Stuff Worth Knowing for the Week of February 27, 2023
Microsoft nets some wins, Square Enix removes its current president, and Meta dishes on future extended reality devices.
Stuff Worth Knowing for the Week of February 27, 2023
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. Look, I promise I’ll write more there soon. I’m tired.
Video Games 🎮
Microsoft’s Activision-Blizzard Deal May Get EU Approval
Microsoft’s journey to spend a lot of money continues. All of the wheeling and dealing seems like it might pay off in at least one region. According to a report from Reuters, Microsoft may win approval of its planned acquisition of Activision-Blizzard from the European Commission. Surprisingly, the deal may be allowed in the region without Microsoft needing to divest itself of any assets.
Instead, Microsoft’s deals to bring its games to other platforms seem to have paid off. The report states that Microsoft will have to keep up licensing deals and other remedies to gain the approval. It likely helps that Microsoft also announced an expansion of PC Game Pass to more countries worldwide. The list of 40 countries includes European regions like Luxembourg, Montenegro, Iceland, and Romania. The European Commision is expected to decide on the acquisition by April 25.
Microsoft Gains Access To Sony Documents Related To Activision-Blizzard Case
Microsoft still has to deal with other regulatory bodies, including the Federal Trade Commission in the United States and the Competition and Markets Authority in the United Kingdom. On the FTC side, a U.S. judge ruled that Sony has to turn over internal documentation that Microsoft requested in regards to the former’s staunch opposition to the deal.
Sony now has to turn over documents related to its third-party publisher content licenses from January 1, 2019 onwards and the text of a declaration made to the FTC by Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan. It also needs to turn over documents related to several employees, including Senior Vice President of Finance, Corporate Development and Strategy Lin Tao; Senior Video President of Global Product Strategy and Management Hideaki Nishino; and Senior Director, Competition & Regulatory Affairs Greg McCurdy.
The FTC trial will begin on August 2. As I said above, the EU decision is scheduled for April 25. The CMA decision is planned to come a day later on April 26.
Square Enix Removes Yosuke Matsuda As President
On Friday, Square Enix revealed that it was taking the drastic move to remove President Yosuke Matsuda from his position. He will be replaced by Square Enix Holdings Director Takashi Kiryu. The change is scheduled to be finalized at the next Annual Shareholders’ Meeting in June 2023.
“Under the rapid change of business environment surrounding the entertainment industry, the
proposed change is intended to reshape the management team with the goal of adopting ever-
evolving technological innovations and maximizing on the creativity of the Company’s group in order to deliver even greater entertainment to its customers around the world,” said the company in its statement.
Matsuda had previously touted the future of the publisher, leaning on blockchain and NFT technology. “I believe that blockchain gaming holds the potential to create new forms of gaming content, and that it represents a new business domain worth our Group addressing alongside traditional games,” he said in his annual letter to shareholders. Based on these comments from the Board, it sounds like he’s been removed because he wasn’t moving fast enough on making those changes.
Why It's Worth Knowing: Matsuda was making a number of shifts in a very short time, including the sale of the Western studios to Embracer Group. (I still feel that those studios were sold for well under what they were worth.) Assuming he was removed because he wasn’t moving fast enough, it’s likely that the incoming boss will make even more drastic changes in a short period of time. It’ll be interesting to see what Square Enix looks like coming in 2024.
Tech ⌨️
Meta’s Extended Reality Roadmap
On Tuesday, Meta revealed a roadmap for its Reality Labs division in an internal employee presentation. Parts of the presentation were acquired by The Verge, who spilled all the details. First up is the Meta Quest 3, which is coming later this year. The device will be thinner than the current Quest 2, more powerful, and feature front-facing cameras to allow for mixed reality experiences like the Quest Pro. It’ll also cost a bit more than the Quest 2.
That will be followed by a cheaper, more accessible model in 2024, currently codenamed Ventura. Then there’s a model called La Jolla, which will be a higher-resolution, premium device meant for enterprise and business customers like the Quest Pro.
On the augmented reality side, Meta is planning for another set of AR glasses this Fall. These will be the second generation of the Ray-Ban Stories. They will be followed by a third generation of the glasses in 2025; while the Stories merely capture video and audio, the third-gen model will have a viewfinder display built-in and a band that will allow the wearer to control the glasses. Meta is planning to have an additional smartwatch to accompany this device, offering further capabilities over the band.
Finally, Meta is betting big on premium AR glasses codenamed Orion. Employees will be testing the device in 2024, but Meta isn’t planning on selling a consumer version until 2027. Orion will come in two flavors, the top-end “Innovation” line and the less-advanced “Scale” line.
Why It's Worth Knowing: Of course, those are just the devices. Toward the end of Verge’s article is the real meat: Meta wants to really monetize AR glasses by leaning on advertising. “I think it’s easy to imagine how ads would show up in space when you have AR glasses on. Our ability to track conversions, which is where there has been a lot of focus as a company, should also be close to 100 percent,” said Meta vice president of AR Alex Himel in the employee presentation.
The ads business has hit a dead end on the traditional web, but can you imagine the dystopia of ads being served directly to your eyeballs? Meta wants to be there, even if the average consumer would rather they be anywhere else. All this is the next step in chasing of the platform of the future.
Amazon Pauses On Building Its East Coast Headquarters
Way back in 2017, cities around the United States threw themselves at the feet of Amazon, when the company announced it was looking for an area to build its second headquarters. Taxpayer funds were thrown around to sweeten the pot and give Amazon incentives to move to their cities. Amazon ultimately decided to build in two locations: Long Island City, New York and Arlington, Virginia.
Amazon pulled out of building the New York headquarters in 2019, allegedly due to backlash from local citizens regarding all of the incentives given. Those citizens look almost prescient now, as Amazon decided this week to pause work on the Virginia location. The pause comes alongside general cost-cutting at Amazon, including recent layoffs.
Why It's Worth Knowing: Alongside several layoffs, the major tech companies have been quietly pulling out of office development over the past year. Amazon itself pulled out of one office in downtown Seattle, Twitter did the same due to impending eviction, and Google cut and ran from a plan to build an office in the Kirkland area. Microsoft delayed a redevelopment of its Redmond headquarters and paused the development of a 90-acre campus in Atlanta, Georgia. The good times and grand expansion for these companies are over, even if the wallets aren’t actually empty yet.
This Week in Twitter: Twitter Continues To Flounder As Its Founder Launches Bluesky
On Sunday, Platformer’s Zoe Schiffer reported that Esther Crawford, chief executive of Twitter Payments, had been fired. Crawford was a Musk faithful within the new “hardcore” Twitter, angling for growth within the company. That didn’t save her, as she was fired with most of the Twitter product team.
This latest round of layoffs—well after Musk stated there would be no more layoffs—comes as Twitter continues to struggle. Twitter timelines went down on Wednesday, one of many smaller technical failures the service has had in recent months. Musk is also behind on features he promised previously, like Twitter sharing ad revenue with creators or cutting the number of ads. I can’t think that firing the product team will help those features become a reality.
At the same time, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has soft-launched Bluesky Social. The app started as a project within Twitter to create a decentralized social network, before being moved outside of the company. The invite-only social media service is now available on the Apple App Store, but it’s invite-only at the moment. The resulting app, based on a hands-on from TechCrunch, looks like a mix of Twitter and Mastodon.
AI 🤖
CNET Lays Off Staff As Editor-In-Chief Moves To Oversee AI Content
A few weeks back, CNET was caught publishing poorly-edited articles generated by AI. This week, the site laid off 10% of its staff. At the same time, editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo is moving to become the senior vice president of AI content strategy and editor-at-large, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Verge.
Under parent company Red Ventures, CNET has increasingly become focused on SEO and nothing else. According to former employees who spoke to The Verge, the site will tighten its focus on consumer technology, home and wellness, energy, broadband, and personal finance, areas that Red Ventures can easily monetize. And given Guglielmo’s shift, you can expect that content will be filled with AI-generated work.
The number of sites using AI-generated writing is only going to increase in the future, because the money men in charge of these sites believe they can get more while spending less. There is some hope though. This week, Wired put down its guidelines for the use of AI-generative tools for its work. These guidelines included not publishing text or images generated or edited by AI. Wired did acknowledge that AI may be used to generate story ideas, however.
FTC Warns Companies Not To Make Ambiguous Claims About AI
AI is moving quickly, but the Federal Trade Commission is trying to move just as quickly. Two weeks ago, I noted that the FTC was establishing the Office of Technology to help it understand emerging tech. This week, it released a post warning companies away from offering wildly unsubstantiated or ambiguous language to promote their AI products.
“AI hype is playing out today across many products, from toys to cars to chatbots and a lot of things in between,” said FTC attorney Michael Atleson. “Breathless media accounts don’t help, but it starts with the companies that do the developing and selling. We’ve already warned businesses to avoid using automated tools that have biased or discriminatory impacts. But the fact is that some products with AI claims might not even work as advertised in the first place. In some cases, this lack of efficacy may exist regardless of what other harm the products might cause. Marketers should know that—for FTC enforcement purposes—false or unsubstantiated claims about a product’s efficacy are our bread and butter.”
The post is interesting, because it also highlights something many companies have already tried to pull with existing algorithms. “If something goes wrong—maybe it fails or yields biased results—you can’t just blame a third-party developer of the technology. And you can’t say you’re not responsible because that technology is a ‘black box’ you can’t understand or didn’t know how to test,” Atleson added. Maybe you guys should do something about those existing companies too?
OpenAI Announces Third-Party API For ChatGPT
Following Microsoft’s integration of ChatGPT into Bing and other Microsoft products, OpenAI has announced its API for third-party developers. OpenAI is pointing to other companies currently using its API, including Snap and Instacart. The model is GPT 3.5, with a price of $0.002 per 1,000 tokens, with one token representing a discrete block of text generated by ChatGPT. An example in their documentation illustrates how quickly tokens can be spent:
For example, the string “ChatGPT is great!” is encoded into six tokens: [“Chat”, “G”, “PT”, “ is”, “ great”, “!”].
That means a number of tokens can be consumed with a generated sentence, so 1,000 tokens can go pretty quick. There’s also another API for Whisper, OpenAI’s speech-to-text model. The Whisper API is great for transcribing audio and can be accessed at $0.006 per minute, rather than using tokens.
Why It's Worth Knowing: Microsoft’s $10 billion investment is good, but now OpenAI will start to really make money. And when it does, others will follow. This is really the true beginning of AI everything, so get ready for AI-powered apps in the next few months. It’s just a matter of time before other companies figure out how the tech fits with their existing product, or make up completely new and useless features to say they’re AI-powered.
Paizo Bans AI-Generated Content In Pathfinder and Starfinder
If you want to work with Paizo on either of its tabletop games, Pathfinder and Starfinder, you’ll have to make the art yourself. Paizo announced on Wednesday that it’s instituting a full ban on AI-generated content across its entire product line.
“The ethical and legal issues surrounding ‘AI art’ and writing prompt programs—and the serious threat they pose to the livelihoods of partners who have helped us get to where we are today as a company—demand that we take a firm position against the use of this technology in Paizo products,” said the company in its tweeted statement.
Paizo also announced that AI content would be banned on Pathfinder and Starfinder Infinite, its marketplaces to users to sell content based on either game system. It is currently unclear how Paizo intended to determine if the art is AI-generated, but at least they have some rules in place.
Film, Television, and Streaming 🎞️
The Future Of Film Is Gaming: Dead By Daylight, Detective Pikachu2, and More
One thing that always bothered me about the talk surrounding the Marvel Cinematic Universe was the pure focus on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The MCU is big, sure, but it’s just the one leading the pole position in the overall model; there are many others drafting right behind hoping to succeed on the same path. It just hadn’t entirely worked for them yet.
With the MCU faltering and DC still in the starting blocks, it’s clear that the “next big thing” is coming. The overall focus remains the same—tentpole films based on existing IP that can be spun out into a universe—but the success of The Last of Us on HBO has Hollywood taking a stronger look at video games.
This week, Variety revealed that Blumhouse and Atomic Monster are working on a Dead By Daylight film, based on the multiplayer horror titles from Behaviour Interactive. This is marginally interesting because Dead By Daylight’s roster of killers is populated almost entirely by riffs on famous horror film icons or those horror film icons themselves. I look forward to seeing how Jason Blum and James Wan can turn that into a successful franchise. Of course, if anyone can do it, it’s those two.
At the same time, Legendary Entertainment is finally starting to move on a sequel to Pokémon Detective Pikachu. That film dropped in 2019 to middling box office, but it didn’t flop and it’s Pokémon, so it’s time to take another crack at it. Deadline reports that Portlandia co-creator Joanthan Krisel is in talks to direct, with The Kings of Summer screenwriter Chris Galletta penning the script.
Why It's Worth Knowing: There are a lot of gaming projects on the horizon, including Horizon Zero Dawn for Netflix, a new Tomb Raider series from Amazon, and the upcoming Gran Turismo film. The point is that Hollywood wants to mine any existing IP. Marvel isn’t the enemy, or at the very least, it’s not the only enemy. Hollywood is taking a larger crack at video game projects, even as it doubles down on turning franchises like The Lord of the Rings into a host of films. The future is here, and it’s more of the past.
Amazon Shows Off Its Proto-Franchise, Citadel
Speaking of the business model, this week Amazon gave everyone a brief look at Citadel, its upcoming spy series from the Russo brothers. The espionage series will star Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden as amnesiac spies, formerly of a secretive organization. The show will focus on the pair as one part of the conflict between their organization, the eponymous Citadel, and Manticore, a conflicting organization. It’s G.I. Joe for adults.
The twist is Amazon is already seeing “franchise” before the series airs on April 28. See, the Russos did not pitch this series to Amazon; in fact, according to Vanity Fair, it was the other way around. The six-episode first season is just the start: Amazon has already finished production on the Italian Citadel and there’s another Indian iteration currently in production. All of the shows take place in the same universe, as Citadel is meant to be a global organization.
Amazon wants to build its own answer to Netflix’s Money Heist, which started with the Spanish-language series, before spinning-off into the connected Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area and Berlin. (Berlin focuses on the Money Heist character code-named Berlin, as opposed to taking place in Germany.) One overarching story, multiple international shows. Of course, the first show has to actually work in the first place to make it all worth it.
Star Trek: Discovery Ending With Season 5
It seems you can only boldly go for so long. On Thursday, Paramount announced that the fifth season of Star Trek: Discovery would be its last. The season is scheduled to debut on Paramount+ in early 2024. Discovery was one of the first shows on what was launched as CBS All Access, eventually leading to a whole slate of Star Trek shows. Five seasons is a good run.
The move comes as Paramount is looking to slim down in terms of costs. This week during an investor conference attended by The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount Global CFO Naveen Chopra announced that the company would spend less than the estimated $6 billion on content in 2024. This will also come alongside increases in the current subscription tiers, as Paramount integrates Showtime with Paramount+.
Star Trek is expensive, especially in a world where much cheaper fare like Yellowstone is drawing big ratings. Paramount is planning more Yellowstone projects, and more spin-offs based on shows like Dexter and Billions. All of those are much cheaper than Star Trek, so it makes sense that Paramount is open to allowing some shows to end naturally. Star Trek: Picard is currently airing the third and final season it promised back when it was first revealed, and Discovery gets to bow out gracefully afterward. I’d expect a spin-off of at least one of those shows though, perhaps in a slightly cheaper, single-location format.
Layoffs 👷
Electronic Arts Lays Off Most Of Its Apex Legends QA Team
On Tuesday, Electronic Arts laid off over 200 quality assurance testers in its Baton Rouge, Louisiana offices. According to Kotaku, the firings were done in an all-hands Zoom call, gutting the team that primarily handled QA for Apex Legends. In an email to Kotaku, an EA spokesperson said that the company intended to move QA operations out of the area.
“As part of our ongoing global strategy, we are expanding the distribution of our Apex Legends testing team and ending testing execution that’s been concentrated in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, impacting services provided by our third-party provider. Our global team, inclusive of remote playtesters across the U.S., enables us to increase the hours per week we’re able to test and optimize the game and reflects a commitment to understand and better serve our growing community around the world,” said the spokesperson.
In its most-recent earnings report for the third quarter of fiscal year 2023, Electronic Arts reported net revenue of $1.9 billion. Net income came to $204 million for the quarter, up from $66 million in the previous quarter.
On My Mind 🧠
FFXIV and FFXVI Producer Naoki Yoshida Kicks Off Discussion About “JRPGs”: This week saw the release of several previews and interviews about Final Fantasy XVI, the next mainline entry in the RPG franchise. In one interview with YouTuber Skill-Up, Yoshida noted that he disliked the term “JRPG”. The quotes were translated from Japanese by FFXVI localization director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox.
"One thing [Yoshida] wants to get across is that when we create games, we don't go into them thinking we are creating JRPGs, we are just creating RPGs. The term JRPG is used by western media rather than users and media in Japan.”
"This is going to depend on who you ask but there was a time when this term first appeared 15 years ago, and for us as developers the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term. As though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers the term JRPG can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past. It wasn't a compliment to a lot of developers in Japan. We understand that recently, JRPG has better connotations and it's being used as a positive but we still remember the time when it was used as a negative.”
"I remember seeing something 15 years ago which was basically a definition of what a JRPG was vs a western RPG, and it's kind of like Final Fantasy VII, and it has this type of graphics, this length of story, and compartmentalizing what we were creating into a JRPG box, and taking offense to that because that's not how we're going into creating. We were going in to create an RPG, but to be compartmentalized, they felt it was discriminatory."
This kicked off a pretty big discussion about terminology and the treatment of Japanese developers almost a decade ago. Of course, this also dovetailed with another discussion made about Final Fantasy XVI’s lack of diversity in its world. It was a lot!
James Bond Anniversary Novels Being Edited For Racist Content: On Saturday, the Telegraph reported that a 70th anniversary reprints of the James Bond novels from Ian Fleming Publications Ltd would feature altered text. Apparently, the company commissioned some sensitivity readers and used their feedback to change certain passages. The books will be published with the following disclaimers:
“This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.”
The Telegraph notes a number of changes in Live and Let Die, where all instances of the n-word have been replaced. In another example, “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough.” becomes “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.” Despite these changes, many phrases and passages remain, including “sweet tang of rape” and homosexuality being a “stubborn disability”. 😬
Despite that, this has been another culture war firestorm similar to the changes made to Roald Dahl’s books. It’s incredibly tiring. From someone who owns a good number of the original Fleming novels… Well, let’s just say they are much harsher than the films would indicate.
From Software Announces The Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree: That’s it. I don’t really have anything to add. Elden Ring is getting DLC.
