Gamedev has got to be the most rewarding type of software coding there is. It’s a type of coding that is much closer to actual artistic creation rather than engineering. The sheer amount of creative & engaging stories, puzzles, real-time strategies and on top of this entirely multiplayerable online allows for an infinite amount of types of entertaining creations… all made possible thanks to code.
Sure there’s untapped potential in all kinds of types of software; hell people are reinventing 2d design (think Figma etc) & issue management (newly released GitHub issues). But surely building “yet another react form” feels like coding an already solved problem.
What I mean is that gamedev has possibly the most untapped potential for coders wanting to make something truly amazing, with a sheer infinite amount of possible creations.
You’re not approaching the creation with the usual “what problem am I trying to solve” but rather “what’s the most fun thing I can build?”.
Unfortunately it's not. If you're working on a small 1 or 2 person game where your work blurs the lines of art and engineering, you're highly unlikely to be successful. For every Undertale there are literally hundreds of other indie games that barely earned a penny
It only takes a small studio of like 10 people before you're practically never touching anything creative and are working on software tools and under the hood functionality just like any other dev job
You're thinking of money. The parent poster was talking about art. If you can afford it, gamedev allows you to blow not only your own mind, but also the minds of everyone else - especially new generations who have learned the medium from birth.
>It only takes a small studio of like 10 people before you're practically never touching anything creative
I've worked at AAA studios on AAA games with 500+ devs and you still get to play with art and fun ideas. How do you think they trick kids into spending 12 hour days at the office?
There are some that retreat into bank software levels of detachment but it seems to be the exception, not the norm.
I have mixed feelings about this. When you do something creative for a job it takes on an entirely different character than doing it for yourself. Another thing is that gamedev is still software coding (among other things), and only a fraction of what you're doing amounts to the "fun bits" related to making interesting game design decisions. The majority of it is endless slog in trying to get collision detection to stop snagging on corners or figuring out why your fire status effect is cancelling as soon as it's applied (turns out it's because fire is cancelling ice without checking for the presence of ice in the first place, and ice turns enemies wet when it expires, and wet status cancels with fire status, so setting things on fire made them wet, which means they're no longer on fire). And 50 million more thing like this.
I enjoy it, but then there's also the fact that the industry itself has a lot of pathologies that "boring" software development doesn't, lower pay and worse working conditions as an employee, and extremely turbulent ever-changing conditions as an independent developer or freelancer.
Whenever some kid tells me they want to go into games for their career, I like to trot out the probably-apocryphal story of the Jewish rabbi who refuses to let a proselyte convert until he's come to the rabbi three times and been flat refused twice. I use the same method -- "no kid, you don't want to go into the game industry for all these reasons." If they keep coming back despite all that, they at least know what they're getting into.
Ok but consider the recent interview this week with Unity CEO John Riccitiello who said:
“real-time 3D content”—a category that includes games and material with game-like interactivity—will account for almost half of all visual digital content by the end of the decade, compared with what he estimates at only about 3% today. [1]
That's in addition to his estimate that more than 15% of Unity development today is outside the gamer space.
Over time I agree with him and think the better part of 3D UI/UX game design elements will make their way in to traditional enterprise software and web stacks. They will be both more functional and beautiful to work with as a result.
10k games were released on Steam in 2020. In 2021 Q1 there are 316k games available on iOS. When creating a game is what you like, it might be rewarding, but the coding work is usually not very rewarding when it comes to the details. Especially because game ideas are usually not as original as most people think...
When you are not a code monkey, coding is always highly creative be it games, missile control systems, high frequency trading, insurance policy management etc. It might be easier to imagine fun in the idea of coding for a leisure activity, but in reality it can also feel very shallow.
One thing jumped out at me above that I had a question on:
With the problem about status effects, how is this typically implemented? Do the rules for interactions exist within the game objects themselves, as if-then-else statements? If so, I can see why that would be error prone. Even if those rules exist in abstractions like "Burnable" and "Metallic", it's still hard to see the side effects of changing or adding a single rule.
Does anyone ever implement it in a single place, where you can query for the interactions between the different status effects? That way, all the rules are in one place, and being able to query for it, the results would tell you how it came to that conclusion. If not, how come?
It's unique in that it lets you create something that is quite immersive and more tangible instead of ephemeral. It feels more familiar to working with your hands than any other type of coding, and pretty much anyone can understand or enjoy it.
My partner doesn't care that I wrote a really sweet cron job for collating web orders today, but she can instantly grok how cool a game idea is and have fun playing.
> Gamedev has got to be the most rewarding type of software coding there is.
Well sure, when you're doing the fun bits for fun.
> It’s a type of coding that is much closer to actual artistic creation rather than engineering.
Unless you're in a team with both artists and coders, which is, y'know, all of the commercial ones with a chance of success.
> The sheer amount of creative & engaging stories, puzzles, real-time strategies and on top of this entirely multiplayerable online allows for an infinite amount of types of entertaining creations… all made possible thanks to code.
It's the game designer who gets to do all this creating, not the coders. Unless (see point 2) you're in a tiny team hoping to win the lottery. See also "the kid fresh out of gamedev boot camp who wants to be a designer and is confused when nobody wants to join their team because everybody else has already has their own great ideas for a game which they've been working on for 10+ years while they also learned to code or model."
> But surely building “yet another react form” feels like coding an already solved problem.
Try building "yet another 3D model loader (that has to handle the quirks of three different modeling programs and eleventy different graphics cards)" - it's just as much reinventing the wheel, but with the added bonus that if you really cock it up you can hard lock your computer. Or my personal favourite, "debug this third party open world game engine which is clearly just a model viewer with a for() loop around it and the object loading part in a separate thread with zero synchronization." :D
> You’re not approaching the creation with the usual “what problem am I trying to solve” but rather “what’s the most fun thing I can build?”.
Sure but 99% of professional game coders don't get to do this. This interdisciplinary paradise is the domain of hobbyists who never get paid and of the tiny minority who are there at exactly the right place and time (and also probably never get paid.)
Career traits: Fun, lucrative, attainable. Pick any two. This applies to gamedev as much as any other line of work.
This rant brought to you by distant, slightly salty memories of my brief stint in gamedev.
As someone who worked at EA for eight years, I think you are viewing the world with pretty jaded glasses.
Yes, most game dev is not a magical utopia of coding whatever you feel like and watching the magic happen. But it's also not a horrific grind where you are treated entirely as a code monkey for someone else's art.
There is an entire continuum between these points and different companies and teams will lie at different points on it. I have worked on games where I was so deep in the bowels of tools and tech that I couldn't even tell you how the game was played (maintaining the UI editor for Madden, which was actually a lot of fun). And I've worked on games where I sat right next to the designers and artists and had a lot of influence on the game itself (Henry Hatsworth, where I wrote the level/animation editor and in-game AI engine).
I think overall, most game dev jobs do have a few things going for them compared to other domains:
* You get a greater opportunity to work on cross-discipline teams. During my time at EA, I worked closely with artists, UI designers, producers, technical artists, sound designers, etc. It was wonderful to not be in a programmer monoculture. It's good for the soul to be around people who think differently.
* People outside of your work have a more immediate understanding and appreciation for what you do. There is some prestige to being a game dev and at the very least most people can at least visualize a video game. If you work at a typical non-famous non-FAANG software company, your job is almost totally invisible.
* You're working on a game. You might not spend much time literally playing it, but it's still more fun when debugging to poke around a football field or dungeon than a spreadsheet full or insurance rates or whatever stuff most typical CRUD devs are dealing with. Game development often feels concrete and tangible in ways that other software doesn't.
But there are some downsides:
* The market factors the intrinsic rewards above into compensation, so game dev pays less than other software fields. The massive number of young people who want to do it also drives salaries down.
* The overtime is often awful.
* A side effect of the above two is a constant brain drain. Experienced devs age out and leave when they want to start a family and have sane hours, to be replaced by another crop of fresh-faced kids who will work for peanuts for the cachet of being a real game dev. That means there is often a large lack of software engineering maturity on teams. Tons of spaghetti code, broken processes, poor estimation, and other self-inflicted wounds.
I really enjoyed my time at EA (except for the overtime and often crappy code), but I'm also glad to not be working full time in games any more.
I've spent like the last 10 years of my life making a few games that nobody will ever play. I don't feel like the years were wasted though, because the games were rewarding to build and stuff doesn't need to make money to be worth the time spent.
I see where you're coming from, but I strongly disagree since you said "coding". I actually feel like the coding part of game dev is quite rote, boring and pretty much totally figured out. At least, for games that smaller teams or individuals can make. One of the best games ever made imo, Hollow Knight, was made with virtually no code at all. They used Playmaker, a visual game scripting engine for Unity.
The romance wears off fast once the ideas are in place and the tedium sets in. The fun brainstorming and dreaming parts amount to about 1-2% of the project, then you actually have to build, draw, tweak, and fix the damn thing.
But oh man, does the high ever hit when you finish building and tweaking some feature, and your dream gets a little bit closer to reality. The video game you imagined playing, sometimes actually in your dreams, sits right there in front of you... maybe not close to completion but a little bit closer. And you can share it with your close network of playtesters a.k.a. friends and family.
> But surely building “yet another react form” feels like coding an already solved problem.
> What I mean is that gamedev has possibly the most untapped potential for coders wanting to make something truly amazing, with a sheer infinite amount of possible creations.
Whilst I agree there is a lot of common and drudgey work in gamedev as well even in extremely creative projects.
Developing games can be as frustrating or rewarding as any other product, it depends on how much you like the industry you work on.
I know people that develops music software, they love playing instruments, they love music, and they enjoy their jobs.
Educational software, medical software, everything can be extremely enjoyable if you like the topic.
I made accounting software, and it was really fun to do. In that case was just because I had creative control of the accounting software, and I like how well everything adds up, and how grateful are users when you remove their day-to-day pain-points.
But if you like that, making games is more fun nowadays. It used to be a lot of code for networking, graphic engines, and tooling. More math and low level system coding than actual game development.
And, no, if you like playing games that does not mean that you would like to make them. Even that it helps.
It's rewarding, but also exhausting. Either you put months/years of your life into something that pretty much no one plays, so it almost feels like why did you bother (other than you gained some skills along the way), or it gets some success and then you get bombarded by neverending expectations from entitled gamers.
Among Us: "I definitely burnt out. It was tough because during all of this, we weren’t able to see friends and family. Being so tired from working, I couldn’t even go visit my family during covid and had to spend holidays alone...That was definitely the hardest time.” [1]
Minecraft fans getting angry at Notch for daring to take a vacation I remember, and here's one about a fan getting PISSED at an update with only one new thing to play with: [2]
Stardew Valley fans mad for how long multiplayer update took "I love you ConcernedApe and your game, Stardew Valley, but people are getting impatient. I am getting impatient. You've had your vacation, your space and your earnings." [3].
Or Shovel Knight "We wanted another Shovel Knight game, but we didn’t want to make it. We’re sick of making Shovel Knight games."
[4]
The book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels goes into this more, especially for Shovel Knight and Stardew Valley.
I worked on several games in the industry, a few small free ones on my own were popular but every game I worked on for a company failed to be successful or enter the gaming zeitgeist at all. It almost feels like a waste of my time when that happens, and often lead to layoffs. I got out of the industry after the third company in a row where that happened.
I'd add that engineers have their place in gamedev as well, because many artists don't know how to make computers create worlds. Engineers generate the possibility space where artists can work. Sometimes, fast code is needed to unlock capabilities no-one could have pre-imagined of.
I've been loving following the Star Citizen project as they've just been throwing intense amount of money and work at really hard problems, due to an almost unbridled scope at the beginning. I think most game projects would have been reigned in by publishers or ran out of money by now.
Whether someone believes the project will succeed or not is an interesting question, but you can't deny that they've made great progress at the fringes of a lot of game mechanics.
> Gamedev has got to be the most rewarding type of software coding there is.
It is... under certain circumstances. At a AAA studio it's an utter slog, unless you're the designer or one of the top coders working closely with the designer. Then you get to build prototypes, bounce ideas around, etc. until you come up with something you can hand down to the C++ slaves in the salt mines.
If you don't want to be in the salt mines yourself, the best route to take is the indie route. Become the designer/lead programmer, write the game on your own schedule, and either do your own art/sounds/music or hire people to make those assets for you as necessary and use placeholders while you refine the game design. You also get your choice of language. Want to write a game in Lisp or Haskell? Go nuts!
Do yourself a favor and start with a data-oriented model for your game world like ECS, instead of an inheritance-based object-oriented model. Your inheritance tree is going to whack you like a Whomping Willow the minute you try to build a game object with traits from different classes across the tree. With a data-oriented approach, your game objects are just pieces of state -- rows in a spreadsheet -- and you can change them with whatever tools are most handy: objects, plain functions, whatever. Choosing an ECS has saved me much hassle in adding new enemies and behaviors to the game I'm working on, and that shortens the time and effort from "I need to add this thing" to "WOW! It works!"
Oh, and START SMALL. The easiest way to get from zero to finished game is to limit the scope of your game! Kenta Cho, the guy behind rRootage and all those bullet hell shooters, put up a bunch of tiny web games on his site, each of which uses tiny bitmaps or canvas graphics primitives, so has little in the way of assets: https://abagames.github.io/games-web-pages/browser.html
> But surely building “yet another react form” feels like coding an already solved problem.
Building "yet another React form" should take minutes to hours. If it doesn't at your shop, consider the processes you have in place. Processes like Scrum are there to ensure transparency to management throughout the SDLC and to act as dampers to prevent programmers from becoming too efficient -- not to make the programmers better at their jobs!
> You’re not approaching the creation with the usual “what problem am I trying to solve” but rather “what’s the most fun thing I can build?”.
That can quickly degenerate into "what problem am I trying to solve" when you are trying to work out why collision detection isn't working or why enemies do random things they shouldn't be doing, etc.
Holy shit its like this author just experienced his very first 'cultural wave' phenomenon and then decided that literally every small detail around it was some critical reason for its success.
There are probably labs out there they have figured out how to send 'viral waves' out into the economy and profit from it, but thats all this is. Game of Thrones was an example, The Walking Dead was an example, Fortnite was an example, and Roblox was an example. Those examples highlight two very different viral culture waves. The kids playing games and the grown ups watching tv, but they highlight the exact same phenomenon.
As for this game itself its probably exactly like Among Us and the million other little indie games like it that shot up in popularity 'out of know where' except it wasn't out of nowhere at all. It was a couple dozen HIGHLY interconnected Twitch streamers all getting into the same space and then 100's of follow along mid tier twitch streamers hoping to ride the new bandwagon to higher viewership.
> It was a couple dozen HIGHLY interconnected Twitch streamers all getting into the same space and then 100's of follow along mid tier twitch streamers hoping to ride the new bandwagon to higher viewership.
I have access to the traffic stats behind FNF and this is demonstrably false. There was a lot more to it. Twitch was one small part of this phenomenon.
I'm happy to welcome critique but could you please be less dismissive and instead make a more substantive critique?
If your only critique of the article is why FNF got popular, then that seems like a really minor critique overall. But honestly, comparing it to Among Us makes me doubt you on this. First of all, simply pointing to Twitch streamers is giving them too much credit. Twitch streamers may be early to trends, but seldom do they start them alone. Secondly, Among Us is particularly good for streaming because it pushed a lot of streamers with pre-existing relationships to stream the game with eachother, and lead to interesting content for that reason alone.
I will gladly agree that Twitch streamers may have helped boost Among Us out of its slump. I also agree that it helped FNF too. But you know what else helped Among Us and FNF? Millions of views on YouTube, Tiktok, fanart on Twitter/NG/elsewhere, mods across the entire Internet, etc. and where it’s fair to say that Twitch could’ve been the catalyst for Among Us, saying that it is the catalyst for FNF without further evidence seems patently unfair. Big platforms like TikTok and YouTube are more than capable of driving viral sensations that are bigger than the entire audiences of “a couple dozen highly interconnected Twitch streamers.” (For clarification I regularly watch a couple of the Twitch streamers you are likely grouping into this category so yes I do know how large their audiences are.)
I think Among Us's mod support is underrated for a multi-player game, and I think it did a lot to improve the game's longevity.
I'm hesitant to make broad sweeping claims about the game, but I agree that looking purely at streamers is probably underselling its success, even though streamers did obviously play a big role in bringing it to more people's attention.
A lot of this article (possibly the majority?) is actually spent explaining why Instant Games haven't taken over the world, despite some success stories. This is why he goes into some detail on Apple - if they can't go on iOS devices, there's a real ceiling on the trend.
I really enjoyed this article, but it's a bit of a discursive brain dump, which is why I think a lot of the criticisms have essentially been misrepresentations of the actual article contents.
> It was a couple dozen HIGHLY interconnected Twitch streamers all getting into the same space and then 100's of follow along mid tier twitch streamers hoping to ride the new bandwagon to higher viewership.
I mean, until Twitch is no longer such a big thing, that sounds like you're describing a likely repeatable formula for success: make a game that will catch on amongst these couple-dozen Twitch influencers.
And it seems like a good property for such a game to have, would be a really low barrier to entry, to entice them into trying it in the first place, when they don't see anyone else playing it.
As such, I can see the validity in the argument in the article is making — and I'm not sure why you think it's a "small detail."
It's not like that set of Twitch streamers has ever made a game go viral that didn't have this "pick-up-and-play-ability" in some way or another. The property is just created in different ways for different games.
> a likely repeatable formula for success: make a game that will catch on amongst these couple-dozen Twitch influencers.
Sure, but like half the world's game devs are all trying to do exactly that right now.
Similar to the stock market, game development is an novelty-based ecosystem. That means that there is essentially no long-term repeatable formula for success. Any formula will eventually discovered by others, over-exploited, and players will lose interest and go elsewhere.
Couple of things -- despite the admittedly click-baity headline, I'm not 100% convinced that "instant games" are definitely the future. Nobody can predict the future with certainty. And as I state up front in the article FNF itself is obviously an outlier which should not serve as a model to try to replicate step by step.
My main point is that instant games -- which is to say browser games -- are actually already the past and the present (even if they're not necessarily taking over everything else just yet), and most people are unfamiliar with a bunch of weird details about how they began in the first place.
The article's actual thesis is not necessarily to prove to you that instant games are the "wave of the future" but to point out:
1) Even games industry insiders are often massively out of touch with trends
2) Browsers games represent the potential to disrupt existing gatekeepers and platforms
3) Browser games had a weird and unique ecosystem that represented a 'minor league' of games that provided an on-ramp to further professional success, especially for international developers, and we've largely lost that today
4) Modern platforms want to own the entire stack top to bottom (editing tools, playback engine, discovery, and marketplace), but trying to capture so much value yourself and tightly controlling the environment can actually stunt the ecosystem
And yeah the article is really long. I'm chronically unable to write short articles when I have a lot to say and that means I'm taking the sincere risk of boring some of you to death while you wait for me to get to the point, sorry about that!
> And yeah the article is really long. I'm chronically unable to write short articles when I have a lot to say and that means I'm taking the sincere risk of boring some of you to death while you wait for me to get to the point, sorry about that!
Brevity is a good skill, but given the choice between too concise and too long, too long is probably the better direction to err.
I'm always happy to see articles like this on HN. I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but it's generally pretty thoughtful and covered some interesting points I hadn't thought about before. Thanks for writing it!
>> Modern platforms want to own the entire stack top to bottom (editing tools, playback engine, discovery, and marketplace), but trying to capture so much value yourself and tightly controlling the environment can actually stunt the ecosystem.
If anything, I see modern platforms using more off-the-shelf and standards based tech rather than reinventing the wheel. It used to be the case that you'd have to download not just Flash, but Shockwave, Silverlight, the Java applet plugin, Unity Web Player, and all sorts of proprietary plugins just to play games built on whatever proprietary game engine and scripting language came with it. It was like downloading individual video codecs in the early 90's before the advent of Quicktime. Nowadays, you can play fully fledged 3-D games on a Web Application built with any game engine, any language, on nearly any browser of your choosing. No plugins needed. I don't think web games are going to be siloed to particular platforms any time soon.
What I do think is that web games are now competing with siloed AAA games. And this might be a good thing overall for competition in that space. For a long time Flash and mobile games were also-rans simply because of the limited computing power. Very few were of such caliber either in graphics or playability as to compete with contemporary installable or console games and were very often mimicries of those very same games. In the West, mobile games underwent a revolution with Angry Birds and Infinity Blade, there hasn't been a killer app that's reinvigorated the browser game craze of the Y2K era just yet. But Epic's interest in itch.io might be hinting at an attempt in that direction.
The difference is, that even though Flash was proprietary in tools (The Flash IDE) and the playback engine (The Flash Player), what was open was distribution, discovery, and marketplace. You didn't pay a tax to adobe to distribute your games and you weren't limited to Adobe.com as the one place to go for Flash games. To be clear this was not because of Adobe's benevolence, but their incompetence -- believe me they tried to find ways to tax Flash, but they just couldn't figure it out until the horse was out of the barn. And this was a good thing for the ecosystem. Honestly, Adobe stubbornly refusing to open source the flash player is one of the things that cemented its demise.
Compare that to say, Roblox. If you make a Roblox game, not only will it only run within the Roblox environment, it is only able to exist on exactly one website and one app -- Roblox. Roblox owns the entire stack top to bottom. You can't take your game anywhere else.
The one thing I think you missed from explaining the economics of the old Flash Game scene was Mochi.
By getting you the pre-roll ads Mochi gave you a way of being rewarded on a per-play basis which
A) bypassed the risjk of up front sponsorship number
B) allowed absolute total amateurs to not even bother with sponsorship and just dump a game with Mochi ads onto the net, if it took off they would rake in the bucks.
m
Add on top of that the Mochi microtransaction infrastructure and I'd say Mochi was as important, if not more, than FGL for boosting the ouptu of games.
I disagree that Mochi was as or more important than FGL. Perhaps this was true for developers who released a lot of games and could rack up consistent significant monthly views across on all their games.
I remember a big question was always: should you self sponsor if you can't get high enough bids for sponsorship? If they're willing to pay $5k to put their ad on your game, why shouldn't you capture that revenue yourself?
The answer was for most developers it was difficult to capture that value without some kind of centralized game portal where you could redirect this traffic and keep those users coming back. So even if the sponsor was paying $5k and still making money off that game, it was unlikely you could make anywhere near that amount just from Mochi ads or similar.
I like the article, it's got a lot of the same threads that I've been thinking about recently while developing an iOS app and a browser game (unrelated to each other). It's also interesting to learn about how the flash sites I used to play when I was younger actually made and distributed money. Back then I just assumed the devs made some cut of the banner ad money or something.
As I was reading it, I somewhat agreed with the sentiment I see in some of the comments around that the article had a bit of the "old person discovers new trend and concludes its the future of everything" (which you see a fair amount with VR, on Stadia/cloud gaming, the "metaverse," and other things you mentioned FNF doesn't do) but this comment tempers that feeling. At the very least, I think that this is an interesting showcase of a project that is successful outside of the big platforms and I agree that it's a direction that things could be going in to some extent.
Speaking about the fact it's free & open source, I think that people --in this case the games industry people to whom this doesn't make sense-- sometimes put too much weight on the decision to publish source code. I think it's about focusing on what differentiates your product from others, and in this case it seems like the game differentiates itself with music and personality rather than complex code, thus bandcamp & kickstarter. There's probably a lot of software products that don't gain anything from being closed source, and I'm no Stallman.
As a bit of an aside, I appreciate you mentioning the fact that there's a whole several continents of people who aren't American, or NA, or English-speaking, etc. and aren't necessarily talked about when it comes to diversity. Diversity is often based around US/CAN sensibilities around identity and other things. Obv very difficult to fully consider the entire Earth's population in everything you do, but just considering the fact that not everyone is in the same place or can have the same powerful hardware/internet connection is worthwhile. I'm absolutely not perfect in this regard either.
I wonder if the increasing use of chromebooks in school (revealing my US bias) is/will push this trend forward as well. I don't use chrome, so maybe there already is an ecosystem of games in the chrome app store.
Yeah so to clarify my bit about open source I have two points:
1) It's made FNF very easy to mod, and these mods drive a lot of viral engagement with the game. If you scan social media you'll see that this is what keeps the community excited and engaged when the authors themselves are not putting out updates.
2) I mention it because many people see being open source as a liability because of concerns about cloning. Seeing a FOSS game like this pull in literal millions shows that at least in this one case, FOSS games aren't literally doomed to failure because of being FOSS, is all.
So my position is, no actual players care that you have a github repo with source available, unless that actually affects them somehow, and in FNF's case I argue it does affect them by enabling the community to keep making more weird content for the game (though it could be achieved in other ways, like using a modding API like [polymod](https://github.com/larsiusprime/polymod), which it has been integrating with recently).
We had instant browser games and the gold rush of mobile ate them. The AppStore stack had better discoverability and native performance...a lot of benefits, really. Why would we all go back to the browser?
I feel like a large leap is being made that instant games will win back users when their instant-ness didn't keep them in the first place.
I don't feel like any catalyst is explored enough to be convincing.
I think the increasing difficulty of being discovered on ever-growing platforms like the App Store is/will push more games to other places (though I don't know how instant-game platforms will build userbases like native app stores).
Also, I don't think people moved away from instant games because the instantness wasn't enough. I think it's more about what devices kids (and people in general) are using for everything else; people who are playing mobile games now probably would have been playing flash games a few years ago. I'm kindof spitballing here, but I wonder if all the chromebooks that are used in schools now are or will be pushing kids back to online games platforms like the old flash sites
I have been downvoted for saying this before but I will say it again
Indeed, the money should flow from app stores to developers and not the other way around
Developers provide value to their platforms. Developers don't need them except for the fact that they enforce a monopoly on distribution (iOS)
The day is coming when platforms will have to reward content creators based on usage metrics or simply up front. Platform subscriptions, micro payments, or platform ads are the future. And they will only get cheaper as time goes on
A ruling forcing Apple to open up iOS to different browsers or app stores will be the sign that change is coming
For a short while, in the beginning, AppStores provided some value allowing you to select top games in category, which were actually good. But then SEO guys took notice and all top ratings are now populated by pay 2 win garbage games which invest heavily in AppStore optimization. You just can't find anything these days on Google Play / AppStore other than by typing a full name of the app. This, of course, relegates these services to gatekeeper role only, void of any positive benefits for the developers.
This seems to be what Apple Arcade is doing. You pay a subscription to Apple and get access to curated games with no ads or microtransactions. Apple pays the developers, although I don't know how.
AFAIK it's going pretty well. I don't actually own Apple Arcade, but the games all look really nice, and no ads or microtransactions. Maybe someone who knows more can comment.
I do not have time to research to which games are implementing loot boxes or other gambling mechanics or showing them ads, so restricting my kids (while they are too young) mostly to Apple Arcade solves that problem for me.
Although, who knows, maybe if Apple Arcade is compensating game makers by how much time is spent playing their games, then those tactics will be present in Apple Arcade too.
That only happens when app stores are competing for developers which is very much not the case. There are a million developers chasing a small amount of potential success, app stores could impose much more ridiculous conditions and still get more developers than they could ever want.
App stores also fund hardware. Ask a consumer if they want a device 50% more expensive or better terms for developers and guess what the outcome will be.
It only changes if there is a lot more competition or legislated terms for how these companies operate.
> Ask a consumer if they want a device 50% more expensive or better terms for developers and guess what the outcome will be.
I find the Epic Game Store really interesting in this regard. While they aren't quite paying developers, they are funding a lot of games and giving out upfront payments.
I love it, personally—but it hasn't gone over too well with users.
App stores aren't competing because.. there is no competition
Also, I didn't know app stores funded hardware. I thought the money came from the value created by devs or from the actual device price. I mean, should my next IAP say "fund the development of the next iphone". How many consumers will like that?
How do Android manufacturers manage to make hardware without an appstore? It's not like Apple has billions to spare to actually make hardware, things must be tight
Now seriously, none of the above are the issue. The issue is that the iOS app store should be one of many, and that Safari shouldn't break html5 functions on purpose to prevent PWAs
This even spills over to Android because devs in general aren't going to adopt wasm until it truly can be run cross platform. Google actually benefits from Apple's protectionist policies. Microsoft also tried to pull this with IE and we know what happened. It will happen again (and consumers will benefit from it). What good is a great device that can only run few and bad apps?
>> App stores also fund hardware. Ask a consumer if they want a device 50% more expensive or better terms for developers and guess what the outcome will be.
What would be interesting is if instead of the Appstore taking the cut off the top, the Appstore charged developers based on utilization of different parts of the A13 or M1 processor. Sort of like an AWS compute pricing.
If iOS Netflix users are using N million hours of the video accelerator, then charge Netflix something like NCost per video compute. If an Augmented Reality app users are using N million hours of ARKit, charge them NCost per ARKit compute.
This could lead to more efficient iOS apps and better future HW roadmaps.
I'd say apriori the one difference between AWS compute fee and an iOS compute fee would be that Amazon owns AWS hardware, whereas Apple sort of doesn't own iOS hardware (i.e the iOS user does).
It needs to go further. Marketplaces should not be required for entry into platforms whose market is essentially "everything you'd do with a computer". Especially if the web is purposefully hobbled.
Apple's "protection" is actually just a racket and scheme to control the flow of money and extract as much as possible.
iPhones and Androids are computers and web downloads should be first class. We've been gaslighted into this "nanny state", yet we do much more dangerous things every day: get into cars, wire transfer money, go on blind dates, ...
Open and free computing is not wrong. The powers that be are trying to tell us that it is so that they can "protect" ( = control and tax) us.
Apple App Store and Google Play can still exist and cater to specific needs. Marketplaces like Itch and NewGrounds do a better job at what they do than either Apple or Google. If indie developers want to show up in multiple places, including their own website, it should be allowed.
>the money should flow from app stores to developers and not the other way around
That's exactly the case and I have receipts to prove it. I have financial records as proof of money flowing from Apple to my bank account.
What's the plan for rewarding the developers? If anything is broken with the mobile games it's the model where the money doesn't flow from the App Stores to the developers but developers need to interrupt the player and make them buy something so that the developers get rewarded.
Ads in games are dreadful.
I'm afraid that if the subscription services for games becomes the norm, and the payment is based on engagement it will make mediocracy the norm just like with Netflix. This will make game development a practice of matching the spec sheet of the subscription platform you want to be included. If it is like Spotify, what developers are supposed to do for substitute of the live performances if their rent is higher than $0.52?
I never had problem with iAP or pay to play games.
Let users side-load and use as many stores as they want. Or let them choose an "Apple only mode". Monetization models will follow that won't be affected by monopolistic practices. I also think IAPs are ok. But the lack of choice makes everything feel wrong
>>That's exactly the case and I have receipts to prove it. I have financial records as proof of money flowing from Apple to my bank account.
Are you sure that money came from Apple and not from your own users? Don't forget, they chose you. Apple doesn't own them
> My 15-year old nephew who isn't part of the game development scene almost certainly noticed this game before I did. Just think of all the other trends you and I are likely missing no matter how close we think we're paying attention.
People like to make fun of me when I talk tech with teens (TM?). This is exactly why. Because as much as we think we're on top of all the latest trends, sometimes we're just too not hip.
Is FNF really so significant that it was important not to miss it? Looking at Google Trends, it's already peaked, and peaked at far less interest than say Among Us or Fall Guys. It does appear have more longevity than Fall Guys did. But right now I just don't see either the cultural or commercial significance.
> Is FNF really so significant that it was important not to miss it?
Probably not, but I also learned about Roblox, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok from teens long before any of those got popular in my usual bubbles. In part because when I would tell my usual bubble about them, they were dismissed as fads.
I think it's not so much that you're not "hip," but you aren't concerned about the minutia most kids are nowadays. My 2nd cousin told me recently he hated reading in school because "there was no sound." It was incredibly eye opening to me to see how starkly different growing up between us was. Not that I'm some enlightened millennial, but often in the earlier days of the internet, reading and images were all we had. Now as a more tech inclined individual, I see what the current generation appreciates as annoying and excessive.
Perhaps market research should interview 10-16 year olds more often?
Yup. I feel like a bunch of stuff is absolutely invisible to my industry bubble until it has a standout hit that makes a ton of money or starts getting talked about by someone everyone knows and trusts and then becomes impossible to ignore. And the lesson then should not be that "wow this is a perfectly replicatable formula" but, "maybe some of our assumptions are wrong."
Which makes me further think -- how many OTHER transformative trends are we missing, because they AREN'T money or media based and thus destined to eventually pierce our industry bubble?
Side note about “instant multiplayer Minecraft”: Minetest is as instant as possible for a native application: you download the client (about 25 MB), then connect to any server, no matter which games and mods run there, and have all the needed assets streamed from it, too. Non-existing nickname is all the identification player needs, IRC-style. It is even inter-operable across major versions and forks, at least to some extent. Of course, it has been this way because it has a typical relatively small and tight open source community, but, from a cursory look, it is possible for a public server to have a protected spawn/sightseeing area with rules and information, then (auto)grant new players who want to participate various gameplay privileges based on their progress.
It doesn't seem that web client built in the same manner is impossible. What's impossible is, most likely, telling a browser to give you a gigabyte or two of memory to keep the local world area, then step aside and forget about it.
I feel like a lot of time was spent convincing the reader that instant games are the future and not explaining the benefits and potential shortcomings of the area. A significant amount of the article is filling in background information. I didn’t need two pages on why Apple and Steve Jobs are the worst thing to happen to instant games, the explanation of how flash games were once monetized, or a rundown of all the different ways that they (or indeed any digital service in the modern day) could become profitable.
The article starts with a point that there is a huge spectrum between the arcade-style instant game and modern “full” games but then never really addresses that gap. They highlight that these games can be on a maintained third-party streaming service but then go on to focus mainly on browser games and make points that don’t even apply tangentially to things like Game Pass or PlayStation Now.
This article takes a while to get to its point. I'm still not sure I understand what "instant" means in this context. Also I find the whole premise pretty claiming a single game => systemic market shift.
Well, almost everything on Stadia matches that definition. You need to create an account and buy the game ( bar the few free games like Destiny 2 and a demo for Hitman WoA), but it's basically accessible via a link, playable in a browser and multiplayer when the game is.
Readit News
Sure there’s untapped potential in all kinds of types of software; hell people are reinventing 2d design (think Figma etc) & issue management (newly released GitHub issues). But surely building “yet another react form” feels like coding an already solved problem.
What I mean is that gamedev has possibly the most untapped potential for coders wanting to make something truly amazing, with a sheer infinite amount of possible creations.
You’re not approaching the creation with the usual “what problem am I trying to solve” but rather “what’s the most fun thing I can build?”.
It only takes a small studio of like 10 people before you're practically never touching anything creative and are working on software tools and under the hood functionality just like any other dev job
I've worked at AAA studios on AAA games with 500+ devs and you still get to play with art and fun ideas. How do you think they trick kids into spending 12 hour days at the office?
There are some that retreat into bank software levels of detachment but it seems to be the exception, not the norm.
I have mixed feelings about this. When you do something creative for a job it takes on an entirely different character than doing it for yourself. Another thing is that gamedev is still software coding (among other things), and only a fraction of what you're doing amounts to the "fun bits" related to making interesting game design decisions. The majority of it is endless slog in trying to get collision detection to stop snagging on corners or figuring out why your fire status effect is cancelling as soon as it's applied (turns out it's because fire is cancelling ice without checking for the presence of ice in the first place, and ice turns enemies wet when it expires, and wet status cancels with fire status, so setting things on fire made them wet, which means they're no longer on fire). And 50 million more thing like this.
I enjoy it, but then there's also the fact that the industry itself has a lot of pathologies that "boring" software development doesn't, lower pay and worse working conditions as an employee, and extremely turbulent ever-changing conditions as an independent developer or freelancer.
Whenever some kid tells me they want to go into games for their career, I like to trot out the probably-apocryphal story of the Jewish rabbi who refuses to let a proselyte convert until he's come to the rabbi three times and been flat refused twice. I use the same method -- "no kid, you don't want to go into the game industry for all these reasons." If they keep coming back despite all that, they at least know what they're getting into.
Over time I agree with him and think the better part of 3D UI/UX game design elements will make their way in to traditional enterprise software and web stacks. They will be both more functional and beautiful to work with as a result.
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/unity-ceo-predicts-a...
10k games were released on Steam in 2020. In 2021 Q1 there are 316k games available on iOS. When creating a game is what you like, it might be rewarding, but the coding work is usually not very rewarding when it comes to the details. Especially because game ideas are usually not as original as most people think...
When you are not a code monkey, coding is always highly creative be it games, missile control systems, high frequency trading, insurance policy management etc. It might be easier to imagine fun in the idea of coding for a leisure activity, but in reality it can also feel very shallow.
With the problem about status effects, how is this typically implemented? Do the rules for interactions exist within the game objects themselves, as if-then-else statements? If so, I can see why that would be error prone. Even if those rules exist in abstractions like "Burnable" and "Metallic", it's still hard to see the side effects of changing or adding a single rule.
Does anyone ever implement it in a single place, where you can query for the interactions between the different status effects? That way, all the rules are in one place, and being able to query for it, the results would tell you how it came to that conclusion. If not, how come?
My partner doesn't care that I wrote a really sweet cron job for collating web orders today, but she can instantly grok how cool a game idea is and have fun playing.
Well sure, when you're doing the fun bits for fun.
> It’s a type of coding that is much closer to actual artistic creation rather than engineering.
Unless you're in a team with both artists and coders, which is, y'know, all of the commercial ones with a chance of success.
> The sheer amount of creative & engaging stories, puzzles, real-time strategies and on top of this entirely multiplayerable online allows for an infinite amount of types of entertaining creations… all made possible thanks to code.
It's the game designer who gets to do all this creating, not the coders. Unless (see point 2) you're in a tiny team hoping to win the lottery. See also "the kid fresh out of gamedev boot camp who wants to be a designer and is confused when nobody wants to join their team because everybody else has already has their own great ideas for a game which they've been working on for 10+ years while they also learned to code or model."
> But surely building “yet another react form” feels like coding an already solved problem.
Try building "yet another 3D model loader (that has to handle the quirks of three different modeling programs and eleventy different graphics cards)" - it's just as much reinventing the wheel, but with the added bonus that if you really cock it up you can hard lock your computer. Or my personal favourite, "debug this third party open world game engine which is clearly just a model viewer with a for() loop around it and the object loading part in a separate thread with zero synchronization." :D
> You’re not approaching the creation with the usual “what problem am I trying to solve” but rather “what’s the most fun thing I can build?”.
Sure but 99% of professional game coders don't get to do this. This interdisciplinary paradise is the domain of hobbyists who never get paid and of the tiny minority who are there at exactly the right place and time (and also probably never get paid.)
Career traits: Fun, lucrative, attainable. Pick any two. This applies to gamedev as much as any other line of work.
This rant brought to you by distant, slightly salty memories of my brief stint in gamedev.
Yes, most game dev is not a magical utopia of coding whatever you feel like and watching the magic happen. But it's also not a horrific grind where you are treated entirely as a code monkey for someone else's art.
There is an entire continuum between these points and different companies and teams will lie at different points on it. I have worked on games where I was so deep in the bowels of tools and tech that I couldn't even tell you how the game was played (maintaining the UI editor for Madden, which was actually a lot of fun). And I've worked on games where I sat right next to the designers and artists and had a lot of influence on the game itself (Henry Hatsworth, where I wrote the level/animation editor and in-game AI engine).
I think overall, most game dev jobs do have a few things going for them compared to other domains:
* You get a greater opportunity to work on cross-discipline teams. During my time at EA, I worked closely with artists, UI designers, producers, technical artists, sound designers, etc. It was wonderful to not be in a programmer monoculture. It's good for the soul to be around people who think differently.
* People outside of your work have a more immediate understanding and appreciation for what you do. There is some prestige to being a game dev and at the very least most people can at least visualize a video game. If you work at a typical non-famous non-FAANG software company, your job is almost totally invisible.
* You're working on a game. You might not spend much time literally playing it, but it's still more fun when debugging to poke around a football field or dungeon than a spreadsheet full or insurance rates or whatever stuff most typical CRUD devs are dealing with. Game development often feels concrete and tangible in ways that other software doesn't.
But there are some downsides:
* The market factors the intrinsic rewards above into compensation, so game dev pays less than other software fields. The massive number of young people who want to do it also drives salaries down.
* The overtime is often awful.
* A side effect of the above two is a constant brain drain. Experienced devs age out and leave when they want to start a family and have sane hours, to be replaced by another crop of fresh-faced kids who will work for peanuts for the cachet of being a real game dev. That means there is often a large lack of software engineering maturity on teams. Tons of spaghetti code, broken processes, poor estimation, and other self-inflicted wounds.
I really enjoyed my time at EA (except for the overtime and often crappy code), but I'm also glad to not be working full time in games any more.
I would claim it's the most risky type of software coding. And because of that probably also the most "dirty" way of software coding...
> What I mean is that gamedev has possibly the most untapped potential for coders wanting to make something truly amazing, with a sheer infinite amount of possible creations.
Whilst I agree there is a lot of common and drudgey work in gamedev as well even in extremely creative projects.
I know people that develops music software, they love playing instruments, they love music, and they enjoy their jobs.
Educational software, medical software, everything can be extremely enjoyable if you like the topic.
I made accounting software, and it was really fun to do. In that case was just because I had creative control of the accounting software, and I like how well everything adds up, and how grateful are users when you remove their day-to-day pain-points.
But if you like that, making games is more fun nowadays. It used to be a lot of code for networking, graphic engines, and tooling. More math and low level system coding than actual game development.
And, no, if you like playing games that does not mean that you would like to make them. Even that it helps.
I don’t think this is true. I’ve worked at multiple jobs where I barely interacted with the subject matter. Just the same old crud for webapps
Among Us: "I definitely burnt out. It was tough because during all of this, we weren’t able to see friends and family. Being so tired from working, I couldn’t even go visit my family during covid and had to spend holidays alone...That was definitely the hardest time.” [1]
Minecraft fans getting angry at Notch for daring to take a vacation I remember, and here's one about a fan getting PISSED at an update with only one new thing to play with: [2]
Stardew Valley fans mad for how long multiplayer update took "I love you ConcernedApe and your game, Stardew Valley, but people are getting impatient. I am getting impatient. You've had your vacation, your space and your earnings." [3].
Or Shovel Knight "We wanted another Shovel Knight game, but we didn’t want to make it. We’re sick of making Shovel Knight games." [4]
The book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels goes into this more, especially for Shovel Knight and Stardew Valley.
I worked on several games in the industry, a few small free ones on my own were popular but every game I worked on for a company failed to be successful or enter the gaming zeitgeist at all. It almost feels like a waste of my time when that happens, and often lead to layoffs. I got out of the industry after the third company in a row where that happened.
[1] https://kotaku.com/among-us-developers-say-they-burnt-out-af...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/iaeqj/dear_notch...
[3] https://community.playstarbound.com/threads/rip-stardew-vall...
[4] https://www.fanbyte.com/features/shovel-knight-dig-interview...
I'd add that engineers have their place in gamedev as well, because many artists don't know how to make computers create worlds. Engineers generate the possibility space where artists can work. Sometimes, fast code is needed to unlock capabilities no-one could have pre-imagined of.
Whether someone believes the project will succeed or not is an interesting question, but you can't deny that they've made great progress at the fringes of a lot of game mechanics.
Artistic creation with code is
Been to a good art show lately? Maybe any one of those popup trippy museums over the last decade?
It is... under certain circumstances. At a AAA studio it's an utter slog, unless you're the designer or one of the top coders working closely with the designer. Then you get to build prototypes, bounce ideas around, etc. until you come up with something you can hand down to the C++ slaves in the salt mines.
If you don't want to be in the salt mines yourself, the best route to take is the indie route. Become the designer/lead programmer, write the game on your own schedule, and either do your own art/sounds/music or hire people to make those assets for you as necessary and use placeholders while you refine the game design. You also get your choice of language. Want to write a game in Lisp or Haskell? Go nuts!
Do yourself a favor and start with a data-oriented model for your game world like ECS, instead of an inheritance-based object-oriented model. Your inheritance tree is going to whack you like a Whomping Willow the minute you try to build a game object with traits from different classes across the tree. With a data-oriented approach, your game objects are just pieces of state -- rows in a spreadsheet -- and you can change them with whatever tools are most handy: objects, plain functions, whatever. Choosing an ECS has saved me much hassle in adding new enemies and behaviors to the game I'm working on, and that shortens the time and effort from "I need to add this thing" to "WOW! It works!"
Oh, and START SMALL. The easiest way to get from zero to finished game is to limit the scope of your game! Kenta Cho, the guy behind rRootage and all those bullet hell shooters, put up a bunch of tiny web games on his site, each of which uses tiny bitmaps or canvas graphics primitives, so has little in the way of assets: https://abagames.github.io/games-web-pages/browser.html
> But surely building “yet another react form” feels like coding an already solved problem.
Building "yet another React form" should take minutes to hours. If it doesn't at your shop, consider the processes you have in place. Processes like Scrum are there to ensure transparency to management throughout the SDLC and to act as dampers to prevent programmers from becoming too efficient -- not to make the programmers better at their jobs!
> You’re not approaching the creation with the usual “what problem am I trying to solve” but rather “what’s the most fun thing I can build?”.
That can quickly degenerate into "what problem am I trying to solve" when you are trying to work out why collision detection isn't working or why enemies do random things they shouldn't be doing, etc.
There are probably labs out there they have figured out how to send 'viral waves' out into the economy and profit from it, but thats all this is. Game of Thrones was an example, The Walking Dead was an example, Fortnite was an example, and Roblox was an example. Those examples highlight two very different viral culture waves. The kids playing games and the grown ups watching tv, but they highlight the exact same phenomenon.
As for this game itself its probably exactly like Among Us and the million other little indie games like it that shot up in popularity 'out of know where' except it wasn't out of nowhere at all. It was a couple dozen HIGHLY interconnected Twitch streamers all getting into the same space and then 100's of follow along mid tier twitch streamers hoping to ride the new bandwagon to higher viewership.
> It was a couple dozen HIGHLY interconnected Twitch streamers all getting into the same space and then 100's of follow along mid tier twitch streamers hoping to ride the new bandwagon to higher viewership.
I have access to the traffic stats behind FNF and this is demonstrably false. There was a lot more to it. Twitch was one small part of this phenomenon.
I'm happy to welcome critique but could you please be less dismissive and instead make a more substantive critique?
I will gladly agree that Twitch streamers may have helped boost Among Us out of its slump. I also agree that it helped FNF too. But you know what else helped Among Us and FNF? Millions of views on YouTube, Tiktok, fanart on Twitter/NG/elsewhere, mods across the entire Internet, etc. and where it’s fair to say that Twitch could’ve been the catalyst for Among Us, saying that it is the catalyst for FNF without further evidence seems patently unfair. Big platforms like TikTok and YouTube are more than capable of driving viral sensations that are bigger than the entire audiences of “a couple dozen highly interconnected Twitch streamers.” (For clarification I regularly watch a couple of the Twitch streamers you are likely grouping into this category so yes I do know how large their audiences are.)
I think Among Us's mod support is underrated for a multi-player game, and I think it did a lot to improve the game's longevity.
I'm hesitant to make broad sweeping claims about the game, but I agree that looking purely at streamers is probably underselling its success, even though streamers did obviously play a big role in bringing it to more people's attention.
I really enjoyed this article, but it's a bit of a discursive brain dump, which is why I think a lot of the criticisms have essentially been misrepresentations of the actual article contents.
I mean, until Twitch is no longer such a big thing, that sounds like you're describing a likely repeatable formula for success: make a game that will catch on amongst these couple-dozen Twitch influencers.
And it seems like a good property for such a game to have, would be a really low barrier to entry, to entice them into trying it in the first place, when they don't see anyone else playing it.
As such, I can see the validity in the argument in the article is making — and I'm not sure why you think it's a "small detail."
It's not like that set of Twitch streamers has ever made a game go viral that didn't have this "pick-up-and-play-ability" in some way or another. The property is just created in different ways for different games.
Sure, but like half the world's game devs are all trying to do exactly that right now.
Similar to the stock market, game development is an novelty-based ecosystem. That means that there is essentially no long-term repeatable formula for success. Any formula will eventually discovered by others, over-exploited, and players will lose interest and go elsewhere.
And a high quality "Fuck you Steve Jobs" as well. I'm here for any posts that says "Fuck you Steve Jobs"
Couple of things -- despite the admittedly click-baity headline, I'm not 100% convinced that "instant games" are definitely the future. Nobody can predict the future with certainty. And as I state up front in the article FNF itself is obviously an outlier which should not serve as a model to try to replicate step by step.
My main point is that instant games -- which is to say browser games -- are actually already the past and the present (even if they're not necessarily taking over everything else just yet), and most people are unfamiliar with a bunch of weird details about how they began in the first place.
The article's actual thesis is not necessarily to prove to you that instant games are the "wave of the future" but to point out:
1) Even games industry insiders are often massively out of touch with trends
2) Browsers games represent the potential to disrupt existing gatekeepers and platforms
3) Browser games had a weird and unique ecosystem that represented a 'minor league' of games that provided an on-ramp to further professional success, especially for international developers, and we've largely lost that today
4) Modern platforms want to own the entire stack top to bottom (editing tools, playback engine, discovery, and marketplace), but trying to capture so much value yourself and tightly controlling the environment can actually stunt the ecosystem
And yeah the article is really long. I'm chronically unable to write short articles when I have a lot to say and that means I'm taking the sincere risk of boring some of you to death while you wait for me to get to the point, sorry about that!
Brevity is a good skill, but given the choice between too concise and too long, too long is probably the better direction to err.
I'm always happy to see articles like this on HN. I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but it's generally pretty thoughtful and covered some interesting points I hadn't thought about before. Thanks for writing it!
If anything, I see modern platforms using more off-the-shelf and standards based tech rather than reinventing the wheel. It used to be the case that you'd have to download not just Flash, but Shockwave, Silverlight, the Java applet plugin, Unity Web Player, and all sorts of proprietary plugins just to play games built on whatever proprietary game engine and scripting language came with it. It was like downloading individual video codecs in the early 90's before the advent of Quicktime. Nowadays, you can play fully fledged 3-D games on a Web Application built with any game engine, any language, on nearly any browser of your choosing. No plugins needed. I don't think web games are going to be siloed to particular platforms any time soon. What I do think is that web games are now competing with siloed AAA games. And this might be a good thing overall for competition in that space. For a long time Flash and mobile games were also-rans simply because of the limited computing power. Very few were of such caliber either in graphics or playability as to compete with contemporary installable or console games and were very often mimicries of those very same games. In the West, mobile games underwent a revolution with Angry Birds and Infinity Blade, there hasn't been a killer app that's reinvigorated the browser game craze of the Y2K era just yet. But Epic's interest in itch.io might be hinting at an attempt in that direction.
Compare that to say, Roblox. If you make a Roblox game, not only will it only run within the Roblox environment, it is only able to exist on exactly one website and one app -- Roblox. Roblox owns the entire stack top to bottom. You can't take your game anywhere else.
By getting you the pre-roll ads Mochi gave you a way of being rewarded on a per-play basis which A) bypassed the risjk of up front sponsorship number B) allowed absolute total amateurs to not even bother with sponsorship and just dump a game with Mochi ads onto the net, if it took off they would rake in the bucks. m Add on top of that the Mochi microtransaction infrastructure and I'd say Mochi was as important, if not more, than FGL for boosting the ouptu of games.
I remember a big question was always: should you self sponsor if you can't get high enough bids for sponsorship? If they're willing to pay $5k to put their ad on your game, why shouldn't you capture that revenue yourself?
The answer was for most developers it was difficult to capture that value without some kind of centralized game portal where you could redirect this traffic and keep those users coming back. So even if the sponsor was paying $5k and still making money off that game, it was unlikely you could make anywhere near that amount just from Mochi ads or similar.
As I was reading it, I somewhat agreed with the sentiment I see in some of the comments around that the article had a bit of the "old person discovers new trend and concludes its the future of everything" (which you see a fair amount with VR, on Stadia/cloud gaming, the "metaverse," and other things you mentioned FNF doesn't do) but this comment tempers that feeling. At the very least, I think that this is an interesting showcase of a project that is successful outside of the big platforms and I agree that it's a direction that things could be going in to some extent.
Speaking about the fact it's free & open source, I think that people --in this case the games industry people to whom this doesn't make sense-- sometimes put too much weight on the decision to publish source code. I think it's about focusing on what differentiates your product from others, and in this case it seems like the game differentiates itself with music and personality rather than complex code, thus bandcamp & kickstarter. There's probably a lot of software products that don't gain anything from being closed source, and I'm no Stallman.
As a bit of an aside, I appreciate you mentioning the fact that there's a whole several continents of people who aren't American, or NA, or English-speaking, etc. and aren't necessarily talked about when it comes to diversity. Diversity is often based around US/CAN sensibilities around identity and other things. Obv very difficult to fully consider the entire Earth's population in everything you do, but just considering the fact that not everyone is in the same place or can have the same powerful hardware/internet connection is worthwhile. I'm absolutely not perfect in this regard either.
I wonder if the increasing use of chromebooks in school (revealing my US bias) is/will push this trend forward as well. I don't use chrome, so maybe there already is an ecosystem of games in the chrome app store.
1) It's made FNF very easy to mod, and these mods drive a lot of viral engagement with the game. If you scan social media you'll see that this is what keeps the community excited and engaged when the authors themselves are not putting out updates.
2) I mention it because many people see being open source as a liability because of concerns about cloning. Seeing a FOSS game like this pull in literal millions shows that at least in this one case, FOSS games aren't literally doomed to failure because of being FOSS, is all.
So my position is, no actual players care that you have a github repo with source available, unless that actually affects them somehow, and in FNF's case I argue it does affect them by enabling the community to keep making more weird content for the game (though it could be achieved in other ways, like using a modding API like [polymod](https://github.com/larsiusprime/polymod), which it has been integrating with recently).
I feel like a large leap is being made that instant games will win back users when their instant-ness didn't keep them in the first place.
I don't feel like any catalyst is explored enough to be convincing.
Also, I don't think people moved away from instant games because the instantness wasn't enough. I think it's more about what devices kids (and people in general) are using for everything else; people who are playing mobile games now probably would have been playing flash games a few years ago. I'm kindof spitballing here, but I wonder if all the chromebooks that are used in schools now are or will be pushing kids back to online games platforms like the old flash sites
I don't agree, particularly in the case of mobile App stores where the top charts are consistently dominated by the same few games.
And some solution for preloading/caching/preinstalling large (many gigabytes) assets are added.
Than yeah webgames have a very bright future ahead, assuming a method of monetization is found.
Indeed, the money should flow from app stores to developers and not the other way around
Developers provide value to their platforms. Developers don't need them except for the fact that they enforce a monopoly on distribution (iOS)
The day is coming when platforms will have to reward content creators based on usage metrics or simply up front. Platform subscriptions, micro payments, or platform ads are the future. And they will only get cheaper as time goes on
A ruling forcing Apple to open up iOS to different browsers or app stores will be the sign that change is coming
AFAIK it's going pretty well. I don't actually own Apple Arcade, but the games all look really nice, and no ads or microtransactions. Maybe someone who knows more can comment.
Although, who knows, maybe if Apple Arcade is compensating game makers by how much time is spent playing their games, then those tactics will be present in Apple Arcade too.
App stores also fund hardware. Ask a consumer if they want a device 50% more expensive or better terms for developers and guess what the outcome will be.
It only changes if there is a lot more competition or legislated terms for how these companies operate.
I find the Epic Game Store really interesting in this regard. While they aren't quite paying developers, they are funding a lot of games and giving out upfront payments.
I love it, personally—but it hasn't gone over too well with users.
Also, I didn't know app stores funded hardware. I thought the money came from the value created by devs or from the actual device price. I mean, should my next IAP say "fund the development of the next iphone". How many consumers will like that? How do Android manufacturers manage to make hardware without an appstore? It's not like Apple has billions to spare to actually make hardware, things must be tight
Now seriously, none of the above are the issue. The issue is that the iOS app store should be one of many, and that Safari shouldn't break html5 functions on purpose to prevent PWAs
This even spills over to Android because devs in general aren't going to adopt wasm until it truly can be run cross platform. Google actually benefits from Apple's protectionist policies. Microsoft also tried to pull this with IE and we know what happened. It will happen again (and consumers will benefit from it). What good is a great device that can only run few and bad apps?
What would be interesting is if instead of the Appstore taking the cut off the top, the Appstore charged developers based on utilization of different parts of the A13 or M1 processor. Sort of like an AWS compute pricing.
If iOS Netflix users are using N million hours of the video accelerator, then charge Netflix something like NCost per video compute. If an Augmented Reality app users are using N million hours of ARKit, charge them NCost per ARKit compute.
This could lead to more efficient iOS apps and better future HW roadmaps.
I'd say apriori the one difference between AWS compute fee and an iOS compute fee would be that Amazon owns AWS hardware, whereas Apple sort of doesn't own iOS hardware (i.e the iOS user does).
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Apple's "protection" is actually just a racket and scheme to control the flow of money and extract as much as possible.
iPhones and Androids are computers and web downloads should be first class. We've been gaslighted into this "nanny state", yet we do much more dangerous things every day: get into cars, wire transfer money, go on blind dates, ...
Open and free computing is not wrong. The powers that be are trying to tell us that it is so that they can "protect" ( = control and tax) us.
Apple App Store and Google Play can still exist and cater to specific needs. Marketplaces like Itch and NewGrounds do a better job at what they do than either Apple or Google. If indie developers want to show up in multiple places, including their own website, it should be allowed.
So are Xboxes and PlayStations
That's exactly the case and I have receipts to prove it. I have financial records as proof of money flowing from Apple to my bank account.
What's the plan for rewarding the developers? If anything is broken with the mobile games it's the model where the money doesn't flow from the App Stores to the developers but developers need to interrupt the player and make them buy something so that the developers get rewarded.
Ads in games are dreadful.
I'm afraid that if the subscription services for games becomes the norm, and the payment is based on engagement it will make mediocracy the norm just like with Netflix. This will make game development a practice of matching the spec sheet of the subscription platform you want to be included. If it is like Spotify, what developers are supposed to do for substitute of the live performances if their rent is higher than $0.52?
I never had problem with iAP or pay to play games.
>>That's exactly the case and I have receipts to prove it. I have financial records as proof of money flowing from Apple to my bank account.
Are you sure that money came from Apple and not from your own users? Don't forget, they chose you. Apple doesn't own them
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People like to make fun of me when I talk tech with teens (TM?). This is exactly why. Because as much as we think we're on top of all the latest trends, sometimes we're just too not hip.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=roblox,among%20us...
(But I hadn't heard of the game before now, so maybe dismissing it is just a bias on my part.)
Probably not, but I also learned about Roblox, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok from teens long before any of those got popular in my usual bubbles. In part because when I would tell my usual bubble about them, they were dismissed as fads.
Perhaps market research should interview 10-16 year olds more often?
Which makes me further think -- how many OTHER transformative trends are we missing, because they AREN'T money or media based and thus destined to eventually pierce our industry bubble?
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It doesn't seem that web client built in the same manner is impossible. What's impossible is, most likely, telling a browser to give you a gigabyte or two of memory to keep the local world area, then step aside and forget about it.
The article starts with a point that there is a huge spectrum between the arcade-style instant game and modern “full” games but then never really addresses that gap. They highlight that these games can be on a maintained third-party streaming service but then go on to focus mainly on browser games and make points that don’t even apply tangentially to things like Game Pass or PlayStation Now.
Although I'd argue that instant games don't necessarily need to be multiplayer. For example Friday Night Funkin isn't right now IIRC.