“The fear is those at the top have seen how profitable this is working at 150, 200 percent and wonder why we should ever slow down.”

– An anonymous Rockstar developer weighs in on the company’s crunch culture

Rockstar Games has long had a troubled relationship with crunch, and concerns over working conditions at the game developer have re-emerged just as the company’s latest game, Red Dead Redemption 2, hits store shelves.

Following criticisms over studio co-founder Dan Houser’s “100-hour weeks” comment, several developers have spoken anonymously to publications like Kotaku to share their crunch and overtime experiences without fear of professional repercussion. While those experiences vary, many of the quotes paint a troubling picture.

A recent story from Eurogamer now backs up much of what was said in that initial Kotaku story and is worth a read for the added perspective it brings to the issue of overtime, mandatory or voluntary, at Rockstar Games.

Devs at Rockstar’s UK-based QA studio Rockstar Lincoln tell Eurogamer of mandatory six-day work weeks and waivers signed to opt out of a UK employment law that would otherwise prevent night shift workers from working more than 8 hours during a single 24-hour span. As of last Friday, seemingly following the public criticism over persistent crunch, employees at that studio were told all overtime was now voluntary, but some speaking to the site say that the terminology is all that’s changed. 

“Naturally it’s a worry that people not working overtime now, even when it is ‘voluntary’, will get a black mark against their name,” said one developer, and many—but not all—of the others interviewed echo that sentiment. 

The full article on Eurogamer has more stories that detail working habits at Rockstar Games from devs who both worked on older titles to those that created the company’s most recent release Red Dead Redemption 2. 

Sometimes a well-intended feature can become more of a liability in the wrong hands. A current trend in SoulCalibur VI’s online play is a perfect example of that.

SoulCalibur VI’s character creation feature offers creative players a significant amount of customization options that have been used to re-create pop culture figures or characters from other games. But those same features are being exploited by some to gain an unfair advantage in online play thanks to a combination of external cheat software and a lack of anti-cheat in the game protections that can block it. 

On first glance, the exploit itself is fairly entertaining, but the result is an unfortunately comedic example of a developer’s well-intentioned feature being used in an unexpected way to get a leg-up in a competitive game mode.

In short, players are placing objects like cubes or apples on their custom character, then enlarging those objects as much as possible until the object completely covers the character itself, with, according to players on Twitter, the assistance of external cheat software not blocked by the game. It makes for a hilarious battle from the outside, but the object itself actually serves to obscure the animations fighting game players rely on to quickly read and react to an opponent’s attacks during a match. Even worse, SoulCalibur VI players have spotted giant colorful cubes and massive battling apples in the more competitive ranked mode as well.

#SoulCalibur6 Hey, I don’t think CaS should be playable in ranked mode, it changes the hitboxes and hurtboxes of the opponents character too much

Others: “No, it’s not that bad”

*Meanwhile in ranked* pic.twitter.com/VZ0DYhq0iO

— Kuma (@_kumaking) October 24, 2018

We know you’re busy and might miss out on all the exciting things we’re talking about on Xbox Wire every week. If you’ve got a few minutes, we can help remedy that. We’ve pared down the past week’s news into one easy-to-digest article for all things Xbox! Or, if you’d rather watch than read, you can feast your eyes on our weekly video show above. Be sure to come back every Friday to find out what’s happening This Week on Xbox!

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Hera, Queen of the Gods, Makes Her Royal Entrance to Smite
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Buy a Double Chalupa Box for a Chance to Win a Limited-Edition Xbox
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Learn About the Inspiration Behind The Jackbox Party Pack 5
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Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption Available Today on Xbox One and Xbox Game Pass
We started working on Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption because we wanted to make something for ourselves. We’d worked for bigger studios for years and with the rise of indie games around the world, we decided that we wanted to join the party and make our own indie game. Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption came about… Read more

Watch the Red Dead Redemption 2 Launch Trailer
America, 1899. The end of the Wild West era has begun. After a robbery goes badly wrong in the western town of Blackwater, Arthur Morgan and the Van der Linde gang are forced to flee. With federal agents and the best bounty hunters in the nation massing on their heels, the gang must rob, steal and fight their way across… Read more

Classic Valve Titles Now in Enhanced Xbox 360 Backward Compatibility Collection
The Backward Compatibility program has quickly become a hallmark feature of the Xbox family, and we love seeing people discover (or rediscover!) games they may have missed the first time around. Gamers have played over 1 billion hours of Xbox 360 and Original Xbox games on Xbox One – and we think our new release… Read more

Explore a Haunted Amusement Park in Roblox’s Hallow’s Eve Event on Xbox One
Roblox’s annual Hallow’s Eve event has officially begun on Xbox One. Play millions of free, user-created games today by downloading Roblox and start earning limited-time Halloween-themed rewards! Discover What Lurks in Sinister Swamp Underneath the ghostly glimmer of a full moon, the pale visage of a forgotten amusement… Read more

Starter Tips for SoulCalibur VI, Available Now on Xbox One
Welcome back to the Stage of History and prepare to take part in a story of souls and swords! SoulCalibur VI stands as the standard of 3-D weapon-based fighting and continues its long-standing tradition of iconic characters, including new ones, such as Geralt of Rivia as a special guest character. The formidable protagonist from The Witcher series… Read more

A Guide to Weapon Specializations in Battlefield V
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Next Week on Xbox: New Games for October 23 – 26
Welcome to Next Week on Xbox, where we cover all the new games coming soon to Xbox One! Every week the team at Xbox aims to deliver quality gaming content for you to enjoy on your favorite gaming console. To find out what’s coming soon to Xbox One, read on below and click on each of the game profiles for pre-order details (dates are subject to… Read more

Watch the Forza Racing World Championship 2018 – Oct. 20 & 21
This Saturday Oct. 20 and Sunday Oct. 21, the Forza Racing Championship (ForzaRC) 2018 season races to the finish line with its final and most exciting event of the year – the Forza Racing World Championship (ForzaRWC) 2018. After months of competition, the top 24 global drivers will take the stage at Gfinity Esports Arena…. Read more

Creating Rhyme Without Reason in Kingdom Come: Deliverance DLC Amorous Adventures
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Stardew Valley, the Herculean effort from sole designer Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone, is massively popular across every platform it’s been ported to – and that’s practically everything, including PS Vita and Nintendo Switch. Now you can cross iOS (with Android coming soon) off the list at long last, with the long-awaited mobile version of the indie farming sim/role-playing game finally out on the market. It’s available now for just about anyone who wants to carve out some time to try the accessible yet challenging sim game, and its mobile iteration is its most ambitious yet. It succeeds at making farming and everything that goes with it a fun and intriguing adventure for just about everyone, too, albeit with a few small missteps that come with the mobile territory.

The game invites you to take on the mammoth responsibility of caring for your late grandfather’s farm, which is a sizable plot of land that lays in disrepair. It’s your job to build up your plot of land to its former glory while getting on with the other citizens of Pelican Town, where the game all goes down. This includes growing crops, raising livestock, and performing a variety of important activities that all take place in day-to-day farming. Much like the very similar Harvest Moon series, you’ve got to take care of everything on your own, whether that means clearing your farming area of bushes and rocks to make space for crops, watering them, harvesting them, and collecting supplies to keep things running smoothly.

Planting crops and harvesting them means you’ll turn a profit, of course, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Crafting, raising livestock, and interacting with the NPCs around you play large roles in the game as well. There’s always something new to do, whether you’re getting to know the abundance of NPCs out in the world, learning to fish and selling off your hard-fought spoils, or heading into the mines to become a seasoned member of the Adventurer’s Guild. There really feels as though there’s no end to what you can accomplish, no matter if you’re just starting out or heading back in for round two, three, or four – no shame!

But despite all of these things being available for you at any given time, there’s no real push to try and make you concentrate on one thing out of it all. You can explore as you wish, at your own leisurely pace, whether you spend an entire day weeding your fledgling farmland or meet up with the locals before going to your in-game bed to advance time to the next day. If there’s a special someone you enjoy speaking to and getting to know, there’s even a chance you might marry them one day, which is a delight in and of itself.

There’s always something more to do around the corner, and the game reminds you of this at every turn. But it never forces you into completing objectives if you don’t want to. It continually introduces new optional quests to take on as it gently pushes you to dig deeper into the systems it’s already lavished you with. It’s difficult to believe all this content is the work of one man, as it’s polished and in fine form, and all here laid out for you to enjoy once more, even if you’ve clocked an ungodly number of hours on another platform.

Mechanically, Stardew Valley‘s iOS version is just as sound as ever. It’s the same fantastic, content-rich game you’ve likely played on just about every other platform. Unfortunately, the mobile version makes a few sacrifices to make it accessible for players on the go. You can tap on the screen to make your character travel to a certain point and tap and drag. It works well enough, but it can be frustrating when navigating tight quarters such as your farmland, which is lined with rocks and other obstacles at the beginning of the game.

What’s more, your tool line-up is set on the left side of the screen in the vertical position, which makes tapping or dragging your character to travel in that direction a pain when you’re forever accidentally hitting a tool instead of heading to the next screen. This is an issue those who play on other platforms won’t run into and isn’t a huge problem, but it’s massively frustrating sometime when you keep having to switch from tool to tool instead of moving to the next screen. Combat controls don’t get any better, but it’s serviceable. Again, these are minor problems in the grand scheme of things (such as the whole of Stardew Valley being available here on mobile), but it’s also enough to drive one to hope for MFi controller support in the future.

Additionally, there’s no multiplayer option available, though it’s not exactly the version I’d recommend playing with others on – it’s still something players would like to see eventually, though, myself included.

Stardew Valley on iOS is another excellent version of the popular farming title, and while it has its own platform-related peculiarities, it’s still very much the same fantastic product, with everything you love about the other versions packed in here. It’s a great and affordable way to experience the full game if you haven’t already, and while you might get a touch annoyed with its mobile-centric control scheme, it’ll still suck you in immediately for the long haul – better settle in.

Many different customers across industries want to have insights into the emotional moments that appear in different parts of their media content. For broadcasters, this can help create more impactful promotion clips and drive viewers to their content; in the sales industry it can be super useful for analyzing sales calls and improve convergence; in advertising it can help identify the best moment to pop up an ad, and the list goes on and on. To that end, we are excited to share Video Indexer’s (VI) new machine learning model that mimics humans’ behavior to detect four cross-cultural emotional states in videos: anger, fear, joy, and sadness.

Endowing machines with cognitive abilities to recognize and interpret human emotions is a challenging task due to their complexity. As humans, we use multiple mediums to analyze emotions. These include facial expressions, voice tonality, and speech content. Eventually, the determination of a specific emotion is a result of a combination of these three modalities to varying degrees.

While traditional sentiment analysis models detect the polarity of content – for example, positive or negative – our new model aims to provide a finer granularity analysis. For example, given a moment with negative sentiment, the new model determines whether the underlying emotion is fear, sadness, or anger. The following figure illustrates VI’s emotion analysis of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s speech on the importance of education. At the very beginning of his speech, a sad moment was detected.

All the detected emotions and their specific appearances along the video are enumerated in the video index JSON as follows:

Cross-channel emotion detection in VI

The new functionality utilizes deep learning to detect emotional moments in media assets based on speech content and voice tonality. VI detects emotions by capturing semantic properties of the speech content. However, semantic properties of single words are not enough, so the underlying syntax is also analyzed because the same words in a different order can induce different emotions.

VI leverages the context of the speech content to infer the dominant emotion. For example, the sentence “… the car was coming at me and accelerating at a very fast speed …” has no negative words, but VI can still detect fear as the underlying emotion.

VI analyzes the vocal tonality of speakers as well. It automatically detects segments with voice activity and fuses the affective information contained within with the speech content component.

With the new emotion detection capability in VI that relies on speech content and voice tonality, you are able to become more insightful about the content of your videos by leveraging them for marketing, customer care, and sales purposes.

For more information, visit VI’s portal or the VI developer portal, and try this new capability for free. You can also browse videos indexed as to emotional content: sample 1, sample 2, and sample 3.  

Have questions or feedback? We would love to hear from you!

Use our UserVoice to help us prioritize features, or email VISupport@Microsoft.com with any questions.