Rolling across rugged alien wilds, your circular base in The Alters offers a twinkling haven from the whipping winds and nauseating radiation. At least, that’s how it feels for the first few hours. Gradually, as the in-game days stack up, my view of the vessel changes: protagonist Jan Dolski seems to be stuck on what is essentially a very expensive, very large hamster wheel, eking out an existence within modular rooms that look a lot like shipping containers. For the corporation funding this venture, Ally Corp (pah!), Jan and his crewmates are just like the resources they’re seeking to extract: commodities.
The hamster wheel stylings of your ship evoke the visual storytelling of filmmaker Bong Joon-ho: the speeding train in Snowpiercer, or the repetitive clone deaths of Mickey 17, each distilling class and the flow of capital into raw images. This should tell you something about how ambitious and frequently weird this sci-fi game is. In part, The Alters is a base-building survival experience of the kind that developer 11 Bit Studios received plaudits for with the Frostpunk series.
But there’s a wrinkle: in The Alters, you’re directing Jan about the ship, getting him to interact with menus rather than seeing everything from the omniscient top-down perspective. Beyond your base walls, the game snaps into a third-person action-exploration mode as you comb the ravishing extraterrestrial planet for resources, and maybe even the key to life itself.
Twenty minutes in, the game evokes another modern great, Hideo Kojima, when you build the most important — and weirdest — room in the whole game: the Womb. Using a shimmering, highly volatile substance called Rapidium, Jan, the sole surviving member of the original crew, is able to replicate himself thanks to a scientific breakthrough involving the multiple universes theory. It sounds heady but is straightforward enough in practice: Jan punches the “alter” that he wants to create into a quantum computer and out pops an all-new, yet strangely familiar, assembly of flesh and bones. There is Jan Botanist, Jan Miner, Jan Doctor, and more. Each represents a fork in the space-time continuum of the original Jan’s life. Conveniently, each is also suited to a particular task on the massive rotating mining vessel.
The game quickly settles into the min-maxing groove typical of survival games. Such are the demands of the economy on default difficulty, it feels as if you need to optimize every single second of the game’s 24-hour day-and-night cycle. Jan Botanist gets to work making veggies in the garden, then rustles up nourishing meals in the kitchen. Jan Refiner processes the raw materials; Jan Scientist researches new technologies in his lab. The day’s labor consumes your attention with its pleasing machinic rhythm. Outside, 11 Bit flexes its art chops with considerable verve. Gnarled, tree-like rock formations curl across the arid terrain; matter swirls within shimmering physics-defying anomalies; a vast cosmic sea churns menacingly.
Everything is running smoothly until — oh no! — it’s not. The crew are peeved, overworked, and understandably terrified. So you build a gym, social room, and, in true corpo-hell style, a contemplation room. Get the exercise endorphins flowing, kick back and watch a movie (which are live-action shorts by comedy sketch duo Chris & Jack), or play a few rounds of beer pong. Your crew’s anxiety fades; their designs on rebellion dissipate.
Fittingly, for a game that can be read as an exploration of dissociative identity disorder, The Alters has its own split personality: the actual work of maintaining your base and the interactions that emerge between your crew. The former can become rote; the latter provide moments of spontaneous drama. One touching early-game scene involves the death of a sheep, the initial test subject for the Womb. Your crew are gutted; they decide to hold a wake honoring the doe-eyed Molly. She was a friend, after all. Despite the psychedelic strangeness of their creation, this oddball assortment of Jans are still human, possessing an innate desire for ritual.
Image: 11 Bit Studios
Elsewhere, the script doesn’t quite sparkle. Original Jan asks his alters the same set of control questions each time they emerge from the Womb, moving through clockwork beats of dismay and outrage as the new arrivals grapple with the baffling nature of their existence. Indeed, as the hours accrue, the conversations naturally take on a kind of eerie, echoey feel, such is the way that Jan is, in essence, talking to himself. The result is a kind of maddeningly claustrophobic nightmare — and perhaps not wholly in the way 11 Bit necessarily intended.
There are exciting, sometimes downright devious decisions to make, like choosing between the unscrupulous company you work for or an unhinged scientist to solve a deadly health issue (goodness knows how long I ummed and ahhed on that one). Beyond such big, plot-altering choices, you’ll spend most of your time agonizing over actions befitting your role as the ship’s de facto boss. Are you getting in extra gym equipment solely because it will brighten Refiner Jan’s day or because it will make him fitter, happier, and more productive?
11 Bit has long explored questions of labor, notably in its Frostpunk games, but the zoomed-in, up-close-and-personal perspective of The Alters successfully reframes them — and in timely fashion. Recent years have shown starkly how most real-world corporations (including those that make and publish video games) feel about their workers: i.e., as an inherently disposable resource, especially when firing them presents an opportunity to swell profits.
In outer space, this disposability becomes existential. Original Jan, and all the other Jans, feel the supercharged, life-and-death stakes of their precarious predicament. Not all of them will make it, spending their final moments toiling under the yoke of corporate labor. They are reduced and then, in turn, extinguished — their bodies considered little more than grist for the cosmic mill.
The Alters launches June 13th on the PS5, Xbox, and PC.
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![OpenAI’s existential questions | TechCrunch
OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether that news is about acquisitions, competition with Anthropic, or bigger debates about AI’s impact on society.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
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October 13-15, 2026
Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it.
I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.
I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?
Anthony: I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
#OpenAIs #existential #questions #TechCrunchAnthropic,Equity podcast,OpenAI](https://i2.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2266645295.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1 "OpenAI’s existential questions | TechCrunch
OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether that news is about acquisitions, competition with Anthropic, or bigger debates about AI’s impact on society.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.”
First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.”
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
Anthony: [We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is that OpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it: OpenAI had also acquired TBPN — a business talk show, like a new media company.
And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.”
Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list?
Kirsten: No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it.
I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.”
This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear.
Sean: I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become.
I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works.
But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing.
One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?”
The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.
And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow just led a report at The New Yorker that dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week.
I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.
Kirsten: So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things.
It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them?
Anthony: I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity.
And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise.
Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he did a great piece over the weekend about the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about.
Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools.
#OpenAIs #existential #questions #TechCrunchAnthropic,Equity podcast,OpenAI")
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