Last week’s surprise departure of Phil Spencer from Microsoft led to the promotion of Asha Sharma, who comes to head Microsoft’s gaming division after two years as president of the company’s CoreAI Product group. Despite that recent history, Sharma says in a new interview that she has “no tolerance for bad AI” in game development.
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Meanwhile the head of another Soulless Tech Corporation Hellbent On Dehumanizing Game Development In Every Sense Of The Word “Dehumanize” Possible reminds us…
CEO Tim Sweeney says requiring developers to disclose their use of AI tools is as relevant as disclosing “what shampoo brand the developer uses,”
This quote reminds me of the owner of this one TTRPG and card shop in my area. If you try to talk to him about literally anything he sells he will straight tell you he does not care about anything he sells. All the nerdy shit under one roof and his ass is there because nerds will pay through the nose for it.
Needless to say I shop at the store where the owner participates on FNM every week and runs D&D campaigns.
That’s a bit different, because he’s selling finished products. He can just check all the boxes from star wars over dnd to collectible card games and order the value pack from a middle man and then it’s all about the location of the shop and the competition in the area.
You don’t have to understand why a specific product works if what you’re doing is essentially providing a mixed physical storefront for a bunch of corporations.
But this lady is now going to have to make important strategic decisions, about which games to give funding, which ones to cancel, what kind of hardware to even envision.
Compare it to valve, who sat down and build their own controller and handheld, because they looked at 20 years of market and product development and thought they could do better and delivered. You have to know a lot about why you want hardware for what purpose and what makes it better or worse for that purpose to do that.
XBOX, theoretically, same as any other big name in media, could be the place where a new media franchise is born that dominates the next 50 years of pop culture. THAT is the kind of position this is.
That they won’t because they can’t “build the next skyrim / WoW” is kind of the problem.