creatives who are successful want more money to fund bigger projects and increase the scope of their art.

capitalists want studios to make money to line their pockets at the expense of creativity and eventually kill them when the games become just another vector to funnel cash to the wrong places.

there used to be a time when a business had to have a proven product/service that brought consistent value to the customer.

openai has been throwing darts blindly at the dartboard for the last three years that it bewilders me that anyone could think they have the ability to be stable or profitable in the near future.

my thing is, if everyone is using LLMs to write emails (for example) then there needs to be a re-think about online communication as a whole and that would definitely not involve LLMs.

it’ll be ripped from netflix and put on youtube anyway. that’s just how modern content works.

be annoyed/angry at the right things.

i was referring to physical games as a whole and not necessarily tied to Playstation games or their discs.

They’ve been transitioning this specific manufacturing division since 2024. It can’t be a “double down” because they’re not going to revert two years of already re-trained staff and re-purposed equipment because of online forum talk.

Messages to shareholders like this is pretty standard. They’re basically saying:

• decision is final
• components manufacturing is more lucrative than disc manufacturing
• we will distribute our IP

So they’re hedging their bets on what their future could be. If they lose out on gaming they’ll make back on microlenses.

Sony didn’t really “double down”. The decision to wind down their physical games category was made years ago. Everything after the initial public announcement is to manage public relations.

Not sure many outside Japan realise but Sony are a conglomerate that dip their fingers into unrelated industries. This to them is clearly just a line through a smaller category on the balance sheet.

There’s a discussion to be had about ownership and physical games but i think that market is going to re-emerge in the future in perhaps a more bespoke way, like the resurgence of music vinyls.

To me, Sony seems to be interested in just managing the distribution of IP opposed to “gaming” itself. They’re not true custodians in that space or if they were, then they’re not now.

OpenAI is trying to artificially plump themselves up before going for IPO. They “attacked” a vendor that dispenses LLM and LLM-adjacent products that are similarly aligned with OpenAI’s goals. It almost seems like it was a coordinated event to generate a sense of mystique around their premier models (à la Anthropic with Mythos).

pretty sure the original devs from disco elysium had split years ago from za/um. the studio is now just a name.

thats right, the average ‘gamer’ is casual. they’ll purchase a couple games per year and maybe a handful more on special.

gaming itself is a leisure activity so when other aspects of life starts getting expensive or free time is reduced then what gets dropped first is an overpriced subscription service.