Lead administrator of federate.cc and its services. Please don’t DM me for support with federate.cc, make a post in /c/meta instead.
Originally from Portland 🇺🇸, lived many years in Vienna 🇦🇹, now living in Setúbal 🇵🇹. Software engineer specialized in Apple platforms. 🌎
yes, but mobile games now are literally casinos, with research going into making them as addictive as possible to maximise in app purchase and advertisement revenue
source: worked in ad tech for several years, specifically in the mobile gaming industry, monetisation/ad optimisation. a job I regret doing and which feels very scummy in retrospect.
Yes, Steam takes a cut as well. But the crux of the argument is the monopoly part. You can distribute your game outside of steam - on other app stores, or sell it directly to customers if you want. On iOS, there is literally no other distribution channel. You have to pay Apple and use their thing. That’s the difference.
I wonder if they’ve fallen into the same trap with not making the console powerful enough. The first switch was also not that powerful when it came out, and it’s really struggled in the end of its lifecycle. A lot of first party releases in the last couple years run like complete shit. They probably missed an opportunity here to stash an eGPU in the dock to provide a more modern experience while playing on the big screen.
Console manufacturers will have to adapt and liberalize self-publishing to stay relevant. AAA gaming continues to enshittify, and indie games / smaller studios are the ones releasing the good titles.
Valve knows this, and the ease for developers to release on Steam means they’re well positioned to ride out the transition. By comparison, releasing on console means signing license agreements, getting access to proprietary SDKs, submitting your game through an approval process, getting each update reviewed, etc etc. The barriers make releasing on console very unappealing for smaller developers.
So IMO if the consoles want to ride out the decline of AAA games, they will need to reinvent their image and how they interact with smaller studios and indies.
Makes me sad to see it’s Windows only given it’s so graphically simple and low tech. Should be a shoe-in for a Mac and Linux version.
Edit: yes I know proton exists, my point is that as an indie game it is likely built with something like Unity or Godot, and thus exporting a native Mac and Linux build is just a matter of turning on a couple check boxes.
Yup. Piracy is bad so make sure to avoid that. Specifically, do not search for “Yuzu 1734” and combine it with “Firmware 18.1” and “Prod keys 18.1”, because if you did that you would be all set to pirate switch games. So to repeat, definitely don’t search for these things. Now you know what to avoid.
Literally every company’s “corporate culture” right here. Assemble a room full of people who know what they’re doing, then boss man dictates what should be done with his very limited information, all the while not listening to said people who know what they’re doing, because ThE pRoJeCt, or the ScHeDuLe, or the shareholders, or fucking whatever. Truly, American capitalism cannot be perfected upon.
Can’t delete a torrent. Just saying. Keep seeding, Lemmings!