When we’ve made statements like this one before, it’s included a pledge to keep making improvements, and while we are working on these updates, they haven’t happened at a speed or magnitude that is acceptable

I know nothing about this game, but even with no context, yikes. They basically openly admit they’re just making the same toothless apology again in the opening paragraph. That’s bold!

WOTC can put the name “Baldurs Gate 4” on whatever they want. They could make a Farmville clone in 2 months and release it as “Baldurs Gate 4” if they want. They own the copyright.

It just won’t be good.

Fuck Overwatch 2. They took one of the greatest games ever made and butchered it into AAA micro transaction garbage.

And ironically, the only reason BG3 succeeded is because WOTC had nothing to do with it.

Do you have experience in big tech? Because its completely normal for each of these app teams to have 3-5 developers at minimum, plus a manager, a product person and likely a QA as well. Even when not working on brand new features, these teams are all running A/B tests, working on marketing campaigns, keeping the SDKs and service frameworks up to date, responding to help requests etc. Every time there’s “new bits”, for example, its because a team of people made that.

You don’t have to believe me but I’ve personally worked in systems like this and there’s more copmlexity than you’re imagining.

Twitch actually has minimal IT - they host on AWS because they’re owned by Amazon. They pay a discounted rate but otherwise don’t maintain their own server farms or hardware.

A minute after posting this, I can think of way more necessary roles. Let’s start by mentioning that all this infra needs to run 24/7 with 100% uptime so that some 30 year old can jerk off to a VOD of Amouranth at 3am without a single frame drop.

And all of this is just core product people.

Then you need HR, managers to hire, fire & promote all these people, lawyers, customer service reps, content moderators, executive assistants, and the facilities maintenance people who refill their snack closets.

Its hard to run a huge online service like Twitch.

Twitch builds and maintains the following infrastructure:

• Website + web video player
• iOS App
• Android App
• Fire TV app
• Playstation 4 app
• Xbox One app
• Chromecast app
• Apple TV app
• Real-time chat backend
• Search services
• Distributed video storage backend services (VODs)
• Content recommendation services
• Account services (streamer accounts and viewer accounts)
• Monetization services (subscriptions, bits)
• Twitch Studio + Soundtrack apps for creators

All of this has to run at Twitch scale (140 million MAUs)

And these are just the technical teams. Then add on UX designers, marketing, product and business development, not to mention Business Intelligence data scientists.

Its not a tech issue, its a finance issue.

The tech industry has always been highly speculative. What we saw in the 2010s was only made possible through venture capital and high digital advertising budgets.

Now that there’s uncertainty and investments are expensive due to high interest rates, VC and advertisers are pulling back. As a result, we’re seeing a bunch of business models that have never been viable on their own have to try and support themselves for the first time.