meheleventyone

Joined 11 years ago

Karma
6,033
Submissions
2,622
Member since
Mar 24
Long time game developer specialising in design, prototyping and gameplay systems.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 days ago
That's a weird way to make assumptions about someone else when you don't have a defence.
Comment · 3 days ago
Why would they need to take a cut in that fantastical case? They'd just own the agents and take 100%. Not to mention AI at this level of advancement would probably have a decisive lead in many areas leading to mass unemployment which would likely crash the game playing parts of the economy so might be it's own undoing. Valve need customers with disposable income.
Comment · 3 days ago
> Why though?

Valve takes a 30% cut of all sales through their platform which is responsible for the majority of their revenue. This is dependent on it being a mutually beneficial relationship for developers and a near monopoly on PC customers eyeballs.

Fantastical examples aside Valve is still dependent on developer good will. The balance of that to the near monopoly is a much more valid point about how far Steam can strain that relationship.

Comment · 4 days ago
The correct comparison isn’t him working by himself but with a similar sized cohort where distribution of revenue was fairer. Co-ops are a thing as are the productivity benefits of working with others.

Even if you don’t like the concept of co-ops it’s fairly easy to ask yourself if you would you be more or less motivated if you shared more in the success of a company rather than it being sucked up by shareholders?

Comment · 4 days ago
So any use is good as long as it saves money. There are no tradeoffs or reasons not to use it?
Comment · 14 days ago
Even getting it to write less obtuse English isn't enough IMO. It seems to have real issues with structuring documentation in a way that makes it easy to follow. Also it's a real demon for leaking its context as implicit assumptions into documentation.
Comment · 17 days ago
There’s way more to making a game deterministic than slapping in a fixed point library which isn’t strictly necessary in and of itself.
Comment · 17 days ago
I’ve been a professional engineer in games for 24 years and can safely say this idea that things aren’t hard anymore is silly. Programming games has definitely got less unpleasant as tooling is much better but the actual mental problems are tough as ever.

You might be mistaking the sheer variety of games and that some are really quite simple for all games being easier to make.

Comment · 17 days ago
Also there is a huge effort to optimise the game for retention, LTV and UA arbitrage.

These are not the fun details but they are details none the less and whilst LLMs will probably be more useful here the insights that drive their actions are the taste humans provide.

Comment · 2 months ago
Even that might be subject to shifting market trends as his audience ages eventually but it's definitely been a nice sticky niche.
Comment · 2 months ago
It's a combination of all those things really. There's also a lot of people in commercial game development that get stuck in their thesis of success when the market has moved on.

In particular I'd say right now it's really hard to look at any given game that has commerical potential and spot the winners across any size category. There is a glut of supply that tends to exentuate the hit driven nature of making games as gamers latch onto the next viral success whilst at the same time making it hard to have multiple hits. Back in the day competition was less and money could buy a scope and technology advantage. Both of which are ideas that no longer really apply.

Comment · 3 months ago
> Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.

There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.

Comment · 3 months ago
The US started the war though and have very recently been targeting civilian infrastructure as well. So by your logic should be replacing it.
Comment · 3 months ago
No, it’s a combo of a post-covid slump in spend, western markets becoming saturated and an assumption from the majority of industry that wouldn’t happen. Essentially games revenue has grown incredibly over the past twenty years and it’s now crunched to a halt.

Then layer in some incredibly bad bets like Game Pass for XBox and audience tastes shifting away from splashy big budget releases making them an “inevitable” success. It’s left middle aged execs heads in a twist.

In a broader view discoverability is the big problem for everyone. People are hoping in the short term that reducing budgets and scope will save things but all that will do is make the discoverability problem worse. So everyone’s hot under the collar for codev, offshoring, “the Hollywood model*” and so on without looking at the downstream effects of everyone doing that.

AI has largely impacted games by sucking all the available money away and the discoverability problem has made what little is left extremely conservative.

* - This has been a thing for at least three decades now in games despite the obvious collapse of this model and Hollywood.

Comment · 3 months ago
Have you ever considered that the high cost of contribution and low cost of moderation is why Wikipedia is successful?

Inverting it would destroy any open contribution system. See open source projects blanket rejecting AI generated PRs as an example. Basically trying to restore sanity when contribution suddenly has very small cost.

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