Hearted Youtube comments on Upper Echelon (@UpperEchelon) channel.
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@UpperEchelonGamers
You, sort of, ask "why" would Bethesda do all of these actions given the negative reaction each brings. Others in the comment section speculate that Bethesda simply needs cash and they need it now. It can't be to please shareholders, which others have speculated, as Bethesda/Zenimax are private companies that are not publicly traded, thus, there are no shareholders to please.
Fallout 4 released in 2015 and was a billion dollar game for Bethesda. Since Fallout 4's release, Bethesda published; Wolfenstein II and Prey. We know that Starfield is in development along with more Wolfenstein games. We also know that sales for both Wolfenstein II and Prey were average. This means that there are or have been a total of five games developed or under development by Bethesda, at least, since Fallout 4. Depending on the budget allotted for these games, it very well could be that Bethesda is trying to bolster its operating capital using Fallout 76. I think that it is only part of the answer, however.
The entire concept of "games as a service" is that there is a steady stream of revenue for little actual work. This fits perfectly with what we've seen regarding Fallout 76; flipped assets from Skyrim and Fallout 4, overpriced cash shop, lootboxes with a pay-to-win aspect, on top of the initial sales for the game itself. Instead of following the cycle of development/release, I think Bethesda decided to bolster their revenue stream with their own "game as a service" title. But, Bethesda only had one IP that they could put forth for it (Fallout) as Zenimax already runs Elder Scrolls Online, so, we saw Fallout 76. The thought of a steady stream of revenue using Fallout looked to be very lucrative on paper.
Fallout 4 sold 12 million copies on day 1 generating over $750 million dollars. Online multi-player pvp games, like Call of Duty, generate as much if not more given cash shops and pay-to-win lootboxes. The trending genre over the past few years have been survival games. Put all that together and you see Fallout 76, or at least, the core concept of Fallout 76 when they did the reveal. I'm sure Todd Howard saw a billion in initial sales alone from the Fallout fans with hundreds of millions in steady revenue each year from the pvp/survival crowd they hoped to attract. What they didn't count on was the 75% loss in initial sales from Fallout fans that refused to buy the game. So they are left with a game that garnered a fraction in sales of Fallout 4 and didn't attract as many pvp/survival players as they hoped. How Bethesda got themselves into this mess is easy to see when we look at it from this angle.
They counted on Fallout 76's initial sales numbers being near Fallout 4 numbers. They knew they would lose some Fallout fans being that Fallout 76 was going to be pvp survival, but, they figured those sales numbers would be bolstered by those new pvp/survival fan sales. After the reveal, Bethesda saw the pre-order numbers and this is when they freaked out. They had to make a decision; they could go forward as is, losing 75% of sales numbers, or, they could reverse course as best they could and try to get some of that 75% back. They chose the latter. Pvp was nuked, but, they still had the problem that the core game, itself, was geared around pvp/survival with no real story or quests to speak of for the Fallout fans. Thus, this decision to try and get back that 75% of Fallout fans started the snowball of bad decisions by Bethesda we see today. There is no doubt that they will have to do as Zenimax had to do with ESO; that is, they will have to take a year and revamp the entire core game of Fallout 76 in an effort to boost player count. The problem? They will never recover that 75% of fans they lost and Starfield is going to go under a microscope.
Todd Howard has screwed Bethesda for years to come. The only game Bethesda has on the horizon that is guaranteed to sell a huge number of copies is TES:VI. Fans of the Elder Scrolls are going to buy that game regardless of its state at launch. It could be worse than Fallout 76. Fans will still buy it knowing the modders will fix many of the bugs, make it playable, and add mods to it. But, TES:VI is at least six years out if not eight years out. Every other title Bethesda releases in the meantime is going to go under a microscope and, I'm going to bet, have lackluster sales.
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So I, personally, disagree with the current version of generative AI being the worst it is going to be. The issue that comes into play is that the rate at which humans can produce content is greatly outmatched by the rate at which AI can produce content. This makes it almost an inevitability that AI content is going to bloat the web as a whole, and eventually, a separate inflection point will occur where there is more AI content than human made content. At face value, this is bad news. But on the contrary, when it's bloated to that point, it begins training on its own products. It receives positive signals that its mistakes are correct as there is more training data that is based on its mistakes, essentially inbreeding these errors until it once again decays in quality. This has already been reported in the neural network Midjourney, which is primarily used for dark fantasy/dark surrealism (which was one of my favorite genres of art, so I have a vendetta against it, I'll attest to) as the genres of art were flooded with its works, replacing most human content there. Once you have an eye for it, you can tell when something is a work of midjourney vs a real human producing it. Styles get stale, seeing only one all the time makes it annoying, which means it has to improve and adapt, or else it gets stale. There is no freezing the weights and expecting the same usage forever, you can't escape needing to continue to train. The same will be the case with deep fakes, it will be an arms race of AI detection vs adaptive AI. This means it will, inevitably, have to continue to train, which means it will train on its own products, which means it will decay in quality. AI, as it exists now, and on the current path of its advancement, will eat its own tail until it devolves. You'll still have the less mentally prepared people falling for it, but it will not get to the point where nobody can tell the difference. There will always be some tool or some people who can detect it. It's incredibly valuable for everyone to train their discernment skills, though, regardless, so I deeply appreciate your work, despite my own rambling.
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2:26 quick correction: you can delete your mods and you will be able to after the collections system has been implemented. If you read the fine print, nexus basically doesn’t want people arbitrarily deleting their mods since it would ruin the collections feature.
The feature to delete mods will return in the form of a new file management system that will allow authors even more control over their files.
If you want to delete your mods after this goes into effect, you need to contact a nexus moderator and ask.
To quote nexus mods themselves:
“Some mod authors brought up the necessity of deleting files that are plain broken and thus useless to the end-user. We do think there is merit to the argument that completely broken files should be deleted, and, at the present moment, we’re open to considering deletion requests based on this on a case by case basis. Down the line, however, we are planning to completely revamp mod and file data management into a much more powerful system that will offer authors better integration with other mods/files. In such a system as we envision it, there will be tools to deal with files that are utterly broken. Our goal ultimately is not to prevent deletions of files that are broken, it is to prevent arbitrary deletions eroding the integrity of the database on one hand, and undermining the collections system on the other. When we’re ready to move closer towards this system, we’ll be more than happy to reach out for feedback from mod authors to make sure they get the toolsuite that would be most useful to them. That being said, let us be clear about the fact that we’re not going to bring back support for random file deletions, due to the problems they cause.”
They are working on a new system to address the issues you brought up.
Source: https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14538
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