“They have formulas that they apply to games to try to figure out how much money they could make, and in the end you end up giving a whole lot of games that look exactly the same as last year’s games, because that makes some money,” Gilbert explained.
…
He continued: “That’s why I really enjoy the indie game market because it’s kind of free of a lot of that stuff that big publishers bring to it, and there’s a lot more creativity, strangeness, and bizarreness.”
There’s still a lot of creativity in big games but it’d be shame to see more movement towards nostalgia-driven/pastiche type games.
You also didn’t hear about it because it’s not great. I watched a stream of it: the gameplay looks uninspired, like a student project to mimic Burnout, and the visuals would have looked dated in 2010.
But it was functional. So it’s neither good nor bad enough to rave about. You just say “huh”, flip a coin, and either uninstall forever or play every 7 months when you remember it’s on your hard drive.
Nowadays, creating fonts is easier than ever, with widely available tools. Creating good fonts that don’t look like hot garbage and don’t make your eyes hurt after reading a paragraph is somewhat harder, though type designers graduate from courses every year. There are lots of small independent foundries selling fonts around the world, and consultancies that will design fonts on commission for brands. If Monotype are going to play the private-equity extortion game, they’ll soon find game companies commissioning fonts they then own outright from designers, or even hiring a few type designers with the usual intake of 3D graphics/texture/animation artists.
Stardew Valley totally would have taken staff and money if you can’t live in your parent’s house forever. edit: I didn’t want it to sound mean towards Barone, it’s great what his family did for him, but this game was made possible with a very strong support net – a luxury not many have.
I will take this opportunity to recommend Crosscode, one of the best action RPGs of all time according to 90% of people who play it.
But yeah even amazing games like that fly under people’s radar in the huge deluge of games. I wish it were easier for good games to find their audience
I like CrossCode, but I am going to bat for Phoenotopia Awakening, one of the best game almost nobody has heard about. Slightly different perspective but similarly massive game full of secrets, puzzles, fun characters and a consistent world where even the tiniest bit of banter can lead you to discover something on the other side of the map.
Not having a quest log made that game hell for me. Massive world with tons of little quests that take you all over the map and no way to track progress or see what the last part of the quest is asking for.
It was not a huge problem for me, but I play lots of metroidvania, and I am used to memorizing stuff for later. And for stuff that I know will be hard to remember, occasionally, I might take notes or screenshots of hints.
Though most of the time, there are more than one hint for a single quest. The game does a very good job at updating every related NPC dialogue when something has changed.
But if you want to find everything, yeah you have to talk to absolutely everyone. TWICE. Almost everyone has two lines of dialogue at any moment.
I love that game but I made the mistake of putting it down for a year. When I came back I was completely lost and had no idea what I had already done or what to do next. The game does not have quest logs and does not hold your hand this way. It’s a game where people might benefit from documenting their progress as they go, especially in case they ever take a break from it.
I bought it last night after reading this. I hadn’t heard of Phoentopia at all. You suggested it. I watched one video. I found it on sale on GOG, and I bought it. I will install it and play it this weekend.
No one reads oldschool curators like RockPaperShotgun anymore. They’re barely afloat.
Generic algorithmic social media like YouTube tends to snowball a few games.
Forums are dead. Reddit is dystopian.
That leaves Steam’s algorithm, and a sea of sparsely seen solo reviewers. But there are billions of people oblivious to passion projects they’d love, and playing AAAs or gacha phone apps instead.
The problem is engagement. Discord, YouTube, even Lemmy all ping you in your pocket and offer more “instant” dopamine hits than a forum or news site, hence they’ve sucked all the attention.
It works. I’m guilty of falling into it for sure, even when I keep telling myself I will change my information diet.
John Walker (founder of RPS, back when it wasn’t a window to Eurogamer style content) is currently doing Buried Treasure, a small review blog for things that aren’t being appreciated by the masses. Well worth checking out!
Are you sure about this being true in Japanese? Open source culture over there might be different, and I don’t think many Western fonts include Japanese glyphs.
It’s likely, but I wouldn’t extrapolate from my Western experiences in this case.
Unfortunately there is a high level of complexity in some asian text, Chinese and Japanese kanji that are very similar have thousands of characters that are built in parts as far as i understood the technical site but are still annoyingly diverse, so you need a lot more than just lower, upper case, numbers and special characters
So then it sounds like somebody just needs to provide a font for applications that is a low priced one time payment and they would do pretty well. I wonder how difficult it is
Yes, I too love allowing large corporations to steal from independent artists and use their larger resources to take market share and all of the profit
Large corporations predate copyright, including the west india trading company. So yes, it is strictly untrue. Not all business relies on copyright and patents to run.
That’s a different conversation. You’re redirecting. My statement was as to that copyright is not necessary for large corporations. I’m still anti corpo. Without copyright large businesses would be the primary beneficiaries. They’d be able to freely do as china’s factories do. They’d simply undercut the original inventers with their massive wealth, making the products cheaper(and often worse), selling more and amassing more money for themselves.
Without copyright large businesses would be the primary beneficiaries.
You merge or sue your competition to death for copyright violations first…
They’d simply undercut the original inventers with their massive wealth, making the products cheaper(and often worse), selling more and amassing more money for themselves.
Because the monopolies that capitalism creates, created copyright in the first place…. The monopoly on who gets to form corporations or not is a feature of capitalism that copyright or not strengthens. If you cease copyright altogether, capitalists will still abuse others because the government lobbied them so.
Capitalism ≠ Laissez-faire free markets, but government owning the rights on who gets to issue bonds and debts. You can’t form a corporation without their expressed permission, if not, you loose your status as a corporation.
Copyright was expressely created to control the free flow of information, so the King and his nobility could amass wealth + control. It keeps working precisely because folks want a class society: wherein the law protects them, but punishes everyone else.
You can’t form a corporation without their expressed permission, if not, you loose your status as a corporation.
This is just wrong. It’s not permission. You submit to their bureaucracy, yes, but that’s guaranteed if you submit your paperwork correctly, it’s not a permission.
Capitalism ≠ Laissez-faire free markets, but government owning the rights on who gets to issue bonds and debts.
This is not completely accurate. It implies it’s a prior approval situation instead of a post-revocable situation which while similar are notably different. The government cannot revoke those privileges arbitrarily. There is rules for them, but those rules do not restrict who does so, they restrict how it’s done.
Speaking broadly, a system where the king issues money, and controls said money, is not capitalism anymore than socialism is communism. When nobility exist and can arbitrarily set rules and taxes, that is not capitalism. That isn’t to say either are good, they’re both terrible systems. But the thing you described with a king is strictly not capitalism, it’s a different evil.
Speaking broadly, a system where the king issues money, and controls said money, is not capitalism
Cripes, your comprehension is just appalling. Next your going to sell me your follicles for your fealty to copyright governance with your level of dissonance
It does, if u comprehend ðt private ownership of ð means of trade means exactly ðt ð Diet made ðmselves proprietors of ð font, & want ð developers to pay rent. But since you ðink ð yen was creatd by Monotype, ðn Laissez faire ur font away, dissonant trader.
Technically the .ttf file could be copyright as a specific means to reproduce the typeface, but someone could just run it through something to copy the shapes and then there’s nothing to be licensed.
Japanese law doesn’t consider font itself or the style to be copyrighted, but font files are considered “program” (it is very broad in jurisdictional sense, roughly translates to “digital data that produce products through computational process”, and displaying letters on monitor is applicable) and thus fall under under copyright protection.
That’s what I was saying with the .ttf file being copyright. It’s entirely possible to generate a new “program” that produces the same shapes while being a brand new uncopyrighted program. There’s an infinite number of ways to describe how to draw a shape, only the one in the original file is copyright.
IANAL but again, the program is not program in general sense. The regular “program” part here is ttf format and protocol around there, but protection goes over ttf data as a whole. It may be able to argue if such new font display system is developed and used, practically no gamedev/publishing industries want to reinvent the wheel and built the ecosystem from scratch.
Also, the infringement criteria is not necessarily on process but also end results similarity and intention in Japanese law. When intention comes up in argument defendant often provide proof they did not have access to the alleged source or its end product.
People complain about the evil of landlords, but it’s nothing compared to companies like this.
Landlords at least nominally provide some sort of ongoing services. There are no necessary services a font company could possibly provide - there’s no maintenance, no upkeep, no ongoing costs at all. This is just pure, and purely evil, rent-seeking.
Landlords province nothing to society, they are leeches who profit off others hard work simply because they “own the property” the worker lives on and takes care of.
This is not true at all. Good landlords also take care of the property, providing what is functionally a “home as a service” with none of the hassle of maintaining it.
There are bad landlords. Most rentals are owned by them. There are precious few that are not.
The reality is that not everyone wants to own and maintain their current home, for a variety of reasons. So long as homes are commodified, which they effectively will be for the long-term forseeable future until we live in a true post-scarcity society, renting a home will be a necessary option that a functioning society must provide. Building housing is expensive in terms of labor and resources, and that labor must be compensated somehow, and not everyone will want or be able to front that entire cost. Or maybe they simply don’t want to settle down permanently where they are now, or even ever, and therefore homeownership would saddle themselves with unwanted debts and the trouble of selling the home when they do move.
The flaws we see in modern day landlords are largely a function of capitalism. Housing is a necessary resource for survival, but one that we’ve rendered artificially scarce through social and economic policy inflating the price, and then it gets bought up by the only people who can afford it and rented out to those who can’t. There’s nothing inherently wrong with, for example, a worker-owned cooperative leasing out housing and providing maintenance services at a fair price for those homes for people who don’t want to do it themselves. Ownership alone isn’t a job and such rentseeking would be forbidden in a sane and just society, but under a better system there would still be room for such a service that provides genuine value to society.
Part of this service is covering the risk of unforseen cost. Heating breaks? That may become expensive. You pay a monthly fee and don’t have to manage risk and cost like that. Many people would be ruined if they had to cover that and repair becomes necessary, or face worsening condition.
As someone who owns my home (a moderately small 2-bedroom condo), I have tens of thousands of dollars worth of work to do to it that I really don’t want to do. Nobody is going to do it for me.
Sometimes I wish I was renting ngl, but rent would be even higher than my mortgage for the same sized place.
As reported by Gamemakers and GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game licence plan at the end of November.
The expensive replacement plan – offered through Fontwork’s parent company, Monotype – doesn’t even provide local pricing for Japanese developers, and comes with a 25,000 user-cap, which is likely not workable for Japan’s bigger studios.
The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters.
gamesindustry.biz
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