Having finally upgraded from a PS4 to a PS5 in the past few months, I have turned on the console and played a game all of about two times. I think I am ready to accept that I have just aged out of gaming. With online games like Roblox and Minecraft dominating my children’s gaming, I am unsure where consoles go in the long term.
It remains a fascinating industry to observe, though. From its seemingly self-destructive tendencies in hiring and story creation to the encroachment of huge corporate thinking into spaces that flourished without it, it is never not entertaining.
Recently, many hares were set running across the gaming community when Former CAA agent and game designer Seamus Blackley made some comments about management moves at Microsoft.
Microsoft announced that XBox is to come under Asha Sharma and her CoreAI division after Xbox CEO Phil Spencer, and COO and president Sarah Bond left the company.
Blackley seemed to hint that the party was over for XBox and Microsoft wanted out in an interview with GamesBeat:
“Xbox, like a lot of businesses that aren’t the core AI business, is being sunsetted. They don’t say that, but that’s what’s happening. I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, her job is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.
The natural consequence of the focus on AI is that AI abstracts every problem from the minds of the executives who believe in it. We’re abstracting the problem of games as well. There’s a core belief, and you can see it in what Satya [Nadella, Microsoft CEO] said, that AI will subsume games like it will subsume everything.
The job of all these people is to just gently usher all of these business units into the new world of AI… Asha is coming into games because her boss believes that games are going to be driven by AI. It’s a very different approach. ”
So, of course, the gaming community erupted. Blackley had to take to BlueSky to clarify his comments:
“No. I love Xbox as my own flesh and blood. It’s the most wonderful thing to me. The distress it’s in kills me, haunts me. But progress requires introspection and realism. Learning is pain.
I love Xbox more than literally anyone. This is killing me. But I know a lot about organisations and business now, and I was being honest, not a PR a–hole. Let’s talk about it. It’s literally something I nearly died to bring into existence. Seeing it struggle and being unable to act is hard.”
For her part, Sharma has also said:
“…we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop…”
This all comes as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey says his technology firm Block is laying off almost half its workforce because of artificial intelligence:
“…fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”
He wrote this in a letter to shareholders. The layoffs will mean headcount at the company – which owns Square, CashApp, and Tidal – will fall to less than 6,000 from 10,000. This comes as many Wall Street analysts start to cool on AI hysteria, saying in this cycle, it is delivering far less tangible commercial benefit than the excitable headlines predicted.
The AI revolution is here, but it looks like it may well follow a similar curve to last century’s digital revolution.
