EnglishMobster

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

Yep, it's been a trend all year. My studio got canned back at the end of January. Publisher called us into a studio-wide meeting scheduled during lunch with 1 hour of notice, only to say "The game you spent 6 years on is canceled and all 150 of you are fired. The media will know in 30 minutes, don't say anything until then if you want to keep a severance package." (I have since landed on my feet elsewhere.)

These studios are owned by big publishers and generally work for years at a loss. With the costs to borrow increasing, we're seeing cuts on long-term investments that might not make their money back (like movies and games).

Volition was owned by Embracer, which is now struggling with funding. So anything that isn't a sure bet is effectively canned - and in turn you see these studios shut down left and right, plus big layoffs from studios that are still open.

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

That's all game development.

Baldur's Gate took 6 years to make. Starfield has been in development since 2015 - that's 8 years. As gamers demand more, games have grown in scope. The ones that stayed behind have gotten punished.

If a AAA game doesn't have at least 8 hours of story and realistic graphics in the modern era, it gets panned by reviewers. People's expectations have been raised - and are continuing to be raised - and in turn, that inflates how long it takes to make a game. People will say "Why should I spend $60 on this game when I can spend $60 on this game that gives me more stuff?" (See: Immortals of Aveum, which itself has been in development for 4-5 years.)

The games that don't take that long are the stale yearly franchises - the FIFAs and CODs of the world. Even COD alternates between studios, with each installment taking 1-3 years. Some franchises (like Pokemon) have multiple teams within a studio that operate independently of one another; Arceus was made by the Let's Go team, while Scarlet/Violet was made by the Sword/Shield team.

If studios stop betting on long-term projects, you're going to wind up with stale yearly iterations - or half-baked games rushed out the door to meet a deadline. If it's true that you say AAA (and even AA!) dev isn't sustainable, then that's effectively calling for stale franchises pushing out cheap content for quick cash grabs (see also: Hollywood movies over the last decade).

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It's also not just games this is happening to. Disney recently canned a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea show that was ready to go. There's the Scooby-Doo stuff that Max recently pulled before release as well. That stuff isn't my industry; I don't know how long it takes to make those things... but I know it costs about as much to make as a AAA game does.

There's probably a reckoning to be had for both industries, but I don't think the correction should be that drastic - and I think it will be bad for people who consume that content.

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

This is the core issue with all procgen games, IMO.

You are promised "infinite exploration", but in truth there are countable variants of the procgen algorithm. Once you see all those variants, you've effectively seen everything. Sure, you'll see small variations, or new ways to combine the existing variants... but when you see all the "tricks" the veil falls.

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

In the US, expansion packs were the general term used.

For example, RCT2 had the Wacky Worlds and Time Twister expansion packs. Empire at War had the Forces of Corruption expansion. While some were called add-ons, those were typically like tiny things, one-off characters or whatever.

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

I mean, spells like Wish are going to be basically impossible outside of going the AI route (which is an entire can of worms).

Wish can duplicate any other spell, or it can have your own effect (with a chance of it being monkey-pawed plus you never being able to cast Wish ever again).

Also bear in mind that it's not "just" rules for moving numbers. You have to have particles, animations, etc. You can't just have conversations, you have to also have SFX from impacts, camera shake, UI elements, etc. When you start to get into the world of "anything is possible" you kind of have to go back to basics, text-based adventures.

With AI stuff, maybe some of that can be done - but AI is just so incredibly slow in its current form. It won't stay that way forever, mind - I think the best comparison is graphics in the 1990s. Graphics were incredibly basic because anything complex would take ages to render and couldn't be used in games. Over the next decade, things were built to specifically speed up that process, and now modern GPUs can easily keep up with the highest-quality CGI without much fuss (there's a reason why Disney has the Volume, which is essentially just running CGI in the Unreal Engine alongside the actors in real-time).

But until that, we're going to be pretty limited. It's going to be impossible for any kind of free-form rules to be implemented, unless options were restricted to such a point that it's basically a completely different spell.

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

Murrieta

That's the problem right there.

Murrieta is very much part of an island of conservativism in the rest of California. It's very much a green grass, "whites only" kind of place. Oodles of Mormons. Not exactly friendly to LGBTQ folk.

I lived there. I went to high school there. It was where I voted for the first time.

I remember in high school thinking a girl was cute and she invited me over on a Sunday morning. She picked me up for what I thought was going to be a day of just hanging out at her place - but instead, she dragged me to her Mormon church. The preacher spoke out about how proud they were that they were able to pass Prop 8 (which banned gay marriage in California), how hard they fought for it, and how evil LGBTQ folk were. I was disgusted, but at the time I couldn't drive (and thus couldn't leave). When I finally escaped, I made a point to never talk to that girl again.

That is absolutely par for the course in Murrieta (and Temecula). They live in a total bubble and refuse to acknowledge that they're part of California proper. A friendly reminder that the Temecula Valley School District (which represents both Murrieta and Temecula) is being sued by the State of California because they decided to promote racism and anti-LGBTQ sentiment within schools, in violation of state law.

Public Counsel, the nonprofit group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of Temecula students, parents and teachers, claims the policy has been used by school board members to stop teaching "any concepts that conflict with their ideological viewpoints, including the history of the LGBTQ rights movement and the existence of racism in today's society."

Murrieta-Temecula is full of bigots, all hiding under their mask. But when you live there, you see the mask slip... especially if you're a cis white male "good ol' boy" like how I present.

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

You do realize that just makes you look, like, actually insane, right?

Like, that in combination with everything else you wrote just makes it seem like mad ramblings and sort of discounts anything you have to say since you're leading an angry rant with "put someone else's poop in your butt".

And then when you say you've been banned from multiple sites and it's all a grand conspiracy from Reddit to be out to get you, people are just going to think "this guy opened the article by suggesting you shove someone else's poop in your butt."

I know there are studies blah blah blah. But you understand how this looks, right?

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

This is sort of the mission statement of Kbin. Kbin supports Lemmy, Mastodon, FireFish, and Pixelfed already. It's planned to support PeerTube (this used to work but broke) and Mobilizon.

That's the main reason why I have a Kbin account. :)

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

It's written in PHP, which a lot of devs dislike.

It is drowning in pull requests: 83 open as of right now. https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls

Ernest (the lead dev) wasn't really expecting it to blow up yet. Kbin was created in January of this year, and the first "major" instance was launched in May. It blew up basically instantly due to Reddit imploding, and Ernest has been playing catch-up.

But it still has rough edges - no API means no mobile apps. Lots of bugs and such from being a new project. It's improving every week (including an API in code review), but Lemmy is more polished and has an relatively mature API.

You can see a list of instances here: https://fedidb.org/software/kbin

As far as I know, there isn't specifically a privacy-focused instance like what Lemmy has. But I also didn't browse that list of instances too closely.

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

I am very pro-union. I was a Teamster for years (Local 495).

I now work in the game industry. A good chunk of the gamedevs I know are pro-union, but there's enough of those opposed where there's effectively a question mark.

Generally, the holdouts tend to think:

• Union leadership is corrupt/greedy, and they don't want to give union leaders money for "nothing" (as they see it)

• Being in a union means everyone would need to be bound to strict regulations - keeping exact track of time worked, having exact lunch breaks, documenting everything. As-is in the game industry, the "standard" at most places is hands-off, take lunch whenever, stay at lunch however long you want, clock in/out whenever, nobody questions you as long as your work is getting done. People like this and don't want to risk losing it

• Being in a union threatens close relationships with management. I can say that when I was a Teamster, management was outright adversarial and conversations with them weren't fun. In the game industry, management is quite literally my friends and people I chill out with. There's a very, very blurry line between "friends" and "bosses" - some bosses are horrible, to be sure, but the general vibe is casual

• There's a lot of benefits in the office like free snacks, free swag, a place to chill out and play games at work, etc. People are afraid that this would count as "compensation" and thus being unionized would mean that you'd have to pay for snacks or swag or whatever - or that it could be taken away as retaliation from management

• Retaliation is a thing. It's illegal. US government doesn't care. Corpos get a slap on the wrist because of plausible deniability. EA has been downsizing recently and they "coincidentally" cut the contract with a QA team that just unionized. Hmm.

Again, I myself am very pro-union. However, to some extent I can see the logic in each of these bullet points - I disliked the guy running my Teamster local way back when because I felt he was too soft and captured by management. I can understand needing to clock in/out (fairest way to ensure nobody is being overworked), ruining relationships (can't have accusations of bias from being friendly), and losing benefits (although this can be put into a contract). And nobody can deny illegal retaliation is a real thing.

So I can understand where the holdouts at least are coming from. It would take a shitty workplace for unionization to happen, shitty enough that all those bullet points above aren't enough to keep the union holdouts in line. I hear Blizzard is really bad from people who have worked there, and my money is still on them being the first "big" dev to unionize - assuming Microsoft doesn't come in and clean up.

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

Yep, you're 100% right. People who have the same job can be paid dramatically differently, and the "reasoning" is that one guy is better at things than the other.

I got a 9% raise this year because I outperformed everyone else on my team, but I know that my 9% raise came at the expense of someone who only got a 2% raise. A union contract would give everyone like a 4-5% raise, which people dislike because they always think they're going to be the ones on top of the totem pole.

Me? I want predictability. Game dev is extremely unpredictable.

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

There's still a lot of people who will always stick to Reddit as well (as evidenced by a good amount of hostility in the comment section of the Reddit discussion on /r/rust).

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

I said what I said.

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

It was pretty much used the way people use Discord with a group of friends today. It didn't have servers or anything like that, but you could hop on a call with a couple of buds and play games together.

I played a lot of Halo Custom Edition over Xfire back in the day...

EnglishMobster, 8 months ago

I've heard if you leave out treats and shiny toys you can make friends with your local crows!