Month: February 2024
Meta accused of ‘massive, illegal’ data collection operation by European consumer rights groups. | CNN Business
submitted by /u/Smart-Combination-59 [link] [comments]
submitted by /u/Smart-Combination-59
[link] [comments]
Electronic Arts announces layoffs and cancels Star Wars game
Electronic Arts (EA) will lay off around five percent of its employees, or around 670 people, and is cancelling its Star Wars FPS.
Another day, another round of mass layoffs in the games industry. Electronic Arts (EA) has announced it will cut around five percent of its employees, putting almost 700 people out of a job. It’s also cancelling games and shutting down at least one development studio.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson announced the layoffs in an email to employees, which was subsequently posted to the company’s blog on Wednesday.
“[W]e are streamlining our company operations to deliver deeper, more connected experiences for fans everywhere that build community, shape culture, and grow fandom,” said Wilson. “In this time of change, we expect these decisions to impact approximately 5 percent of our workforce.”
According to EA’s 2023 annual report, the company employed approximately 13,400 people as of the end of March last year. Five percent of that is 670 people.
“[W]e will support and work with each colleague with the utmost attention, care, and respect,” wrote Wilson — a wordy euphemism for laying them off.
Skirting explicit phrases such as “layoff,” “cut,” and “reduction in headcount,” Wilson stated that EA would try to shift staff to new projects or roles before it lets them go. Conversations with impacted employees have already begun, and are expected to conclude around April. Even so, it’s likely that many people will find themselves without a job.
This is the second mass layoff EA has announced in less than a year. In a similar blog post last March, Wilson revealed that the company would cut six percent of its workforce at the time, amounting to almost 800 people.
Mashable has reached out to EA for comment.
EA moving away from licensed IPs
Staff cuts aren’t the only reductions at EA. In addition to “continuing to optimize our global real estate footprint” AKA shrinking its office space, the company is cancelling or discontinuing some of its development studio’s titles. Notably, this includes shifting focus away from games based on licensed intellectual properties (IP), as EA apparently sees little future in them.
“We are also sunsetting games and moving away from development of future licensed IP that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry,” said Wilson.
According to the CEO, this change will allow EA to focus on its “biggest opportunities — including [they company’s] owned IP, sports, and massive online communities.”
This doesn’t mean the company is cancelling all EA Studios games which are based on external licensed IP. Cliffhanger Games‘ Black Panther title and Motive Studio‘s Iron Man game reportedly remain in development for now, though the developers might not feel too reassured by Wilson’s statements.
However, EA has cancelled the Star Wars first-person shooter that Respawn Entertainment had been developing. Respawn is the studio behind Apex Legends and the Star Wars Jedi series, franchises it is now being directed back toward.
“As we’ve looked at Respawn’s portfolio over the last few months, what’s clear is the games our players are most excited about are Jedi and Respawn’s rich library of owned brands,” said EA Entertainment and Technology president Laura Miele. “Knowing this, we have decided to pivot away from early development on a Star Wars FPS Action game to focus our efforts on new projects based on our owned brands while providing support for existing games.”
EA’s decision to eschew licensed IP also extends to its mobile games, with the company having previously announced that it is discontinuing Kim Kardashian Hollywood, Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth, MLB Tap Sports Baseball, and F1 Mobile.
“These games have entertained many people over the years, and it’s the right time to focus our time on the remaining games in our portfolio which we believe can grow,” said Miele. “We have some great titles, and I’m optimistic about where we can take our significant library of owned IP.”
Sadly, even working on company-owned IP doesn’t guarantee safety from the layoffs, with not all of EA’s studios having survived the cull. U.S. developer Ridgeline Studio will be shut down completely, with studio head and Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto having already made the personal decision to leave. Initially unveiled in September 2022, Ridgeline had been focused on creating a new story set in the Battlefield universe. Now that responsibility has been shifted to Criterion Games, while Ridgeline will close without ever having shipped a game.
The news of EA’s layoffs comes just one day after PlayStation announced it would cut around 900 of its own employees, including staff at well-known development studios such as Naughty Dog, Insomniac Games, and Guerrilla Games. A running tally by Kotaku calculates that over 8,000 people in the games industry have been laid off in the past two months alone. That’s just 1,000 off estimates on the number of games industry workers cut throughout all of 2023 — a year which was already defined by mass layoffs in games.
Why AI progress doesn’t have to come at an environmental cost
Huge efficiency gains can be made in underlying infrastructure, freeing-up organizations to embrace the future.
While there is no sugar coating the pressures on businesses and government departments to meet NetZero carbon targets, most IT leaders have the added strain of trying to keep up with demands for new technologies. It’s a constant balancing act of enabling people to work and perform better, while addressing ESG compliance and not blowing IT budgets.
Automation is now dominating IT buyer thinking. New products and tools keep emerging. Only recently, Microsoft founder Bill Gates talked about the huge potential of AI assistants, for example, suggesting the race is on for organizations to develop powerful AI assistants that could reshape the digital landscape, putting the likes of Google and Amazon under threat. He suggested these AI assistants could radically change behaviors impacting everyday life and work. We’ve already seen an element of this with ChatGPT, while Microsoft has already made a play in this direction with the announcement of its Copilot AI assistant for 365.
The fact is, automation is attractive to organizations for productivity, efficiency and overcoming skills shortages but it can come at a cost, both a financial and environmental one. As Gartner warned in its 10 Strategic Predictions for 2023, AI comes with increased sustainability risk. By 2025, it says, “AI will consume more energy than the human workforce, significantly offsetting carbon-zero gains.” With this in mind, something surely has to be done now, to enable AI without undermining environmental efforts.
Meeting ESG targets is, according to Deloitte at least, a more prominent issue in boardrooms this year, so how organizations balance this with increased automation needs will be key. Cloud computing is, of course, central to the enablement of AI tools in organizations. Digital transformations to implement platforms that unify organizations and therefore data are driving cloud adoption.
As Gartner revealed recently, worldwide spending on cloud is expected to hit around $600 billion this year, driven primarily by emerging technologies, such as generative AI. Sid Nag, vice president analyst at Gartner, says generative AI requires “powerful and highly scalable computing capabilities to process data in real-time,” with cloud offering “the perfect solution and platform.”
Cloud bursting
And yet, cloud continues to be dogged by claims of being bad for the environment and not helping organizations hit their ESG compliance targets. In fact, the cloud industry has been one of the most active in trying to increase efficiencies and reduce environmental impacts. Such is the demand for cloud services, that inevitably keeping up is difficult. Piling on more racks in a datacenter is a short term solution but not really a long term answer, especially given the leap in power demands to manage increased automation.
In our Enterprise Cloud Index research, 85% of 1,450 IT decision makers acknowledged that meeting corporate sustainability goals is a challenge for them. While nearly all (92%) said sustainability was a much more important issue than a year ago, there is clearly a disconnect between what organizations want to achieve and how they go about it. What we have seen is that there are big challenges arising from a mix of complexity and IT budget restraints.
Our research shows that most organizations use more than one type of IT infrastructure, whether it is a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, or an on-premise datacenter, along with a hosted datacenter. This is only going to grow but mixed infrastructures create new management challenges. Given the increased complexity, organizations need a single, unified place to manage applications and data across their diverse environments, to reduce costs but also to measure impacts.
Increasing efficiencies in data processes is an important step in reducing ‘hits’ on IT systems but this really only goes part of the way. The real step change for any organization operating in the cloud is looking at the underlying infrastructure. Measuring and then managing impacts from datacenters will continue to be key to reducing carbon impacts of organizational computing. As with a car, if you have a smaller and yet more powerful and efficient engine, not only are you going to reduce emissions, you are going to enable room for growth and increased performance, through tools such as AI.
Re-framing the picture
As Atlantic Ventures suggests in its report Improving sustainability in data centers, the required energy demand on datacenters is still very high and results in large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions. Energy consumption is a major factor in measuring environmental performance of datacenters but one traditional method is now being questioned.
Fundamentally, changes need to be made at the rack. Infrastructure modernization starts with hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI), reducing ‘moving parts’ and therefore energy needs. This also means less complexity, both in terms of cloud structures but also data management. This is what will achieve the most direct outcomes.
As Atlantic Ventures says, “in the EMEA region HCI architectures have the potential to reduce up to 56,68 TWh from 2022-2025 and save up to €8.22bn in electricity costs in the same period for companies and data center providers undertaking a complete transformation towards HCI.” This, combined with next generation liquid cooling is a huge step towards creating a low impact platform for the future.
For any organization looking to embrace AI and related automation applications, addressing infrastructure complexity now is key. Running datacenters is an increasingly specialist business (especially given on-going high energy prices) and as more and more data is required in real time, so the challenges for organizations only increase. With the right partners and the most efficient infrastructure in place, any organization could consider itself AI-ready without sacrificing an ESG targets.
We’ve listed the best bare metal hosting.
This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro