Hanselman pointed to a Microsoft blog post noting that, starting in October, the company began requiring “mandatory account verification for all partners in the Windows Hardware Program,” which also covers certifying software drivers. Last month, the company updated the post to say: “Accounts that did not successfully complete account verification and received a Rejected verification status have been suspended from the Windows Hardware Program, and submissions from these accounts are no longer permitted.”

So they didn’t hand over their blood and urine samples to Microsoft so they don’t get to be developers anymore

I stream on owncast and it’s tock solid. It needs very few resources and is very easy to get set up. We have matrix rooms to help you, and a community here on Lemmy! Check us out at [email protected]

Yesterday my spouse was trying to figure out how to set up copilot. I was trying to show them how I use AI to automate some of my flows, and tried to set it up for them, but turns out Copilot is different under every area of the company. Github Copilot != Office Copilot != Windows Copilot. They are all different and require different subscriptions! Horrible horrible user interface. Even the shit they’re trying to push everywhere on everyone is convoluted to hell. Why in the hell is would there not be one subscription that gives you access to everything?

Microsoft is bloated and bureaucratic, and this whole thing proves it. They never think out of their divisional lines and it shows so hard. “Why would our subscription need to be linked with X or Y division?” _Because to a customer, there are no divisions, it’s just Excel and Visual Studio, it’s all just microsoft.

Nothing concrete, but their stated goal is to play any pc game on it, similar to what steam did with the deck. That was enough to scare off sony

They made such a wonderful bug beautiful world and filled it with fetch quests and chests. I swear ubisoft should focus on making worlds, then hand it off together studios who know how to write stories and fill those worlds

So, not defending them because it’s still a stupid choice, but their reasons were not because PC bad, but because Xbox announced their “Play PC games on the next Xbox”. Meaning Microsoft’s next console could play PS games now (if they bought the PC version). Sony doesn’t want their rival console to play their games, so they revoked it.

I still think it’s stupid, exclusives are stupid, but that’s the actual reason before many more people claim that sony hates PC players. (I mean they do, but not for the reason you think)

It was Xbox. Their “You can play anything on the next xbox” made Sony pissed, and that’s ultimately why they scaled it back.

I’ve never seen it put so well. Yes it’s a monopoly, but unlike most bad monopolies it didn’t get there from being predatory, or anti competitive. Ironically with the Deck I’d argue by allowing other launchers and stores they’re surprisingly pro-competition.

It’s that every single other store (except GOG) has done everything in their power to be as anti-consumer pro-business as they can and just have destroyed themselves. EA’s Origin from the start was a buggy mess with bad DLC. Ubisoft was just an Assassin’s Creed store and pissed everyone off by forcing it and not giving a single reason to be over there except “You can’t buy Valhalla anywhere else”, proving how little PC players needed to play Valhalla. Microsoft had a strict 5-install limit of installing games over the lifetime of the purchase, and you had to use their shitty “I solidly work 15% of the time” microsoft store. Everything other store was just hot garbage made up by MBAs who had zero interest of serving the consumer.

But now “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”

Phenomenal. They chose the buggiest operating system for a spacecraft. Amazing.

I think we’re both right in a way. They won’t care about Windows specifically, but Windows to them isn’t the product anymore. It’s the entrypoint for users to Microsoft services, which is why they advertise so much in Windows now for OneDrive, Office, Copilot. You’re essentially already in their store just by using Windows. So the real loss isn’t that people aren’t using Windows, it’s that people are cancelling OneDrive and Office subscriptions. That is what is going to be noticed.

What’s really interesting to me is these numbers:

From this, it’s roughly that Windows 11 + Linux = (-) Windows 10. So people really are pissed about migrating to 11, and leaving in droves. 5% of the market is huge. This is not being ignored my Microsoft. Rough number I see is there are 14M Steam users in the US. 5.3% of that is 742,000 computers. 742,000 points of entry into OneDrive, Office, Xbox, and of course Copilot that will never be exposed to them. That’s millions in potential revenue lost.

It’s fine. It’s not going to get any better with age. Look people will say it’s crap, it’s shit, it’s horrible. It’s not. It’s just, fine. It’s not amazing, it’s not groundbreaking, it’s just plainly fine.

The real issue is that they obviously had a lot of really cool ideas that were all left half finished or cut it out for the sake of simplicity. We can’t have advanced mining, that’d be too complex. We can’t have too many story lines, it’d confuse people.

So, treat it as it is, it’s an okay game, it’s fun, it’s just not going to be RDR2 or Cyberpunk. I’d say it’s solidly worth 30-40 dollars. Pick it up if it’s on sale.

LOL no shit, I have two separate threads going on, one about Tim Sweeney here and another in /c/movies about Sydney Sweeney! That is amazing, I did not understand why you posted the image but damn, that was stupid of me. I don’t care it stands, and I stand by my opinion of Sydney!

God she’s just not likeable. I’ll admit that she was great in White Lotus, but it’s because she was seemingly just playing herself! She did a great job at being an unlikable brat!

We just watched “Anyone but you” as a joke, and man what a shit job she did. Ironically she did really great at the beginning of the movie, by the end it was just a trainwreck. Funny enough, I also dislike Glenn Powell, but that movie made me like him more. It was a shit script and he honestly did a pretty good job with it. While there are many better than him, it does take talent to take a shit script and try to make something of it.

But I mean, her boobs were nice in it. So I guess that’s enough for Hollywood to say that it was in fact a movie.

And then they bitch. All. The time. About it.

We keep choosing the worst possible choices for the customer but the customers are going somewhere else! Why?!?!

Gonna need captain big brain over here for why Valve has a monopoly.

I just don’t understand. Their engine powers the vast majority of AAA games, and a huge chunk of non-AAA. I know they charge for this engine. How the hell are they strapped for cash. And before you comment, I know the answer unfortunately.

They had fortnight. A competent executive team would see that as a fluke that is great, but not dependable long term, and plan for investing that money back into the business but always prepared for the popularity of Fortnight could dip, but it wouldn’t matter because the core of their business would carry it.

Instead, it sounds like they had a standard executive team, where they thought the money from fortnight would last forever, it would never die, and line would only ever go up. They stupidly made a bunch of wrong decisions, and are now all shocked pikachu that Fortnight’s popularity is waning after almost a decade. So of course it’s the workers who should be fired now, not the executives, no of course not.

Oh man I love when companies make stupid tonedeaf decisions like this.

Hey you know how we haven’t made a great first party game in over a decade?

Yeah?

Well, what if to boost sales numbers we add a tier that ONLY gives you our lame first party games!

Because they refuse to see games as a creative artform. Or, they think they ate, but then do the worst corpo bs to them. This all reeks of some boardroom joining all their MBAs together to come up with this brilliant shit covered plan.

I’m optimistic about this. She has a deep passion for games and who makes th, she doesn’t like corpos but knows how to work in their system. Could be good.

Yeah let’s smash-cut back 48 hours ago where he told us we were all wrong. Dude is Backpedaling and desperately trying to do damage control.

Oh he’s clearly very desperate for the hype to keep going. His ass is literally on the line. (I mean, golden parachute, but he’ll never work again), so no more infinite money glitch.

I forget who said it, but if AI doesn’t literally surpass all current realms of thinking and automate everything, i.e. what they promised, it has failed. To the investors it means it failed. With that, the stock does not continue up exponentially, which to investors also means it failed. Then they demand he resign, and they put someone else in there.

He could have stayed realistic through the whole thing. “Hey everyone, we’re learning day by day, and we’re proud to be the chipmakers to bring this to you.” Modest growth, but sustainable long term growth. Instead they drank the kool-aid full on, and said that it’ll cure all disease and wipe out hunger and everything else. Now he’s freaking out because all of the latest ideas are duds, people aren’t buying the hype anymore, and that means Jensen might be looking at the end of his tenure.

This is good. Nvidia and ram manufacturers showed how reliant we are on them, and took advantage of their monopolies. It makes absolute sense that other govs will be looking to make them in house now, china being the most obvious. The nvidia and them will cry saying it’s unfair they have to compete again, and the us go will do something stupid for short term gains while the rest of the world plans long term.

This should be taught in MBA and finance classes for how Bros get caught up in a hype cycle and how it’s all bullshit

Guh. Look I’m not against AI, when it’s used in a good place. Hot take, DLSS 5.0 features could have an interesting place. HOWEVER, before you mass downvote me

NVidia is not the one to tell when a game should use something like this. This should be used as a fine tuning option if the developer thinks it legitimately will make their games slightly better, and only for super realistic games. I think Cyberpunk, where main characters are all super detailed but background NPCs are more or less fairly low poly and not detailed. It might be good. However, then it comes up against the real kicker, which is that those limitations of those engines and the hardware at the time is what made artists think about their decisions. They made design choices at the time which drove how their game would look. I said in another thread, Master Chief’s now iconic armor was because they had such heavy restrictions. It’s a few triangles of green at the end of the day.

Added to a few games where it’s been tested and fits in the artistic style? I classify that as upscaling, a proven use of AI, and fits within the DLSS brand. Slapped into every game to make all men beefy hunkcakes and all women look like OF models? That’s when it’s slop.

Sorry Jensen, you’re pushing the slop angle, and that makes me sour to the concept.

Bethesda should be offended that their flagship product that runs on their archaic engine was just roasted like this

I agree, but also I see the other side. This is actually a neat usage of AI, it’s not slop in my book, it’s akin to upscaling.

That being said, those limitations are what drove the original artwork. The artists used those limitations to make the styles and characters we now love.

Master chiefs classic armor was just as much designed my the polygon limitations as much as what they imagined could be done

Let’s not forget they literally build and license unreal engine, which most AAA games use. If they’re low on money that sounds like horrible business. They should be able to take even a meager amount and be wildly profitable

Hm, still a bit butthurt that their best installment was made by Obsidian it seems

I’ve heard the same. If you’re in the games industry and you finish shipping usually you’re laid off and then you move on to the next project. When a new battlefield comes along they’ll just start hiring everyone again whether they worked on the last one or not. It’s not really a long-term strategy but they don’t care. It’s about short-term gains.

'Chievos are a very personal thing, they were never important unless you personally thought they were. If you don’t think they’re important anymore, then great. If you want to chievo hunt, also great. Gaming is what you make of it.

That’s fair. A huge difference is how much money is behind the crazy hype machine, and how desperate they are to keep the hype going. Most actual tech people I know, work with, and are connected with in the field have normalized on tech usage. Knowing when to use it and when not to use it. It’s only the tech bros at the top who are still like “Yeah bro it’s totally going to get rid of labor bro we’re all gonna have androids who do all the work bro just trust me just 200 billion more dollars bro I promise”

Exactly. It should all be treated as another tool in the toolbelt. To me, it reminds me of when GUI editors came along in IDEs like Visual Studio. It honestly feels the same. Tech CEOs immediately clamor to say that tech jobs are dead, the market for engineers dips. Engineers freak out and refuse to learn the technology while others learn what it is. Those who learn and use it as a tool elevate themselves and move faster. There is a non-trivial group of people who refuse to use the GUI tools on principal. Eventually the CEOs realize they made a mistake, and then more work comes in faster than ever before. Eventually over the years/decades everyone starts using the tech as a tool.

It’s the same with an AI. Like it’s following the exact same pattern to a T. CEOs starting to realize that it’s just a tool that can be used, but it needs people at the helm to know how to use it. Devs are split, some it’s accelerating their work if they know what it’s doing, others see a useless boondoggle and refuse to use it but are probably only hurting themselves because every interview is asking “are you using AI”. I’d say we’re finally starting to normalize on it’s usage as a tool.

Corporate suits love ignoring player feedback and telling people they’re wrong.

No, we’re goddamn sick of enshittification and would rather PlayStation failed than give into it.

It definitely had me trust them for way too long. To be fair, I trusted the original CEOs and company though, who from what I can tell were decent enough people.

Wen Google had to drop literally “don’t be evil”, something I would assume is supposed to be a given, I lost hope for all corporations.

They keep forgetting this, Xbox thought it too. We are with our digital libraries, I’m not going to go buy a PS5 because of one game. The hardware is only the portal.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the agency said such laws would “disrupt global data flows, increase costs and cybersecurity risks, limit Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services, and expand government control in ways that can undermine civil liberties and enable censorship.”

• disrupt global data flows - good
• increase costs and cybersecurity risks - not sure how owning their own data is a risk
• limit Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services - good, and kind of goes against #2
• expand government control in ways that can undermine civil liberties and enable censorship - ironic

Anyone who thinks Xbox is still going to be worth anything is a fool. They overspent on gaming studios, didn’t produce anything of value, gamepass value went down, and now everyone hates them for the constant enshittification. Even stepping back from “This is lemmy and we all hate microsoft” they have done some horrible business moves with Xbox. I don’t know anyone who is positive about the brand. They have ran it firmly into the ground.

I wonder if this is a huge demotion for the AI guy. AI teams in Microsoft are “good” right now, I wonder if he fucked up in some way and they put him on xbox.

Hey don’t discount them that much, they also can’t make games either. They’re going for full on business-only approach, consumers are not a priority for them at all anymore.

And they want us to stay hyped about games. I refuse to believe any marketing garbage because I know now they’re just measuring hype to determine if they should keep making things. That is not a long term strategy