Yeah, that was the first red flag for me too. Even if it’s true, that would mean his experience in game dev is not that much longer than the time it took to make BG3.
But even if we assume years in the industry is not a useful metric, the article makes a bunch of other assumptions. Like saying the player is “punished” by the existence of so many dead end dialogue options. I don’t consider it a punishment to not see every single dialogue option a game has. I intend to make the choices in the game that I think are my best option, and if that means I miss out on some content, so be it, that’s the experience I got.
But to flat out call the game “not good” us laughable. Particularly from someone so green in the industry.
Totally agree, but where the line is, I think, is that companies want free lunch: they want to leverage a mind-like thing (either a human brain or a trained AI) that has internalized a ton off content that it can use to generate new content from, but they don’t ever want to pay them or treat them like a living being.
If these AI models ever become advanced enough that people actually consider them to be alive or conscious or something, suddenly the tables will turn, and companies will be fighting against their ethical treatment. It will basically be another, much more philosophically difficult, slavery debate, and we all know which side the corporations will be on.
Or maybe it’s simply a false equivalence we all need to accept. Maybe creativity can exist independent from a conscious brain, or maybe it’s just a vulnerability in human consciousness to look at these stochastic arrangements of data and say “that looks inspired”.
Either way, in 300 years our progenitors will look back at us and think, “wow, I can’t believe they thought that was ok. Clearly it was just a different time.”
CEOs have to schedule their sales many months ahead of time. Also, it was 2000 shares, which is peanuts.
The article is focusing on this guy because people know who he is. Instead, they should be focusing on the board members who sold tens of thousands of shares right before the announcement. From Kotaku:
Tomer Bar-Zeev, Unity’s president of growth, …sold 37,500 shares on September 1 for roughly $1,406,250, and board director Shlomo Dovrat, who sold 68,454 shares on August 30 for around $2,576,608.
Also, I actually didn’t know this until yesterday, but CEOs are also permitted to buy shares of their own company, so long as they clear the purchase with the SEC. But that would indicate they’re optimistic about their company…
Interesting, I didn’t realize this. I assumed a dev kit was always required for that behavior, and that’s why Nintendo offering a cheap switch dev kit was such a big deal. TIL
It would be great if there was a guaranteed way to homebrew your consoles, but yeah security and stability is the real thing we benefit from. I don’t think anyone would advocate for more hackers in console multiplayer games, and I don’t want a homebrew game I’m running to crash or brick my system because of their fly-by-night hardware usage.
Remember when Sean Murray said prior to NMS launch that it was part of their vision for you to be alone in a vast uncharted universe with nowhere to call a home? That was code for, “we don’t have multiplayer or basebuilding, and there’s not really anything interesting enough for you to stay there long term”.
Give Starfield a few years, they’ll figure out what to do with those planets.
Zachtronics games are on another level, really. I think what sets them apart from “edutainment” games is that they’re not really made for someone to learn programming, they’re a labor of love for people who love to program. And as a result, they just happen to be the most attractive resource to learn programming that I’ve ever seen.
I think that’s a good lesson that all games that want to be educational should take away: don’t feel the need to force material down the player’s throat, instead make a game for someone who loves the subject matter, and the rest will take care of itself.
I hope you’re not disappointed by Inscryption, because it’s not going to be what you expect. But it is great. Don’t look anything up before you play it.
If you think I’m arguing that artists should not be compensated for their work, then I’ve completely misrepresented myself. Is that what you thought I meant?
I was going to say, all artists should share this position, but I’ll do one better: if you don’t have this position, you’re not an artist. Feels bold to make any absolute claim about what makes an artist, but I feel safe on this one. If making sure you’re fairly compensated is higher priority than sharing your art, then you’re not an artist.
Yeah, that’s why I think we’re in an MMO slump right now. The only companies who can afford the scale “need” it to be a cash cow. So they need really predictable methods of generating income, which means not doing anything too interesting. I’m hoping one day we’ll get past that. I think we have the technology right now for indie devs to roll out a semi-affordable MMO of decent quality, but I also don’t want the market to be flooded with garbage MMOs. We already have too many of those.