Yeah, the silver lining of the whole gaming industry fallout is that the indie game scene has never been better. I was lamenting the fact that we hadn’t had a good top-down zeldalike in a long time, echoes of wisdom notwithstanding even though the formula is pretty altered. Someone pointed me in the direction of Master Key and it was an incredibly satisfying time. Almost like it would have fit in perfectly between LoZ 1 and Link’s Awakening.
You can’t build a game studio without funding, and that is where the problem lies…
Publishers have become very risk-averse ever since Embracer went downhill. They basically only invest in <literally the same game as some previously successful title>…
It isn’t that easy to go indie though, unless you do gamedev as a hobby and have another source of income.
I am working at what was a small studio (about 10 persons) when I joined, and has meanwhile grown to more than 50 employees.
I am a coder, and therefore don’t have direct insight into our finances, so please take everything below with a grain of salt. It is also intentionally vague because I don’t want to violate any NDAs.
Over the years we have started two indie projects, that both were completed and released, but both in the end had a publisher funding a part of the development. So, while they were indie initially, the released products cannot be called indie any more… The reason why we went for publisher contracts for those two projects were manyfold, but an important part was simply that we needed a way to cover our running costs. We are doing gamedev as a day-job, after all, so it needs to pay for our rent, food, etc… (Other important reason for going with a publisher were marketing, customer support,… All the things that we as developers have no experience in.)
Now that we have grown to medium studio size, we are hoping that we can at some point fund an indie project by making enough profit with other, publisher-funded projects. We have several projects running in parallel anyhow, and if 3 of them would yield enough money to pay a 4th project that would be fully our own, we would definitely go for it.
However, the market situation is tough, and we currently cannot afford to do that. Almost all profit we make goes into developing prototypes that we need in order to have a realistic chance to get the next publisher-funded project…
Two years ago it was a lot easier to get publisher contracts. Back then we were quite optimistic about being able to fund a fully independent project, but then the market changed, getting new publisher-funded projects has become a lot more difficult, and right now doing an indie project is (for us) not financially possible…
So, what we are doing now is that we are taking our game ideas and presenting them to publishers. The prottypes I mentioned? Most of them are for our own ideas. Having something the people at the publisher can play goes a long way in convincing them that a game-idea is fun. That’s not indie, but it is as close as we can get to making the games we want to make. While the last year has been tough, with publishers being very, very, very cautious about new ideas, the situation seems to slowly change, and we might eventually get funding for one of our own ideas. Maybe. If we are lucky.
There are also going to be lots of talent who permanently leave the industry because there are no longer any stable decent paying jobs at larger studios.
Meh. They might have not wanted to make Ep3, but the fans sure did.
I understand Valve works or used to work very differently, people collaborating without a strong top-down steering from management. Yet whatever explanation they have, we were punched in the gut at the end of Ep2, then left waiting, holding our breath. It’s just a piece of media, but it was an important part of my teenage years, and I could never experience the end of the story (outside of reading it in a blog) I waited so much for.
This made me really resent Valve, and soured my experience/memories with the series, I haven’t touched HL or other Valve game for 10+ years, and I don’t think I will in the future.
Half-Life 2 doesn’t even have a good combat loop. Half-Life 1 has more variety in the weapons and the map team in HL1 actually talked to the AI team. Notice how the combine just stand in doorways or out in the open? It’s lost, but I once saw a video showing that the combine can flank the player and do other complex maneuvers if the maps are properly designed, but Gabe was too obsessed with the Gravity Gun and everything else suffered. The “puzzles” are all either busy work or another seesaw task. I remember being hyped when Gabe said that Ep2 would have the biggest physics puzzle in it, but it ended up just being a huge seesaw “puzzle” that was solved just by clearing the cars off of it.
Every time I do a Half Life replay, I always end up getting bored in HL2 and skip to the community made stuff. Half-life Echoes and Entropy: Zero are musts.
There are so many landmark games. I’d say HL1 was more influential then HL2 anyway. Hell, I’d say Portal did more for first person puzzle games then HL2 did for FPS games.
It just handicapped itself by making the gravity gun such busy work and ignoring other aspects.
HL2 is more than just the gravity gun. The art style, the open levels on the beaches, the facial animations, the improved storytelling from HL1, the antlion army, game was so much more than just an updated half life. Without HL2, portal wouldn’t have any legs to stand on, valve took on narbacular drop, hired the team and put them to work on the source engine to make portal. Counter strike source was the defacto mp shooter for years if not decades, hell even the portal 2 goo came from half life 2 ep 3 just like they mention in the documentary. Saying they ignored all other aspects of the game for the gravity gun does half life 2 a disservice to what it accomplished.
Hey, here’s this cool thing. You can summon Antlions to fight with you, but only in two areas and never again. Oh, that boss fight in Ep2 where you could have gotten it again? Nope, but here’s a Defend Against Waves set piece instead.
What I’m saying is that the combat loop got ignored for the gravity gun. Where’s the Gluon Gun? Why is the Tau Cannon only mounted to the buggy? Why are both the SMG and AR2 full auto, spread weapons? If we’re doing wide open areas, the AR2 should really have a tighter spread for long range engagements.
Halo did wide open environments, did vehicles with mouse or analog stick steering was a joy to drive and actually used them in more then one area before HL2. Keyboard steering sucks.
What HL2 excels at is presentation of the story. It’s really not that deep of a story.
Also, never liked CS or military shooters, so that’s not exactly a going to sell me. And don’t get me started on the hat shit.
The combat may not have been the most interesting versus basic grunts, but it never got stale. I’ve never played another game where the core gameplay changed so much so frequently.
Physics interactions -> Basic FPS -> Fan Boat -> Mounted Gun -> Gravity Gun -> Zombies & Traps -> Car -> THE CRANE FIGHT -> Rockets & Gunships -> Ant Lions -> Ant Lion Minions -> Turrets -> Resistance Squads -> Striders -> Super Gravity Gun
Honestly the HL1 combat may have been somewhat more challengjng, but it was a grind. Fights were often just frustrating. I’ve abandonded playthroughs because I didn’t feel like spending another 10 hours beating my head against the endless amounts of enemies just to get to the end of… whatever I was doing I forgot.
HL1’s big innovation was never removing control from the player just to tell the story. Beyond that they also had some interesting AI behaviour and weapons. It was a game with old-school length and old-school difficulty.
HL2’s big innovation was the physics engine, and they played with it in so many ways, while polishing every other aspect of the design. They kept the gameplay tight and did something just long enough to explore it and then they moved on. They never forced you to hang out just repeating the same loop over and over to pad the length.
Plus, unless the installers have the full package, it’ll still require an internet connection. Usually installers download the files and then install them.
What’s the difference? In practical terms, what does this mean for me as the consumer? We don’t own the intellectual property, but may use the software as-is? From a practical, consumer standpoint that feels the same as the days of owning your software on a disc, unable to be taken as long as you have physical control over the device. I’m fine with calling this “owning” personally.
I’m absolutely willing to be wrong on this. I’m by no means an expert. Please, if I have missed something, let me know.
There really is no difference. For almost all intents and purposes, GOG’s offline installers can be treated the same way as physical CDs of way back then, with one of the only exceptions being that you cannot resell them.
Depending on your perspective, the sell/trade/loan aspect of physical can be a huge deal. I outlined in another comment, selling/trading games was never my thing, but it was my cousins. From my perspective, there’s marginal difference, but there IS a difference.
I don’t want to advocate for shoveling money into any company, but if you could sell your steam games it would screw over indie devs in a big way. Many games made by small studies or one person don’t have as much content as AAA studies and would be far more prone to a small handful of copies being distributed back and forth on the used market instead of each being a sale that goes to the developer.
Some devs would see a drop in sales as much as 90% and I just don’t think it’s worth it to shoot the gaming industry in the foot like that.
Just to be clear: my main point was that you don’t own any more the game bought on GOG than on Steam.
And there are definitely upsides to this type of market.
Although nowadays I wouldn’t buy a just released triple A 70€ game knowing I can’t sell or give it (not that I play those much anymore). The games I actually want to keep a few and far between.
I buy second hand Switch games for my nephews. It’s cheap, I’m actually giving them something, and they can trade them with their friends or sell them to buy fortnite skins the little shits
Again, not hating on GOG, I’ve been a customer for a long time. Mainly because I don’t want any kind of launcher. I play 99% solo games, don’t need no updates or multiple clicks to launch a game.
I would ABSOLUTELY argue that you more own a game purchased on gog, with an offline installer, than one purchased on steam. I now see the functional difference between owning a drm-free installer vs owning a physical game, but there’s also a gulf of difference between steam and gog
Just to be entirely fair. The rest of what you said is absolutely spot on.
I can see the functional difference there, with regards to sell/trade/loan. You could of course emulate the functionality, or rely on the honor system for abandon ware stuff, but that’s clunky, inefficient, not worth the energy.
I hadn’t considered the second hand aspect. Even as a kid, I was always more a “build a library” kind of person versus a “cycle my catalog” kind of person. I was considering things from an availability to play the game perspective alone. Thanks for the different perspective!
I think it might be more subtle than that, unions exist so that when negotiations happen they can fuck back, but we know Microsoft can strategise longer term than that. They pioneered “embrace, extend, extinguish”. Embracing a union then trying to infiltrate and turn it into a corporatised union is another version of that exact same play.
It’s more likely a cost benefit analysis. Fighting the Unions is lawyer expensive and PR expensive. Gamers are noisy after all, when riled up. Microsoft is evil, but also like Trump, they understand optics.
Companies can leverage CBAs to “fix” pay scales well below CPI or other metrics by forcing extensive negotiation as a way to sell down an agreement. Similarly, they can use agreements to create separate classes, for example: the SAG/AFTRA agreement for voice actors with all the Gen AI exemptions.
In some respects, I can see this. Games such as unscrupulous MMOs are often carefully engineered to distort your ability to manage time and money. However, many games are still produced as entertainment products meant to compete on a basis of artistic or entertainment value. The addictive aspect doesn’t come from a manipulative design, but Rather just plain old fun, and in those cases similar arguments could be made about strawberries or books.
I would like to reiterate that there are addictive video games which really do try to manipulate you. Just like how a breakfast cereal might market itself as healthy and balanced while loaded with sugar and deceptive portion sizes, leading to unhealthy habits, a money first video game will contain elements carefully crafted to distort player’s perception and reasoning.
Gamers can understand this. Casinos understand this. But how do you articulate the difference to a court or actually legislate against it? FOMO is usually used in a predatory way, like with daily rewards. Paid random lootboxes are definitely predatory, but other rng systems can be genuinely fun. Not an easy problem to solve without stepping on toes.
Dailies are probably something that could be solved with targetted legislation. Harmful to player mental health just to boost stats for investors. Some games need to limit progression, but there are loads of ways to do so other than dailies.
I can’t get into the whole debate because I’m not knowledgeable enough to articulate the difference between a genuinely good game and games using skinnerbox mechanics to force operant conditioning. However, I have an anecdote.
I used to play a mobile game that was mid level fun, but a very obvious skinnerbox with time based turns (energy? Mana stones? Hell, I don’t remember), daily and weekly battles, sporadic new releases where you had a chance to get some kind of cool stuff, and clan activities. I had to put it down for a couple of weeks due to real life and just never picked it back up. I still talk to some of the guys on discord but after not being on every day I stopped caring about the game entirely.
I know people tend to joke about having a Civ addiction, but the number of people who have in fact binged an entire night or more playing civilization and have experience addiction like relationships with it should tell you that the line is thinner than I think most people are comfortable with.
Few games are “just good old fashioned fun.” Every game is designed to draw our attention. The distinctions between intent/accident, “it’s just fun”/designed to be addicting, etc. are not always very clear.
There’s no reason for that to be a directed force, just suck in air from multiple directions and eject it in multiple directions to cancel out all net forces. Or ramp it up slowly so it isn’t so jerky. But even if it’s set up in the worst way possible, the forces will be significantly less than shooting a relatively massive bullet.
Nah, active air cooling is a thing that computers have been using successfully for decades. It does create more heat overall, but it moves heat away from the parts you don’t want to melt.
Even liquid cooling or phase change cooling relies on air cooling eventually, those techs can just move heat quicker to a temporary heat reservoir that is then air cooled. If the cooling on the reservoir is slower than the heating, the cooling system will eventually saturate and fail to continue cooling the heat source faster than the reservoir cooling.
Even liquid nitrogen or dry ice cooling does this, it just dumps that heat earlier when the N2 or CO2 is condensed. And for those, you either have limited cooling time or need to top up the coolant as it evaporates.
Edit: not sure why you were downvoted… Your assumption was wrong but IMO worthy of discussion.
But in essence, because they carry energy they must have momentum. It’s why they can impart momentum on what they hit, because momentum must be preserved.
You know that old E=mc² equation? That’s actually only the simplified “rest” half of it. The full equation that relativity gives us says E²=m²c⁴+p²c². Meaning if it has energy, it definitely has mass (m), momentum (p), or both.
For a massless particle like a photon, that means E=pc, and its momentum is proportional to its energy and therefore frequency/wavelength.
The root of the problem is that you think of momentum as being defined to be the product of something’s mass and its velocity, but this is actually only an approximation that just so happens to work extremely well at our everyday scales; the actual definition of momentum is the spatial frequency of the wave function (which is like a special kind of distribution). Thus, because photons can have a spatial frequency, it follows simply that they therefore can have momentum.
Something else that likely contributes to your confusion is that you probably think that where something is and how fast it is going are two completely independent things, but again this is actually only an approximation; in actuality there is only one thing, the wave function, which is essentially overloaded to contain information both about position and momentum. Because you cannot pack two independent pieces of information into a single degree of freedom, it is not possible for position and momentum to be perfectly well defined at the same time, which is where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from.
But if I shot that raynof sunshine in auch a way that it killed someone I would be okay with assuming there would be more force than just a standard ray
Okay I did some math. If the gun shot a single photon with all the energy of a .50BMG from an M2 heavy machine gun, it would have about 1.2e-4 Ns of momentum. For reference, the bullet it’s compared to would have 38.3 Ns. So the photon has about 32000 times less momentum than a bullet. Do with that what you will.
From what I’ve read about their Daily Active Users they’re going to be overstaffed soon. No hate but they exploded and when things settle they might not need as much staff. Thoughts?
You’re good. I’d have thought the same thing had I not been following the development story.
Their game pass numbers also seem to be going up, which is harder to dev for as well. I know my steam friends got sick of it after putting in 100 hours in three weeks though
I too have sunk more then 100 hours into the game. It was worth its purchase already. Yet in a year or however long it takes to be complete… i and many others will jump right back on to see how everything has progressed. Plus they’ll release on play station and that alone will be millions more copies sold.
This is how it happens. If they dont staff to meet the demand the game suffers and dies out, if they do in a few years when the player base falls off and they announce layoffs everyone makes the shocked Pikachu face.
Live service games really did a number on people. Why does it matter if people stop playing Palworld between now and when those new people they hire can produce the things they're hired for?
Yeah I keep thinking this too, it’s a buy once game, they still have the money they made. They’re trying to push more content as quick as possible to get more waves of players, new and old. I’m positive their accountants know the player base isn’t rebuying the game.
There's something called "Brook's Law" that basically observes that a software project which onboards more developers in order to catch up will fall further behind. I hope they're careful about how they allocate new developers or they'll end up doing a year of onboarding, rewriting core code, and have no meaningful updates for 6-12 months. I know they have the resources to spare, and that scenario worked out okay for Valheim, but I hope the game doesn't lose momentum because they overhire or don't allocate enough senior devs to continue feature development while they catch the new devs up to speed.
Edit to add: I don't think it actually matters in this instance if they don't have a large player base by the time the game is feature complete. They don't have continuous revenue streams like a live service game, so hiring more devs is ultimately just about making sure they have enough talent to make good on their early access promises. The company could probably dissolve tomorrow and all the staff could live the rest of their lives in luxury never working again. It'd be a dick move, but they already sold an insane number of copies.
They don’t have continuous revenue streams like a live service
Yet. The game seems extremely easy to monetize, up to them how evil they go. To be successful longterm (if thats something they even want) they will need to add more content first but they could cash in in so many ways. Dlc, selling servers, cosmetics or more nefarious stuff lkke boosters to speed up mechanics, pals that take huge grinds without payments. It would be very easy to do.
MSI says that this game tracking won’t just be limited to League of Legends, as it’ll be releasing an application that’ll allow you to train these features to recognise and react to enemies and other on-screen elements in any game you like.
The whole unfair advantage thing aside, this is a really cool feature that might have a bigger range of application than just gaming.
Yeah like reading MRIs and X-rays, it’s already been proven that those reading medical images tend to have blinders on looking only for what they regularly see and never see the gorilla. With AI they might see the more weird things.
They have a tiered system where important NPCs can't die until conditions are satisfied, wonder if the condition to die was satisfied but dialog still got delivered?
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