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iww-gnv · 3 months

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The entire game industry is still reeling from yesterday's bombshell announcement that Microsoft—hot on the heels of its $69 billion acquisition of Activision—would be laying off 1,900 employees across Activision-Blizzard and Xbox. Inevitably, Twitter is awash with reactions highlighting the human cost, both from dazed devs waking up in a world in which they no longer have jobs, and from others wondering what this all means for the months and years ahead. The posts by former Blizzard devs are too many to count. "After years of applying," wrote former QA learning specialist Cole McElwain in a much-retweeted post, "I finally secure a job at Blizzard. I move to California and am welcomed with an incredible team. I couldn't be more excited to start… "Four months into the job, I'm laid off. What the hell, Microsoft?"

#news #labor news #gaming news #gaming industry #gaming layoffs #gaming industry layoffs #tech layoffs #tech industry layoffs #layoffs #2024 layoffs

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renthony · 3 months

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From the article:

Grover, the self-described "cute, furry little monster," has famously held a wide variety of jobs since he arrived on Sesame Street in 1970. In addition to his regular stint as a bumbling waiter, the furry blue Muppet has also worked as a mailman, professor, door-to-door salesman, driver, actor, flight attendant and hot dog vendor, to name just a few of his career moves. On Monday, he surprised his social media followers by adding another profession to the list. "As a news reporter, I always do my research before I break a story. I am confident to report that you are so special and amazing!" Grover posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The announcement cheered some users, who thanked Grover for his hard work and kind words. A number of journalists welcomed him to their ranks and joked good-naturedly about his fact-checking abilities. But others in the journalism industry — which has been decimated by unrelenting layoffs over the last year — were less excited about the news, responding with dark humor instead. "UPDATE: Unfortunately, Grover was part of the latest round of newsroom cuts," tweeted the account Stuff Journalists Like. "I regret to report a hedge fund has since purchased Grover's paper and laid him off," reporter S.P. Sullivan wrote in a tweet with over 1,000 likes. "[Grover] has been laid off without severance despite being part of his paper's bargaining unit," tweeted the Washington Post's Angel Mendoza. "[He] found out this morning while at the [Capitol] via a push alert from the [New York Times]." Grover's tweet didn't quite hit as big of a nerve as his pal Elmo did last month, when he asked how everyone was doing and was inundated with frank replies from every corner of the Internet. But it did shine a light on the precarious state of the industry.

#journalism news #sesame street #2024 layoffs

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devsgames · 2 months

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Just this week in games:

- EA laid off 700 workers

- Sony laid of 900 workers

- Rockstar announces in-person work mandates for all employees (a 'soft layoff' that will force some staff to quit, which likely means that actual layoffs are forthcoming)

In 2023 6,000 games workers were laid off. Now in 2024 over 10,000 workers have been laid off, and there's still 10 months to go.

Not to be hyperbolic, but I think this is perhaps the worst year for video games ever if we're measuring by number of layoffs.

#gamedev #game development #game dev #gamedevelopment #game industry #games industry #sony #playstation #rockstar #rockstar games #ea #ea games

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jcmarchi · 8 days

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Telltale Games Releases New Screenshots Of The Wolf Among Us 2 Alongside Development Update

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/telltale-games-releases-new-screenshots-of-the-wolf-among-us-2-alongside-development-update/

Telltale Games Releases New Screenshots Of The Wolf Among Us 2 Alongside Development Update

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We do so with a small editorial team, alongside contributing paid writers from around the world – over 65 individuals from 9 countries around the world, just in the last couple of years.

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In a time when game makers and games coverage have faced hard struggles and layoffs, the future of this 30+ year magazine and community is at risk. Our new standalone magazine subscription is the number one way you can keep us alive – and we believe you’ll get a pretty fantastic gaming magazine in your mailbox every few weeks for your trouble.

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aeoexpert · 3 months

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Enjoy the vibes?

Tech Vibes: Decoding the Layoff Trend in 2024

Remember the heady days of 2021, when tech giants threw around terms like "unicorn" and "moonshot" with reckless abandon? The champagne flowed, valuations soared, and everyone seemed convinced that tech's growth trajectory was a straight line to infinity. Well, fasten your seatbelts, folks, because 2024 has a different vibe.

That's right, the tech sector is no stranger to boom-and-bust cycles, and the pendulum of fortune seems to be swinging back. Layoffs are making headlines, funding rounds are drying up, and the once-unshakeable confidence of Silicon Valley is looking a little… shaky. So, what's going on?

Several factors are contributing to this shift:

Rising Interest Rates: The Federal Reserve's fight against inflation has meant tightening the money tap, making it harder and more expensive for startups to secure funding. This has put the brakes on the rampant growth we saw in previous years.

Market Correction: After years of inflated valuations, investors are taking a more cautious approach. We're seeing a return to fundamentals, with a focus on profitability and sustainable business models.

Global Uncertainty: Geopolitical tensions and economic instability are adding to the overall sense of anxiety. Businesses are tightening their belts and re-evaluating their priorities, often leading to cost-cutting measures.

What does this mean for the future of tech?

Don't hit the panic button just yet. While the current climate might feel chilly, it's not a tech apocalypse. Here are some key takeaways:

Innovation will continue: The desire to solve problems and build new things is ingrained in the DNA of the tech industry. While the pace might slow, the spirit of innovation is alive and well.

Focus on fundamentals: This is a good thing. Companies that prioritize sustainability and profitability will be better positioned to weather the storm and emerge stronger.

Talent will be king: As companies become more selective, attracting and retaining top talent will be crucial. This means creating positive work environments that foster growth and development.

The "tech vibes" might be over, but that doesn't mean the story is over. This is an opportunity for the industry to mature, learn from its mistakes, and emerge stronger and more resilient than ever before. So, buckle up, tech world, the ride might get bumpy, but the future is far from bleak.

SEO STRATEGIST nearby PREDRAG PETROVIC AEO AND SEO

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ujusttry · 4 months

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Google Layoffs Employees In AI Division Amidst Leadership Changes

Google's AI division faces a shakeup with layoffs. Discover the reasons, the impact on Fitbit execs, and the ripple effect in the evolving tech industry landscape of 2024.

Introduction: Google Layoffs Employees The aim of discussing “Google Layoffs Employees” is to provide a concise yet thorough understanding of recent workforce reductions at Google, particularly within its AI division. The article intends to explore the reasons behind the layoffs, highlight the broader context of reorganization, and examine the implications for both Google and the tech…

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#2024 #AI Division #Competitiveness #Cost-cutting #Efficiency #Fitbit Executives #Google #Industry Trends #Job Cuts #Layoffs #Restructuring #Tech Industry

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ayeforscotland · 3 months

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In 25 days of 2024, the games industry has passed half the number of total layoffs than there were in 2023.

Really worrying time as I’ll be losing my job at the end of February when we launch the game and work dries up.

Complete failure from industry leaders, all for money-hungry executives.

#ayeforscotland #games industry

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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When private equity destroys your hospital

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 9-10), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

As someone who writes a lot of fiction about corporate crime, I naturally end up spending a lot of time being angry about corporate crime. It's pretty goddamned enraging. But the fiction writer in me is especially upset at how cartoonishly evil the perps are – routinely doing things that I couldn't ever get away with putting in a novel.

Beyond a doubt, the most cartoonishly evil characters are the private equity looters. And the most cartoonishly evil private equity looters are the ones who get involved in health care.

(Buckle up.)

Writing for The American Prospect, Maureen Tcacik details a national scandal: the collapse of PE-backed hospital chain Steward Health, a company that bought and looted hospitals up and down the country, starving them of everything from heart valves to prescription paper, ripping off suppliers, doctors and nurses, and callously exposing patients to deadly risk:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-02-27-scenes-from-bat-cave-steward-health-florida/

Steward occupies a very special place in the private equity looting cycle. Private equity companies arrange themselves on a continuum of indiscriminate depravity. At the start of the continuum are PE funds that buy productive and useful firms (everything from hospitals to car-washes) using "leveraged buyouts." That means that they borrow money to buy the company and use the company itself as collateral: it's like you getting a bank-loan to buy your neighbor's mortgage out from under them, and using your neighbor's house as collateral for that loan.

Once the buyout is done, the PE fund pays itself a "special dividend" (stealing money the business needs to survive) and then starts charging the business a "management fee" for the PE fund's expertise. To pay for all this, the PE bosses start to hack away at the company. Quality declines. So do wages. Prices go up. The company changes suppliers, opting for cheaper alternatives, often stiffing the old company. There are mass layoffs. The remaining employees end up doing three peoples' jobs, for lower wages, with fewer materials of lower quality.

Eventually, that top-feeding PE company finds a more desperate, more ham-fisted PE company to unload the business onto. That middle-feeding company also does a leveraged buyout, pays itself another special dividend, cuts wages, staffing and quality even further. They switch to even worse suppliers and stiff the last batch. Prices go up even higher.

Then – you guessed it – the middle-feeding PE company finds an even more awful PE bottom-feeder to unload the company onto. That bottom feeder does it all again, without even pretending to leave the business in condition to do its job. The company is a shambling zombie at this point, often producing literal garbage in place of the products that made its reputation. Employees' paychecks bounce, or don't show up at all. The company stops bothering to pay the lawyers that have been fending off its creditors. Those lawyers sue the company, too.

That's the kind of PE company Steward Health was, and, as the name suggests, Steward Health is in the business of stripping away the very last residue of value from community hospitals. As you might imagine, this gets pretty fucking ugly.

Steward owns 32 hospitals up and down the country, though its holdings are dwindling as the company walks away from its debt-burdened holdings, after years of neglect that have rendered them unfit for use as health facilities – or for any other purpose. Tcacik's piece offers a snapshot of one such hospital: Florida's Rockledge Regional Medical Center, just eight miles from Cape Canaveral.

Rockledge is a disaster. The fifth floor was, at one point, home to 5,000 bats.

Five.

Thousand.

Bats.

(Rockledge stiffed the exterminators.)

The bats were just the beginning. One of the internal sewage pipes ruptured. Whole sections of the hospital were literally full of shit, oozing out of the walls and ceiling, slopping over medical equipment.

That's an urgent situation for any hospital, but for Rockledge, it's catastrophic, because Rockledge is a hospital without any hospital supplies. Steward has stiffed the companies that supply "heart valves, urology lasers, Impella catheters, cardiac catheterization balloons, slings for lifting heavier patients, blood and urine test reagents, and most recently, prescription paper." Key medical equipment has been repossessed. So have the Pepsi machines. The hospital cafeteria had its supply of cold cuts repossessed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/massachusetts/comments/1agc1j4/comment/kolicqo/

It's not just Steward's nonpayments that reek of impending doom. Its payments also bear the hallmarks of a scam artist on the brink of blowing off the con. The company recently paid off a vendor with five separate checks for $1m, each drawn on "a random hospital in Utah" (Steward recently walked away from its Utah hospitals; its partners there are suing it for stealing $18m on their way out the door).

This company – which owns 32 hospitals! – has resorted to gambits like sending photos of fake checks to doctors it hasn't paid in months as "proof" that the money was coming (the checks arrived 22 days later).

Steward owes so much money to its employees – $1.66m to just one doctors' group. But the medical staff keep doing their jobs, and are reluctant to speak on the record, thanks to Steward's reputation for vicious retaliation. Those health workers keep showing up to take care of patients, even as the hospital crumbles around them. One clinician told Tcacik: "I watched a bed collapse underneath a [patient] who had just undergone hip surgery."

Rockledge has nine elevators, but only five of them work – the other four have been broken for a year. The hospital's fourth floor has been converted to "a graveyard of broken beds." The sinks are clogged, or filled with foul gunk. There's black mold. Nurses have noted on the maintenance tags that the repair service refuses to attend the hospital until their overdue bills are paid. The fifteen-person on-site maintenance team was cut to just two workers.

Steward is just the latest looting owner of Rockledge. After the Great Financial Crisis, private equity consultants helped sell it to Health Management Associates. The hospital's CEO took home a $10m bonus for that sale and exited; Health Management Associates then quickly became embroiled in a Medicare fraud and kickback scandal. Soon after, Rockledge was passed on to Community Health Systems, who then sold it on to Rockledge.

Steward, meanwhile, was at that time owned by an even bigger private equity giant, Cerberus, which then sold Steward off. That deal was performatively complex and hid all kinds of mischief. Prior to Cerberus's sell-off of Steward, they sold off Steward's real-estate. The buyer was Medical Properties Trust, who gave Cerberus $1.25b for the real-estate: three hospitals in Florida and three more in Ohio. Steward then contracted to operate these hospitals on MPT's behalf, and pay MPT rent for the real-estate.

This complex arrangement was key to siphoning value out of the hospital and to keeping angry creditors at bay – if you can't figure out who owes you money, it's a lot harder to collect on the debt. The scheme was masterminded by Steward founder/CEO Ralph de la Torre. De la Torre is notorious for taking a massive dividend out of the company while it owed $1.4b to its creditors. He bought a $40m yacht with the money.

De la Torre was once feted as a business genius who would "disrupt" healthcare. But as Steward's private jet hops around "Corfu, Santorini, St. Maarten and Antigua" as its hospitals literally crumble, he's becoming less popular. In Massachusetts, politicians have railed against Steward and de la Torre (Governor Healey wants the company to leave the state "as soon as possible").

Florida, by contrast, is much more friendly to Steward. The state Health and Human Services Committee chair Randy Fine is an ardent admirer of hospital privatization and is currently campaigning to sell off the last community hospital in Brevard County. The state inspectors are likewise remarkably tolerant of Steward's little peccadillos. The quasi-governmental agency that inspects hospitals has awarded this shit-and-bat-filled, elevator-free, understaffed rotting hulk "A" grades for quality.

These inspectors jointly represent a mismatched assortment of private and public agencies, dominated by a nonprofit called Leapfrog, the brainchild of Harvard public-health prof Lucian Leape, who founded it in 2000. Leapfrog likes to tout its "transparent" assessment criteria, and Steward are experts at hitting those criteria, spending the exact minimum to tick every box that Leapfrog inspectors use as proxies for overall quality and safety.

This is a pretty great example of Goodhart's Law: "every measurement eventually becomes a target, whereupon it ceases to be a good measurement":

https://xkcd.com/2899/

But despite Steward's increasingly furious creditors and its decaying facilities, the company remains bullish on its ability to continue operations. Medical Properties Trust – the real estate investment trust that is nominally a separate company from Steward – recently hosted a conference call to reassure Wall Street investors that it would be a going concern. When a Bank of America analyst asked MPT's CFO how this could possibly be, given the facility's dire condition and Steward's degraded state, the CFO blithely assured him that the company would get bailouts: "We own hospitals no one wants to see closed."

That's the thing about PE and health-care. The looters who buy out every health-care facility in a region understand that this makes them too big to fail: no matter how dangerous the companies they drain become, local governments will continue to prop them up. Look at dialysis, a market that's been cornered by private equity rollups. Today, if you need this lifesaving therapy, there's a good chance that every accessible facility is owned by a private equity fund that has fired all its qualified staff and ceased sterilizing its needles. Otherwise healthy people who visit these clinics sometimes die due to operator error. But they chug along, because no dialysis clinics is worse that "dialysis clinics where unqualified sadists sometimes kill you with dirty needles":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-dirty-business-of-clean-blood

The bad news is that private equity has thoroughly colonized the entire medical system. They took hospitals, fired the doctors, then took over the doctors' groups that provided outsource staff to the hospital:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

It's illegal for private equity companies to own doctors' practices (doctors have to own these), but they obfuscated the crime with a paper-thin pretext that they got away with despite its obvious bullshittery:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

The financier who decides whether you live or die depends on an algorithm that literally sets a tolerable level of preventable deaths for the patients trapped in the practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

Private equity also took over emergency rooms and boobytrapped them with "surprise billing" – junk fees that ran to thousands of dollars that you had to pay even if the hospital was in network with your insurer. They made billions from this, and spent a many millions from that booty keeping the scam alive with scare ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

The whole health stack is colonized by private equity-backed monopolies. Even your hospital bed!

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/05/hillrom/#baxter-international

Then there's residential care. Private equity cornered many regional markets on nursing homes and turned them into slaughterhouses, places where you go to die, not live:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

The palliative care sector is also captured by private equity. PE bosses hire vast teams of fast-talking salespeople who con vulnerable older people into entering an end-of-life system before they are ready to die. Thanks to loose regulation, the nation is filled with fake hospices that can rake in millions from Medicare while denying all care to their patients (hospice patients don't get life-extending medication or procedures, by definition):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

If you survive this long enough, Medicare eventually tells the hospice that you're clearly not dying and you get kicked off their rolls. Now you have to go through the lengthy bureaucratic nightmare of convincing the system – which was previously informed that you were at death's door – that you are actually viable and need to start getting care again (good luck with that).

If that kills you, guess what? Private equity has rolled up funeral homes up and down the country, and they will scam your survivors just as hard as the medical system that killed you did:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/09/high-cost-of-dying/#memento-mori

The PE sector spent more than a trillion dollars over the past decade buying up healthcare companies, and it has trillions more in "dry powder" allocated for further medical acquisitions. Why not? As the CFO of Medical Properties Trust told that Bank of America analyst last week, when you "own hospitals no one wants to see closed." you literally can't fail, no matter how many people you murder.

The PE sector is a reminder that the crimes people commit for money far outstrip the crimes they commit for ideology. Even the most ideological killers are horrified by the murders their profit-motivated colleagues commit.

Last year, Tkacic wrote about the history of IG Farben, the German company that built Monowitz, a private slave-labor camp up the road from Auschwitz to make the materiel it was gouging Hitler's Wehrmacht on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Farben bought the cheapest possible slaves from Auschwitz, preferentially sourcing women and children. These slaves were worked to death at a rate that put Auschwitz's wholesale murder in the shade. Farben's slaves died an average of just three months after starting work at Monowitz. The situation was so abominable, so unconscionable, that the SS officers who provided outsource guard-labor to Monowitz actually wrote to Berlin to complain about the cruelty.

The Nuremberg trials are famous for the Nazi officers who insisted that they were "just following order" but were nonetheless executed for their crimes. 24 Farben executives were also tried at Nuremberg, where they offered a very different defense: "We had a fiduciary duty to our shareholders to maximize our profits." 19 of the 24 were acquitted on that basis.

PE is committed to an ideology that is far worse than any form of racial animus or other bias. As a sector, it is committed to profit above all other values. As a result, its brutality knows no bounds, no decency, no compassion. Even the worst crimes we commit for hate are nothing compared to the crimes we commit for greed.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/retaliation#charnel-house

#pluralistic #Rockledge Regional Medical Center #private equity #looting #Steward Health #ponzis #maureen tcacik #Medical Properties Trust #Ralph de la Torre #Massachusetts #florida #Cerberus #too big to fail #pe #guillotine watch

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iww-gnv · 2 months

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On Thursday morning, before my first sip of coffee, the alerts started flooding my phone. My employer, Microsoft, was laying off 1,900 workers and it was all over the news. I work at the video game company ZeniMax, which was acquired in 2021 by Microsoft, so I felt a familiar, sickening feeling start to take hold. But I can’t say it came as a surprise. So many people in our industry have lost their jobs this way recently. In 2023, at least 6,500 video game workers were laid off (unofficial trackers have that number much higher). And even before this latest round, 2024 hadn’t shown any sign of improvement. The video game industry is huge. It was bigger than the movie and music industries combined following the 2020 pandemic surge, and while it has dropped a bit since then, it remains a multibillion-dollar industry. However, it’s still relatively young and lacks a history of successful worker organizing.

#news #labor news #gaming news #tech news #tech industry layoffs #gaming industry layoffs #2024 layoffs #zenimax #zenimax union #communications workers of america #cwa

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phantomrose96 · 2 months

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Hey not to go all "tumblr is a professional networking site" on you, but how did you get to work for Microsoft??? I'm a recent grad and I'm being eviscerated out here trying to apply for industry jobs & your liveblogging about your job sounds so much less evil than Data Entry IT Job #43461

This place is basically LinkedIn to me.

I'm gonna start by saying I am so so very sorry you're a recent grad in the year 2024... Tech job market is complete ass right now and it is not just you. I started fulltime in 2018, and for 2018-2022 it was completely normal to see a yearly outflow of people hopping to new jobs and a yearly inflow of new hires. Then sometime around late-spring/early-summer of 2022 Wallstreet sneezed the word "recession" and every tech company simultaneously shit themselves.

Tons of layoffs happened, meaning you're competing not just with new grads but with thousands of experienced workers who got shafted by their company. My org squeaked by with a small amount of layoffs (3 people among ~100), but it also means we have not hired anyone new since mid-2022. And where I used to see maybe 4-8 people yearly leave in order to hop to a new job, I think I've seen 1 person do that in the whole last year and a half.

All this to say it's rough and I can't just say "send applications and believe in yourself :)".

I have done interviews though. (I'm not involved in resume screening though, just the interviews of candidates who made it past the screening phase.) So I have at least some relevant advice, as well as second-hand knowledge from other people I know who've had to hop jobs or get hired recently.

If you have friends already in industry who you feel comfortable asking, reach out to them. Most companies have a recommendation process where a current employee fills out a little form that says "yeah I'd recommend such-and-such for this job." These do seem to carry weight, since it's coming from a trusted internal person and isn't just one of the hundreds of cold-call applications they've received.

A lot of tech companies--whether for truly well-intentioned reasons or to just check a checkbox--are on the lookout for increasing employee diversity. If you happen to have anything like, for example, "member of my college Latino society", it's worth including on your resume among your technical skills and technical projects.

I would add "you're probably gonna have to send a lot of applications" as a bullet point but I'm sure you're already doing that. But here it is as a bullet point anyway.

(This is kind of a guess, since it's part of the resume screening) but if you can dedicate some time to getting at least passingly familiar with popular tech/stacks for the positions you're looking into, try doing that in your free time so you can list it on your resume. Even better if you make a project you can point to. Like if you're aiming for webdev, get familiar with React and probably NodeJS. On top of being comfortable in one of the all-purpose languages like C(++) or Java or Python.

If you get to the interview phase - a company that is good to work for WILL care that you're someone who's good to work with. A tech-genius who's a coworker-hating egotistical snob is a nuisance at best and a liability at worst for companies with even a half-decent culture. When I do interviews, "Is this someone who's a good culture fit?" is as important as the technical skills. You'll want to show you'll be a perfectly pleasant, helpful, collaborative coworker. If the company DOESN'T care about that... bullet dodged.

For the technical questions, I care more about the thought process than I do the right answer, especially for entry-level. If you show a capacity for asking good, insightful clarifying questions, an ability to break down the problem, explain your thought process, and backtrack&alter your approach upon realizing something won't work, that's all more important than just being able to spit out a memorized leetcode answer. (I kinda hate leetcode for this reason, and therefore I only ask homebrewed questions, because I don't want the technical portion to hinge at all on whether someone managed to memorize the first 47 pages of leetcode problems). For a new hire, the most important impression you can give me is that you have a technical grasp and that you're capable of learning. Because a new hire isn't going to be an expert in anything, but they're someone who's capable of learning the ropes.

That's everything I have off the top of my head. Good luck anon. I'm very sorry you were born during a specific range of years that made you a new grad in 2024 and I hope it gets better.

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cheritzteam · 6 months

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[Cheritz] Answering Customer Questions regarding the use of A.I. in <The Ssum> Season 2 and More

Hello, this is Cheritz.

Some of the photos of our newest Ssumone, June, have not been polished enough to the game standard, and we will be updating them as soon as possible. We apologize for the disappointment caused by this issue.

On that note, we would like to clarify the topic on the use of A.I. in art in June’s photos.

First of all, we express our sympathies to the fan base who have been worried about the recent issue over the use of A.I. in games and movies, as it has been linked to copyright issues, job security, and more.

As you may have already been aware, <The Ssum> had to showcase an unparalleled amount of text and images to create a long-term romantic experience for you, and in Season 1, we used real-world images and free stock images to achieve the goal. While keeping the subscription price as low as possible in relation to production costs, our team have been working on the game with a limited number of staff to make <The Ssum> viable in the gaming market on its own.

In Season 2, we decided to apply the 2D art style to meet the feedback received by the fan base, we used retouched images sourced by A.I. which got data exclusively from a commercially available sources of packs to avoid any conflict with copyright issues for the art work that do not involve characters’ faces.

It was never the case for our team to replace the art staff with machines, but rather because most illustrators in the game industry have preferences on drawing main character illustrations over backgrounds or objects. For that reason, the art team was more focused on drawing 2023 commemorative artwork for <Mystic Messenger> and SD images on social media. Also, because Cheritz has been running four-day work weeks since the start of 2023, there was an internal consensus to tap into A.I. to balance work and life for staff. There were no cuts or layoffs of art staff for Season 2 projects.

The team feel terrible about unpleasant surprises some of you may have gone through by us not announcing this before the release.

Additionally, we have learned that some of the users feel disappointed that the new character in <The Ssum> has a connection to one of the main characters of <Mystic Messenger>.

The team has been constantly getting requests for 2D-art style images and involvements of <Mystic Messenger> characters, and more text content to <The Ssum> since its release. Our team is aware of the users’ support for <The Ssum>, however, we did not expect the new change would sadden some of our loyal fan base.

We will do our best to make it obvious that the launch of June is not an extension of <Mystic Messenger>, but rather as an extension of the launch of <The Ssum>, where the games from the same company share a universe but are on their own game systems and charms.

In addition to the currently released June, we have a new character currently under development, and we plan to release the rest of Season 1 in 2024 with some of the improvements applied.

We understand this clarification would not satisfy everyone, and we feel awful that these changes made some of you feel disappointed. We will pay close attention to the negative impact that the A.I. has brought to the gaming industry, and we would like to find a viable way to reach out to you through our games.

The team would like to thank you for your continued support of <The Ssum> and other Cheritz games, and we truly appreciate our fans’ feedback.

We hope this announcement has made your heart a little lighter and given you clarity.

*To clarify rumors about the author of <Mystic Messenger>, please let us address it as well here. The main writer of <Mystic Messenger> is Ms. Ri, the founder of Cheritz, as revealed in the Otakon video. Ms. Ri is also the writer of <Dandelion>, <Nameless>, and is the main writer of <The Ssum> Season 2.

Thank you.

-Cheritz Team

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jcmarchi · 1 month

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Knockout City Developer Velan Studios May Potentially Suffer Significant Layoffs

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/knockout-city-developer-velan-studios-may-potentially-suffer-significant-layoffs/

Knockout City Developer Velan Studios May Potentially Suffer Significant Layoffs

Velan Studios, the team behind Knockout City, has announced it is entering a reorganization that will likely result in layoffs.

In a post to X (formerly known as Twitter), the studio’s co-founders Guha and Karthik Bala revealed the team was working on a big project that an outside partner suddenly canceled. As a result, it might not be able to maintain its current team size; 46 out of 121 employees were given notice they may be laid off in the next 60 days.

“This is a rough environment for a lot of indie studios, and like them, we are faced with some very hard choices,” Velan writes in the post. Should the worst come, Velan states it will do its best to support affected staff members. You can read the full post below.

Velan Studios developed 2020’s Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit , 2021 dodgeball competitive multiplayer game, Knockout City, and 2023’s Hot Wheels Rift Rally. Knockout City, an EA Originals title, is perhaps the studio’s best-known title, which earned a generally positive reception and was supported through multiple seasons. Velan later transformed it into a free-to-play experience after ending its publishing relationship with EA. Unfortunately, the game would shut down roughly a year after this transition and only two years after launch.

These potential job cuts join a string of other disheartening 2024 layoffs, which now total more than 8,000 in just the first two months of the year. EA laid off roughly 670 employees across all departments, resulting in the cancellation of Respawn’s Star Wars FPS game. PlayStation laid off 900 employees across Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Guerrilla, and more, closing down London Studio in the process, too. The day before, Until Dawn developer Supermassive Games announced it laid off 90 employees.

At the end of January, we learned Embracer Group had canceled a new Deus Ex game in development at Eidos-Montréal and laid off 97 employees in the process. Also in January, Destroy All Humans remake developer Black Forest Games reportedly laid off 50 employees and Microsoft announced it was laying off 1,900 employees across its Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax teams, as well. Outriders studio People Can Fly laid off more than 30 employees in January, and League of Legends company Riot Games laid off 530 employees.

Lords of the Fallen Publisher CI Games laid off 10 percent of its staff, Unity will lay off 1,800 people by the end of March, and Twitch laid off 500 employees.

We also learned that Discord had laid off 170 employees, that layoffs happened at PTW, a support studio that’s worked with companies like Blizzard and Capcom, and that SteamWorld Build company, Thunderful Group, let go of roughly 100 people. Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive also reportedly laid off 45 people, too.

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beagan-gaidhlig · 4 months

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Duolingo’s decision to lay off thousands of human translators and replace them with AI has sparked a heated controversy. Critics argue that this move disregards the value and expertise that human translators bring to the table.

edit: Additional link (posted Jan 8th, 2024) - "About 10% of contractors were “offboarded,” a company spokesperson said Monday. “We just no longer need as many people to do the type of work some of these contractors were doing. Part of that could be attributed to AI,” the spokesperson said.

Chief Executive Officer Luis von Ahn said in a November letter to shareholders that the company is using generative AI — a technology that lets users more quickly create text, speech and images — to produce “new content dramatically faster,” such as the scripts to shows that help teach languages. The company also uses AI to generate voices within the app and has introduced a premium tier, Duolingo Max, with AI-generated feedback and conversations in other languages."

#locking this bc i haven't kept up with the news on it and idk if they've backtracked any since january #couldnt find a posting date for that first article but the (now-removed?) reddit post was from around December 2023 #don't wanna vouch for things I haven't used but I have repeatedly heard good things about the gaelic course on mango languages

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transhuman-priestess · 3 months

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Everyone: chrome sucks switch to Firefox

Mozilla: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/mozilla-lays-off-60-people-wants-to-build-ai-into-firefox/

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