Daily Archives: February 13, 2026

A Friday the 13th of Unsurprising Bullet Points

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It is Friday the 13th, which either means back luck or a somewhat regrettable series of movies from the 80s, and I can assure you I saw every single one in the theater. (And that I have not seen any of the later entries aside from Jason Goes to Hell, which I saw on VHS.)

What does that mean for the blog?  I don’t know, aside from giving me an opening paragraph and maybe dictating a theme for the entries.  You’ll have to tell me if that is really true or not.

I know, what a surprise?  But I live in a reality where only billionaires and a few greedy minions want Gen AI slop in everything, and those people only want it because they don’t want to pay for human talent.  They want to return to literal serfdom where we have to be grateful for our daily bowl of gruel lest the take even that away.

The key is how much players really do not want AI slop.  Quantic’s survey of 1,799 users found a majority, 62.7% had a “very negative” view of Gen AI, up from Q2 2024 survey where AI generated content had a 45.3% negative response… well short of the 78.6% who responded negatively to blockchain games, but almost three times more negative than… checks notes…. roguelikes!  Did not see the roguelike hate coming.

A dim view of Gen AI

And that number goes up to 85.4% when you rope in all levels of negative responses.

So all those AI ads on Reddit along with Krafton and EA and Tim Sweeney out there defending it at every turn are really having an effect!   If only shitty, disreputable people and organizations support your idea, maybe asking them to shut up is a better course of action.  Also, I down vote every single AI ad on Reddit.

Discord, which famously can’t keep your data secure, will soon want a scan of your government documents to prove that you are an adult.  Or that was their pitch on Monday, when they were being pretty smug about not caring that they might drive some users away.

Unity through Discord

They told Ars Technica in the interview linked above “we’ll find other ways to bring users back.”

Then the magnitude of user backlash started to hit and by Tuesday they were swearing that most people would not have to submit a scan of an official government ID for them to lose in another data breach… because they were going to us AI!

AI will be going through the meta data of your account… which given how much detail manages to slip into some definitions of meta data ought to cause some concern as well… in order to determine if you are an adult or not.  If only we had some inkling about how end users feel about AI!

Didn’t I say that the whole thing would be going downhill, that enshittification would set in, once the IPO was announced?  Well here we are.

And I get some of this. Australia and the UK and some US states are forcing online services to do this sort of thing  But there is no universal US or EU mandate for checking all of our papers.  This is a company complying with autocracy in advance because there is no penalty for supporting tyrants.

Anyway, failure to prove you are an adult will mean that Discord will assume you are a teen.  I guess they aren’t ready yet to kick non-adults off the service, and there is the rank magical thinking hypocrisy of believing everybody who signs up is 13 years of age or older. (This is related to US law that says they cannot track data for those under 13, so everybody online is at least 13 now.)

All I have to say is that if they are going to tell me I am a teen, then I am going to act like one.  And teens are famously not a demographic with money, so I cancelled my server boost.  In their eyes, after all, I am just a teen.

I often hold up Embracer Group as an example of a video game conglomerate being run by dumb rich people who don’t know or care how video games are made.  They just jumped on board the idea and bought a bunch of gaming studios because they heard at a cocktail party or read in an in-flight magazine that this was what smart people were doing and it sounded like easy money.

Ubisoft, by contrast, and despite all of its problems, is a company founded on the idea of making video games and has successfully done so for coming up on 40 years.

Early Ubisoft Logo – A Designed by Max Headroom before he got famous

If you are reading this then you will likely recognize the names of at least a few of their titles or franchises.  I mean, the list of Ubisoft titles on Wikipedia had to be broken up into four different pages and the list of their cancelled titles is longer than the list of titles most studios manage to ship.  (Though it does make you ask the question “How many Tom Clancy titles can one studio cancel?”  14 appears to be the answer.)

And, as the industry goes so does Ubisoft.  They are big enough to start trends, but that is risky so they much prefer to follow trends or make sequels.  I lack sufficient fingers and toes to count all the variations of Assassin’s Creed they have tried

All of which is expected.  As a company gets larger, and certainly once the owners decide to take a company public, it becomes more conservative.  Innovation in the industry generally comes from indie projects or almost by mistake from larger companies, which the industry then feeds on.

However, Ubisoft seems to be going overboard on the idea that the line must always go up.  Perhaps that is understandable given that the industry is still trying to get over the end of a decade long growth cycle that peaked with Covid and everybody staying home and playing video games.

So Yves Guillemot has taken a break from hating his customers and created a plan to slash and burn the core of the business that actually makes the product they sell with layoffs, cancellations, and closures.  And anybody who is left has to report to the office for work so he can keep an eye on them personally.  Eschewing what brought success to the company in the past, there is now a rush towards AI and outsourcing to China… and nepotism, always have to keep the family in charge of everything so Yves’ son gets a new job… as a way to keep the line going up.

Because he too has caught the Wall Street brain worm and believes success isn’t creating a sustainable business of acknowledging the cyclical nature of the market, but making the line go up every single quarter… which puts him in the same zone as Lars Wingefors and the Embracer group.

Now, I notably do not care about Ubisoft having declared I would never buy another game from them more than 20 years ago, back when they were at one of their customer hating peaks.  But where the major publishers go, and they are a major publisher, the industry tends to follow… though, in this case Ubisoft seems to be more of a follower than a leader.

So we’ll see how that works out I guess.