Arialonomus

Your analogy undermines the point you seem to be making, given that renting is, by definition, not purchasing.

From the (very brief) article, I don’t see anything wrong with this use-case. Filling out the documentation is a time-consuming job and getting a program to automate it to speed up the application process is one of the things I think generative AI would be excellent for.

Of course they’re still going to have to check it, but reviewing 12,000 pages of documents is an order of magnitude faster than writing them from scratch.

Yes! Sorry I meant 3-4 times as long. It’s not universal to every game, but for a perfect example, my husband and I both played Mario Kart 8 on CEMU (Wii U Emulator) and I can play for about 6 hours uninterrupted before needing to charge, whereas my husband only gets 1.5 or so on my old LCD deck.

I will absolutely second this. Working full time and going to school full time, I never game anymore because the last thing I wanna do is spend more time at my desk.

I was an immediate early adopter of the LCD deck, since I’d been waiting for a device like this for years. While I absolutely loved it, I can concede it still felt a bit half-baked, especially on battery life. The OLED version feels like the proper 1.0 of the device in this form factor. Games that would drain the batter of my OG 512 model now run (EDIT) up to 3-4 times as long.

I still carry my portable battery with me for it, but now outside of very long trips (international flights, etc) I don’t need to break it out if I start from a full charge. Plus the screen and user experience on the OLED just looks and feels better. While the OLED Deck isn’t perfect, I’ve been able to happily game so much more than before, and feel confident further iterations on the tech will improve it

I think, as often, the truth lies down the middle. SAG/AFTRA and the WGA were right in fighting to not give studios free rein to use AI to own their likeness or replace them in the process. Likewise, people who say using AI tech for lighthearted fun like this is “disrespectful” are just having a kneejerk reaction at this point. I struggle to see a how this is different from say, a song parody.

The EU also has a much stronger regulatory framework than the United States does. American corporate-friendly policy decisions make litigating anti-trust more difficult. Not to mention congressional inaction means regulatory policy is stuck generally in the last century. The case against Google has seemed the strongest yet, but we shall see how things play out.

I would argue that UE5 is even less suited to a game like this than Unity is. Unreal certainly has impressive rendering tech, and it has designs towards increasingly becoming a generalist engine, but it is clearly designed with certain genres in mind (i.e. 1st and 3rd person games like RPGs, Shooters, Action games, etc.). A city-builder in UE5 would present a whole host of other challenges, and many of the high-tech rendering features would likely be overkill. Not to mention, Unreal games have notorious performance issues of their own--though there is dedicated effort to resolving those.

Unity is designed more as a general engine, but it comes with a lot of baggage in terms of half-baked features and optimization difficulties. As the author mentions they really unlocked their potential with implementation of Unity's ECS framework, but they were still chained to Unity's rendering tech, which has been underdeveloped for several years now.

My observation tends to be that simulation games are the ideal case for custom engines. While there are some commonalities across games, compared to many other game genres, they don't get a lot of benefits from standardizations. Sim games often end up kneecapped by trying to conform to existing engine frameworks instead of spinning up something optimized to the way their systems work. It requires a lot more technical know-how than an action-adventure game or a platformer, and the up-front cost to developing your own tech is an order of magnitude compared to using out-of-the-box solutions. I think with the massive success of C:S, Colossal Order was in an excellent position to try something ambitious.

Maybe with open-source tools like Godot having more flexibility in their frameworks, where you can just get the parts you want (rendering approach, etc.), it'll be easier in future to develop more specialized custom tech for games.

I am speaking entirely speculatively, but I’d imagine it might be having to do with going for low-hanging fruit, or at least trying to chip away legally before (or instead of) sweeping anti-trust litigation.

The appetite for this kind of action hasn’t exactly been great the last few decades, and big swings can lead to big misses (like Activision-Microsoft)

I think a more likely scenario is this will force studios back to the table with SAG-AFTRA to get the industry moving again as quickly as possible.

If the deal really is as good as the WGA is claiming, it also bodes well for the actors since their demands were largely aligned, and one union being able to achieve concessions gives others leverage on same/similar issues.

> Then there’s using funds from one place you have significant dominance to to undercut (including running at a loss) in the new industry - I’m much iffier on exactly at what point this becomes uncompetitive as it seems a fairly common thing for many companies to do.

I think the distinguishing factor in something like this would be beyond running at a loss, but doing so in a way that would be no way sustainable unless you had massive cash reserves or income streams from your other business verticals—-which you allude to.

Most businesses operate at a loss initially, and sometimes competitive pricing is a part of that, but you typically can’t price your services far far below market rate and not quickly go out of business unless you just have insane amounts of seed funding or you’re abusing your market power as a large corporation.

Of all the qualifiers you listed, though, I’d agree it’s definitely the one with the biggest gradient between competitive and anti-competitive practices.