6 ms·

> Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn't have dreamed of possible. Such as mountains of bloatware/shovelware template games clogging up every single onl

by ythn 9y ago

> Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn't have dreamed of possible. Such as mountains of bloatware/shovelware template games clogging up every single online store and platform.

andybak 9y ago
Shall we go back to the old days, then? Because there were no crap games then. The solution is better curation and discoverability. Not harsher gate-keepers and horribly difficult development. So many incredible games wouldn't exist without modern development tools. Just because you were mildly inconvenienced the last you time browsed an app store, don't wish it all away.
- Maxious 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
georgeecollins 9y ago
There has always been mountains of books and huge libraries of music being created and we have always managed. Find people you trust to recommend things to you. I recommend Tom Chick at Quarter to Three.
- eropple 9y ago
  Tom's alright; his forums are a mess, though. I find Three Moves Ahead to encapsulate a similar viewpoint with a lot less gross around it.
- zrobotics 9y ago
  I've never understood why there's so much rage about crappy games on steam. I certainly wouldn't have the gall to charge money for a unity tutorial game, but I absolutely love some of the insane games people like zachtronics make. If we want to go back to publishers controlling access, who in their right mind would approve Schenzen IO? There's a lot of crappy products on EBay as well, but that doesn't mean the platform is useless.
  - krapp 9y ago
    >I've never understood why there's so much rage about crappy games on steam. It's because there are so many crappy games on Steam that it makes it all but impossible for indie developers with decent games to be discovered. The perception that Steam is a cesspool of con-artists and incompetents depresses the perceived value of any game on the platform not released by a known publisher, meaning any independent game is more likely to fail merely by being associated with Steam to begin with. Also because the last time the video game market was drowning in mediocrity, it crashed. I mean... when I was in high school I used to doodle Mario levels on my schoolbook jackets because I was just that kind of nerd, and now I live in the glorious future of Unity and Godot and Game Maker and C++ and SDL2 if I want to be a masochist. It's fantastic that anyone can more or less make something that can at least theoretically be called a "game." But that doesn't mean all of it deserves to be on the open market. >If we want to go back to publishers controlling access, who in their right mind would approve Schenzen IO? You're right, if it were up to publishers no one would be making anything but MOBAs and first person shooters and maybe Candy Crush clones. Independent game development allows niche and non-profitable genres to thrive. However, again, it's still a problem that the sheer bulk of garbage on these platforms makes it difficult to find that good content without some kind of gatekeeping.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Similarly, it is not because one can play a guitar that they are entitled to turn into musician, or writing something doesn't turn one into a writer. There is crap in all kinds of artistic work, for some reason devs seem to think they should be special and get everything for free.
      - krapp 9y ago
        > Similarly, it is not because one can play a guitar that they are entitled to turn into musician, or writing something doesn't turn one into a writer. I disagree.. playing a guitar does make one a musician, and writing does make one a writer. What either is not entitled to is success in the marketplace, but then, no one is, regardless of skill. Once you put your work into the marketplace, the market decides its value, and your value by proxy. But for that to work successfully, the marketplace has to efficiently sort for quality, and one way to enforce quality is having the barriers to entry be sufficiently high. In practice, that doesn't often work because entrants don't want to be sorted efficiently, they want to be sorted to the top to maximize exposure and revenue. It's why SEO exists - to optimize the Googlebot for you and you alone by any means necessary. Unfortunately, Steam also wants to maximize the size of its library and revenue, so it has an incentive to engineer a marketplace that favors quantity over quality. But even amateurs put in more effort than the developers publishing much of the garbage onto Steam - using the term "developers" loosely. These are incoherent rage games or weekend projects, barely functional tech demos and tutorial games, asset flips, etc. Games that don't even run. If the bar for quality on Steam was merely "amateur" then I would be happy, but it isn't. There seems to be no bar, and that makes it bad for everyone, except maybe Valve.
ticviking 9y ago
I grew up in the 90s, and still have a big mountain of CDs full of shovelware my well meaning mom picked up.
pjmlp 9y ago
Unity and Unreal did not exist when 1983 crash happened. I had tons of floppies and CDs with shovelware for ZX Spectrum, MS-DOS, Amiga and Windows 3.x, 9x, Linux,.... All before Unreal or Unity ever happened.
jeremiep 9y ago
Every single person I've ever heard talk about Unity or Unreal in such an aggressive way was completely clueless about software development. They all have high hopes of making the best game/engine the world has ever seen yet are stuck in the planning phase. Either that or they're gullible gamers who watched too many youtubers. The reality is, every single engineer who built the very optimized engines you my have in mind (that power a few specific games at most) have great respect for Unity and Unreal. Game development is a small world, people know each other across companies, share tech stuff on Twitter and go to the same conferences.

by ythn 9y ago

> Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn't have dreamed of possible. Such as mountains of bloatware/shovelware template games clogging up every single online store and platform.

andybak 9y ago

Shall we go back to the old days, then? Because there were no crap games then. The solution is better curation and discoverability. Not harsher gate-keepers and horribly difficult development. So many incredible games wouldn't exist without modern development tools. Just because you were mildly inconvenienced the last you time browsed an app store, don't wish it all away.

Maxious 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

georgeecollins 9y ago

There has always been mountains of books and huge libraries of music being created and we have always managed. Find people you trust to recommend things to you. I recommend Tom Chick at Quarter to Three.

eropple 9y ago
Tom's alright; his forums are a mess, though. I find Three Moves Ahead to encapsulate a similar viewpoint with a lot less gross around it.
zrobotics 9y ago
I've never understood why there's so much rage about crappy games on steam. I certainly wouldn't have the gall to charge money for a unity tutorial game, but I absolutely love some of the insane games people like zachtronics make. If we want to go back to publishers controlling access, who in their right mind would approve Schenzen IO? There's a lot of crappy products on EBay as well, but that doesn't mean the platform is useless.
- krapp 9y ago
  >I've never understood why there's so much rage about crappy games on steam. It's because there are so many crappy games on Steam that it makes it all but impossible for indie developers with decent games to be discovered. The perception that Steam is a cesspool of con-artists and incompetents depresses the perceived value of any game on the platform not released by a known publisher, meaning any independent game is more likely to fail merely by being associated with Steam to begin with. Also because the last time the video game market was drowning in mediocrity, it crashed. I mean... when I was in high school I used to doodle Mario levels on my schoolbook jackets because I was just that kind of nerd, and now I live in the glorious future of Unity and Godot and Game Maker and C++ and SDL2 if I want to be a masochist. It's fantastic that anyone can more or less make something that can at least theoretically be called a "game." But that doesn't mean all of it deserves to be on the open market. >If we want to go back to publishers controlling access, who in their right mind would approve Schenzen IO? You're right, if it were up to publishers no one would be making anything but MOBAs and first person shooters and maybe Candy Crush clones. Independent game development allows niche and non-profitable genres to thrive. However, again, it's still a problem that the sheer bulk of garbage on these platforms makes it difficult to find that good content without some kind of gatekeeping.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Similarly, it is not because one can play a guitar that they are entitled to turn into musician, or writing something doesn't turn one into a writer. There is crap in all kinds of artistic work, for some reason devs seem to think they should be special and get everything for free.
    - krapp 9y ago
      > Similarly, it is not because one can play a guitar that they are entitled to turn into musician, or writing something doesn't turn one into a writer. I disagree.. playing a guitar does make one a musician, and writing does make one a writer. What either is not entitled to is success in the marketplace, but then, no one is, regardless of skill. Once you put your work into the marketplace, the market decides its value, and your value by proxy. But for that to work successfully, the marketplace has to efficiently sort for quality, and one way to enforce quality is having the barriers to entry be sufficiently high. In practice, that doesn't often work because entrants don't want to be sorted efficiently, they want to be sorted to the top to maximize exposure and revenue. It's why SEO exists - to optimize the Googlebot for you and you alone by any means necessary. Unfortunately, Steam also wants to maximize the size of its library and revenue, so it has an incentive to engineer a marketplace that favors quantity over quality. But even amateurs put in more effort than the developers publishing much of the garbage onto Steam - using the term "developers" loosely. These are incoherent rage games or weekend projects, barely functional tech demos and tutorial games, asset flips, etc. Games that don't even run. If the bar for quality on Steam was merely "amateur" then I would be happy, but it isn't. There seems to be no bar, and that makes it bad for everyone, except maybe Valve.

ticviking 9y ago

I grew up in the 90s, and still have a big mountain of CDs full of shovelware my well meaning mom picked up.

pjmlp 9y ago

Unity and Unreal did not exist when 1983 crash happened. I had tons of floppies and CDs with shovelware for ZX Spectrum, MS-DOS, Amiga and Windows 3.x, 9x, Linux,.... All before Unreal or Unity ever happened.

jeremiep 9y ago

Every single person I've ever heard talk about Unity or Unreal in such an aggressive way was completely clueless about software development. They all have high hopes of making the best game/engine the world has ever seen yet are stuck in the planning phase. Either that or they're gullible gamers who watched too many youtubers. The reality is, every single engineer who built the very optimized engines you my have in mind (that power a few specific games at most) have great respect for Unity and Unreal. Game development is a small world, people know each other across companies, share tech stuff on Twitter and go to the same conferences.