I think there's only really two real sets of artwork - the EGA and VGA releases. Some (EGA running on CGA or Hercules, VGA running on EGA) dither down the artwork rather than there being extra artwork for there, and the other versions are largely derived from whichever of EGA and VGA was a better fit for the target platform. Still a meaningful amount of work (especially reducing the 256 colour VGA art to 32 colours for the Amiga port), but it's the kind of thing that happened in games porting in that era.
Earlier this year I studied a few of the Amiga portraits and yes, they reduced VGA to fit in 5 bitplanes (32 colors), but they actually don't even use all of the colors. I found them to be around 20-25, keeping _more than a few_ aside for, say, the GUI.
Except in close-up chat mode, from memory all you get is text and a background color for the text, and not much cursor or anything else. So I'm still wondering why they didn't allow themselves a couple more color indices, which can go a long way even without dithering and anti-aliasing (which there isn't too much of in the VGA portraits). Maybe it ended up compressing a bit better.
Wow. I’ve just entered the embroidery world myself. And yeah, Embrillance… it’s so clunky and poorly designed. The way they have broken the software into tiny pieces and charge hundreds for each piece. But it has this massive fanbase.
I did briefly look at what it would take to build a competitor, but it was a bit daunting. Kudos to you for giving it a go.
I do think AI will be a wreaking ball for the entire software industry.
There are rumours that Microsoft is internally demanding 30% margin from Xbox, and the gaming industry simply doesn't operate with those types of margins long term and it's not even in a position to dictate industry pricing.
It's like the entire company is only satisfied with being #1.
The whole thing is very confused and lacks consistency. The latest rumours are they are going to break up its Game Pass subscription offering so there are different subscriptions for multiplayer, cloud, games, etc. Isn't that the opposite of an effective subscription strategy?
GPUs that were planned for cloud streaming are much more valuable now. It (unfortunately) makes sense for the only real cloud streaming player to significantly revisit pricing.
Success in business is all about short-term thinking. If they destroy the Xbox brand today they can still pick it back up next year. Who else will you go with - Sony?
This type of internal financial management is a sign that the people running Microsoft aren’t interested in how any of the divisions actually work or making strategic decisions about their portfolio. They’re accountants pushing the difficult decisions down
And the actual margins are about 3%. No one in gaming makes the sorts of margins that Satya is demanding Xbox makes. It's pretty clear to see where this goes. I'm also not sure that the unionization pushes in their studios isn't the real story.
You’re confusing 2 different things. Microsoft isn’t demanding a “cut,” it’s demanding its business units achieve a 30% profit margin on its investment. I think industry standard is closer to 10% once you factor in games that don’t make a return on their investment.
Valve isn’t trying to make a bunch of games with AND pay for/off all the studios they bought, all while trying to advertise and compete with Sony and Nintendo in hardware.
Steam just sits back and takes money, for the most part. The hardware/software/advertising spend is probably a drop in the bucket compared to MS.
I initially misunderstood OP. However the more I think about it, the more it seems similar though. If Steam is charging game developers a 30-20% cut, that must mean those game developers margins are higher than 30-20% or there will be no point selling on Steam. It seems that Xbox would be expecting their Studios to operate at the same efficiency as others in the market then, no?
If you're talking about the margins of a video game sale, the gross margins on that are like 99.9% in absolute terms.
You don't seem to understand the difference between the margins on a sale and the averaged margins once the studio development costs are included.
If the store takes 30% you are still left with 70% gross margins but if you have development costs, you maybe only have enough sales to break even or just barely be profitable. A 30% margin on the entire studio means the studio must produce guaranteed successes consistently.
It might also not be obvious but if Microsoft imposed 30% margins, those are a floor, whereas a fee reduces the ceiling. They are not the same even if we assume the target is met.
No, they’re not even remotely the same. The retailer keeps 30% of the retail price and, out of that, they pay for the upkeep of the store. It’s not 30% pure profit, it’s not even gross profit given they need to pay the card processing fees out of that 30%.
I’m not following how that is a response to what I said. I’m not talking about Valve’s profits. I’m talking about the profit of the game developers selling their games on Steam.
I think I understand why Microsoft costs are higher than others due to their a spending spree, so the break even is much higher.
You said “they’re similar” and I’m refuting that by pointing out that they operate very differently. One is a retailer and one is a developer/publisher. Their operating models are different, so you can’t point at two percentages and say “they’re similar” in any way.
I love Steam but this is just backwards. If it was about recouping fixed costs the threshold would be 10k not 10M with the rate dropping down to 15 or 20% after that.
Game revenues follow a power law type distribution so they're hurting indies and leaving money on the table.
Valve targeted the big releases / industry players specifically because the context in which Valve added that was where all the big players were making their own store fronts: EA Original/App Ubisoft launcher, Blizzard Battle.net. And Epic Game Store, where Ubisoft (or another big player I forget) was talking about abandoning their launcher for Epic which has a lower revenue cut like ~12%. So it seemed Valve made that change to shore up keeping the big industry players releasing on Steam.
I'm not expecting the people who take the vibecode shortcut to have the discipline and commitment and talent to steward their projects in the manner of the successful ones I've come to trust in the past.
Yeah, I would and do, but many people like shiny and just jump around for some reason. And the ones that have a reason and make products popular overnight, have as reason that they need likes and upvotes as they are influencers.
People who have jobs, lives, other stuff to do in other words, keep sending me 'the latest new bla' many times per day, every day. All products that will be gone tomorrow.
I mean, AI made my own canva because my wife uses it and hates their support, bizarre amounts of long standing critical showstopper bugs and attitude to long standing members. So I hope they do get vibecoded to death, however, I would not release such a project until after a year of testing and fixing, which is where our version is about. Canva in the basis, like Miro etc is a one shot with Opus 5.5: it works fine-ish. But you will need months of grind to get it so people will want to use it.
Edit: in the vibecode age, 2000 commits would be the minimum to consider a project maintained. And then I do have a script to analyse the 'effort' of an average commit because some people fake commits with crap to inflate the number.
There’s a lot. You can surprisingly run a competent web application with a React client, Go backend, and SQLite DB. Go in particular is very efficient on small compute instances.
It’s definitely a way to get a competitive advantage over others that rely on more traditional architecture.
They have to expand capacity, Chinese company CXMT is scaling fast; Micron and SK need to protect their market share even if they risk trading at a loss in 2028.
If people read nothing else, they need to read this. Now that they have EUV etc CXMT and others in China will scale much much faster. They always had the EE’s and hardware people. I’m excited to see what happens.
Or they’ll just take the easy money and join the price fixing cartel
Or they’ll run the others out of business by doing a Walmart and then just jack up prices.
I think what was meant is that Amiga’s market share was predominantly in the home computer space. And its software catalog consisted primarily of video games rather than productivity software. In that sense it was low end.
It was wedged between game consoles and PC’s, and it eventually couldn’t compete against neither.
There was the Video Toaster, but that was a small business at the time compared to desktop publishing. And unlike Apple's immensely profitable LaserWriter, the Toaster was a 3rd party product.
They couldn't compete because the company was horrible run. They basically relied on chips designs from the early 1980s until 1992. They did almost nothing to improve the product line while their CEO earn a huge amount. They fired the only decent CEO they had.
Had the taken some money in hand and all-in-one Amiga 500 SoC that had some sales potential left, and combined that with a next generation chip set that could run the modern games of the early 90s I think you would have had a great product.
And Windows wasn't really actually good at all the games media stuff for a long time. I think the home market for that stuff was possible if somebody grabbed it along with continuing some higher level unix, video, audio workstations.
And many people who had one liked it and grew up with it. There was a market there. Many switched to PC simply because the product was no longer competitive. Many had grown up with the Amiga 500 and were ready for an upgrade.
If you look at what Acorn achieved with even fewer resources and a much worse market position. Imagine and ARM chip with modern chipset but Amiga 500 compatible. Maybe along with non-backwards compatible console version like the CD32.
Would it have been a hyper-growth company, I don't really think so, but survive for the rest of the 90s was possible.
Millions of households have plug-in solar. The payoff is something like 1.5-5 years. Of course, this should be tens or hundreds of millions, but this isn’t vaporware
It's already been a thing for a long time. People in the UK are talking about it more because it's about to be legalized(up to 800W) by the end of August.
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