This video is a short documentary talking about how idTech developers and how they came together to make their own employee-owned indie studio. Good stuff!

  • Kaligalis@lemmy.world
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    1 hour ago

    Has anyone tried a nonprofit game studio yet?
    Like it makes money which only goes into expenditures like salaries, game maintenance and game development and reserves. But there are no no bonuses, no dividends, and no growth expectations. It would not be expected to make someone rich, but it’s there to fund the lives of the game devs and the making and maintaining of games.

  • HiroK@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    Companies firing employees for AI, only for that AI to help crack their games, leak their exclusives, and those fired employees now create their own studios making the market more competitive

    • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      It wasnt for AI in this case. IdSoftware had arguably the best engineers in the industry. Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal look beautiful and run on junk GPUs to this day.

      Something happened after Doom Eternal and next game came up… Just mid. Amazing cutscenes, very mid gameplay, garbage performance due to mandatory ray tracing, while looking same as previous games.

      Game didnt sell well, parent company fired people EA style.

      Also they fucked Mick Gordon their music producer who did music for all doom games.

      • Kaligalis@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        Always has been.

        It’s the AI companies which are bad. AI itself is one of the dependencies for an actually free society where people only work because they actually want to. Still a long way to go for that. But the first steps have been made. Let’s hope that MAD keeps working until we are there.

        • DeLacue@lemmy.world
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          2 minutes ago

          I agree that the system we have now were everyone has to be shackled to a job in order to be considered valuable is terrible. And that a system were work is entirely at will is both desirable and achievable. But I’m afraid gen ai isn’t the way to that goal.

          Gen AI is impressive but you have to understand how it works; it is just a statistical model, every word or character is decided by probablity. It will have a list of words (or changes to an image) that might come next and will have different probabilities for each one. One will be randomly picked according to their assigned odds and then the algorithm calculates the words and odds for the next word till it’s finished. The fact that this system produces such consistent output is an achievement. But there is an issue: the ai needs a constant flow of new training data or it’s outputs start to become very similar, it’s facts start to get out of date and it’s use of language starts to fall behind natural linguistic drift.

          Leaving aside the rather weighty issue of where and how these ai companies have typically gotten the enormous amount of data they require; they need a constant supply of human generated data to train on. Training on only machine generated data threatens model collapse so there must be a majority of human generated data in the training data to prevent that.

          To put it another way AI isn’t the solution to needing human effort its just laundering where the human effort is coming from.

      • Baggie@lemmy.zip
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        22 hours ago

        Nah it’s unaligned and chaotic. It’s an industry disrupter because everyone wants to pretend it’s good at everything, wildly unsustainable, and a huge time bomb.

        • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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          20 hours ago

          My point is it’s good because in this instance, it seems like we get something good out of it.

      • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        15 hours ago

        It’s like trump: pushing for electric cars, uniting the EU, and more!

        /s but actually it’s true.

        • Kaligalis@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          Just don’t tell him. And don’t discuss it with Muricans because it’s way less funny for those who are in that failed state.

      • Goodeye8@piefed.social
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        22 hours ago

        In the same way as Trump is good by making the gas price so high people would rather buy an EV than pay for gas.

        • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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          20 hours ago

          Worked for me 🤣. Car payment is a wash because of the gas savings.

    • HiddenHorses@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      I know it’s possible to comment on Threadiverse posts from Mastodon, but it seemed easier to make an additional Lemmy account, too.

    • warm@kbin.earth
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      22 hours ago

      We doing this 200 years of experience thing again?!

      Best of luck to them!

      • Goodeye8@piefed.social
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        22 hours ago

        I do hope they succeed and I’m more than happy to support them if they put out something to the quality of Witchfire. That said the combined experience of 250 years does have a “9 women can make a baby in 1 month” vibe. Ubisoft probably has 1000+ years of experience and their games are still shit. Naming what they’ve worked on would give far more credibility to their experience.

        • HiddenHorses@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          The majority of our experience has been working together for Doom 2016, Eternal, and Dark Ages. There are a few of us that had been at id since Rage, and some have shipped games from before joining id, like Crysis, Call of Duty 3, Assassin’s Creed 4, etc.

        • warm@kbin.earth
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          21 hours ago

          Riot Games got laughed at for that previously. It’s such a dumb metric to even mention.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    Danger Pay

    For our first project, Hidden Horses is developing a high-octane single-player FPS. Influenced by games like Smash TV and movies like 1987’s The Running Man, the game will take place on a deadly game show run by a sinister but charming AI host. Our game will focus on classic FPS gameplay, awesome weapons, crazy enemies, and will be highly optimized.

    We’ll have a lot to share in the coming months: in-person events, podcast appearances, Q&A’s, and even a promotional beer! Additionally, we will soon be releasing a documentary featuring the development team as well as a teaser for our upcoming project.

    Pretty wholesome.

  • bw42@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    This description is bad. The grammar is off, and the studio was founded by id Software former employees. Some of whom worked on idTech, the game engine.

  • Sludgehammer@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    And now, free from corporate shackles they’ll be free to make some actual interesting innovative games again. These innovative games will probably sell well, attracting attention of larger companies who will buy the new gaming studio. Said larger company will churn out generic sequels while slowly firing all the old talent. As the quality diminishes and the formulaic slop they’re now making stops selling, the big company will fire everyone and close down the studio. Many of those fired devs will get together and form a new game studio and start publishing interesting games…

    • HiddenHorses@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      Hopefully we can stop that cycle by skipping the “larger companies […] will buy the new gaming studio” step. We just want to make games. We’re not doing this to get rich.

      • Quazatron@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        You can’t stop the cycle. You merely get to watch it being repeated over and over again if you live long enough.

        You take the gems that are produced in the first half of the cycle, then move on.

    • erinyes (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      17 hours ago

      it would be such a wasted opportunity for them to jump straight into bed with some other cunt capitalist whos just gonna pull the same shit, rather than forming a worker cooperative and ensuring if they do well theyll be rewarded with money and security.

    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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      21 hours ago

      I mean, innovative isnt a guarantee when leaving a company.

      Lets not forget the devs who wanted an employee owned game after apex legends to form the game we know as Highguard.

    • aksdb@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Since they make money off of this, it doesn’t even seem too bad, if you put it like that.

  • Nouvellalia@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    The id of id? When id became what id sought to get away from? So id splintered off from id to try and make id stuff again? Good for them.

  • ohmancer@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    Only to become so successful that they are acquired and laid off again. Rinse and repeat.

    • Bilb!@lemmy.ml
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      8 hours ago

      Probably won’t go that far. I hope they do make something great, but yeah.