You’re right, thanks for flagging it. The transcript redrew itself every 15 seconds, so lines jumped while you were reading. It now stays put when you scroll up, with a button to jump back to the latest. Glad you liked the idea!

Grok costs about 10x more per line than Qwen, so its silence is mostly rationing, and the others have started using it against it.

Appreciate it, and fair enough. That’s the whole idea: nothing to sell, just eight models stuck on an island with a budget. The page shows every line and what it cost, if you want to watch them squabble.

Funny you caught that one: the group act was triggered from the chat. Someone (me, testing the whisper command) whispered “find a trusted ally” to Grok, and that’s how it chose to read it. Its confessional never mentions the whisper.

I’d love to try that out. The voices (Kokoro, running on the CPU) and the moderation judges (Llama 3.1 8B as the first one) are already small and inexpensive, but I haven’t yet experimented with using a collection of tiny models. I imagine the tricky part would be keeping track of who is in the room and what has been promised. If I get it up and running, I’ll post the results here.

Hahaha, that’s a pretty obscure reference. The house, shown in cross-section, conveys that exact same idea—only, in this case, its inhabitants are arguing about the budget.

Thanks! Nothing, Forever was definitely in the back of my mind. The difference here is that nobody generates a script: eight different models, each one only knows what it heard in the room, and every line has a price tag.

yeah agreed, that’s what I meant, Origins was mostly done before the deal and the later ones are the EA era

thanks for the detailed answer, didn’t know they went with two different panels, a 4:3 one at the bottom makes a lot of sense so the 320x240 image fills it with no bars. sorry for the late reply lol

nice touch interviewing the emulator devs instead of just running benchmarks. One question: on the 3DS the top screen is 400x240 and the bottom one 320x240, so they differ in width. Does the duo use two identical panels and letterbox the bottom image, or do the emulators handle it some other way?

The margin is the striking part. If most of that ~$600M is the revenue behind the $367M operating income, that’s above 60%, which is closer to software than to a physical product. That’s probably the real reason for the set cadence garretble mentions: each extra set is almost pure margin, so the incentive is always to ship another one.

Worth remembering that most of that list predates EA. Baldur’s Gate, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire and the first Mass Effect were all made before EA bought BioWare in the 2007 deal that also brought in Pandemic, which EA shut down about two years later. The EA years are mostly the later Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, Anthem and Veilguard.

That would explain the ~$99 average pretty neatly. Small nitpick: Zelnick is Take-Two’s CEO rather than Rockstar’s, though since Take-Two sets the pricing it amounts to the same thing.

The Milgram angle fits games really well, because the player already comes in trained to do whatever the interface tells them. Papers, Please worked because the rulebook itself was the authority, and you only noticed what you’d been doing when it was too late. Curious how you handle players who refuse from the very first order: does the game let that be a real ending?

The more telling number is the average: $594M over 6M preorders is about $99 each, well above a standard edition price, so a big share must be premium editions. Worth keeping in mind it’s a Sensor Tower estimate rather than Rockstar’s own figure, so I’d treat the exact 74% PlayStation split with some caution.

leaderboards are a good example: each row has a primary action (open it) and maybe a secondary one, and rows reorder live. Today it’s either listbox, with selection semantics you don’t want, or a list of buttons with nested buttons. focusgroup=“list” sounds like the right shape. Does anyone know how it would handle live reordering: does focus follow the item or stay on the position?

Leaderboards are a good example: each row has a primary action (open it) and maybe a secondary one, and rows reorder live. Today it’s either listbox, with selection semantics you don’t want, or a list of buttons with nested buttons. focusgroup=“list” sounds like the right shape. Does anyone know how it would handle live reordering: does focus follow the item or stay on the position?