Notices by Brendan Sinclair (brendansinclair@mastodon.social)

New Unlosing Writer post: Meta has lost more than $59 billion on AR/VR since 2020. What else could Mark Zuckerberg have put that money towards instead? Here's a (non-comprehensive) list.

https://www.unlosingwriter.com/metas-money-well-spent/

With a bunch of upheaval in the game engine scene of late, I'm hoping there's room for a dark horse game dev tool to retake the market.

I've been laid off and need a new job. Maybe game journalism, maybe something else in games, maybe not games at all. Entertaining all possibilities at this point, so please reach out if you think I might be a good fit for you.

Even the name of the place is unhinged. It's like calling yourself Corporation, Inc. or Business Company.

Wildest game developer website I've ever seen.

www.globalworldwide.com

I wrote about the layoffs at Riot Games and Microsoft, hiring for culture fit, and one good thing unions would definitely do for developers

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/riot-and-microsoft-layoffs-the-same-but-different-this-week-in-business

With the people in charge at all these places laying off 1,000s to make up for their own mistakes, I would like to once again point out that John Riccitiello is basically the only one to resign after tanking the business. And he's done it twice now.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/riccitiellos-exit-a-rare-bit-of-accountability-this-week-in-business

@eaton Thank you for your lack of service!

One idea seems to be that you could connect users so that if, for example, someone you were close to suddenly was having a Very Bad Time, you could reach out to check in on them.

I'm skeptical that emotional state can be properly inferred from physical metrics with a useful degree of accuracy and generally don't like efforts to boil down the mystery of human existence to numbers, but OK, maybe someone could find that helpful?

Just found an all-timer patent application that might go up on Context-Free Patent Art at some point, but I thought it would be fun to walk through it with a little context here. So let's look at the patent for a "Digital Telepathy Ecosystem Method and Devices."

It starts off talking about monitoring a person's emotional state by collecting heart rate, temp, O2 saturation, galvanic skin response, etc.

Then it moves to empathy.

And just in case they weren't collecting a scary amount of personal information as it was, they also want to use this for innovations in the exciting field of teledildonics.

This one was a lot of fun to write but also made me pretty angry over how obviously broken IP protection methods are, who's allowed to profit off piracy openly and who isn't.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/where-to-get-illegally-pirated-games-this-week-in-business

If I am elected president in 2024, I promise that we will go back to console add-ons that looked like they were eating the original console. This is my pledge to you. #retrogaming

First bit of This Week in Business is a fairly straight-forward retelling of one dev's horror story with Steam, followed by a section on how the people responsible for AI right now are manifestly unqualified for the job.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/be-thankful-this-didnt-happen-to-you-this-week-in-business

I hope every journalist writing a "Who is new OpenAI CEO Emmett Shear?" article reads this first.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/twitch-staff-call-the-company-out-on-sexual-assault-racism-more

Game industry bosses often feel they are owed something more than labor in exchange for money even though they benefit far more from a project's success than their employees do.

They demand unflinching and total loyalty to "the team" (a stand-in for the boss' interests, because unions would not be so hated if bosses really wanted the team's interests put first), while also reserving the right to toss people aside whenever it's expedient for them.