Gaming CEO Shares Nightmare Scenario Of Using AI To Spy On Devs

At least one video game company has considered using large-language model AI to spy on its developers. The CEO of TinyBuild, which publishes Hello Neighbor 2 and Tinykin, discussed it during a recent talk at this month’s Develop:Brighton conference, explaining how ChatGPT could be used to try and monitor employees who are toxic, at risk of burning out, or simply talking about themselves too much.

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“This one was quite bizarrely Black Mirror-y for me,” admitted TinyBuild boss Alex Nichiporchik, according to a new report by WhyNowGaming. It detailed ways that transcripts from Slack, Zoom, and various task managers with identifying information removed could be fed into ChatGPT to identify patterns. The AI chatbot would then apparently scan the information for warning signs that could be used to help identify “potential problematic players on the team.”

Nichiporchik took issue with how the presentation was framed by WhyNowGaming, and claimed in an email to Kotaku that he was discussing a thought experiment, and not actually describing practices the company currently employs. “This part of the presentation is hypothetical. Nobody is actively monitoring employees,” he wrote. “I spoke about a situation where we were in the middle of a critical situation in a studio where one of the leads was experiencing burnout, we were able to intervene fast and find a solution.”

While the presentation may have been aimed at the overarching concept of trying to predict employee burnout before it happens, and thus improve conditions for both developers and the projects they’re working on, Nichiporchik also appeared to have some controversial views on why types of behavior are problematic and how best for HR for flag them.

In Nichiporchik’s hypothetical, one thing ChatGPT would monitor is how often people refer to themselves using “me” or “I” in office communications. Nichiporchik referred to employees who talk too much during meetings or about themselves as “Time Vampires.” “Once that person is no longer with the company or with the team, the meeting takes 20 minutes and we get five times more done,” he suggested during his presentation according to WhyNowGaming.

Another controversial theoretical practice would be surveying employees for names of coworkers they had positive interactions with in recent months, and then flagging the names of people who are never mentioned. These three methods, Nichiporchik suggested, could help a company “identify someone who is on the verge of burning out, who might be the reason the colleagues who work with that person are burning out, and you might be able to identify it and fix it early on.”

This use of AI, theoretical or not, prompted swift backlash online. “If you have to repeatedly qualify that you know how dystopian and horrifying your employee monitoring is, you might be the fucking problem my guy,” tweeted Warner Bros. Montreal writer Mitch Dyer. “A great and horrific example of how using AI uncritically has those in power taking it at face value and internalizing its biases,” tweeted UC Santa Cruz associate professor, Mattie Brice.

Corporate interest in generative AI has spiked in recent months, leading to backlashes among creatives across many different fields from music to gaming. Hollywood writers and actors are both currently striking after negotiations with movie studios and streaming companies stalled, in part over how AI could be used to create scripts or capture actors’ likenesses and use them in perpetuity.

       

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Redditors Vent Their Rage At CEO In Funniest Way Possible

Reddit is a place where people come together. Indeed, it’s home to many of the internet’s biggest and most active communities, including, of course, thriving communities dedicated to just about every game, console, and genre imaginable. Now, that collective, collaborative quality is demonstrating itself in a new way. r/place, the Reddit-based collaborative art project, is back for its third incarnation since the 2017 original, and it couldn’t arrive at a better time for pissed-off Reddit users who have had enough of the message board management’s shit. With everyone able to place only a single pixel every few minutes, it’s some collective fury that’s allowing the result to be shaping up quite so cross.

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Last year, r/place saw an incredible total of 10.4 million people contribute 160 million pixels to create an astonishing and enormous piece of pixel art, 6000 x 6000 pixels big. Somehow meticulously detailed faces were created, despite the restrictions placed on any individual being able to deliberately directly draw. It was a strange and beautiful thing.

Jump to 2023, and times at Reddit aren’t nearly so content. The introduction of charges to third-party apps caused widespread outrage, and in turn, a widespread outage, as many subreddits went dark to protest the decision. Multiple beloved third-party applications like Apollo and BaconReader have had to give up, facing API costs in the tens of millions of dollars, and users are livid. Which makes now the most peculiar moment for Reddit to think launching a new r/place might be a good idea.

With what might best be described as “optimism,” Reddit posted the new version saying, “but hey, what better time to offer a blank canvas to our communities than when our users and mods are at their most passionate… right?”

Er, right. The results are predictable. “FUCK SPEZ” reads enormous swathes of the picture, over and over, referring to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who has been particularly tone deaf in his response to the protests and anger. “There’s a lot of noise with this one,” Huffman is reported to have written in a staff memo. “Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.” It was hardly the message Redditors were looking for.

Such feelings are being made very clear on the canvas. In German across the top of the image it currently reads, “U/SPEZ IST EIN HURENSOHN,” which translates to, “U/SPEZ IS A SON OF A BITCH.” Elsewhere are the more normal depictions of Pepe, some My Little Ponies, and even some Pikmin, but by far the most prominent and repeated motif is “FUCK SPEZ.”

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine what else Reddit was thinking would happen. We’ve contacted Reddit to ask what else they might have been expecting, and whether Huffman might listen to any of this noise.

 

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Payday 3 CEO Apologizes For Nightmare ‘Always Online’ Launch

By many accounts, Payday 3 appears to be a disappointing half-step forward for the longrunning co-op bank robbery series. Unlike its predecessor, it also requires players to always be online, a seemingly grave misjudgement given Payday 3’s first-week launch woes. The problems with crashes, slow matchmaking, and disconnected servers were so bad the CEO of creator Starbreeze Studios began apologizing for the state of the game almost immediately.

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“We are so sorry that the infrastructure didn’t hold up as expected, and although it’s impossible to prepare for every scenario—we should be able to do better,” Tobias Sjögren tweeted on September 22, just a day after Payday 3’s debut. “We work tirelessly until we have restored all services and our players can get back to heisting again without issues!”

“Early access” for Payday 3 began on September 18, but the massive influx of new players didn’t begin until its full release on September 21. In addition to PC and PlayStation 5, the multiplayer heist sim also hit Game Pass, where paying subscribers on Xbox Series X/S could download it for free. PC players complained about the game being stuck in “searching” mode when trying to find a match. Some Xbox players also appear to have faced unstable servers and crashes.

“No matter what you choose, public, friends only, invite only, it will just matchmaker forever,” wrote one player in a post that blew up on Reddit. “Release day is usually tough for studios. This…This is embarrassing.”

Players on PS5, meanwhile, began the week with an apparent wrong build of the game. Lead producer Andreas Häll-Penninger blamed Sony for pushing out an incorrect patch. “PS5 players: For reasons out of our control you are currently playing an older version of the game,” he tweeted. “Sony is working on rolling out the proper patch.” The right version arrived a day later, but it was still a bad omen for fans on PS5 who paid $30 extra for the Silver Edition to play the game before others.

Naturally, the outages have once again spurred calls for companies to move away from always-online requirements. Payday 2’s offline mode lets players run through missions with AI-controlled characters. While the allure of the series remains its real time online multiplayer antics, being able to still enjoy the game without an internet connection was a nice feature. An offline mod for the game is apparently already in the works.

A three-act play on the Payday 3 Twitter account (sorry, I mean “X” account) perfectly captured the mood of the launch. “HEISTERS! We’re number one on Steam!” the account tweeted on September 21. “Heisters, we’re currently experiencing slow matchmaking,” read its very next tweet. “We’re investigating and working on a solution.” While matchmaking was unavailable for many throughout the afternoon and evening, the studio reported that things were improving by early in the morning on September 22, only for outages to creep back in as the day went on.

The ongoing mess is another reminder of why so many people take a wait-and-see approach to new game launches, especially on PC, especially when they have stringent online requirements. “Payday 3 feels like the kind of game that is not meant for day-one purchase,” wrote one observer on Reddit. “But rather wait until they have a bunch of content released.”

This is effectively what IGN wrote in the very first paragraph of its Payday 3 review. “The usual horrible Payday bugs, a dinky pool of jobs to tackle, and a predictably weak story mean it’s not exactly the giant leap forward I was hoping for,” it reads. “Still, if Payday 2’s post-launch support is any indication, this is at least a very promising start for what could become another decade of happily pistol whipping cashiers and fixing drills.”

A promising start indeed!

 

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Unity CEO Riccitiello Retires After Big Install Fee Controversy

CEO John Riccitiello has retired from game development software company Unity after possibly its worst month of bad headlines ever. The tech company that’s slowly morphed into an in-game advertising firm announced a confusing and seemingly predatory new set of fees for game makers in September, only to walk the policy back after studios threatened to abandon the Unity engine moving forward.

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James M. Whitehurst, former head of the IBM-acquired open source software company Red Hat, will take over from Riccitiello as interim CEO while Unity’s board of directors search for a new long-term replacement. “It’s been a privilege to lead Unity for nearly a decade and serve our employees, customers, developers and partners, all of whom have been instrumental to the Company’s growth,” Riccitiello said in a press release. “I look forward to supporting Unity through this transition and following the Company’s future success.”

Riccitiello joined Unity back in 2014 shortly after leaving Electoronic Arts. He oversaw the game engine company’s shift from one-time licensing fees to an ongoing subscription model, launched the IPO in 2020, and made a series of acquisitions, including the in-app monetization firm IronSource in 2022. When Unity first went public, its stock price was around $68. Today it’s just over $30.

Once synonymous with the explosion of creativity and experimental design in the indie gaming space, Unity is being left by Riccitiello a month after a bungled new monetization strategy rollout burned bridges with tons of game makers. The initial messaging made it sound like game developers might be charged fees every time their game was installed, including retroactively.

A follow-up apology by president and general manager Marc Whitten later clarified that the new terms would only apply beginning in 2024, and laid out much bigger carve-outs for smaller studios whose games don’t hit a certain threshold of income. But for many developers it was too late. Their trust in the company had already been irrevocably shaken. Re-logic, maker of the Steam hit Terraria, pledged $200,000 toward the creation of a Unity competitor, and Slay the Spire dev, Mega Crit, says it will still move to rival game software platform Godot.

Rethinking monetization more aggressively was also one of Riccitiello’s legacies at EA. His seven years at the FIFA (now EA Sports FC) and Battlefield publisher saw it experiment with day-one DLC, microtransactions, and a focus on post-launch content. While there was no week-long crisis moment on the scale of what happened at Unity last month, it’s clear he helped usher in the company’s current live-service era, which many players now feel nickel-and-dimed by. Madden and FIFA’s lootbox modes were both added while he was head of EA, though they didn’t become the billion-dollar windfalls they are today until the tenure of his successor, current CEO Andrew Wilson.

Perhaps nothing summed up Riccitiello’s time at both EA and Unity better than another controvertial incident last year. In an interview with Pocketgamer.biz in July 2022, he called developers who don’t think about monetization early in the process “fucking idiots.” He immediately walked the comments back the next week, calling articles about it “clickbait” that took his comment out of context, but later apologized, saying he should have chosen his words more carefully.

That unforced error came shortly after the company revealed hundreds of layoffs at the same time it was buying IronSource in a $4.4 billion all-stock deal. Six hundred more were laid off at Unity earlier this year. Meanwhile, Riccitiello, in addition to the millions he has in Unity stock, will be kept on salary until April of 2024.

Update 10/11/2023 4:50 p.m. ET: SFGate reports that Riccitiello is set to earn up to $8.4 million through stock options over the next six months. That’s in addition to the roughly $253 million he already holds in current Unity stock.

            

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Controversial CEO Bobby Kotick Will Leave Activision Blizzard

Longtime Activision Blizzard CEO, Bobby Kotick, is almost gone, but not quite yet. Nearly two years after over 1,000 of his employees called on the controversial executive to resign, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer confirmed that Kotick will remain the head of the Call of Duty publisher until the end of 2023, to help with the transition as it begins officially merging with the tech giant.

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“Bobby Kotick has agreed to remain in his role through the end of 2023, reporting directly to me, to ensure a smooth and seamless integration,” Spencer wrote in an October 13 email to staff. “We look forward to working together as a unified team and we will share more updates on our new organizational structure in the coming months.”

“I have long said that I am fully committed to helping with the transition,” Kotick wrote in his own email to Activision Blizzard employees. “Phil has asked me to stay on as CEO of ABK, reporting to him, and we have agreed that I will do that through the end of 2023. We both look forward to working together on a smooth integration for our teams and players.”

Kotick’s leadership at Activision has often been contentious, especially following a 2021 lawsuit by regulators in the state of California alledging a history of sexual harassment and discrimation at the company. Activision Blizzard has denied those claims and continues to fight the lawsuit in court. But the allegations and subsquent reporting became a catalyst for hundreds of employees at the company to speak out against the CEO, and even begin unionizing at some studios.

A November 2021 investigation by The Wall Street Journal alleged that Kotick was aware of serious sexual misconduct incidents at the company and did not always report them to the board of directors. Activision called the reporting misleading, but in the wake of the story gaming executives—including Sony’s Jim Ryan, Nintendo of America’s Doug Bowser, and Spencer himself—informed staff they were concerned about the allegations. The report also led over 1,000 Activision Blizzard employees to call for Kotick to resign amid large scale walkouts.

Instead, Microsoft swooped in to begin acqusition neogtiations. According to reporting by Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, the mounting calls for accountability and unease among some members of the board of directors were a factor in convincing Kotick to move ahead with selling Activision Blizzard. It’s a deal that now looks set to provide him with a nearly $400 million windfall in the sale of company stock.

Even prior to the sexual harassment and discrimation allegations against the company, which spurred Kotick to announce a series of initiatives to make Activision Blizzard a more safe and inclusive workplace, developers working under him have often been critical of the executive’s vision for aggressively monetizing franchises with sequels and pricey in-game items. The annual production of blockbuster Call of Duty games has been blamed for poor working conditions among quality assurance testers, and extended periods of overtime “crunch” across the teams making them.

“We see the progress that they’re making that was pretty fundamental to us deciding to go forward here,” Spencer said of Activision’s plans to improve workplace culture in the wake of the California lawsuit, back when the merger was first announced in January 2022. More recently, Kotick had controversial comedian and former late night host James Corden come to Activision to interview him earlier this week. He told the Cats star that the company had a “magic” culture, and it was that magic that first attracted Microsoft to the acquisition in the first place.

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