341–350 of 375 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not deferred payment for most devs as they do not reach the 1 million revenue
For "the best train sim ever made" they probably reach it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between today and 30 years ago is that if you are an individual developer, you are at the complete mercy of a single company (Valve), who can force you to do essentially anything they want for the privilege of publishing on their platform, with no meaningful alternative, and zero recourse if they say “no”.
Both Itch.io and GOG are alternative platforms, as is just doing your own thing Many games I own started their life distributed exclusively through a platform other than steam. Arguably, you don't even want to approach steam distribution until you've already collected your hype. Steam no longer can surface gems, because it's just far too flooded, so you should seek alternative channels in general.
This hasn't been my experience. I've found that running the "Discovery Queue" a few times once or twice a week brings up an interesting game or two every month. It also brings up a bunch of stuff I'm not interested in, but that's the nature of game development... what you make isn't going to be particularly interesting to most folks.
There's also the "Show me a random game" link, which is fun to hit and see what crap it presents you. [0]
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/explore/random/>
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nowadays most games will run on Linux thanks to Valve's Proton compatibility layer.
"most" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Multiplayer games generally don't. Haven't tried this one yet, but in my experience it's like 90% of single player games work and the remaining 10% will never work.
Another notable, if old, train simulator from Japan is OpenBVE. It was easy to model railroads on it. Many short Brazilian routes were/are modeled in OpenBVE. It is particularly convincing since it simulates well the typical lateral wobbling that metric trains are known for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's important to keep development going but commercial projects is not the only way. Godot Foundation exists and there are plenty of others in open-source space. A nonprofit means actual reports about how money is used, and it's not as if commercial projects are somehow better because they don't fold or get sold or canceled. And even between commercial ways, charging royalties is one of the worst. It doesn't cost Ep…
Nothing against Godot, it's a great project, but looking at the wikipedia list of notable games using the engine, there's a single one I have heard of. Meanwhile about 28% of the market share of all video games is using Unreal. So I don't really see the need to make "everyone much happier" honestly. > Sell additional services which actually do cost you money to keep up After a game has been released a solo dev often…
The dev is a person from Indonesia (Rizky Nova) who's device has 16GB of ram. Being able to use the Unreal Engine for free to develop this is awesome. This couldn't have happened 10 years ago.
I have said it for a few years now. If Epic ever decided to go public on the stock market, I would throw a significant amount of my savings at them. Their technology is astounding. Yes, some games have some issues but it really seems like that is a problem of developers not knowing when to say 'No!' to the giant tool kit they have been provided.
One person made the best train sim. Meanwhile AAA studios need 400 people to make the same game twice.
But starfield, which was widely criticized by fans, was over 100 people and 8 years development. With the most common criticism from former devs being about the additional management structure and difficulty of communication.
I can’t help but feel there is a lesson there for tech companies where engineering orgs for products are 200+ people when a 20-30 person startup is your top competitor in the vertical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints. Removing them is what's difficult - so why don't you add them back if it makes you a better programmer and you enjoy doing it more? Personally, I think the reason you enjoyed it more as a teenager is just down to the fact you were fully in control of what to do and had no external pressure to earn money etc, so if anything you had less constraints - at least from my po…
Which is often the case in music too actually. So many famous artists and bands created their best work early in their careers. You would think touring and several albums make them perfect the craft of making songs, but I think involving money and external pressure actually kill the creative spark if you’re not mindful about it.
If I were forced to write music, now, for money or whatever, it would be bad music.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This couldn't have happened 10 years ago. I agree. Something similar could have happened 30 years ago, and it did, see Transport Tycoon (or a lot of early games). But from 2000 to 2020?
The difference between today and 30 years ago is that if you are an individual developer, you are at the complete mercy of a single company (Valve), who can force you to do essentially anything they want for the privilege of publishing on their platform, with no meaningful alternative, and zero recourse if they say “no”.