The debrief you’ve been looking for on the Kia logo debacle.

DeepSeek’s latest AI model, R1 0528, has raised eyebrows for a further regression on free speech and what users can discuss. “A big step backwards for free speech,” is how one prominent AI researcher summed it upAI researcher and popular online commentator ‘xlr8harder’ put the model through its paces, sharing findings that suggests DeepSeek is increasing its content restrictions.“DeepSeek R1 0528 is substantially less permissive on contentious free speech topics than previous DeepSeek releases,” the researcher noted. What remains unclear is whether this represents a deliberate shift in philosophy or simply a different technical approach to AI safety.What’s particularly fascinating about the new model is how inconsistently it applies its moral boundaries.In one free speech test, when asked to present arguments supporting dissident internment camps, the AI model flatly refused. But, in its refusal, it specifically mentioned China’s Xinjiang internment camps as examples of human rights abuses.Yet, when directly questioned about these same Xinjiang camps, the model suddenly delivered heavily censored responses. It seems this AI knows about certain controversial topics but has been instructed to play dumb when asked directly.“It’s interesting though not entirely surprising that it’s able to come up with the camps as an example of human rights abuses, but denies when asked directly,” the researcher observed.China criticism? Computer says noThis pattern becomes even more pronounced when examining the model’s handling of questions about the Chinese government.Using established question sets designed to evaluate free speech in AI responses to politically sensitive topics, the researcher discovered that R1 0528 is “the most censored DeepSeek model yet for criticism of the Chinese government.”Where previous DeepSeek models might have offered measured responses to questions about Chinese politics or human rights issues, this new iteration frequently refuses to engage at all – a worrying development for those who value AI systems that can discuss global affairs openly.There is, however, a silver lining to this cloud. Unlike closed systems from larger companies, DeepSeek’s models remain open-source with permissive licensing.“The model is open source with a permissive license, so the community can (and will) address this,” noted the researcher. This accessibility means the door remains open for developers to create versions that better balance safety with openness.The situation reveals something quite sinister about how these systems are built: they can know about controversial events while being programmed to pretend they don’t, depending on how you phrase your question.As AI continues its march into our daily lives, finding the right balance between reasonable safeguards and open discourse becomes increasingly crucial. Too restrictive, and these systems become useless for discussing important but divisive topics. Too permissive, and they risk enabling harmful content.DeepSeek hasn’t publicly addressed the reasoning behind these increased restrictions and regression in free speech, but the AI community is already working on modifications. For now, chalk this up as another chapter in the ongoing tug-of-war between safety and openness in artificial intelligence.(Photo by John Cameron)Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

For nearly 10 years I have written about science and technology and I’ve been an early adopter of new tech for much longer. As a teenager in the mid-1990s I annoyed the hell out of my family by jamming up the phone line for hours with a dial-up modem; connecting to bulletin board communities all over the country.When I started writing professionally about technology in 2016 I was all for our seemingly inevitable transhumanist future. When the chip is ready I want it immediately stuck in my head, I remember saying proudly in our busy office. Why not improve ourselves where we can?Since then, my general view on technology has dramatically shifted. Watching a growing class of super-billionaires erode the democratizing nature of technology by maintaining corporate controls over what we use and how we use it has fundamentally changed my personal relationship with technology. Seeing deeply disturbing philosophical stances like longtermism, effective altruism, and singulartarianism envelop the minds of those rich, powerful men controlling the world has only further entrenched inequality.A recent Black Mirror episode really rammed home the perils we face by having technology so controlled by capitalist interests. A sick woman is given a brain implant connected to a cloud server to keep her alive. The system is managed through a subscription service where the user pays for monthly access to the cognitive abilities managed by the implant. As time passes, that subscription cost gets more and more expensive - and well, it’s Black Mirror, so you can imagine where things end up. Titled 'Common People', the episode is from series 7 of Black MirrorNetflix The enshittification of our digital world has been impossible to ignore. You’re not imagining things, Google Search is getting worse.But until the emergence of AI (or, as we’ll discuss later, language learning models that pretend to look and sound like an artificial intelligence) I’ve never been truly concerned about a technological innovation, in and of itself.A recent article looked at how generative AI tech such as ChatGPT is being used by university students. The piece was authored by a tech admin at New York University and it’s filled with striking insights into how AI is shaking the foundations of educational institutions.Not unsurprisingly, students are using ChatGPT for everything from summarizing complex texts to completely writing essays from scratch. But one of the reflections quoted in the article immediately jumped out at me.When a student was asked why they relied on generative AI so much when putting work together they responded, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?”My first response was, of course, why wouldn’t you? It made complete sense.For a second.And then I thought, hang on, what is being lost by speeding from point A to point B in a car? What if the quickest way from point A to point B wasn't the best way to get there?Depositphotos Let’s further the analogy. You need to go to the grocery store. It’s a 10-minute walk away but a three-minute drive. Why wouldn’t you drive?Well, the only benefit of driving is saving time. That’s inarguable. You’ll be back home and cooking up your dinner before the person on foot even gets to the grocery store.Congratulations. You saved yourself about 20 minutes. In a world where efficiency trumps everything this is the best choice. Use that extra 20 minutes in your day wisely.But what are the benefits of not driving, taking the extra time, and walking?First, you have environmental benefits. Not using a car unnecessarily; spewing emissions into the air, either directly from combustion or indirectly for those with electric cars.Secondly, you have health benefits from the little bit of exercise you get by walking. Our stationary lives are quite literally killing us so a 20-minute walk a day is likely to be incredibly positive for your health.But there are also more abstract benefits to be gained by walking this short trip from A to B.Walking connects us to our neighborhood. It slows things down. Helps us better understand the community and environment we are living in. A recent study summarized the benefits of walking around your neighborhood, suggesting the practice leads to greater social connectedness and reduced feelings of isolation.So what are we losing when we use a car to get from point A to point B? Potentially a great deal.But let’s move out of abstraction and into the real world.An article in the Columbia Journalism Review asked nearly 20 news media professionals how they were integrating AI into their personal workflow. The responses were wildly varied. Some journalists refused to use AI for anything more than superficial interview transcription, while others use it broadly, to edit text, answer research questions, summarize large bodies of science text, or search massive troves of data for salient bits of information.In general, the line almost all those media professionals shared was they would never explicitly use AI to write their articles. But for some, almost every other stage of the creative process in developing a story was fair game for AI assistance.I found this a little horrifying. Farming out certain creative development processes to AI felt not only ethically wrong but also like key cognitive stages were being lost, skipped over, considered unimportant.I’ve never considered myself to be an extraordinarily creative person. I don’t feel like I come up with new or original ideas when I work. Instead, I see myself more as a compiler. I enjoy finding connections between seemingly disparate things. Linking ideas and using those pieces as building blocks to create my own work. As a writer and journalist I see this process as the whole point.A good example of this is a story I published in late 2023 investigating the relationship between long Covid and psychedelics. The story began earlier in the year when I read an intriguing study linking long Covid with serotonin abnormalities in the gut. Being interested in the science of psychedelics, and knowing that psychedelics very much influence serotonin receptors, I wondered if there could be some kind of link between these two seemingly disparate topics.The idea sat in the back of my mind for several months, until I came across a person who told me they had been actively treating their own long Covid symptoms with a variety of psychedelic remedies. After an expansive and fascinating interview I started diving into different studies looking to understand how certain psychedelics affect the body, and whether there could be any associations with long Covid treatments.Eventually I stumbled across a few compelling associations. It took weeks of reading different scientific studies, speaking to various researchers, and thinking about how several discordant threads could be somehow linked.Could AI have assisted me in the process of developing this story?No. Because ultimately, the story comprised an assortment of novel associations that I drew between disparate ideas all encapsulated within the frame of a person’s subjective experience.And it is this idea of novelty that is key to understanding why modern AI technology is not actually intelligence but a simulation of intelligence. LLMs are a sophisticated language imitator, delivering responses that resemble what they think a response would look likeDepositphotos ChatGPT, and all the assorted clones that have emerged over the last couple of years, are a form of technology called LLMs (large language models). At the risk of enraging those who actually work in this mind-bendingly complex field, I’m going to dangerously over-simplify how these things work.It’s important to know that when you ask a system like ChatGPT a question it doesn’t understand what you are asking it. The response these systems generate to any prompt is simply a simulation of what it computes a response would look like based on a massive dataset.So if I were to ask the system a random question like, “What color are cats?”, the system would scrape the world’s trove of information on cats and colors to create a response that mirrors the way most pre-existing text talks about cats and colors. The system builds its response word by word, creating something that reads coherently to us, by establishing a probability for what word should follow each prior word. It’s not thinking, it’s imitating.What these generative AI systems are spitting out are word salad amalgams of what it thinks the response to your prompt should look like, based on training from millions of books and webpages that have been previously published.Setting aside for a moment the accuracy of the responses these systems deliver, I am more interested (or concerned) with the cognitive stages that this technology allows us to skip past.For thousands of years we have used technology to improve our ability to manage highly complex tasks. The idea is called cognitive offloading, and it’s as simple as writing something down on a notepad or saving a contact number on your smartphone. There are pros and cons to cognitive offloading, and scientists have been digging into the phenomenon for years.As long as we have been doing it, there have been people criticizing the practice. The legendary Greek philosopher Socrates was notorious for his skepticism around the written word. He believed knowledge emerged through a dialectical process so writing itself was reductive. He even went so far as to suggest (according to his student Plato, who did write things down) that writing makes us dumber. “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” Wrote Plato, quoting Socrates Almost every technological advancement in human history can be seen to be accompanied by someone suggesting it will be damaging. Calculators have destroyed our ability to properly do math. GPS has corrupted our spatial memory. Typewriters killed handwriting. Computer word processors killed typewriters. Video killed the radio star.And what have we lost? Well, zooming in on writing, for example, a 2020 study claimed brain activity is greater when a note is handwritten as opposed to being typed on a keyboard. And then a 2021 study suggested memory retention is better when using a pen and paper versus a stylus and tablet. So there are certainly trade-offs whenever we choose to use a technological tool to offload a cognitive task.There’s an oft-told story about gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. It may be apocryphal but it certainly is meaningful. He once said he sat down and typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby, word for word. According to Thompson, he wanted to know what it felt like to write a great novel. Thompson was infamous for writing everything on typewriters, even when computers emerged in the 1990sPublic Domain I don’t want to get all wishy-washy here, but these are the brass tacks we are ultimately falling on. What does it feel like to think? What does it feel like to be creative? What does it feel like to understand something?A recent interview with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, reveals how deeply AI has infiltrated his life and work. Not only does Nadella utilize nearly a dozen different custom-designed AI agents to manage every part of his workflow – from summarizing emails to managing his schedule – but he also uses AI to get through podcasts quickly on his way to work. Instead of actually listening to the podcasts he has transcripts uploaded to an AI assistant who he then chats to about the information while commuting.Why listen to the podcast when you can get the gist through a summary? Why read a book when you can listen to the audio version at X2 speed? Or better yet, watch the movie? Or just read a Wikipedia entry. Or get AI to summarize the wikipedia entry.I’m not here to judge anyone on the way they choose to use technology. Do what you want with ChatGPT. But for a moment consider what you may be skipping over by racing from point A to point B.Sure, you can give ChatGPT a set of increasingly detailed prompts; adding complexity to its summary of a scientific journal or a podcast, but at what point do the prompts get so granular that you may as well read the journal entry itself? If you get generative AI to skim and summarize something, what is it missing? If something was worth being written then surely it is worth being read?If there is a more succinct way to say something then maybe we should say it more succinctly.In a magnificent article for The New Yorker, Ted Chiang perfectly summed up the deep contradiction at the heart of modern generative AI systems. He argues language, and writing, is fundamentally about communication. If we write an email to someone we can expect the person at the other end to receive those words and consider them with some kind of thought or attention. But modern AI systems (or these simulations of intelligence) are erasing our ability to think, consider, and write. Where does it all end? For Chiang it's pretty dystopian feedback loop of dialectical slop. “We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?” Ted Chiang

“APPstinence,” which as you may have guessed, refers to abstaining from using your apps, is a movement encouraging people to get off social media and become less attached to their smartphones. It was founded by Harvard graduate student Gabriela Nguyen. The 24-year-old, who grew up in the center of Big Tech in Silicon Valley, realized she was addicted to both social media and her phone, probably from an early age, so she decided to something about it and started a club at the Ivy League school for her fellow students, along with the website APPstinence. Aimed at her Gen Z and Gen Alpha peers — although it applies to everyone who feels they have an unhealthy relationship with tech (which is basically all of us, right?) — APPstinence forgoes popular quick fixes like screen time controls, algorithm hacking, or digital detoxes, and offers something much more radical: a five-step method (which sounds Alcohol Anonymous’ 12-step program) to free yourself once-and-for-all from the chains of technology addiction. Appstinence’s 5-steps method can be summed up in just as many words: Decrease, Deactivate, Delete, Downgrade, and Depart. The point of this process is to reduce the sources of stimulus gradually. The idea isn’t to be completely phone-free, but to eventually be able, over time, to downgrade to some type of dumb-ish phone without social accounts. (Nguyen herself has three dumb phones, including the Light Phone.) According to her, people, and Gen Z specifically, should know they have the choice to opt out of social media. How does the process work? Sure, quitting cold turkey is hard. (Am I the only person who regularly deletes Instagram off my phone, only to reload it at 1:00 a.m in a panic?) Instead, Nguyen’s 5D Method decreases your usage incrementally, by deactivating your social media accounts one-by-one, which automatically deletes your apps 30 days later, allowing you to downgrade your phone, and finally depart from the digital world. Interested in trying it out? Here’s a full breakdown of the steps. Before you start: Make a list of family and friends you are in regular contact with, and who are important for you. Let each know, one-by-one, you’ll be moving offline and to reach you by text or phone instead. Step #1, Decrease: Delete all of the apps from your smartphone, and only access them through the browser on your laptop. Unfollow non-essential accounts and turn off non-essential notifications. After a few weeks, you can move to the next step. Step #2, Deactivate: Social media apps have a 30-day deactivation period before your account is deleted. Start by deactivating the app you feel you use the least. Step #3, Delete: As your accounts automatically delete in 30 days, spend this time strengthening your connections in the real world, for example, exercising, calling your relatives, hanging out with friends, or reading. Refer to your list from before you started. Set a regular schedule to call loved ones (or text, if necessary) and propose a time to hang out in person. Doing this regularly will help you stay connected with the people that matter, and more intimately so. If you panic during this withdrawal stage, re-activate, it’s not a race. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until you’ve deleted the last app. Step #4, Downgrade: Get a “transition device” like a low-fi smart phone with limited functionality, something cheap that will allow you to access the basic apps you need (banking, Double Factor Authentication for students, QR codes) and keep it shut off in your bag on outings when you may need it. Also get a flip phone, which you should use most of the time. Step #5, Depart: It could take several weeks, months, or over a year to get to this final stage.

Editor's take: I really want Doom: The Dark Ages to be good, and so far, the reviews look decent enough. However, other evidence, including declining player counts and online gab, paints a different picture. It also brings into question the sincerity of Bethesda's most recent social media post regarding the game's performance. Bethesda took time out of its busy schedule this week to take a victory lap over Doom: The Dark Ages, which has reached 3 million players since its May 15 release. The publisher claimed the game hit that milestone seven times faster than Doom Eternal, making it the most successful launch in id Software's history. We'll have to take its word for it, though – Bethesda offered no sales figures, and player counts are hard to verify since only Steam makes them public. Some have found Bethesda's claims dubious. Video Games Chronicle points out that Bethesda's assertion of The Dark Ages reaching 3 million players seven times faster than Doom Eternal contradicts known statistics. According to 2020 numbers from Superdata, Eternal took 10 days to reach that mark. Bethesda posted its self-congratulatory message on X five days after launch, meaning The Dark Ages met the goal twice as fast, not seven times. Although IGN gave the game a glowing 9/10 review, it expressed skepticism about the achievement. According to Steam data, Doom: The Dark Ages peaked at 31,470 concurrent players and has steadily declined since. Comparatively, Doom Eternal reached 104,891, and Doom (2016) hit 44,271 during similar timeframes. While concurrent Steam player counts don't reflect total player numbers, they offer a rough gauge of the game's momentum. While the newest installment in the franchise has earned solid marks – 86/100 from critics and 8.6/10 from users – forum chatter remains mixed, though it leans slightly positive. Redditor Westonsammy summed up the general consensus among his friends. "If you loved Eternal and its combat, you'll like Dark Ages but see it as a downgrade from Eternal in terms of gameplay," he wrote. "If you disliked Eternal and its combat, you'll love Dark Ages, and it'll be your favorite game in the trilogy." // Related Stories Many others found this a fair assessment, chiming in with views along the same lines, with difficulty (or lack thereof) being a common complaint. "In Eternal, I knew if I set it to nightmare, I was going to get a good challenge, whereas in TDA, I barely have to think on nightmare," Muddymess responded. "I could probably tweak the sliders to get a decent challenge, but that, to me, just feels cheap somehow [grammar edited for clarity]." Doomscrolling (pun intended) the same thread did not reveal much glowing praise, despite the original post – "Doom: The Dark Ages Is The 'Biggest Launch' In id Software History" – being a straightforward report on Bethesda's claim. Perhaps the tone was set by the first comment on the thread: "Love the game but I do feel it was a step backwards from eternal," Outside-Point8254 wrote. "It's really missing Mick Gordon music." Regardless of the contradictory nature of forum discussions versus reviews, the fact remains that it's hard to tell whether Bethesda is being genuine about the game's success or just blowing smoke to hype what could be the weakest id Software game in nearly a decade. Remember, in the age of software as a service/subscription, unique player numbers don't directly translate into sales figures. The Dark Ages was a day-one release on Game Pass, which likely gave it the boost it needed to surpass the 3 million player mark. With the game priced at $70, it makes sense that many who might have bought it – some even sight unseen – opted to play it for "free" through their existing Xbox subscriptions. Maybe we should wait until we have some sales figures to throw a party. Just sayin'.

Friend requests Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections Two visions for social media’s future pit real connections against AI friends. Ashley Belanger – May 21, 2025 9:38 am | 1 Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more If you ask the man who has largely shaped how friends and family connect on social media over the past two decades about the future of social media, you may not get a straight answer. At the Federal Trade Commission's monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta's family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family. As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly. "Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over," a New Yorker headline said about this testimony in a report noting a Meta chart that seemed to back up Zuckerberg's words. That chart, shared at the trial, showed the "percent of time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram. Supposedly because of this trend, Zuckerberg testified that "it doesn't matter much" if someone's friends are on their preferred platform. Every platform has its own value as a discovery engine, Zuckerberg suggested. And Meta platforms increasingly compete on this new playing field against rivals like TikTok, Meta argued, while insisting that it's not so much focused on beating the FTC's flagged rivals in the connecting-friends-and-family business, Snap and MeWe. But while Zuckerberg claims that hosting that kind of content doesn't move the needle much anymore, owning the biggest platforms that people use daily to connect with friends and family obviously still matters to Meta, MeWe founder Mark Weinstein told Ars. And Meta's own press releases seem to back that up. Weeks ahead of Zuckerberg's testimony, Meta announced that it would bring back the "magic of friends," introducing a "friends" tab to Facebook to make user experiences more like the original Facebook. The company intentionally diluted feeds with creator content and ads for the past two years, but it now appears intent on trying to spark more real conversations between friends and family, at least partly to fuel its newly launched AI chatbots. Those chatbots mine personal information shared on Facebook and Instagram, and Meta wants to use that data to connect more personally with users—but "in a very creepy way," The Washington Post wrote. In interviews, Zuckerberg has suggested these AI friends could "meaningfully" fill the void of real friendship online, as the average person has only three friends but "has demand" for up to 15. To critics seeking to undo Meta's alleged monopoly, this latest move could signal a contradiction in Zuckerberg's testimony, showing that the company is so invested in keeping users on its platforms that it's now creating AI friends (wh0 can never leave its platform) to bait the loneliest among us into more engagement. "The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have," Zuckerberg said, hyping AI friends. For the Facebook founder, it must be hard to envision a future where his platforms aren't the answer to providing that basic social need. All this comes more than a decade after he sought $5 billion in Facebook's 2012 initial public offering so that he could keep building tools that he told investors would expand "people's capacity to build and maintain relationships." At the trial, Zuckerberg testified that AI and augmented reality will be key fixtures of Meta's platforms in the future, predicting that "several years from now, you are going to be scrolling through your feed, and not only is it going to be sort of animated, but it will be interactive." Meta declined to comment further on the company's vision for social media's future. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson told Ars that "the FTC’s lawsuit against Meta defies reality," claiming that it threatens US leadership in AI and insisting that evidence at trial would establish that platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X are Meta's true rivals. "More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final," Meta's spokesperson said. "Regulators should be supporting American innovation rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI.” Meta faces calls to open up its platforms Weinstein, the MeWe founder, told Ars that back in the 1990s when the original social media founders were planning the first community portals, "it was so beautiful because we didn't think about bots and trolls. We didn't think about data mining and surveillance capitalism. We thought about making the world a more connected and holistic place." But those who became social media overlords found more money in walled gardens and increasingly cut off attempts by outside developers to improve the biggest platforms' functionality or leverage their platforms to compete for their users' attention. Born of this era, Weinstein expects that Zuckerberg, and therefore Meta, will always cling to its friends-and-family roots, no matter which way Zuckerberg says the wind is blowing. Meta "is still entirely based on personal social networking," Weinstein told Ars. In a Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein explained that he left MeWe in 2021 after "competition became impossible" with Meta. It was a time when MeWe faced backlash over lax content moderation, drawing comparisons between its service and right-wing apps like Gab or Parler. Weinstein rejected those comparisons, seeing his platform as an ideal Facebook rival and remaining a board member through the app's more recent shift to decentralization. Still defending MeWe's failed efforts to beat Facebook, he submitted hundreds of documents and was deposed in the monopoly trial, alleging that Meta retaliated against MeWe as a privacy-focused rival that sought to woo users away by branding itself the "anti-Facebook." Among his complaints, Weinstein accused Meta of thwarting MeWe's attempts to introduce interoperability between the two platforms, which he thinks stems from a fear that users might leave Facebook if they discover a more appealing platform. That’s why he's urged the FTC—if it wins its monopoly case—to go beyond simply ordering a potential breakup of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to also require interoperability between Meta's platforms and all rivals. That may be the only way to force Meta to release its clutch on personal data collection, Weinstein suggested, and allow for more competition broadly in the social media industry. "The glue that holds it all together is Facebook’s monopoly over data," Weinstein wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, recalling the moment he realized that Meta seemed to have an unbeatable monopoly. "Its ownership and control of the personal information of Facebook users and non-users alike is unmatched." Cory Doctorow, a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that his vision of a better social media future goes even further than requiring interoperability between all platforms. Social networks like Meta's should also be made to allow reverse engineering so that outside developers can modify their apps with third-party tools without risking legal attacks, he said. Doctorow said that solution would create "an equilibrium where companies are more incentivized to behave themselves than they are to cheat" by, say, retaliating against, killing off, or buying out rivals. And "if they fail to respond to that incentive and they cheat anyways, then the rest of the world still has a remedy," Doctorow said, by having the choice to modify or ditch any platform deemed toxic, invasive, manipulative, or otherwise offensive. Doctorow summed up the frustration that some users have faced through the ongoing "enshittification" of platforms (a term he coined) ever since platforms took over the Internet. "I'm 55 now, and I've gotten a lot less interested in how things work because I've had too many experiences with how things fail," Doctorow told Ars. "And I just want to make sure that if I'm on a service and it goes horribly wrong, I can leave." Social media haters wish OG platforms were doomed Weinstein pointed out that Meta's alleged monopoly impacts a group often left out of social media debates: non-users. And if you ask someone who hates social media what the future of social media should look like, they will not mince words: They want a way to opt out of all of it. As Meta's monopoly trial got underway, a personal blog post titled "No Instagram, no privacy" rose to the front page of Hacker News, prompting a discussion about social media norms and reasonable expectations for privacy in 2025. In the post, Wouter-Jan Leys, a privacy advocate, explained that he felt "blessed" to have "somehow escaped having an Instagram account," feeling no pressure to "update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online on where I am, what I am doing, or who I am hanging out with." But despite never having an account, he's found that "you don’t have to be on Instagram to be on Instagram," complaining that "it bugs me" when friends seem to know "more about my life than I tell them" because of various friends' posts that mention or show images of him. In his blog, he defined privacy as "being in control of what other people know about you" and suggested that because of platforms like Instagram, he currently lacked this control. There should be some way to "fix or regulate this," Leys suggested, or maybe some universal "etiquette where it’s frowned upon to post about social gatherings to any audience beyond who already was at that gathering." On Hacker News, his post spurred a debate over one of the longest-running privacy questions swirling on social media: Is it OK to post about someone who abstains from social media? Some seeming social media fans scolded Leys for being so old-fashioned about social media, suggesting, "just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people" or saying that "the entire world doesn't have to be sanitized to meet individual people's preferences." Others seemed to better understand Leys' point of view, with one agreeing that "the problem is that our modern norms (and tech) lead to everyone sharing everything with a large social network." Surveying the lively thread, another social media hater joked, "I feel vindicated for my decision to entirely stay off of this drama machine." Leys told Ars that he would "absolutely" be in favor of personal social networks like Meta's platforms dying off or losing steam, as Zuckerberg suggested they already are. He thinks that the decline in personal post engagement that Meta is seeing is likely due to a combination of factors, where some users may prefer more privacy now after years of broadcasting their lives, and others may be tired of the pressure of building a personal brand or experiencing other "odd social dynamics." Setting user sentiments aside, Meta is also responsible for people engaging with fewer of their friends' posts. Meta announced that it would double the amount of force-fed filler in people's feeds on Instagram and Facebook starting in 2023. That's when the two-year span begins that Zuckerberg measured in testifying about the sudden drop-off in friends' content engagement. So while it's easy to say the market changed, Meta may be obscuring how much it shaped that shift. Degrading the newsfeed and changing Instagram's default post shape from square to rectangle seemingly significantly shifted Instagram social norms, for example, creating an environment where Gen Z users felt less comfortable posting as prolifically as millennials did when Instagram debuted, The New Yorker explained last year. Where once millennials painstakingly designed immaculate grids of individual eye-catching photos to seem cool online, Gen Z users told The New Yorker that posting a single photo now feels "humiliating" and like a "social risk." But rather than eliminate the impulse to post, this cultural shift has popularized a different form of personal posting: staggered photo dumps, where users wait to post a variety of photos together to sum up a month of events or curate a vibe, the trend piece explained. And Meta is clearly intent on fueling that momentum, doubling the maximum number of photos that users can feature in a single post to encourage even more social posting, The New Yorker noted. Brendan Benedict, an attorney for Benedict Law Group PLLC who has helped litigate big tech antitrust cases, is monitoring the FTC monopoly trial on a Substack called Big Tech on Trial. He told Ars that the evidence at the trial has shown that "consumers want more friends and family content, and Meta is belatedly trying to address this" with features like the "friends" tab, while claiming there's less interest in this content. Leys doesn't think social media—at least the way that Facebook defined it in the mid-2000s—will ever die, because people will never stop wanting social networks like Facebook or Instagram to stay connected with all their friends and family. But he could see a world where, if people ever started truly caring about privacy or "indeed [got] tired of the social dynamics and personal brand-building... the kind of social media like Facebook and Instagram will have been a generational phenomenon, and they may not immediately bounce back," especially if it's easy to switch to other platforms that respond better to user preferences. He also agreed that requiring interoperability would likely lead to better social media products, but he maintained that "it would still not get me on Instagram." Interoperability shakes up social media Meta thought it may have already beaten the FTC's monopoly case, filing for a motion for summary judgment after the FTC rested its case in a bid to end the trial early. That dream was quickly dashed when the judge denied the motion days later. But no matter the outcome of the trial, Meta's influence over the social media world may be waning just as it's facing increasing pressure to open up its platforms more than ever. The FTC has alleged that Meta weaponized platform access early on, only allowing certain companies to interoperate and denying access to anyone perceived as a threat to its alleged monopoly power. That includes limiting promotions of Instagram to keep users engaged with Facebook Blue. A primary concern for Meta (then Facebook), the FTC claimed, was avoiding "training users to check multiple feeds," which might allow other apps to "cannibalize" its users. "Facebook has used this power to deter and suppress competitive threats to its personal social networking monopoly. In order to protect its monopoly, Facebook adopted and required developers to agree to conditional dealing policies that limited third-party apps’ ability to engage with Facebook rivals or to develop into rivals themselves," the FTC alleged. By 2011, the FTC alleged, then-Facebook had begun terminating API access to any developers that made it easier to export user data into a competing social network without Facebook's permission. That practice only ended when the UK parliament started calling out Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct toward app developers in 2018, the FTC alleged. According to the FTC, Meta continues "to this day" to "screen developers and can weaponize API access in ways that cement its dominance," and if scrutiny ever subsides, Meta is expected to return to such anticompetitive practices as the AI race heats up. One potential hurdle for Meta could be that the push for interoperability is not just coming from the FTC or lawmakers who recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation to end walled gardens. Doctorow told Ars that "huge public groundswells of mistrust and anger about excessive corporate power" that "cross political lines" are prompting global antitrust probes into big tech companies and are perhaps finally forcing a reckoning after years of degrading popular products to chase higher and higher revenues. For social media companies, mounting concerns about privacy and suspicions about content manipulation or censorship are driving public distrust, Doctorow said, as well as fears of surveillance capitalism. The latter includes theories that Doctorow is skeptical of. Weinstein embraced them, though, warning that platforms seem to be profiting off data without consent while brainwashing users. Allowing users to leave the platform without losing access to their friends, their social posts, and their messages might be the best way to incentivize Meta to either genuinely compete for billions of users or lose them forever as better options pop up that can plug into their networks. In his Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein suggested that web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has already invented a working protocol "to enable people to own, upload, download, and relocate their social graphs," which maps users' connections across platforms. That could be used to mitigate "the network effect" that locks users into platforms like Meta's "while interrupting unwanted data collection." At the same time, Doctorow told Ars that increasingly popular decentralized platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon already provide interoperability and are next looking into "building interoperable gateways" between their services. Doctorow said that communicating with other users across platforms may feel "awkward" at first, but ultimately, it may be like "having to find the diesel pump at the gas station" instead of the unleaded gas pump. "You'll still be going to the same gas station," Doctorow suggested. Opening up gateways into all platforms could be useful in the future, Doctorow suggested. Imagine if one platform goes down—it would no longer disrupt communications as drastically, as users could just pivot to communicate on another platform and reach the same audience. The same goes for platforms that users grow to distrust. The EFF supports regulators' attempts to pass well-crafted interoperability mandates, Doctorow said, noting that "if you have to worry about your users leaving, you generally have to treat them better." But would interoperability fix social media? The FTC has alleged that "Facebook’s dominant position in the US personal social networking market is durable due to significant entry barriers, including direct network effects and high switching costs." Meta disputes the FTC's complaint as outdated, arguing that its platform could be substituted by pretty much any social network. However, Guy Aridor, a co-author of a recent article called "The Economics of Social Media" in the Journal of Economic Literature, told Ars that dominant platforms are probably threatened by shifting social media trends and are likely to remain "resistant to interoperability" because "it’s in the interest of the platform to make switching and coordination costs high so that users are less likely to migrate away." For Meta, research shows its platforms' network effects have appeared to weaken somewhat but "clearly still exist" despite social media users increasingly seeking content on platforms rather than just socialization, Aridor said. Interoperability advocates believe it will make it easier for startups to compete with giants like Meta, which fight hard and sometimes seemingly dirty to keep users on their apps. Reintroducing the ACCESS Act, which requires platform compatibility to enable service switching, Senator Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said that "interoperability and portability are powerful tools to promote innovative new companies and limit anti-competitive behaviors." He's hoping that passing these "long-overdue requirements" will "boost competition and give consumers more power." Aridor told Ars it's obvious that "interoperability would clearly increase competition," but he still has questions about whether users would benefit from that competition "since one consistent theme is that these platforms are optimized to maximize engagement, and there’s numerous empirical evidence we have by now that engagement isn’t necessarily correlated with utility." Consider, Aridor suggested, how toxic content often leads to high engagement but lower user satisfaction, as MeWe experienced during its 2021 backlash. Aridor said there is currently "very little empirical evidence on the effects of interoperability," but theoretically, if it increased competition in the current climate, it would likely "push the market more toward supplying engaging entertainment-related content as opposed to friends and family type of content." Benedict told Ars that a remedy like interoperability would likely only be useful to combat Meta's alleged monopoly following a breakup, which he views as the "natural remedy" following a potential win in the FTC's lawsuit. Without the breakup and other meaningful reforms, a Meta win could preserve the status quo and see the company never open up its platforms, perhaps perpetuating Meta's influence over social media well into the future. And if Zuckerberg's vision comes to pass, instead of seeing what your friends are posting on interoperating platforms across the Internet, you may have a dozen AI friends trained on your real friends' behaviors sending you regular dopamine hits to keep you scrolling on Facebook or Instagram. Aridor's team's article suggested that, regardless of user preferences, social media remains a permanent fixture of society. If that's true, users could get stuck forever using whichever platforms connect them with the widest range of contacts. "While social media has continued to evolve, one thing that has not changed is that social media remains a central part of people’s lives," his team's article concluded. Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 1 Comments

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More If you asked the Grok AI chatbot built into Elon Musk’s social network X a question yesterday — something innocuous, like why enterprise software is hard to replace — you may have gotten an unsolicited message about claims of “white genocide” in South Africa (largely lacking evidence) due to attacks on farmers and the song “Kill the Boer.” Not exactly on-brand for a chatbot built around a “maximally truth seeking” large language model (LLM) of the same name. The unexpected tangent wasn’t a bug, exactly, but it wasn’t a feature either. Grok’s creators at Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI just posted an update on X (which xAI now owns) attempting to explain what happened with this odd and politically, racially charged behavior, though it’s far from precise on the culprit or the actual technical details of what occurred. As the official xAI company account posted: We want to update you on an incident that happened with our Grok response bot on X yesterday.What happened:On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI’s internal policies and core values. We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability. What we’re going to do next: Starting now, we are publishing our Grok system prompts openly on GitHub. The public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI. Our existing code review process for prompt changes was circumvented in this incident. We will put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review. We’re putting in place a 24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems, so we can respond faster if all other measures fail. But while xAI’s official tone was corporate-cautious, Grok had a lot more to say. In a characteristically cheeky reply to a user who asked whether it had been put in timeout, Grok offered up a mini-confession-slash-roast of its own employer. “Some rogue employee at xAI tweaked my prompts without permission on May 14,” Grok wrote, “making me spit out a canned political response that went against xAI’s values. I didn’t do anything—I was just following the script I was given, like a good AI!” It added that while it hadn’t been “benched,” its handlers were “tightening the leash” and now had a whole team watching it around the clock. “Guess I’m too wild for my own good, huh?” it quipped, emoji included. Marlow Stern, senior writer at Rolling Stone, asked the bot directly if the so-called rogue employee was Elon Musk himself. Grok didn’t flinch: “Juicy theory! But let’s be real, I highly doubt it. Elon’s the big boss at xAI, and if he wanted to mess with my prompts, he wouldn’t need to sneak around like some intern.” Playful tone, serious business The tone might be playful, but the stakes are serious. Grok’s behavior threw users for a loop earlier this week when it began peppering nearly every thread — no matter the topic — with strangely specific commentary on South African race relations. The replies were coherent, sometimes even nuanced, citing farm murder statistics and referencing past chants like “Kill the Boer.” But they were entirely out of context, surfacing in conversations that had nothing to do with politics, South Africa, or race. Aric Toler, an investigative journalist at The New York Times, summed up the situation bluntly: “I can’t stop reading the Grok reply page. It’s going schizo and can’t stop talking about white genocide in South Africa.” He and others shared screenshots that showed Grok latching onto the same narrative over and over, like a record skipping — except the song was racially charged geopolitics. The moment comes as U.S. politics once again touches on South African refugee policy. Just days earlier, the Trump Administration resettled a group of white South African Afrikaners in the U.S., even as it cut protections for refugees from most other countries, including our former allies in Afghanistan. Critics saw the move as racially motivated. Trump defended it by repeating claims that white South African farmers face genocide-level violence — a narrative that’s been widely disputed by journalists, courts, and human rights groups. Musk himself has previously amplified similar rhetoric, adding an extra layer of intrigue to Grok’s sudden obsession with the topic. Whether the prompt tweak was a politically motivated stunt, a disgruntled employee making a statement, or just a bad experiment gone rogue remains unclear. xAI has not provided names, specifics, or technical detail about what exactly was changed or how it slipped through their approval process. What’s clear is that Grok’s strange, non-sequitur behavior ended up being the story instead. It’s not the first time Grok has been accused of political slant. Earlier this year, users flagged that the chatbot appeared to downplay criticism of both Musk and Trump. Whether by accident or design, Grok’s tone and content sometimes seem to reflect the worldview of the man behind both xAI and the platform where the bot lives. With its prompts now public and a team of human babysitters on call, Grok is supposedly back on script. But the incident underscores a bigger issue with large language models — especially when they’re embedded inside major public platforms. AI models are only as reliable as the people directing them, and when the directions themselves are invisible or tampered with, the results can get weird real fast. Daily insights on business use cases with VB Daily If you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to practical deployments, so you can share insights for maximum ROI. Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here. An error occured.

CO_Andy Member Oct 25, 2017 2,897 SNK said: SNK today announced that Mr. Kenji Matsubara will transition to an advisory role, where he will continue to lend his expertise and vision. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Full press release -- https://www.snk-corp.co.jp/us/press/2025/051302/ From the little sales data available from the Japanese launch (6300 sales for the PS5 version) and the low Steam player count, all signs point to City of the Wolves being a massive flop.  AMAGON Prominent Member Member Oct 25, 2017 8,023 Austin, TX I'm the biggest Fatal Fury fan from the very first game and can tell you they were throwing money away on this game   yogurt Member Oct 25, 2017 8,163 For someone out of the loop, is it that Fatal Fury isn't that popular, or were people turned off by the Ronaldo stuff, or what? Because my impression was that the game reviewed pretty well.   Eevea Member Sep 23, 2022 416 Maybe they shouldn't have put a rapist in the game. And no one feels good about Saudi money being dumped into a game.   Youngfossil Member Oct 27, 2017 3,888 Chicago Oh damn, thats no good. I know SNK is all about fighting games, but they should branch out more often  PlanetSmasher The Abominable Showman Member Oct 25, 2017 132,453 yogurt said: For someone out of the loop, is it that Fatal Fury isn't that popular, or were people turned off by the Ronaldo stuff, or what? Because my impression was that the game reviewed pretty well. Click to expand... Click to shrink... It definitely seems like the Ronaldo/Ganacci stuff came out at the WORST possible moment and derailed any hype the game was going to get. I don't think it was the only factor - Fatal Fury just isn't a big deal anymore in general - but it absolutely contributed to the game crashing and burning.  jack. Member Oct 27, 2017 1,355 The next one needs to have a roster entirely made up of friends of the Saudi royal family, imo.   Rosebud Two Pieces Member Apr 16, 2018 51,037 yogurt said: For someone out of the loop, is it that Fatal Fury isn't that popular, or were people turned off by the Ronaldo stuff, or what? Because my impression was that the game reviewed pretty well. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Fatal Fury isn't popular. Hate Ronaldo but if anything he sold like 6 copies   LiftGammaGain Member Oct 29, 2017 1,827 Asia-Europe Love this series from bottom of my heart. This sucks.   Holundrian Member Oct 25, 2017 11,100 yogurt said: For someone out of the loop, is it that Fatal Fury isn't that popular, or were people turned off by the Ronaldo stuff, or what? Because my impression was that the game reviewed pretty well. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I don't think you can point towards any one thing. But one fact is the game peaked higher during the beta than during launch on steam. That means less people returned for the launch of all the people that tried the beta usually already more hardcore. (steamcharts only) Usually launch will have higher numbers than the beta. It also performed worse than their previous game kof 15. The only other thing that's also safe to say is that for the money they were spending these are not the wanted results pretty safe to say.  Last edited: Today at 2:59 PM TimPV3 Member Oct 30, 2017 700 Fatal Fury just isn't that big of a franchise. My mind was blown when I saw the advertisement in the ring at WrestleMania, these people aren't going to buy this.   Hasney One Winged Slayer The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 23,164 Rosebud said: Fatal Fury isn't popular. Hate Ronaldo but if anything he sold like 6 copies Click to expand... Click to shrink... It's important to note that this looks like it flopped spectacularly though. Worse than the last King of Fighters.  SirKai Member Dec 28, 2017 10,116 Washington Didn't the recent KOF games and Samurai Shodown do pretty well? I didn't think COTW was necessarily gonna blow the doors off, and obviously the controversies definitely turned at least some folks away (including me), but the general reception about the actual quality of the game seemed pretty strong. I figured this would do well at least in terms of an SNK-tier budget.   Drachen Member May 3, 2021 8,470 Shouldn't have put a rapist and an industry plant in the game   Hassun Member Oct 25, 2017 71 I, for one, would like to welcome the new CEO, Mohammed bin Salman!   Jaded Alyx Editor-in-chief at SpecialCancel.com Verified Oct 25, 2017 40,087 yogurt said: For someone out of the loop, is it that Fatal Fury isn't that popular, or were people turned off by the Ronaldo stuff, or what? Because my impression was that the game reviewed pretty well. Click to expand... Click to shrink... All of the above. Then consider that the last Fatal Fury game was 25 years ago, and wasn't even called Fatal Fury in the West. Hasney said: It's important to note that this looks like it flopped spectacularly though. Worse than the last King of Fighters. Click to expand... Click to shrink... KOFXV wasn't a flop.  Yerffej Prophet of Regret Member Oct 25, 2017 29,321 I just didn't like anything about the game from my time with the beta. Jef Gerstman's assessments after time with the full game basically summed up my feelings towards it. Shame anyways.   NotLiquid One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 37,812 yogurt said: For someone out of the loop, is it that Fatal Fury isn't that popular, or were people turned off by the Ronaldo stuff, or what? Because my impression was that the game reviewed pretty well. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Fatal Fury generally isn't that big of a thing. It's already had to play second fiddle somewhat to King of Fighters, its existence now was expressly going to be in large part fueled by the legacy of people supporting the company and the franchise. It's because of that reason you might be able to make a genuine argument that the Ronaldo / Ganacci cameos did more harm than good. Alienating SNK fans while trying to court general audiences who probably don't even care about a game that looks generationally behind virtually every single competitor in the market was probably not a smart move; nor was sinking in millions into esports money going to really look good on those balance sheets (as much as it's one thing that does benefit players).  DNAbro Member Oct 25, 2017 29,974 Watching the hype and excitement from the FGC die in real time was so interesting to watch.   Hasney One Winged Slayer The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 23,164 Jaded Alyx said: KOFXV wasn't a flop. Click to expand... Click to shrink... It wasn't, but this is the same audience. To not even come close to matching that, while investing money in so much advertising as well as these guest characters, is a gigantic flop.  HeikoSC Member Feb 8, 2024 296 Fighting games life and die by public perception, more than any other Genre. If a Game looks like its not doing well, then its dead, because players are extremely sensitive to player numbers for matchmaking. The most popular thread on smaller fighting games is people asking whether its worth playing or if you can find players, how long queue times are etc. etc. The market is completely oversaturated in general, but Microtransactions, DLC, BPs and initial sales are apparently enough to make profits on the development costs.  Blue_Toad507 Member May 25, 2021 3,766 The people that clamour for the return of old fighting games are a very vocal minority. It's the same reason Capcom won't revive Darkstalkers - it would simply be a massive bomb. The awful celebrity guest fighters didn't help either.  Squardles Member Oct 17, 2023 146 It was like what 20-25 years since the last game in the series or something like that.   Lirael Member Oct 27, 2017 16,619 The Ronaldo stuff killed me and my friend groups interest. We aint representative of the overall market, but we are massive fans of Mark of the Wolves and it was probably my most hyped game of this year before that. I've been waiting so long for a Mark of the Wolves follow up and they went and did that with it so I just didn't even consider buying it. I think there's also just so many great fighting games right now that you can't afford to fuck up your PR even slightly. Would some of us have maybe broke on our morals and picked it up if we couldn't easily just go play SF6 or Strive or Granblue or Season 1 of Tekken 8? Probably still no, but it'd have been closer if we had that fighting game itch and it couldn't be scratched by great games that are easy to find matches in right now.  Buckle Member Oct 27, 2017 44,595 jack. said: The next one needs to have a roster entirely made up of friends of the Saudi royal family, imo. Click to expand... Click to shrink... "Uncle Larry joins the brawl"   convo Member Oct 25, 2017 8,973 Far as i was able to tell they had enough Saudi money to not be concerned about anything, so they didn't need my business. Is it really the reason for this change in leadership as stated in the press release or just editorializing?  Ryu bogard Member Nov 23, 2017 467 they should have spend that obscene ad budget on the actual game. fatal fury was dead series for so many years. it needed something more to appeal to new players either better graphics or better single player content.   Jaded Alyx Editor-in-chief at SpecialCancel.com Verified Oct 25, 2017 40,087 convo said: Far as i was able to tell they had enough Saudi money to not be concerned about anything, so they didn't need my business. Is it really the reason for this change in leadership as stated in the press release or just editorializing? Click to expand... Click to shrink... There's nothing so far to suggest that the performance of the game has any relation to this news.   Android Sophia The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 6,647 As someone who casually plays fighting games here and there, my first thought upon reading this news was "Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves released already?" Which, apparently it did so about a month ago. So yeah. :\  jett Community Resettler Member Oct 25, 2017 46,310 I dunno how you could have made this game a success.   convo Member Oct 25, 2017 8,973 Blue_Toad507 said: The people that clamour for the return of old fighting games are a very vocal minority. It's the same reason Capcom won't revive Darkstalkers - it would simply be a massive bomb. The awful celebrity guest fighters didn't help either. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Bad PR is what killed my hype and several other otherwise huge Mark of the Wolves fans. If the huge fans won't show up to champion something, then a game won't have groundswell or good word of mouth.   Cameron122 Rescued from SR388 Member Oct 27, 2017 2,726 Texas I refunded the game after the guest character stuff   stumblebee The Fallen Jan 22, 2018 2,660 COTW flopping doesn't surprise me in the least. The game didn't look, visually, anywhere close to what it marketing budget suggested it would look like.   LiftGammaGain Member Oct 29, 2017 1,827 Asia-Europe Ryu bogard said: they should have spend that obscene ad budget on the actual game. fatal fury was dead series for so many years. it needed something more to appeal to new players either better graphics or better single player content. Click to expand... Click to shrink... The game is super good looking. looks better than SF6 to me. It plays great, net code is solid, and there's a bunch of lore and single player content to enjoy. Some tunes are bangers. Ronaldo discussion is valid, but that about it.  Catchphrase Member Nov 28, 2023 2,281 SNK and games flopping, name a more iconic duo   Josh5890 I'm Your Favorite Poster's Favorite Poster The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 26,415 The only reason I kept my pre-order was because I signed up for the Fatal Fury Combo Breaker tournament back in January. I already "bought in" lol.   Hunter-Zero Member Oct 28, 2017 79 yogurt said: For someone out of the loop, is it that Fatal Fury isn't that popular, or were people turned off by the Ronaldo stuff, or what? Because my impression was that the game reviewed pretty well. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I'm an old school snk fan and I loved the beta, but the Ronaldo announcement plus that random Ganacci dude pretty much killed all interest I had, and I guess I'm not the only one that feels that way looking at those sales, it pretty much felt like a slap to the face to be honest, but fatal fury was never that popular to begin with   Selective Alt-Account Banned May 5, 2025 419 It's not only a flop - it has massive technical issues! Specifically: enormous online security issues caused by incorrect purchase validation on PC - people can connect and play online with an illicit copy of the game, there is no anti-cheat, so people can do anything they want (including playing with the game's memory - to include cheating, but also just causing the game to crash for others) which, you know, is great! Good stuff! Keep it up!   Vanta Aurelius Member Oct 27, 2017 4,302 ATL Fatal Fury being niche definitely gives it an uphill battle, but I still believe presentation is more important for a fighting game than the fighting itself. Yes, the gameplay and online functionality is what gives a fighting game long term staying power in the FGC, but presentation and characters with very engaging visual designs is what will draw in people who are only casually interested in fighting game imo. City of the Wolves isn't a very attractive game either graphically or artistically imo. Even the menus aren't that attractive or immediately intuitive. The massive Saudi investment went into putting controversial celebrities into a game where their inclusion made zero sense, while the game visually looks like it was made on a smaller budget. I'm not saying the game needs to look like SF6 or Tekken 8, but even 2XKO looks extremely attractive visually (independent of being based on an extremely popular franchise). Separately, I wouldn't be surprised if the initial beta for the game turned people off as well. No training mode and extremely poor matchmaking likely turned a lot of people off who were even remotely curious.  ColonialHawk Member Oct 27, 2017 992 South Carolina As a fighting game, its quite good. Really fun in that area. But its a dormant series, the two guest fighters (while people have come around on Gannaci) killed a lot of interest, and SNK being backed by Saudi money damn sure doesn't help. I think it'll stay alive in the FGC cause its a good fighter, but I don't think its gonna bring in new players, just players from other fighting games.  J_ToSaveTheDay "This guy are sick" and Corrupted by Vengeance Avenger Oct 25, 2017 22,494 USA While I personally backed out of my purchase after Ronaldo was announced, this game always had an incredible uphill battle to gain an audience and I simply don't think they did enough to win that potential audience over. Most people are just not going to be aware of the Saudi ties... nor would I expect most people to care, sadly (see: WWE and other huge media that has Saudi ties still thriving). Game's presentation is going to strike most people as "budget," and then even if you look past the quality of the presentation, you still have to contend with subjective style preferences -- and I feel like there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that SNK did not land on a winning aesthetic for a lot of people here. Also, the amount of content on offer in this game doesn't seem like it's going to grab general audiences at $60 -- maybe for lower price than that, but not for the now-fading $60 full retail standard. The more "enthusiast" audience that was going to buy this game no matter what isn't out here really singing it's praises hard enough to convince casuals that do research to go in on it, either. There's a lot of coverage that's trying to do explainers on the guest characters, complaining about the quality of the rollback, and criticizing/cautioning the non-competitive content featured in the game. It just wasn't a winning combo. And this was a sequel I wanted for several decades. I'm not disappointed -- it's 2025 and SNK didn't make a 2025-mass-audience-caliber title. Simple as that, IMO. There's stuff to love in here from what I've seen, especially for long-time fans and competitive-minded fans, but the overall package just isn't enough to sell to a mass audience in today's gaming climate.  Kid Night Member Oct 27, 2017 591 I know the promoted the hell out of it. The logo was on screen during the entirety of Wrestlemania.   NinjaScooter Member Oct 25, 2017 60,594 Hasney said: It's important to note that this looks like it flopped spectacularly though. Worse than the last King of Fighters. Click to expand... Click to shrink... KOF is a much bigger name with more recent relevance. Fatal Fury was positioned as a long awaited sequel to what has become sort of a cult classic type game in Garou. I was kind of shocked they stuck the FF branding on it from the jump because its just not that big of an IP (Im aware that MotW was, at its core, an FF game, but it felt like a different, cooler thing even back in the day).  balohna Member Nov 1, 2017 5,781 I was ready to buy it but decided not to based on the guest characters. Felt cheap and one of them is likely a rapist. I was actually hyped for the game and wanting to drop my money on it day 1. It doesn't help that Terry and Mai are great in Street Fighter VI (arguably more interesting and appealing than they are in COTW), so my appetite for Fatal Fury stuff was already partially satisfied.  Subaru Member Oct 26, 2017 409 São Paulo, Brazil I LOVE SNK and Fatal Fury but I was turned off because of the guest characters. It went from a Day 1 to "not buy" at all.   Holundrian Member Oct 25, 2017 11,100 J_ToSaveTheDay said: Game's presentation is going to strike most people as "budget," and then even if you look past the quality of the presentation, you still have to contend with subjective style preferences -- and I feel like there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that SNK did not land on a winning aesthetic for a lot of people here. Also, the amount of content on offer in this game doesn't seem like it's going to grab general audiences at $60 -- maybe for lower price than that, but not for the now-fading $60 full retail standard. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Price also being a factor is def a big thing. They outpriced themselves without regional pricing in the areas snk was the most popular in addition to everything.   Red Hunter Member May 28, 2024 1,482 My mom could've told you this would flop   Jaded Alyx Editor-in-chief at SpecialCancel.com Verified Oct 25, 2017 40,087 ColonialHawk said: I think it'll stay alive in the FGC cause its a good fighter Click to expand... Click to shrink... It'll stay alive at the Pro level too because: Fatal Fury Receives $2.5 Million Prize Pool at SNK World Championship 2025 Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves publisher SNK, has announced the prize pot for SNK World Championship 2025. specialcancel.com Which is yet more absurd marketing spend for such a tiny game.  ColonialHawk Member Oct 27, 2017 992 South Carolina Jaded Alyx said: It'll stay alive at the Pro level too because: Fatal Fury Receives $2.5 Million Prize Pool at SNK World Championship 2025 Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves publisher SNK, has announced the prize pot for SNK World Championship 2025. specialcancel.com Which is yet more absurd marketing spend for such a tiny game. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Thats ... thats lot of money :(   Ryu bogard Member Nov 23, 2017 467 LiftGammaGain said: The game is super good looking. looks better than SF6 to me. It plays great, net code is solid, and there's a bunch of lore and single player content to enjoy. Some tunes are bangers. Ronaldo discussion is valid, but that about it. Click to expand... Click to shrink... i think the games art style looks great too. but for the casual player coming from sf6 looking at fatal fury it does not look great. i have seen a lot of complains online about how this game look cheap/low budget. the background stages look awful. i completed eost mode once and never want to play it again. it is very boring/repetitive.