People greatly overestimate the chances of success of a video game, even with $2.5 million. It’s even easy to fail entirely for reasons unrelated to developing a game, such as corporate governance.

It’s not totally comparable, because we did a physical game, the Kickstarter I created ended up succeeding and shipping (over a year late!), we lost virtually all profits to early company investors and surprise tariffs. It was basically a wash financially.

Bad for the budget too, because a shrinking economy shrinks tax revenues from other sources.

And let’s not exclude the MASSIVE performance boost in the latest update. They’re doing great over there.

Rimworld keeps me buying every couple years with absolutely killer DLC that enhances the game just right. And yeah you can get most of those features for free with mods, but first party support is always welcome.

Game mechanics cannot be copyrighted or patented, but design elements can. There may be enough legal standing to do something about this but I highly doubt it. And it would almost certainly not be worth it financially.

A ton of their tech has been an important reference for other engines. I don’t think there’s any reason to hate UE if it’s basically pioneering different techniques for everyone else to copy.

The sad part is that it doesn’t have to fool the people that are paying attention. If it even fools the foolish, humanity is in for a bumpy ride.

It’s interesting how quickly people learned to detect the patterns of AI images. Like, I can nearly always tell which platform it was generated on because they all have specific biases.

Except ConcernedApe, apparently.

I’ve bought it at least 5 times; sent it to a lot of family members.

It seems clear that during training they weight Musk’s tweets (and those of accounts he likes) more heavily than everyone else’s.

The biggest problem with Cyberpunk 2077’s redemption arc is that they pulled it off, and now a bunch of studios think they can do it too.

Survivorship of older games is a really good indicator that they’ll continue to be available in the future. Like you said, too many modern games are online only and turn to expensive nothingness when the servers are shut down.

It’s not a normal choice of game controller but people have played games with weirder.

Totally agree. Make a game, not a game engine!

Though as an unrelated counterexample, Kitten Space Agency is doing a custom game engine and development is scary fast right now. They’re doing all the work in public and it’s wild how good the dev team is.

That’s a really delightful bit of hackery. Props to the creator.

Makes sense. AAA games are finance projects more than creative projects. Yeah there’s a lot of art and writing and stuff, but it’s all calibrated to make the most money and anything that threatens it is jettisoned. This makes them formulaic to a fault.

Indie games are passion projects, so you see a lot of weird stuff out there. Most of them are utter failures, financially, but the ones that survive are truly something special.

• Exclusive mobile UI with touch controls

What a weird way to phrase that.

Depends on your location in the world. Which shows just how arbitrary the price actually is.

I’ll take my chances with the boredom room.

Survivorship bias, essentially.

I’m not sure that’s true, if I understand correctly, Steam Deck has more RAM and a better CPU. It’d only be true for graphics card constrained games.

You certainly will get all that on a Steam Deck, if you give it a little time.

The KSA team keeps showing off incredibly impressive demos. I have no doubt they will be able to achieve a worthy KSP successor.

I almost religiously play games without modding, but Rimworld is the major exception - it is simply too good to ignore.

I could but that’s because a friend of mine works on the legacy rendering code in Excel. He has some traumatic war stories to share.

Agreed, this will anger young people, who need to be shaken awake to let them know that politics isn’t a fucking game. Conservatism and authoritarianism is poison, they just didn’t understand that yet.

I’m not a huge fan honestly. I think the stylized graphics are a better fit for the genre, and you get into uncanny valley a lot faster with realistic graphics.

But I mean, that’s just MY taste, I’m not going to tell anyone else what to think.

“You don’t need (and therefore shouldn’t want) this obviously good thing” has this connotation that the Minecraft team has been wasting their time on pointless features, when in reality first-party support for a feature is nearly always more stable than a mod.

Plus read the article, the author is a vehement hater of Minecraft. What a joke.

What a weird passive aggressive headline. A better default is a good thing, and doesn’t stop modders from doing their own thing.

Curious what makes Realmz so replayable. BG3 has so many unique storylines and endings you’d be hard pressed to play them all. Not to mention character classes and subclasses.

How will they enforce this? And won’t the actual effect be the improvement of LLMs to the point they can no longer be distinguished from human text? I suspect this will end up being like a slow GAN training the LLMs.

Yep, unlike the US, they aren’t shooting themself in the foot. As they industrialize and invest in Africa, they are displacing the established world order.

What’s there to debate? You put your data in a public site, it gets read by anybody who wants it. Period.

Eh, spend that money on indie games and you’re doing good in the world regardless.

Very wise. Scope control may be the single most important factor in getting your game shipped.

There are lots of things to physically fight back over, but video games ain’t one of them.

Citation for there never being a Steam Deck 2?

Because the interview at CES 2025 heavily implied it: https://youtu.be/UI-C-nZnDE8?t=525

Well yeah, a game still popular after a decade must be pretty damn badass.

Age is mostly irrelevant in regards to game quality.

Right, Muse is essentially an interactive AI video of a game. You can change something about the gameplay and see what might happen if the player encountered it. Not terribly useful at this time.