a1studmuffin

I really hope they come up with some kind of certification system for games targeting Steam consoles, in the same way Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo do. All the boring stuff like making sure controllers connect and disconnect gracefully, the console can be slept/woken at any point in gameplay without bugs, consistent language/UX etc. That stuff goes a long way to making things “just work” on a platform. IMHO it’s the one edge console still has over PC gaming. Even if it was an optional certification, it would give players some decent guidance as to what will work well.

The Instapak stuff I’m thinking of was basically medium sized bags that acted like a heat pack, where you break something inside the bag to combine two chemicals then shake it, which makes it expand and harden quickly.

I think the stuff is called Instapak expanding foam. Personally I think I’d remove the GPU and any mechanical drives to play it safe, but I’ve had a PC shipped to me before fully assembled with Instapak around the GPU (no HDDs, only SSDs) and it was fine. Ideally ship it in the original box for the PC case.

It’s also the fact that AAA budgets demands a huge return on investment, so you end up with gross monetization schemes designed to keep players paying as long as possible. Imagine if Stardew Valley had a Farming Pass subscription each year.

If you’re looking at collaborating in game jams, you’ll find it handy to have some Unity, Unreal Engine and Godot under your belt. Don’t worry about becoming an “expert” at any of them, just do a few intro tutorials and read the starter docs on each.

Yeah that sounds about right - VST is such an awful standard, and is only made worse by all the copy protection nonsense that companies pile on top of it. I wish there was an open standard that was cross-platform, portable and used PGP encryption for standard licencing, but alas, it’s too late for that.

I’m quite surprised Ableton haven’t released a Linux version yet. They would have had to do some of the legwork to stand up Ableton Push.

I backed the Kickstarter, and oh wow did I get my money’s worth! I genuinely wasn’t expecting them to finish, and that’s fine - I was there for the support and the ride, however it turned out.

It’s been so long since I originally backed the project that I’m not really that interested in playing it any more, but I’m happy for them that they got it over the line… well, most of it.

Like many Kickstarters they promised a lot without realising just how difficult or expensive it would be. There’s still a lot of deliverables ahead for them, but they’ve been pretty open about running out of money and operating on pure good will at this point, and I can’t say I blame them with over a decade of their lives poured into it.

I hope it does well for them!

But is the overall market growing? What I’d love to know is if less people are playing non-MTX games now than before, or if we’re just getting more people staying to play games and they happen to be drawn to MTX games, ie. a broader target market, in the same way we saw mobile gaming explode with people who never played games before.

It’s really not limited to the game industry. A project of any kind with 10 people vs 100/1000 people is going to be a very different experience. It’s just human nature - there’s more planning and communication required, and more personality types involved.

Isn’t this asking for trouble with spam, bots etc?

I worked for a large AAA during the pandemic, and it was ridiculous how many people they hired in a short space of time. We quadrupled our studio size over 12 months. So when layoffs started happening, of course our studio scaled back. Public corporations cannot be trusted to act ethically.

I chuckled at this bit:

The breakage should nevertheless be fixed as soon as possible, ideally before the breakage reaches Linus.

So what’s going on here? Is this related to the new US administration? Or Microsoft and Meta exchanging money to silence the competition? Genuinely confused, but it seems fairly important whatever the motivations.

It’s how most large forums ran back in the day and it worked great. Quality over quantity.

True, but what you should really be afraid of these days are spam filters and hackers. As much as I’d love to selfhost my own mail server, IMHO it’s just not worth the risk of important emails getting flagged as spam (both outgoing and incoming), or losing control of accounts due to a zero day attack or other means. The latter might sound far-fetched but I just saw it happen firsthand to a friend. The modern internet is a battleground!