kosei

It was a different time: “Condor plans to spend one year in the development of Diablo. Personnel will consist of: one designer, one chief programmer, 2 junior programmer, 2 art director/artists, 1 illustrator/sculptor, 3 pixel artists, and 1 sound FX person”

So, 11 people for a year for Diablo. Meanwhile Diablo 4 took 300+ people 6+ years. So over 150x the cost, not accounting for the fact that game developers are paid much more now as well. People pretend it’s the same industry but it’s evolved dramatically.

I wonder how long it takes to go from “those who live near Google offices” to “all employees”. Once 80-90% of employees are back at work regularly it’s not a stretch to believe that those few people who are always remote will be seen as less effective and less connected to their peers going into the office everyday. This is likely one step of many.

Though I applaud the effort to get age right and protect players, I'm not sure I'll ever be comfortable having me or my child scan our photo ID and selfie to upload it as part of a login flow to an application.

Pretty wild. May be buying Adjust for a low price here, but the vertical integration of Applovin (a game developer/ad tech platform) owning Adjust (the biggest mobile attribution platform) and its data and all the data of its game developer partners seems... pretty questionable.

I love this letter. This is exactly the type of direction and freedom to come up with solutions that I would expect from a strong CEO or leader. Not prescriptive, but clear on which problems are critical to solve.

Holy cow, if that doesn’t come off as biased, I don’t know what does.

As someone who works in the video games industry, I can guarantee it is the lockdown. Stay at home orders align really closely with significant lifts in new players, increased hours played, and many other core metrics across the industry. And many games have seen significant lifts in their existing live service performance (not just new games).

> "Dougherty said that despite rain, Maker Faire’s big Bay Area event last week met its ticket sales target."

Why would you set a target so low that meeting it still results in bankruptcy?