Sometimes I make video games
Say what you will about the woke gaming agenda, I love to see a company brave enough to take this stance. It’s refreshing to see a publisher wear its beliefs on its sleeve because now I know that I don’t have to spend money on their trash games
Y’know, the prickly thing about using AI for these things is that it seems to be fairly difficult to accurately accuse or deny that it was used.
Like, people see a trailer or a still and there’s something uncanny about it, so AI is the first thing people reach for. It’s kind of like the early days of Photoshop, people get dragged into debate that boils down to “look at the hands” or “check out these pixels.” But at the end of the day, identifying AI is all about the vibes (read: not a super accurate methodology)
And then on the flip side, if you’re defending your work against an accusation that you used generative AI, the only defense is, “trust us, bro,” and that’s not much of a defense either.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the trailer or the selected stills are works of AI. The trailer looks like the union of hyperrealism and stop motion that always bleeds into the uncanny for me - and it has for as long as we’ve been using graphics to tween stop motion frames.
I guess we really let the cat out of the bag with AI
For the bones in your mooth
When I originally saw the game on steam I felt a pang of nostalgia. Then I saw the kernel level anticheat and the F2P trappings and was so disappointed
I missed that Tencent had involvement though. Weirdly that makes me feel better. Not because I think that might make it a decent game, but more because it means that the people who made a game I liked didn’t have as much of a hand in this travesty.
It’s like having to kill a zombified loved one. It might look like them, but it’s not them anymore
Steam store page legal flags:
They ought to make these red. I get that’s a tough sell for the publisher, but as a consumer a kernel-level anti-cheat is an immediate turn-off
I believe this is indicating that it’s using the Python syntax highlighting.
Which is still a failure, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t think that AI truly knows the difference between one language and another anyway
That’s crazy, how can somebody not know what brand of laptop they…
HOLY SHIT ME TOO
The other comment points out that it’s only a case of selling steam keys where steam must have the lowest price.
I released a game a while back and while reading the terms it sounded like I couldn’t link my Steam store page to another storefront where the game was available cheaper. Which, honestly, also kind of fair.
But again, I think that’s really only if you’re selling steam keys. If you sold the game DRM-free on your own website, I can’t imagine they’d take down your company website.
If you link to an Itch page or something similar that might be a thornier issue because they’re primarily a storefront.
I’m of the opinion that my game costs X unless it’s discounted to Y. I don’t see the appeal to the end user of having a dozen different prices on a dozen different storefronts.
I could see a situation where a developer wants to always earn, say, $10 from their game. So on Steam it might sell for $13, on another platform it might be $11 to show the difference in platform fees. But I wouldn’t do that because it’s putting me before my players, and that’s not why I make games.
In English we have an idiom, “same shit, different day,” which means dealing with the same sort of unpleasant task until it’s routine. Do you have something similar?
This Hamburg court thing sounds like something I’d call “same shit, different pay,” which would be like when you have an issue with your boss so you appeal to their boss, and find out that they’re just as bad except they’re higher in the organization.
Every other skilled trade just says “Fast, Right, or Cheap: pick two.”
It’s not my fault if they always pick fast and cheap
I’ve got an idea for a game, I call it “Elmo’s Steaming Pile of Bingo”
Make a bingo card with all the horrible dark patterns in gaming on it.
A monthly fee to play a game where you can buy the battle pass with cryptocurrency and you get NFTs in the lootboxes. Watch ads during matchmaking, purchasable respawns, buy your way out of chat bans. The winning team can talk as much trash as they want on the post-game lobby while the losers are sent to farm captchas until they can play again
Get five boxes in a row and you win! I mean, we all lose, but you win!
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs - I know you know what they are, but for anyone reading who doesn’t) are such a terrible metric for performance. Like, yes, well performing teams generate good KPIs because they’re performing well. The minute a suit tries to actually tie a KPI to performance, people start gaming them and the product suffers.
A little bit of a segue here, but Factorio recently released some tidbits about their performance when they wrapped up development. They said they have 0.24 sales per line of code. Now they’re a very different team making a very different kind of game for a very different kind of market, so I take this as the amusing corelation it is without putting any stock into why that is.
Some project manager from Ubisoft is going to read that and think, “Well we can do better,” and start mandating more sales for less code. Next thing you know, devs are being punished for verbosity (an ironic twist on the classic and often abused KPI of how many lines of code are written) and before you know it you’ve got compound statements, nested ternaries, and inscrutable lambdas out the wazoo that make maintaining the code base impossible.
I wonder if I minified all my source code into a single line before compiling if I could game the system 🤔
I don’t understand, you didn’t get the jokes? I forwarded the chain letter to everyone
I spent longer than I care to admit waiting for David Bowie to show up in Pan’s Labyrinth, does that count?
I hope they don’t trip over that bar, it’s dangerous how they leave it on the floor
Oh wait, maybe those are my expectations of Rockstar
Often times, people learn that the stove is hot by touching it.
It’s easier to blame the stove than the person who touched it. But if you laugh when you watch it happen, you’re probably not laughing at the stove.
Oh my gosh, I was not prepared for that.
As if CSS didn’t give me enough reasons to cry.
But it’s still got to be responsive for all devices, although flexbox is disabled
When I get to hell they’re going to make me work on the front end.
It’s all going to be inline HTML and Inspect Element isn’t available in their browser
I would love to be able to gift my unplayed games to others.
I guess you do get into a problem where a group of people might swap the game back and forth to avoid ever having to pay for the game. But people will abuse any system, so I guess that would just be a cost of it
If a game is still within the refund window, then maybe it should have an option to gift it. The devs / publishers could keep their money and Steam doesn’t have to process a refund. Seems like a win-win