My view of AI (13)

[Fairy-Possum]

Bethesda tells workers company "needs to change course" and "focus on games with greatest potential"

Microsoft recently announced sweeping lay-offs affecting 4,800 people, including 3,200 at Xbox alone. This is happening as a part of a "reset" of Xbox, and this includes changes to the company's various subsidiaries, including Bethesda.

Bethesda boss Jill Braff said the cuts at Xbox "reflect the realities of our industry and business." She said Bethesda has a responsibility to ensure it is "operating from a more stable foundation." In addition to lay-offs across the organisation - Bethesda's id Software, ZeniMax Online Studios, and Obsidian teams were hit particularly hard - Braff said Bethesda needs to rethink how it works and what franchises it focuses on.

"To be successful in the future, we need to change course," Braff said in a memo to staff obtained by IGN. "We must strengthen our business, return to sustainable growth, and ensure we can continue investing in our franchises and players. I know that doesn't make a day like today any easier."

Microsoft's dramatic cuts to Xbox are the results of "catastrophic mismanagement" by Microsoft leadership as it chases the AI trend, some say.


Bethesda union says HR forced staff to remove display honouring laid-off colleagues

In the aftermath of Xbox's blood-letting, the Bethesda Game Studio union says staff at the studio's Rockville, Maryland office assembled a "Celebration of Service" display honouring their laid-off colleagues - a display that employees were "almost immediately" forced to remove by the company's HR department, the union says.

The extent of the lay-offs in striking: Among those who lost their jobs this week were Bethesda Games Studios staff like Christiane Meister, a senior character artist who oversaw character art asset creation from every Elder Scrolls game from Morrowind to Skyrim during her 27-year tenure at the studio.


https://www.gamespot.com/articles/be...est-potential/

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...ff-colleagues/

All I have to say is "**** Microsoft, and **** AI"

[boredjedi]

It's Microsoft behind that. The new CEO of Xbox Gaming Asha Sharma
is going on a closing developers and firing a lot of people spree.
She also filed for thousands of H-1B visa hires this year.

[Fairy-Possum]

It's Microsoft behind that. The new CEO of Xbox Gaming Asha Sharma
is going on a closing developers and firing a lot of people spree.
She also filed for thousands of H-1B visa hires this year.

I've heard nothing good about her, and so far she's proof that CEOs are incapable of compassion. Thanks to her, thousands of people are going home to tell their families that they no longer have a job and it's gonna be thousands more by the years' end. Remaining employees are having their payments decreased by those H-1B visa hires too.

Although she not entirely to blame. Plenty of nameless fat cats profit from this. She's just the most famous

[chuft]

Nobody is profiting from anything. It's a gigantic money pit. They are firing people to help pay for their insane hardware investments, in which they are paying ten times what the components cost a year ago due to bidding against each other. It's only a matter of time before the bills come due. Then it will get ugly.

A local university is now offering Master's degrees in AI use in business. I wonder what the degrees will be worth by the time people finish getting them.

Meanwhile watching this fiasco always gives me a smile. Since the IPO June 12 or whatever day it was:






The most absurdly overvalued company in the world. You can't calculate a price/earnings ratio for it because it does not make a profit (has no earnings). Note it owns xAI, the AI company behind the less than popular Grok, as well as X (yes these names are stupid) the company formerly known as Twitter.

Now some fat cats did profit from this IPO - the insiders and rich people allowed to buy at $130/share right before the public sale, which opened at $160. Instant 25% profit if you bought at $130 before the bell directly from the issuers and immediately sold for $160, even more if you found one of those suckers who paid $200/share later in the day.

Anthropic and OpenAI have not had their IPOs yet so there is no public share price to track.