With streaming balkanized into so many individual providers, it's hard to pay for more than a couple.
So the Grandson has learned to discriminate ads from content, and as soon as an ad comes one, we all chorus, "Stinky Ad!" and then everyone rushes to be the first person to get to the remote and skip it.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's what we have.
Blizzard's golden goose is WoW, and WoW is an ideal IP for a software company: you have people who have been playing it for two decades who will continue to pay a subscription no matter what. The hard work was done decades ago. id, on the other hand, has to keep making better and better new games every couple of years, and each one is a risk.
There's a reason game companies want to move towards the digital-only subscription model, and Xbox has been going that way for some time. As "bad" as Blizzard is, it's got the right model. That's what they care about, not about workplace culture or innovation.
WoW has become quite soulless after the changes where everyone gets the same end game equipment but you have to grind upgrade currency to improve it.
My wife and I used to play quite a bit but it doesn't really engage anymore. Perhaps we are getting too old, but we should be in the correct customer segment (mid 40 years old).
Now I have spun up a local wotlk server with player bots powered by ollama which is actually a bit fun again.
I agree, that approach to game development is soulless. I don't really play any new video games anymore. In the rare instance I do play games, it's something from 15+ years ago. The games were designed to be played, beaten, and that was it. It wasn't an effort to keep you locked in forever. It became that. Then it became a soulless effort to keep you locked in forever.
Unfortunately, soul doesn't matter. The quarterly statement does.
All of them. Diablo is dead. They can't capitalize on StarCraft. All they have left with WoW is micro transactions for old users. Overwatch has been a disaster for years. Blizzard hasn't had a win in a very long time.
I think it's their first big test of a layoff? Am interested to see how this plays out.
In any case, WoW has been stagnating for quite some time even before the merger. The devs act as though everything is slow because it needs to be. Classic+ could've been much better.
Do you think having a union means the entire organization can't get shitcanned? Ask all those auto workers whose jobs got shipped to Mexico over the years how much being unionized helped.
But actually their own codex harness is quite decent on its own and doesn't have the quality issues or bloat that Claude Code does. Native Rust and open source. And in fact I've got a configuration here to point it at GLM which I also use (via Neuralwatt subscription) in addition to OpenAI's sub.
I do not like opencode's philosophy on the clipboard, it tries to be too clever.
Codex works great in opencode until it gets up to around 200k context. Then it starts doing things like:
me: Can you implement the next thing
OpenCode+Codex: Yep I'll do that next.
<does nothing and returns to prompt>
me: Well?
OpenCode+Codex: <starts implementing>
me: Looks good, let's fix this one issue.
OpenCode+Codex: Sure let's do that.
<does nothing and returns to prompt>
me: <bangs head against wall>
--
I've found the codex cli to be much better in this regard, it doesn't nearly derp out so much at higher token counts.
Opus is still my favourite model (I've found 4.6 specifically gives me the best results in OpenCode), but with all the shenanigans Anthropic is pulling, Codex is a close enough substitute.
I went back and forth between the two for months, often having both in various proportions. But I had enough reliability issues with Anthropic back in March timeframe that I just threw in the towel. I find GPT "boring" to work with but it's a steady hand and there's really nothing I throw at it that it can't do.
And yeah, I am supplementing with GLM 5.2 and have actually found it quite complimentary.
One of Codex's weaknesses is "excessive staging" -- basically it's quite cautious and pushes a very incremental approach. This is good for working in an established codebase (which most work is anyways). But for yeeting new projects, Claude always shone better for me (though it often left a mess of race conditions and unhandled negative cases that I had to clean up by hand or with codex)
GLM actually does pretty well in this regard, with the right prompting. It's more "creative" than GPT.
The first time I accessed the internet (I was ~8) was at a computer school, where I learned LOGO and a bit of BASIC. The first website I ever visited was the Space Jam website. Great memories…
Oh, and the computer had a webcam, but we never managed to get it working with someone on the other end.
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