The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Foundation broadened its reach by attending the world’s biggest video games event this summer – but faces challenges funding its work helping underrepresented developers
Listen, I think its cool that people are following their dreams. But I can’t imagine looking at the modern world and thinking “The thing we’re really lacking right now is new video games”.
What I would love to see is the existing pool of video game developers enjoying more labor protections, shorter working hours, paid sick leave, and guaranteed housing/health care benefits. Because, as someone who has seen the industry chew up and spit out really talented developers, that strikes me as far more important than just learning to code or getting networked into the crunch pipeline at EA or Microsoft.
Walles says: “My favourite example of someone in our cohort who has work experience but is trying to break into the games industry is this young man from Nigeria. He’s a home builder, he’s project managing every day, building houses – and he codes. He wants to take that project management experience and become a producer in video games.”
This is such a bleak read, knowing how many people - both inside the gaming industry and out - who are struggling to find affordable housing.
We have a lot of entries appearing in Steam, yes, but a huge percentage of them are investor-driven, research-founded money farms.
Where do you think future game developers are getting funneled? This is a tail as old as the industry. Big firms sponsor these entry level programs in order to glut the market with cheap labor.
We’re kind of complacent with having people like Valve around making Steam, but we kind of need more people in that space for people to turn to as every major console gets enshittified.
I do not think we need more game developers (particularly in an industry that’s contracting labor demand in the pivot to AI) more than we need housing developers (particularly in a real estate market that is struggling to meet new production targets).
I’m personally a big fan of doing the very tiny semi-transparent (X) that’s impossible to click on as far away from the “Yes, Please Digitally Fuck My Wallet Pussy” blinking blue bar at bottom center of the screen.
Your ads are not gonna work the way you think they’ll work
They’re banking on people too young/old to know how to navigate past the screen to accidentally sign up for shit.
My one-year-old son accidentally got ahold of my TV remote and signed me back up for Netflix by pushing random buttons a month ago. Had to go through the TV and scour it of all the little pre-installed buy-me apps to make sure that couldn’t happen as easily again. Still not quite sure how to disable the “Netflix” button that’s built into the remote, shy of carving it out with a knife.
Sure. But a lot of the marketing is geared towards younger people unfamiliar with the service. I remember getting deluged with ads my freshman year of high school and again my freshman year of college, for instance.
They’re banking on their unsubscribe process being so obnoxious that they’ll lose fewer people than they gain, year to year. And given the steady growth of revenues for these programs, it appears to work over the long term.
Yeah, you’re pissing people off. But when everyone operates this way, it just becomes the standard for accessing this form of entertainment. Like ad reels before a movie starts. “Well, I just won’t go to the movies!” is a hollow protest in the midst of the crowds of people fighting to get into the theater.
In the same way that slot machines and roulette wheels aren’t sustainable, sure. Once you figure out they’re a scam, you stop playing them.
But you don’t need to trick all the people all the time. You just need to trick enough people to turn a steady profit. Firms like Microsoft and EA have figured out a formula that’s worked for a long time and now they’re just running the playbook. Like any good bookie in Vegas, they make money off the suckers. And they reinvest a sizeable chunk of their profits into marketing to bring in new marks. And there’s always new marks.
No-one will enjoy where that leads
There will be a dozen senior executives in a VIP lounge absolutely enjoying where this goes in another five or ten years.
The bigger your market grows, the more aware the cultural zeitgeist becomes
You’d like to think so. But look at Robinhood. Five years ago, everyone was screaming about how it was a rigged game. Citadel Investments was manipulating the options markets. Fidelity was getting insider deals. Everything was rigged. People needed to protest. Close out your account. Yadda yadda yadda.
What happened after that? As far as I can tell, Robinhood is more popular than ever. They’re certainly more profitable than ever. There was never any reform or regulation. Mostly, Reddit and similar big name social media firms just purged all the whinners and inflated the profiles of the shills and hacks.
A bookie in Vegas, one city, could keep running their casino forever
DraftKings has been making money hand over fist. They’re desperately trying to find new things for people to bet on. This isn’t one bookie in one city, it’s an international conglomerate that’s expanded its market share around the globe. It is a worldwide bookie.
Soulless cash grab with a healthy veneer of jingoism and plenty of toxic masculinity.
You’ll play your Muscle Man Beats Up The Evil Foreigners game, you’ll pay top dollar for it, and if you’re lucky you’ll get a loot box with a Trump/MBS NFT in it.
Was going to say… Who is out there buying games way outside their machines’ specs? Seems pretty straightforward.
I do get a little annoyed at the folks angry at BL4 using a higher end engine. Like, it does look a lot better than previous iterations. That engine upgrade wasn’t for nothing.
There are a ton of looter shooters floating around that aren’t using the Unreal 5 engine. Just play one of those instead.
This is actually from 2022, but I missed it back in the day. This is quite important research imo, and very relevant lately. Link to the paper itself: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0747563222001637
Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television.
Wasn’t the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?
Didn’t we get this whole '10s era Christian Conservative “We just want to debate! We just want our free speech on College Campus and The Internet!” campaign?
It seems as though censorship of <insert bad thing> is mostly just a wedge issue to put your partisan group on the side of the current popular media trend. In the '80s, it was saying you were Opposed To Satan during the Satanic Panic. In the 90s, it was saying you were Opposed to Gangster Rap and Saggy Pants and Drugs. In the '00s, we were in an ideological war against Islam. In the '10s, we were in an ideological war against Big Government Socialism Taking Over Our Lives. In the '20s its been the War on Woke Foreigners.
Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!
That’s one theory.
Another is that we’re trying to put together an industrial scale compromat operation, such that any given individual can be smeared and alienated from the public at-large if they oppose the current regime.
I’m sure advertising can function as a side hustle. But we’ve been drifting away from any kind of real consumer economy for nearly a decade. Everything is “how quickly can the government and its business interests cycle money between one another to replicate economic growth”? You don’t really need end-users if all you’re making is an AI-driven marketplace.
Virtually every JRPG has a straight romance subplot, typically staring the main character. Every FF since… six? Every Dragon Quest. Every Persona. Kingdom Hearts. Fucking Mario Brothers has a straight romance in it.
Like you think Doom Guy is straight because he’s clearly a Christian?
I think you can head-cannon that the two dudes in Time Crisis are having hard core steamy Special Agent on Special Agent lovemakings in between chapters. Fine and good.
But when Arno & Elise kiss in Assassin’s Creed Unity? I’m sorry, but nobody needs to see that heteronormative degenerate filth. Kids are playing that game. What are they going to grow up thinking?
If you sleep through all the romantic subplots of the last 40 years of RPGs, but you wake up offended when you discover that Ellie and Riley Kiss at the end of The Last of Us: Left Behind, you’re working from a double standard.
you mean that since they didn’t call out people complaining about a lack of gay representation they shouldn’t call out everyone complaining now that the complaints go both ways?
It’s why I’m excited for a certain JRPG remake that puts one such relation (between a guy and a girl) front and center, so much so that it becomes a driving element of the story.
Are we talking about FF7 or something else?
IMO, a good romantic plot sneaks up on you after you’ve invested in the characters.
President Reagan decided Friday to impose punitive 100% tariffs on a wide variety of goods produced by Japanese electronic giants in retaliation for Tokyo’s failure to abide by the semiconductor trade agreement between the two nations.
In approving a recommendation Thursday by the Administration’s top economic officials, the White House decided to put the tariffs into effect about April 17, less than two weeks before Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone is scheduled to begin a visit to the United States aimed at easing trade frictions.
The tariffs will be targeted to bring in as much as $300 million and designed to punish such firms as NEC Corp., Hitachi Ltd., Fujitsu Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and Oki Corp. by either pricing some of their goods out of the American market or by forcing them to accept substantial losses on U.S. sales.
Japan / Korea were early instances of US industrial outsourcing. The consequences of the project was an economic boom during late 70s/early 80s in both countries, such that American politicians feared Japan and Korea would return to the world stage as independent regional powers. Reagan’s tariffs, the subsequent opening of Japanese import markets, and the further industrial outsourcing to China, the Philippines, and the rest of the South Pacific labor markets effectively clipped the wings of the Japanese/Korean wage laborer.
You could argue this was part of the “agreement” between Eastern Zaibatsu executives and Western investment banks. But I’d hardly call it a “measured response”. I certainly wouldn’t call it a policy that served the best interests of either Eastern or Western wage labor.
Warner Bros, famous for such hits as Multiversus, Suicide Squad, and that harry potter quidditch game has decided that 99% of gamblers quit before they hit big.
it assumes people will act at least mostly rationally
People generally do act rationally, just not optimally. The difference is rooted in availability of information and accumulation of priors.
“The Marshmallow Test” is a great example. People who are predisposed to distrust authority figures and experience chronic hunger will “fail” the test, because they rationally assume they better take the marshmallow now rather than put their trust in a second marshmallow later. This same group happens to underperform long term, not because they are short-sighted or dim-witted, but because they continue to experience the same psychological reinforcements - unreliable social services, inconsistent access to basic necessities, predation by private industry and law enforcement, notably higher rates of social murder - that lead them to take what’s in front of them rather than waiting patiently for a bigger reward.
The next big market crash will produce this kind of person in spades, just like 2008 and 2001 and 1987 did. As people experience retirement accounts as a scam and schools as a prison pipeline and professional careers as economic dead ends and police as occupying invaders, they stop engaging with these institutions innocently and start dealing with them adversarially.
These rational responses result in a vicious deteriorating cycle of distrust and division. Any individual action rationally follows from the prior experiences. But the system isn’t optimal - people suffer disproportionately the longer these rational actions continue.
The problem with “good games” is that you can only make them a few times before people stop getting excited.
Mario was a good game. A cloned, reskinned Mario knock off is derivative and hack.
At some point, you need to incorporate new technology, new art, and new game mechanics in order to draw in the crowds. Otherwise, why would I feel the urge to put down money for Starcraft 35 when I’ve got Starcraft 1 & 2 back home?
Right. It’s a system of economic exchange, not a moral position. There are ways around this system, but they’re time consuming and annoying to accomplish. So the vendors tend to take the path of least resistance when setting their internal policies. You were taught about Free Markets as this perfect, frictionless vacuum of interactions between buyers and sellers, but it doesn’t work that way and never did.
For some reason, people seem to confuse being naive and gullible with being moral and upstanding.
…made in 2018 by a Russian team. Way before the whole Ukraine war thing, you understand
Flipping through a history book on Russian/Ukrainian relations in the 21st century
Closing the book, putting it back on the shelf, whistling, and walking away
More seriously, I’ll never understand folks who hear “So-and-so is from Nationality X, so now I must/must not purchase products from them because of their bloodline.”
Doesn’t seem like years of sanctions on Russia, Iran, or North Korea had a sufficient impact to cause any change.
Seems like it made them more insular, more self-sufficient, and more hostile to future diplomatic entreties.
Change by force can have negative results, and change by economic means can have positive ones
What if, instead of trying to extort or kill a nation’s residents in order to force them to adopt your preferred foreign policy, you simply afforded them an opportunity for peaceful coexistence?
Putin wouldn’t be President of Russia if the US and the USSR had been able to settle their differences without a 60 year long series of proxy wars and regime changes. Neither would Trump, for that matter.
I bought it and really tried to use it, but the reality was just too clunky for primary use. It has no dpad, a single crappy convex analog stick, terribly placed ABXY buttons, horrible shoulder buttons, and just a bit too much input lag on the trackpads.
Hard truths.
Why did they feel the need to replace analog controls with these weird, inconsistently responsive, difficult to map touch controls when every other console platform had already demonstrated why that’s a bad idea?
Was the SC innovative, bold and ahead of its time in many ways?
NO. It was kitsch and poorly engineered and obviously not play tested sufficiently before release. It was a hobbyist’s attempt at reinventing the mousetrap that got shoved into a major distribution pipeline when Playstation and Nintendo and XBox had already demonstrated why you don’t build controllers this way ten years earlier.
Eliminating 9,000 jobs only guarantees they’ll flounder even longer.
Maybe. Microsoft’s biggest revenue stream has historically been government contracts. I don’t see that failing them anytime in the next decade.
But retail consumer spending? That’s something that could seriously take a few hits in the next big downturn. I can see a company putting its finger to the wind and betting a '08 style recession will kill the market for console gaming in another two or three years.
That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.
Okay, sure. But consider that they didn’t earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers, rich family members, and ego-driven Presidential nominees.
Netflix getting in on the streamed video games wasn’t all that crazy. I flirted with it initially, as they had a few good Steam titles on there that I was effectively getting handed for free.
But the marketing approach of jamming “Play this clickbait garbage game, you stupid idiot!” install button into my face every time I visited the site ultimately lead me to cancel my subscription. Like so much else in modern streaming, the website’s admins do not want you to have any control over your front page. The end result is utterly alienating.
*Also the writing generally sucks ass and assumes I’m not paying attention.
I’ve seen the articles dealing with the phenomenon of “Standard Netflix Show” and how it has become so painfully formulaic that it can only be described as background noise.
Really not a great sign when your premium service is treated like elevator music. But hey, they’ve got a near-trillion dollar valuation, so clearly I’m dumb and their C-levels have earned every penny.
But then again, the mass general population is fucking dumb
That’s a lazy explanation. It neglects that Netflix did have a lot of accumulated goodwill from ease of access and quality content.
But now its in the enshittification era. All the streaming services are behaving like this. There’s no alternative that doesn’t suck with a comparable library.
I genuinely enjoyed the Kingdom Hearts action-adventure with a couple of celebrity minions supporting your Dark Souls-style main character and the occasional Big Summons to drop a global special effect. I don’t think its bad on its face.
But they’ve invested so much time and energy into making Live Action work as a system that everything from the story to the game mechanics have suffered. Like, if you want to make a FromSoft game, then go over to FromSoft and do a business partnership to make Eldin Fantasy: The Soulslike Crystal Saga. You don’t need to keep tinkering with this engine that clearly doesn’t work.
Also, the FF7Remakes seem to have found a sweet spot. Why can’t the mainline games deliver this level of quality?
Also, also, also why have you abandoned ChronoTrigger? Twelve different DragonQuest titles but you gave up on Chrono in the mid-90s? You monsters.
So no, Steam Deck didn’t outsell the Switch 2. It didn’t need to.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment. I would still consider the Steam Deck a “failure” if it couldn’t move enough units to justify its production cost, but it looks like they’re still churning them out, so… eh, it’s not great but its fine.
I would argue that merely comparing generic PC sales to Switch sales also misses the mark. At the very least, you’d focus on unique Steam installs or Active Steam Accounts if you’re really interested in counting the success of Steam relative to Nintendo.
Even then, what you’re really competing with isn’t “SteamDeck sales v. Switch sales”. I’d say its “SteamDeck sales per $1 advertising spent v. …” Given that Nintendo spent around $730M in advertising last year and Valve spent under $100M, it seems that Nintendo has to spend roughly $50/unit to move a Switch relative to Valve coming in closer to $40/unit.
It’s very difficult to compare popularity under two wildly divergent marketing strategies.
But I don’t feel that Steam alone accounts for PC gaming.
If we’re putting the SteamDeck against Nintendo, I’d say the natural comparison is Steam exclusives against Nintendo exclusives.
Even on my Steam Deck, I use GOG, Epic, and itch.io quite regularly.
Sure. Because it is functionally just a computer with a Valve-branded Linux distro. But there are PC games ported to Mobile. I’m not going to count all Android phones to the “PC” side of the aisle just because I can install Balatro on my OnePlus.
The whole reason the Steam Deck exists is to compete as a portable full sized hand-held console comparable to the Switch. If you’re not talking about portable consoles, you’re not really talking apples-to-apples. Anyone crammed into the coach end on an airplane can tell you the quality of life difference between a gaming laptop and a hand-held.
14 crashed and burned until they brought in the A-Team to reboot it.
I’d say that had a much bigger impact on Dev cycle than a successful release on the first try with 7Remake.
If nothing else, successful releases produce more talented Devs, while failures burn them. And that gets us back to 15, which was an outright dumpster fire.
The non-profit helping people from all over the world to become successful game developers (www.theguardian.com) angielski
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Foundation broadened its reach by attending the world’s biggest video games event this summer – but faces challenges funding its work helping underrepresented developers
Xbox consoles are now getting a fullscreen Xbox Game Pass Ultimate ad at boot, just a day after a 50% price hike was announced angielski
source...
EA CEO says company values will 'remain unchanged' under the new ownership of Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner's investment firm (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Right…
'My Advice to Users Is to Accept Reality and Tune, or to Not Play' — Randy Pitchford Is at the 'Get a Refund From Steam' Stage of the Borderlands 4 PC Performance Backlash (www.ign.com) angielski
'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to research (www.psypost.org) angielski
This is actually from 2022, but I missed it back in the day. This is quite important research imo, and very relevant lately. Link to the paper itself: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0747563222001637
Whine harder you assholes angielski
Sony is raising all PS5 console prices in the US by $50, starting tomorrow (www.theverge.com) angielski
Warner Bros. Games is working on another live-service game, despite Suicide Squad flop (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Warner Bros, famous for such hits as Multiversus, Suicide Squad, and that harry potter quidditch game has decided that 99% of gamblers quit before they hit big.
Steam is cracking down on porn games, to keep Payment Processors happy. angielski
https://reddthat.com/pictrs/image/3d4d3bb4-67c7-40fd-9458-238f50f665f2.jpeg...
PAPERS, PLEASE - The Short Film (www.youtube.com) angielski
This is the official short film adaptation of the classic video game Papers Please....
The Steam controller was ahead of its time angielski
The original Steam Controller is undoubtedly one of the coolest pieces of gear I own—and one of the most innovative, too....
Microsoft cancel Perfect Dark reboot and shut the developers down in the name of "continued success" (www.msn.com) angielski
Young men are 'playing videogames all day' instead of getting jobs because they can mooch off of free healthcare, claims congressman (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun! (store.steampowered.com) angielski
What're you buying?
Netflix is delisting some of its best indie games (www.theverge.com) angielski
Square Enix acknowledges Expedition 33 success as inspiration for next Final Fantasy as turn-based is still beloved by gamers (www.videogamer.com) angielski
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Chrono Trigger Remake Seemingly Confirmed By Yuji Horii (insider-gaming.com) angielski