Microsoft Games General Thread

[Dr. Zoidberg]

There are rumours that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and Halo: The Master Chief Collection will be coming out on Switch 2 and PS5 in 2025.

[ian]

I was looking at a friends PlayStation store the other day and I saw sea of thieves...

It was as disgusting as the first time I saw a Rare game on a Microsoft console.
Or as disgusting as the first time I saw a Sega (or god forbid Sonic) game on a Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo console.

After the initial shock of something that simply should not be wears off, it makes total sense, and I can see why they'd want Halo on as many platforms as possible.

[melancholy]

I feel like Microsoft’s ‘This is an Xbox’ promotion is a sign of things to come. I think there’s a real possibility this might be the last Xbox we see, instead just making their games be Game Pass exclusives and having them playable on as many devices as possible.

[Skynet]

While I agree with Mel, I hope he's wrong. Playstation just isn't my console. Switch isn't either, but I play my Switch more than my PS5. If I'm not gaming on my PC it's usually my Xbox, then sometimes the Switch.

[ian]

It will leave space in the market for Sega!

Overall I usually prefer xboxeses to PlayStations too, but considering Microsoft owns 95% of the developers in the world, they've sure had fuck all games for a long time now... And they few they do actually have, they're putting everywhere else.

[pixel]

Nvidia (Intel and AMD to a lesser extent) calls all the hardware shots now. It seems counterproductive for Sony, MS to be the brokers for hardware specifcations anymore. Outfits like ROG, Acer and Lenovo seem happy to make handhelds now. Why not consoles too?

Microsoft will be first to leave the hardware business. Or at the very least, they'll be happy to license the Xbox trademark to anyone who will pay. Sony will probably follow some time after, but they're a consumer electronics company first. I don't think Nintendo is willing to divest hardware from software development and publishing.

[Hawq]

[Hawq]

[Hawq]

[pixel]

Today, the journal Nature(opens in new tab) 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.

The paper in Nature offers a detailed look at Muse, which was developed by the Microsoft Research Game Intelligence(opens in new tab) and Teachable AI Experiences(opens in new tab) (Tai X) teams in collaboration with Xbox Games Studios’ Ninja Theory(opens in new tab). Simultaneously, to help other researchers explore these models and build on our work, we are open sourcing the weights and sample data and making the executable available for the WHAM Demonstrator—a concept prototype that provides a visual interface for interacting with WHAM models and multiple ways of prompting the models. Developers can learn and experiment with the weights, sample data, and WHAM Demonstrator on Azure AI Foundry(opens in new tab).

In our research, we focus on exploring the capabilities that models like Muse need to effectively support human creatives. I’m incredibly proud of our teams and the milestone we have achieved, not only by showing the rich structure of the game world that a model like Muse can learn, as you see in the video demo below, but also, and even more importantly, by demonstrating how to develop research insights to support creative uses of generative AI models.

What motivated this research?
As we release our research insights and model today, I keep thinking back to how this all started. There was a key moment back in December 2022 that I remember clearly. I had recently returned from maternity leave, and while I was away the machine learning world had changed in fundamental ways. ChatGPT had been publicly released, and those who had tried it were in awe of OpenAI’s technical achievements and the model’s capabilities. It was a powerful demonstration of what transformer-based generative models could do when trained on large amounts of (text) data. Coming back from leave at that moment, the key question on my mind was, “What are the implications of this achievement for our team’s work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and video games?”

A new research opportunity enabled by data
In our team, we had access to a very different source of data. For years, we had collaborated with Xbox Game Studios’ Ninja Theory (based in Cambridge, UK, just like our research team) to collect gameplay data from Bleeding Edge, their 2020 Xbox game. Bleeding Edge is a 4-versus-4 game where all games are played online, and matches are recorded if the player agrees to the End User License Agreement (EULA). We worked closely with our colleagues at Ninja Theory and with Microsoft compliance teams to ensure that the data was collected ethically and used responsibly for research purposes.

“It’s been amazing to see the variety of ways Microsoft Research has used the Bleeding Edge environment and data to explore novel techniques in a rapidly moving AI industry,” said Gavin Costello, technical director at Ninja Theory. “From the hackathon that started it all, where we first integrated AI into Bleeding Edge, to building AI agents that could behave more like human players, to the World and Human Action Model being able to dream up entirely new sequences of Bleeding Edge gameplay under human guidance, it’s been eye-opening to see the potential this type of technology has.”

Until that point in late 2022, we had used Bleeding Edge as a platform for human-like navigation experiments, but we had not yet made meaningful use of the large amount of human player data we now had available. With the powerful demonstration of text-models, the next question was clear: “What could we achieve if we trained a transformer-based model on large amounts of human gameplay data?”

[...]

[melancholy]

More proof that Xbox days are numbered. Imagine, having software licensed to companies that can make their old catalog playable on any device with modern features AND without any dev team involved. It’s practically prints money, and Microsoft will surely put a nice monthly license fee on it. Why even be in the hardware game at that point?

[Hawq]

[Hawq]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2aGX4l2dfc
get it here quicker if you dont wanna go through ty to find the link

[Hawq]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeB-E-4_RPs
0:07 https://imgur.com/i2yYun3

[Hawq]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX9sVCckzWo

[Hawq]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRlW_YAErEs

[Hawq]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTZPTQi42cw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s49i18D-Q4

[Hawq]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JhnigHnXts

[pixel]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsMmmwYhshI

[Hawq]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHuEt0c_92g