Those making entertainment products aimed at the mass market can either avoid making political and social statements or they can accept being a niche market product. It’s about making enough money that people don’t have to be laid off. The people running these companies for the last 10 years have failed to accomplish that.

Don’t forget the most important part. Anticipate the user’s needs or wants or else ask them what they are likely to be, then make sure they’re addressed. Making the most popular idea inside the company isn’t what ever works. Its what the users want or will want that works. This is what the tech industry mostly gets wrong, especially among the most famous companies and leaders. Unless your name is Jensen or a few others, if you’re a tech CEO, then you’re almost certainly clueless about what the customers want and need to go ask them. The long list of mediocre and obscure games that won at The Game Awards, and active player data, confirms this to be true in gaming.

Startups are real companies. They are not the comfortable lazy jobs you would have on a big tech company campus or even a post-IPO tech company. They are still trying to “change the world” or else they figured out it’s not going to work. The founders typically leave within 5 years of starting them, either because they succeed and get bought out or because the investors stopped financing their continued existence for a particular reason. Maybe the idea was great at the time but the market changed. Maybe they were wrong about the idea from day 1. They are often 1 mediocre executive decision from going out of business.

Big companies are full of people who aspire only for a comfortable existence in a relatively easy job offering a career path or a lucrative compensation package that will get them the nice 2 story home in the suburbs and pay for the kids private school this year. They work a standard 40-50 hours per week unless they’re on the management track and then they may leave the baby at home with the nanny until they make Vice President of something very ordinary and mediocre.

In a startup, depending on what it is, you could be working for or alongside the next Steve Jobs and not know it yet. You could also be working for and alongside total bozos. Figuring that out is key to knowing whether its worth your time. Steve was kind of an a-hole according to some, so it might not be apparent until you talk about serious things having to do with the vision for the future. You will probably have 5 to 10 jobs that change frequently and will work way more than a standard workweek.

It’s like saying “I’m going to join the military and can either become a supply clerk or join an elite unit whose name is not publicly acknowledged”. Most people should probably stick to supply but the others will never be fulfilled there.

The headline seems a little misleading about the real point of the article where it explains the best way to avoid having to pay anyone like Github in the future is using a p2p equivalent. I agree that having a backup somewhere else is the key to avoiding all kinds of problems when companies decide to raise prices, enshittify, or otherwise ruin the service. Companies have been driven to bankruptcy by cloud services becoming unavailable and they had no backup.

Whether it’s development, using AI, office suites, file storage or anything else, you should always have a backup and not rely on another company to continue working or existing as a company. The same social media moderation hall monitor karens who make your article or video critical of commercial cloud AI executives disappear go to all the same conferences as the ones employed at cloud services companies. Most of these people live within 50 miles of each other and are in the same San Francisco Bay Area social circles.

Nano’s used because it’s easier to use, which means the user interface is more intuitive than the others who insist you hit a key before making an edit.

Chances are, nobody’s following most of the laws there regardless.

There’s nothing new (“Neo”) about that. It’s been common practice for a long time. They don’t cover it in public schools since it takes time away from crayon art.

AI is the latest gimmick to avoid paying people a fair share of the profits. Hoarding profits is the only way anyone can afford to make $100 million before age 30 or be a billionaire by age 40. There is no other way to do it.

Pre-1860s: Have slaves do the work, to avoid paying fair wages

1860s-1920s: Have Chinese and low-wage immigrants do the work, to avoid paying fair wages

1930s: Plenty of unemployed, so no need to pay fair wages

1940s: War

1945-1960s: Lets try paying fair wages

1970s-early 2020s: That sucked! Offshore to Asia and Latin America and hire low wage foreigners, to avoid paying fair wages.

mid-2020s: Replace the humans with AI, to avoid paying fair wages

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The free to play listen to player feedback and incorporate related design or development features in a timely manner. If there’s a bug they fix it. If they want a new feature, they strongly consider it. The AAA gaming industry has been inwardly focused for about 10 years now. Watch The Game Awards and you see its just like the Oscars. Awards going to a lot of very obscure titles for checking some box on the social justice agendas. Some games like CS2 stay at the top by simply not making major changes for the worse when they already have a winning formula for their market that nobody wants to see changes.

Aside from the California-western europe developer culture, I think a lot of it has to do with the people above AAA gaming who make the major decisions are not themselves in the industry but in enterprise services or the business community. Microsoft top people may know how to squeeze profits out of enterprise customers but they’ve been clueless on gaming.

The Xbox is a dead platform and PS is right behind it. Look at active player counts for the info on who matters. It’s not Microsoft, EA or the others. It’s indie studios and free to play studios on the PC and Steam. Until those guys decide they need to comply, none of these laws are going to matter. Any country telling some indie dev somewhere else that they need to set up software to verify ID cards is going to be ignored. Then, the people who want to play those games are going to ignore them too. If you walk around in any major city in Australia today, you see people ignore the law routinely. This is just one more law they will ignore.

AAA gaming is full of execs who have not grasped how their industry has already begun imploding. The survivors in the all digital potato PC world will be the indie devs and Steam since Steam sells their games. The indie game devs write their games to run on anything. The other survivor will be the free to play studios who have already won every market they’ve entered. If they don’t own a gaming market yet its because they haven’t bothered winning it. Look at active player counts. Franchises like Battlefield and Call of Duty are way down the charts from the free to play shooter games.

Probably true, although Ballmer didn’t screw it up and Nadella did screw it up for one simple reason. He’s a 1 Cloud Pony. He came from the cloud and that’s all he really knows, and his narrow Senior VP perspective helped him extract earnings from cloud but nothing else at Microsoft.

AI is the new African slave

They can vote out the city and county leaders then change the zoning to warehouses only.

What they need to do right now is create a Windows emulator for all Xbox games so they can be played on a Windows PC. Then encourage developers to do a re-release, even if it’s just an upgrade to textures for 1440 gaming. Then sell those for $20 each. This is the only free lunch in AAA gaming. All the rest are big gambles on big budget games that people generally disliked since 2020 or they’re niche games offering little revenue

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This seems like one of those clickbait articles where a reporter enters dozens of prompts trying to lure the AI to say something they can write an article about.

X loses money so no margins there. Twitter has never made a profit in its history that I’ve ever heard of. Facebook’s on the way out. 20 years ago it was college age users. 10 years ago it was people over 50. Now it’s a lot of commercial accounts posting as they do on other basically dying or dead platforms. The only sign of life is streaming video and chats related to streaming video. YouTube has been losing users and content creators to both Rumble and Twitch. The right 1/3 of America is on Rumble while Twitch took the gamers. Youtube still has business but they basically gave away enough business to make those 2 relevant.

Alphabet’s dependent on Youtube, cloud services, web search, and related ads to pay for the unprofitable parts of the business, which appears to be where the bulk of their employees work, rather than at the earnings-generators. If they screw up youtube, then they will have to lay a lot of the people in the fun and interesting jobs off, along with the many layers of bureaucracy and non-coders working in jobs that nobody’s quite sure what they do there. They can’t really afford to screw up youtube any more than they have. It can’t merely do well. It has to do great to pay all of their bills. Very similar to the action-hero movies at the movie studio paying for all the unprofitable ones that most people work on