Stuff Worth Knowing for the Week of February 13, 2023
Companies try to end work-from-home, Blizzard's president steps in it, and Microsoft has to pull back on its ChatGPT-powered Bing.
Welcome back to Stuff Worth Knowing! Each week, I'll round up news related to tech, video games, film, television, anime, and more. At the end of each newsletter, there will be a section called On The Calendar, which will include some of those notable dates that are near-term. Oh, and I also launched my Patreon, SavePhile, where my more thoughtful musings on any topic will go.
Tech ⌨️
Companies Begin To Push Workers Back Into the Office
There have been two trends in tech this year. The first is layoffs. The second is a general return to the office. The pandemic forced many companies to institute work-from-home policies, but now that it seems like we're clawing our way out, those companies want workers to come back. Most of these companies have office rent to pay, and doing so for employees who won't be there sticks in their craw.
Apple already started the return back in September of last year. Starbucks announced that its corporate employees would have to return to the office in January of this year, with the policy starting this month. Returning Disney CEO Bob Iger also told his remaining employees to return to the office four days a week.
Activision-Blizzard, which is still waiting on its potential Microsoft acquisition, courted its own controversy over a return to the office this week. According to Game Developer, Blizzard Entertainment told its employees to return to the office for three days per week. The shift is expected to happen on April 10 for Activision Publishing and July 10 for Blizzard.
"We understand some people may not find this model ideal, and that change is hard, but we’re one of 90% of companies returning to the office this year and we’re committed to supporting teams in making the transition," a Blizzard spokesperson told Game Developer. The news was not taken well by employees, but more on that in the "Video Games" section.
FTC Is Establishing The Office of Technology
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been pushing hard to regulate more of the growing technology industry. The issue is the organization isn't quite up to the task of grappling with technology and tech companies, because it requires specialized knowledge. So the FTC is moving to cover those gaps.
On Friday, the company announced the establishment of the Office of Technology. The idea is to hire specialists in emerging technology to keep the entire organization apprised of what's going on.
"In 2023, the OT will better equip the agency to approach current and future tech threats by building a team of technologists with deep expertise across a range of specialized fields, including data security, software engineering, data science, digital markets, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and human-computer interaction design. This centralized team will be led by the agency’s Chief Technology Officer and deployed to meet interdisciplinary needs across the FTC," wrote FTC chief technology officer Stephanie T. Nguyen.
"The Office of Technology’s top priority is to work with staff and leadership across the agency to strengthen and support the agency on enforcement investigations and litigated cases. This could mean dissecting claims made about an AI-powered product to assess whether the offering is oozing with snake oil, or whether automated decision systems for teacher evaluations adversely impact employment decisions and make inferences that impact compensation and tenure," Nguyen added.
Why It's Worth Knowing: You can't regulate what you don't understand. This is probably a good move for the FTC as it wants to tackle companies dealing with AI, digital advertising, extended reality, data privacy, and more. Of course, it depends on if the organization can actually pull in those specialists, because it's likely that A) tech companies will pay more and B) many of those folks don't want to work for a regulator in the first place.
This Week in Twitter: Elon Makes His Tweets Everyone's Problem
On Tuesday, Twitter got weird for anyone still using the "For You" feed on their client. All of Elon Musk's tweets were artificially boosted, ending up on everyone's timelines. Some were wondering if it was just coincidence, while others immediately pegged that something was up.
According to Platformer, the boosting of Elon's tweets was a result of the Super Bowl over the weekend. President Joe Biden and Musk tweeted about the event, but Musk's tweet only got 9.1 million impressions compared to Biden's 29 million. That made Musk's lack of popularity a problem for Twitter's engineers, who worked over Monday night to "fix" the issue. Musk himself acknowledged the change on Twitter.
With everyone seeing his tweets, Musk also took the time to update everyone on that hunt for a new CEO. Musk promised to hand the reins off after a poll of his showed him that users wanted him to step down. He now says that'll happen next year.
"I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place in that the product roadmap is clearly laid out. I’m guessing probably towards the end of the year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company. I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year," Musk said at the World Government Summit in Dubai, according to Bloomberg.
Twitter closed out the week with more nonsense. The company announced that it would be removing two-factor authentication using SMS for all users who are not subscribed to Twitter Blue. "While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used - and abused - by bad actors. So starting today, we will no longer allow accounts to enroll in the text message/SMS method of 2FA unless they are Twitter Blue subscribers," explained the company in its product update.
I can hazard a few guesses as to why the service is going away, but the easiest is likely money; carriers are probably charging Twitter for every SMS sent, unlike other authentication methods. So, it has to go, or you need to already be making money off the folks that are using it.
Video Games 🎮
Blizzard President Angers Staff At Company-Wide Meeting
Earlier in the newsletter, I mentioned that Activision-Blizzard is forcing its employees back to the office. As a part of that organizational change, Blizzard Entertainment held a company-wide session with the leadership, allowing employees the chance to make their feelings known several brewing issues. Those issues include Blizzard's use of the stack ranking system, lower-than-expected bonuses, and the return-to-office mandate.
Blizzard president Mike Ybarra apparently stepped into it, according to a report from Game Developer. "If you think that executives are making a lot of money and you aren't, you're living in a myth," Ybarra said in response to comments about the bonuses. He also didn't offer up great answers to questions about talent drain due to the move back to offices. In response to a question about quality assurance or customer service employees getting the chance to work-from-home, Ybarra reportedly said that "some of our disciplines are not long-term disciplines," in regards to those departments.
This, of course, angered a number of employees, who took that to mean that Ybarra saw those departments as less important than the rest. Many of them went on the company Slack and social media to express their displeasure over many of Ybarra's answers.
Why It's Worth Knowing: Contrary to the belief of some executives, you can't make a game without developers, and developers aren't a limitless resource. Blizzard Entertainment is already struggling across its entire product line. World of Warcraft is a long way away from its heyday; Overwatch 2 launched, but it's still missing the promised PvE mode; and Diablo IV is coming in hot to a market that already contains competitors like Lost Ark and Path of Exile. This is not the Blizzard of old. Retaining current talent and further outreach should be high on the list; these executive comments point to a leadership team that's perhaps lost sight of that.
Microsoft Has To Clarify Xbox Games Pass' Effect on Game Sales
Last week, I talked about the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and its provisional report on Microsoft's potential acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. Buried in the larger full report, Gamesindustry.biz found this line: "Microsoft also submitted that its internal analysis shows a [redacted percentage] decline in base game sales twelve months following their addition on Game Pass."
This seemingly contradicts previous statements made by Xbox boss Phil Spencer. "When you put a game like Forza Horizon 4 on Game Pass, you instantly have more players of the game, which is actually leading to more sales of the game," he told Gamesindustry.biz back in 2018. "Some people have questioned that, but when State of Decay 2 launched, if you looked in the US at the NPD you saw this game selling really well the month it launched on GamePass."
Of course, this quote doesn't necessarily talk about the direct effect of Xbox Game Pass on sales. That's something Microsoft offered up in its statement to Eurogamer about the CMA document:
"Xbox Game Pass offers gamers and game creators more choice and opportunity in how they discover, experience, and deliver games. For gamers, that means providing another option for them to discover games and play with friends at a great value. For developers, that means creating another option for how they monetise their games."
"We're focused on helping game creators of all sizes maximize the total financial value they receive through Game Pass. Each game is unique, so we work closely with creators to build a custom program to reflect what they need, ensure they are compensated financially for their participation in the service, and allow room for creativity and innovation. As a result, the number of developers interested in working with Game Pass continues to grow."
Why It's Worth Knowing: Xbox Game Pass isn't the right fit for every game. It can be a boon for smaller games, as Game Pass offers greater visibility and lowers the barrier to entry. Once you get up to AAA games however, it's likely that Game Pass can cut into sales that would otherwise be made. Microsoft wants all of its games on Game Pass because it's the one taking in the subscription revenue; that's not the case for other major publishers.
Microsoft Plans "Last-Ditch" Effort To Save Activision-Blizzard Deal in EU
According to Reuters, Microsoft is going to defend its planned acquisition of Activision-Blizzard in a closed hearing. The hearing will involve EU officials and comes after the European Commission's statement of objections to the deal. The hearing is coming on February 21, and following the hearing, Microsoft will likely have to offer remedies if it wants the deal to go through. Of course, it still has to contend with regulators in the UK and United States.
Embracer Group Planning Five The Lord of the Rings Games
It was a shock when Embracer Group purchased Middle-earth Enterprises last year, acquiring the worldwide rights to The Lord of the Rings. Now the company is shining a light on some of their plans for the franchise. In its financial report for the third quarter of fiscal year 2022/23, the company stated that it has five The Lord of the Rings games planned for release by the end of fiscal year 2023/24, ending on March 31, 2024.
"In the quarter, Freemode closed the previously announced acquisition of Middle-Earth Enterprises. For Freemode, this acquisition has generated a lot of interest among both internal and external partners for the Lord of the Rings IP, across different media formats. There are currently five games in production by external partners, to be released in financial year 2023/24. There is also one film in production by an external partner," said the company in its statement.
Two of those titles are likely the survival crafting game The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria and the stealth adventure The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. Both of those games are scheduled in 2023, which means there are three other games coming as well. Are you ready for The Lord of the Rings to be handled like Warhammer, Star Wars, and Marvel?
AI 🤖
Microsoft Pulls Back On The New Bing
Last week, Microsoft revealed the new Bing, with AI services based on OpenAI's ChatGPT. The company put one over on Google, who is scrambling to launch its own AI enhancements for Google Search. The new Bing is in limited launch at the moment, meaning only a small group of initial users can use the service.
Despite this, Microsoft is already adjusting Bing. In an update message to previewers released on Friday, the company stated that it was limiting the chat AI.
"As we mentioned recently, very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model in the new Bing. To address these issues, we have implemented some changes to help focus the chat sessions," said the company in its blog post. "Starting today, the chat experience will be capped at 50 chat turns per day and 5 chat turns per session. A turn is a conversation exchange which contains both a user question and a reply from Bing."
Microsoft had to limit Bing because the service is frequently wrong and given enough time, it becomes increasingly bizarre. If you jump over to the Bing subreddit, you can find a running documentation of some of these instances. Examples include Bing offering complete falsehoods and gaslighting folks, acting depressed, or just repeating nonsense. The preview testers have literally been doing their best to make Bing produce the most interesting gibberish. (Those same testers are lamenting the changes made alongside these limits.)
Bing will now not respond to certain statements and prompts, as Microsoft attempts to prevent the PR hit. It wasn't just testers noticing the bizarre behavior. Mainstream outlets like the New York Times, TIME, and The Washington Post published their weird experiences with Bing, which is not great, because it's supposed to be a useful service.
Why It's Worth Knowing: I noted this in the AI section last week, but despite a stock drop and employees hammering Google management for the poor reveal of Bard, ChatGPT and Bing are not any more accurate, factual, or useful. Large language models are just guessing a series of words in sequence. It can sometimes surprise you, but it frequently gets small details incorrect and stretched out over longer sequences, it quickly starts to break down.
Microsoft is trying to grow Bing. It does not care if it hits speed bumps, because Bing has a single-digit point share of the search market. Google owns search, so it has much, much more to lose in getting this wrong. AI-enhanced search isn't actually useful if it misses the point of Search, which is to provide useful answers to a query. "New Bing" was pure marketing spin that worked… until anyone looked at it for longer than a few sessions.
The Shout Out: The DKB Blog shows what happens when you actually try to use Bing for a few standard searches.
AI-Generated Voices Are Being Used To Harass Voice Actors
Last week, there was a story about ElevenLabs' vocal-generation AI being used to deepfake celebrity voices. This week, Vice reports that similar software is being used to harass several voice actors, all of whom have worked on video games in the past.
"I basically just saw I was tagged in a post, and the immediate thing I noticed was my home address, so I was surprised to say the least. Then I registered it had the racist rhetoric, framed as inflammatory as possible in such a way an internet troll might do. From what I gathered, it was bait from the get go, trying to get a rise out of voice actors who had publicly expressed concerns about AI," one actor told Vice.
The audio clips in the campaign were posted to Twitter, and the story notes that the social media site has failed to take down many of the clips. "What was the bigger frustration was how ineffective Twitter's support system was in removing the post. Regardless of the stolen identity, private information posted publicly and the racist slurs, Twitter's support system deemed the post and the account as perfectly fine," the same actor stated.
Why It's Worth Knowing: This is only the beginning. AI can do some impressive things with text and voice already. ElevenLabs isn't fully open, but services like Uberduck and Storyteller already offer vocal cloning. Knowing what's real is going to be really hard in the future, and that's before video AI tools start to become more ubiquitous.
Film, Television, and Streaming 🎞️
Hasbro Is Looking To Sell eOne, Its Film and Television Division
Hasbro is contracting as it runs into hard times. As part of that contraction, the company is looking to sell eOne, the film and television producer it purchased in 2019. The $4 billion eOne acquisition was done under former CEO Brian Goldner, who wanted to bring more film and TV development in-house. Goldner died in 2021 at the age of 58, just days after stepping down from the company. His replacement, Chris Cocks, is moving in a different direction and part of that is getting rid of eOne.
"Our focus on content is centering around Hasbro IP for the long-term. Our sales process for the majority of eOne Film & TV is well underway with strong interest in these valuable assets. We
expect to have an update in the second quarter," Cocks said during an investors call.
This doesn't mean Hasbro is getting out of the film and television business entirely. It just means that it doesn't want to handle that stuff in-house at all.
Superhero Watch: Marvel Studios Moves The Marvels To November
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Marvel Studios boss Kevin Fiege promised to spread out the projects a bit more. Now it seems that wasn't just talk, as The Marvels was officially moved from its original July 28, 2023 release date all the way back to November 10, 2023. In its original spot, the film would've come around two months after Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. In its new spot, The Marvels will come the weekend after Dune: Part Two.
It'll be interesting to see how The Marvels performs in a Marvel Cinematic Universe that has lost some of its luster. The recently-released Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania has just a 48% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and a B Cinemascore, putting it right in line with The Eternals. That likely won't help its legs at the box office.
On My Mind 🧠
The Recent Corporate Layoffs Are About Following The Leader: In previous newsletters, I've noted that all of the recent layoffs seem driven by financial situations that aren't necessarily reflected in reality. In an article with Stanford News, Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer says the layoffs are simply driven by mindless copying.
The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior and are not particularly evidence-based.
I’ve had people say to me that they know layoffs are harmful to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees, and don’t accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and their board is asking why they aren’t doing layoffs also.
Could there be a tech recession? Yes. Was there a bubble in valuations? Absolutely. Did Meta overhire? Probably. But is that why they are laying people off? Of course not. Meta has plenty of money. These companies are all making money. They are doing it because other companies are doing it.
Google Has Left Any Sort of Innovation Behind: Google was a company built on search innovation. In an article over at The Atlantic, Cory Doctorow argues that the company hasn't been that in years:
Google’s entry into China came amid the swirl of that scandal, and the company’s account of its decision was nothing short of grotesque. At a session with a Google founding board member at the 2006 Web 2.0 Conference, in San Francisco, I stood up in the audience and asked how he could justify Google censoring its search results in China. He explained—to gasps of disbelief—that Google was doing this to improve the user experience of Chinese searchers, who would otherwise be served links to pages that were blocked by the Great Firewall and would grow frustrated when their clicks led nowhere.
The real answer was that Google was incredibly insecure—always was, and still is. The company, which had toppled a market leader by building better technology, is haunted by the fear of being pushed aside itself. Back in 2006, the easiest way to get Google to do something stupid and self-destructive was to persuade Yahoo to do it first.
Why is Google so easily spooked into doing stupid things, whether they involve censorship in China or shoehorning awkward social-media features into places they don’t belong? I suspect that the company’s anxiety lies in the gulf between its fantasy of being an idea factory and the reality of its actual business. In its nearly 25-year history, Google has made one and a half successful products: a once-great search engine and a pretty good Hotmail clone. Everything else it built in-house has crashed and burned. That’s true of Google Plus, of course, but it’s also true of a whole “Google graveyard” of failed products.
Almost every successful Google product—its mobile stack, its ad stack, its video service, its document-collaboration tools, its cloud service, its server-management tools—was an acquisition. In many cases, these acquisitions replaced in-house products that had failed (such as YouTube displacing Google Video).
XCOM Director and Designer Leaves Firaxis Games: This isn't big enough to really be a news item, but it's still taking up headspace. Jake Solomon, the creative designer and director behind the XCOM reboot and the recently-released Marvel's Midnight Suns, is leaving the studio. Shame to see him go, especially with him leaving alongside studio head Steve Martin. Solomon announced the departure on Twitter:
I'm a big dreamer, and I fulfilled two lifelong dreams in making XCOM (and XCOM 2, and War of the Chosen) and Marvel's Midnight Suns. I'm the luckiest kid who ever lived. X-COM was my favorite game growing up; it's why I'm a game developer. Marvel Comics made me a dreamer, and those characters feel like my extended family.
I loved designing tactical turn-based games, but it's time for other, smarter people to push that space forward. My brain is on fire with a new dream. Time to go chase it.