Is it just me, or is the gaming industry a bit of a hot mess right now.

So over the last couple of years there have been a number of large and not so large studios that have wound up folding or having large budget games completely bomb, and honestly I'm almost surprised that it's taken this long to happen.

The most recent example of this is Concord, a game developed by a studio owned by Sony that was released and the pulled from market after about two weeks after it's release. 

There's lots of chatter about why this failed, but my personal thought is that the game didn't hit well because there are already many other games just like it floating around that are free to play. Overwatch, Valorant, Apex Legends, Fortnite, all have modes that sound like the same thing that Concord was offering. Without some interesting hook or gameplay mechanic that would make the game unique I'm not shocked to hear that it flopped.

Looking at a bunch of games that were huge in their day many of the sequels are just re-hashes of the same game over and over again. 

If you look at what's been going on this year it's painting a interesting photo;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023%E2%80%932024_video_game_industry_layoffs

It's not just one game being canceled this year, that link has a list of multiple game studios that have been closed, and paints a rough picture of the layoffs that have happened this year. And honestly my thought is there are just too many games that are being positioned as AAA games that are rehashes of the same dammed thing over and over again and I think that people are starting to notice and are getting less and less interested. 

I've been around long enough to remember the video game crash in the early 80's that happened. And I'm feeling that we are looking at something similar. I don't think that we will see the industry completely collapse and burn, but I would not be shocked to see more larger studios collapsing and taking smaller ones with it as they go. And honestly while I can sympathize with the folks caught in this I also think that might not be a bad thing. My hope would be that the process would carve room for some new developers to come up with something that's not a rehash of existing games and stories. 

And here we go...

Ok, if you haven't been keeping up on what's going on with VMWare, you should probably look into that and then read the link below;

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/att-sues-broadcom-for-refusing-to-renew-perpetual-license-support/

It looks like somebody who's big enough to be able to afford the lawyers is taking objection to the new licensing terms that Broadcom is forcing on people. In a lot of cases companies and people just don't have the money to go to court on things like this, so it's going to be interesting to watch this play out. 

I'm thinking that there will b a settlement at some point, so likely a quiet boring outcome, but still interesting to see the shots fired.

Uni-taskers vs. Multitaskers - round 2

So, last round I was singing the praise of the Kindle, a purpose built book reader. Now I'm going to talk about the other side of the coin and another device that I have in my bag. 

Yep, a Leatherman Wave. 

While it's not the best single tool that I own it's one that I continually have on me and make use of more than a lot of the other tools that I have kicking around. And the entire reason for that I just because it's so dammed convenient. 

The tools on the Leatherman aren't the "best" version of a given tool that I own. I have better pliers, knives, screwdrivers, and scissors sitting around but I can't carry all of those in my backpack without having a lot of extra weight to carry around. Nevermind the looks that I would get if I pulled a four inch hunting knife out of my backpack to cut a rope or open a box at work. 

VMWare, Proxmox, and other fun things (if you work in IT).

 So, a while back VMWare was purchased by Broadcom. 

If you work in IT you already know where this is going. If you don't there are a couple of things that you should know. 

VMWare makes a number of products, one that I have worked with quite a bit is called ESXi, it's effectively a platform that lets you run virtual machines so that you can run multiple things of of a single piece of hardware. It's a huge thing if you work in IT or like to pretend that you do. One of the big reasons that it was popular was because VMWare basically let you use ESXi for free and you would have to pay for some of the more advanced features.

While those advanced features were freaking cool you could still get a lot done with the free version of the platform, with a little more running around and manually poking at things. 

When Broadcom bought VMWare a lot of people started to worry about what Broadcom was planning since they have a bit of a reputation as to how they handle companies they purchase. Sure enough earlier this year they killed off the free version of ESXi and then started putting the screws to people who are using their software with price increases.

Strangely enough they have released VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion, the desktop versions of their hypervisor, as free for personal use. 

Regardless seeing the writing on the wall I was already looking into other options for running virtual machines and in the end Proxmox became the platform that I decided to put into production in places where I needed something. And when the time came to put other projects underway VMWare was basically ignored as a potential platform just because of the pricing and uncertainty regarding what was going to happen.

I'm very glad that the FOSS options managed to get caught up to VMWare - at least as far as I needed it to get for my workloads.