imagine felt usable. Each product had its own room to breathe. Now one heavy workflow can eat the same shared allowance and hurt the others. If I spend my week coding, I should not lose normal chat usage. If I spend my week generating images, I should not lose my ability to ask Grok questions. If a generation fails or is blocked, users should not feel like they paid quota for nothing. The right version of this system would be hybrid: Keep guaranteed reserved limits per product. Add a flexible weekly pool on top. Show real numbers, not only a percentage bar. Do not silently reduce what paying users could already do. Make top-ups optional, not the obvious destination of the redesign. For example: give every SuperGrok user a reserved baseline for Chat, Build, and Imagine, then let the weekly pool handle overflow or personal preference. That would make the product better. What happened feels like the opposite: a good product idea used to justify a worse subscription experience. And this matters more because SuperGrok is $30/month. That is more than ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Google AI Pro. If xAI wants to charge more than the standard $20 AI subscription tier, it should give more value, not more anxiety around usage. I don’t mind a fair limit system. Compute is expensive. Video and coding agents are not free. But paying users should be able to keep the workflows they already had. A new limit system should make usage more flexible, not make the product feel smaller. @xAI @X @XDevelopers please fix the usage limits. We love Grok, but we don’t love feeling robbed by a subscription that suddenly gives us less.

@RockLeeSmile yeah now let's look at the 6% that aren't. Guarantee they're the games people actually care about

@fdksfjdfd I'm getting tired of this. I just refuted this point twice in the last 10 minutes. No, you're wrong. Doesitplay.org found 94% out of 773 PS5 games are fully playable offline directly installed from the disc.

I'm really curious psychologically what is going on with the people spending their time advocating for Sony's side (destruction of physical games) online, making arguments for us all to have less consumer rights. Can anyone explain it?

@mSanterre I hate saying it because it's elitist, but web dev really is just pretend coding. Vibe coding web dev stuff is so freaking easy. I could never imagine vibe coding game code.

Some programmers have never done anything except basic CRUD web apps and it shows.

@FreakZoneGames at least with a PC you can get pirated/cracked versions and put them on a disc. Or buy games from GOG which offer DRM free installers. The real killer is DRM + digital only. That's a recipe for disaster. Steam DRM is trivial to crack, which is good for game preservation