Tech News: Microsoft Shuts Down Multiple Video Game Studios

plans for the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset. So if you'll recall this, analyst said that Apple initially planned to produce seven hundred and fifty thousand to eight hundred thousand units, but subsequently cut back to around four hundred and fifty thousand units in the wake of less demand

than anticipated. But other analysts have argued that Apple's play and from the get go, was to ship around half a million units this year, so that four hundred and fifty thousand number isn't really that far off from that estimate. So I guess this is what I get for talking about analysts who make their living scrutinizing a company that's famously very quiet. It only communicates stuff when it darn well feels like it. So either the Vision Pro isn't selling as quickly as Apple once or it's on the

right track. I don't know the right answer. And we have a couple of other Apple stories for this week,

so we might as well stick with Apple. So Apple held an event at which it unveiled a new iPad pro model this week, which the company says is the thinnest one yet also fun side note, Apple also subsequently apologized for an ad that talks about it being the thinnest iPad pro because the ad showed an enormous hydraulic press crushing stuff like musical instruments and stereo equipment and paint containers and more, and that really upsets some artists

who traditionally have been among the most enthusiastic customers of the iPad, and so Apple said, whoops, sorry about that. Anyway. The iPad pro comes in thirteen and eleven inch sizes. It's got an M four processor and an ultra retina XDR display. It's supposed to be real pretty. Apple says it is quote an outrageously powerful device for artificial intelligence end quote. So you know, buzzwords of the day it

is available starting May fifteenth. You can pre order it now, and the base model for the eleven inch version that's Wi Fi only starts at nine hundred and ninety nine dollars, and obviously the price goes up from there depending upon the size and the features you want, how how much storage you want in it, et cetera. Also, if you want the new Apple Pencil Pro to go with it, that'll set you back an extra one hundred and twenty

nine bucks, So yay. Speaking of Apple and AI, the Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has a new project code named ACDC, which is not a reference to the Australian rock band. Instead, ACDC stands for Apple Chips in Data Center and that part of this project involves Apple developing its own chips for data centers that are running

AI applications. So, according to The Wall Street Journal, Apple's plan is to hone in on data centers that run actual AI implementations as opposed to data centers that are used to train AI models. So why is Apple not getting into the training area. That's largely because Nvidia has a huge head start as far as developing chips for AI training purposes, and Apple would rather aim for a different spot on the AI food chain. Whether Apple's ACDC plan will shake me all night long remains to be seen.

Microsoft's top brass made some big and somewhat controversial decisions this week. One of those decisions affects executive compensation and it links it to cybersecurity. So essentially the new Secure Future Initiative or SFI, which is a kind of an umbrella plan at Microsoft, the new version is tying security milestones to part of executives pay. Now which part of executives pay, I don't know how much of executives pay will be tied to this, I don't know, but the

message is pretty clear. Microsoft wants to reverse the trend of recent security intrusions, which is not a surprise for multiple reasons. I mean, among the things that Microsoft does is it hosts services that are used by other companies, and if Microsoft can't demonstrate that it is secure, then it loses all that business. You know, having bad security

is a bad business plan. Plus, the US government, in the form of Homeland Security, has been very very much concerned about Microsoft's failure to detect and stop some high profile hacker attacks. So not a big surprise that Microsoft is telling executives, hey, we need to get on this or else you're not gonna get all your bonuses. But I said, Todd Brass made some big decisions, which is plural, right,

not just tying executive pay to security. So among those big decisions were some pretty sad ones, like closing multiple video game developer studios. Microsoft is one of the few really big companies that have scooped up a bunch of smaller companies in the video game space in recent years, and now some notable studios are getting shut down. Among those are Austin Arcane, which recently produced the vampire shooter

game Redfall. Notably, Redfall got a very lukewarm reception, but from one I understand, the team behind Redfall was put in a pretty impossible situation. It's sounded to me like there were a lot of shifting priorities during development that we're coming from leadership, and when that happens, it's pretty much impossible to deliver upon expectations because the expectations themselves

keep changing. But in addition to Austin Arcane, Microsoft is also shutting down Tango Game Works, which recently produced the acclaimed game Hi Fi Rush Alpha Dog Games is also on the chopping block. That company makes mobile games, and Zenemax Online Studios is to absorb another company called Roundhouse Studios, which will be no more. The closures are going to affect previous promises that were you know about unreleased content

for titles like Redfall. So if gamers actually shelled out money for stuff that was supposed to include DLC, that's you know, supposed to be coming down the pipeline. Well, now that DLC is gone, it's been scrapped. But Microsoft says it will make good on those various deals. No word yet on how many staff are going to be laid off. Some people are going to be show to new teams, but other people will be let go. And it's a really tough time in the video game industry

in particular, but tech in general right now. And just as a matter of contrast, I feel I should also point out Microsoft currently has a market capitalization of more than three trillion dollars. It is a three trillion dollar company, you know, I think that's something that should be kept in mind as we hear about how many people are getting laid off from this three trillion dollar company. Also,

the day after the announcement talk about tone death. The head of Xbox Game Studio said in a town hall call that quote, we need smaller games that give us prestige and awards end quote. But literally that was Hi Fi Rush. High Fi Rush was a smaller game. It was released in a surprise release. No one had even heard about the darn thing when it came out, and it actually won some awards, so it meets those criteria.

And the day when this guy says we need games that are going to be small and prestigious was the day after they had shut down a studio that had made a game like that. So yeah, very much mixed messages and very upsetting. All right, up next, we'll talk about some more trouble in big tech. Google reportedly had a bit of a tense all hands meeting this week. The company recently posted an extremely positive earnings report for the company, like they did gangbusters business this past quarter.

But this comes at a time when Google's also been making some pretty drastic cuts across its businesses, including significant layoffs. So employees had left comments wanting to know what the company was going to do to address issues with morale, which is a good question because it sucks to work for a company where you or your coworkers are worried about getting laid off every day while the company itself seems to be flourishing. That kind of disconnect is really upsetting.

Staffers argued that Google has done very well, but in the meantime quote many Googlers have not received meaningful compensation increases into quote. That's according to one staff member who left a comment on this town hall Zoom meeting or call meeting. I guess I don't know if it was

over Zoom probably wasn't with it being Google anyway. Others pointed out that Google was investing billions of dollars in AI and spent like tens of billions of dollars in stock buybacks, and instead maybe Google should have been spending that money on the people who work at the company. It sounds like it was a really uncomfortable meeting, and you know, to their credit, the executives actually had responses

to these. They didn't just sit there silently waiting for the clock to run out so that they could leave the meeting. They actually did say, you know, and tried to express what the strategy was. But I think it was such a hard time at Google that those answers probably weren't met with a lot of satisfaction. But here's hoping that everything gets sorted out fairly. Okay, we've got a lot more news to talk about, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. So we're back.

So over at Tesla, we saw even more job cuts this week. That's been going on for a while now. According to the Register, this latest round of cutbacks impacted engineers and developers. This appears to be part of the larger move for Tesla to downsize by around fourteen thousand jobs total compared to where it started out the year. The company also appears to have put a hiring freeze

in place, at least in North America. So according to Gizmoto, Tesla went from having three four hundred job listings across North America down to just three job postings across the entire continent, which is a big old wolf. And then Tesla's head of product a guy named rich Otto, which to me is hilarious. His name is rich Auto and he worked for Tesla anyway, He's left. He has resigned and said he is donezo with Tesla. He had worked there for nearly seven years. Actually came from Faraday Future,

another electric vehicle startup. That one went belly up, but Auto did not mince words about his decision for leaving. He posted on LinkedIn that the moves that Tesla had absolutely disrupted employee morale and made it hard to create a long term vision for the company, and he couldn't really work there anymore, so said it was time for a change and he resigned. Video games are going to be popping up throughout this episode. We're back to it

right now. We had talked previously about Microsoft shutting down some studios. This one's going to be a quick one. Nintendo has announced that it is pulling x slash Twitter integration from Switch platforms. So previously Switch owners could post images from gaming sessions to their connected x formerly known as Twitter accounts, but Nintendo is following the lead of Sony and Microsoft, which have already ended similar support for

such integrations. Nintendo did not explain why it made this decision, but the educated guess is that it's tied to x slash Twitter hiking up the price of its API policies, which means that if you build an app that taps into x now you have to pay a pretty substantial amount of money depending on how frequently your app does that. So my guess is Nintendo said, we're not seeing benefit from this particular feature, let's just cut it because it's costing us money. Rumor has it that open ai will

announce an AI powered search product next week. Reuter's reports that the plan is to unveil the search offering on Monday, although this is not set in stone. We've been hearing some scuttle butt that open ai has an AI backed search engine in the works for a while now, and it seems like this is pretty much a direct shot at Google's dominance in the space. This also explains why Google has invested billions in AI research and development, because the company is terrified that AI is going to drink

its milkshake. If open ai does announce something on Monday, then really it is a big slap in the face of Google because Google is launching its annual Io Developer conference on Tuesday, and undoubtedly that conference is going to include a lot of talk about AI. So yeah, shots fired. Some users over at stack overflow, which serves as a question and answer site for software developers, are really getting ready to do some digital vandalism. In fact, some folks

have been doing it already. Now the reason they're unhappy has to do with open Ai. Stack Overflow recently announced a partnership with open ai, and some users are really steamed about this. So, to begin with, stack overflow was upset at open ai because of the assumption that open ai was scraping stack overflow for information to train up

AI models. But then this actual official partnership forms, and now some of the folks who have been providing answers in stack overflow are really upset because they don't want their knowledge to be used as training data for AI. And they were never consulted or asked about this, you know, in advance. It just happened. Now some of them have already started to go into their old answers and attempt

to delete or deface them to foil AI training. But that doesn't really seem to have helped much because according to Ours Technica, stack overflow employees have been suspending users who are doing this. So if you have provided an answer and you've gone in and changed it, you could get suspended for a given amount of time, like a week, and they also revert your changes back to what they were before, so all that effort goes to nothing anyway.

But it does sound like users are expressing themselves and making it known to stack overflow that they are not happy with this particular arrangement, and I'll be curious to see if stack overflow does anything to try and smooth this all out, or if they just try and take a weight and hope that it goes away approach. TikTok announced this week that it will be including a digital watermark on content posted to the platform that was generated

by AI. The company also said it would remove realistic AI content that is not labeled as AI, and this is all in an effort to curtail attempts to use AI to spread misinformation. The digital watermark doesn't just magically detect AI though, It's not like it has some killer ability to know when something was AI generated. This is actually an industry standard that some but not all, generative

AI tool makers will incorporate in their tools. So if you were to use their tool to create something, there'd be this digital watermark there, and that would be what TikTok would detect and then apply its AI generated watermark on top of whatever was being posted to TikTok. But if the tool may doesn't incorporate the standard, well then TikTok doesn't know magically that it was AI generated. So it's not a perfect cure. It just works with the companies that are all agreeing to play by this set

of rules. Streaming services continue to try and reinvent cable TV. This week, Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery revealed that US customers will be able to purchase bundled services this summer that include Hulu, Disney Plus, and Max for an unannounced amount of money. Like they don't say how much the subscription is. Users will have a choice between ads supported and ad free tiers of service. Hulu already has options to add on access to Max as well as to

Paramount Plus. So yeah, we're edging closer to having bundles of streaming services resemble what used to be cable television offerings, or actually what still is cable tv. It's just that cable tv is really starting to kind of die off. But then everyone has been struggling to find a way to make streaming a profitable business, so this isn't that surprising.

And now for some more video game news, Roadblocks announced it was cutting back its annual bookings forecasts, so essentially, this is an estimate of how much revenue the company expects to earn in the upcoming quarters, and Roadblocks said it estimated a lower amount than was previously you know, estimated, And obviously that got investors in a tizzy because numbers supposed to go up. No, like when number not go up, grow grow grow. Sorry, the older I get, the grouchier

I am about late stage capitalism anyway. In other video game financial news, EA confirmed that the company is looking at introducing ads in Triple A video games in the future. Advertisements in games is not a new thing. There's been everything from brand integrations to full on commercials to those annoying little ads that pop up in mobile games, and so they've been part of the industry for a while.

But you don't typically see very many of those pop up in a seventy dollars triple A title because you know, customers get grouchy if they've spent seventy bucks on something and then they have to watch ads in it. EA CEO stressed that any ad integrations would be quote very thoughtful end quote, which is good to hear from a company that was voted as the worst in America two years in a row and happier video game news. Nintendo confirmed that the successor to the Switch is coming and

that the company will announce it this fiscal year. However, Nintendo's fiscal year starts in April, so that means it may not be until the end of March next year that we hear anything. But it is coming. It just is not going to be part of Nintendo Direct in June. That is not going to be when the company announces it. They've already confirmed there will be no information about it at that event. However, you know, the Switch is seven years old, it's not really a surprise that the company

is prepping a follow up. One last story for this week. It was supposed to be a test launch for the Boeing Starliner spacecraft with an actual crew abord it this week, but engineers detected a malfunction in a pressure regulation valve on a liquid oxygen tank aboard the Atlas five launch

vehicle that ended up necessitating scrubbing the mission. It was another frustrating setback for Boeing, which is obviously dealing with some really serious problems unrelated to the star Liner at the moment, so the earliest date for another attempt is May seventeenth, at six sixteen pm if everything is ready to go by then. At that point, the star Liner will be lifted by rocket up into orbit and then head off to the International Space Station. So we'll have

to see if that actually happens next week. All right, that's it for this week's tech News. I hope you're all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.