101–110 of 266 posts
Stardew Valley, which has been sold to millions of gamers, has been created using the free MonoGame engine. So ConcernedApe is giving back to the open source software which made his commercial success possible, like commercial parties should.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't call anything Epic Games does charity: it's all empire expansion for them.
All of this is self-serving, even from the Stardew Valley dev. It’s win-win.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your chances are much more higher building your own game than playing the lottery endlessly. You forget that guy who made Stardew Valley had to self-teach everything he knew, till he got to the point he quit his full time job. I don't see in what universe you have a better chance to win the lottery, than to build a successful indie game if you truly put your heart into it. Some of the greatest inventions didn't come…
The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much. If you want to create indie games—and you can make it work without quitting your day job—go for it! But I don't think it would be smart for EA or Ubisoft to, like, stop making big-budget games and make indie games instead. If you can make a breakout hit, you can make a huge profit—but you have to make a breakout hit, and that comes down to…
I think the problem comes from marketing budgets. For any given game a marketing budget can push some amount of sales, but applying a marketing budget to each game makes it much harder for the winners to make up losses on the rest.
Small releases also need to be 'lean' releases; management overhead is another cost that's hard to make up in scale.
Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
Hearthstone (Blizzard) is another rare exception of an indie-scale, in-house game that was a breakout hit that could not have come from the outside (because of the IP involved), but even that existed because it started as a "closet-scale" project with senior developers who insulated themselves from management pressures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, this indie developer sold more than lots of (most?) AAA studios, and AAA studios have a lot more operating costs than an indie. Donating one dev year is a lot easier when you sell 50 million copies and hire no one than when you sell a couple million copies and have 100 employees plus investors. (I have 3000 hours on this game, so definitely not biased against indies or something.)
These studios have profit margins in the multi-millions, they could afford a symbolic $100k donation. Instead they choose to push their developers through another crunch cycle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the Godot donation expand their empire? Other than get more people into game development?
It expands their empire like Microsoft pledging to "support" Open Source: it's disingenuous, self-serving, and develops a "claim" of authority over the sector. It allows them, the makers of Unreal Engine, to develop a business relationship with their competition and influence the trajectory on one of only major alternatives in order to control the market more. If Epic Games really cared about Godot, they would align…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, this indie developer sold more than lots of (most?) AAA studios, and AAA studios have a lot more operating costs than an indie. Donating one dev year is a lot easier when you sell 50 million copies and hire no one than when you sell a couple million copies and have 100 employees plus investors. (I have 3000 hours on this game, so definitely not biased against indies or something.)
These studios have profit margins in the multi-millions, they could afford a symbolic $100k donation. Instead they choose to push their developers through another crunch cycle.
Oh and these studios often lose money instead of having profit margins in the multi-million, see Ubisoft.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valve contributes effort to Wine via Proton, and provides open source software like Steam Audio. EA does something similar, and their EASTL is an opinionated and gaming-focused container and algorithms library that they maintain and made open source.
They’ve also paid tons to Igalia to develop features for them in open source projects.
But I think people cynically underestimate the value of the contributions corporations do make and fail to understand just how much of the software we enjoy is only possible due to corporate funding.
Igalia may be a good example as most of have are not even familiar with them. But the Linux distro that I use comes from their, the Servo browser is being driven by them, and many other projects benefit from their contributions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would 1 unit of this game have a "profit margin" of 10%? It's a video game. He's not selling canned goods.
What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is? They make cents on every can. Something like 2-3%. The video games industry is filled to the brim with gatekeepers who take their cuts. Valve takes 30%, just for their store. Publishers start at 10%. Your engine might take a cut. Estimating that Stardew Valley, the big success video game with the lowest overhead bar none, has made 10% profit might be too low. 20…