#406: Distressed leather

So long then, Jensen Huang. You will be remembered as the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, turning a little-known maker of graphics cards into the most valuable company in the world; as the ultimate poster-boy for generative AI, with all that implies; and finally as the man who answered, once and for all, AI’s defining question: how many pokes does it take to pop a bubble?

The answer, at the time of writing, is three, though given the exponential rate at which Huang’s extramarital dalliances are being revealed — and following the predicted growth curves of which he and his AI-boosting colleagues are so proud — we should probably expect there to be a few dozen of them by the end of the weekend. The conquest, if we can call it that, that set this all in motion was one Alice Huang, an executive at a Singapore-based AI firm with a reported side hustle in China’s intelligence service. But Jensen’s also been at the company ink, with one direct report and another non-executive employee also finding out just how deep his love of leather runs. More, one imagines, will follow, even though Huang has already resigned, Nvidia’s CFO Colette Kress put in temporary charge while the board sets about finding a successor.

Obviously everything about this is objectively hilarious. We have all wondered for years what it would take to pop the AI bubble, what flavour of disaster would belatedly bring down what to any sane observer has always looked like a house of cards. Government regulation? A botched IPO? The collapse of a major corporate player? Good old enshittification? Nope, just an executive who couldn’t keep it in his pants. It is hilarious to imagine the reaction of Huang’s chinless, sexless billionaire peers, agog at the realisation that one of their tribe had been gettin’ some all this time, and he didn’t even have to concoct some paranoid white-supremacist fantasy about a population crisis or looming civil war to justify it. Huang’s proximity to the Trump administration — reports this morning suggest commerce secretary Howard Lutnick may be about to lose his job over it — is similarly funny, and helpfully protracts the schadenfreude of the midterms. It is just brilliant from top to bottom, this thing, even with an awkward eye on the damage Huang’s rapacious libido has caused this week to our savings, investments and retirement plans. Worth every penny imo, though it's easy for me to say that — I write for a living, and therefore have no money.

It is also quite worrying, of course. While the question around AI has always been when and how the bubble would burst, for those of us in Gameland the most pressing question has always been for how long Nvidia was going to stick around when there was so much money on offer elsewhere. Throughout its ascent to the top of the corporate pile it has stayed true to its roots. It has continued to make new GPUs for PCs, and support them with regular driver updates. Along the way it has invented new software trickery that not only boosts the apparent power of the latest cards on the market, but also extends the lifetime of legacy hardware with techniques like DLSS and Frame Generation. How much of that effort and support came from the top — from a man who’d been there since the beginning, understood the role GPUs had played in the company's success, and had an emotional attachment to graphics technology and the gaming business more broadly? What happens to that now he’s gone?

Nvidia certainly wouldn’t be the first to turn its back on PC gaming. Late last year Micron announced that it was sending its RAM brand Crucial to a nice farm in the countryside “in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.” Just last week Lisa Su, CEO of chipmaker AMD — Nvidia’s only real rival in the PC graphics space, and a more than worthy competitor to Intel in the CPU department — said her firm was now a “data-centre-first company”. (Su, incidentally, is Huang’s cousin, and reportedly a frontrunner for his old job.) What happens to PC gaming when Nvidia follows the crowd, and the money, out the door?

I suppose all of this is moot to an extent. Nvidia’s next batch of graphics cards has already been delayed to allow it to focus its efforts on the AI bubbleboom. When they eventually arrive hardly any of us will be able to afford them, and the few that can will be beaten to the punch by scalpers. We end this week much as we started it, hunkering down with our precious hardware while the AI craze blows through, praying nothing breaks or needs upgrading before the bubble bursts and prices revert to something approaching normality. At least, for once, we got a few laughs out of it along the way.

MORE!

• Sony has cancelled Fairgames, the execrably titled live-service nonsense-thing from Jade Raymond’s Haven. (Raymond left in May 2025, continuing her remarkable streak of building lavish new studios for big companies, then getting out before it all goes to pot. Respect it tbh.) And with that, Sony’s live-service dream is pretty much dead. All that money, effort and time, and what did we get out of it? Helldivers 2, Marathon and about three-and-a-half minutes of Concord. Somehow, Hermen Hulst continues to steal a living.
• And yet... PS5 just crossed 100m sales, so I guess nothing matters anymore and Hulst should get a payrise or something? Carry on.
• Australian studio House House caused quite the stir, and a typically miserable wave of The Discourse, this week after admitting it had used generative AI to fix a troublesome bug in the final stretch of development on its widely admired co-op hike-em-up Big Walk. I don’t really know where I stand on this, for what it’s worth, which probably means I don’t care that much. More interesting, I reckon, is the schism it’s caused among IGF judges, with a cabal of indie luminaries issuing a statement proclaiming genAI usage, of any kind, a voting red line. Good on them for taking a stand but I’m mildly stunned, and honestly quite disappointed, that the IGF organisers didn’t see something like this coming, and already have a policy in place. Bet they will next year, though. I imagine this has been quite embarrassing.
• A gang of laid-off Id Software developers have unveiled their new studio, Hidden Horses. Best of luck, like, but I am destined to forever confuse this with strategy-game publisher Hooded Horse, which is also a hidden horse by virtue of the whole hood thing, but obviously it’s only one horse and the new one is horses plural and look, sorry, you can’t do this to me, I hate it. The studio will be funding its first project, a singleplayer FPS named Danger Pay, on Kickstarter.
• The relative handful of remaining staff at Id Software, meanwhile, are working on a DLC expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages. The news was, rather confusingly, announced in a post on Bethesda’s website that’s written more like a games-media news story than a press release, with a quote attributed to Asha Sharma. The Xbox boss also used this rare moment in the spotlight (cough) to announce that Wolfenstein 3 is in development at MachineGames.
• Marvel 1943: Rise Of Hydra hasn’t been cancelled, staff have been reassured, after rumours to the contrary briefly swirled on various social-media hellscapes. I say ‘reassured’; publisher Skydance Games is in the midst of a rather messy reorg following its parent company’s $110bn merger with Warner Bros, so blood sacrifices seem inevitable at some point.
• Fredrik Wester has stepped down as CEO of Paradox Interactive after a combined decade and a half in the big chair (he also stepped aside in 2018, before being roped back in three years later). Paradox has been having a rather rum time of it of late, from Cities Skylines 2’s messy launch to the much-delayed wet fart that was Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2, so perhaps it’s for the best. His former deputy, Mattias Lilja, will replace him.
• If, like me, you crave misery and fury on a Friday, you’re in luck: here’s this year’s GDC State Of The Game Industry report. Layoffs! AI usage! Crunch! It’s got the lot, and more besides. I need a lie down.
• I quite like Xbox Playback, which is a sort of Spotify Wrapped thing that spans Xbox’s entire 25 years in business. Pretty cool to see it all laid out like this. I’ve seen some grumbling here and there about how accurate it is but hey, could be worse. I was half expecting Asha Sharma to turn up on my doorstep to tell me I’d played 696 hours of Super Street Fighter IV.

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