Another Xbocalypse begins: Microsoft are reportedly closing or spinning off Double Fine, Ninja Theory and Compulsion

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https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/another-xbocalypse-begins-microsoft-are-reportedly-closing-or-spinning-off-double-fine-ninja-theory-and-compulsion

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I will never understand why you would sell your studio to someone like microsoft or ea, it is well known they will bastardize it drag its name through the mud and then strip off and sell every asset.

To me the money is not worth the lost legacy, but what do I know I’m not some short sighted selfish ceo.

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If Double Fine closes instead of just splitting back off into its own studio, I’m gonna be pissed.

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“What if we had… a lot of money. And never made a game again.”

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Microslop is one of those companies that acquires properties and destroys their productivity and profitability.

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https://nogamesforgenocide.com/

Microsoft provides the Israeli military with Azure cloud and AI services that are crucial in empowering and accelerating Israel’s genocidal war on 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip.

If you needed another reason to avoid Xbox, they’re one of the biggest supporters of the US regime.

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Friends don’t let friends use Microsoft products. Fuck Microsoft.

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Comments in Gaming@beehaw.org

Man fuck Xbox and fuck Microslop. Why even let them announce Senua if they’re gonna get shut down days later?

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They’re trying to spin the studio off without shutting it down. This allows them to talk about their ongoing/future work publicly.

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There was never any other realistic option here, Microslop is too dysfunctional and lost in the fake AI “revolution” to ever hold on to game developer talent.

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I’ve been thinking about this, and I think it’s likely mostly to do with cashflow. They won’t say that, of course, since implying any cashflow challenges is a massive red flag for analysts, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.

Basically:

  1. Microslop is all-in on AI.
  2. AI infrastructure is incredibly expensive to build, requiring intensive capital investment over years to build out capacity.
  3. AI models are incredibly expensive to train.
  4. Microslop’s gaming division also requires intensive capital over years to deliver games.
  5. Microslop has finite cashflow available to reinvest in long-term bets.
  6. Microslop has to choose where to allocate its capital investments, and gaming is less attractive to upper management than AI.

Because AI is the “it thing” right now, the reputational harm to Microslop for, well, being called Microslop because of their self-inflicted sloppening and the reputational harm from writing off all their investments in gaming is less than the perceived reputational harm they would face if they weren’t seen as being technology leaders in the AI space.

So, it all comes back to the AI bubble; investors are pumping up any company “doing AI”, so it’s become the target that Microslop cares about, and is redirecting all available cashflow in a mad gold rush to establish Copilot and their agentic OS, regardless of all consequences.

On the plus side, the world will be a better place with more investment in open software, so Microslop imploding will be fantastic… But that’s not going to do anything, at least not now, for the tens of thousands of laid off employees as they crash and burn.

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What pisses me off so much about the AI bubble as someone who was trained in science is the basic obvious fact that if you have a magic tool that can “solve any problem” but that takes a nearly impossible amount of energy to do so, taking so much energy that everything else has to be sidelined in order to power this magic problem solving tool….. than you are just restating that the tool you have is incapable of problem solving.

Suppose there are two problem solving machines A and B. Problem solving machine A does not work very well but it takes a small amount of energy and material to function, problem solving machine B is like AI in that it can tackle “any problem” if given nearly all the electrical power and computer chips that humans can produce.

Both problem solving machine A and B are equally useless even though the owners of problem solving machine B can make grandiose claims about the power of their problem solving machine if they conveniently exclude the “energy required” part, which as someone trained in science ends up seeming pretty damn similar to someone arguing that their perpetual motion machine is capable of perpetual motion so long as we feed all of the electrical power humanity can generate into it…

If your Oracle requires all the investment, electrical energy and computer chips earth can produce and more to tell you the future, it is not an Oracle but rather your own demise twisted into a promise of absolute power and knowledge.

Anybody who understands computer science should be able to grasp the basic idea that it is trivially easy to describe infinitely powerful computer programs that take essentially infinite time and energy to compute, that doesn’t mean anything, in fact most of computer science has been the proactive study of how to rigorously talk about programs that are impossible to execute because of outsized material demands and develop an overarching theory of computer science that nonetheless accounts for that theoretical axis. Computer science people thus should be well equipped to understand AI is just bullshit being sold as genius by disguising the cost per unit of intelligence…….. but they don’t really seem to grasp that basic aspect of physics in how it limits computation and it doesn’t say a lot of good about the whole industry.

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Aw. Gee whiz. They promised not to close studios, as long as they’re allowed to do illegal mergers.

I’m beginning to mistrust CEO promises.

I’m sure they’ll do their best, in the future.

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please for the love of god like doublefine survive!!

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Killing off Double Fine would be a war crime. They’re a national treasure.

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Honestly, they need to do this. It can’t be possible to manage that many studios from the top of the Xbox organization. And, without market pressure as a clear feedback mechanism, it’s got to be difficult for the managers of the studios too.

The original sin here was buying so many and trying to become some game-production monopoly. The whole plan was crazy.

Hopefully this is good for the industry long-term. I’d love to see a bunch of independent studios pop up run by the people Microsoft temporarily ingested.

To be clear, this is terrible for the people involved, and it is all Microsoft’s fault (or, at least, Phil Spencer era Xbox’s fault - never understood why he was so respected inside or outside of Microsoft when he kept making one surely-obviously-bad decision after another). But it was surely inevitable.

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