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Note that this post was written shortly after seeing the News so it's likely modestly incoherent, and only given the most basic of editing pass. As always, hopefully there's enough meat for discussion.
Link to article below, but today I was greeted by an IGN article titled:
That in the same breath IGN and Microsoft feel the need to announce Matt Booty's promotion, is... indicative of how they perceive the public reception of this announcement. Kiwi Farmers are likely feeling vindicated, and potentially mounting despair, as even under the most anti-DEI culture we've had in ages, a man retires and is replaced by a woman, chosen by the venerable Satya Nadella.
IGN provides this quote:
Now, I'm going to ignore all the fluff as it was incredibly well-prepared and likely approved by multiple PR people to have the just-right wording. I am be tempted to ask Satya: What was the point of letting (or directing) the closing of all those existing, profitable studios? You wouldn't need to back these ideas. Xbox has historically been a money-printer and the most present in consumers' minds, the one people would argue on forums and reddit and making youtube videos for days defending your honor? Such that even fanboys are rapidly admitting the rot has occurred under your feet?
And now, Gamers are left with shit on plates and eating it over the last 5 years, as Microsoft has done everything they can to push the limits of their fans' loyalties.
Xbox was already struggling under the thumbs of Phil Spencer, someone that actually enjoyed and was from gaming and gamer culture. Whether or not normies are going to Notice these canned and prepared responses and coincidental promotion alongside her remains to be actually seen, but even worse: the woman appears to have comparable-or-less Gamer Credentials than Zoe Quinn, so Sharma has to tap another person to be the internal "voice" of games. Probably already being talked about on one of the chans at any rate, so I'll leave that discourse to Those Places for the time being.
That said, unless I am blind and failed my reading comprehension like an average "Gamer", as far as I can tell, Sharma has done basically nothing related to games or gaming throughout her career. So the open-ended question is: why would Satya take that risk despite the general consumer climate?
Again, another quote:
So yes, I'm sure consumers, who have been finally pushed off the edge onto switching off windows, and upset that they literally cannot afford gaming hardware any more are extremely excited for the lady that put Copilot into notepad.exe and the beleagured and oft-derided Microsoft Recall.
Satya really loves his wordsoup that's for sure.
Loose thoughts that don't fit anywhere else in this already-eclectic post, and may be duplicated:
Notably, as far as I can read she does not have any qualifications or past interest in gaming.
Seems that Satya wants more wordsalad and wordsoup to throw at consumers to sound like they're Super Advanced and Definitely Things Will Get Better. Watch for more wordsoupification of the Xbox and microsoft gaming division.
More push into renting in order to play games.
CoreAI is one of Microsoft's largest money-sinks in the company-- they have done their absolute best not to discuss the cost vs revenue on during earning calls.
Having been at both Meta and Instacart and head over the CoreAI department, means Sharma has some credible credentials toward running large teams and driving some level of product.
The incessant ai push means microsoft has gobs of compute, and gamers are being starved of what little compute they did have access to even a year ago
At any rate, if you're a capital-G Gamer, the sign was on the wall, but if you're actually invested in the future of the hobby, you probably want to migrate off Xbox before your xbox turns into an diffusion-ran agenticifed gas town, maximizing memory, entitlements, and workflows for such world-changing ideas as Microsoft has clearly been driving forward with such ... vision.
As some of the other posters note, I'm not sure what overall point you are making here? Microsoft has switched out one (massive failure) corpo for another - an Indian(!) woman(!) - and this suggests all kinds of disasters?
Phil Spencer was a capital-G Gamer. He successfully reversed the absolute disaster that was the Xbone... and then succeeded in little else but spaffing hundreds of billions up the wall on poor acquisitions. He's one of many, many gamer leaders who have been shit at their jobs. You clearly understand the damage he's done, mentioning Xbox's shocking reputation at multiple points. Is there any reason to believe a non-gamer could do any worse?
You also state:
My only response is: What?? What Xbox are you thinking of? It's also been a giant money sink, fortunate that it's an irrelevance to MS's balance sheet or else it would surely have been killed a decade ago. Most recently they sunk another 70bil into Activision just to watch the latest CoD have a disastrous reception. The most shocking thing about this announcement is that Microsoft have actually published this news and are pushing Sharma as some kind of saviour, instead of abandoning it once and for all.
As for Sharma herself, is there any reason to suspect she's not a perfectly capable corpo? As you note, time at Meta is almost an anti-signal at this point, but given her other experience and several years now at Microsoft, it would be a surprise if she was useless. I suppose you could see it as Indian nepotism, but if anything this a downgrade for the woman. She's gone from Microsoft main focus, the all-important AI push, to their failing, irrelevant gaming division, which is surely on its last roll of the dice. She must be confident in her ability to turn it around.
As for her AI experience, well, she also worked at Instacart. Why is no one assuming Xbox is getting into the grocery business?
Anyone gamer with any sense would have long ago abandoned the Xbox brand. Indeed, Spencer ensured such a thing by pivoting so heavily towards their PC presence and gamepass. I don't see much reason to assume it could get any worse.
I actually wanted to post something on this myself, but in a completely different direction. I saw on another forum the most curious reaction to the news:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aa23o5w4w2afknay44oqxqz6/post/3mfdtqu5wjk2x
The linked post is a negative reaction from noted game journalist Jeff Gerstmann.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but this is absolutely insane. Merely expressing concern over birth rates - from a minority woman no less - is enough to immediately get cast as some kind of super Chud. Sure, the AI angle is an easy attack point for some of the more obsessed members of Bluesky, but for that to filter out to a relatively normie game journo is another step.
Gerstmann, from what I know of him, has never been particularly lambasted as a woke or poor journalist. GiantBomb was popular as far as I was aware. Has game journalism become so poisoned that everyone has to jump onto the latest left-wing fad or risk being cancelled?
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Is it any more complicated than he's Indian, she's Indian, this is promoting a fellow in-group person to a meaningless but important-sounding position?
I hope so! But i may concede that Satya is just racist.
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The most important new thing for me in this announcement is that XBOX is still alive.
The other is that Indian sounding C level names is the coupling constant of the enshittification field.
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A successful stint at Meta tends to imply you have been able to bring some order to sprawling, argumentative chaos.
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I think this is a good idea. It's not like many AAA games are acclaimed for their dialogue, characters and writing, people literally joke about how crap their writing is. Let people have conversations with in-game characters, why not?
Open source communities have gone out of their way to set up general-purpose AIs to play Minecraft with you in the crudest ways imaginable and it kind of works. Microsoft literally owns Minecraft and they have a ludicrous amount of compute. They could make a minecraft-specific AI model, special servers where the player (players?) could be warlords with whole armies they direct and manage. The sky is the limit. This is a GAAS subscription goldmine just waiting to happen if they can cut down the inference costs, which they should definitely be able to do with a specialist model.
The real problem Microsoft has is dysfunctional culture. It's really not that hard to make Halo Infinite and have it be actually good. They have the money but not the necessary organizational skills. How hard can it be to make Windows 11 run smoothly enough for people to risk their computers and 'upgrade'? Windows 10 was OK...
This would only require ousting Satya and a purge of every manager and new hire in the windows division, firing all the h1bs and rehiring the old microsoft os engineers and QA divisions and an eight-year long purge of the last few years of slopcode.
Just don't accidentally go all the way back to Windows ME.
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I didn't play it any real depth but recent Chinese triple A game Where Winds Meet did the AI chatbot npc thing I believe. There's some funny memes of people hacking them off topic but I think there are some enjoyers.
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It depends on implementation (as with everything...)
Consider: AI art. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks this and this look absolutely tasteless. If companies start replacing even background elements with slop, their games will look noticeably worse.
I'm ambivalent regarding coding agents. In my experience, they are very useful, but you still need real skill to avoid writing horrible code. They write code in one shot that "just works"...except there are small issues: outdated patterns, slow algorithms, unnecessary operations (e.g. copying), missed opportunities for abstraction, no high-level design. It really does just work, and quite often does not work for edge-cases. Except, my understanding is that most video game code is already like this, and AAA games regularly get flamed for buggy launches, so I have a hard time imagining worse. Hence I'm ambivalent.
A genuinely good use of AI would be for more human-like, or at least more fun, NPCs and enemies. AI-generated writing is like AI art, very bland, but if the NPCs are more dynamic that could be interesting. Perhaps the best use I can imagine is playing a single-player game and getting a multi-player experience, against players who are at my skill level and have good etiquette. But can LLMs do that?
We've known since the middle ages that some parts of any picture are important and others are less important. Masters who supervised junior artists would farm out parts of a painting and then come in to paint the most difficult or important parts.
It would seem like AI could be used similarly, to fill the background and let an artist do the important parts of the image. A composite like this would mean the artist could make more pictures with the same time and critical eyes would see human made things in the parts of the image that matter (the clouds see fine for example and too basically no human time to make).
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Not if their training data includes chat from real multiplayer humans, no.
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AI slop was unheard of even a few years ago - where’s your imagination?
Look at what Seamless2 is doing now … this shit will be unbelievably real in a few years time.
Every year even on forums like these people are showing examples of how bad AI is but every year it’s monumentally better than the year prior.
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LLMs really are the best argument for GAAS I can think of. They would sway me, if done well, and I've literally never paid for a game that's on a subscription model.
There are significant costs involved in serving tokens, and the average consumer/gamer can't run very good models on local hardware (especially if they need to run a remotely demanding game at the same time).
The Chinese are already doing it, with positive sentiment. I predicted and continue to predict they'll become ubiquitous, and a genuine improvement.
Both you and @RandomRanger expressed this sentiment, and I'm a little perplexed. When I've noted concerns about the financials of some of these big AI companies, people have assured me that the inference side of things is profitable. Is this a different enough use case that it would be a significant cost, or are you including all the infrastructure necessary for it in this calculation as well?
Cheap tokens have to be paid for anyway. If you're using an LLM to stream tokens to users, or doing something more complex like AI voices, then you have continuous running costs above and beyond whatever costs you were paying for the multiplayer servers etc.
This is completely unrelated to the profitability of AI companies. They charge you a subscription, or a per-token basis on the API. The game dev/publisher has to pay those costs, and unless they go for aggressive rate limiting, it's possible for power users to cost them more than a single up-front sticker price for a game can manage. The ideal solution would be local LLMs, since the consumer shoulders the burden, but they're not good enough because the average consumer doesn't have the hardware to both serve the model and play games at once.
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I've fooled around with AI chats for like DND-level RP and found the inherent 'yesman' aspect making it hard to have a genuinely adversial interaction. They're fine for cursory NPCs though.
Properly-done NPCs wouldn't have the same "yesman" prompt as the current chatbots. LLMs are a brand new kind of magic and we're all still figuring out the right incantations. There's going to be a big learning curve as we figure out how to make AI-driven NPCs that feel natural, but IMO it's perfectly possible to get there (once the cost of decent models falls to where it makes economic sense).
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Head of XBox role is closest to a producer role.
Your job is to be a ruthless bean counter while individual studios focus on the core creative pursuit. This is especially true for Microsoft, which unlike Nintendo isn't as strongly coupled to its 1st party IP. Zenimax, Bethesda, Activision & Blizzard will probably keep doing their own thing.
Xbox should not be driving forward with vision. It should be funding game directors with vision, and keeping them on a leash of the correct length.
Todd Howard has maintained control over Bethesda, Sam Houser still runs Rockstar. Still no Elderscrolls 6 or GTA 6. Despite being run by 'capital G gamers', AAA Game studios are dysfunctional frankenstiein's monsters.
The primary thing that gives me pause about Asha's Linkedin is
hmm.....
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Only tangentially related, but is there a single Microsoft product that is prevalent by virtue of its actual quality, as opposed to inertia from widespread business adoption decades ago? Windows is so much worse than OS X. Outlook is so much worse than Gmail. Teams is so much worse than Zoom. XBox is so much worse than PlayStation/Nintendo. I don't know a single person who uses anything from Microsoft by choice.
Vscode was a breath of fresh air when it released.
Microsoft teams was quite good at release. They made it progressively worse, but its V1 was pretty good. Then they added the telemetry.
Windows 7 was excellent.
Github copilot was an excellent V1. They failed to capitalize on it, conceding ground to cursor and later Claude code. But, the first release was magical.
Linkedin has stayed good-ish. For a platform that was meant to be corporate-slop by design, it has stayed inoffensive. Compared to the decline of Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook & Twitter, Linkedin is the only era-1 social network that still functions the way it is supposed to.
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Those are the consumer facing products, Microsoft makes the majority of their money through selling to other companies, in particular cloud services and servers like with Azure/GitHub/SQL Server/etc and Microsoft office products like Excel. Even Windows now is mostly a product for other businesses to pay.
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C#/.NET is rock solid, that's about the only one I'd give them credit for.
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Microsoft Excel is better than other spreadsheet software.
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