Xbox Community Thread

[Para]

laut kotick kam der abk x ms deal in erster linie zustande, da beide konzerne die social media plattform tiktok damals nicht kaufen konnten.

"Trump administration 1, they banned TikTok," Kotick said. "Microsoft was the only bidder.

"I know the founder of ByteDance [Zhang Yiming] pretty well, he's a great guy... So I called Yiming and I said 'would you rather have Microsoft or rather have me?' He said 'I'd probably rather have you'."

Seemingly aware that even his pockets weren't big enough to outbid Microsoft, Kotick claims he floated an alternative option - that he and the Xbox owner share ownership of TikTok.

"I said it may be tough to pull it all together and I don't know that I have all the resources to do what will need to be done," Kotick continued. "Like, we don't have top secret security clearances with the government, I don't know what the National Security issues are going to be."

According to Kotick, Yiming said he should discuss the matter with Microsoft boss Satya Nadella. And it was during that next phone call that the idea of Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard was floated.

"So I called Satya and I said 'I don't want to bid against you, it would be great if we were partners in this, I think we're more of a consumer company than you are and I think I know a little bit more about social media than you do. We should do this together'," Kotick said.

"[Nadella] said 'look, we're further ahead than you, I don't even know if this deal is going to get done, I don't need a partner in this one'. And [then] he said, 'but if the deal doesn't get done, we should sit down and talk about us buying Activision."

And the rest is history: Microsoft did not buy TikTok at the time, but did eventually buy Activision Blizzard, after a lengthy anti-competition process.

 

[America`s Most Wanted]

In Textform:

XboxEra Interviews Phil Spencer

Phil Spencer sat down with the XboxEra Podcast crew to catch up with us and celebrate our 250th Episode. Here's a lengthy written version (edited for brevity) along with a standalone video for you to enjoy. #Xbox

xboxera.com

 

[Bautinho]

Und gibt's was neues zu ps5 Spielen daraus?

 

[America`s Most Wanted]

Sowas halt:

On Seeing The PlayStation Logo during an Xbox show…

I think it’s just being honest and transparent about where the games are showing, and we actually even had this discussion last year for the June showcase, and by the time we kind of made our decision, we couldn’t get all of the assets done and it felt weird to have some of them in and some of them out.

But I just want to be transparent with people – for shipping on Nintendo Switch, we’re gonna put that. For shipping on PlayStation, on Steam…People should know the storefronts where they can get our games, but I want people to be able to experience our Xbox community in our games and everything we have to offer, on every screen we can.

And obviously not every screen is equal. Yeah, like there’s certain things we can’t do on the other closed platforms that we can do on open platforms, cloud – it’s different. But games should be the thing that we’re focused on. And the strategy that we have allows us to do big games, while also supporting our native platform from hardware to the platform and services that we have and that’s going to be our approach.

And I know it’s not what everybody else is doing, but I just believe games should be the thing that’s at the forefront. Maybe it’s because of how I’ve grown up in this industry. I came from building games. But I think the games are the things that I see growing in their strength in what we’re doing and it’s because more people can play. So yeah, I’m just trying to be open and transparent with people.

I’m not trying to move them all over to Xbox anymore. People were all so invested in where our games are. Let’s just allow more people to play and yes, the 70% that we make on games on other platforms is helpful to us being able to build great portfolios like we showed at the Dev Direct and I hope this will continue to show through the rest of the year.

Und noch viel mehr davon. Ansich ist es wie so ziehmlich jedes Interview mit Spencer seit langem, for better or worse.

 

[Para]

Today, the journal Nature is publishing our latest research, which introduces the first World and Human Action Model (WHAM). The WHAM, which we’ve named “Muse,” is a generative AI model of a video game that can generate game visuals, controller actions, or both.

In our research, we focus on exploring the capabilities that models like Muse need to effectively support human creatives by demonstrating how to develop research insights to support creative uses of generative AI models.

 

[Cycrow]

Based on Bleeding Edge

In partnership with Xbox Game Studios’ Ninja Theory, Microsoft Research developed a world and human action model (WHAM) named Muse: a first of its kind generative AI model trained on Ninja Theory’s multiplayer battle arena game, Bleeding Edge. Ninja Theory and Microsoft Research are both based in Cambridge, which made collaboration easy and led to the use of Bleeding Edge for this research.

Xbox Wire Blog