u/imitzFinn

Source - https://bsky.app/profile/007game.ioi.dk/post/3mtjfu7yxhz2n

Shaken, not stirred.

Source - https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7495321215083905025/

Full text here for folks to read:

Let me cut right to the chase. I'm retiring from game development. At least I think so. I've been here before and changed my mind but this time I'm pretty sure I mean it.

I've had a great career. Wouldn't change a thing even if I could. But the reasons to retire are simple: I'm a month away from my 44th year as a developer. I've had the chance to work on tabletop roleplaying games and boardgames. I've worked on more digital games than I can remember -- 17 full games, I think, and 9 or so add-on packs. Gratifyingly, some of those games are still being played 15... 20... 30 years later. And most of them have been in a genre that has had influence beyond what I or anyone else expected. I've run teams as small as a dozen and as big as 800. I've worked for big companies and done startups. I like to think I've helped some insanely talented people along in their careers. (That last is the most important.)

With all that behind me and with age and health (my business) catching up with me I'm feeling like I've done what I set out to do. It's time to write some books, do a lot of reading, do some lecturing, maybe do some consulting. (Feel free to get in touch about those last two.) Also there's a keyboard here just waiting for me to get my piano chops back.

I definitely have mixed feelings about this. I mean there are three games in particular I'd still like to make. (One is very big... one is very small... and one I don't know how to make which scares me.) But the game business has changed and it's just not as much fun for me anymore. Plus there's a new generation of developers coming up who deserve their time in the sun.

To all of you reading this I want you to remember that games are not a solved problem yet -- there is, I hope, plenty of experimentation and innovation to come. And to all you young developers out there, I've said it before and I'll say it again, your job is to make people forget people like me ever existed.

Will I come back? Never say never. But I think it's time to ride off into the sunset.

Now stop reading and make great games.

Source - https://nitter.net/empiremagazine/status/2088376820874035441?mx=1

Couldn't fit the entire post cause character limit but here's the rest of it- says current showrunner Matt Selman. Sounds like there may be some news coming that wasn’t supposed to be announced yet… #D23

Looks like a whoopies on his part, or in Homer language "D'oh!"

Source - https://nitter.net/scottvanvliet/status/2086814728551289308#m

Follow up from this post from two weeks ago.

Full Text For Those Who Can't Read The Screenshot:

I wanted to provide an update on the incident affecting some players trying to launch games and access other game library features last week.

What was the root cause?
As I previously wrote, an underlying service required for XBOX Home Console sharing and Game Pass purchased content, as well as some PC scenarios, experienced an outage whereby an update to the system put some services in an unresponsive state. This was compounded by a bug in the XBOX client software stack, which caused other license checks to also fail when that first service went down. These two issues created some cascading failure scenarios that affected some players' ability to launch games and causing cascading issues with library enumeration.

What have we done about it?
We are transitioning ownership of the underlying licensing service to the XBOX team while our engineers are actively hardening the services and infrastructure for future updates. The client bug has been fixed in an upcoming release, which starts rolling out today, August 10, and becomes mandatory August 17.

What comes next?
Our engineering and operations teams are looking broadly across our stack to improve reliability of our products and services. We will have more updates to share in the weeks and months ahead as we roll out some great new features for players, paired with quality-of-life systems updates. Thanks for playing!

Source - https://nitter.net/XBOX/status/2084761306721140926#m

Brodcast time (from each time zone) - 3 AM PDT / 6 AM EDT / 11 AM BST / 7 PM JST

Source - https://bsky.app/profile/doublefine.com/post/3mrq3vfqkf22s

Text from the post:

Today, Double Fine Productions let go of 23 members of our staff.

As a small, tightly-knit team, these actions are not taken lightly. Only the survival of our studio would ever make us consider such a painful action. Our transition to becoming an independent company also means becoming a size that we can sustain.

The people we are losing were all important.

They all made an impact on our games and culture, and they will be missed.

We are committed to supporting each affected person as best as we can, and we thank them for their hard work and commitment to the creative spirit we cherish here at Double Fine.

-Tim

Source - https://nitter.net/scottvanvliet/status/2081892395218841974#m

Pasting the text here for folks who can't see the screenshot:

Earlier today, many players began experiencing issues with sign in, enumerating their game libraries and playing games. The team has worked hard throughout the day to fix the issue, and we've restored service as of 2:30 PM PDT. Nonetheless, this is an unacceptable situation, and we must do better to support you.

Over the coming weeks, you'll hear more from me about our services, our platform, and the work we're doing to make XBOX better. And that starts with some transparency about this incident.

What happened. Late last night, a licensing service that sits outside of XBOX, but which XBOX depends upon, began failing. This caused some sign-in scenarios to fail, and it caused many scenarios that require an entitlement check to also fail, such as listing out your Full Library and launching games that you own. It also affected several of our publishing and store partners who depend on those same systems which is why some of you saw issues in specific games and not others.

What we did. Our on-call teams caught the first signals overnight through automated monitoring and declared a major incident. Once we isolated the failing infrastructure, we shifted traffic onto the healthy parts of the system while the team continued to work towards a root cause. Service came back unevenly across regions which is why some of you recovered hours before others.

What's next. We're running a full post-incident review. I care less about the one-line root cause and more about the real questions: why a failure in one service was able to take down this much, why recovery took as long as it did, and what we change so a single point of failure can't ruin your night again. That means hardening the dependencies underneath sign in and game launch, improving how we detect and contain this class of failure, and being faster and clearer with you when something breaks.

Thank you for your patience, and for the reports that genuinely helped us narrow this down. We'll do better.