6 ms·

Times have changed a lot since Garry broke through with the infamous Garry's Mod. That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller fo

Times have changed a lot since Garry broke through with the infamous Garry's Mod. That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse. Today, it's easier than ever to get started making games (even I can do it! [0]) but standing out in a crowded marketplace is very difficult. The music industry saw a very similar trend about 10-15 years ago, with the release of consumer recording equipment. In both cases it lead to a 'de-professionalization' of the industry, where most participants are amateurs but most of the success still goes to established studios - barring one-in-a-million outliers such as Garry's Mod, or other indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Balatro, Stardew Valley. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/

glimshe 1y ago
Just like in the music industry, people still believe they can be the outlier. Flappy Bird, more so than your examples built by skilled individuals, showed that "anyone could do it".
- chickenzzzzu 1y ago
  Having a hit game and being an industry programmer/artist might as well be two completely different skills. Sticking with the music analogy, it is the difference between programming your own DAW vs being the audio engineer/writer/producer/singer of your own rap album.
skeeter2020 1y ago
>> 'de-professionalization' I'm a dinosaur who's supposed to hate the music kids listen to these days, but the quality seems as good or better, and the quanity magnitudes higher, so maybe it was a professionalization of amateurs?
- miohtama 1y ago
  Tools are much better compared to old school cassettes and such
- tiniuclx 1y ago
  Well, the quality of the games that reach some level of commercial success has indeed gone up. On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach. The best indie games are amazing these days, but they hide a long tail of disappointed developers.
  - Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
    > On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach. I'd wager a lot of them are money grabs from someone who followed a tutorial on how to make a certain type of game in Unity, swapped a few assets, and put it out there hoping to make a few dollars?
    - shortrounddev2 1y ago
      Yes but it's difficult to distinguish your game from theirs in the search results. It's not like people play a demo of every game and then buy the best one
    - GoofGarage 1y ago
      Someone on YouTube recently looked at exactly what those 50 games are. She tried to give all the ones she bought (she looked at most of the 50 in the store) a fair shake, tried to "find the fun" and give it an honest assessment while trying to at least get a laugh out of it. Video here (fun watch!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_qbe26m9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_qbe26m9E -- ----- Though I'll summarize what she played that was released on August 4th, 2025, of what she chose to buy: * "The Last Mage" was a game produced very cheaply by apparently a lone gal (the videographer found the dev diary) that was a fan of K-pop, levered heavily on existing assets, to produce a campy idea as best she could. * "You Suck at Football" levered existing "viral game" ideas like "Only Up". Very much someone's early attempts. * "Velocity Racing 1000" was a racing game that appeared like someone's early attempts. Very wonky controls and physics. * "Potato Cop" is a simple action game in an deliberately "amateur style", likely produced very quickly and cheaply. She had fun with it though. * "Escape from Amazonia" is an horror game with a quirky plot premise that did elicit some actual screams. Again, produced very quickly and cheaply, but she had some fun with it. * "Descent" was a horror game with some genuine attempts on the presentation side, and again elicited some screams. Some clear effort there. Someone was on to something with this one, and it's a shame they didn't refine it further. * "Agu" is a crude, early access, challenging platformer. This won't go anywhere, but the videographer made the best of it and had some fun with the sheer difficulty of overcoming the physics. * "Bee Simulator: The Hive" had some FANTASTIC presentation and assets. Localized for 14 languages. Great voiceover. Somewhat educational. It's apparently a re-release of a previous game which is why it has poor reviews. Some quirks and bugs, but some might really enjoy it. -- ----- So are you really "competing" with 50 other games if you put out something extremely high quality and polished? No. You might be competing with 5... at most. If you put out a genuine banger and took the time to market it in advance, you should get noticed. Steam's algorithms clearly are doing a good job and ensuring most of this stuff isn't getting much visibility outside of release. Though it's there to find if you deliberately look to unearth all of it.
- hn_throw_250829 1y ago
  [flagged]
- bluedino 1y ago
  Rick Beato would disagree.
  - mattmaroon 1y ago
    Anyone who knows much of anything about music would disagree that the quality is on par with anything from the 90s, the 70s, etc.
    - matheusmoreira 1y ago
      Yeah... A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to talk with one of the musicians who played at a friend's wedding. They turned out to be absurdly skilled musicians in general who can each play multiple instruments and genres. They've got their own songs, their own musical tastes, their own selection of tracks that they really enjoy playing for their audiences. And yet they are reduced to playing popular radio stuff to make money. Lowest common denominator stuff that gets pumped out like products to a wide global audience. That's what people ask them to play. It just feels soulless.
      - lotsoweiners 1y ago
        > And yet they are reduced to playing popular radio stuff to make money. Lowest common denominator stuff that gets pumped out like products to a wide global audience. That's what people ask them to play. It just feels soulless. Why though? I’ve played in both original and cover bands and had the most fun playing “the hits” in cover bands to be honest. I think it is the audience feedback and knowing that we are playing beloved songs that I enjoyed.
        matheusmoreira 1y ago
        > I think it is the audience feedback and knowing that we are playing beloved songs that I enjoyed. That seems right... Out of every person in the wedding, this person remembered me because I sat down to enjoy one of the older tracks they were playing while everyone else was busy. Maybe it's just their tastes. He told me they can play anything but they just really liked playing instrumental music a lot more than big radio hits. They really liked playing jazz which I also enjoy.
- zzbzq 1y ago
  the quality is definitely not better, not since the early 2000s when everything was fully digital and everything is single tracked, rhythm shifted to metronome grid, autotuned--the really big budget producers like max martin will put a little effort into the mixdown but by and large they're not even trying to make thing sound good, they're just pumping out minimal effort productions with default settings.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- reactordev 1y ago
  Quality is subjective, quantity definitely is more abundant however, there was a certain aspect to analog that can’t be reproduced digitally in one’s bedroom. The studio sound, while recorded digitally, is still very much an analog thing. That recording quality comes through. I can tell when something has been quantized and syncopated vs someone really good at the drums. It will be game on when a bedroom artist can make their own master vinyl and print their own records without a $45k upfront cost.
  - delis-thumbs-7e 1y ago
    I think Bernard Purdie was (and still is) pretty damn good at drums, so syncopation certainly did not hurt. I’m not sure how you play funk without it. https://youtu.be/HO7u2n5owu8 https://youtu.be/HO7u2n5owu8
    - reactordev 1y ago
      Machine-assisted syncopation is what I’m saying. Human syncopation is skills.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  > the quality seems as good or better, and the quanity magnitudes higher Doubt. To me it seems like 99% of everything is crud and I have to wade through a lot of crud before I find something that's actually good.
- globnomulous 1y ago
  > professionalization of amateurs? If this were the case, they'd be paid better.
x0x0 1y ago
You may find this channel interesting: https://www.youtube.com/@thomasbrush/videos https://www.youtube.com/@thomasbrush/videos Thomas interviews lots of successful indies about how to make games that provide a living. My takeaway is that while the AA/AAA environment may have never been more challenging, if you can ship small focused games, you the evolution of devtools (eg free and/or functionally free engines for teams earning under $1m) means that making a living shipping small games is doable. You just have to ship small games, not try to compete with studios spending $150m on the low end.
- tiniuclx 1y ago
  Thanks, that seems very interesting!
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  And I'd reinforce that to say that you can do the same thing with software, and small IT build-outs. Monolith platforms right now are more unpopular than perhaps they've ever been. Businesses in your area would LOVE to not be saddled to the monstrous site-builders and corporate-focused clouds that don't fit their businesses. If you want to make a good living, get out there and network with folks who run businesses in your community. I make a solid side-income doing IT for businesses in my area, just easy stuff like setting up WiFi services that they can rely on, managing on-site POS systems, printer ink, that sort of shit. I did the same thing at a previous job and now I do it for a handful of businesses near me. I don't make a ton of money but I think I could scale this up if I really wanted to, I'm just happy with it where it is and want the reliable salary of my WFH programming job too, and a lot of this stuff I also manage with automation. There's a lot of money to be made in small IT/Software/Games. It takes more legwork but it's far more rewarding IMHO.
ecshafer 1y ago
I am not sure if I buy the "de-professionalization" of the music industry. If that happened, it happened 70 years ago. beatles, beach boys, metallica. Many of the biggest bands of all time, with some of the best selling albums were literal teenagers.
- badpun 1y ago
  They still needed expensive studios and technicians to produce a commercial-grade quality album. Nowadays you can try pulling it off at home by yourself.
  - majormajor 1y ago
    I think they have a point, though. If you're talking about making popular music isn't the de-professionalization of the performers and (in many, many cases, especially for those groups like Metallica or The Beatles) the writers and composers more interesting than de-professionalization of the recording engineers? Which maps pretty directly to changes in tool technology, vs taste? Though I think you could also argue the opposite, that there have long been huge amounts of "amateur" mass-popular music compared to, say, Mozart. They just didn't have recording technology to turn into Elvis or The Beatles or Dr Dre or whoever. In games the analog is probably random card games, or Mafia, or dominos variants, vs big productions...?
sodaplayer 1y ago
> That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse. Yeah, same here! I had done a couple of simple personal Flash games previously, but Garry's Mod is where I really felt like I cut my teeth on programming. Doing Wiremod/Expression 2 taught me PID controllers and some basic linear algebra, and after having helped some friends debug their code, taught me the importance of style and good practices.
- tiniuclx 1y ago
  Wiremod, that was it! What a blast from the past. Garry's Mod is probably the reason I have a career in programming now. That, and Minecraft redstone!
  - drchickensalad 1y ago
    I was an admin on a huge wire mod server as a teen and it changed my life :). I might not even have gotten into software, don't even want to imagine that life
raffraffraff 1y ago
And you're competing against games studios who spend millions on salaries for artists, engineers, designers, story writers to produce a game, and then spend 6x the salary cost again on marketing.
cedws 1y ago
I spent 1000+ hours with Garry’s Mod/Wiremod/E2 and I definitely attribute some of my programming knowledge to it. It was in Gmod that I figured out how to draw a circle with sin/cos.
DonHopkins 1y ago
Another more constructive way to frame "de-professionalization" is "prosumerization", focusing more on the gain to consumers than the loss to professionals. I was lucky to work on a AAA game called The Sims from 1997-2000, at the end of the era when a small team could make a product like that (the teams for The Sims 2-4 were enormous in comparison). We didn't have the resources to ship a demo, so instead we focused on creating tools for user created content, releasing "SimShow" before the game was released to enable users to create and preview skins, so after it was released there was already a big collection of skins available (many that we could not have published ourselves like the Star Trek skins). So the fans were already producing content and sharing them on web sites themselves, before the release. https://tcrf.net/Proto:The_Sims_(Windows)/SimShow https://tcrf.net/Proto:The_Sims_(Windows)/SimShow https://archive.org/details/sim-show https://archive.org/details/sim-show Then we released "Transmogrifier" to make custom objects, which was widely accessible because it only required inexpensive easy to use tools like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, instead of requiring expensive and enormously difficult to use 3D editor tools like 3D Studio Max (Blender wasn't an option at the time). https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Transmogrifier https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Transmogrifier https://www.thesimstransmogrifier.com/TransmogrifierDocumentation/TransmogrifierTutorial1.htm https://www.thesimstransmogrifier.com/TransmogrifierDocument... Yahoo Groups were instrumental in enabling fans (kids, adults, even elderly) to make objects, share them, and help each other learn how to use the tools. The great thing is that Sims mods gave people a purpose and motivation to learn powerful tools that would serve them well in many other aspects of life. I knew a grandmother who learned to use Photoshop just to make furniture for her grandchildren to play with. Will Wright talks about the interrelationships of tool builders, content artists, web masters, story creators, collectors, browsers, and casual players, and organizes them into an ecological pyramid with many casual players at the base, then fewer collectors/browsers, storytellers, content artists, webmasters, and finally a few toolmakers at the apex. SimFreak and SimSlice are a couple of prolific successful webmasters and toolmakers who met through the Sims community and got married, and are still producing some of the most amazing collections of integrated Sims objects like ZombieSims, and also working on projects with Will Wright's Gallium Studios: https://simfreaks.com/ https://simfreaks.com/ https://simslice.com/ https://simslice.com/ https://zombiesims.com/ https://zombiesims.com/ https://thealveys.us/ https://thealveys.us/ Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996) (donhopkins.medium.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406 https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d#9f09 https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s... Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk Will Wright's Design Plunder (With Slides) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91IWh4agzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91IWh4agzU
ninetyninenine 1y ago
You wrote a PID controller for a virtual turret? Why? It’s virtual you can go open loop and the delay is negligible. You don’t need a feedback loop here.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
That’s a very bleak way of putting it. A more positive way of framing it is that it has never been easier to make properly produced music/games. If you have a lot of free time on your hands and want to make a good looking game today, you will have all the tools you need to do so and absolutely nothing stopping you from making something great. No capital required. Obviously, it means that the field is now very crowded so if you want to live from it you will need to stand out a lot. But the activity in itself has never been more accessible than now. Amusingly, it means the easiest way to enter the video game industry nowadays is probably just making games. This equally applies to music and video by the way. In all likelihood, people will fail to turn it into a job, but the entry cost has never been this low.
lelandbatey 1y ago
I think if you look at the larger numbers, there is more of a middle class of game devs than ever before, they just ALSO exist in the shadow of a set of large studios that are larger than ever before. I as a game player feel like I'm getting more "games for me" than ever, even though the games I enjoy fall pretty far out of the mainstream (Farm Together 2, Cat Quest 3, Quest Hunter, Slime Rancher 2, Factorio, Traveler's Rest, Satisfactory, many many more). All of those are games made by "small to medium sized" studios and sold enough to support their team (maybe not Quest Hunter, as that's older). My point is that there's just SO MANY games that're just mid-size and floating along. Basically no one is getting RICH on game dev, but there's more folks making a living there than ever.

glimshe 1y ago

Just like in the music industry, people still believe they can be the outlier. Flappy Bird, more so than your examples built by skilled individuals, showed that "anyone could do it".

chickenzzzzu 1y ago
Having a hit game and being an industry programmer/artist might as well be two completely different skills. Sticking with the music analogy, it is the difference between programming your own DAW vs being the audio engineer/writer/producer/singer of your own rap album.

skeeter2020 1y ago

>> 'de-professionalization' I'm a dinosaur who's supposed to hate the music kids listen to these days, but the quality seems as good or better, and the quanity magnitudes higher, so maybe it was a professionalization of amateurs?

miohtama 1y ago
Tools are much better compared to old school cassettes and such
tiniuclx 1y ago
Well, the quality of the games that reach some level of commercial success has indeed gone up. On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach. The best indie games are amazing these days, but they hide a long tail of disappointed developers.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
  > On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach. I'd wager a lot of them are money grabs from someone who followed a tutorial on how to make a certain type of game in Unity, swapped a few assets, and put it out there hoping to make a few dollars?
  - shortrounddev2 1y ago
    Yes but it's difficult to distinguish your game from theirs in the search results. It's not like people play a demo of every game and then buy the best one
  - GoofGarage 1y ago
    Someone on YouTube recently looked at exactly what those 50 games are. She tried to give all the ones she bought (she looked at most of the 50 in the store) a fair shake, tried to "find the fun" and give it an honest assessment while trying to at least get a laugh out of it. Video here (fun watch!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_qbe26m9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_qbe26m9E -- ----- Though I'll summarize what she played that was released on August 4th, 2025, of what she chose to buy: * "The Last Mage" was a game produced very cheaply by apparently a lone gal (the videographer found the dev diary) that was a fan of K-pop, levered heavily on existing assets, to produce a campy idea as best she could. * "You Suck at Football" levered existing "viral game" ideas like "Only Up". Very much someone's early attempts. * "Velocity Racing 1000" was a racing game that appeared like someone's early attempts. Very wonky controls and physics. * "Potato Cop" is a simple action game in an deliberately "amateur style", likely produced very quickly and cheaply. She had fun with it though. * "Escape from Amazonia" is an horror game with a quirky plot premise that did elicit some actual screams. Again, produced very quickly and cheaply, but she had some fun with it. * "Descent" was a horror game with some genuine attempts on the presentation side, and again elicited some screams. Some clear effort there. Someone was on to something with this one, and it's a shame they didn't refine it further. * "Agu" is a crude, early access, challenging platformer. This won't go anywhere, but the videographer made the best of it and had some fun with the sheer difficulty of overcoming the physics. * "Bee Simulator: The Hive" had some FANTASTIC presentation and assets. Localized for 14 languages. Great voiceover. Somewhat educational. It's apparently a re-release of a previous game which is why it has poor reviews. Some quirks and bugs, but some might really enjoy it. -- ----- So are you really "competing" with 50 other games if you put out something extremely high quality and polished? No. You might be competing with 5... at most. If you put out a genuine banger and took the time to market it in advance, you should get noticed. Steam's algorithms clearly are doing a good job and ensuring most of this stuff isn't getting much visibility outside of release. Though it's there to find if you deliberately look to unearth all of it.
hn_throw_250829 1y ago
[flagged]
bluedino 1y ago
Rick Beato would disagree.
- mattmaroon 1y ago
  Anyone who knows much of anything about music would disagree that the quality is on par with anything from the 90s, the 70s, etc.
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    Yeah... A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to talk with one of the musicians who played at a friend's wedding. They turned out to be absurdly skilled musicians in general who can each play multiple instruments and genres. They've got their own songs, their own musical tastes, their own selection of tracks that they really enjoy playing for their audiences. And yet they are reduced to playing popular radio stuff to make money. Lowest common denominator stuff that gets pumped out like products to a wide global audience. That's what people ask them to play. It just feels soulless.
    - lotsoweiners 1y ago
      > And yet they are reduced to playing popular radio stuff to make money. Lowest common denominator stuff that gets pumped out like products to a wide global audience. That's what people ask them to play. It just feels soulless. Why though? I’ve played in both original and cover bands and had the most fun playing “the hits” in cover bands to be honest. I think it is the audience feedback and knowing that we are playing beloved songs that I enjoyed.
      - matheusmoreira 1y ago
        > I think it is the audience feedback and knowing that we are playing beloved songs that I enjoyed. That seems right... Out of every person in the wedding, this person remembered me because I sat down to enjoy one of the older tracks they were playing while everyone else was busy. Maybe it's just their tastes. He told me they can play anything but they just really liked playing instrumental music a lot more than big radio hits. They really liked playing jazz which I also enjoy.
zzbzq 1y ago
the quality is definitely not better, not since the early 2000s when everything was fully digital and everything is single tracked, rhythm shifted to metronome grid, autotuned--the really big budget producers like max martin will put a little effort into the mixdown but by and large they're not even trying to make thing sound good, they're just pumping out minimal effort productions with default settings.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
reactordev 1y ago
Quality is subjective, quantity definitely is more abundant however, there was a certain aspect to analog that can’t be reproduced digitally in one’s bedroom. The studio sound, while recorded digitally, is still very much an analog thing. That recording quality comes through. I can tell when something has been quantized and syncopated vs someone really good at the drums. It will be game on when a bedroom artist can make their own master vinyl and print their own records without a $45k upfront cost.
- delis-thumbs-7e 1y ago
  I think Bernard Purdie was (and still is) pretty damn good at drums, so syncopation certainly did not hurt. I’m not sure how you play funk without it. https://youtu.be/HO7u2n5owu8 https://youtu.be/HO7u2n5owu8
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Machine-assisted syncopation is what I’m saying. Human syncopation is skills.
matheusmoreira 1y ago
> the quality seems as good or better, and the quanity magnitudes higher Doubt. To me it seems like 99% of everything is crud and I have to wade through a lot of crud before I find something that's actually good.
globnomulous 1y ago
> professionalization of amateurs? If this were the case, they'd be paid better.

x0x0 1y ago

You may find this channel interesting: https://www.youtube.com/@thomasbrush/videos https://www.youtube.com/@thomasbrush/videos Thomas interviews lots of successful indies about how to make games that provide a living. My takeaway is that while the AA/AAA environment may have never been more challenging, if you can ship small focused games, you the evolution of devtools (eg free and/or functionally free engines for teams earning under $1m) means that making a living shipping small games is doable. You just have to ship small games, not try to compete with studios spending $150m on the low end.

tiniuclx 1y ago
Thanks, that seems very interesting!
ToucanLoucan 1y ago
And I'd reinforce that to say that you can do the same thing with software, and small IT build-outs. Monolith platforms right now are more unpopular than perhaps they've ever been. Businesses in your area would LOVE to not be saddled to the monstrous site-builders and corporate-focused clouds that don't fit their businesses. If you want to make a good living, get out there and network with folks who run businesses in your community. I make a solid side-income doing IT for businesses in my area, just easy stuff like setting up WiFi services that they can rely on, managing on-site POS systems, printer ink, that sort of shit. I did the same thing at a previous job and now I do it for a handful of businesses near me. I don't make a ton of money but I think I could scale this up if I really wanted to, I'm just happy with it where it is and want the reliable salary of my WFH programming job too, and a lot of this stuff I also manage with automation. There's a lot of money to be made in small IT/Software/Games. It takes more legwork but it's far more rewarding IMHO.

ecshafer 1y ago

I am not sure if I buy the "de-professionalization" of the music industry. If that happened, it happened 70 years ago. beatles, beach boys, metallica. Many of the biggest bands of all time, with some of the best selling albums were literal teenagers.

badpun 1y ago
They still needed expensive studios and technicians to produce a commercial-grade quality album. Nowadays you can try pulling it off at home by yourself.
- majormajor 1y ago
  I think they have a point, though. If you're talking about making popular music isn't the de-professionalization of the performers and (in many, many cases, especially for those groups like Metallica or The Beatles) the writers and composers more interesting than de-professionalization of the recording engineers? Which maps pretty directly to changes in tool technology, vs taste? Though I think you could also argue the opposite, that there have long been huge amounts of "amateur" mass-popular music compared to, say, Mozart. They just didn't have recording technology to turn into Elvis or The Beatles or Dr Dre or whoever. In games the analog is probably random card games, or Mafia, or dominos variants, vs big productions...?

sodaplayer 1y ago

> That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse. Yeah, same here! I had done a couple of simple personal Flash games previously, but Garry's Mod is where I really felt like I cut my teeth on programming. Doing Wiremod/Expression 2 taught me PID controllers and some basic linear algebra, and after having helped some friends debug their code, taught me the importance of style and good practices.

tiniuclx 1y ago
Wiremod, that was it! What a blast from the past. Garry's Mod is probably the reason I have a career in programming now. That, and Minecraft redstone!
- drchickensalad 1y ago
  I was an admin on a huge wire mod server as a teen and it changed my life :). I might not even have gotten into software, don't even want to imagine that life

raffraffraff 1y ago

And you're competing against games studios who spend millions on salaries for artists, engineers, designers, story writers to produce a game, and then spend 6x the salary cost again on marketing.

cedws 1y ago

I spent 1000+ hours with Garry’s Mod/Wiremod/E2 and I definitely attribute some of my programming knowledge to it. It was in Gmod that I figured out how to draw a circle with sin/cos.

DonHopkins 1y ago

Another more constructive way to frame "de-professionalization" is "prosumerization", focusing more on the gain to consumers than the loss to professionals. I was lucky to work on a AAA game called The Sims from 1997-2000, at the end of the era when a small team could make a product like that (the teams for The Sims 2-4 were enormous in comparison). We didn't have the resources to ship a demo, so instead we focused on creating tools for user created content, releasing "SimShow" before the game was released to enable users to create and preview skins, so after it was released there was already a big collection of skins available (many that we could not have published ourselves like the Star Trek skins). So the fans were already producing content and sharing them on web sites themselves, before the release. https://tcrf.net/Proto:The_Sims_(Windows)/SimShow https://tcrf.net/Proto:The_Sims_(Windows)/SimShow https://archive.org/details/sim-show https://archive.org/details/sim-show Then we released "Transmogrifier" to make custom objects, which was widely accessible because it only required inexpensive easy to use tools like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, instead of requiring expensive and enormously difficult to use 3D editor tools like 3D Studio Max (Blender wasn't an option at the time). https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Transmogrifier https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Transmogrifier https://www.thesimstransmogrifier.com/TransmogrifierDocumentation/TransmogrifierTutorial1.htm https://www.thesimstransmogrifier.com/TransmogrifierDocument... Yahoo Groups were instrumental in enabling fans (kids, adults, even elderly) to make objects, share them, and help each other learn how to use the tools. The great thing is that Sims mods gave people a purpose and motivation to learn powerful tools that would serve them well in many other aspects of life. I knew a grandmother who learned to use Photoshop just to make furniture for her grandchildren to play with. Will Wright talks about the interrelationships of tool builders, content artists, web masters, story creators, collectors, browsers, and casual players, and organizes them into an ecological pyramid with many casual players at the base, then fewer collectors/browsers, storytellers, content artists, webmasters, and finally a few toolmakers at the apex. SimFreak and SimSlice are a couple of prolific successful webmasters and toolmakers who met through the Sims community and got married, and are still producing some of the most amazing collections of integrated Sims objects like ZombieSims, and also working on projects with Will Wright's Gallium Studios: https://simfreaks.com/ https://simfreaks.com/ https://simslice.com/ https://simslice.com/ https://zombiesims.com/ https://zombiesims.com/ https://thealveys.us/ https://thealveys.us/ Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996) (donhopkins.medium.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406 https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d#9f09 https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s... Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk Will Wright's Design Plunder (With Slides) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91IWh4agzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91IWh4agzU

ninetyninenine 1y ago

You wrote a PID controller for a virtual turret? Why? It’s virtual you can go open loop and the delay is negligible. You don’t need a feedback loop here.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

That’s a very bleak way of putting it. A more positive way of framing it is that it has never been easier to make properly produced music/games. If you have a lot of free time on your hands and want to make a good looking game today, you will have all the tools you need to do so and absolutely nothing stopping you from making something great. No capital required. Obviously, it means that the field is now very crowded so if you want to live from it you will need to stand out a lot. But the activity in itself has never been more accessible than now. Amusingly, it means the easiest way to enter the video game industry nowadays is probably just making games. This equally applies to music and video by the way. In all likelihood, people will fail to turn it into a job, but the entry cost has never been this low.

lelandbatey 1y ago

I think if you look at the larger numbers, there is more of a middle class of game devs than ever before, they just ALSO exist in the shadow of a set of large studios that are larger than ever before. I as a game player feel like I'm getting more "games for me" than ever, even though the games I enjoy fall pretty far out of the mainstream (Farm Together 2, Cat Quest 3, Quest Hunter, Slime Rancher 2, Factorio, Traveler's Rest, Satisfactory, many many more). All of those are games made by "small to medium sized" studios and sold enough to support their team (maybe not Quest Hunter, as that's older). My point is that there's just SO MANY games that're just mid-size and floating along. Basically no one is getting RICH on game dev, but there's more folks making a living there than ever.