Saturday, January 31
Daily News Stuff 31 January 2026
Logical Negativisim Edition
Logical Negativisim Edition
Top Story
- One third of video game workers have been laid off in the past two years. (Variety)
I'm a little surprised it's not higher, but the article points out that layoffs have hit major - so called "AAA" - Triple A - studios twice as hard as indies, so it is higher for the companies I'd focus on with news stories.The survey also found that 82% of US-based respondents support the unionization of game industry workers, with 5% opposed and 13% unsure.
And I was just about to feel some sympathy for these people.
- Ubisoft has cancelled six games and closed three of its studios in the wake of disastrous sales of its recent major titles. (BBC)
The studios on the chopping block include Ubisoft Halifax, which unionised earlier this month. (Games Industry)
That went about as well as could be expected.
Tech News
- The latest high-budget disaster is called Highguard. (Destructoid)
Produced by Wildlight Entertainment, which is a private company so we don't have details of the financials, but they've had over a hundred experienced developers working on this game for four years in California. So somewhere north of $100 million.
It's free-to-play. It reached nearly 100,000 players on its first day... Then lost 90% of them on its second day.
Not because it is particularly buggy. Players have shown problems with being disconnected from the servers, but for the most part it seems technically competent. The problem is that it is completely uninspired.
It got the top billing during the recent Game Awards (which had more viewers than the Super Bowl), with shameless promotion from the presenter. Everyone watching saw it as derivative slop and predicted it would fail, hard, and it was, and has.Highguard was in for a bloodbath, and I cannot believe that the devs didn’t know that. With so much experience at AAA powerhouses like EA, I genuinely think they fully understood the implications of that TGA shenanigan, and cannot fathom why they never reacted.
Toxic positivity.
- Tesla throws in the towel on car sales. (The Verge) (archive site)
Of course, this is not true, but The Verge has abandoned any pretense at being a news site.
- The $100 billion deal between Nvidia and OpenAI seems to have encountered choppy waters. (WSJ) (archive site)
The plan, unveiled in September, was for Nvidia to invest $100 billion in OpenAI so that OpenAI could purchase $100 billion of Nvidia hardware.
Now... Not so much.Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has privately emphasized to industry associates in recent months that the original $100 billion agreement was nonbinding and not finalized, people familiar with the matter said. He has also privately criticized what he has described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach and expressed concern about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic, some of the people said.
OpenAI has name recognition - it's the company behind ChatGPT - but its CEO is a snake oil salesman.
- Researchers have discovered 175,000 publicly exposed Ollama servers worldwide. (Tech Radar)
Ollama is an AI tool that you run on your own hardware, but can also talk to services like ChatGPT and Claude.
Around half of those servers are configured not just to answer questions but to execute code... For anyone in the entire world.
- AMD's Zen 6 CPU chiplet is slightly smaller than Zen 2. (WCCFTech)
It has twelve cores and 48MB of L3 cache vs. 8 cores and 32MB of cache for Zen 2 (and 3, 4, and 5), but the move to the latest 2nm process means that it's about the same size as it always has been. Zen 2 on 7nm was 77mm2, and Zen 6 is 76mm2.
If the promises for TSMC's N2P process node are borne out, this should be a major upgrade - not just 50% more cores, but cores running 30% faster at the same power requirements.
- Nvidia has gone all-in on the video cards you don't want. (VideoCards)
Reportedly - Nvidia hasn't announced this officially but it matches my own and everyone else's market observations - 75% of GPU supply from Nvidia will go to three models: The 5060, the 5060 Ti 8GB model, and the 5070.
The high-end models and the 16GB 5060 Ti will have limited availability going forward, with the entry level 5050 not even rating a mention. And the 5090 already isn't available anywhere for less than 50% over MSRP.
I bought an AMD 9060 XT 16GB fearing shortages and price increases, which haven't happened to that model, though the 9070 which was briefly available below MSRP no longer is.
Musical Interlude
I looked up Van Morrison just now fearing I'd missed an obituary at some point, and not only is he still around, he was recording anti-lockdown songs with Eric Clapton during the WuFlu.
Here's to you, Mr. Morrison.
Here's to you, Mr. Morrison.
Disclaimer: Don't make my brown-eyed girl blue.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:04 PM
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Honestly, I can sympathize with workers in the game industry who
want to get together and collectively bargain for better conditions.
It's an open secret how terribly programmers are treated by the AAA game
companies. "Death march" conditions, being "asked" to work 60+ and
often 80+ hours per week, are (according to rumor) routine, not just in
the last two weeks before a big release, but month after month. A lot of
these guys are driven guys who are willing to put in the hard work to
make a good product, and they would put up with that sort of thing if it
was occasional, and rewarded accordingly (say, with a big party and
three days off after the release is successful, then back to the office
to start the inevitable bugfixing). But their willingness to put in the
hard work is being routinely abused, by companies that treat them like
replaceable widgets. Some of the stories I have heard, and I'm not all
that well connected to the game industry so I'm sure there are lots more
that I don't hear, are nearly unbelievable, they're so bad.
So even though many of them don't realize what a bad idea it is to unionize (the union always, always ends up getting led by people who want to run it for their own benefit instead of the members' benefit), I really do understand their desire to do so. However, instead of forming a union, many of these guys would be much better off resigning, then taking the knowledge and skills that they gained and starting their own company with half-a-dozen buddies and putting out quality indie games. That's a big risk, though, and unionizing looks like a much smaller risk (and honestly, it is a smaller risk in the short run, it's only in the long run that it's a stupid decision) so many of them want to go that route.
But their ignorance of history doesn't change the fact that they're being routinely abused by the companies they work for. Really, it's surprising that more game-industry devs don't end up falling for Marxist lies about capitalism, because they are working for the very people that are the stereotypical worker-exploiting fatcats that Marx said were everywhere. They're not everywhere, and not even every single AAA company is like that. But so many of the AAA companies are terrible, terrible places to work.
Moral: buy indie games. Your dollars are much less likely to be going to people who hate you. (Especially if you do your research beforehand).
So even though many of them don't realize what a bad idea it is to unionize (the union always, always ends up getting led by people who want to run it for their own benefit instead of the members' benefit), I really do understand their desire to do so. However, instead of forming a union, many of these guys would be much better off resigning, then taking the knowledge and skills that they gained and starting their own company with half-a-dozen buddies and putting out quality indie games. That's a big risk, though, and unionizing looks like a much smaller risk (and honestly, it is a smaller risk in the short run, it's only in the long run that it's a stupid decision) so many of them want to go that route.
But their ignorance of history doesn't change the fact that they're being routinely abused by the companies they work for. Really, it's surprising that more game-industry devs don't end up falling for Marxist lies about capitalism, because they are working for the very people that are the stereotypical worker-exploiting fatcats that Marx said were everywhere. They're not everywhere, and not even every single AAA company is like that. But so many of the AAA companies are terrible, terrible places to work.
Moral: buy indie games. Your dollars are much less likely to be going to people who hate you. (Especially if you do your research beforehand).
Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, January 31 2026 08:50 PM (/YfO5)
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P.S. If you want an example of game companies treating their workers badly, search for news about Subnautica 2 and the reason it was delayed. I don't know whether the various rumors and allegations are true, but rumor speaks of some very shady dealings going on by the company. I won't go into more detail since I don't remember the details well enough to be accurate, but a quick DDG search will turn up plenty of news articles.
Posted by: Robin Munn at Saturday, January 31 2026 08:56 PM (/YfO5)
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