There are prebuilt solutions in some common engines, and companies like Multiplay that will help with development and hosting, but ultimately it depends on the specific needs of each game.
What works well for one project might be overkill for another, so studios have to spend a lot of time figuring out their needs and building something bespoke for it.
Turn-based all the way for me. I need time to think about my moves!
I want to love RTS games, but I just don’t have the executive function skills needed to prioritise tasks and make decisions fast enough to do well. Single player against CPU is sometimes doable if there’s an easy mode or cheats, but online multiplayer is just impossible.
Newer, cheaper competitors like the FPGBC are finally muscling in on the Analogue Pocket’s market, so I guess they’ve decided to double down on being the ‘premium option’.
The return on indie games (if there even is a return) is already vanishingly small for 99% of releases - printing and distributing physical copies would just be pouring even more money down the drain.
Wow - Take Two shuttering this studio AND Roll7 (OlliOlli, Rollerdrome) just a month after they announced they’re buying Gearbox for almost half a billion. Absolutely catastrophic mismanagement. What a shitshow.
I’m really not a fan of the trend for really long video essays, especially since it’s almost always padding and repeating similar points.
Anything up to 25 mins is usually fine, but 35+ is in the realm of ‘I’ll add it to Watch Later but never bother watching it’ and over an hour I’m just going to keep scrolling