theneverfox

theneverfox, miesiąc temu

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, miesiąc temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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

theneverfox, 4 miesiące temu

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, 4 miesiące temu

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, 4 miesiące temu

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, 7 miesięcy temu

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, 8 miesięcy temu

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, 8 miesięcy temu

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, 9 miesięcy temu

Nice write-up, I appreciate it

theneverfox, 10 miesięcy temu

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, 10 miesięcy temu

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?

theneverfox, 10 miesięcy temu

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

theneverfox, 10 miesięcy temu

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

theneverfox, 10 miesięcy temu

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, 11 miesięcy temu

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