Gamdevs should get roylties based off contribution like a number so small for indie games its meaningless unless it does well, but for bringingg us longlasting moneymaking games like gta they should be making way more
Absolutely; but you just know that Publishers will just push to outsource development to 3rd party “contractors” so that they won’t be eligible, or some other such bullshit.
I mean they can do that and quality assurance will struggle even more, making indie games look even better in comparison. Let publishers keep shooting themselves in the foot in their endless greed. It will only speed up the destructive cycle.
I pretty much only buy indie games these days, maybe one AAA a year and I used to buy multiple a month. Most stuff doesn’t feel unique enough, like I’m just repeating experiences with slightly different themes and controls.
Uhh, going to need to see some evidence of that. Literally never heard of non indie devs getting royalties or continued payments based off the success of the game.
Actually I’ll correct myself, rockstar is the only company I’ve heard of that does big internal payouts post launch. Most of Rockstars game launches have resulted in new houses for some of their teams.
Unfortunately for larger games individual devs don’t have that much control nor can have a mensurable impact. For example, I wrote a few lines of code for a large game, those lines will be executed every single time the game runs, but if they weren’t there no user would notice. I was told to write those lines, and it’s not something I personally wanted to add to the game, there was an issue, I was sent to fix it, I did. This is true for the vast majority of the game code, most devs are pointed to issues to fix or features to implement, they have some wiggle room in the how to do stuff, but the what to do has been approved by the boss of the manager of your manager’s manager, and unless there’s a good reason it won’t change.
Think about it this way, have you ever watched the credits from a AAA game? The vast majority (as in there are likely only a couple of persons who didn’t) of the people in that list contributed something to the game, either directly or indirectly, it’s hard to measure how much each contributed, a small but critical fix might be more important than a large but unused feature, how do you measure between the two?. Not to mention past employees who did stuff for a previous game that got re-used.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice idea, one that I would personally benefit from, but I think it’s just not feasible for large games. In short it’s impossible to be fair doing that, and people would get hurt because John from accounting got the same share that he did. And if you do it in any other way that’s not everyone gets the same share, you’re essentially playing favorites with the people whose job is to do the stuff you’ve ranked higher, even though the other person’s job is just as important.
That is true. However, you can still solve it and i have seen it work in practice: allow every employee to buy shares of the company. Fixed limit of shares per year of employment. Shares cannot be sold on the free market, they are bound to employment. Shares are kept after departure. Shares give dividends as usual.
That’s an interesting approach, but eventually you’ll run out of shares to allow employees to buy, and you’ll have to dilute the ones you’ve already sold. You need to think that AAA studios have hundreds of people working there, and certain games have thousands of people working on related stuff that’s not directly the game but contributes, like engine, servers, social, etc.
There is no problem with diluting. It’s not guaranteed amount passive income :) but if more people work there, you would usually also have higher gains to distribute. And old shares eventually disappear, they are not inheritable.
the problem is that companies will find a way to screw devs with that too. Imagine figuring out a solution to track every single bit of contribution to keep royalties as low as possible based on STATS BYATCH. it will literally turn into “your grass texture will bring you 0.00000000000000000000000001 cent off each sale” kind of fuck around.
I would love the Machine as a case for PCs. I’m not sure how feasible it is (knowing PCs probably not) but i’ve already got a gaming PC that’s far more powerful in terms of GPU and RAM. I’d love to be able to shove it in there and have the best of both. That light on the front has me especially interested despite just being a light
Well, basically, I wrote out a whole brainstorming session, but it boils down to this:
The Steam Machine case is way too small to be a general PC case.
Its smaller and more compact than even most small form factor, ITX, homebuilt or custom built PCs, that have actual inbuilt, like fullsize desktop GPU graphics capability.
But!
If Valve, or somebody, reworked the internal MoBo to have more of a pure CPU type onboard chip, with SODIMM sys RAM, not an APU with LPDDR RAMlike what we see here… and then also gave it a Thunderbolt port, or hell, maybe just a second SSD slot, which you could then use an OcuLink with…
Well, now you have roughly a system box, that shunts off the GPU part into an eGPU box, sitting next to it.
That would/could allow you to basically plug in any fullsize desktop GPU you want, down to a a less expensive, laptop grade or whatever.
So thats basically a laptop + eGPU setup, and would allow you to, within the main system, upgrade RAM and storage mem as you please, and that should, theoretically, be able to fit into the Steam Machine case, or something very close to it.
Then you just have a second box next to it with a second power supply, that seats some kind of GPU, and connects via thunder bolt or oculink, which can do data transfer at speeds/bandwidths that you’d normally only see within/on the motherboard itself.
Imagine. Product is released, people buy the Steam Machine, and Half-Life 3 is just… there. Preinstalled on some of the units. The buyers post it on the internet and get called bullshitters. Then Half-Life 3 is officially announced the next day. The internet loses it. Gaben ascends to godhood. He. Has. Cooked.
I’ll at least hold them accountable, by being that jerk on the internet who reminds people of union busting every time someone mentions Rockstar or one of their games.
Why yes I am still boycotting Sony over that time they booby trapped their CDs. Businesses might not go under when they do amazingly evil stuff, but they’re dead to me.
It says it is a stand alone headset and doesn’t need a PC… Right before it goes on to say it’s meant to be used with a PC but wirelessly. Is it stand alone or not? If I have Beat Saber in my library, do I have to stream it from an actual dedicated PC or can it run straight off the headset like I can with a Quest?
Its both, based on their article. Its an ARM chip they have a translation layer called FEX to handle, so it should be able to play most any steam game. Native vulkan games will apparently run even better because it can skip some of the emulation and just hit the vulkan API directly for rendering. It has onboard storage, so it can be used standalone.
In standalone mode, the intergrated chip will use about 20w, so you will get about 1 hour of playtime on it because of the 20wh battery. In streaming mode, the graphics will be better, and the power use cuts to about 6w, so it can go 3-4 hours. It has an integrated usb port, so you can easily plug in a bog standard battery bank and put it in your pocket for longer play times.
Just want to add an hour in VR is a LOT longer than 1 hour of flat screen gaming. If you haven’t used VR then they aren’t as comparable as you think.
You’re usually on your feet, holding your arms up high, waving them around ,likely squatting - a lot and you’ve got a screen blaring into your eyes with constant high intensity stimulation.
Most people won’t do 1 hour sessions on the regular, forget a 3-4 hour session without being put down to charge for while you take a break.
I’ve done a 3-hour session playing Beat Saber multiplayer with a friend. It was the most intense workout I’ve ever experienced.
The only break was in the middle to refill my enormous water bottle and to clean up the huge pool of sweat on the floor that was getting gross (I was wearing socks, LOL).
My arms hurt for like three days straight after that. I still played every night though 😁👍
Oh man you gotta try Pistol Whip if you have not . I had a 2 hour session and I felt like I could not get up the next day. Knees weak, arms heavy, >!mom’s spaghetti !<
GTA will proceed to break all media sales records because why do the right thing when you can buy a new shiny toy to spend your hard earned capitalism bucks on
why do the right thing when you can buy a new shiny toy
It’s not like they’re plastering “We Busted A Union To Get This Game Out Six Months Late” on the packaging. The overwhelming majority of retail customers have no idea how the sausage is made. Those that are curious enough to ask typically aren’t the ones going in on the “Rape And Loot Simulator” franchise to begin with.
Gotta get off this hobby horse of blaming the anonymous gooner gamer at the bottom of the food chain for decisions made in a smoke-filled board room long beforehand.
The “anonymous gooner gamers” or uninformed consumers are why the companies get away with shit like this. Because they keep throwing money to buy the next best thing
No they aren’t. Games flop all the time and the companies don’t quit this bullshit. No business executive has ever walked out of a tense call with their investors and re-committed themselves to being nicer to the staff. You’re delusional if you think people not buying a game results in the quality of life of that game’s staff improving.
What improves the lives of game developers is going indie and doing well. What improves the odds of doing well as an indie developer is producing games that can compete with the GTAs absent the absurd marketing budgets. That requires a symbiosis between indie games media, indie developers, and early adopters. But the gooner gamer is at the end of the line in any event. They don’t even know the game exists until it gets a splash ad on the Steam Store.
Your retail consumer market is a consequence of industry practices, not a cause.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne