“If I wish for three more wishes, you will grant them with no catches.”

Keep doing this, over and over again, trying different strategies. It’s a way to test and validate genie loopholes (as you will be unable to state that if it’s wrong).

Though if the genie was smart, being “wrong” would be qualified to your own internal knowledge, I suppose. E.g. you can’t knowingly lie.

On a technical level, that makes zero sense.

AI “agents” are basically just fancy prompts with a tool calling harness. They are infinitely replicable, at zero cost, with no intrinsic value; the cost comes from the generic CPU host, and the API calls to GPU servers, databases, or whatever else that are all centralized anyway.

Wanna hear a dirty secret?

“AI” cost is going to zero.

Model capabilities aren’t scaling, but inference efficiency is exploding, thanks to more resource-constrained labs and breakthroughs in papers. The endgame of the current bubble is mediocre but useful tools anyone can host themselves, dirt cheap. Maybe a bit more reliable and refined than what we have now, but about as “intelligent.”

And guess what?

Microsoft can’t profit off that. None of the Tech Bros can.

Point being, this exec is either delusional, or jawboning, so the world doesn’t realize that “AI” is a dumb utility/aid, and they can’t make any profit off it.

Regardless of whatever fraction most of the revenue comes from, they still draw absolutely massive amounts of players.

Or effectively F2P/MTX based ones, even if they have an upfront cost.

And it’s not even counting mobile.

I hear a lot about the resurgance of honest, pay-upfront games, but revenue sure isn’t supporting that.

All the games I see are PC/console. A few happen to be on mobile too, but that shouldn’t exclude them from the list.

TBH mobile revenue probably dwarfs these games, and must have a very different looking chart.

I mean, TES VI could be a rickroll mp4 and still sell millions of copies. There’s a megaton of nostalgia, and gamers are demonstrably… not the smartest shoppers, in aggregate.

Starfield and FO76 are not commercial failures, even if they aren’t hits either.

Point being, BGS is not short on time. I posit they have at least one “freebie” no matter what, or maybe a few more mediocre releases that will still sell big.

Actually this makes perfect sense.

Starfield is… trying to be part Mass Effect with big-budget cutscenes, but it has less charisma than Wrex has in his toe.

I’d argue it’s a bad “Bethesda wandering RPG,” without the quirky, charming side areas Oblivion or even Fallout 76 have.

But it’s an alright No Man’s Sky-like.

You want some crafting? Looting? A vast amount of chill exploration area? Reasonable “I’m in space” fidelity and tasks to tickle your brain? Starfield’s got it in droves. BGS games scratched this NMS kind of “looting exploration sandbox” itch for some, when there was no big-budget alternative back then, and I think Starfield leans into it more.

Hence my hypothesis is that gamers who love No Man’s Sky like Starfield, those who are looking more for “Mass Effect 2” loathe Starfield. And you and @[email protected] seem to be further datapoints supporting my observations.

The problem is Starfield’s expectation for most us internet dwellers was “Skyrim but Mass Effect.” And it’s kind of Bethesda’s fault for setting that expectation instead of leaning into Starfield’s real niche (and wasting cash on what BGS isn’t very good at).

Yep.

Have you tried KCDII? Stuff to hoard/sell is everywhere, albeit a bit more realistically.

But Bethesda aren’t really being punished for it because tons of people are still buying it and might have no idea games like KCDII or even a fixed-up CP2077 exist.

Nope.

Not sure where OP got it from, but it’s an edit of this image:

Dating back to 2013: https://tineye.com/search/cf7d2b88446844f3df676dddf009f7824c20cabc?tags=&sort=crawl_date&order=asc&page=1

YMMV, I guess? I think it runs incredibly well, especially with Lumen enabled, given the sheer amount of stuff in-game. FPS is way higher than comparable looking games without thousands of player built objects, and the lighting is beautiful.

To illustrate what I mean more clearly, look at the top comments/replies for the NASA Artemis posts, as an example.

…It’s basically all conspiracy theorists, and government skeptics.

Twitter’s focusing the Artemis posts on them because it’s what they want to see, and most engaging for them.

In the EFF’s case, I’m not just talking about Musk’s influence. The algorithm will only show the EFF to users who would be highly engaged by it. E.g., angry skeptics who wouldn’t be swayed by the EFF anyway, or fans who already agree with the EFF. It’s literally not going to show the EFF to people who need to see it, as Twitter’s metrics would show it as unengaging.

This is the “false image” I keep trying to dispel. Twitter is less and less an “even spread” of exposure like people think it is, like it sort of used to be, more-and-more a hyper focused bubble of what you want to hear, and only what you want to hear. All the changes Musk is making are amplifying that. Maybe that’s fine for some orgs, but there’s no point in the EFF staying in that kind of environment, regardless of ethics.

I feel like the EFF’s messaging is just not going to get through to anyone still on Twitter.

Remember, it’s not a fair forum; it’s an algorithm. And it’s not going to show the EFF to users who need to see it.

There some some very efficient games using UE5, like Satisfactory.

On the contrary, I’m afraid of custom engine games. Even if they ultimately turn out okay, the dev hell required to get them there often sinks the game. See: ME: Andromeda, Cyberpunk 2077. And Distant Worlds 2 (even though it wasn’t technically fully custom).

IMO the best path is choosing the game engine for your niche. As an example, Cryengine was practically made for KCD2’s European forests and medieval towns. Larian’s Divinity engine is literally made for a D&D-type game like BG3.

No.

But it certainly has some strong indirect effects on my buying decisions.

What would happen if a tanker was destroyed and spilled out there?

Imagine if you showed this to someone in ~2009.

Even not-fully-reproducible open-weights models are extremely important because they’re poison to OpenAI, and they know it. It makes what they’re trying to commodify and control effectively free and utilitarian.

But there are fully open models, too, with public training data.

It’s anticompetitiveness.

They want to squash open models, and anyone too small to comply with this.

I say this in every thread, but the real AI “battle” is open-weights ML vs OpenAI style tech bro AI. And OpenAI wants precisely no one to realize that.

Ughhh, I could go on forever, but to keep it short:

• Tech bro enshittification: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1p0u8hd/ollamas_enshitification_has_begun_opensource_is/

• Hiding attribution to the actual open source project it’s based on: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1jgh0kd/opinion_ollama_is_overhyped_and_its_unethical/

• A huge support drain on llama.cpp, without a single cent, nor a notable contribution, given back.

• Constant bugs and broken models from “quick and dirty” model support updates, just for hype.

• Breaking standard GGUFs.

• Deliberately misnaming models (like the Deepseek Qwen distills and “Deepseek”) for hype.

• Horrible defaults (like ancient default models, 4096 context, really bad/lazy quantizations).

• A bunch of spam, drama, and abuse on Linkedin, Twitter, Reddit and such.

Basically, the devs are Tech Bros. They’re scammer-adjacent. I’ve been in local inference for years, and wouldn’t touch ollama if you paid me to. I’d trust Gemini API over them any day.

I’d recommend base llama.cpp or ik_llama.cpp or kobold.cpp, but if you must use an “turnkey” and popular UI, LMStudio is way better.

But the problem is, if you want a performant local LLM, nothing about local inference is really turnkey. It’s just too hardware sensitive, and moves too fast.