Destructoid Checkpoint: It's Big Business, as usual

It’s a joyous week, this week. I would say a glorious week, were I prone to accurate summation of what kind of week it was. The long, dreary January is no more, and glorious February is unfurling itself ahead of us, like a red carpet of blissful opportunity and potential. 

Let’s dive into the news, which surely must be all good this week, right?

Right?

The Steam Machine Dream fades

Early last December, I told you all that it was a rough time for Valve to launch the Steam Machine, and it turns out I was bang-on. I figured that the supply issues around memory and GPUs would impact them negatively, as Valve, for all their success, simply cannot outbox the AI companies when it comes to hoovering up components. Now, this doesn’t make me NAND Nostrodamus, but you will see in a story later that it does put me LEAGUES ahead of the average stock market analyst.

Valve recently announced that they would delay confirming the price pointand release dates for the Steam Machine. Itstill hopes to ship the new hardware products in the first half of the year, but the volatility of the component market means that committing to prices right now would literally be the dumbest thing anyone at Valve has ever done. (The wording of that last part is mine.)

Clearly, thosewho were hopeful that Valve would launch something to shake up the console market with a genuinely competitive offering are currently crying into their Gabe Newell body pillows. 

It sucks, but it is a good reminder that you don’t hate AI bros enough, and I can only hope that any potential investments in their companies turn out to be smoke and mirrors.

NVIDIA rugpulls OpenAI in a hilarious moment for everyone who is not an AI dork

In September last year, Hideo Kojima throwaway character Sam Altman from OpenAI and known leather jacket fetishist Jensen Huang from NVIDIA heavily implied that the companies were on the cusp of a deal that would see Team Green invest $100 billion into the ChatGPT owner.

According to reports, the honeymoon is over, as sources claim that OpenAI is not sold on NVIDIA's new chip, especially when it comes to using machine learning models to generate new data, a process called inference. According to Bloomberg, the companies are currently trying to put the finishing touches on a $20 billion deal instead. 

The AI market is currently seeing some tribulation because, well, nobody is actually making any money yet. The hardware costs are insane, and there is no killer app that people are willing to pay for. Investors might be turning around on the idea that AI is in a place where it can produce money on demand, and I am frankly of the opinion that we are about six months away from the world realizing that most of the promises made about AI are really just NFTs for billionaires, that is, a complete waste of cash. 

We can live in hope.

That’s not a stock market crash: How analyst overreaction cost rich idiots millions

Last week, Google unveiled Project Genie, an AI that they claim allows you to generate any kind of interactive world you wish by simply typing a sentence into a prompt box. The AI will then generate a ripoff of Dark Souls, Mario, or any other game that your complete lack of imagination desires.

It was touted as a major next step in interactive media, despite generating ugly worlds with essentially zero aim or interactivity that did nothing more than allow your trademark-infringing player character to move through the syrupy reality it rendered with all the urgency of an octogenarian heading for the nearest Bingo hall. 

The market reaction to this was absolutely hilarious, as the people who spend investor money once again showed off how little they understand what gaming actually is. Share prices were stomped across the board, but the real shocker is in exactly what people were willing to sell. 

The ugliest AI-generated slop ever to ooze out of a prompt box inspired people to part with Take-Two stock the same year the company will release what is likely to become the highest-grossing game of the next decade. Unity’s stock plummeted 30% because nobody needs silly things like engines now. CD Projekt RED will be following up on their two most successful games ever with new installments in two top-tier franchises, so of course, it was time to sell that stock, too.

If we are lucky, we will always have brokers and analysts, their central nervous systems absolutely shredded by stress, providing us with solid laughs as they make their terrible choices.

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Hadley Vincent has a friendslop problem - “I’ve had it. YAPYAP has pushed me over the edge. Friendslop is running rampant in the indie horror sphere, spreading with no sign of stopping.”

Scott Duwe is stuck in a loop - “Happy Groundhog Day, everybody! It’s the most menial, silly, and uneventful “holiday” of the year in the United States, but I love it. For those outside of the states (or those unaware), every year on Feb. 2, the people of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, gather around to pull a groundhog out of his temporary home called Gobbler’s Knob.”

Andrej Barovic thinks things could have been very different for Highguard - “It’s common knowledge by now that Highguard was shot in the foot with that The Game Awards trailer. Saved for the final slot, the one everyone watching would have been waiting for, Highguard was presented in the worst possible way: yet another generic hero shooter that you should force yourself to be excited for. Though Keighley introduced the game with remarks about its devs’ past experience making Titanfall, that wasn’t enough to keep a very bad taste from staying in everyone’s mouth.”

And that is it for this week!