This article is sensationalizing a non-issue. It reads like the author went to the convention with the story already written and then tried (and failed) to find people that supported the premise.

As someone who attended GDC for the full week this year, I can tell you that not a single conversation I had or panel I attended discussed the RAM shortage. I’m sure this topic arose in some circles, especially anything related to the timing or cost of next gen hardware. As a professional AAA game designer of 25 years and an occasional game director, this does not affect the way that the games themselves are made. Games on consoles already have their limitations, games on PC should always be (but not always are) optimized to work across a broad spectrum of hardware configurations, with the minimum spec being the lowest system possible without sacrificing playability.

Even people interviewed in the article are saying the same thing:

“Does this affect us? No,” Subotnick said. “We’re making games on as many platforms as we can to delight consumers. Could it impact us? Sure. If there’s less devices for people to get their hands on, then we potentially have less consumers to sell to. But right now, I’d argue that there are plenty of consumers with plenty of devices for us to sell these games to. Where it could impact us is, sure, we will have to make decisions around next-gen platforms when they tell us that it’s time to bring content to them. And if they are threatened to have a total addressable market that is viable from a business standpoint, sure that’s a business challenge. But right now all I’d be doing is speculating on a bunch of hypotheticals.”

I’m guessing this is the non-specific way of saying Limbo-like.

Investors are not required to form an indie studio, in the case where every team member of that studio has some means to pay their own rent/mortgage, bills, and feed themselves for the entire duration of the project. If you’re in the US, you’ll also need to figure out how you’re paying for health insurance. This could be a passion project in addition to a day job, but coordinating work/life balance in that scenario with multiple team members is exponentially difficult.

Money adds up quick. Let’s use some round numbers and say you want to hire a team with some experience (those folks that just got laid off and are looking for work). Let’s say everybody on the team costs the project $100k/year in salary & benefits. Let’s just imagine that includes costs a normal employer would pay: insurance premiums, IT hosting costs, all the little stuff. Note, this is underpaying people with more than 5 years experience who live in California (where many game dev studios are based). Let’s say you can get the game made in one year with everybody starting on day one and ending on ship day, exactly 365 days later. People will be wearing multiple hats, but let’s be general.

• 1x Gameplay Programmer
• 1x 3D Artist (general modeler)
• 1x 2D Artist (general texture artist)
• 1x Game Designer (Camera/Controls/Combat)
• 1x Audio Designer

$500k

Expanding that team:

• 1x Animator
• 1x Character Artist
• 1x Environment Artist
• 1x Prop Artist
• 1x VFX Artist
• 1x Lighting Specialist
• 1x Tools Programmer
• 1x Render/Optimization Programmer
• 1x Level Designer
• 1x Narrative Designer

$1.5M

That’s a 15 person studio, where people are still wearing multiple hats like UI, Music, IT, Testing, other things I’m forgetting about. This isn’t anywhere close to a AAA sized team of 100+ people.

This is also assuming you can stick to a STRICT time schedule. In reality you’re probably going to need a very small team at the start and not grow until you finish prototyping, then again once you’ve done a vertical slice.

Anyway. This post got real long. The gist of it is the people making the game need that money to live. There should be space in the industry to make a game with a team this size, paying your employees something close to what the big studios pay them. Getting that kind of money has been incredibly difficult these past few years.

It’s against the EULA, but nobody is going to get caught. The main issue is that it’s a pain in the ass and doesn’t scale. You can do this for one person, but most people aren’t going to be cool sending a payment to an address and just waiting around, hoping that they get a key. This is why Steam exists. There are other services that do the same thing that are not US based. GOG is based in Poland, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com

Amy Hennig is great, but what? Are you saying Uncharted 1-3 is the whole PlayStation brand identity?

10 reviews means the developer has some combination of the following:

• friends/family/classmates
• developers on the actual game
• multiple Steam accounts with the same owner

10 is essentially 0 and cannot be extrapolated into sales.

I agree that if game development is a hobby and not a career, this isn’t a problem for those developers.

I also submit that if you are attempting to make money from your efforts and don’t yet have a following, and can’t afford a marketing budget, and have actually made something unique, interesting, or otherwise worthwhile, it is more difficult to stand out in a market whose signal to noise ratio is continuously and exponentially growing noisier.

Indie has always been a way to define a category for creators without access to the same amount of money that publishers had historically provided. Now publishers are both no longer needed to release a game and are very rarely taking chances on original games from first time developers.

We’ve gotta figure out some rules for what “indie” means. E33 is a great game, but that budget is estimated to be least $20 million. How many small teams are not being honored because a spot is being taken up by a game that has the same budget as a small AAA project?

It’s not the team that made Thank Goodness You’re Here. It’s the same publisher that also published Thank Goodness You’re Here. That’s the equivalent of two different streaming shows that are both exclusive to the same service.

It’s not. There’s no gameplay here. It’s just streaming weird content.

This is all the same point.

I agree with you, but they also continue to release more interesting and innovative games than most every other first party studio.

Why?

The Witcher and Cyberpunk I’ll give you, but Mass Effect definitely fades to black before getting to actual sex, the other two are mods. I wasn’t saying sex in games doesn’t exist, but if we’ve gotta go back several decades for a handful examples, that doesn’t feel like something that’s “common.”

Accurate, but one series does not make something common.

Sex scenes are common in modern games - and are often made by filming human actors who are then digitised into game characters.

Is “common” referring to cringey low budget Steam games? I don’t think I’ve seen any sort of on screen simulated sex in a game, ever. Granted I tend to only play well publicized indie games and larger releases. But how common is this? Am I out of the loop?

As a game developer that has curated my mutual list of fellow developers, I’m saddened by the state of Twitter and genuinely have no alternative. A few folks have left for Threads, Mastodon, and BlueSky, but no community has coalesced on one platform. I would love to leave, but the fact is that if we want to communicate in a similar medium, we have to go where the people are. Right now, the people are still on Twitter.

There’s a dodge meter now that shows you how many dodges each character has left

So the assumption is that they took the game down for almost a year, changed nothing, and are putting it back up?

The fact that it is gonna be live action is what concerns me the most. I hope it’s live action in the style of the Netflix One Piece series and not the Bob Hoskin’s Super Mario Bros film.

Comedy is an important part of Point & Click games for me. If anyone has other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

This list is in order of my favorites:

• Paradigm
• Darkside Detective
• Everything by Amanita Design
• Cleo: A Pirate’s Tale
• Feria d’Arles
• There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension
• Lost In Play
• Thimbleweed Park
• Bertram Fiddle
• Will of Arthur Flabbington