adnzzzzZ

Step by step:

There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way.

This is what he said. The post is about succeeding in the market as an indie developer, so pushing the boundaries of technology is not very relevant, as that's not the only way to succeed with making indie games.

You cannot make a game as radical and captivating as DOOM was.

OK, maybe true, maybe false, still irrelevant as succeeding in the market today doesn't require DOOM-level success.

You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz.

Again, irrelevant, because the post is about succeeding in the market, and there are multiple ways to succeed in the market, most of which do not involve technological boundary pushing.

Do you now see my point or not? The issue in contention is that he is fixating on the example of id in the past to make factual statements about reality today ("There is very little opportunity today for any team") without looking at the current market and the evidence that exists in it to the contrary. He makes multiple such wrong statements, which I quoted in the post you replied to.

But marketing effectiveness. Which is closely related to marketing spend.

Marketing effectiveness is not closely related to marketing spend on the Steam market for indie games. You can't buy your way to the front page of Steam. Either your game is good and people buy it, play it and share it, or it isn't and then the algorithm will not promote it. There are many things you can and should do to try to nudge the algorithm your way, but by far the best is having a genuinely good game. If the game's quality isn't good you'll mostly be wasting money if you try to approach it with the marketing mindset you have.

Even for an exceptional game, getting traction in the market is far harder than it used to be.

It's actually easier than ever because very few games are exceptional, as has always been the case. The offering of exceptional released games doesn't increase just because the total number of released games does. If there suddenly was an AI tool that let anyone finish a game very easily, you still wouldn't get a significant increase in exceptional released games because there aren't that many exceptionally creative people in the world.

There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person)

You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer

but the people you want to buy them (let alone play them) aren't going [...] to buy and try your weird little games.

The market is saturated. The market being saturated pushes it to be (even more) hit-oriented.

These are the things you said. I'm simply saying they're all wrong and there's plenty of evidence, in the present, right now, as to why they're wrong, as I mentioned in my previous reply. Consider the last one, "the market is satured and it pushes it to be more hit-oriented". I posted an example of a small indie team consistently releasing games and succeeding without having had any super huge hits. You don't have to reply anymore if you don't want to, it's just that you posted things that are wrong, and I felt the need to correct them.

I'd probably agree, but I'm not sure who is calling all of them exceptions or what doing so would be an excuse for.

The excuse is basically most replies in this thread, yours included. They all take the shape of "yea, but this idea is wrong because [the market is saturated/the issue is discoverability/no one wants to buy your little games/you're better off at a normal job] and so on. All of these are defeatist mindsets that people use as an excuse to not try, and they also happen to be wrong, as the examples shown in the article as well as the ones I posted show.

It also was framed heavily around John Romero and id, which is what I was talking about in that paragraph.

The article clearly uses id as an example of a broader point and ends the post by bridging into the present situation. Talking about what people should do in the present, which you did, while ignoring present evidence and focusing only on the past sounds like poor thinking, doesn't it?

id Software is an exception and makes a poor example to follow. Studying wild success stories is not without merit, but is -- if you are interested in how to do the thing successfully -- ultimately a trap.

The article has plenty of current examples of developers doing this on Steam now that are not at all outliers or an exception. For another concrete example you have something like Chilla's Art https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Chilla%27s%.... Two japanese developers who have been releasing games for 5 years very consistently and have slowly built up their audience while also increasing their skills as developers. They also have a Patreon, which is a model that works nicely, with another more known example of it being Sokpop https://sokpop.co/. And for all their consistent work they're now getting rewarded pretty nicely for it, without having had a single insanely huge hit as far as I can tell. You can find plenty of examples of devs like this, doing it and succeeding on Steam, right now. Calling all of them exceptions sounds like a poor excuse.

You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz.

Yes, you need to be creative in the creative profession and come up with good ideas. That comes with the territory. If you aren't very creative then you should probably consider doing something else.

This developer's next game was banned though: https://twitter.com/Team_SNEED/status/1651022411368628224. They're fairly inconsistent about it.

No way. Fucking hell, Valve. Sort your shit out. How many thousands of hours have been wasted because of this?

This is to prevent abuse. Some games will have 1000s of achievements as a feature, because gamers like games with lots of achievements (and because Valve kinda encourages that with some of their store features), so forcing people to do it manually is a way to decrease that kind of activity somewhat.

A shadowban has the property that it's hidden from the user. Elon seems to want to make these kinds of actions transparent, like, for instance, deboosted tweets being visible as deboosted by their creator/other users, which is a pretty big difference. This difference is already visible in initial intent: Twitter hid what they were doing https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1022658436704731136, while Elon is explicitly saying what he will do.

No one needs to explain anything. I transact in it and it works, therefore it is an efficient mechanism for value transaction. If you don't want to participate then fine, but as the person you replied to said, evidently enough people do.

No, it actually is that simple. Recreational drugs that significantly change your state of mind and that create chemical dependencies (this includes alcohol), or that permanently make you mentally ill are, in fact, bad, and their careless use should be shunned.

I'm fine with a world with more than the absolute minimum number of mentally ill people. Put another way, there are things that are not worth sacrificing in order to have fewer mentally ill people.

Cool, that's your opinion. It has been tried. Your opinion creates the tweet I linked as well as this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB6gwOBClwE. I can post many more videos like these as there are plenty.

My opinion is that your principles are completely idiotic and they're not worth sacrificing other people's well being for. You disagree, that's fine. But you're obviously and verifiably wrong based on the state of reality and anyone with two eyes and a brain can see it.

This is what your mentality creates by the way: https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/15682375482748641... At some point you have to be pragmatic and realize that some mental illnesses can't be fixed with more freedom. Some people need boundaries and structure in their lives or they'll make society worse for everyone. A responsible society provides said structure for those people who need it, and lets the ones who don't be free as you claim they should be.

If you're prone to it (family with history of mental illnesses) you shouldn't use it no matter your age. Why risk it? Something like schizophrenia is no joke and ruins your life completely. And if you don't find meds that work for you you literally can't fix it and go back to normal.

You mean you are going to prefer anecdotal evidence over scientific research?

Yes, if it has the potential to ruin my life and the life of people I care about, as it is plainly obvious to anyone who pays any attention at all to the world around them that these drugs are extremely harmful to a subset of the population.

Sorry, but I'm just going to trust my own observations of reality over some random paper. It's plainly obvious that these drugs trigger schizophrenia and other mental illnesses in a percentage of people who use them. Sometimes all it takes is a single use even. If you haven't met people who have had this happen to them then I advise you to search online for people's stories since it's not that hard to find them.

I think Godot shows there's a clear subset of people (generally indie developers) who are fine with the middle ground of a proper scripting language instead of either extreme. It's why languages like Lua are still fairly popular when the option to use it exists.

This is so true. What really terrifies me is if this new monkeypox became more easily transmissible and killed millions of people. Imagine the backlash against homosexuals?

You still have to pay taxes when you convert back to fiat though. And eventually you have to do this because you don't want a significant portion of your wealth in stablecoins that might collapse overnight.

This analysis I saw says something else? https://twitter.com/woonomic/status/1512433154875101198 Which one is right? I haven't looked into it carefully.

All energy and computing resources used on mining Bitcoin are spent and cannot be used for anything else.

Bitcoin mining can be used to monetize excess energy (especially with renewables) that would otherwise be wasted, so what you said is not entirely true.

Deluded self-assurance most reliably delivers success. Cynics and realists tend to not understand this and thus don't take enough risks when they should, and are confined to mediocre results (compared to their peers in similar situations).

This is like saying it wasn't silly to order pizza using bitcoin 10 years ago. Obviously you can find examples of people doing it and people praising them for it, but it was clearly not the general feeling of the public at the time, just like it isn't the general feeling of the public with cryptos now.

Doesn't seem like everyone in Sweden agrees with that opinion, especially not the people actually running energy companies: https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1457114531314995206

The only money entering the system is investors and fees drain that out of the system

? Fees are generally extremely small. All the money that enters the system is from investors and from players. The fees are minimal and have almost no effect on this.

Without people spending, not investing,

Those are the same thing because both players and investors can cash each other's money out. There's literally no distinction between both things.

the system is doomed to hurt people who are left holding tokens when everyone else has cashed out.

That's the case with every stock that currently exists. When a company fails there will be bag holders who lost a lot of money. Ideally the company doesn't fail and keeps making games forever.

Sorry but I just disagree. A game that is free to play and where every item is bought and can be sold later for a higher price doesn't stop being fun and engaging just because people can sell what they bought when they feel like they don't wanna play anymore. The idea that there absolutely need to be people who are buying things without the intent of ever selling them isn't what would stop from making it a "ponzi scheme". Like I said, people sharing in the success (and failure) of a company's valuation is not a ponzi scheme.

and the profit needs to be in part redistributed to the community.

This already happens through the token's increase in value. The notion that this redistribution can ONLY happen if there are money sinks in the system is misguided and old fashioned.

Axie is very different, the price of the token only rise because of investors (here players)

There are players and investors who actually only buy the token and don't play the game. These are different people. Here the "external" source of money for players would be the investors who don't play the game and for investors it would be players playing the game because they think it's fun. In Axie's case that's probably a minority of people, but that's obviously not the case for most games, you only need to look at games like Genshin Impact to see that people are willing to spend tons of money on good games just because they want to spend money on it.

So yes, in this particular case it's a bad business, and I agree that the same is true for most other crypto games right now, but there's zero reason for it to remain the case in the future. Nothing about the setup fundamentally prevents people from spending real money on real games, and from the token's value to increase as a result, like any normal company.

As a video game maker myself I'd say that video games generally provide value. If this particular video game provides as much value as its valued at is not for me to decide, but for the people who play it and invest in it.

Investors also buy tokens because they think it will go up, not only people playing the game. Yes, people will lose if it goes down, but that's what it's like with everything. Some players will win, some players will lose, some investors will win, some investors will lose. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. This is how the world works. If people think the project has value then it will go up in value and if they don't then it won't. I don't understand why people make it so complicated and try to imply that there's anything wrong with this.

People sharing in the success of a new company is not a ponzi scheme. If a company is started from nothing, is providing value, and early adopters are paid with tokens as a way to jump start the business the tokens are simply being used to extract future value into the present. In some cases there's no actual value in the future because the product isn't good, but that doesn't make it a ponzi scheme, just a poor business.

It's way more ethical for people across the world, primarily in 3rd world countries, to be able to share in the success of a company via its tokens than just being mined for data so some asshole in San Francisco can be paid 10 million dollars a month in rent.