@theneverfox@pawb.social
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theneverfox

@theneverfox@pawb.social

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theneverfox,
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That’s a bit much… It’s just not possible to guarantee that as a developer

Software is a living thing, and anything useful is made up of layer after layer of ever shifting sand. We do our best, but we are all at the mercy of our dependencies. There are trade-offs, there are bugs we can do nothing about, and sometimes moving forward means dropping support for platforms that are no longer “cheap” enough to afford while also working on the game

I love this though. I also like the idea of requiring access to earlier builds.

These mitigate anti consumer practices - dropping support for a platform is more likely to be a technical trade-off or unintentional consequence though

theneverfox,
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Oh no, I totally agree with you that this is gross behavior - I just think your rule is too broad.

So we need more focused rules and mechanisms. I think disclosing anti-cheat on the store is a good mechanism, I think forcing them to provide previous releases is a good rule. That obviously doesn’t cover nearly enough, but in the current gaming environment I think it’s a good start

theneverfox,
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Wozniak is probably the most famous example. He recognized the corrupting nature of money, decided he had enough, and stopped to live in comfort and occasionally work towards causes he finds important

Lots of people have done the same… But if they’re rich and still chasing after money? They’ll never stop

theneverfox,
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I couldn’t get past the title.

Good remakes are good, they must bring not only graphics, but game mechanics and balance, up to date. They must be better than the original in all aspects, or they lose out to nostalgia

Bad remakes are bad, and most remakes in this era are bad

It’s not about remakes, it’s about quality

theneverfox,
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Doesn’t steam have a clause to the effect of “if we go out of business, you’ll get X period to download your games so you can manage them yourself”?

theneverfox,
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I think I read in the steam agreement itself - I could be wrong, but I generally have a source tagged to my knowledge, and the knowledge is tagged as a direct quote from the document

And yes, if a VC buys out steam I’d be horrified, but it’s structurally resistant to that. It’s largely employee owned and heavily employee managed, their handbook helped me understand the concept of how employee owned businesses could be the answer to many of society’s problems

theneverfox,
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  1. installers for games are usually just a script that unzips the game and makes some shortcuts. Steam installs all your games in a standard way in a folder of your choice. You can straight up copy that folder to another computer. You can use another launcher and just play your games, there are already many that can read steam’s standardized format. I’ve done it multiple times to avoid redownloading my library
  2. It depends how steam sunsets their DRM, but yes - obviously if a game has 3rd party DRM, that third party is in control. Steam could choose a user hostile way to sunset their own DRM, but they could release ways to deactivate it

DRM is bad, steam provides an easy way for developers to use steam DRM, and it’s generally less user hostile than most DRM. To me, this seems like harm reduction

Ultimately, it’s not up to steam what, if any, DRM a game uses. They manage their in house offering, but the developer doesn’t have to use it if they don’t want to

theneverfox,
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That’s not what arbitration is. This doesn’t stop valve from reaching a settlement, it stops them from using fake privately funded bench trials

Binding arbitration means the results are legally binding, non-binding arbitration means a judge needs to approve the arbitration results before it’s final. Sometimes it’s with an off duty judge, sometimes anyone can be the arbiter

Regardless, on one side you have a repeat customer, on the other you have someone who will probably never be back - there’s a built in conflict of interest

theneverfox,
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For all we know, they’re literally just passing massive checks in a circle to one another to say “yes, it says right here in our bank records that we spent a combined $100,000,000”, meanwhile only 25% actually goes into the production, and they pocket the rest.

That would be illegal and easily discovered

But you could pay $10M to hire another company to do the sound mixing. They might spend $500k to do the work. You might also be the owner of that company, and the money ends up back in your pocket…And that’s not embezzlement or a kickback, because that’s what it’s called when poor people do it

theneverfox,
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Ideas are nothing. Everyone has a million daydreams, the most special and creative idea in the world is worthless if you can’t express it.

Execution is everything. Hell, you don’t even need an idea - you can draw random design elements out of a bag and come up with something great

theneverfox,
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Ideas have both quality and value, and they interconnect to make the backbone of interactive experiences

That’s it exactly. The way the ideas interconnect and the way they’re presented to the player is everything. That’s execution, that’s everything - the ideas are just what’s in your head

theneverfox,
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I had the original with the expansion, I used to play Tony hawk online

There was no psn back then though, you just plugged in and were good to go

theneverfox,
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But the switch isn’t just an underpowered console… It’s a handheld with an HDMI port

theneverfox,
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Oh, it’s always been around. Before the Internet even… It’s always been there, hell as a kid I jailbroke my PSP and loaded it up homebrew games, some of them were quite good.

And before that, there were no AAA studios, there was only indie. Doom was made by an indie studio, Minecraft was indie, flash games were indie, even the original text mmorpgs played over arpanet were indie

They’ve always been there, often pushing the boundaries and trailblazing. It may not have been mainstream, but it’s always been at the forefront of gaming, trying new things and trailblazing

Three things are different now - it’s far easier to advertise and sell indie games, powerful tools are more available to the common person than ever, and modern gaming is getting worse by the day

Which is great, but also a double edged sword. Games (even fairly simple games) take a long time to make - like years if you do it consistently in your free time, or months going full time.

Early Access was great for this - you could put up the prototype, then raise the money and support to quit your job and hire an artist to flesh it out. But if everything is early access, nothing is.

Conversely, if you go into game dev communities (haven’t found any great ones since I left that site), you hear all about people dropping $1500 for marketing that does nothing, because indie gamers tend to like indie style social media, and mainstream gamers you can easily pay to reach don’t really like indie games

Skill with social media is key to a successful indie game, but there’s not a lot of crossover between that and making a good game

So this kind of thing is huge - if piratesoftware recommends a game I’ll at least look at it, because I respect his opinion on game design. If I see an ad, store page, or random clip of a game, I’m unlikely to look at it

Indie gaming doesn’t need this because indie games are rare, it needs it because it’s so difficult to find the hidden gems buried in mountains of mediocre games

theneverfox,
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Not even planned obsolescence… It’s just “hey, you guys aren’t buying our slightly better new version. We were talking today about how to make a little bit more money, and we decided, hey, we don’t want to maintain this anymore. We also don’t want to unlock it and let someone else take over, and while we’re at it let’s just start shutting off features until you buy a new one. Because fuck you”

theneverfox,
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I was just able to get in just now - it took me a couple tries before I realized it wants your email, not username

Not sure if that’s what was happening for you, but I figured it’s with mentioning

theneverfox,
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I’m not attracted to masculine characters. You want me to care what a dude looks like? You’re barking up the wrong tree. And if I wanted to look at myself, I’d look in a mirror

My avatar is not me… If I’m going to watch a character for a couple dozen hours, it’s going to be someone I find attractive. Hell, if I’m going to spend more than 5 minutes on a character creation screen, it’s going to be a woman, because it’s hard to get invested in a male character for me

theneverfox,
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Crazy more expensive for raw profits - per unit, it’s basically negligible.

You could say this if s consumer focused effort to achieve market share or sell more games, but I choose to believe this if just what happens

Personally, I think this is just what happens when you have an employee run tech company. They lose out on like 0.05% profits, but more then make up for it through game sales and reputation

I mean realistically, this is probably a few cents a unit. Across hen million units, that’s real money. But quality pays over time. They lose out on quarterly profits, but they don’t worry about that bs - they’re not publicly traded, and they’ll make way more on a 5 year timespan

theneverfox,
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Fair point, although I’d argue that this is probably a cheap and standard extra step

Molds and turn around time are definitely expensive… But much cheaper if you wait until the next version that probably will have different mount points for the newer internals

I’m not saying this isn’t worth praising, I’m just saying this is exactly what integrity and giving your employees autonomy looks like. You come back for version 2, and you take your lessons learned, you explore the improvements that you thought up during the last version

It’s just basic craftsmanship, but that has unfortunately been smothered in most places these days. You have to be big enough for this to be an R&D effort you can afford to fail, but small enough no one has bought you up to wring you for value

theneverfox,
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Monopsony - a monopoly but instead of controlling production, you control the marketplace, like Amazon

Steam is almost at that level, but they at least do it by tempting people with features and don’t try to lock you in… Trouble with exchanges is that fragmentation really sucks for everyone

theneverfox,
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True, but steam is about as good as it gets. They aren’t actually a monoposody, they’re just the biggest marketplace.

They don’t do exclusives, don’t restrict you from selling elsewhere, they’ll integrate with any piece of software (including things you’ve installed externally or will install other launchers for you - even if they contain competing storefronts)

They do have competition, except they did the one thing companies hate to do most at this stage - they compete. They’re the only real option because they limit nothing from their customers and offer better features. Epic offers free games, Microsoft comes pre-installed on most gaming computers, Amazon has everyone’s payment details already, and despite it all these alternatives steam is still the best option in every regard

Yes, it’s almost guaranteed to go to shit eventually, but what better system is there? There’s no one more trustworthy to run the primary gaming marketplace… They’ve even built their company structure and policies to resist the pull of enshittification.

A new company isn’t a good answer, a distributed system wouldn’t work well for this application, and even nonprofits struggle to resist enshittification as well as valve has done

What can we do except keep watch and push back if valve goes out of bounds?

CD Projekt recommends starting a new game when Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 drops: 'starting fresh will enhance your overall gameplay experience' (www.pcgamer.com)

Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a mammoth-sized update, titled Update 2.0, tomorrow, September 21, and it promises to be a bit of a game changer. A police revamp, a progression overhaul, a new cybernetics system, vehicular combat, DLSS 3.5—it's vast, and thankfully separate from the Phantom Liberty expansion due next week, so you'll...

theneverfox,
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It does, you just have to go into the game properties menu and there’s a version option

theneverfox,
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I think it’s a different story - I’d play the base game first

theneverfox,
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Mobile games, case in point. They often aren’t designed to be good or even fun, they’re designed to maximize playtime over the long term

That means you start off making it fun and easy to advance, but then you start to back off on the rewards and make them grind and wait more and more. It’s the Facebook technique

theneverfox,
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Because all those things make it possible to release independently, it’s still not easy. Marketing and getting exposure is hard, it’s a totally different skill. With a publisher, you don’t have to worry about any of that - you might even get funding up front.

Personally, I still think it’s worth doing - I’m in that position, and although I’m having a lot of trouble getting off the ground, at least I’m free to follow my visions

But I get why people would do it. A slice of a big pie is worth more than all of a tiny one.

It’s also stressful if it’s not in your skillset - I’ve started using chat gpt to rewrite my announcements and such. Before I’d stress trying to put them together and focused on being clear and honest, but no one was reading them. I find it worse than public speaking, at least when I get on stage I’m too busy to feel self conscious.

The stuff I come up with using chat-gpt is a bit cringe, but at least people read them - sadly corpo speak draws people in

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