101–110 of 252 posts
I liked cyberpunk, if only because of the story. I like games with decent - excellent stories. Sure, I wish cyberpunk could’ve been even better but it was enjoyable.
It’s hard to find games with good stories and lore nowadays, I think.
Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago. It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has r…
It doesn't always have to be like this though. Look at Factorio – the devs are happy (looking from the outside, but they are always very enthusiastic about how they love the game), the community loves it (there are infinite remarks of people who sunk thousands of hours into this game, all for a single payment of 25 €), and they don't seem to have any financial issues either. I have not seen many disappointed people a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be a stupid question, but isn't it standard practice to require that employees use VPN? Why would they expose servers to the internet?
Perhaps, but I’d say it’s quite hard to do this effectively when you’re using sass products. Even if you’re self hosting, and have dozens or hundreds of WFH employees, what’s the alternative? No access for anyone while you scale your VPN? Just wait while everyone pulls and pushes gigs of data over the VPN to perforce, you didn’t need that video meeting after all? You’ll get a big fat nope to that when you try to do i…
Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago. It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has r…
Read up on Jonathan Blow [1], sounds like you might like his philosophy. The short of it is that he believes time is valuable and should be respected. I also love Braid, a game he made. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Blow#Philosophy_and_v...
EDIT: There's a minority of population (which is heavily overrepresented in our industry), which enjoys solving pure logical puzzles just for the sake of solving them. Just look at how much praise Factorio gets on HN. Also famously, Feynman enjoyed to figure out keylocks and ancient hieroglyphs as a past time. Puzzle games cater mainly to such audience I guess.
Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago. It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has r…
Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago. It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has r…
I quit the games industry for similar reasons. I worked in a management position at Nintendo and couldn't see anywhere evident to step up, with very few options to even step horizontally.
All the potential step ups in the so-called extrinsic motivators of work (salary, reputation, nice places to work, etc) came from pay-to-win mobile studios and the like. I could never find the intrinsic motivation to go there - I felt it's not what I signed up for when I started to work in the industry.
To add, I don't think that all micropayment models are necessarily predatory. For example, Nintendo finally caved in to mobile gaming (it started under Iwata IIRC), and from what I hear (and have very briefly seen with their Fire Emblem mobile game) their microtransaction policy is pretty fair.
Hell, we had microtransactions when I was a kid with arcades. I feel a bit of pity about my former self and all the other kids spending all those quarters on fleeting moments of entertainment (the PC and home console were so much better value for money!), however I wouldn't call the whole affair exploitative.
But indeed, games as close-ended artistic works are a fairly small part of the market now, and if that's your jam, you may need to prepare yourself to navigate a niche rather than an entire industry.
Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago. It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has r…
Take these values down to 10-15%, and the game development business becomes a lot higher-margin, encouraging new entrants and supporting better salaries and conditions for staff.
The other problem is that games are unique that they are entirely B2C, retail products. As a result, the full taxation burden falls on them. Its not uncommon for developers to actually receive only 50% of spent revenue, after global sales taxes, platform commissions, refunds, chargebacks are taken into account.
By contrast general IT companies - if providing B2B services (including advertising) - have a much lower commission and taxation burden.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most addictive games are not the ones we think about. My friends are into "competitive" gaming, games like CSGO, Dota2. These developers barely bring any content to their games and it amazes me how much profit they make for less work compared to AAA studios releasing blockbusters like RDR2. If your game is not competitive, microtransaction-ready, not a sandbox with procedural, generative stuff, the chances are th…
This made me wonder: Is there a parallel between the advertising industry and their ever increasing quest to mine more data and the games industry with their incessant need for DLC, microtransactions and whatnot? It seems that middle-management/VC's in both of these industries are pushing the same processes (or could we use "dogma"?) without any empirical evidence that what they are doing is the right thing, all the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't always have to be like this though. Look at Factorio – the devs are happy (looking from the outside, but they are always very enthusiastic about how they love the game), the community loves it (there are infinite remarks of people who sunk thousands of hours into this game, all for a single payment of 25 €), and they don't seem to have any financial issues either. I have not seen many disappointed people a…
Factorio is awesome. It's kind of funny-ironic that a counter-example to "making games as addictive as possible" is an indie game addictive enough to be called "cracktorio" by its fans.
When people talk about "making games as addictive as possible" in the general and pejorative sense, they usually mean something else: they mean that the optimization goal is not "fun", but "making money off players". That very often involves making games less fun on purpose, to exploit player's psychology against them. You keep frustrating them on purpose - but not hard enough for them to abandon the game entirely - in hopes that over time, enough of them will break and buy the paid content or unfrustration features, to relieve their psychological pain. Explicitly additive aspects get included to maximize the time the player is exposed to these monetization opportunities.
Addictiveness is ultimately a red herring in these discussions. Factorio is designed as a win-win game, the devs wants to give their players the best experience in the game's category. Modern, pay-to-win, addictive games are designed by malicious people with no moral compass, who want to extract as much money as possible from people, as cheaply as possible.
(Like with many of the big problems in our industry, focusing on tech or immediate "sciency-sounding" consequences is missing the forest for the trees. These problems all stem from people being allowed to exploit others for money. Solutions to mitigate immediate consequences will be worked around very quickly. Real solutions need to involve restrictions on the types of business that can be done.)
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[0] - https://xkcd.com/356/
Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago. It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has r…
These are just symptoms - the fundamental underlying factor is the 30% commission taken by Valve, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Google. Take these values down to 10-15%, and the game development business becomes a lot higher-margin, encouraging new entrants and supporting better salaries and conditions for staff. The other problem is that games are unique that they are entirely B2C, retail products. As a result, the full t…