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How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

elbowgreasegames.substack.com

61–70 of 127 posts

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't games like CSGO, FIFA, and Overwatch almost exclusively run on gacha-profits?

I think it is possible to be successful in games without being predatory. Humble Bundle was a demonstration of that. I don’t believe that ultra-predatory mechanics are long-term sustainable. They usually yield a “ring of fire” effect that creates a growing ring of users for a while but really you’re burning out all your core users and will implode. This is how many describe the original Zynga model. Supercell (founde…

>I don’t believe that ultra-predatory mechanics are long-term sustainable

I don't think they're trying to be. I think they're whale hunting, find a few high spenders, and milk them for all they're worth. Then they spin up a new IP (or license one out), rinse and repeat

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#62
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are. The implementation tends to differ from how eastern-developed gacha games work, but they're making billions from virtual slot machines nonetheless.

Yeah, I still indulge in video games, and understand that on the surface CSGO skins feel different than Genshin summons, but from 100 feet up it's all the same crap, imo I do kinda get what you mean, though. Gacha mechanics feel expected in anything western, while 'loot boxes' are still a 'feature' of some games in the east. Eastern studios have definitely noticed, though, and are running the same playbook.

...I think I mixed up East and West oops

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#63
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. "More leisure for everyone" is utter bollocks. We know it doesn't work like that. If it did we would all be doing nothing but leisure because of how much leisure we gained by switching to email. 2. Games are just code that's fun. How does this sounds as a process for making something fun: "Start by de-risking." Hmmm OK, yes, this tracks with my experience of private equity companies being the most innovative and s…

> "More leisure for everyone" is utter bollocks. it's fascinating how this delusion persists. More leisure will only occur if it becomes true that the marginal return of doing additional work falls almost to zero. So to say people will have more leisure time actually suggests more that they will lack opportunities to do things of value than it does that they will choose to have more leisure time. Which is depressing.

If everyone could live a life of leisure, the logical end result would be roving gangs engaging in street warfare for funsies. If money is no object for anyone, what else is there to do but to seek fame, even infamy?

Each gang member could be running their AI value-miners at home, but of course since they're the only kind of value in the new AI-communist society they'll be the obvious target for the other leisure gangs. So after enough rounds of violence each leisure gang will run a fortified, paramilitary "intelligence mining" operation, and oh by the way indie software dev is punishable by death in these territories.

Is this scenario, like, 9 kinds of insane? Sure! But so is the idea that we'll all be at the beach doing Idunno what, fucking? All this to say yeah, I'm with you that anyone who describes that AI will make a future defined by a lack of productive work is describing a depressing future...

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#64
A related but slightly different impression of early YC that I mentioned the other day, touching on the "disingenous and exploitative finance" aspect this article alludes to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46437148

> This reminds me of when YC seemed to be a response to the dotcom boom environment, a bit "by hackers, for hackers", to help hackers start Internet businesses. Rather than mostly only the non-hackers starting dotcoms (such as with affluent family angel investors and connections). Or rather than hackers having to spend their energy jumping through a lot of hoops, while dealing with disingenuous and exploitative finance bro types.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is possible to be successful in games without being predatory. Humble Bundle was a demonstration of that. I don’t believe that ultra-predatory mechanics are long-term sustainable. They usually yield a “ring of fire” effect that creates a growing ring of users for a while but really you’re burning out all your core users and will implode. This is how many describe the original Zynga model. Supercell (founde…

[flagged]

It's successful in my opinion by offering really good value with fair practices. It's not a secret, I think.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#66
post #56

Besides that, is YC building new trust? One recent concern I have is (anecdotally) how poor a deal YC startups I've seen are offering for founding engineers. Before YC started, early hires who helped make a startup successful could get rich on stock. YC may have changed the investment scene for the better in some ways, such that founders are less likely to screwed by investors. But today, early hires are the ones who…

Because the truth is that recent batches are filled with nepo founders and companies that are not really at the caliber of those that carry these VC names from the past (like pre-2015). Lots of fraud-aligned people/companies too. Now its just a way to sell these companies to those OGs.

It's so easy to post substanceless slurs, but I've been around YC since 2009 and it hasn't changed much from my perspective. The primary difference between pre-2015 and now is that those earlier startups have been around for over a decade longer. Of course the ones who turned out to be successful are better known.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#67
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a good book on that subject by Stephen Bungay called "The Art of Action". He explains the concept of Auftragstaktik . Great book, although a bit hard to read.

There's also Franz Osinga's book Scince, strategy, and war, which covers John Boyd's work in detail.

John Boyd, describer of the “OODA” loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI tech has the spotlight right now for sure amongst VC’s. But I believe AI is also a huge tailwind for video games. Namely, small, clever teams will be able to do big and entertaining things that were not possible before. (But yes there will also be tons of slop.)

It can't be a tailwind for a whole industry. It can only take from some and give to others.

None of this is necessarily zero-sum. I'm skeptical AI is going to be a meaningful tailwind for games, but if I'm wrong it could absolutely benefit customers, studios, and labs through boosting productivity.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#69
post #56

Besides that, is YC building new trust? One recent concern I have is (anecdotally) how poor a deal YC startups I've seen are offering for founding engineers. Before YC started, early hires who helped make a startup successful could get rich on stock. YC may have changed the investment scene for the better in some ways, such that founders are less likely to screwed by investors. But today, early hires are the ones who…

This got downvotes, after getting upvoted.

I wonder who thinks that a practice of combining sub-market salary with miniscule ISO grants (not even real equity) for early hires is a good idea for startups that want to win big.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can't be a tailwind for a whole industry. It can only take from some and give to others.

The industry has experienced slowed growth and is restructuring which is scary for many people right now. There have been continuous layoffs and studio closures. That sucks (though is not all caused by AI). But a few quick thoughts: Video games have always been about cutting edge technology. Because they are interactive, they are best positioned to leverage AI tech. (unlike static media) Prototyping tends to be the m…

>Because they are interactive, they are best positioned to leverage AI tech.

You have not supported this argument.

On the contrary, I think LLMs are not a big help.

We've already been here. Procedural generation was the magical solution that was supposed to help a single dev make giant worlds. And it did. It helped you make giant, utterly empty and soulless worlds.

Great for minecraft. Not so great for No Mans Sky, as there were significant limitations. Useless for anything that depends on a story or immersion in that story or characters.

This idea that you can wire an in game character up to an LLM is misguided and doesn't seem to understand what players want a character to be.

In Mass Effect 2, a fan favorite character infamously had little content for most of the game. Garrus was a very loved character, including being the love interest for a lot of people who played the game, but during 2 he just sits in a part of your ship and says "Sorry, can't talk, running some calibrations" for almost the entire game.

Put the entire game's script into an LLM as context and have it pretend to be Garrus and try and talk to it. Will the LLM take a strong stance that Garrus would take? Will it correctly figure out that Garrus would rather kill a bad guy than let him get away, and then have him make convincing arguments about that in reference to the previous mission, and then in the next mission put you in a situation where you have to decide whether Garrus is right and whether you should dome that "Bad Guy" instead of letting the police fail to aprehend him? Will that Garrus make you think about this world and your place in it and whether your personal or chosen morals are right?

Probably not.

People don't want to chat about the weather with random NPCs. People want characters that have character notes and integrate into the story and make you feel.

So far LLMs can't really write that well, and certainly are not cohesive and multidisciplinary enough to be able to build that into a game in a convincing way.

There's a famous game called "Facade" which plays up this big fanfare about how it uses "AI" and Natural Language Processing to bring two characters to life for you to talk with and navigate a crisis with, but it's almost entirely lies. The actual logic of how it works is almost identical to old fashioned text adventure parsers in their heyday. It's a heavily scripted sequence, with fairly few actual paths it can take, and the script is not that big. It got so much press for what was basically done in the 80s. I think some people have tried to hook LLMs into it, but it just doesn't feel good. The problems that AI dungeon adventure game always had still exist, just under more paint.

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