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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

The war over traditionally maligned and abused video game engineers, artists, and ancillary staff (testing, community leads, etc.) is about to begin.

Epic wants it known that they're a great place to work. They're gunning at a $100B+ valuation, and they've got a multi-trillion dollar market to capture. It helps that they own one of the biggest rendering technologies and have turned it into an entire career and marketplace. They have huge mindshare across a half dozen industries.

The last two technological waves were Internet and Smartphones. The next one is GPUs and all of the things unlocked by them: deep learning, rendering, spatial computing, etc.

Longbets: Epic surpasses Google's valuation one day. We're in the early stages of a brand new surge of innovation and investment. Imagine the browser being leapfrogged - that's where Tim Sweeny's head is.

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It’s fascinating to me that they keep overlooking and/or downright abusing their contributors on their answer hub / forums (in the form of routinely wiping content in a knowledge base that’s been built up for years).

Multi trillion dollar market?

Also: GPU's are new?

PDAs existed before smart phones. There's an inflection point, and it's happening now.

GPU-powered applications are going to eat Hollywood, music production, literally every form of entertainment. Everything a person watches or listens to. Kids will be making their own Star Wars films from their bedrooms. Every creative industry will be upended.

I don't like the term "metaverse", but there are a number of spatial computing trends that are undeniably evolving at a rapid clip. Volumetrics, photogrammetry, 3D SLAM warehousing. Pose correction, relighting -- photography, telepresence, video games -- everything is going to change.

And it goes without saying that deep learning is only getting started.

GPUs are the next big thing.

The entire movie business is $42 Billion dollars a year and declining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_industry

The entire music industry is $23 billion a year and declining

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272305/global-revenue-of...

Honestly, you sound like every bad pitch deck from startups.

The $x industry is $y billion big. If we only get 10%…

> The entire movie business is $42 Billion dollars a year and declining.

Your own source says $136 billion for the industry, $42.2 billion is just global box office.

Fair enough.

How many of those are going to need any type of special effects?

People are going to stop recording with glass.

When the inefficiencies go away, the field will enlarge dramatically.

Every kid wants to be a YouTuber. What happens when you give them tools better than Spielberg has and can compress quadratic time manual labor (writing, editing, set dec, etc.) into nothing?

That's not a shrinking industry.

You’ve been able to edit movies easily on personal computers for a decade. Your typical high end phone can already do 4K video.

Editing movies is not easy. It's a quadratic time expenditure.

High end phones still use glass and light. This requires a lot of setup from the user to get right, despite the advancement in computer vision and enhancement algorithms.

The former is fixed by making the edit part of the act of capture. Inverting the production pipeline. The latter is fixed by capturing a lot more than just photons. Actually, there are a lot of techniques that will help.

We're getting off into the weeds. Let's reconvene in ten years and see what happened to the movie business.

I'm just glad we're finally debating about a subject I like rather than Apple for once.

How is it a quadratic time expenditure? You’ve been able to edit video like you would text for a decade. An M1 Mac Mini handles 4K video well. A higher end M1 Mac Pro

Mix some optical two shots, OTS, closeups, and cutaways and tell me how long it takes.

A virtual camera would do this automatically and let you adjust pacing, placement, and more all with knobs.

From everything I have read, filmmakers are giving rave reviews about the editing prowess of high end Intel Mac Pros and they are looking forward to the Arm High end Macs.

But is this “anyone can be a film editor” the next “anyone can code”?

While I can code with the best of them, new more powerful computers aren’t going to make just everyone a film editor (including me) anymore than the low code solutions made it so anyone can code.

Epic doesn't make GPUs though?

Many companies will surpass Google's current valuation due to inflation. However, I don't see how Epic could replace Google as the third most valuable tech company. For one, Tencent owns almost half of the company.

That doesn't make sense. Inflation would impact everyone, including Google, the same.

> Epic wants it known that they're a great place to work.

Ironically, every engineer I know would drop a $150,000/yr Epic contract to work for half the salary at Valve. You're right, though: the war is about to begin, and it's going to be very entertaining from an outsiders perspective.

> Ironically, every engineer I know would drop a $150,000/yr Epic contract to work for half the salary at Valve.

I don't believe that for one second.

I doubt that a person would have to drop to 75000$ to work at valve, i would imagine they can compete given how comically different their income streams are.

Valve is probably one of the rare companies that don't need to compete with compensation, but can.

Whether they would actually need to take a comp hit is irrelevant to the hyperbolic claim that a random engineer hypothetically would prefer to switch to valve in exchange for a comp hit.

I think this an interesting thing, where I think if you have the skill and savings to work in games, nobody is going to choose Epic which have provided little in value overall as far as actual useful consumer things go outside of free games, that steam has had for a long time (steam controller system, quality online save sync and mulitplayer, proton????, etc) over either an indie studio or a place like valve where (from my personal perspective) it seems like real innovation is happening -- between things like the steam deck and it being not only a really intersting powerful and open device but it also being repairable, to it also running linux and also things like their vr headsets where they at this point set the standard for a real premium experience, even occulous with all of Facebook's money hasn't created an experiencing that comes close to how amazing half life alyx is.

I hope valve succeeds in all their endevours because while I can only assume their efforts are not altruistic, they have improved so much of the linux ecosystem for what so far has only been at their own expense.

Valve might not be “altruistic”, but they don’t seem particularly financially driven either. GabeN has more money than he could possibly want, and now he mainly seems to want to make cool stuff with lots of other people who want to make cool stuff.

... except for Unreal Engine and pretty much the highest quality and most indie friendly suite of tools for indie devs out there.

Valve is a pretty cool company. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Do you even know a single Epic Engineer? Every Epic engineer I work with has been at the company for ages. They have some of the highest retention in the industry.

Source: I actually do know Epic engineers, my game is published by them.

I've known probably at least a dozen Valve employees and most of them quit to work somewhere else. The studio's culture problems create a real emotional toll on staff and are also somewhat evident in their production and release schedules.

The ones I know who are still there got a pay raise when starting, not a pay cut.

Valve doesn't have Dan Piponi and Simon Peyton Jones (and that's just off the top of my head).

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