Microsoft laid off more🍸 than 9000 employees earlier this month. This has resulted in long-gestating games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Perfect Dark and Everwild getting axed, alongside an 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:unannounced MMO project from the makers of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Elder Scrolls Online.
In each individual case, you can point to potential causes for their demise. The Initiative and Rare were arguably taking too long to deliver their games, and both seemed to be struggling through its own troubled development cycle. The ground has shifted for live-service games in recent years and a new offering, even one from a proven MMO developer like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Zenimax Online, has no guarantee of success. More broadly, Xbox has made puzzling decisions in recent years — like going all-in on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game Pass at the expense of its hardwar♉e — that may have finally come back to bite ๊it.
Unity AI Is Democratisin♛ไg The Ability To Rip Game Developers And Artists Off
Unit🥂y Muse and Sentis are new AI technologies that make developing games easier. Like most AI, they’re also likely stealing work from artists.
But a recent report suggests that the layoffs may, in fact, be due to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft's big spending on AI. Less that Microsoft plans to immediately replace those employee🍒s with AI and more that it 💎is cutting costs across its business to make up for the massive $80 billion investment it has made in AI tech.
This comes from a report on Microsoft's widespread layoffs that was published at . In the article, Universit🥃y of Washington professor Margaret O'Mara, a historian who has written extensively about tech, is quoted suggesting that Microsoft is taking a step toward a future with far fewer human workers. ♒“If AI is the centerpiece of what Microsoft [is] doing," O'Mara says, "then what it needs to buy is GPUs and data centers. It might invest in people, but maybe instead of hiring 10 middle managers, Microsoft is hiring one extremely expensive AI specialist.”
In other words, a co♑rporation isn't likely to invest heavily in costly AI tech if it doesn't intend to cut costs in the future, and we just saw how Microsoft plans to do t☂hat.
Xbox Specific Investments In AI
While Microsoft is broadly investing in AI, the gaming division is also making Xbox specific investments in the tech. Back in February, Fatima Kardar, Xbox's corporate vice president of gaming AI, penned an , an AI model designed to analyze games and create new gameplay using the data. It isn't capable of making playable games yet, but Kardar pitches a future where old games can be updated for any hardware using Muse, or t💯hat developers could use it to rapidly prototype ꧅for future releases.
Those ideas sound nice. And Muse squares with the ‘wow, look what it can do’ pitch that companies have made to consumers and consumers have made to each other since generative AI first made its way into the mainstream in 2022. With the arrival of DALL·E mini and ChatGPT, the technology quickly ingratiated itself into many consumers' daily lives. Endless Wes Anderson and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Studio Ghibli parodies have been generated, and . The pitch is that it's a magic technology that does your work for you, and during its rise, a lot of people have enjoyed watching the six-toed rabbit emerge from the 𒉰too-glossy hat.
Though the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA saw the🤪 threat AI posed to creative fields back in 2023, it was easyꦚ for many workers to ignore the risk of such a technology. Since then, AI has become omnipresent, integrated into every corner of the internet. Your Google searches are AI, the photos in your Facebook feed are AI, the songs on your Spotify playlist are AI, the lo-fi beats videos you work to are AI. Big tech's implementation of AI has started to feel like Apple's decision to remove the headphone jack from the iPhone. Is it better? No. But you still want an iPhone, right?
A Future For All Of Us
The Microsoft layoffs make the cost of that ubiquity clear. AI being everywhere means AI being used in every field. AI being used in every field means workers in every fiel൩d being replaced by AI (if it’s not taking their jobs, it’s sucking up their salaries).
Not all workers will be replaced, obviously. There are plenty of things AI still can't do. But as governments and corporations dedicate more and more money to the tech, that list of tasks will narrow. It may not do your job better than you, but that doesn't matter when enough money has been sunk. Then the question becomes less ambitious: Can it do your job well enough?
Xbox Was In Troubleꦰ The Second It Starꦏted Painting Phil Spencer As Its Saviour
After a week of unprecedented layoffs and project cancellations, Xbox's Phil Spencer stands at the centre oไf it all.
For many, AI has seemed like a toy or a useful tool. But in reality, it's the catalyst of the next big labor f🐟ight. Technological progress isn't an inexorable march forward. It's more like a river with many tributaries. Some of which go on to become mighty rivers in their own right — fire, the wheel, the internet. Others dry up, like LaserDisc, Google Glass, or Hyperloop. L🦩ooking back, it's easy to see tech's evolution as one unstoppable, natural force, but that's only because the times it was dammed up are harder to see. Time will tell if gaming-specific AI initiatives like Muse dry up or surge forward.
A🅰I tech has broad, far-reaching applications, which makes it equally easy to vision cast or fearmonger about it. But AI doesn't have to replace all of our jobs. It doesn't have to create our games. We, together, create the world we live in. The Microsoft layoffs make it clear that the future tech companies want to create﷽ will only serve the needs of the few. As the many, we need to reject it.
Xbox's Life Raft Is Also Its Anchor - Game Pass Might Ruin Xbox For Good
If iﷺt fails to disrupt the game industry completely, Game Pass is doomed to fail - and take its studios with it.
