7 ms·

There's a lot to dislike, but my gripes as a developer who occasionally dabbles in games are more along the lines of "this puzzle game prototype is interesting

There's a lot to dislike, but my gripes as a developer who occasionally dabbles in games are more along the lines of "this puzzle game prototype is interesting and may be worth polishing up and tossing on steam, but oh right, it won't even pay for itself unless I turn it into yet another gambling machine." Then I go back to writing system software.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Yeah, people blame the developers, blame the publishers, but I think the sad truth is, gamers themselves shoulder much of the blame. Somehow the public came to believe that everything should be free. Maybe it was the internet? Maybe it was sites/apps like Facebook? Regardless, when a great piece of software that happens to have a price tag fails to sell, whose fault is that? Don't blame developers/publishers for going instead to the only model that pays the bills these days.
- greggsy 5y ago
  IMO, it’s the platforms that turn down novel ideas in preference for money making products, resulting in less visibility for the underdog. Apple’s App Store routinely promotes paid for apps over free ones. Steam does the same. Google search is obviously the worst offender.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Why blame anyone? Gamers get the content they want in the way they prefer to pay for it, developers and publishers get paid. The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games. Just because it doesn’t match the Hacker News gaming utopia template doesn’t mean anyone is doing anything wrong. This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of children don’t have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value to the people who do have money to spend on it.
  - ddaalluu2 5y ago
    Wrong. The market has not spoken. The producers leave no alternative so it's do or die for consumers
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    That's not true though. No game lives off the general public buying a few cosmetics. It lives off a few addicted people buying thousands of dollars worth, while the vast majority pay nothing. It's a terrible business model that will hopefully be outlawed in the coming decade.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      I had assumed those "few addicted people buying thousands of dollars worth" were instead just people with a lot of disposable income. You could be right though, and it is addiction. That would in fact be uncool. My only data-point though is a friend of mine who has spent hundreds of dollars (or more?) on Star Citizen ships and he is the disposable-income kind of gamer.
      - tsimionescu 5y ago
        There are combinations of both, for sure. But there was an interview some time ago on Eurogamer about a super spender (thousands of pounds) on Candy Crush who was awarded some airplane tickets to attend a Candy Crush convention, but she couldn't afford tickets to get to the airport...
        JKCalhoun 5y ago
        That's extremely sad.
      - bytehowl 5y ago
        This video by Jim Sterling is a good overview of how knowingly sinister microtransactions truly are, with a couple narrated testimonies of people who fell for them despite not being able to afford them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14
- thot_experiment 5y ago
  Artificial scarcity is bad, actually. Things that don't cost money to duplicate should be free, we need UBI and maybe a general shift to patronage-based models, luckily this is starting to happen. There are also plenty of games that implement a cometic lootboxes that don't impact gameplay model that are totally fine.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    Lot of assertions here about how society should be run without any actual argumentation.
    - thot_experiment 5y ago
      Fair enough, it's not a great comment. I don't really know how society should be run, and I shouldn't have offhandedly emphasized a couple things that I think might lead us to a solution. That being said I'll stand by artificial scarcity being bad thing and clarify that while I don't have some master plan on how to create a functioning society where we don't have to impose artificial scarcity on the digital world; I absolutely think that is something we should be dedicating a lot of effort to. I reject the premise that we need to deny some people things that can be copied essentially for free.
      - School-Cotton 5y ago
        > That being said I'll stand by artificial scarcity being bad thing and clarify that while I don't have some master plan on how to create a functioning society where we don't have to impose artificial scarcity on the digital world; I absolutely think that is something we should be dedicating a lot of effort to. I reject the premise that we need to deny some people things that can be copied essentially for free. Again this just sounds like an emotional argument -- you seem convinced on a purely intuitive level that artificial scarcity is bad without actually explaining rationally how the harm it does outweighs the benefits. There is a _very simple_ argument (which I'm not claiming is _true_ in all cases, but it is at least compelling, so anyone claiming the contrary needs to address it) in favor of artificial scarcity: taking away a major monetization strategy (often the only viable one) massively reduces the incentive to create high-quality products and we all end up poorer for those cultural outputs not existing.
- apatters 5y ago
  This is like saying we should blame the smoker, the junkie, or the gambling addict. The latter is an especially accurate comparison because these companies turn their games into gambling machines. Sure, personal responsibility is important. In the end the only person who can free an addict from the quagmire of addiction is them. But that doesn't stop us from regulating the fuck out of tobacco companies, heroin dealers or casinos to reduce the harm they do to their victims. The elephant in the room is that we as an industry hold the power to alter people's psychology on a greater scale than any drug. But people stay silent because it delivers the paychecks and the shareholder returns...
shusaku 5y ago
The other option is to apparently blanket your game with advertisements. I spent some time yesterday looking for word games in the iOS store, and it seems like everything was “free”, but had non stop, unskippable ads. One offered to remove ads for a fee, but even after paying they remained in various parts of the game.
- temp8964 5y ago
  Almost all top iOS games are like this now, iPhone App Store is an extremely toxic market for games.
- samatman 5y ago
  Some of that is that Apple's App Store search remains the worst search engine I'm forced to use, but some of it is evaporative cooling from Apple Arcade. Most of the decent games have migrated there. I barely use it, but I think it works out to two bucks with the other iStuff I'm happy to pay for, and having a few games on my tablet or phone can be nice when I'm traveling.
- rstupek 5y ago
  what type of word game were you looking for?
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
What exactly makes you think as someone who "dabbles in games" to be entitled to profit? AFAIK it costs $100 +30% to publish on Steam. It only takes 260 people to buy your game at 50 cents to break even. If your game can't sell 260 copies at 50 cents then it's just that, worthless. Why not just release your game for free, for free? Does it have to be on Steam? Does it have to make money?
- pengaru 5y ago
  > AFAIK it costs $100 +30% to publish on Steam. It only takes 260 people to buy your game at 50 cents to break even. If your game can't sell 260 copies at 50 cents then it's just that, worthless. It doesn't take zero time to ship a bespoke finished game, your calculus is asinine.
  - zimspy 5y ago
    Break even on publishing costs. What about the man hours put into development?
- temp8964 5y ago
  How is that break even? Don’t you need to invest time/money to make a game?
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    Nope. I guess you do.
- bccdee 5y ago
  The difference between someone who "dabbles in games" and a professional is that the professional polishes up the prototype and sells it on Steam. The commenter above explained why the state of the industry has prevented them from doing that. Your weird tangent asking "why do you feel entitled to make money for your work?" isn't really relevant to the conversation.
- bradknowles 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
That depends on how good the concept is! Plenty of indie games have succeeded without gambling mechanics, look at something like Baba Is You for instance. I don’t know that the developer became rich off of it but be seems to have done well enough.
- techdragon 5y ago
  This only works if you either already have a brand like Zachatronics or if you have the patience to support/polish these small games for years till the random slot machine of the universe drops you enough reviews that you get critical mass and decent sales… or you pay for PR and you can successfully profit from even a shit game with enough PR money so why bother at that point… Your right about a good concept winning a lot of good will and making success possible with less polish, but these days it doesn’t subtract the “risk of never being discovered” if you make an iOS app your just one of millions in the App Store if it’s on steam the shovelware isn’t as bad and discovery is better but it still requires market understanding in order to stand out.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    The reason I referenced Baba Is You is because that concept was so incredibly brilliant, I legitimately believe you could have dropped the game into five parallel universes and it would have gotten attention every single time. Just get the game in front of one journalist for five minutes, and they'll very quickly see how brilliant it is. Discovering a game concept like that is hard, but it does happen.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Yeah, people blame the developers, blame the publishers, but I think the sad truth is, gamers themselves shoulder much of the blame. Somehow the public came to believe that everything should be free. Maybe it was the internet? Maybe it was sites/apps like Facebook? Regardless, when a great piece of software that happens to have a price tag fails to sell, whose fault is that? Don't blame developers/publishers for going instead to the only model that pays the bills these days.

greggsy 5y ago
IMO, it’s the platforms that turn down novel ideas in preference for money making products, resulting in less visibility for the underdog. Apple’s App Store routinely promotes paid for apps over free ones. Steam does the same. Google search is obviously the worst offender.
Gigachad 5y ago
Why blame anyone? Gamers get the content they want in the way they prefer to pay for it, developers and publishers get paid. The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games. Just because it doesn’t match the Hacker News gaming utopia template doesn’t mean anyone is doing anything wrong. This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of children don’t have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value to the people who do have money to spend on it.
- ddaalluu2 5y ago
  Wrong. The market has not spoken. The producers leave no alternative so it's do or die for consumers
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  That's not true though. No game lives off the general public buying a few cosmetics. It lives off a few addicted people buying thousands of dollars worth, while the vast majority pay nothing. It's a terrible business model that will hopefully be outlawed in the coming decade.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I had assumed those "few addicted people buying thousands of dollars worth" were instead just people with a lot of disposable income. You could be right though, and it is addiction. That would in fact be uncool. My only data-point though is a friend of mine who has spent hundreds of dollars (or more?) on Star Citizen ships and he is the disposable-income kind of gamer.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      There are combinations of both, for sure. But there was an interview some time ago on Eurogamer about a super spender (thousands of pounds) on Candy Crush who was awarded some airplane tickets to attend a Candy Crush convention, but she couldn't afford tickets to get to the airport...
      - JKCalhoun 5y ago
        That's extremely sad.
    - bytehowl 5y ago
      This video by Jim Sterling is a good overview of how knowingly sinister microtransactions truly are, with a couple narrated testimonies of people who fell for them despite not being able to afford them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14
thot_experiment 5y ago
Artificial scarcity is bad, actually. Things that don't cost money to duplicate should be free, we need UBI and maybe a general shift to patronage-based models, luckily this is starting to happen. There are also plenty of games that implement a cometic lootboxes that don't impact gameplay model that are totally fine.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  Lot of assertions here about how society should be run without any actual argumentation.
  - thot_experiment 5y ago
    Fair enough, it's not a great comment. I don't really know how society should be run, and I shouldn't have offhandedly emphasized a couple things that I think might lead us to a solution. That being said I'll stand by artificial scarcity being bad thing and clarify that while I don't have some master plan on how to create a functioning society where we don't have to impose artificial scarcity on the digital world; I absolutely think that is something we should be dedicating a lot of effort to. I reject the premise that we need to deny some people things that can be copied essentially for free.
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      > That being said I'll stand by artificial scarcity being bad thing and clarify that while I don't have some master plan on how to create a functioning society where we don't have to impose artificial scarcity on the digital world; I absolutely think that is something we should be dedicating a lot of effort to. I reject the premise that we need to deny some people things that can be copied essentially for free. Again this just sounds like an emotional argument -- you seem convinced on a purely intuitive level that artificial scarcity is bad without actually explaining rationally how the harm it does outweighs the benefits. There is a _very simple_ argument (which I'm not claiming is _true_ in all cases, but it is at least compelling, so anyone claiming the contrary needs to address it) in favor of artificial scarcity: taking away a major monetization strategy (often the only viable one) massively reduces the incentive to create high-quality products and we all end up poorer for those cultural outputs not existing.
apatters 5y ago
This is like saying we should blame the smoker, the junkie, or the gambling addict. The latter is an especially accurate comparison because these companies turn their games into gambling machines. Sure, personal responsibility is important. In the end the only person who can free an addict from the quagmire of addiction is them. But that doesn't stop us from regulating the fuck out of tobacco companies, heroin dealers or casinos to reduce the harm they do to their victims. The elephant in the room is that we as an industry hold the power to alter people's psychology on a greater scale than any drug. But people stay silent because it delivers the paychecks and the shareholder returns...

shusaku 5y ago

The other option is to apparently blanket your game with advertisements. I spent some time yesterday looking for word games in the iOS store, and it seems like everything was “free”, but had non stop, unskippable ads. One offered to remove ads for a fee, but even after paying they remained in various parts of the game.

temp8964 5y ago
Almost all top iOS games are like this now, iPhone App Store is an extremely toxic market for games.
samatman 5y ago
Some of that is that Apple's App Store search remains the worst search engine I'm forced to use, but some of it is evaporative cooling from Apple Arcade. Most of the decent games have migrated there. I barely use it, but I think it works out to two bucks with the other iStuff I'm happy to pay for, and having a few games on my tablet or phone can be nice when I'm traveling.
rstupek 5y ago
what type of word game were you looking for?

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

What exactly makes you think as someone who "dabbles in games" to be entitled to profit? AFAIK it costs $100 +30% to publish on Steam. It only takes 260 people to buy your game at 50 cents to break even. If your game can't sell 260 copies at 50 cents then it's just that, worthless. Why not just release your game for free, for free? Does it have to be on Steam? Does it have to make money?

pengaru 5y ago
> AFAIK it costs $100 +30% to publish on Steam. It only takes 260 people to buy your game at 50 cents to break even. If your game can't sell 260 copies at 50 cents then it's just that, worthless. It doesn't take zero time to ship a bespoke finished game, your calculus is asinine.
- zimspy 5y ago
  Break even on publishing costs. What about the man hours put into development?
temp8964 5y ago
How is that break even? Don’t you need to invest time/money to make a game?
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  Nope. I guess you do.
bccdee 5y ago
The difference between someone who "dabbles in games" and a professional is that the professional polishes up the prototype and sells it on Steam. The commenter above explained why the state of the industry has prevented them from doing that. Your weird tangent asking "why do you feel entitled to make money for your work?" isn't really relevant to the conversation.
bradknowles 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

That depends on how good the concept is! Plenty of indie games have succeeded without gambling mechanics, look at something like Baba Is You for instance. I don’t know that the developer became rich off of it but be seems to have done well enough.

techdragon 5y ago
This only works if you either already have a brand like Zachatronics or if you have the patience to support/polish these small games for years till the random slot machine of the universe drops you enough reviews that you get critical mass and decent sales… or you pay for PR and you can successfully profit from even a shit game with enough PR money so why bother at that point… Your right about a good concept winning a lot of good will and making success possible with less polish, but these days it doesn’t subtract the “risk of never being discovered” if you make an iOS app your just one of millions in the App Store if it’s on steam the shovelware isn’t as bad and discovery is better but it still requires market understanding in order to stand out.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  The reason I referenced Baba Is You is because that concept was so incredibly brilliant, I legitimately believe you could have dropped the game into five parallel universes and it would have gotten attention every single time. Just get the game in front of one journalist for five minutes, and they'll very quickly see how brilliant it is. Discovering a game concept like that is hard, but it does happen.