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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • of all the games released on Steam in 2022, only 70 have hit the million dollars threshold. I think it is misleading to bundle all “indies” in one big basket. Those 70 games can afford to pay or negociate. Don’t get me wrong, total dick and amateurish move from Unity, but the amount of people around social media who believe game devs can just hit the threshold by accident and become unprofitable is ridiculous. Current gamedev here and ex Unity employee. It is worth denouncing Unity and fighting for our indies, but understand that this affect the 0.01%, literally. 70 games out of 6000 released games on Steam in 2022. Sure most games are shit and w/e, but you get the point.





  • My buddy works in a bank and they spelled it out loud that the return-to-office was in fact because of real estate, and making sure that the restaurants and business located in the same building had customers. He was admittedly pretty pissed. Makes you realize the futility of it all, all those useless jobs and useless commute. Do society really needs us to work, or are we used as pawns to pay for parking, over-priced coffee and to inflate commercial real estate value. Back to my buddy, he vowed to never ever buy anything in that building again lol.


  • Yeah, it is kind of the default isn’t it. It kinda make sense for the programmers and artists, but it is still kinda weird that the actual designers don’t really understand why people play video games. You wouldn’t expect a movie director to not like movies, or a car designer to not like cars. I guess it must be happening everywhere at least to some degree.

    Nowadays I would compare some game studios to what some boys bands were to music. You start with some guys with money who are neither musicians, nor sound engineers, nor anything really. They pick singers and musicians based on look and market research, they hire a large team of specialized workers, and then they spend millions on marketing to flood the space with their new album. The indie developers in this scenario would be Pink Floyd.

    It wasn’t always like this, at least for video games. I feel like in the 80s up to the early 00s it was mostly dominated by passionate workers, but there just isn’t enough passionate workers for the demand. As the industry grew, big players started building those “soulless” projects to make good return on investment. Not to denigrate the individual contributions of the workers, but sadly the people who own those business don’t really care if they’re making games or cars or selling cigarettes. They care about r.o.i.


  • I have worked in the gaming industry and let me tell you that in some game studios most of the people involved in making the games are not gamers themselves.

    Lots of programmers and artists don’t really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.

    Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.

    Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.

    You have entire games being made top to bottom where not a single employee gave a fuck, from the executives to the programmers. Those games are made by checking a serie of checkboses on a plan and shipped asap.

    This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.

    Afaik even in other “similar” industry (e.g filmmaking) you expect the director, producers and distributors to have a decent level of knowledge of the challenges of making a movie. In the video game industry everyone seems a bit clueless, and risk is mitigated by hiring large teams, and by shipping lots of games quickly.