Patch Notes #2

Bug fixes and performance improvements

This is Patch Notes, a weekly(?) update wherein we attempt to make sense of where modernity is heading by… wandering the internet. You can read the original introduction to the series here.

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(h/t Daniel) Obviously, Palworld / Pokemon with guns has been the talk of the week in the gaming sphere. More on Palworld in a future piece…

• I mentioned deepfakes in last week’s Patch Notes, and lo and behold, this week everyone, including the White House, is talking about them after explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift spread across social media (NYT).

• Noah Smith published a piece asking whether China would squander it’s moment in the sun, and I agreed with a lot of it, up until the conclusion. Noah seems to think that the CCP wants control because they think the Chinese people can’t handle it, which I think misses the point. I wrote about it here in a separate note:

• China’s Feared Spy Agency Steps Out of the Shadows (FT, $): You don’t need to be a geopolitical expert (I am not) to think this does not bode well.

  Ni said that during the “reform and opening up” period that followed Mao Zedong’s rule, China’s emphasis was on economic growth and maintaining good relationships with trading partners. “But now, increasingly we are seeing more focus and resources diverted to national security.”
  
  He pointed to amendments to anti-espionage law that expanded China’s definition of spying, as well as new legislation on data and raids on foreign consultancies last year.
  
  “The MSS has a bigger role . . . because of the shift to putting more focus on national security and the need to convince the public there is a genuine risk,” said Ni.
  
  The security publicity campaign had also sought to persuade citizens that espionage was a real and pressing concern, Ni said, often through the use of social media.

  

  From the FT: Beijing marked the first annual ‘National Security Education Day’ in 2016 with a comic series entitled Dangerous Love, which warned young women to be wary of foreigners who might be spies

• A “great little Hacker News vignette” (h/t Chrix): A game developer wrote a post titled “Ludum Mortuus Est” decrying the death of the game industry (more on that in a moment), and receives a reply correcting his Latin: “The title should be "ludus mortuus est", the game is dead. Ludus takes the nominative, since it's the subject of the sentence. And mortuus also takes the nominative, because it's a nominative complement. Google Translate will only take you so far.”

  As for the original article, “gaming is dead” is a bit hyperbolic to say the least, but gaming is definitely in a tough spot (see also Matthew Ball’s post down below). It seems unfair to blame gaming’s woes entirely on Bobby Kotick: Starcraft 1 cost $40 at launch in 1998, or $74 in 2024 dollars. Starcraft 2 cost $60 at launch in 2010, or about $85 in 2024 dollars. Diablo IV (which launched in 2023) has an MSRP of $70. Both older games were more expensive (in inflation-adjusted terms) than today’s games! And that isn’t even factoring the tremendous increase in team size needed to produce a AAA game that gamers expect today (one analysis shows roughly 4x from 2010 to 2024).
  
  Then again, it does seem like Kotick also said this, so maybe AAA gaming deserves to die:

  “We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.”

• Denver pastor pocketed $1.3M selling worthless cryptocurrency, state says: On the one hand, this is just your story of typical garden-variety crypto fraud. On the other hand, just watch this video. “Yes we stole $1.3m but out of that $1.3m, half a million went to the IRS and a few hundred thousand dollars went into a home remodel that the Lord told us to do.”

• “Coffee badging” apparently refers to badging into an in-person office so you are logged as being on site for HR tracking purposes, getting coffee, and then going home.

• Ezra Klein on the state of media:

  

• Wizards of the Coast is printing a new card called Prisoner’s Dilemma (h/t Daniel), which is… very on the nose. I’m actually surprised it’s taken this long to print a mechanic like this.

  

Longer reads

• Matthew Ball on the state of gaming: A 12,000 word essay on the video game industry in 2023 as we head into 2024. It attempts to answer the apparent conundrum of how games seem to be bigger than ever with a massive year of releases (Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, Diablo IV to just name a few) but also suffering from a record year of layoffs that shows no signs of slowing down in 2024. The piece is long, but for anyone curious about the economics of video games these days, it provides some exhaustive details.
  
  Also, gaming was not immune from the ZIRP valuation phenomenon:

  In July 2021, Splitgate, a sort of Halo-meets-Portal shooter, launched its open beta across PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, amassing 600,000 downloads on consoles within a week and 13 million over two months. The initial success of the title landed 1047 Games a $100MM investment at a $1.5 billion valuation in September, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. A year later, 1047 announced it was ending development of Splitgate (with the title remaining online) to instead build an “entirely new shooter” — an effort that is likely to take years.

• Hark, the Millennial Death Wail (NYT): Um, I’m not really sure what to make of this one. I guess millenials are getting older, “as is the way of all life” the article declares, and they’re upset about it. Related / if you want to feel old:

  What Gen Z Got for Christmas in 2023