331–340 of 379 posts
How much is left after steam takes their cut, taxes, etc? Heard it's about 30-40% which is really demoralizing
Then it's depend on location of company, corporate tax, etc.
So 25-30% of net profit for game development studio.
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RE: "Make sure your hook is glowingly radioactively good. Don't overbalance. Leave in some jank. Scope down and finish quickly. And avoid tropes. Stand out." For games with a limited run time is it possible to balance this against Steam's 2 hour return policy? Feel like we're now trapped in a position where you can make short little proof of concepts on itch but when it comes to trying to make something professional…
This is very much personal opinion but if you can blast through all of a games content within 2 hours of purchase it wasn't finished / big enough to justify a financial transaction in the first place.
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Thanks Rand! 1) It obviously varies w/ each dev's situation, but I think your sense of the value prop is a fair default one w/o context. In my case, there were four reasons: 1) having a partner to help with (to me) "the unknown unknowns" (i'm only a dev and a novice designer, literally anything else would be my first time doing it, so i figured having an experienced partner there would be wise) 2) the advance was nic…
RE: "Make sure your hook is glowingly radioactively good. Don't overbalance. Leave in some jank. Scope down and finish quickly. And avoid tropes. Stand out." For games with a limited run time is it possible to balance this against Steam's 2 hour return policy? Feel like we're now trapped in a position where you can make short little proof of concepts on itch but when it comes to trying to make something professional…
200,000 units is a far cry from just a 'minor hit' - congratulations! During the project, what was the biggest instinct you had that was ultimately validated by its success, but still surprised you? What was a lesson you learned that you didn't expect? How was working with a publisher? What did they do right and what did they do wrong?
Honest answer? Dancing stick figure guy on the title screen. I did it very early in the project, in a fugue state at 3am. It lingered and lingered there, with ppl wondering "Is this real? Is this the actual title screen?" and luckily by the end I think everyone had drank enough psychedelic koolaid to agree - stick figure man stays. The artist made some better art for his hands/feet, and that was that. He's divisive,…
One of the greatest joys in score-attack games like Ballionaire is discovering certain combos that feel brokenly good.
During one of my early playthroughs, I got some combo that would spawn a crazy number of balls on every drop. The game would seriously lag for about half a second while the playing field absolutely exploded with balls. It was incredibly entertaining!
Some developers see this happen and will nerf things into the ground to prevent them, but that's an absolute fun-destroying choice. In a PVP game, yeah, absolutely you should prevent broken builds like that. But a single-player score attack? Nah. Leave that in.
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That might be challenging as large companies tend to hit people with strong NDAs which means that any reference to time at $company would need to be approved by $company. IF you don't do this then you might be rinsed by the court.
That’s not a thing. I’m not sure where you heard that. Large companies definitely don’t try to prohibit you from telling people you worked there.
no, thats not what I said.
Large companies that pay generous severance generally want a non disparagement agreement in return. This means that yes you can say you worked there, you might even be able to say what department you worked in.
What you can't say is that you worked on x,y or z, your opinion on the company direction or anything else that might be related to the company or is actions.
If you even speak of this NDA/non disparagement agreement to anyone other than the listed highly limited number of people, you'll have to pay back all the severance, plus legal costs.
So OP might want to tell you about their time, but they don't want to because it'll cost them a house worth of cash.
Do you think "diamond in the rough" games exist? Some claim that there are games that are hidden gems that haven't received the recognition they deserve. Other claim they have never seen a generally good game that didn't have generally good success. What is your view? I think some games are good within their niche, but their niche sucks. Something like a hardcore roguelike with ASCII graphics. Within the hardcore rog…
I've even played a version of the original Rogue. Nethack and Brogue are my preferred rogue-likes. The term rougelike has been watered down so much it means many different things to many different people. I do however have a hard time nostalging over old games I used to love - mainly for screen resolution issues. Once you get the new space/bling its hard to go back. I do like some of the remasters though, but some ha…
Remasters/Remakes are often a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation for the developers.
If they make the game function exactly like the old one, just with an updated skin, people complain that it's all they did.
If they fix bugs and update mechanics for a modern audience, people complain that it isn't the same game at all, just a similar story being told through a different game.
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My favorite is pachincremental but I have an unnatural affinity for those games. Number go up. Someone called doom and quake boomer-shooters and that's funny to me.
This comment introduced me to pachinkremental. Thank you / goddamn you.
Do you know why Facebook let you and/or your team go?
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Thanks Rand! 1) It obviously varies w/ each dev's situation, but I think your sense of the value prop is a fair default one w/o context. In my case, there were four reasons: 1) having a partner to help with (to me) "the unknown unknowns" (i'm only a dev and a novice designer, literally anything else would be my first time doing it, so i figured having an experienced partner there would be wise) 2) the advance was nic…
How far were you into building the game before you began to approach publishers? YC speaks frequently about investing in the founders, and not the idea---but then dives right into well you need to have revenue and/or users and it's a bit of a double-standard---so I'm curious what stage you were at when you started talking to publishers and what state your product was in when you finally signed a deal.