4 ms·

Ever since Mojang was sold to MS in 2014, I'd say his notoriety has dropped quite a bit. Most people that would have been familiar with him are now in their mid

Ever since Mojang was sold to MS in 2014, I'd say his notoriety has dropped quite a bit. Most people that would have been familiar with him are now in their mid teens at the youngest.

kllrnohj 5y ago
Even before Notch left I'd say others like Jeb or Dinnerbone were more commonly known in the Minecraft communities as they were more active in the community & posting about upcoming things. (then of course Notch went off the deep end and most communities rapidly began distancing themselves from him...)
- ineedasername 5y ago
  And the fame associated with these names was only possible because they canes from a small indie group that broke through to the mainstream so massively successful that I can't think of any other example on that scale in the last decade. In the 90's and early 00's, many big names practically were studio, the brand.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    There are definitely still "well known names" in the indie scene. They may not hit mainstream success, but there's for example there's some pretty well known members of the Factorio team in the Factorio community (kovarex & Klonan come to mind). There's people like Maddy Thorson of Towerfall & Celeste fame. If they decide to embrace it I imagine one of the very few people on the team behind Valheim would also fit this, but it doesn't seem like they are interested in that. There are still small indie groups that make breakout or successful games that hit mainstream awareness (Untitled Goose Game anyone?), but it seems like many prefer to use a company branded twitter than make their own name(s) public or just let the game stand on its own.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Sure, but they're not breakthrough names like Carmack & a few others, and are unlikely to be known by anyone not familiar with those particular games. Carmack on the other hand is completely unavoidable if you even casually tune in to gaming news. I've never player a Doom game, but I know who Carmack is. In contrast, I've played 200+ hours of Factorio, and had no idea what the names of the developers were. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it takes much more than a breakout hit from indie devs to thrust them to Carmack levels of fame. Part of it is likely due to technology changes. A big part of Carmack's fame initially stemmed not only from having a wildly popular game, but having done things with hardware that were practically magical at the time. The use of Binary Space Partitioning-- a not very well known technique for rendering that had, to my knowledge, never been used in videogames before was used by Carmack because he could not only program, he rises above the level of programmer to computer scientist. Many people study computer science in college or bootcamps, but most simply become programmers. Compare that to today's game dev ecosystem: Even indies are typically using a variety of middleware and off-the shelf software to build there game. There is both less room and less need for the type of hackery of the Carmack era (which wasn't unique just to Carmack). These days if you want your game to do something more computationally intensive, you just do it, and up the minimum reqs from a gtx 950 to a gtx 960. I think this is why the closes thing to the level of celebrity of a single dev we've had in a while is Notch w/ Minecraft. He didn't get there by pushing the boundaries of hardware to make something previously not possible, he simply put in long years of iterative design that results in a unique breakthrough hit that appealed to hugely different audiences. If we're looking for future celebrity devs, that's the sort I would expect, and they seem much more rare.

Ever since Mojang was sold to MS in 2014, I'd say his notoriety has dropped quite a bit. Most people that would have been familiar with him are now in their mid teens at the youngest.

kllrnohj 5y ago

Even before Notch left I'd say others like Jeb or Dinnerbone were more commonly known in the Minecraft communities as they were more active in the community & posting about upcoming things. (then of course Notch went off the deep end and most communities rapidly began distancing themselves from him...)

ineedasername 5y ago
And the fame associated with these names was only possible because they canes from a small indie group that broke through to the mainstream so massively successful that I can't think of any other example on that scale in the last decade. In the 90's and early 00's, many big names practically were studio, the brand.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  There are definitely still "well known names" in the indie scene. They may not hit mainstream success, but there's for example there's some pretty well known members of the Factorio team in the Factorio community (kovarex & Klonan come to mind). There's people like Maddy Thorson of Towerfall & Celeste fame. If they decide to embrace it I imagine one of the very few people on the team behind Valheim would also fit this, but it doesn't seem like they are interested in that. There are still small indie groups that make breakout or successful games that hit mainstream awareness (Untitled Goose Game anyone?), but it seems like many prefer to use a company branded twitter than make their own name(s) public or just let the game stand on its own.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Sure, but they're not breakthrough names like Carmack & a few others, and are unlikely to be known by anyone not familiar with those particular games. Carmack on the other hand is completely unavoidable if you even casually tune in to gaming news. I've never player a Doom game, but I know who Carmack is. In contrast, I've played 200+ hours of Factorio, and had no idea what the names of the developers were. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it takes much more than a breakout hit from indie devs to thrust them to Carmack levels of fame. Part of it is likely due to technology changes. A big part of Carmack's fame initially stemmed not only from having a wildly popular game, but having done things with hardware that were practically magical at the time. The use of Binary Space Partitioning-- a not very well known technique for rendering that had, to my knowledge, never been used in videogames before was used by Carmack because he could not only program, he rises above the level of programmer to computer scientist. Many people study computer science in college or bootcamps, but most simply become programmers. Compare that to today's game dev ecosystem: Even indies are typically using a variety of middleware and off-the shelf software to build there game. There is both less room and less need for the type of hackery of the Carmack era (which wasn't unique just to Carmack). These days if you want your game to do something more computationally intensive, you just do it, and up the minimum reqs from a gtx 950 to a gtx 960. I think this is why the closes thing to the level of celebrity of a single dev we've had in a while is Notch w/ Minecraft. He didn't get there by pushing the boundaries of hardware to make something previously not possible, he simply put in long years of iterative design that results in a unique breakthrough hit that appealed to hugely different audiences. If we're looking for future celebrity devs, that's the sort I would expect, and they seem much more rare.