Penny Arcade - Comic - Low And Slow
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Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Low And Slow
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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JR is talking about game developers who don't change their business model to match the times. At my time at EA, he was pushing DLC and new IP. We got a number of new franchises from JR as he rightly realized that EA had to make new IP or it would die rather than pushing out big sports game 20## every year. If you want engagement, putting out DLC and new content on a game keeps people coming back. Opening up games to modding helps as well.
In his nonapology he said that by idiots, he meant the small minority of people who created because they want to create something instead of to make as much money as possible in whatever way possible.
Yes, if your end result must have predatory monetazation, than it is smarter for you to plan that from the beginning. But you can also, just, not to that. And if you're planning on not doing that, than you don't have to take that into account at the start of the development cycle or at any point.
Since his job was essentially to buy other people's artistic vision and then order them to hamfist monetazation into it, yeah it would have been more convenient for him if they had planned on that from the beginning.
*cough* Elden Ring *cough*
Yeah, you're basically looking at Stardew Valley vs Madden NFL _ITERATION_. To this guy, the SV creator is an idiot. To the rest of us, the SV creator is a successful artist. And operating in Riccitiello's sphere, you could say that's a valid - if impoverished - worldview.
I have a friend who plays the Madden games. I don't think he gets every year, but he probably gets at least every other year. And he enjoys them, but he also spends a ton of time complaining about, especially with regards to monetization and weak iteration. He's certainly never spoken of any recent version as highly as he does SDV.
I feel like it comes down to joy as well. You can just feel that those games were made with joy and made to produce joy. I just can't see the same generally describing the AAA cash cows. Yes, they can be entertaining, and even fun. But joy? I'm just not sure it's involved in any part of the process.
It's kind of the ur example of single developer passion project that gets huge success. It was first announced back when Steam greenlight was a thing and got a ton of follows, and then when it finally came out years later it sold something like 1.5 million copies within the first couple of years. All of which went to that single developer.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Similarly, people like the creator of Stardew Valley aren't "fucking idiots" because they wanted to make a game rather than wanting to make money.
but think how much better Elden Ring could be if every time you tried to kill Malenia you had to either wait five minutes or pay a dollar
(Also, it suddenly makes more sense that even though our company has made zero income in the last couple of years, Unity started making us pay for Unity based on us having taken a PPP loan to avoid firing everyone/folding. They counted that as "income" that triggered having to pay for licenses. With this absolute piece of shit at the wheel, that's the behavior I would expect.)
Something that is far, far more likely to get my money and time than whatever IP EA is going to crank out since I am so utterly, utterly tired of companies trying to min max every single cent they can obtain from me with shitty practices.
If the goal is to maximize profits then yeah, he's right. If the goal is to make an actually good game then "monetization" is the worst way to ensure that happens and is not at all required to make a good profit.
Anyways does Tycho's attached post seem like a subtle dig at Robert Khoo to anyone else?
*looks up name* eFront, that's it.
Why isn't there Torrent Armor for $5 that has no gameplay effect in this single-player game?
I know from a customer POV I groan when I see Unity because it's either a situation where the devs figured out that the engine is going to have limitations and optimized their game to stay well within them...or an absolute shitshow that may not be completely fixed no matter how many rounds of optimization patches they put out..
Man even reading the detached description of that makes regular SEO/marketing seem like a bastion of morality in a business sector that is not exactly on the up and up by default.
What I'd like to see is this guy looking at the balance sheet of Coffee Stain, they must be like some sort of mythical beast to his world view. Its a real shame too, because we need more competition in the engine/ platform space, everyone going to unreal 6 is not going to be healthy for the world of gaming in the long term, despite how pretty it might be in the short term.
If we could, I'd like our company to go to UE. It has nothing to do with being pretty. It has everything to do with Unity being a bit shit, and their developers lacking in the ability to realize it's a bit shit. Because they never actually make anything significant with it. They just make Unity and example projects.
I’m thinking of trying the Godot engine if I cant get into UE
It was eye opening how much faster it animated. All the stuff I thought was just lumbering robots and dramatic slow mo missiles was just it not being able to keep up.