Daily Tech News 25 December 2024

• Merry Christmas everybody!
  
  
  
• Electric aircraft startup Lilium has ceased operations and laid off 1000 workers after being unable run raise additional funds. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The German company has filed for insolvency - effectively bankrupt - after fundraising attempts fell through. It had been operating for over ten years and laid off 200 workers earlier this year.
  
  
  
• Electric aircraft startup Lilium has been bought out of insolvency by a group of American and European investors. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The deal is expected to complete early in January and the new owners plan to rehire former workers.
  
  Sometimes things mostly work out.

• Though not for the games industry, for whom 2024 was the worst year since 1983 when the industry all but disintegrated, with revenue decreasing by 97%.
  
  2024 was the year the bottom fell out of the games industry. (Wired) (archive site)

  In 2023, more than 10,000 developers lost their jobs ... Six months in, this year's layoff tally had already surpassed that of 2023.

  How could this happen?

  "The explanation is complex and wide-ranging for the same reason the layoffs are so deep and continuous, and sit alongside many studio closures and even more canceled games," Ball says.

  How could this happen?

  As the industry faltered, games suffered. High-profile releases like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were commercial failures.

  Wait.
  
  Apart from the fact that Suicide Squad was very poorly received, this is entirely backwards. Bad games caused the industry to falter. That's the direction of causality here. Warner Bros didn't create an unpopular game because they lost $200 million; they lost $200 million because the game was unpopular. Workers were laid off because the game didn't sell because players didn't like it.

  While there were many reasons for this, online right-wing groups reduced it to a single mantra: "go woke, go broke."

  Well, yes.
  
  If you look at the big budget catastrophic flops of 2024, there is one thing they all have in common.

  Although there have been incredible games released this year - Balatro

  Indie.

  Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

  Japanese.

  Metaphor: ReFantazio

  Japanese.

  Astro Bot

  Japanese.

  Black Myth: Wukong

  Chinese

  they just couldn't distract from the troubles faced by the people making them. They couldn't make up for the fact that the meta-narrative of video games in 2024 was bleak.

  How did this happen?

  Ball says that the blame for all of this can't be pinned to a single thing, like capitalism, mismanagement, Covid-19, or even interest rates. It also involves development costs, how studios are staffed, consumers' spending habits, and game pricing. "This storm is so brutal," he says, "because it is all of these things at once, and none have really alleviated since the layoffs began."

  We may never know.

  Even studios owned by tech juggernauts weren't immune to the industry's contraction. Microsoft shuttered Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks; Sony shut down Firewalk. The latter's shuttering wasn't wholly surprising. Its big 2024 release, Concord, was largely considered a flop.

  Largely considered a flop?
  
  Concord cost $400 million to develop.
  
  It earned $1 million in sales.

  In other words, it's been a dismal year for morale. When developers gathered in Los Angeles in June for Summer Game Fest, developer New Blood Interactive bought out a billboard solely to memorialize their fellow developers who'd lost jobs: "We love you. We miss you. We hate money."

  I begin to see the problem here.

  In March, harassment toward a small consultancy company called Sweet Baby Inc. reached new heights as bad actors organized through Discords, Steam forums, and other online spaces.

  Sweet Baby Inc, or SBI, is known for its reported standover tactics, threatening bad press if game companies didn't hire them, and then destroying the game under development when they did.
  
  The harassment campaign? That was never towards SBI. It was started by SBI and its allies against those trying to drag its practices into the light.

  Branding themselves as Gamergate 2.0, online mobs harassed developers using tweets, DMs, YouTube videos, and Twitch streams.

  In other words, people commented on the situation, behaviour which Wired finds completely unacceptable.
  
  Of course, the original Gamergate, just as with its 2.0 edition ten years later, revolved around a scandal of the ethics of games journalists, or would have if they had any.

  Dragon Age: The Veilguard, was criticized by far-right trolls for its customization options, which allow players to create characters with top surgery scars or play with a nonbinary companion.

  Veilguard, a fantasy role-playing game set in the Dragon Age universe, does indeed have top surgery scars available in its character creator. It has a very specific option for top surgery scars. In a magical universe where players can be seven foot tall minotaurs, it has a delusional cult that slices off healthy breast tissue, just as we do.
  
  I guess we'll never know why the American games industry is dead in a ditch, and being put to shame by actual communists.
     
• Britain is testing a new anti-drone energy weapon that can drop autonomous vehicles from the sky for tenpence. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sounds great until someone gets their hands on one.
  
  
  
• For $480 the GMK NUCBox11 seems to have two of everything. (Liliputing)
  
  Powered by an AMD 8945HS, it has two DDR5 SODIMM slots for up to 96GB of RAM, two M.2 NVMe slots, two USB4 ports, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, and two regular USB 3.2 ports running at 10Gbps.
  
  And two fans.
  
  It also has an HDMI port, DisplayPort, OCuLink - 60% faster than USB4 and great for external video cars though if you're planning to buy an external video card for a desktop PC maybe you should just buy a larger computer, and an audio jack.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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