6 ms·

This piece from Gabe's talk [1] is interesting: "But the one entity we wouldn't ever want to compete with is our own users, right? They have already out-stripp

by Arjuna 13y ago

This piece from Gabe's talk [1] is interesting: "But the one entity we wouldn't ever want to compete with is our own users, right? They have already out-stripped us spectacularly. You can't compete with them once you give them the tools that allow them to participate in the creation of the experiences that they find are valuable. And it's not by a little bit; it's like an order of magnitude more productive already, and we're only a couple of years into thinking about how to do that. [...] The point is that the connected groups of users are going to be way more successful if they're properly enabled and supported than any of the individual game developers are going to be. But, there's this huge tension between, if that's the direction that gaming is going, or if that's the direction content creation is going, these other systems actually put a tremendous number of road-blocks in the way of doing that. It takes Valve several months to get through certification process for a single update. I mean, it took us 6 months to get one update through the Apple Store to ship an iPad update. We have a lot of resources and have a huge commercial motivation. No individual user, if they're the sort of center of gravity for content production, is going to have the wherewithal or the stubbornness to get through that. That's just one example of the many ways that the closed systems appear to us to be antithetical to our user-centric model of content production, going forward." -- Like you, I'm just trying to "read the tea leaves" here, but the future is user-generated content. Valve needs to leverage that by offering a hardware platform [2] that will allow them to be in complete and full control, both technologically and financially. A hardware platform that they can update as needed, that will give users more control to generate content; free from the concerns of pushing an update through Apple or Microsoft. In turn, their goal will be to leverage content creation by connecting users in a unified economy, again, that they control. They engaged Yanis Varoufakis [3], who is a renowned academic economist, no doubt to assist in that endeavor. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzn6E2m3otg&t=783 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzn6E2m3otg&t=783 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steambox#Steam_Box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steambox#Steam_Box [3] http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a-strange-email http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a...

m3mnoch 13y ago
> the future is user-generated content as a veteran of the "user-generated" game content industry, i can honestly say 5 years ago, i had that same vision. 5 years of blood, sweat, money and tears later, i can (also honestly) say -- that's not the case. and won't be. for those of you who've never made (finished and shipped!) a game before, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. you have what would be called an mvp in ycombinator terms inside of a month. "i will crush the rest of this thing out 3 months and ship!" uh... no. i'm here to tell you that is not the case. the whole "first 90%" vs. the "second 90%" thing is magnified 10-fold in games. it's a really long post for me to explain the myriad of gotchas involved from safely syncing game state between sleep-and-non-sleep-packets-suddenly-flood-in-but-omg-my-clock to btw-you-need-3-times-the-states-in-your-state-machine-oops to why-am-i-getting-3-fps-on-a-faster-device to all-of-the-above-times-multiplayer-exponentially. i plan on writing that post someday, but not now. anyway. the prototype flies off your finger tips and then the next 2 and a half years (please see the common thread of 3 years to make a game, from the movie indie gamer [highly recommended!] to that recent atomic brawl post) working through obscure bugs and corner cases because games have more complex interactions than non-games and gamers don't have a clue how to follow the damn happy path when they play. so, yes. i said 1 month of fun, fast iterative prototype and 2 years of awful, in-the-weeds debugging where your strength of will to finish is tested daily. (insert rovio making 51 games before angry birds here) finishing a good game is goddamnhard. finishing a shitty game is a snap -- just ship your prototype! what we found was that anyone who has the strength and perseverance to actually build and (more importantly) finish a game was already working in the game industry -- mostly because they possess a proven will to finish. i guess what's i'm saying is lots of people can snap together sweet, use-with-care prototypes ugc-style. almost nobody -- and i really, really mean almost nobody, like 0.0001% of "i want to make a game" developers -- can actually finish and launch a game regardless of scope. mind you -- i don't view indie games as ugc. if you ship (SHIP, not start) an indie game, you have what it takes to work in the non-indie game world. you just choose not to. if you don't believe me, i challenge you to prove me wrong and just make a simple game this weekend and let your friends play it where you can watch, but not talk or help them at all. it will take approximately 12 seconds of them touching your game before you're completely "wtf -- how did that happen?!?!?" screwed. m3mnoch.
- 13y ago

by Arjuna 13y ago

m3mnoch 13y ago

> the future is user-generated content as a veteran of the "user-generated" game content industry, i can honestly say 5 years ago, i had that same vision. 5 years of blood, sweat, money and tears later, i can (also honestly) say -- that's not the case. and won't be. for those of you who've never made (finished and shipped!) a game before, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. you have what would be called an mvp in ycombinator terms inside of a month. "i will crush the rest of this thing out 3 months and ship!" uh... no. i'm here to tell you that is not the case. the whole "first 90%" vs. the "second 90%" thing is magnified 10-fold in games. it's a really long post for me to explain the myriad of gotchas involved from safely syncing game state between sleep-and-non-sleep-packets-suddenly-flood-in-but-omg-my-clock to btw-you-need-3-times-the-states-in-your-state-machine-oops to why-am-i-getting-3-fps-on-a-faster-device to all-of-the-above-times-multiplayer-exponentially. i plan on writing that post someday, but not now. anyway. the prototype flies off your finger tips and then the next 2 and a half years (please see the common thread of 3 years to make a game, from the movie indie gamer [highly recommended!] to that recent atomic brawl post) working through obscure bugs and corner cases because games have more complex interactions than non-games and gamers don't have a clue how to follow the damn happy path when they play. so, yes. i said 1 month of fun, fast iterative prototype and 2 years of awful, in-the-weeds debugging where your strength of will to finish is tested daily. (insert rovio making 51 games before angry birds here) finishing a good game is goddamnhard. finishing a shitty game is a snap -- just ship your prototype! what we found was that anyone who has the strength and perseverance to actually build and (more importantly) finish a game was already working in the game industry -- mostly because they possess a proven will to finish. i guess what's i'm saying is lots of people can snap together sweet, use-with-care prototypes ugc-style. almost nobody -- and i really, really mean almost nobody, like 0.0001% of "i want to make a game" developers -- can actually finish and launch a game regardless of scope. mind you -- i don't view indie games as ugc. if you ship (SHIP, not start) an indie game, you have what it takes to work in the non-indie game world. you just choose not to. if you don't believe me, i challenge you to prove me wrong and just make a simple game this weekend and let your friends play it where you can watch, but not talk or help them at all. it will take approximately 12 seconds of them touching your game before you're completely "wtf -- how did that happen?!?!?" screwed. m3mnoch.

13y ago