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After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

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Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#441

Post by chaostheory »

unity1001 wrote: post #438
chaostheory wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With all the 'power and influence', the 'elites' of Eastern Bloc did not live so much more in luxury compared to their own people. If an ordinary person got his house at the age of ~35, a party official got it a few years earlier. If an ordinary person drived an X years old car, the official drove a 4-5 year newer car. You’ve contradicted yourself in the same comment. Besides what you wrote doesn’t fully reflect re…

> You’ve contradicted yourself in the same comment. I didnt. There is absolutely no practical difference in between driving a car that came out last year and driving a 5 year old car. > Besides what you wrote doesn’t fully reflect reality Im sorry but a paper from a private American think thank does not make reality. Actual statistics do. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-... > Power is much…

> There is absolutely no practical difference in between driving a car that came out last year and driving a 5 year old car.

Newer cars weren’t the only thing socialist kleptocrats were found to be hoarding. They had all sorts of luxury goods from the West ranging from fashion, jewelry, and even food.

I don’t deny that late stage capitalism will happen or is happening as we speak, but socialism isn’t immune to corruption either. Late stage socialism also happens much sooner than late stage capitalism because power is so much more concentrated in socialist systems. We know this because we’ve had plenty of failed socialism experiments in the 20th century

> Those are religious statements without any sound basis

It’s ironic that you’d write this when you never offer solid facts yourself despite other commenters requesting that you provide data. My data is more valid than your little anecdotes

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#442

Post by chaostheory »

justadolphin wrote: post #341
chaostheory wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been watching news in Asia, including from Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and the Philippines. It’s not overblown. If I were to guess, people are prone to normalcy bias even when the probability for an invasion is getting higher and higher. The further China’s social order degrades, the higher the chances of an invasion.

I think I'm going to take the Taiwanese person's opinion on the matter over yours, no offense haha. Frankly being a Japanese native in Japan, I can only confirm his opinion. Endless political posturing does not make a war, except in the case of the classic gung-ho American cowboyism.

I’m Taiwanese as well, but that irrelevant in light of things like news and facts. Japanese media tends to side with my narrative as well.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#443

Post by chaostheory »

komali2 wrote: post #351
chaostheory wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been watching news in Asia, including from Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and the Philippines. It’s not overblown. If I were to guess, people are prone to normalcy bias even when the probability for an invasion is getting higher and higher. The further China’s social order degrades, the higher the chances of an invasion.

> I’ve been watching news in Asia, including from Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and the Philippines. It should be obvious, but so have I. What are you seeing in your news that makes you think you know more than I that there's not only a higher risk of PLA invasion, but that said risk is at all measurable in any meaningful way? > The further China’s social order degrades, the higher the chances of an invasion. By what bas…

TSMC wouldn’t be making foundries in multiple countries if the danger of a Chinese invasion wasn’t both real and imminent.

There’s also a lot of troop deployments in both Fujian and Hainan.

Focusing your country’s rage outward towards a foreign enemy is also a strategy so old that even the Romans mention it.

I get it. You don’t want to leave like the Cantonese in Hong Kong. You can keep your head in the ground all you want, but it’s not going to make the danger go away

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#444

Post by chaostheory »

mtts wrote: post #329
chaostheory wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taiwan has other problems that are similar to what Ukraine has faced from Russia. People would be crazy to immigrate there now and in the near future.

The difference being that Taiwan is a goose that lays golden eggs (TMSC) so you'd be crazy so invade and thereby kill it. Pretty sure Ukraine had / has nothing that Russia wants to keep alive.

Xi isn’t very bright. Taiwan is also an emotional issue for mainlander China, so the logic will not be fully rational.

If the danger wasn’t real, TSMC wouldn’t be building foundries in the US, Japan, India, and Germany to name a few places.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#445

Post by mtts »

unity1001 wrote: post #423
mtts wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any proof for this? Because in the Netherlands wait times are increasing because, get this, more (old) people are using health care. This increases pressure on the people who work in health care so they burn out, leaving fewer people to pick up the work, who then burn out, lather, rinse, repeat. Salaries in health care are not fantastic, true, but the people burning out do so because they have to work too hard, not b…

> Any proof for this? Its amazing how people are still unaware of this after so many documentaries, reports, advocacy on the matter. Just google. "Neoliberal privatization tactics", "Economic hitmen" (that was a pretty popular take), neoliberalism etc. > more (old) people are using health care. Irrelevant. The number of older people in any country is not enough to bankrupt healthcare systems Healthcare is a function…

I appreciate that you’re angry and I agree that for the most part there’s entirely too much privatization going on (railways? really?). As far as healthcare is concerned, however, in the Netherlands (it might very well be different elsewhere), it is mostly not being privatized and the government is spending ever increasing amounts of money on it which take up an ever increasing cut of the budget and the reason for this is more people are growing older and sicker and are therefore requiring more complex care.

We’re currently at €7000 per person per year spent on health care, with average salaries being €36.000 annually. This is unsustainable.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#446

Post by Shocka1 »

justinlloyd wrote: post #158
mosseater wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read on the /r/gamedev subreddit of people succeeding with even just doing cold-call emails to popular twitch streamers. Someone recently posted a breakdown of how many streamers played their game after he sent out emails, and he seemed to get around 5% turnaround. There's a guide that was posted to this subreddit a while ago too, that gives what you are looking for I think. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comm…

I was playing Diablo 3 one evening (I use my real name), and the guy who I was grouped with was streaming on Twitch. Reasonably big name streamer. He looked up my name, found my personal resume website, played the small game on there. His viewers play the game. It is just some super simple stupid little space invaders game. Next day I wake up to several hundred emails in my inbox from various people just randomly tal…

This is a cool story and a lot can be said about it, including how authentic/organic it is. I think your exact scenario had a lot of luck involved, but I think what we call "luck" is the type of thing is more common than we would think. What I'm talking about is continuously getting in situations that allow luck to happen. If someone is consciously aware of this phenomenon, they can continuously expose themselves and increase their odds. I think some refer to this as the law of attraction, but that doesn't seem right to me given the law of attraction's magical attributes. It's more statistics at play IMO.

It's important that it's authentic though as people can see right through someone's BS. In your situation you were simply playing a game you liked, which is about as authentic as it gets. There are a lot of people out there grinding away at something they don't necessarily enjoy, for the end goal of making money or success, which sounds terrible to me. I'd much rather grind away at something I truly enjoyed and where it's a win/win whether success comes with it or not.

In my younger and very introverted days I accidentally figured this phenom out. I was on a BBS site for a couple years, just hanging out with people with the same interest (motorcycle riding/racing). This led to IRL meetups, which led to me riding for a professional motorcycle racing team, where I lived my dream racing fully built Superbikes for several years. There was some luck involved of course, but it would have never happened if I hadn't participated authentically on some random website.

Since learning this important life lesson I've applied the same philosophy to my professional life. At this point I've had enough "lucky" situations happen where it's affirmed my opinion of statistics at play.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#447

Post by nonethewiser »

komali2 wrote: post #228
nonethewiser wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They decided to live off 30k a year with no health insurance. What did they think would happen?

Would you rather live in a world where we don't have things like Dwarf Fortress? Their passion has been the game, as they understood it, they weren't able to make it and have health insurance (as I recall from the documentary, there were some issues getting remote jobs, and health insurance out of pocket is apparently prohibitively expensive in the USA). Why are you blaming them and not the system?

> Would you rather live in a world where we don't have things like Dwarf Fortress?

1. we do have Dwarf Fortress.

2. It's not our collective responsibility to finance people who want to make art

I'm not blaming the system because it's not the limiting factor here. They did not prioritize their financial security so why should society do it instead? They have all the tools to finance their lives yet opted not to. They learned this themselves and corrected it when they realized it was unsustainable. The worst possible scenario is subsidizing their previous lifestyle.

Insurance not covering medically necessary procedures and hospitals charging exorbitant prices is a problem, not this.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#448

Post by doorstuck »

namrog84 wrote: post #394
bowsamic wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's lottery. I think that we don't want to admit that most people are just bad at designing and developing games. I hang about on /r/gamedev and I've seen a lot of posts complaining about low sales and not a single one of those games was compelling

its hard to be critical. ive never seen a great game not do well. even games that might seem pretty not doing well if you look closely enough are often still missing something. I challenge anyone to provide a link to an actual great indie game that hasnt done well. that flew under radar.

"Great" and "haven't done well" would be subjective, but here's my list of amazing games that are underperforming in sales: The Hex Eliza Suzerain Know by Heart (and all Ice Pick lodge games for that matter)

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#449

Post by will5421 »

todfox wrote: post #200
dabeeeenster wrote: post #76

So this happened to a guy that worked for me. Loved video games, super talented front end dev. Made a horror game in Unity at evenings and weekends with his best friend. Launched it on Steam. Very low sales. But he learnt a huge amount about marketing and game design based on player feedback. Designed a second game, put all the marketing learnings into it, 48 hours after launch the biggest streamer on twitch was stre…

After four years working on my retro game nearly full time, and several launches, I still don't understand marketing enough to understand what to do differently. A lot of the advice out there is something like: "create a community" or "go join several communities" or "get to know other indie devs on Twitter". To me, this simply feels fake. I don't really participate in any online communities. I spend enough time in f…

Have you thought about making a demo? That would give you something you might feel good about sharing on social media, and would be passed around on if the game is good. And it’s something you could make with your existing skill set (no crafting of emails necessary).

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#450

Post by vkoskiv »

serverholic wrote: post #107
satvikpendem wrote: post #67

I'm happy for their success. However, I'm dismayed that it was their inability to pay for healthcare that landed them in this (albeit good) situation. It's not a situation that should be forced on citizens in a modern country, for which this particular example is a feel-good ending, but there are many more (orders of magnitude more) feel-bad endings, so to speak.

Healthcare and basic income are crucial for moving towards the next stage of civilizaiton. Like you said, I'm really glad it worked out for them but so, so many people don't get so lucky or are willing to take such a big risk. How many more dwarf fortresses could we have if we gave people the safety net to follow their dreams? Instead of worrying about basic necessities like food, shelter, and healthcare.

> How many more dwarf fortresses could we have if we gave people the safety net to follow their dreams?

So, so many. Linux is a good example. Linus has talked about how he was able to spend a lot of time on getting Linux off the ground because back in the 80s and 90s, study allowances in Finland were very, very generous. Took him like 8 years to graduate, and during that time he didn't have to worry at all about finding a job to pay rent and buy food. These days, the system is similar, but they do monitor your progress more closely and will cut off the allowance if you don't progress in your studies. (ask me how I know :P)

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