It was a indie publisher, not developer, big difference. They published titles from indie studios. Publishing is the act of funding, supervision, sometimes giving advice, doing a launch marketing campaign, etc. In short, indie publishers are key for a indie game to make money, as tradicional publishers tend to avoid them because they are high risk.
They still haven’t formally announced that development on KSP2 has stopped right? They didnt even announce the studio shutdown. Yet it’s still on sale on Steam…
In case you haven’t heard, a bunch of the original KSP developers are teaming up with the DayZ guy’s company to make a spiritual sequel: Kitten Space Agency.
Initial version will be free, and DRM free, distributed by us and completely open. This will be so we can get feedback from modders and establish some confidence. When the project becomes more structured we will look at future options.
Not sure how to feel about the company behind DayZ getting in on it though. It’s kinda ironic, because they (or the guy that is/was leading them) are quite notorious for abandoning active running projects for something new, and repeatedly doing so. They even did this with DayZ until after a long time they picked it up again (I think), but I’m not sure what state the DayZ is in now.
It’s not a myth when it really happens. I specifically remember DayZ being the first game I even reviewed on Steam because they abandoned it to work on a new project before wrapping up DayZ.
It’s just bad business to let projects linger in early access while starting new ones, or even sell loads and loads of DLC for these games. Frankly Steam should do something about it and punish studios abusing the system.
Nope. They had anti cheat that supported it, but they experienced higher issues with cheating via linux than elsewhere. Which sucks. People who cheat suck.
I’m curious to see how Valve will respond to this seeing as they have CS. I imagine they’d be interested to build a solution but I’m not sure how plausible that even is.
That would just cause legit Linux players to generate negativity by always being stuck with cheaters. It’s way easier to just remove support if it really is most of your cheating problems for such a small player base.
Aight. You know what. I’ve been eyeing this thing for hella long. I’ve had a shitty few weeks. I can afford it. Just ordered one! Excited for December! I’ll def try your game out :)
My worry is that after a few days of playing around with it, it becomes a $200 paperweight. It’s a bit (and by that I mean at least 2x) too expensive for what it is.
Unfortunately it’s still ~$100 just to make the thing, so halving the price doesn’t sound likely. It’s definitely a device you have to use intentionally because of the screen, but I still play mine at least few times a week (and daily when I’m pomodoroing!)
Plus you get 3 months of included games! A bit harder to become ewaste so fast when you’re playing something new every week
Yeah, being a niche product without the economies of scale elsewhere in gaming makes the price really awkward. My hope is that will improve over time if the install base keeps growing.
I use mine just about every day, I’ve been fully obsessed with a game on multiple occasions, and I’m excited every time there are new things in the catalog. Easily worth full game-console price for the joy I’ve gotten out of it. But, that doesn’t really help anybody else, I know.
It really is a lot less of a gimmick than it might seem. The final game of the first season is a shockingly polished gameboy-zelda-style adventure that I’ve played start-to-finish more than once.
I get that. But at the same time I have a bit of an obsession with handheld devices. And there’s enough of a cool indie scene that I think I’d use it quite a bit, and develop for it myself. UFO 50 is my goty and I feel that same sense of discovery and fun I could get out of a device like this
Nice! I havent used lua before but will look at it when my system arrives as I’d rather use that than C haha.
I saw someone started / did a wario ware style game for the playdate but I really want to try my hand at something like that. With the accelerometer, crank, buttons, etc it seems like the perfect device for quick micro games like that!
As a dev who recently released a game for the system (on sale now - only $1!), I’m pretty excited to see what gets included! It sounds like it’ll be all new games
Ayy, Pomo Post is super cute! Cool to bump into a dev on Lemmy.
I love that the Playdate is inspiring people to make tools that are also beautiful and fun like a good toy. The whole system makes me just plain happy :)
Hello, thank you 👋 The niche toys are my favorite! Someone made an orrery app, which is like a solar system simulator. I have this year’s eclipse bookmarked because it’s neat
Man I’ve not heard about the finals in a while. I remember I played it every day for two week straight and got everything for my class. Is it better now than at launch?
All of this anticheat bs is still making the baseline assumption that the problem needs to be solved at the expense of the players.
It’s illegal to steal someone else’s property. We don’t enforce that law by cutting off everyone’s hands preemptively so that there is less demand on police to solve a problem that hasn’t happened yet…
If people are assholes and go against the wishes of society, you police and moderate them. If they can’t moderate their platform, that isn’t the fault of the community - it’s a failing of the corporation. It’s such a ridiculous mindset. It’s a fucking video game…
Make fun of Apex all you want, it was the best performing game of its kind on the Deck and kept me from selling my Deck sooner. Now, I’m even a Linux convert because of how well games like Apex worked away from their Windows origins. Seeing a large game like this be killed off on Linux is awful. I’m not sure where the blame lies (with EA, right?) but it needs to be fixed.
I mean, the problem is kind of fundamental. They have a competitive multiplayer game. Many competitive multiplayer games are vulnerable to cheating if you can manipulate the client software; some software just can’t really be hardened and still deal with latency and such reasonably. Consoles are reasonably well locked down. PCs are not, and trying to clamp down on them at all is a pain – there are lots of holes to modify the software. Linux is specifically made to be open and thus modifiable. You’re never going to get major Linux distros committing to a closed system.
Frankly, my answer has been “Consoles are really the right answer for competitive multiplayer, not PCs.” It’s not just the cheating issue, but that you also want a level playing field, and PCs fundamentally are not that. Someone can, to at least some degree, pay to win with higher framerates or resolution or a more-responsive system on a PC.
My guess is that the most-realistic way to do do games like this on the PC is to introduce some kind of trusted hardware sufficient to handle all the critical data in a game, like a PCI card or something, and then stick critical portions of the game on that trusted hardware. But that infrastructure doesn’t exist today, and it’s still trying to make an open system imperfectly act like a closed one.
I think that the real answer here is to use consoles for that, because they already are what game developers are after – a locked-down, non-expandable system. In the specific context of competitive multiplayer games, that’s desirable. I don’t like it for most other things, but consoles are well-suited to that.
My own personal guess is the even longer run answer is going to be a slow shift away from multiplayer games.
Inexpensive, low-latency, long-range data connectivity started to give multiplayer games a boost around 2000-ish. Suddenly, it was possible to play a lot of games against people remotely. And there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans are a sophisticated, “smarter game AI”. They have their own problems, like sometimes doing things that aren’t fun for other players – like cheating – but if you can rely on other players, you don’t have to write a lot of complicated game AI.
The problem is that it also comes with a lot of drawbacks. You can’t pause most multiplayer games, and even when you do, it’s disruptive. If you’re, say, raising a kid who can get themselves into trouble, not being able to simply stand up and walk away from the keyboard is kinda limiting. You cannot play a multiplayer game without data connectivity. At some point, the game isn’t going to be playable any more, as the player base falls off and central servers go away. You have to deal with other people exploiting the game in various ways that aren’t fun for other players. That could be a game’s meta evolving to use strategies that aren’t very much fun to counter, or cheating, or people just abusing other people. Yeah, you can try to structure a game to discourage that, but we’ve been working on that for many years and griefing and such is still a thing.
Writing game AI is hard and expensive, but I think that in the long run, what we’re going to do is to see game AI take up a lot of the slack. I think that we’re going to to see advances in generic game AI engines, the sort of way we do graphics or sound engines, where one company makes a game AI software package that is reused in many, many games and only slightly tweaked by the game developers.
Multiplayer games are always going to be around, short of us hitting human-level AI. But I think that the trend will be towards single-player games over time, just because of those technical limitations I mentioned. I think that where multiplayer happens, it’ll be more-frequently with people that someone knows – someone’s friends or spouse or such – and where someone specifically wants to interact with that other person, and where the human isn’t just a faceless random person filling in for a smart piece of game AI that doesn’t exist. That’d also hopefully solve the cheating problem.
Some ways I could see the problem at least partially resolved on PC are: Returning to server-side validation, and designing games such that player location knowledge and aiming reflexes are not always the biggest tests for victory. Hackers may, in fact, develop wallhacks and aimhacks for such a game, but may exhibit frustration finding these alone don’t necessarily bag them a win because of bad tactical decisionmaking.
Such games wouldn’t be realistic tactical shooters in the vein of COD, though.
I was with you up until the shift away from multiplayer part. I do not see that happening at all, and I don’t even like multiplayer games myself. There’s no denying that more multiplayer has been the trend for the last 30 years, spanning multiple (people) generations, and I don’t see AI changing that.
Developers have full control over servers in most cases. A viable server side anti cheat should be a thing. For every case of “client sending false data to server” we can come up with a solution to verify that to some degree. Finally, it should help a lot to rely on player generated reports and utilize replay recording on server.
But no, developers will continue to rely on 3rd party solutions (made by people who never developed a game), even infect their co-op-only games with it, and complain “uh oh we can’t handle Linux cheaters”.
The problem is EAs business model for this game. It is free to pay, so EA need to extract money otherwise. They introduce some gamified resource collection and crafting with exponentially rising costs, etc. And hope that gamers circumvent that by buying stuff with real money. Now players don’t all want or can’t do that, and look for alternative solutions.
So EAs business model drives people to cheat. To cheat them primarily and other players secondarily.
And because of their business model, they cannot solve the cheating between players by giving them dedicated servers or just let them P2P match, because they would loose control over them and their ability to extract more money.
Apex was the game I played with my friends to keep in touch long distance. Guess I gotta find something new now. Sure as he’ll ain’t installing Win11 for it.
I guess it’s been a long time coming. The dev decisions and priorities the last few years have really made it feel like I’m the last person they want playing their game.
If you are looking for a semi competitive shooter, I’d highly recommend The Finals. Tons of fun and solid gun play. Game isn’t officially supported but runs great on linux.
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Aktywne